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She walked toward him, her hand held out. Stefan stood mute. Then he took her hand, but instead of shaking it, bent and kissed it.
But he was thinking about Elena, and about just how rare she had been. Without him controlling her mind, she had accepted him. Without him controlling her mind, she had seduced him—for that had been, in truth, what had happened. Without the slightest fetter around her mind or body, she had given him her blood, and had delighted in it.
Elena had been like a force of nature: take her or leave her for the passionate, cynical, idealistic, selfcentered, generoustoafault, girl that had been her mortal self. A wild tropical storm in rising in a millpond. An orchid in a field of daisies; a gryphon in a herd of sheep. Elena had never been like anyone but herself. And she had absolutely gloried in the moment when she could drop all her defenses and submit entirely to the fate of the quarry caught by the hunter—because the hunter had been her heart’s desire, and because in all other things he was her slave, to cherish or spurn or destroy as she pleased. And Stefan had gloried in that.
They had been a pair of mad little things, in love in a way that was senseless and probably hopeless from the start. First love—for he now realized that before Elena he had only experienced infatuation—on a planetary scale. But it had changed him, he would swear, from a creature who gloomily enjoyed his doom; a zombie that could only remember and remember the time of his humanity, into an approximation of a human being—for the little time that he had had her.
Maybe I’m insane, he thought, shame always ready to leap for his throat. I helped her—after the first time when she had it all her own way—to do those things. If what they had done equated to madness, as it would seem to, then he had aided and abetted her . . .
Stop it, Stefan!
The voice was so sharp it was almost like having Damon mock him, urging him to renounce the role of martyr. Stefan flushed, full of new blood, full of anger—
And then in shock, glanced upward.
There was no mistaking that voice—or that indignation. Bonnie had been right, his inamorata was here, watching over him. He looked at Meredith to see if she had heard anything and saw that she hadn’t.
Who was he to flout one of Elena’s edicts?
Meredith’s dark eyes were on him. He said, apropos of nothing, “You rigged the drawing of the twigs. You made sure you’d be first.”
She didn’t admit it aloud, but he could still pick up thoughts from her mind.
Rigorously, he tried to shut his own mind to it.
“You wanted to see if it was bearable.”
This time she answered him. “If it would be bearable for anybody except Elena. I think Bonnie will be fine, if you control her mind, and keep it light and romantic.”
“Like the kiss?”
She flinched, making him flinch. Then she straightened herself and met his eyes again directly, sparing him nothing. “A little lighter than the kiss,” she suggested.
He wasn’t hurt by her reaction; his mind was elsewhere. “And Matt?”
“If I can stand it—but, no, Matt isn’t sensible. You’re absolutely right. I’ve got to stop Matt even if it means hitting him over the head. He’ll
try to give—and he’ll be humiliated and mortified when he can’t.”
Stefan looked away. “You were humiliated and mortified?”
“We’re being completely honest with each other, aren’t we?” He nodded.
“Stefan—it isn’t flattering.”
“Tell me.”
“I felt—well—disposable. As if, when you were done with me, you would crush me like an aluminum can and toss me in the waste basket. I kept wondering if I’d be evaluated by the FDA. I didn’t feel like a person anymore.”
Stefan could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He wanted to cry. But that was as unfair to Meredith as anything else that had happened. She would end up comforting him, the perpetrator.
“Don’t—Stefan, it’s not that bad. We did it for a reason, a reason we’d both agreed on beforehand. So just saying “food” is all wrong. I guess I was thinking of the other girls—and boys—out there who saw a sudden dark shadow in the night—”
“And then found themselves being served raw. We do what we do, Meredith. We prey on your species. To us—to most of us—you are meat. And for a lot of vampires, you’re disposable, a lot of them kill when they feed But you’ve known that all along, Meredith. You knew how different we were. You knew we were that bad. How could it have come as such a surprise?”
Meredith
Meredith thought, partly because knowing something is not the
