"Certainly, my lovely," Damon said, and took her hand.
Elena felt a slight frisson of unease. But his fingers were reassuringly firm in hers, and she pushed her hesitation away.
The ancient tennis-shoed librarian in charge of the archive room explained how to search the database of school records and got Elena and Damon set up in the corner on a computer.
"Ugh," Damon said, poking disdainfuly at a key. "I don't mind computers, but books and pictures ought to be real, not on a machine."
"But this way everyone can see them," Elena said patiently. She'd had this kind of conversation with Stefan before. The Salvatore brothers might look col ege-aged, but there were some things about the modern world they just couldn't seem to get their heads around.
Elena clicked on the photo section of the database and typed in her mother's name, Elizabeth Morrow.
"Look, there are a bunch of pictures." She scanned through them, looking for the one that she had seen hanging in the hal . She saw a lot of cast and crew pictures from various theatrical productions. James had told her that her mother was a star on the design side, but it looked like she was in some productions, too. In one, Elena's mother was dancing, her head flung back, her hair going everywhere.
"She looks like you." Damon was contemplating the picture, his head tilted to one side, dark eyes intent. "Softer here, though, around the mouth" - one long finger gestured - "and her face is more innocent than yours." His mouth twisted teasingly, and he shot a sidelong glance at Elena.
"A nicer girl than you, I'd guess."
"I'm nice," Elena said, hurt, and quickly clicked on to find the picture she was looking for.
"You're too clever to be nice, Elena," Damon said, but Elena was barely listening.
"Here we are," she said. The photograph was just as she remembered it: James and her parents under a tree, eager and impossibly young. Elena zoomed in on the image, focusing on the pin on her father's shirt. Definitely a V. It was blue, a deep dark blue, she could see that now, the same shade as the lapis lazuli rings Damon and Stefan wore to protect themselves from sunlight.
"I've seen one of those pins before," Damon said abruptly. He frowned. "I don't remember where, though. Sorry."
"You've seen it recently?" Elena asked, but Damon just shrugged. "James said my mother made the pins for al of them," she said, zooming closer so that al she could see on the screen was the grainy image of the V. "I don't believe him, though. She didn't make jewelry, that wasn't her kind of thing. And it doesn't look handmade, not unless it was made by someone with an actual jewelry studio.
That's some kind of enameling on the V, I think." She typed V in the search engine, but it came back with nothing. "I wish I knew what it stood for."
With another graceful one-shouldered shrug, Damon reached for the mouse and zoomed in and out on different parts of the picture. Behind them, the librarian thunked a book down, and Elena glanced back at her to find the woman's eyes fixed on them with disconcerting intensity.
Her mouth tightened as her eyes met Elena's, and she looked away, walking a little farther along the aisle. But Elena was left with the creepy feeling that the librarian was stil watching and listening to them.
She turned to whisper something to Damon about it but was caught again by the sheer unexpectedness of him, of him here. He just didn't fit in the drab and ordinary library computer station - it was like finding a wild animal curled up on your desk. Like a dark angel fixing oatmeal in your kitchen.
Had she ever seen him under fluorescent lights before?
Something about the lighting brought out the clean paleness of his skin, cast long shadows along his cheekbones, and fel without reflection into the black velvet of his hair and eyes. A couple of buttons on the col ar of his shirt were undone, and Elena found herself almost mesmerized by the subtle shifts of the long muscles in his neck and shoulders.
"What would a Vital Society be?" he asked suddenly, breaking her out of her reverie.
"What?" she asked, confused. "What are you talking about?"
Damon clicked the mouse and shifted the zoom, focusing this time on the notebook in her mother's lap. Her mother's hands - pretty hands, Elena noticed, prettier than her own, which had slightly crooked pinkies - were splayed over the open book, but between the fingers, Elena could read: Vit l Soci y
"I assume that's what it says," Damon said, shrugging.
"Since you're looking for something that starts with V. It could say something else of course. Vital Socialy, maybe?
Was your mother a social queen bee like you?" Elena ignored the question. "The Vitale Society," she said slowly. "I always thought it was a myth."
"Leave the Vitale Society alone." The hiss came from behind them, and Elena whipped around.
The librarian seemed curiously impressive framed against the bookshelves despite her tennis shoes and pastel sweater set. Her hawklike face was tense and focused on Elena, her body tal and, Elena felt instinctively, threatening.
"What do you mean?" Elena asked. "Do you know something about them?"
Confronted by a direct question, the woman seemed to shrink from the almost menacing figure she had been a second before to an ordinary, slightly dithering old lady. "I don't know anything," she muttered, frowning. "Al I can say is that it's not safe to mess with the Vitales. Things happen around them. Even if you're careful." She started to wheel her book cart away.