The Craving

I moaned. My head spun.

“But. You. Burned,” I rasped. “I saw the church.”

“Do you wish me dead?” she asked, fire in her eyes. “Do you want me to burn, to collapse to the ground in a pile of ashes, simply because you can’t have me all to yourself?”

“No!” I protested, trying to push her off my neck. “Because you made me a monster . . .”

Her laugh was light and melodic, like the wind chimes Mother had hung on the front porch of Veritas. “Monster? Really, Stefan, one day you will remember what you knew to be true back in New Orleans—that what I have given you is a gift, not a curse.”

“You’re as mad . . . as . . . Klaus. . . .”

She sat back, alarm etching lines around her amber eyes. Her lower lip wobbled. “How do you know about K—? ”

The crypt doors exploded into a thousand shards of stone and wood, as though shot through with a cannon.

I covered my face, the light burning my eyes like acid. When I opened them again, Katherine was gone, and a blurry figure garbed in black wavered in the jagged doorway, haloed by the punishing light.

“Klaus?” Lexi whispered in a terrified voice, clutching my hand.

“Sorry to disappoint,” came a wry voice.

“Damon!” I struggled to sit up.

“Stefan, don’t you think it’s time you stopped just waiting around for your big brother to come and rescue you?”

Without ceremony he reached in, grabbed my wrist, and flung me out of the crypt. I flew into the opposite wall and fell down into a heap on the marble floor. Damon was gentler with Lexi, though not by much. Another weightless corpse, she flopped against me, legs askew.

Dust and shrapnel floated around us like fog. I blinked at the nondescript walls, trying to get my bearings.

“Here,” Damon said, holding out a silver flask. “You’re going to need it to escape.”

I put my lips against the mouth of the vessel. Blood. Sweet, sweet, blood . . .

A voice in the back of my mind shouted that it was human blood, but I silenced it with a splash of heady liquid. I drank deeply, desperately, groaning when Damon grabbed the flask away from me.

“Save some for the lady,” he said.

Lexi drank greedily as well. Blood dripped down her chin and around her lips as she sucked hard and silently. Her skin, which had been drawn, pale and wrinkled as an old woman’s, filled out and became pink and puffy.

“Thanks, sailor,” she breathed. “I needed that.”

Like a lamp filling a cellar with heat and light, I felt my own Power radiate through my limbs, returning my senses to what they were, imbuing my body with strength that I hadn’t experienced since before I started eating only animals.

As my vision cleared, I gasped. Behind Damon, a black-haired woman stood with one hand to her temple, the other gripped into a fist at her side. Her eyes were closed and her body shook with the slightest of tremors. It looked like she was in deep pain, being held in place while unknown tortures were applied to her mind and body.

Margaret.

And she wasn’t alone. There was a prone figure in front of her, writhing in pain, and I realized with a jolt that Margaret wasn’t being tortured—she was the one inflicting pain in another. In Lucius.

In the super-vampire, so Powerful, yet still only a foot soldier of Klaus, the demon directly descended from hell. Lucius had murdered an entire family, captured me with ease, and caught Lexi like a troublesome mouse. The monster had his head in his hands and was screaming, terrible screams that seemed to send reverberations through the very chapel.

“Is that Margaret?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Damon pulled me up, propelled me toward the door.

“We can’t leave her!”

“She’ll be fine!”

“But—”

“Questions later. Running now.”

And so, with one last look at the woman who had brought Hell itself to its knees, I ran away from the site of my imprisonment and out into moonlight.

Chapter 28

The three of us tore out of the chapel. As soon as we left the Richards’ estate grounds we were plunging through woods. Saplings stung our legs as we pitched downhill through the wet night, and tall pines blocked whatever moonlight might have slipped between the clouds. If we had been human, our feet would have surely skidded on the forest floor of decaying leaves. Unable to see more than a yard or so in front of us we would have crashed into the giant trunk of a tree.

Instead, we moved like predators, coursing through the night like vampires had for hundreds of years: streaking through the wilds to the next village of potential victims, chasing down someone who had foolishly separated from the herd and decided to travel at night by himself.

It felt good to be racing this way, with a few ounces of human blood zinging through my veins. I was almost able to lose myself in the flight, forgetting about what it was we were fleeing from.

Then there was a noise.

It started out like the beginning of a long roll of thunder, climbed into a crescendo of inhuman groaning, and ended in a screech of despair. The noise was everywhere, filling our ears, the valley we were descending into, the sky above us.

The three of us stopped, startled by the sound.

“Well, I guess the vampire is free,” Damon huffed.

“Margaret—” I began.

“Trust me, she’s fine. Did you see what she did to him?” Damon pointed out.

“What is she, though?” I asked.

“A witch.”

“Like Emily?” I wondered, my theory confirmed. Was the world simply full of witches, vampires, demons, and who knows what else, most of which were invisible to human eyes?