Suddenly, she felt Stefan's body tense against hers and realized he was looking around. "Stefan?" she asked.
He was looking off into the distance over her head, his mouth tight and eyes alert. "I'm sorry, Elena," he said as Elena pulled away and met his gaze. "We'll have to talk about this later. I just felt something. Someone in pain. And now that the wind has changed, I think I smell blood."
Elena tamped down her emotions, forcing herself back into calm rationality. All of this, all her own problems and questions, could wait. They had a job to do. "Where?" she asked.
Stefan took Elena's hand and led her farther into the undergrowth. The trees blocked out more of the stars here, and she stumbled over roots and stones in the darkness. Stefan steadied her, guiding their way.
A moment later, they burst into another clearing. It took Elena's eyes a second to adjust, to see the dark shape Stefan was already moving toward cautiously. Huddled on the ground lay the body of a human.
They dropped to their knees beside it, and Stefan reached out and carefully, gently turned the person over. The body flopped heavily onto its back. A girl, Elena realized. A girl about her own age, her face pale and empty. Golden hair shone in the starlight. There was blood on her throat.
"Is she dead?" she asked in a whisper. The girl was so still.
Stefan touched the girl's cheek, then carefully ran his fingers across her neck, below the trickle of blood, not touching the thick red fluid. "Not dead," he said, and Elena let out a sigh of relief. "But she's lost a lot of blood."
"We'd better get her back to campus," Elena said. "And we'll tell the others the vampires are hunting in the woods. We can come back and find who did this."
Stefan was staring down at the girl's wounds, his mouth oddly twisted in an unreadable expression. "Elena, I - I don't think this was Ethan's vampires," he said hesitantly.
"What do you mean?" Elena asked, puzzled. A root was digging into her knees, and she shifted to get more comfortable, pressing one hand against the cold ground. "What else would have done this?"
Stefan frowned and gently touched the girl's neck again, still careful not to come into contact with the blood. "Look at the marks," he said. "The vampire who did this was angry and careless, but he was experienced. The bite is clean and in the perfect place to get the maximum amount of blood without killing the victim." He smoothed the girl's hair carefully, as if to comfort her. He looked like he was in pain, his teeth clenched, his eyes narrow. "Elena, Damon did this," he said.
Everything in Elena tightened and she shook her head, her hair whipping around her. "No," she said. "He wouldn't just leave someone in the woods to die."
Stefan had a far-off look on his face and she instinctively reached out to touch his arm, trying to comfort him. He closed his eyes for a second and leaned into her. "After five hundred years, I can recognize Damon's bite," he said sadly. "Sometimes it seems like he's changed, but Damon doesn't change." The weight of Stefan's words seemed to hit him just as strongly as they hit Elena, and he hunched his shoulders.
For a moment, Elena couldn't breathe, and she gulped, feeling dizzy and sick. Damon? Images flashed in her mind's eye: Damon's fathomless, dark eyes hot with fury, sharp with bitterness. And softer, warmer sometimes, when he looked at her or at Stefan. A hard kernel of denial formed in her chest.
"No," she said, and looking at Stefan, she repeated it more firmly. "No. Damon's hurting, because of us - because of me." Stefan nodded almost imperceptibly. "We're not going to give up on him. He has changed, he's done so much for us, for all of us. He cares, Stefan, and we can pull him back from this. He didn't kill her. It's not too late."
Stefan was listening to her carefully and after a moment he drew his hand wearily across his face, his features firming with resolve. "We have to keep this a secret," he said. "Meredith and the others can't know what Damon's done."
Elena remembered Meredith's expression as she wielded her stave, and swallowed hard. The hunter in Meredith wouldn't hesitate to kill Damon if she thought he was a real danger to innocent humans. "You're right," she said thinly. "We can't tell anyone."
Reaching across the body of unconscious girl, Stefan took Elena's hand in his again. She clasped his hand tightly, her eyes meeting his in a silent pledge. They would work together; they would save Damon. It was going to be all right.
Chapter 4
Elena didn't tell anyone about the girl they'd found in the woods. Elena and Stefan had shaken the girl and poured cool water on her face, trying to wake her up without having to take her to the hospital. Blood had pooled through the bandages they'd put on the girl's wounds - Damon had bitten too deeply, Stefan said - and finally Stefan had fed her blood from his own wrist, grimacing, to help her heal. He didn't feel right doing that, Elena knew: the exchange of blood was too intimate, meant love to Stefan, but what else could they do? They couldn't let her die.
When the girl finally regained consciousness, Stefan Influenced her to forget what had happened, and he and Elena helped her back to her sorority house. By the time they'd left her, near dawn, she'd been flushed and giggling, sure that she'd just been out too late drinking on a fabulous night.
Back in her dorm room, Elena had tried to sleep, but she'd been too worked up. She tossed and turned under her clean cotton sheets, remembering the frustration in Stefan's eyes as he told her, Damon did this, and the suppressed flash of panic she'd seen when he said, We have to keep this a secret.
She'd known Damon still fed off humans, although she usually managed not to think about it. But he hadn't done any real harm, not for a long time. Now he used his Power to convince pretty girls to give him their blood willingly, and then left them with nothing but a vague memory of an evening spent with a charming and mysterious man with an Italian accent. If that. Sometimes they just had a hole in their memory.
And, sure, it was wrong. Elena knew that, even if Damon didn't. The girls weren't in their right minds. He fed on them, and they never really understood. Elena was sure that if it happened to her, or Bonnie, or anyone she cared about, she would have been outraged and disgusted. But she'd been able to ignore the facts when the end result - Damon satisfied, his victims seemingly unscathed - appeared to be so benign.
But this time he clearly hadn't bothered to be careful with the girl, or to make it easy on her. She'd been bleeding alone in the woods, and when she'd finally woken, she had been screaming. Elena shuddered at the memory, sick with guilt.
Was this the reality she'd been ignoring? Maybe Damon had been attacking people all this time and hiding it from her, and the idea of the woozy, unaware, and happy victim was a lie. Or maybe there had been a change, and it was Elena's fault. Had Damon done this in a rage, because Elena had chosen Stefan?
Elena tried once more to reach Damon, but when it rang through to voice mail, she pushed the "end call" button on her phone. She'd been calling Damon on and off all morning and had left a couple of messages already, but he hadn't picked up or called her back.
"Was that Stefan?" Bonnie asked, coming out of the bathroom toweling off her hair. Red strands curled wildly over her face in all directions. "Is he on his way?"