"Well, neither do you, apparently. Maybe if you hadn't been hiding in the living room, you'd have seen what happened. Then somebody might believe you."
Bonnie's retort died on her tongue. She stared at Tyler, opened her mouth, and then closed it. Tyler waited. When she didn't speak, he showed his teeth again.
"For my money, Vickie did it," he said, winking at Dick Carter, Vickie's ex-boyfriend. "She's a strong little babe, right, Dick? She could have done it." He turned and added deliberately over his shoulder, "Or else that Salvatore guy is back in town."
"You creep!" shouted Bonnie. Even Meredith cried out in frustration. Because of course at the very mention of Stefan pandemonium ensued, as Tyler must have known it would. Everyone was turning to the person next to them and exclaiming in alarm, horror, excitement. It was primarily the girls who were excited.
Effectively, it put an end to the gathering. People had been edging away surreptitiously before, and now they broke up into twos and threes, arguing and hastening off.
Bonnie gazed after them angrily.
"Supposing they did believe you. What did you want them to do, anyway?" Matt said. She hadn't noticed him beside her.
"I don't know. Something besides just standing around waiting to be picked off." She tried to look him in the face. "Matt, are you all right?"
"I don't know. Are you?"
Bonnie thought. "No. I mean, in one way I'm surprised I'm doing as well as I am, because when Elena died, I just couldn't deal. At all. But then I wasn't as close to Sue, and besides... I don't know!" She wanted to hit something again. "It's just all too much!"
Bonnie thought. "No. I mean, in one way I'm surprised I'm doing as well as I am, because when Elena died, I just couldn't deal. At all. But then I wasn't as close to Sue, and besides... I don't know!" She wanted to hit something again. "It's just all too much!"
"Yes, I'm mad." Suddenly Bonnie understood the feelings she'd been having all day. "Killing Sue wasn't just wrong, it was evil. Truly evil. And whoever did it isn't going to get away with it. That would be-if the world is like that, a place where that can happen and go unpunished... if that's the truth..." She found she didn't have a way to finish.
"Then what? You don't want to live here anymore? What if the world is like that?"
His eyes were so lost, so bitter. Bonnie was shaken. But she said staunchly, "I won't let it be that way. And you won't either."
He simply looked at her as if she were a kid insisting there was so a Santa Claus.
Meredith spoke up. "If we expect other people to take us seriously, we'd better take ourselves seriously. Elena did communicate with us. She wanted us to do something. Now if we really believe that, we'd better figure out what it is."
Matt's face had flexed at the mention of Elena. You poor guy, you're still as much in love with her as ever, thought Bonnie. I wonder if anything could make you forget her? She said, "Are you going to help us, Matt?"
"I'll help," Matt said quietly. "But I still don't know what it is you're doing."
"We're going to stop that murdering creep before he kills anybody else," said Bonnie. It was the first time she'd fully realized herself that this was what she meant to do.
"Alone? Because you are alone, you know."
"We are alone," Meredith corrected. "But that's what Elena was trying to tell us. She said we had to do a summoning spell to call for help."
"An easy spell with only two ingredients," Bonnie remembered from her dream. She was getting excited. "And she said she'd already told me the ingredients-but she hadn't."
"Last night she said there were corrupting influences distorting her communication," Meredith said. "Now to me that sounds like what was happening in the dream. Do you think it really was Elena you were drinking tea with?"
"Yes," Bonnie said positively. "I mean, I know we weren't really having a mad tea party at Warm Springs, but I think Elena was sending that message into my brain. And then partway through something else took over and pushed her out. But she fought, and for a minute at the end she got back control."
"Okay. Then that means we have to concentrate on the beginning of the dream, when it was still Elena communicating with you. But if what she was saying was already being distorted by other influences, then maybe it came out weird. Maybe it
wasn't something she actually said, maybe it was something she did..."
"What?"
"Hair! I asked her who did hers, and we talked about it, and she said, 'Hair is very important.' And Meredith-when she was trying to tell us the ingredients last night, the first letter of one of them was H!"
"That's it!" Meredith's dark eyes were flashing. "Now we just have to think of the other one."
"But I know that too!" Bonnie's laughter bubbled up exuberantly. "She told me right after we talked about hair, and I thought she was just being strange. She said, 'Blood is important too.' "