“Wrong answer.” Damon shoved the stake through his chest again, and the kid screamed, a high shrill sound. Meredith shuddered.
When Damon pulled the stake out with a sickening squelch, the kid hung against the bars for a moment, panting, before the sullen expression settled back on his face. “He’ll get me out,” he muttered, and his eyes fixed on Meredith’s. Frozen to the spot, she met his gaze. Did he know what she was?
Damon grinned, an angry, deadly grin, and gripped the stake again.
Alaric coughed. “Instructive as this is,” he said dryly, “weren’t we going to discuss our plans?”
“Right.” Damon loosened his grip on the stake and turned away from the young vampire.
In that second, the vampire lunged at him with teeth and clawed fingers, reaching through the bars between them, moving so fast Meredith’s eyes could barely follow. Without thinking, she charged forward, shoving the kid away, her hands slamming against the bars of his cage.
“Thank you.” Damon stepped back, rubbing at his neck. He glanced at the trapped vampire, his eyes sharp. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said, his tone threatening. The kid hadn’t been able to reach far, bound as he was, but there were bloody scrapes across the side of Damon’s throat.
Relief loosened Meredith’s chest, and she took a deep breath. When it had come down to it, she was still on the right side. All this hunger she was feeling, the way all her friends, except Damon, smelled like food, was just a technicality. She was going to be fine.
“Damon found this vampire outside our building,” Elena told them all. “We have to assume it means that Jack knows that Damon’s living there and will send more vampires after him. He’s on Jack’s list, and we all know how far Jack will go to… eliminate his enemies.” She sounded businesslike, but Meredith could hear the undercurrent of fear in her voice. Elena couldn’t handle losing anyone else.
“So we need to step up our game,” Bonnie said cheerfully. “I’ll pull out all the tracking spells I can think of and make some more protection charms for all of us. Zander and the Pack can—”
“Uh.” Zander broke in, looking uncomfortable. “We’ve got a lot of official Pack business going on right now. I mean, I’ll do whatever I can, but I don’t think you can count on the whole Pack.”
“But…” Bonnie looked confused.
Zander shifted from one foot to the other, his white-blond hair falling into his eyes. “We’ll patrol like we usually do, I just don’t know how much else the guys are up for.” He wasn’t looking at Bonnie, or at any of them.
Meredith frowned. Zander was acting peculiar. Then she caught a full whiff of Zander’s scent as he moved and couldn’t think of anything else. His blood would be strong and wild, she knew, and she couldn’t help imagining how an alpha werewolf might taste. Her teeth ached, and she stepped back away from him. Clearly, she wasn’t fine yet. She had to fix this.
Damon’s eyes met hers for a moment, and she was surprised by the sympathy in his gaze.
“Okay,” Elena said briskly. “Bonnie, that sounds great, and Zander, just have the Pack do what they can.” Zander nodded. Bonnie was still staring at him, her lips slightly parted.
“You and I will work on this fellow,” Damon said to Elena, with a vicious glance at the trapped vampire, who snarled back at him. “If we can’t get information on Jack out of him, maybe we’ll be able to figure out how to kill him.”
“If I can get some of his blood, I can analyze it at the hospital to see how Jack is making his vampires,” Jasmine offered shyly. “Maybe Matt can help me.”
“And I’d like to try to track down Jack’s history,” Alaric added. “The more we learn about who he was before he became a vampire, the better we’ll be able to fight him.”
From behind Alaric, Damon caught Meredith’s eye and cocked an eyebrow at her. They’d already discussed Meredith’s next step.
“I want to head down to Atlanta for a while, talk to Darlene and the other hunters who were working with Jack,” she said, slipping easily into the lie they’d decided on. “They’ve got to know something they haven’t told us, something that will help us track him.”
Alaric took a half step toward her, his mouth opening in a question. Of course he was surprised—she hadn’t discussed this with him at all.
“It’s important,” she said, begging him with her eyes to understand. Alaric bit his lip, and then his face softened. He knew how she had admired Jack, back when she thought he was a hunter, and Meredith could see him deciding that this would be good for her.