A few years ago, I have found a very devastating truth. A truth that didn't just light fire within me, but a truth that changes so many things.
A few years back, I learned something that the men at the church back in 1848 had not told themselves aloud.
They thought they had burned monsters to cinders, that the cleansing flame had rid Mystic Falls of a not just a single, beautiful parasite, but a whole clan of it, and so do I thought.
The church lay as a blackened skeleton and the smoke marked the horizon like a wound. Men bowed before it and felt, for a few hours, as though some great wrong had at last been set right.
But the world does not bend to the comfort of men.
Giuseppe Salvatore and the rest of the Founder Council's members had changed the plan in the dark between grief and pride. He had held a funeral for his sons, without their corpse, as they had turned into a vampire that very same night. But Giuseppe still held the funeral, in the same way only a man who had lost blood near him could, with hands clenched and voice sharp.
There was no time afterward for indulgence or lingering heroics. The man who had stood with him wanted not only and end to Katherine. They wanted the cruelty of their loss recognized. They wanted an answer measured in more than embers.
So the decisions was made. Not all the vampires burned. Not the ones who had been dragged to the church and bound in place. Some few, the ones whose danger had been measured and who might yet be useful to the Council, were stripped of their daylight and their mercy. They were not consumed. They were released.
A tomb had been prepared.
The tomb was a new wound cut into the earth, a stone mouth that swallowed the condemned and closed. Closed with not just a stone but a very strong spell.
It would not be fire that finished them. It would be slow emptiness, the padded suffocation of being kept and watched until the last heat leached out of them and the teeth dulled to nothing. Giuseppe wanted them to suffer, to dessiate slowly rather than be granted the oblivion of flame. It was an answer befitting his rage.
I learned of this by accident, or perhaps by the necessity of the world insisting on truth. A stray coversation, overheard rumors beneath tarps and smoke, revealed the calculus. Men spoke like bankers settling books, the language of et debt and repayment.
Back then, the council had voted for a slow justice. They had the right, in their minds. They were men who had lost sons, husbands, and brothers. Their grief was a tyrant commanding its own form of law. But what they never had right for was ruining my plan.
I am no judge of men. I am at most, an instrument. A sharp, and reluctant one. The tomb didn't soothe me, because this could mean one thing. Katherine is not dead. She is still alive in there, dessicated, but alive. And anyone, anyone could help her escape as every spell is flawed by its nature.
So that night, when I learned that Anna, daughter of Pearl, who was one of the vampires that was trapped in the tomb had come into town with the knowledge of the tomd and Giuseppe's plan had hummed under my skin like and old curse. It made me move faster, think quicker and suddenly the alleyway near the Grill became less like a sene and more like a chessboard.
I stood in shadow, where the brick leaned close to the dark and the smell of frying onion clung to the air. I watched Elena and Bonnie weave their easy way out into the night. They moved like two halves of a single bright thing. Bonnie with her protective hestures and Elena with the kind of careless charm that made the world soft at its edges. They laughed about nothing and everything. Their voices small against the hum of late night traffic. There was a warmth in them that commanded protection.
Perhaps the warmth pulled at me. Perhaps it was something deeper. A remnant of obligations and promises. The particular chain forged when Emily Bennett had asked me to safeguard her bloodline, the next morning after the so massacre. Whatever the reason, I felt a tug, the legal of promises owed not to men but to last breaths and the name of children. I had told Emiy that I would keep what belonged to her safe. I kept a graveyard of promises like a miser keeps coins. They clinked oddly in my pocket when I walked and I counted them as one counts small mercies.
Anna and Noah, one of her follower, had been moving for days. Their approach was a pattern I had mapped in my head. Quiet footsteps, a watchful distance, the bit of confidence that comes from thinking one is unseen.
Anna, Pearl's daughter, moved with the hollow hunger around her mouth that did not belong to hunger for blood but for a mother's return. Pearl had been sealed away with others of their kind, a relic from the 1848 purge, and children of such lines do not accept silence well. They read the past as a fault line that must be opened.
Their plan, as I had predicted, hinged on leverage and ritual. They were planning on using Bonnie's on the spell to break the seal on the tomb. As for Elena, they need to use her as leverage on the Salvatore's brothers. Why? Because the Salvatore's brother has what they need.
Giuseppe's journal that wrote the location of the tomb and Emily's grimoire that has the spell to break the tomb's seal.
But once the seal was broken, Pearl is not the only one thaty would step into this world. The rest of the vampire inside the tomb will too, and that includes Katherine.
