The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Nightfall Read Free Page A

energy. Once again, Damon flashed the instantaneous smile, and then he turned it off, admiring himself in the dark glass of the window. Yes, no matter how you look at it, I am gorgeous, he thought absently.
    The door had a bell that made a tinkling sound as he entered. Inside was a plump and very pretty girl with brown hair tied back and large blue eyes.
    She had seen Damon and she was smiling shyly.
    “Hi.” And though he hadn’t asked, she added, in a voice that quavered, “I’m Page.”
    Damon gave her a long, unhurried look that ended in a smile, slow and brilliant and complicit. “Hello, Page,” he said, drawing it out.
    Page swallowed. “Can I help you?”
    “Oh, yes,” Damon said, holding her with his eyes, “I think so.”
    He turned serious. “Did you know,” he said, “that you really belong as a chatelaine in a castle in the Middle Ages?”
    Page went white, then blushed furiously—and looked all the better for it. “I—I always wished that I’d been born back then. But how could you know that?”
    Damon just smiled.
     
    Elena looked at Stefan with wide eyes that were the dark blue of lapis lazuli with a scattering of gold. He’d just told her that she was going to have Visitors! In all the sevendays of her life, since she had returned from the afterlife, she had never—ever—had a Visitor.
    First thing, right away, was to find out what a Visitor was.
     
    Fifteen minutes after entering the sunglasses shop, Damon was walking down the sidewalk, wearing a brand-new pair of Ray-Bans and whistling.
    Page was taking a little nap on the floor. Later, her boss would threaten to make her pay for the Ray-Bans herself. But right now she felt warm and deliriously happy—and she had a memory of ecstasy that she would never entirely forget.
    Damon window-shopped, although not exactly the way a human would. A sweet old woman behind the counter of the greeting cards shop…no. A guy at the electronics shop…no.
    But…something drew him back to the electronics shop. Such 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 wereaching 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, her good 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 hisjeans 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,