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The girl Damon had left in the woods, dazed and frightened, blood streaming from the bites on her neck.
Inside herself, Elena felt something unfurl, not swinging open like a door or spreading like Powerful wings, but gently blossoming, like a flower.
She opened her eyes slowly, and saw Andres close beside her. A glow of pure green light surrounded him, and Elena's chest tightened. The light was so beautiful, and without knowing exactly how she knew it, she knew the light was good in the simplest, most definite sense.
"It's beautiful," she said, awed. Andres opened his eyes and smiled back at her.
"Something?" he said, an undercurrent of excitement running through his voice.
Elena nodded. "I can see light around you," she said.
Andres almost bounced with happiness. "This is wonderful," he told her. "I've heard of this. You must be seeing my aura. "
"Aura?" Elena said skeptically. "Is that really
going to help us fight evil?" It seemed like a flaky, New Agey power.
Andres grinned. "It will help you sense if someone is good or evil right from the start," he said. "And with practice, I've heard you can use it to track and seek out your enemies. "
"I guess I can see how that might be useful," she agreed. "Not as useful as blasting away evil things with my hands like you can, but it's a start. "
Andres stared at her for a moment and then began to laugh. "Maybe you'll get to the blasting part soon," he said.
Unable to stop herself, Elena laughed, too, and leaned against him helplessly, giggling. She was so relieved, so simply, fiercely glad. She had found a Power without having to wait for a Principle Guardian to give her a task. And now that she had accessed one, she thought that she could feel more Power curled up inside her, more flowers waiting to open.
This was just the beginning.
By the central gates to the campus, Meredith paced, her sneakers making tracks in the dust at the edge of the road. In the past, she'd always been able to school herself into calm, but since she'd moved from training as a vampire hunter to actually using her skills to fight vampires, she'd gotten more and more restless. She always wanted to be moving, wanted to be doing something - especially now when she knew monsters haunted the campus. She knew that with Samantha gone - a part of her still choked at the memory - she was one of the only protectors left. Her skin was tingling and tight with the sense of something evil, something wrong, just out of sight.
She couldn't wait to see Alaric.
As if that thought had conjured him up, there was Alaric's little gray Honda turning down the road toward campus at last. Meredith waved to him as he parked, and started to run toward the car, aware that she was grinning like an idiot but not caring.
"Hey," she said, coming up to him as Alaric stretched and got out of the car, and then she kissed him hard. She knew they needed to strategize and plan - that with luck, Alaric had found something in his research that could help them fight Klaus. But for now, she just treasured the feeling of Alaric solid and real in her arms, his lips soft on hers, the smell of him that was made up of leather and soap and something sort of herbal and just essential Alaric.
"I've missed you," he said, resting his forehead against hers for a moment after they finally broke the kiss. "Talking on the phone isn't the same. "
"Me too," Meredith said, and she had, so much. "I love your freckles," she told him inconsequentially, and brushed her lips across the golden spots on his cheek.
They headed into the campus, holding hands as they walked. Meredith pointed out sites of interest: the library, the cafeteria, the student center, her dorm. The few people they passed hurried by in groups, heads down, not making eye contact.
When they came to the gym, Meredith hesitated before stopping in front of it. "This is where I train. It's hard . . . I used to come here with Samantha," she told Alaric. "She was so competitive and smart. She pushed me, in a really good way. " She leaned against Alaric for a moment, and felt him drop a kiss on the top of her head.
They walked on, but Meredith couldn't stop thinking about Samantha. Before Samantha, Meredith had never met anyone else from a family of hereditary vampire hunters. Her parents had left the hunter community behind. Because Samantha's parents had been killed when she was young, she hadn't really known any other hunters either.
They had taught each other so much. Meredith loved Elena and Bonnie - they were her best friends, her sisters - but no friend had ever understood as much about Meredith as Samantha had.
And then Ethan and the Vitale vampires had killed her. Meredith had been the one to find Samantha's body. She had been ripped apart so violently that her room had been soaked in blood.
Meredith felt her face twist, and her voice came out thick and fierce. "Sometimes I feel like it's never going to stop," she told Alaric. "There's always more monsters. And now Klaus is back, even though we killed him. He should be gone. "
"I know," Alaric said. "I wish I could make things better. Klaus destroyed your family, and you defeated him. You're right, this should have ended then. " They paused by a bench underneath a clump of trees, and he sat, pulling Meredith down beside him. Taking her hand, he looked into her eyes, his face filled with love and concern. "Tell me the truth, Meredith," he said. "Klaus destroyed your family. How are you feeling?"
Meredith caught her breath, because that fact was exactly what she had been avoiding ever since Klaus stepped out of the fire.
Klaus had attacked Meredith's grandfather and driven him into madness. He had kidnapped her twin brother, Cristian, and made him into a vampire. And he had made Meredith herself into a living half vampire, something every hunting family had a right to loathe.
And then the Guardians had changed everything, making a reality out of what would have happened if Klaus had never come to Fell's Church. Cristian was a human now - Meredith didn't remember ever meeting him, but he had grown up with her in this reality - and in army boot camp in Georgia. Their grandfather was happy and sane, living in a retirement village down in Florida. And Meredith didn't need blood, didn't have sharp kitten teeth. But she and her friends still remembered the way things used to be. No one else in her family remembered, but she did.
