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Meredith brushed her hands together to show that she was done. Then she picked up her purse. “I have to think a little, Stefan. Then maybe we can talk again.”
“Right,” Stefan said dully. She knew he knew without either of them having to say it, that their relationship would never be the same. That they might not have any relationship even if somehow they both survived this night.
He reached to help her into her windbreaker, but she took it from his hands and put it on herself. Her eyes were ashamed and apologetic, but she did it anyway.
Somehow she didn’t want to be catered to by homo sapiens superioris right now.
“Stefan, I’m—I’m sorry. But no matter what, I’ve got to turn Bonnie over to you now.”
Bonnie, the smallest, youngest, most fragile of any of them. Stefan opened his mouth, but Meredith was already turning to unlock and open the door by herself. She turned back to say only one thing.
“It’s the biggest cliché in the human world, Stefan, but please be gentle with her.
And it’s not such a big cliché, but if you aren’t, and we survive tonight—well, then it’s going to be me coming after you. The meat bites back!
Stefan didn’t smile. Silently, he nodded.
He could never have guessed what he was promising with that one small gesture.
Bonnie
Bonnie was excited. She was devoured by curiosity, prickling with fear, too impatient to stay in the car, and . . . well, just excited.
She and Elena had taken up boys before Meredith or even Caroline had. Bonnie had been a flirt since kindergarten. And by the time they had hit puberty—well, it was Elena—not Bonnie—that got nicknamed “Ice Princess” for throwing away her boyfriends just before they proposed marriage. (Or, if not marriage, eternal devotion.) Bonnie wasn’t an ice princess, she was a firebrand.
And she’d had been hearing Elena boast about Stefan for what seemed like years.
And now Bonnie was going to get to experience what Elena had said was the ultimate, and she was going to do it safely, for of course Stefan was safe. Stefan was safe as . . . as a deer. Sometimes he was like a deer caught in the headlights, sometimes he was like the rare wild fawns that would let you feed them because they didn’t know what you were.
She couldn’t wait.
She was tramping around the car for the sixtysixth time (oh, surely they’d be done soon! Elena said it was just a matter of teaspoonsfull, and Meredith wasn’t the romantic kind to stretch things out—!) when she ran into something.
She’d been staring at her feet, so she had to look up to see what it was. And then she had to look up some more. And then she had to decide whether to scream or not.
“Tracking a woozle?” Damon asked her. He seemed perfectly serious. “The next time we go around, there will be seventy of them.’”
Bonnie was not about to be distracted—especially by WinniethePooh. “You—you—”
“Yes, it is I.”
“You left us.”
“I think it was more the other way round. Call it a mutual dissolution of our partnership, anyway.”
“Don’t try to confuse me with big words. You’re a traitor; that’s what you are. And because of you a girl is dead. And that makes me feel like—like—”
“Yes?” He looked curious and amused.
“Like doing this!” Bonnie stepped hard on his insole, wishing she was wearing her party shoes; then backed up and took a running kick at his shin and added an elbow to the ribs.
It was true that this was her method, or her opening method anyway, when she was on dates and boys misbehaved. From here on it went to broken noses, blackened eyes, and . . . well, serious dislocations of the groinal regions. When Bonnie didn’t want to play Bonnie didn’t play.
Unlike most of her combatants, however, Damon did not scream. He didn’t even blink. And he certainly wasn’t hopping around cursing, or doubled up moaning in pain. He simply stood exactly as he had been standing and looked at her as he had been looking, curious and hopeful of amusement.
Then he flashed one of his inimitable smiles, onethirtysecondth of a second on, and then instantly off again, and said, “And what are you planning to do now?” She looked up at him. Matt was in the car, his back to them, probably listening to music if he wasn’t under some spell of Damon’s. Stefan and Meredith were even farther away, and—preoccupied.
Vampires. You just couldn’t trust them to feel pain like real people. Even her patented kneetothefamilyjewels—patented because of its speed, force, and a secret second bounce she wasn’t demonstrating for anyone—probably would have no effect.
