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.

Just before Jack’s vampires burst through the trees at him, Damon leaped into the air, completing the transition as he jumped. In crow form, he flapped his way above the forest.

They had gotten too close to him that time, he realized, tilting his wings to catch the night breeze. And they would never stop coming after him, now that they’d found him again.

He needed to figure out how to kill them for good.

Chapter 13

“I wish Damon was here for this,” Elena said, staring at her own reflection in the dark window.

There are a lot of people I wish were here for this, Bonnie thought. Alaric had invited everyone to his apartment, saying he had new information to share. But “everyone” felt like a lot fewer people now than it ever had.

Bonnie pulled two more chairs into place around the table. Doing this made it so clear to her how many people they were missing. They only needed six chairs, maybe five: Bonnie, Elena, Alaric, Matt, and Jasmine. And Damon, if he showed up. Stefan was gone. Meredith was away, and Bonnie hadn’t heard from her for quite a while.

Zander and his Pack should have been here, but he was still acting distant, and Bonnie hadn’t seen the rest of the Pack for days. She’d texted Zander to come to Elena’s, but she hadn’t been surprised when he’d given an evasive reply. She didn’t know when he’d be home, where he was.

Six chairs. And it looked like the sixth one would be empty.

“Can’t you just do your whole soul-bond thing and call Damon here?” Bonnie asked.

Elena finally turned around and looked at her, shrugging. “He tunes me out most of the time unless it feels like something’s wrong.”

“Really?” Bonnie asked, distracted from her angst. She’d always figured that the bond between Elena and Damon made them perfectly attuned to each other at all times, an open connection of love and longing. Which was totally romantic. And just slightly creepy.

“I tune him out, too,” Elena said. “We’d drive each other crazy otherwise.” She looked a little wistful as she said it.

Alaric came in from the kitchen and handed them each a cup of coffee. “You won’t believe how much I’ve found,” he said.

Before Bonnie or Elena could say anything, they heard feet clomping up the stairs outside, and Alaric hurried over to open the door. Matt and Jasmine came in, hand in hand. Bonnie’s heart gave a twinge of longing. Where was Zander?

“Sorry we’re a little late,” Matt said, “but we have some interesting news for you.”

Jasmine tipped her head up as Alaric kissed her on the cheek in greeting. “Have you heard anything from Meredith lately?”

“I just talked to her. She’s with the hunters, tracking Jack. No leads yet. She’ll let us know right away if they find him.” Alaric smiled, still looking excited about his news, but he seemed tired, too. Bonnie wondered if he was having trouble sleeping without Meredith. Zander had been coming to bed later and later, and she found herself tossing and turning until he came. She wasn’t used to sleeping alone.

“Where’s Zander?” Jasmine asked, as Alaric herded them all toward the table.

“He couldn’t come,” Bonnie said, keeping her voice light. Jasmine just nodded, but there must have been something in Bonnie’s tone, because Matt glanced up at her sharply.

“So I’ve been doing some digging into Jack’s background,” Alaric said, handing around photocopies of a newspaper article. The article was in English, but from a Swiss paper, dated five years before. The headline read WOMAN’S DEATH RULED ANIMAL ATTACK.

“You think this is Jack killing someone?” Matt asked thoughtfully. “Look at how they describe it. Her throat was torn open, she was almost completely drained of blood. Definitely a vampire.”

Alaric shook his head. “Based on the journal Damon found, Jack’s only been a vampire for three years,” he told them. “But look—at the end.” He tapped the last line of the article with one finger. Lucia di Russo is survived by two sisters and her fiancé, Henrik Goetsch.

“Okay…” Bonnie said. “Is this supposed to mean something? Because I don’t get it.”

“Henrik is Jack,” Alaric said, grinning. “Once I managed to ferret out his real name through missing persons reports, I was able to find out why he turned from scientist to vampire.”

“Pretty impressive detective work,” Matt said.

“So was Jack—Henrik—experimenting on this woman? His own fiancée?” Elena asked, looking horrified.

“I don’t think so,” Alaric said. “We don’t have any record of him having interest in vampires before Lucia was killed. I think this is when he discovered they were real.”

“And instead of being horrified, he decided he wanted to be one,” Bonnie remarked, feeling a little sick.

“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.