her mind as she dove headfirst from her sixty-foot perch in the tree.
Believe.
Chapter 37
As she fell, it all rushed through her mind.
The first time she had seen Stefan...she had been a different person then. Ice-cold outside, manic inside - or was it the other way around? Still numb from the death of her parents so long ago. Jaded by the world and by anything to do with boys...A princess in an icy tower...with a lust only for conquest, for power...until she'd seenhim .
Believe.
Then the world of the vampires...and Damon. And all the wicked wildness she'd found inside herself, all the passion. Stefan was her lynchpin, but Damon was the fiery breath beneath her wings. However far she went, Damon seemed to lure her on just a little farther. And she knew that one day it would be too far...for both of them. But for now, all she had to do was simple.
Believe.
And Meredith, and Bonnie, and Matt. She had changed relations with them, oh, most definitely. At first, not knowing what she had done to deserve friends like these three, she hadn't even bothered to treat them as they deserved. Yet they had all stuck by her. And now shedid know how to appreciate them - knew that if it came to that, she would die for them.
Below, Bonnie's eyes had followed her dive. The audience on the widow's walk looked, too, but it was Bonnie's face that she stared into: Bonnie startled and terrified and disbelieving and about to scream and realizing at the same time that no screaming would save Elena from a headlong dive to her death.
Bonnie, believe in me. I'll save you.
I remember how to fly.
Chapter 38
Bonnie knew that she was going to die.
She had had a clear premonition of it just before thosethings - the trees that moved like humans, with their hideous faces and their thick, knotted arms - had surrounded the little band of humans in the Old Wood. She had heard the howl of the black weir dog, turned, and just caught a glimpse of one vanishing in the glare of her flashlight. The dogs had a long history in Bonnie's family: when one of them howled, a death was soon to come.
She'd guessed then that it would be hers.
But she hadn't said anything, even when Dr. Alpert had said, "What in the name ofheaven wasthat ?" Bonnie was practicing being brave. Meredith and Matt were brave. It was something built into them, an ability to keep going when any sane person would run away and hide. They both putthe group's good ahead of their own. And of course Dr. Alpert was brave, not to mention strong, and Mrs. Flowers seemed to have decided that the teenagers were her own special charges to take care of.
Bonnie had wanted to show that she could be brave, too. She was practicing holding her head up and listening for things in the bushes, while simultaneously listening with her psychic senses for any sign of Elena. It was hard to juggle the two kinds of hearing. There was a lot to hear with her real ears; all kinds of quiet chucklings and whisperings from the bushes that didn't belong there. But from Elena there wasn't a sound, not even when Bonnie called her name over and over:Elena, Elena, Elena!
She's human again, Bonnie had realized sadly, at last. She can't hear me or make contact. Out of all of us, she's the only one who didn't miraculously escape.
And it was then that the first of the Tree-Men loomed up in front of the group of searchers. Like something out of a nursery-tale nightmare, it was a tree and then - suddenly - it was athing , a treelike giant that suddenly moved swiftly toward them, its upper branches bunching together to become long arms, and then everyone was screaming and trying to get away from it.
Bonnie would never forget how Matt and Meredith had tried to help her run then.
The Tree-Man wasn't fast. But when they turned and ran from it they found that there was another one behind them. And more to the right and the left. They were surrounded.
And then, like cattle, like slaves, they were herded. Any of them that tried to resist the trees were slapped and cuffed by hard and sharp-thorned branches, and then, with a lithe branch wound around the neck, weredragged .
They'd been caught - but they hadn't been killed. Instead they were being taken somewhere. It wasn't