Dark Reunion

"No."

And this is how the ending starts. Like this, so simply, with one word, and you’re going to die on a summer night. A summer night when the moon and stars are shining and bonfires burn like the flames the Druids used to summon the dead.

"Bonnie, go," Stefan said painfully. "Get out while you can."

"No," Bonnie said. I’m sorry, Elena, she thought. I can’t save him. This is all I can do.

"Get out of the way," Klaus said through his teeth.

"No." She could wait and let Stefan die this way, instead of with Klaus’s teeth in his throat. It might not seem like much of a difference, but it was the most she could offer.

"Bonnie…" Stefan whispered.

"Don’t you know who I am, girl? I’ve walked with the devil. If you move, I’ll let you die quickly."

Bonnie’s voice had given out. She shook her head.

Klaus threw back his own head and laughed. A little more blood trickled out, too. "All right," he said. "Have it your own way. Both of you go together."

Summer night, Bonnie thought. The solstice eve. When the line between worlds is so thin.

"Say good night, sweetheart."

No time to trance, no time for anything. Nothing except one desperate appeal. "Elena!" Bonnie screamed. "Elena! Elena!"

Klaus recoiled.

For an instant, it seemed as if the name alone had the power to alarm him. Or as if he expected something to respond to Bonnie’s cry. He stood, listening.

Bonnie drew on her powers, putting everything she had into it, throwing her need and her call out into the void.

And felt… nothing.

Nothing disturbed the summer night except the crackling sound of flames. Klaus turned back to Bonnie and Stefan, and grinned.

Then Bonnie saw the mist creeping along the ground.

No-it couldn’t be mist. It must be smoke from the fire. But it didn’t behave like either. It was swirling, rising in the air like a tiny whirlwind or dust devil. It was gathering into a shape roughly the size of a man.

Mist was flowing out of the ground, between the trees. Pools of it, each separate and distinct. Bonnie, staring mutely, could see through each patch, could see the flames, the oak trees, the bricks of the chimney. Klaus had stopped smiling, stopped moving, and was watching too.

Bonnie turned to Stefan, unable to even frame the question.

"Unquiet spirits," he whispered huskily, his green eyes intent. "The solstice." And then Bonnie understood.

They were coming. From across the river, where the old cemetery lay. From the woods, where countless makeshift graves had been dug to dump bodies in before they rotted. The unquiet spirits, the soldiers who had fought here and died during the Civil War. A supernatural host answering the call for help.

They were forming all around. There were hundreds of them.

Bonnie could actually see faces now. The misty outlines were filling in with pale hues like so many runny watercolors. She saw a flash of blue, a glimmer of gray. Both Union and Confederate troops. Bonnie glimpsed a pistol thrust into a belt, the glint of an ornamented sword. Chevrons on a sleeve. A bushy dark beard; a long, well-tended white one. A small figure, child size, with dark holes for eyes and a drum hanging at thigh level.

"Oh, my God," she whispered. "Oh, God." It wasn’t swearing. It was something like a prayer.

Not that she wasn’t frightened of them, because she was. It was every nightmare she’d ever had about the cemetery come true. Like her first dream about Elena, when things came crawling out of the black pits in the earth; only these things weren’t crawling, they were flying, skimming and floating until they swirled into human form. Everything that Bonnie had ever felt about the old graveyard-that it was alive and full of watching eyes, that there was some Power lurking behind its waiting stillness -was proving true. The earth of Fell’s Church was giving up its bloody memories. The spirits of those who’d died here were walking again.

And Bonnie could feel their anger. It frightened her, but another emotion was waking up inside her, making her catch her breath and clench tighter on Stefan’s hand. Because the misty army had a leader.

One figure was floating in front of the others, closest to the place where Klaus stood. It had no shape or definition as yet, but it glowed and scintillated with the pale golden light of a candle flame. Then, before Bonnie’s eyes, it seemed to take on substance from the air, shining brighter and brighter every minute with an unearthly light. It was brighter than the circle of fire. It was so bright that Klaus leaned back from it and Bonnie blinked, but when she turned at a low sound, she saw Stefan staring straight into it, fearlessly, with wide-open eyes. And smiling, so faintly, as if glad to have this be the last thing he saw.

Klaus dropped the stake. He had turned away from Bonnie and Stefan to face the being of light that hung in the clearing like an avenging angel. Golden hair streaming back in an invisible wind, Elena looked down on him.

"She came," Bonnie whispered.

"You asked her to," Stefan murmured. His voice trailed off into a labored breath, but he was still smiling. His eyes were serene.

"Stand away from them," Elena said, her voice coming simultaneously to Bonnie’s ears and her mind. It was like the chiming of dozens of bells, distant and close up at once. "It’s over now, Klaus."

But Klaus rallied quickly. Bonnie saw his shoulders swell with a breath, noticed for the first time the hole in the back of the tan raincoat where the white ash stake had pierced him. It was stained dull red, and new blood was flowing now as Klaus flung out his arms.

"You think I’m afraid of you?" he shouted. He spun around, laughing at all the pallid forms. "You think I’m afraid of any of you? You’re dead! Dust on the wind! You can’t touch me!"