“Okay…” Bonnie said. “Is this supposed to mean something? Because I don’t get it.”
“Henrik is Jack,” Alaric said, grinning. “Once I managed to ferret out his real name through missing persons reports, I was able to find out why he turned from scientist to vampire.”
“Pretty impressive detective work,” Matt said.
“So was Jack—Henrik—experimenting on this woman? His own fiancée?” Elena asked, looking horrified.
“I don’t think so,” Alaric said. “We don’t have any record of him having interest in vampires before Lucia was killed. I think this is when he discovered they were real.”
“And instead of being horrified, he decided he wanted to be one,” Bonnie remarked, feeling a little sick.
“I wonder…” Jasmine said eagerly. Her shining eyes flew to Matt’s. “We know he started it all with real vampire blood.”
Matt explained that Jasmine had used the lab equipment at the hospital to analyze the blood she had drawn from Damon’s captive. It was clear that Jack hadn’t, after all, just transformed humans into synthetic vampires with drugs and surgery as they’d thought. There had been a real vampire’s blood in the mix.
“What if it wasn’t just any vampire?” Jasmine asked eagerly. “What if it was his fiancée’s killer?”
“We don’t have any proof of that,” Elena said, leaning forward intently, her golden hair swinging forward around her face. “But whoever it was, he would have needed some kind of relationship with the vampire he got the blood from. Whether he forced them to give him the blood, or if they did it willingly…”
Alaric was nodding. “That vampire would know something about him.”
Matt shifted in his seat and let out a frustrated huff of breath. “But that doesn’t really do us any good, does it? If Jack’s going around trying to kill all the regular vampires, probably the first thing he did was kill this one. Even if he didn’t, we don’t know who the vampire was, and I don’t see how we’re going to find out.”
Elena raised her head and fixed Bonnie with a shining gaze. “Bonnie can do it.”
“I can?” Bonnie asked, thrown off balance.
“Sure!” Elena said. “If we still have the blood, you can do a locator spell. It’ll be easy for you, you’re so powerful now.”
Bonnie bit her lip, worried. “But the blood we have doesn’t even belong to the vampire we want to find,” she said. “It would be like trying to use your own blood to find your grandparents.” Her mind was busy, though. It might work. Blood was powerful stuff—even human blood had a lot of magic in it. It was life, vitality, and connection. If she could follow those connections…
“I’d need some of the synthetic vampire blood,” she said dubiously.
“I have that,” Jasmine told her. She dug into her purse and pulled out a small stoppered vial. “I thought we might need it.”
Bonnie met Elena’s eyes and knew the other girl could see the ideas sparking in her mind.
“Okay, then,” Elena said, grinning at her. “Tell me how we can help.”
Under Bonnie’s direction, they cleared the table and dimmed the lights. “Candles,” Bonnie told them decisively. “Red ones, if you have them.” Alaric was able to dig up one red candle and three white ones, which they grouped at the center of the table.
Bonnie headed into Alaric and Meredith’s kitchen and puttered around, opening drawers and cabinets, until she found a marble mortar and pestle. She’d left some herbs here, a small stockpile for emergencies, and she dug around in the cabinet under the sink to find them. Ground mastic and juniper berries would help with divination, she thought, and there was some sandalwood oil that couldn’t do any harm. Poke root was good for finding lost objects—maybe it was good for looking for vampires, too.
She dumped the herbs into the mortar and poured a little sandalwood oil over them, then mashed everything together with the pestle. Carrying it back out to the living room, she plunked it down on the table in front of the candles.
Elena handed her a book of matches and Bonnie carefully lit the candles, then reached to take the vial of blood from Jasmine. The blood had coagulated a bit. When she tipped it over above the pile of herbs, it trickled out, leaving a thick film inside the vial.
“Don’t use it all,” Elena breathed, hanging over Bonnie’s shoulder. “What if we need to do it again?”
“I don’t want to make the herbs too wet, anyway,” Bonnie told her, capping the vial. “They need to burn.” She handed the vial, a third of its contents gone, back to Jasmine, and reached for another match.