The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation, Unspoken(42)

“I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t trust myself.” Around you, she didn’t add.

Alaric was silent for a moment, and tears began to fall from Meredith’s eyes. She pressed her face against his shoulder again, shaking. His shirt was warm with his body heat, and she pushed closer, treasuring the last moments of contact. He’d leave her. He’d have to. How could Alaric love her, if she was a monster?

But then his arms went around her and held her tightly.

“We’ll get through this,” he promised. His lips brushed the side of her head, and she gave a choked sob, soaking Alaric’s shoulder with tears and snot. “There’ll be a cure. Maybe. And even if not, we love each other. We can handle this.”

Alaric’s voice was strained, but he wasn’t flinching away from her. And there weren’t any lies between them, not now. She closed her eyes and sobbed into his shoulder.

She could still smell his blood, salty and metallic, as rich and mysterious as the ocean. But Alaric didn’t smell like food anymore. Instead, he smelled like home.





Matt hesitated in the hallway, Jasmine’s hand firmly in his, staring at the plain wooden door to Meredith and Alaric’s apartment. His mouth felt dry, and he wasn’t breathing quite right.

It was ridiculous, he knew. He wasn’t afraid of Meredith just because she was suddenly a vampire. He’d been friends with Stefan for years, and he had a cordial relationship with Damon, although they weren’t exactly friends. He’d even been in love with a vampire, poor Chloe, when he was a freshman in college.

Maybe his history with Chloe was the trouble. He knew how hard it was for a vampire to resist feeding, to stay a person instead of a killer. Chloe hadn’t been able to, and in the end she’d chosen to die instead. Becoming a vampire, fighting against those new, violent instincts, could tear a good person apart.

Matt wasn’t going to let that happen to Meredith. None of them were.

Jasmine leaned against him, warm and quietly reassuring. “Can’t stand out here all day,” she said, and Matt lifted his hand and knocked.

Alaric opened the door and smiled at them, looking so normal that Matt’s heart gave a ridiculous hopeful hop. Maybe everything’s okay.

But, as the door swung wider, he saw Meredith, slumped at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, and his heart sank again. Meredith was definitely not okay. She looked broken. Like she’d been fighting on, out of pride, pretending everything was fine, fiercely determined that none of them would know what had happened to her. And now that they knew, all that fight had gone.

Damon lounged in a chair on the other side of the table from Meredith, while Elena and Bonnie leaned against the counter behind him, their faces troubled. Out of the corner of his eye, Matt registered Zander coming in from the other room, moving with an easy, animal grace. But Matt’s attention was fixed on Meredith. He couldn’t believe she was a vampire. And they hadn’t known.

“I can hear your heart thumping, Matt,” Meredith said, not raising her head. “You’re scared of me.”

It was the flat bitterness in her tone that got Matt moving toward her; she was one of his dearest friends, he couldn’t let her sound like that, feel that way. She looked up at him, her gray eyes wide and wet, and warmth flooded him.

“I’m not scared,” he said, reaching out for her. She flinched away for a second and then leaned into his hand, her body as warm and solid as it had always been. “Meredith, it doesn’t matter.” She gave a tear-choked snort at that, and he reconsidered, squeezing her shoulders. “Okay, of course it matters, but you haven’t changed. You’re still the same girl who shared your lunch with me in kindergarten.”

He could remember her so clearly at age five, tall and solemn, dark hair pulled into pigtails. On their first day, Matt had forgotten the lunch his mom had carefully packed for him, and he burst into tears in the cafeteria. Meredith had been there, calm and compassionate, giving him half of her peanut butter sandwich, a handful of grapes, breaking her cookie neatly in two. Matt had tagged along after her for the rest of that whole long confusing first day, confident that Meredith would look after him.

“I trust you, Mer,” he went on. “Jack did something terrible to you—really awful, and God, I’m so sorry about that. But I’m not scared. Because I know that you’re still the girl who was the only person I could talk to when Elena went to France that summer in high school and I worried she was going to break up with me. You’re still the same girl who was the total champion of our fifth grade soccer team.” His eyes were stinging, and he swiped a hand across them. “I know that girl, Meredith, and I know she’s good all the way through. I’d never be scared of you.”