Phantom (Page 65)

No asphalt here to radiate back the sun’s heat. But something had to be causing that shimmer.

Unless she was imagining it. Were her eyes playing tricks on her, showing her a mirage among the rosebushes?

"Do you see that?" she asked the others. "Over there, just a little to the right?"

They stopped and peered careful y.

"Maybe?" Bonnie said hesitantly.

"I think so," Matt said. "Like hot air rising, right?"

"Right," Elena said. She frowned, estimating the distance. Maybe fifteen feet. "We should take it at a run,"

she said. "In case we have any trouble getting through. There might be some kind of barrier we have to break to get out. I don’t think hesitating wil help us."

"Let’s hold hands," Bonnie suggested nervously. "I don’t want to lose you guys."

Elena didn’t take her eyes off the shimmer in the air. If she lost it, she’d never find it again, not with the sameness of everything in here. Once they got turned around, they’d never be able to tel this spot from any other. They al three took one another’s hands, staring at the smal distortion that they hoped was a gate. Bonnie was in the middle and she clutched Elena’s left hand with her thin, warm fingers.

"One, two, three, go," Bonnie said, and then they were running. They stumbled over the grass, wove between rosebushes. The space between the bushes was barely wide enough for three to run abreast, and a thorny branch caught in Elena’s hair. She couldn’t let go of Bonnie and she couldn’t stop, so she just yanked her head forward despite the eye-wateringly painful tug on her hair and kept running, leaving a tangle of hair hanging from a bush behind her.

Then they were at the shimmer between the bushes. Close up, it was even harder to see, and Elena would have doubted that they were at the right spot except for the change in the temperature. It might have looked like a heat shimmer from a distance, but it was as cold and bracing as a mountain lake, despite the warm sun right above them.

"Don’t stop!" Elena shouted. And they plunged into the coldness.

In an instant, everything went black, as if someone had switched off the sun.

Elena felt herself fal ing and clung desperately to Bonnie’s hand.

Damon! she cried silently. Help me!

Chapter 30

Stefan drove like a maniac al the way back to the boardinghouse. "I can’t believe I forgot to tel him that his name had been cal ed," he said for what felt like the hundredth time. "I can’t believe we left him alone."

"Slow down," Meredith told him, trying to hold Matt’s sleeping body steady in the backseat as Stefan whipped around a corner, tires squealing. "You’re going way too fast."

"We’re in a hurry," Stefan growled, yanking on the wheel to make a hard right. Alaric turned around in the passenger seat and gave Meredith a panicky look as Stefan narrowly missed a garbage truck. She sighed. She knew he was trying to make up for his mistake, for not tel ing them immediately that Matt’s name had appeared in the herb shop, but kil ing them al in a race to get home wasn’t exactly the solution. Besides, although they probably would have done things differently if they’d known, it might not have changed the outcome for Matt. It wasn’t as if their precautions had saved either Bonnie or Elena.

"At least you’ve got vampire reflexes," she said, more to reassure Alaric than out of any particular confidence in Stefan’s driving abilities.

She’d insisted on being the one sitting in the back with Matt, and now she turned her attention to him. She put a restraining hand on his chest so he wouldn’t go tumbling to the floor as the car jerked and swerved.

He was so stil . None of the twitching and eye movements that usual y went with sleep, just the steady shal ow rise and fal of his breathing. He wasn’t even snoring. And she knew from camping trips as far back as sixth grade that Matt snored like a buzz saw. Always. Meredith never cried. Not even when the worst happened. And she wasn’t going to start now, not when her friends needed her calm and focused to try to figure out how to save them. But if she had been the kind of girl who cried, instead of the kind of girl who strategized, she would have been sobbing. And even now, the breath caught in her throat a little painful y, until she schooled herself into impassive calm again.

She was the only one left. Of the four old friends who’d gone through school and summers and adolescence and al the horrors the supernatural world could throw at them, she was the only one the phantom hadn’t captured. Yet. Meredith clenched her teeth and held Matt steady. Stefan pul ed up and parked in front of the

boardinghouse, having somehow avoided causing any damage to other cars or pedestrians along the way. Alaric and Meredith started to inch Matt careful y out of the car, looping his arms around their necks and slowly shifting him forward into a half-standing position. But Stefan simply grabbed Matt away from them and threw him over his shoulder.

"Let’s go," he said, and stalked off toward the boardinghouse, easily balancing Matt’s unconscious body with one hand, not looking back.

"He’s become kind of a strange guy," Alaric commented, watching Stefan alertly. The sunshine caught the stubble on Alaric’s unshaven chin and it glinted with a touch of gold. He turned toward Meredith and gave her a rueful, disarming grin. "Once more into the breach…" he said. Meredith took his hand, warm and solid in her own.

"Come on," she said.

Once they were in the boardinghouse, Stefan clomped straight upstairs to deposit Matt with the other bodies – the other sleepers, Meredith reminded herself fiercely. Meredith and Alaric, hand in hand, turned toward the kitchen. As she pushed the door open, Meredith heard Mrs. Flowers’s voice.