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“I wonder…” Jasmine said eagerly. Her shining eyes flew to Matt’s. “We know he started it all with real vampire blood. ”
Matt explained that Jasmine had used the lab equipment at the hospital to analyze the blood she had drawn from Damon’s captive. It was clear that Jack hadn’t, after all, just transformed humans into synthetic vampires with drugs and surgery as they’d thought. There had been a real vampire’s blood in the mix.
“What if it wasn’t just any vampire?” Jasmine asked eagerly. “What if it was his fiancée’s killer?”
“We don’t have any proof of that,” Elena said, leaning forward intently, her golden hair swinging forward around her face. “But whoever it was, he would have needed some kind of relationship with the vampire he got the blood from. Whether he forced them to give him the blood, or if they did it willingly…”
Alaric was nodding. “That vampire would know something about him. ”
Matt shifted in his seat and let out a frustrated huff of breath. “But that doesn’t really do us any good, does it? If Jack’s going around trying to kill all the regular vampires, probably the first thing he did was kill this one. Even if he didn’t, we don’t know who the vampire was, and I don’t see how we’re going to find out. ”
Elena raised her head and fixed Bonnie with a shining gaze. “Bonnie can do it. ”
“I can?” Bonnie asked, thrown off balance.
“Sure!” Elena said. “If we still have the blood, you can do a locator spell. It’ll be easy for you, you’re so powerful now. ”
Bonnie bit her lip, worried. “But the blood we have doesn’t even belong to the vampire we want to find,” she said. “It would be like trying to use your own blood to find your grandparents. ” Her mind was busy, though. It might work. Blood was powerful stuff—even human blood had a lot of magic in it. It was life, vitality, and connection. If she could follow those connections…
“I’d need some of the synthetic vampire blood,” she said dubiously.
“I have that,” Jasmine told her. She dug into her purse and pulled out a small stoppered vial. “I thought we might need it. ”
Bonnie met Elena’s eyes and knew the other girl could see the ideas sparking in her mind.
“Okay, then,” Elena said, grinning at her. “Tell me how we can help. ”
Under Bonnie’s direction, they cleared the table and dimmed the lights. “Candles,” Bonnie told them decisively. “Red ones, if you have them. ” Alaric was able to dig up one red candle and three white ones, which they grouped at the center of the table.
Bonnie headed into Alaric and Meredith’s kitchen and puttered around, opening drawers and cabinets, until she found a marble mortar and pestle. She’d left some herbs here, a small stockpile for emergencies, and she dug around in the cabinet under the sink to find them. Ground mastic and juniper berries would help with divination, she thought, and there was some sandalwood oil that couldn’t do any harm. Poke root was good for finding lost objects—maybe it was good for looking for vampires, too.
She dumped the herbs into the mortar and poured a little sandalwood oil over them, then mashed everything together with the pestle. Carrying it back out to the living room, she plunked it down on the table in front of the candles.
Elena handed her a book of matches and Bonnie carefully lit the candles, then reached to take the vial of blood from Jasmine. The blood had coagulated a bit. When she tipped it over above the pile of herbs, it trickled out, leaving a thick film inside the vial.
“Don’t use it all,” Elena breathed, hanging over Bonnie’s shoulder. “What if we need to do it again?”
“I don’t want to make the herbs too wet, anyway,” Bonnie told her, capping the vial. “They need to burn. ” She handed the vial, a third of its contents gone, back to Jasmine, and reached for another match.
The blood- and oil-drizzled herbs smoked and sputtered, letting out a hissing noise as they slowly began to burn. Bonnie fixed her eyes on the smoke, watching the patterns as it curled before the bright candle flames. She slowed her breathing and let her eyes slip out of focus, a deep calm coming over her.
Riding a surge of Power, Bonnie pushed outward, letting her mind expand. The red trickle of blood from the vial. Blood pounding through veins, drunk by vampires, passing from one vampire to another in an exchange of blood. Jack’s hands holding a syringe.
She could feel her eyes rolling back into her head and her mouth filled with a metallic, bitter taste. In the distance, Jasmine gasped and Matt shushed her quickly.
Then it was like Bonnie was speeding through the night sky above Dalcrest, the wind rushing through her hair. She hovered over the campus, feeling the pull toward Pruitt House, her old dorm, where she knew the captive vampire was locked in the basement. No, she thought firmly. Someone else. Further back.
There was an immediate jerk at her consciousness, but weak and in more than one direction, scattered. The other vampires Jack made, she realized. There were a lot of them, more than she’d supposed.
No, she thought again, more firmly. Further back. Older.
For a moment, she thought it was hopeless. Her consciousness hovered uncertainly, and then started to slide backward. She could see herself from above, her red head tilted back, the black smoke rising from the mixture of herbs and blood toward the ceiling. She was falling back into her body. No! she shrieked silently, trying to pull away.
There was a sudden tug somewhere in her center, and Bonnie was rising again, flying faster, feeling light and buoyant. She zoomed over the campus, past Pruitt House, past the playing fields, and felt herself slow as she reached the stretch of woods on the other side of campus.
There was something—someone—down there. The blood was yanking her toward it. The sensation was stronger than what she had gotten from the vampires in the woods and somehow felt older and darker than the pull toward Damon’s captive.
Down, down, closer and closer. The image was becoming clearer: a shadowy figure in a small room. Some kind of little house deep in the woods behind the campus. Through the window she glimpsed the bell tower of the Dalcrest chapel.
