It probably wasn’t what the Guardians wanted, as they’d assigned Elena the task of finding and killing the old vampire, but who cared what they wanted? Dead was dead, and he didn’t like the idea of Elena following auras by herself, finding corpses in the night. She was strong, he knew, but she was still so young.
And he was ready to take someone down. His experiments in killing the synthetic vampires were at a standstill. Nothing worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Damon with dull, resentful eyes instead of fighting back. Restlessly, Damon touched his tongue to his sharp canines. He needed to do something.
He pushed his Power outward, searching, categorizing what he found. There was life all around him. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth, an owl swooped overhead. He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a family of black bears searching for food. Humans down in the town below, sleeping or indoors. One walking a dog at the edge of the forest.
Nothing other. No vampire consciousness stirring. If Siobhan was in a cabin in the woods, it wasn’t one of the ones up here in the hills past the edge of town.
Damon looked up at the stars again and thought about whether he should call another animal to him before he went home. He hadn’t tried bear yet; maybe it would be less vile. All that fur seemed like it would be a pain to bite through, though, which might be even worse than the raccoon.
Or maybe he should head down into town, find a game of pool or a fight, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power.
He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when something stopped him short. Tensed, he held his breath and listened.
There was the lightest crackle, as if someone were carefully stepping across dry leaves. Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness, wrongness crept up on him, the faint chemical wrongness that was now all around.
Jack’s vampires. Now that Jack knew Damon was in Dalcrest, they had been tracking him. The little vampire outside his and Elena’s home hadn’t been there by coincidence. He had been scouting, and only the fact that Damon had captured him had stopped more from coming there. And now they’d found him here, in the forest. If they were able to track him, they would pursue Damon the same way their kind had chased him and Katherine across Europe. Only now he was alone.
Pushing away a flare of panic, Damon stepped backward so that the birch tree was at his back once more. They wouldn’t be able to come at him from behind. He stretched his Power, feeling for the shape of their minds. Even using his Power to its fullest extent, he could barely sense them. It was lucky he had just fed, or he might not have sensed them coming at all. There was more than one—maybe as many as eight or nine, the feel of them quiet but, once he’d found them, distinct from one another.
Jack wasn’t among them, he thought, nor was Meredith. He knew the feel of those two minds now, and these felt like strangers. Just how many minions had the mad scientist created?
They were coming closer, almost close enough for him to see them. He peered into the darkness, watching for movement. There was a crackle of dry leaves somewhere to his right, but he couldn’t spot them, couldn’t find exactly where they were coming from. Growling low in his throat with frustration, Damon took one step to the right, glaring off into the tangle of trees.
The first vampire slammed into him from the left, unexpected, knocking him sideways. She was a young blond girl, no taller than Bonnie and probably a few years younger. She took advantage of his surprise, going straight for Damon’s throat, her white teeth flashing in the starlight.
Damon caught his balance and grabbed a fistful of her thick hair, yanking her head back and away from his throat. With a quick motion, he managed to snap her neck. She fell limply at his feet, her face empty and innocent. It wouldn’t keep her down for long, but she’d be out of the fight for the moment.
“Come on then, children,” he said to the dark shapes he knew were just out of his field of vision, taunting them. “Are you monsters or cowards?” He hesitated and stared out into the darkness, feeling with his Power. Could he feel something now? The faintest shine of a rust-red aura in the night? “Dilly, dilly, ducks, come and be killed,” he shouted wildly, an old nursery song popping into his head as he strained to pinpoint just what it was he was on the verge of sensing.
There. There and there. All around. They were dropping their shields now, he realized; he could feel them coming from all sides, pressing in eagerly. They weren’t intimidated by how quickly he’d put down the little blonde. She’d only been an experiment, like poking a snake with a stick to see how fast it moved. A sense of grim satisfaction rose from them.