Destiny Rising Read Free

with heavy lashes. And the hair was, now that he looked at it closely, obviously dyed.
    The girl smiled at him hesitantly, unsure.
    “You’d better go back to your room,” Damon said. He sent a current of commanding Power into her, and continued. “You won’t remember later that you met me. You won’t know what happened.”
    “I’d better get back,” she echoed, her voice wrong, the wrong timbre, the wrong tone, not right at all. Her face brightened. “My boyfriend’s waiting for me,” she added.
    Damon felt something inside him snap. In a fraction of a second, he had pulled the girl roughly back to him. With no care or finesse, he ripped back into her throat, gulping her rich, hot blood furiously. He was punishing her, he realized, and taking pleasure in it.
    Now that she was no longer under his thrall, she screamed and struggled, beating against his back with her fists. Damon pinned her with one arm and expertly worked his fangs in and out of her neck to widen the bite, drinking more blood, faster. Her blows grew weaker and she swayed in his arms.
    When she went limp, he dropped her, and she landed on the forest floor with a heavy thud.
    For a moment, he stared into the dark woods around him, listening to the steady chirp of the crickets. The girl lay unmoving at his feet. Although he had not needed to breathe for more than five hundred years, he was gasping, almost dizzy.
    He touched his own lips and brought his hand back red and dripping. It had been a long time since he’d lost control of himself like that. Hundreds of years, probably. He stared down at the crumpled body at his feet. The girl looked so small now, her face serene and empty, lashes dark against her pale cheeks.
    Damon wasn’t sure if she was dead or alive. He realized he didn’t want to find out.
    He backed away a few steps from the girl, feeling oddly uncertain, and then turned and ran, swift and silent through the darkness of the woods, listening only to the pounding of his own heart.
    Damon had always done what he wanted. Feeling bad about what was natural for a vampire, that was for someone like Stefan. But, as he ran, an uncharacteristic sensation in the pit of his stomach nagged at him, something that felt more than a little bit like guilt.
     
    “But you said Ethan was dead,” Bonnie said. She felt Meredith flinch beside her and bit her tongue. Of course Meredith would be sensitive about Ethan’s possible survival; she’d killed him, or had thought she had. Meredith’s face was hard and guarded now, revealing nothing.
    “I should have cut off his head to make sure,” Meredith said, sweeping her flashlight from side to side to illuminate the stone walls of the tunnel. Bonnie nodded to herself, realizing something she should have guessed: Meredith was angry .
    Meredith’s call alerting Bonnie to Ethan’s disappearance had come while Bonnie and Zander were having a late dinner at the student union. It had been a sweet, easy date: burgers and Cokes and Zander gently trapping her foot between his two bigger ones under the table as he sneakily stole her fries.
    And now, here she and Zander were, looking for vampires in the secret underground tunnels beneath the campus with Meredith and Matt. Elena and Stefan were doing the same thing in the woods around the campus overhead. Not the most romantic we-just-got-back-together date, Bonnie thought with a resigned shrug. But they do say couples should share their hobbies.
    Matt, striding along on Meredith’s other side, seemed grimly determined, his jaw clenched and his eyes fixed straight ahead down the long, dark tunnel. Bonnie felt sorry for him. All the strain the rest of them felt had to be a hundred times worse for Matt right now.
    “You with us, Matt?” Meredith asked, apparently reading Bonnie’s mind.
    Matt sighed and kneaded at the back of his neck with one hand as if his muscles were strained and stiff. “Yeah, I’m with you.” He paused and took a breath.