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felt rather than heard it, a piercing pain in her eardrums. Damon, whose eyes
were more sensitive, threw up a hand to protect them.
Then he shouted "Klaus!" and sprang toward the blond man. He wasn't stalking
now; this was the deadly race of attack.The burst of killing speed of the
hunting cat or the wolf.
Lightning caught him inmidspring .
Bonnie screamed as she saw it, jumping to her feet. There was a blue flash of
superheated gases and a smell of burning, and then Damon was down, lying
motionless on his face. Bonnie could see tiny wisps of smoke rise from him,
just as they did from the trees.
Speechless with horror, she looked at Klaus.
He was swaggering through the clearing, holding his bloody stick like a golf
club. He bent down over Damon as he passed, and smiled. Bonnie wanted to
scream again, but she didn't have the breath. There didn't seem to be any air
left to breathe.
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"I'll deal withyou later," Klaus told the unconscious Damon. Then his face
tipped up toward Bonnie.
"You," he said, "I'm going to deal with right now."
It was an instant before she realized he was looking at Stefan, and not her.
Those electric blue eyes were fixed on Stefan's face. They moved to Stefan's
bloody middle.
"I'm going toeat you now, Salvatore."
Bonnie was all alone. The only one left standing. And she was afraid.
But she knew what she had to do.
She let her knees collapse again, dropping to the ground beside Stefan.
And this is how it ends, she thought. You kneel beside your knight and then
you face the enemy.
She looked at Klaus and moved so that she was shielding Stefan. He seemed to
notice her for the first time, and frowned as if he'd found a spider in his
salad. Firelight flickered orange-red on his face.
"Get out of the way."
"No."
And this is how the ending starts. Like this, so simply, with one word, and
you're going to die on a summer night. A summer night when the moon and stars
are shining and bonfires burn like the flames the Druids used to summon the
dead.
"Bonnie, go," Stefan said painfully. "Get out while you can."
"No," Bonnie said. I'm sorry, Elena, she thought. I can't save him. This is
all I can do.
"Get out of the way," Klaus said through his teeth.
"No." She could wait and let Stefan die this way, instead of with Klaus's
teeth in his throat. It might not seem like much of a difference, but it was
the most she could offer.
"Bonnie& " Stefan whispered.
"Don't you know who I am, girl? I've walked with the devil. If you move, I'll
let you die quickly."
Bonnie'svoice had given out. She shook her head.
Klaus threw back his own head and laughed. A little more blood trickled out,
too. "All right," he said. "Have it your own way. Both of you go together."
Summer night, Bonnie thought.The solstice eve.When the line between worlds is
so thin.
"Say good night, sweetheart."
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No time to trance, no time for anything.Nothing except one desperate appeal.
"Elena!" Bonnie screamed. "Elena! Elena!"
Klaus recoiled.
For an instant, it seemed as if the name alone had the power to alarm him. Or
as if he expected something to respond toBonnie's cry. He stood, listening.
Bonnie drew on her powers, putting everything she had into it, throwing her
need and her call out into the void.
And felt& nothing.
Nothing disturbed the summer night except the crackling sound of flames.
Klaus turned back to Bonnie and Stefan, and grinned.
Then Bonnie saw the mist creeping along the ground.
No it couldn't be mist. It must be smoke from the fire. But it didn't behave
like either. It was swirling, rising in the air like a tiny whirlwind or dust
devil. It was gathering into a shape roughly the size of a man.
There was another one a little distance away. Then Bonnie saw a third. The
same thing was happening all over.
Mist was flowing out of the ground, between the trees.Pools of it, each
separate and distinct. Bonnie, staring mutely, could see through each patch,
could see the flames, the oak trees, the bricks of the chimney. Klaus had
stopped smiling, stopped moving, and was watching too.
Bonnie turned to Stefan, unable to even frame the question.
"Unquiet spirits," he whispered huskily, his green eyes intent."The
solstice."
And then Bonnie understood.
They were coming.From across the river, where the old cemetery lay.From the
woods, where countless makeshift graves had been dug to dump bodies in before
they rotted.The unquiet spirits, the soldiers who had fought here and died
during the Civil War.A supernatural host answering the call for help.
They were forming all around. There were hundreds of them.
Bonnie could actually see faces now. The misty outlines were filling in with
pale hues like so many runny watercolors. She saw a flash of blue, a glimmer
of gray.BothUnion and Confederate troops. Bonnie glimpsed a pistol thrust into
a belt, the glint of an ornamented sword.Chevrons on a sleeve.A bushy dark
beard; a long, well-tended white one.A small figure, child size, with dark
holes for eyes and a drum hanging at thigh level.
"Oh, my God," she whispered."Oh,God ." It wasn't swearing. It was something
like a prayer.
Not that she wasn't frightened of them, because she was.It was every
nightmare she'd ever had about the cemetery come true. Like her first dream
about Elena, when things came crawling out of the black pits in the earth;
only these things weren't crawling, they wereflying , skimming and floating
until they swirled into human form. Everything that Bonnie had ever felt about
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the old graveyard that it was alive and full of watching eyes, that there was
some Power lurking behind its waiting stillness was proving true. The earth
ofFell's Church was giving up its bloody memories. The spirits of those who'd
died here were walking again.
And Bonnie could feel their anger. It frightened her, but another emotion was
waking up inside her, making her catch her breath and clench tighter on
Stefan's hand.Because the misty army had a leader.
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