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The thought came to him quite simply and, if not quite in words of one syllable, it was very simple to understand.
Meredith was too smart and too disciplined and too logical to struggle, and so he wasn’t causing her agony, but it certainly was nothing like the kiss. Meredith was experiencing, in all its raw ugliness, the truth behind the mindillusions that vampires usually used to seduce their victims.
He broke his promise about not reading her mind. He allowed him
self to sense just a little of what she was experiencing.
She didn’t like it.
Panting, stunned, Stefan pulled his head up.
Oh, God. I’m so sorry. Meredith—oh, my friend, my dear, dear friend . . .
The tie of blood was strong enough to allow him to speak without words. But, of course, that was because he was a monster.
He stared down at her, and then, in one motion, he rolled away and was on his feet, frantically licking the evidence of what he’d been doing from his lips and teeth. His canines would not retract immediately, but he put all his energy into blunting those razorsharp tips and drawing some of their length back into his jaws.
He couldn’t remember feeling so ashamed, so caught, since Elena had innocently stumbled upon him feeding.
He was pacing without thinking, the way that a distraught panther paces its cage. He could feel the sting of tears inside his nose and behind his eyes, but what good would it do to cry? He paced, shuddering, until Meredith had finished buttoning up her blouse. And as he did, involuntarily, from the sweetdry aftertaste of Meredith’s blood dissolving into his body, he unwillingly saw more of her thoughts.
He really couldn’t help it. As the molecules from her donation fitted into place in his own oxygen receptors, random phrases bubbled up in his mind. Homo sapiens raptor. Top of the feeding chain. Why hadn’t they taken over the world already?
She could never entirely trust; could never entirely relax with; and she could certainly
never fall in love with a being like Stefan Salvatore.
He stopped his pacing; Meredith had finished with her blouse. He was conveniently near the door. He looked at her. His thoughts were tangled in such loops and knots that the only words he could force out were, “God,” and “So sorry.”
Meredith’s cool, incisive intelligence had stripped him bare. She had put him in his place, along with the fox, the cobra, the tiger, and the shark. He knew now that she would never look at him without seeing a deadly snake in the grass and feeling, along with Emily Dickinson, “zero at the bone.”
He fumbled with the lock as he heard Meredith’s footsteps on the wooden floor. He had lost Elena, and now he had lost his only links to Elena; because of course he couldn’t face Bonnie or Matt ever again. He opened the door for Meredith with a feeling that as he saw her back retreating from him he would see all three . . .
“Wait.” It was just one word, spoken hoarsely, but it froze Stefan like a troll caught by sunlight. It took him a moment before he could compose himself enough to look back into the room.
Meredith was standing up, but she was farther from the door than before. She was standing by the window, looking out as if she were seeking answers in Mrs. Flowers’ kitchen garden.
“Wait,” she said again, as if to herself. “Stefan, do you think—that he can get into our thoughts as well as our dreams?”
Stefan felt a bound of hope in his chest, followed by the inevitable fall. “I don’t know. He would have to be very powerful. And we would have to be very vulnerable—“
“—such as when I’m concentrating all my energies on relaxing and letting myself be controlled by something from the outside?”
Stefan studied Meredith for longer this time. He noticed that her eyes did not skitter away from his gaze. She wasn’t afraid to look at him.
“Is it all right if I come back in?” he asked, as if it wasn’t his own room and she nodded without hesitation. She wasn’t afraid to be alone with him.
But despite the warmth that kindled inside him at such signs he had to be rational.
“Meredith, what you were thinking—I caught some of it. I couldn’t help it. And you were right. I’m not human. I’m not the same species as you are. I’m a carnivore that would live only off humans if . . . if I could live with myself that way.”
“And I am a . . . a xenophobe.” She glanced at him as if to see if he knew the English word. “Someone afraid of aliens, that’s the dictionary definition. But it really means someone afraid of humans from other countries, or people who are just too different.” Very suddenly, she put her hands to her face, which wasn’t like Meredith at all.
Meredith was always in control. Her voice, muffled, went on, “I’m ashamed of myself. I know you, and yet I could think all that . . . crap.”
And she didn’t swear, not even mildly. Stefan began to speak to her to explain that she was the one who was right, and that he was just as alien and dangerous as she had thought, when she took her hands away from her face.
“I know you, Stefan Salvatore. And if you say that everything I was thinking is true then I have some thinking to do. I can’t help but be prejudiced on the side of ordinary humans. But I also owe an apology to the one of your . . . species . . . who is willing to die to save mine.”
