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/> “Long story short?” Jasmine arched an eyebrow, a pleased little smile on her lips. “Jack may have made his vampires in a lab, but he didn’t do it without help. There are all kinds of chemical and genetic modifications going on here,” she said, pointing to one edge of the lower graph. “But the basic structure of the blood shows that Jack didn’t start with just ordinary human blood. He used real vampire blood. That’s not in the lab notes Damon stole from him, but it’s definitely true. There was a first step he didn’t document in that notebook. ”
“Wow. ” Matt ran his eyes across the screen as Jasmine explained her conclusions in more detail. They still meant nothing to him, but he believed she knew what she was talking about. “It’s amazing that you figured this out. ” He hesitated. “Is it going to help us kill them?”
Jasmine’s face fell. “I don’t know,” she said. “The mutated strands must be what keep them from being vulnerable to the things vampires usually die from. But I can’t—I’m not a geneticist. ”
Seeing the disappointment in her eyes, Matt felt like a jerk. “This is great, though,” he said hastily. “The more we know about what Jack’s doing, the better. ”
He was glad to see Jasmine’s lips tilt up again into a smile. And it was true. He had to believe that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his vampires would bring them closer to killing him.
Raccoon, Damon thought, scraping his tongue against his teeth, is even more disgusting than rabbit. That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing. He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up through branches at the stars, so clear and distant. The night forest was quiet around him.
He should just discreetly find a girl who would let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but somehow he couldn’t with Elena around. Even though he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seem right to find another companion. Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées.
How had Stefan managed it, decade after decade, resigning himself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Damon bit his lip and then consciously relaxed, lounging against the tree, pushing the thought away. He wasn’t going to think about Stefan.
Instead, he reached for his connection with Elena. It was better to think of her, of her soft skin and shining eyes, of her proud spirit and sharp, fierce mind, than to poke again and again at the painful scars left by Stefan’s loss.
Her grief was still there, haunting the bond between them. It would never leave her, he supposed, never leave either of them completely. But there was something else there, he thought, something gentler and warmer creeping into her emotions. He thought—hoped—that perhaps it was the way she felt about him.
Licking his lips, Damon let the blood flowing inside him—disgusting, but full of the energy of life—warm him and quicken his Power. Elena thought Siobhan might be in one of the hunting cabins up here in the hills. So Damon was looking.
It probably wasn’t what the Guardians wanted, as they’d assigned Elena the task of finding and killing the old vampire, but who cared what they wanted? Dead was dead, and he didn’t like the idea of Elena following auras by herself, finding corpses in the night. She was strong, he knew, but she was still so young.
And he was ready to take someone down. His experiments in killing the synthetic vampires were at a standstill. Nothing worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Damon with dull, resentful eyes instead of fighting back. Restlessly, Damon touched his tongue to his sharp canines. He needed to do something.
He pushed his Power outward, searching, categorizing what he found. There was life all around him. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth, an owl swooped overhead. He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a family of black bears searching for food. Humans down in the town below, sleeping or indoors. One walking a dog at the edge of the forest.
Nothing other. No vampire consciousness stirring. If Siobhan was in a cabin in the woods, it wasn’t one of the ones up here in the hills past the edge of town.
Damon looked up at the stars again and thought about whether he should call another animal to him before he went home. He hadn’t tried bear yet; maybe it would be less vile. All that fur seemed like it would be a pain to bite through, though, which might be even worse than the raccoon.
Or maybe he should head down into town, find a game of pool or a fight, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power.
He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when something stopped him short. Tensed, he held his breath and listened.
There was the lightest crackle, as if someone were carefully stepping across dry leaves. Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness, wrongness crept up on him, the faint chemical wrongness that was now all around.
Jack’s vampires. Now that Jack knew Damon was in Dalcrest, they had been tracking him. The little vampire outside his and Elena’s home hadn’t been there by coincidence. He had been scouting, and only the fact that Damon had captured him had stopped more from coming there. And now they’d found him here, in the forest. If they were able to track him, they would pursue Damon the same way their kind had chased him and Katherine across Europe. Only now he was alone.
Pushing away a flare of panic, Damon stepped backward so that the birch tree was at his back once more. They wouldn’t be able to come at him from behind. He stretched his Power, feeling for the shape of their minds. Even using his Power to its fullest extent, he could barely sense them. It was lucky he had just fed, or he might not have sensed them coming at all. There was more than one—maybe as many as eight or nine, the feel of them quiet but, once he’d found them, distinct from one another.
Jack wasn’t among them, he thought, nor was Meredith. He knew the feel of those two minds now, and these felt like strangers. Just how many minions had the mad scientist created?
They were coming closer, almost close enough for him to see them. He peered into the darkness, watching for movement. There was a crackle of dry leaves somewhere to his right, but he couldn’t spot them, couldn’t find exactly where they were coming from. Growling low in his throat with frustration, Damon took one step to the right, glaring off into the tangle of trees.
The first vampire slammed into him from the left, unexpected, knocking him sideways. She was a young blond girl, no taller than Bonnie and probably a few years younger. She took advantage of his surprise, going straight for Damon’s throat, her white teeth flashing in the starlight.
Damon caught his balance and grabbed a fistful of her thick hair, yanking her head back and away from his throat. With a quick motion, he managed to snap her neck. She fell limply at his feet, her face empty and innocent. It wouldn’t keep her down for long, but she’d be out of the fight for the moment.
“Come on then, children,” he said to the dark shapes he knew were just out of his field of vision, taunting them. “Are you monsters or cowards?” He hesitated and stared out into the darkness, feeling with his Power. Could he feel something now? The faintest shine of a rust-red aura in the night? “Dilly, dilly, ducks, come and be killed,” he shouted wildly, an old nursery song popping into his head as he strained to pinpoint just what it was he was on the verge of sensing.
There. There and there. All around. They were dropping their shields now, he realized; he could feel them coming from all sides, pressing in eagerly. They weren’t intimidated by how quickly he’d put down the little blonde. She’d only been an experiment, like poking a snake with a stick to see how fast it moved. A sense of grim satisfaction rose from them.
They weren’t afraid of him, and, deep inside, this shook Damon. He’d fought monsters stronger than he was, demons and ancient vampires. But they’d always been cautious, a little wary, respecting him even if they didn’t think he was a true threat.
But he didn’t know how to kill these vampires, didn’t even know how to hurt them properly, not for long. And they knew it.
There were too many of them, and he was alone. So Damon did the only thing he could. Between one blink and another, he pulled his Power fiercely around him, feeling his body violently compact. It was almost too much to manage with only animal blood in his veins, but he was determined. There was no way he was going to be ripped apart in the woods with the taste of raccoon still in his mouth.
