clever devices they were inventing these days. He had a strong urge to acquire a palm-sized video camera. Damon was used to following his urges and was not picky about donors in an emergency. Blood was blood, whatever vessel it came in. A few minutes after he'd been shown how to work the little toy, he was walking down the sidewalk with it in his pocket.
He was enjoying just walking, although his fangs were aching again. Strange, he should be sated - but then, he'd had almost nothing yesterday. That must be why he still felt hungry; that and the Power he'd used on the damnable parasite in Caroline's room. But meanwhile he took pleasure in the way his muscles were working together smoothly and without effort, like a well-oiled machine, making every movement a delight.
He stretched once, for the pure animal enjoyment of it, and then stopped again to examine himself in the window of the antiques store. Slightly more disheveled, but otherwise as beautiful as ever. And he'd been right; the Ray-Bans looked wicked on him. The antiques store was owned, he knew, by a widow with a very pretty, very young niece.
It was dim and air-conditioned inside.
"Do you know," he asked the niece when she came to wait on him, "that you strike me as someone who would like to see a lot of foreign countries?"
Some time after Stefan explained to Elena that Visitors were her friends, hergood friends, he wanted her to get dressed. Elena didn't understand why. It was hot. She had given in to wearing a Night Gown (for at least most of the night), but the daytime was even warmer, and she didn't have a Day Gown.
Besides, the clothes he was offering her - a pair of his jeans rolled up at the hems and a polo shirt that would be much too big - were...wrong somehow. When she touched the shirt she got pictures of hundreds of women in small rooms, all using sewing machines in bad light, all working frantically.
"From a sweat shop?" Stefan said, startled, when she showed him the picture in her mind."These?" He dropped the clothes on the floor of the closet hastily.
"What about this one?" Stefan handed her a different shirt.
Elena studied it soberly, held it to her cheek. No sweating, frantically sewing women.
"Okay?" Stefan said. But Elena had frozen. She went to the window and peered out.
"What's wrong?"
This time, she sent him only one picture. He recognized it immediately.
Damon.
Stefan felt a tightening in his chest. His older brother had been making Stefan's existence as miserable as possible for nearly half a millennium. Every time that Stefan had managed to get away from him, Damon had tracked him down, looking for...what? Revenge? Some final satisfaction? They had killed each other at the same instant, back in Renaissance Italy. Their fencing swords had pierced each other's hearts almost simultaneously, in a duel over a vampire girl. Things had only gone downhill from there.
But he's saved your life a few times, too, Stefan thought, suddenly discomfited. And you promised you'd watch out for each other, take care of each other....
Stefan looked sharply at Elena.She was the one who'd made both of them take the same oath - when she was dying. Elena looked back with eyes that were limpid, deep blue pools of innocence.
In any case, he had to deal with Damon, who was now parking his Ferrari beside Stefan's Porsche in front of the boardinghouse.
"Stay in here and - and keep away from the window.Please ," Stefan hastily told Elena. He dashed out
of the room, shut the door, and almost ran down the steps.
He found Damon standing by the Ferrari, examining the dilapidated boardinghouse's exterior - first with sunglasses on, then with them off. Damon's expression said that it didn't make a great deal of difference whichever way you looked at it.
But that wasn't Stefan's first concern. It was Damon's aura and the variety of different scents lingering on him - which no human nose would ever be able to detect, much less untangle.
"What have you beendoing ?" Stefan said, too shocked for even a perfunctory greeting.
Damon gave him a 250-watt smile. "Antiquing," he said, and sighed. "Oh, and I did some shopping." He fingered a new leather belt, touched the pocket with the video camera, and pushed back his Ray-Bans. "Would you believe it, this little dust speck of a town has some pretty decent shopping. I like shopping."
"You like stealing, you mean. And that doesn't account