That was the risk that I cannot let happen. They all imagine that after power is reclaimed, the world will be grateful, that Katherine will repent and cause no harm. That is a child fairytale. A lie. History rarely plays such kind parts.
When the two make their move, I did not hesitate.
Noah struck first. A raw, trained motion, fast and hungry. He had slipped forward from a shadow and placed his hand over Elena's mouth, forcing her into the alley. Elena's body went still, fear has a particular weight in the limbs, like snow on young branches. Bonnie screamed. A fine, piercing sound that made the night contract.
They never saw me coming.
I summoned a wind the same ease I summon a thought. It is a small, old courtesy to speak the air into motion. A curl of breath at first, then the tide. Noah slammed into the brick with a sound like bad bones breaking. The shock popped his hands away from Elena's mouth and she toppled free, gasping and wild eyes.
Anna's expression snapped from command to surprise in less than a blink. She recognize me. I can tell from her eyes, and the moment that she was in daze gave me the distance that I needed. I moved towards her. My hand closed on her throat, not in the clumsy fashion of a brawler but in the precise, ergonomic way of a woman who had learned where to touch a nerve and how to coax.
Magic coursed under my skin like a second blood. My eyes narrowed at her, with dark veins around my eyes and a hint of yellow rim appearing at the edge of my eyes, like a cautionary sun, that only visible from close.
"Natalia." Anna said in fear.
"Hello Anna."
"You-" I cut her words short.
"Not tonight child." I said. The sentence was small but it landed like iron. My voice was the cloth of an old dress, smooth, measured, and deliberately fashioned.
"You have picked the wrong family to meddle with." I told Anna.
I did not break her neck at once. That would have been too merciful, or perhaps too abrupt. Violence may be an easier choice but making sure she understands my strength is also necessary. I let her taste the fear and then when it reached the point it needed to be, I snapped her neck and sent her body sailing. She struck hard against the dumpster and slid, unconscius. Her plans dissolved in the wavering breath between heartbeats.
Noah scrambled to his feet, teeth bared in a grin that was bravado and a confession o f the adrenaline that hammer at his veins. He advanced, fruitless, necessary. I moved, I did not run. I slipped like a thought and stood behind him in a motion that would have frightened lesser men more than any sword could.
"Who are you? This has nothing to do with you." Noah said.
"You don't need to know my name." I said, leaning in so that my breath ghosted his ear. I let the cold of it settle.
"But you will carry my words." I said as my hand wrapped around his neck and he gagged on the insult of surprise and the taste of his own fear. My hand tightened and the world narrowed for him to the point where all his bravado was a joke. I always find that the bravest men die last and the cowardly die quick.
"Tell Anna to leave Mystic Falls." I murmured in that steady, old rhythm that makes people who once feared God, feared me.
"Tell her to take whatever pride she thinks she keeps and go far from here. If she returns, I will find her. I will unmake her. There will be no mercy."
I let the threat sit like a stone, heavy and inevitable. Then I released him. The weak thud as he hit the pavement was almost polite in its finality. He glanced toward Anna, sprawled near the dumpster, then snatched her up, and fled into the dark with the consideration of a man whose bed had been burned.
When the alley grew still, I turned to Elena and Bonnie. They had been frozen in the wake. Their faces were pale and small in the night. The adrenaline in them had not yet ebbed. Their breaths were staccato.
Bonnie's hands were shaking. She had the look of a child whose world had been rent with a seam that you are quite certain cannot be sewn back. Her satre was fixed on me like she was trying to invent the person who now stood in the place where madness and myth overlapped.
"You-" she began and her voice was barely a whisper.
"You are safe now." I said. My voice to them was soft as water poured over a cut. I kept my tones low and gentle v because some wounds respond to kindness as if it were an antiseptic.
"You are safe." I said again and Bonnie's fingers clutched onto Elena's sleeve. She looked as if she might faint.
"Who are you?" Bonnie asked. The word carried both accusation and plea.
"A witch and a vampire." I admitted. There was no point in pretending. Lies are quickly found out in fear's bright light, and none of us benefits from being liedf to while the heart still races.
"I have read things about you." Bonnie said as her eyes blinked.
"My grandmother, her journals. They say you were, dangerous." Her tone became small, defensively.
"Some of it is true." I said, and for a moment the old weight of admission flattened my face.
"Not because I desired it. But because I was shaped into it. But tonight, I am on your side." I said and Elena looked at me in confusion.
"I thought you said you are leaving town?" Elena asked.
"I lied." I said.
"But why?" Another question is asked.
"There are somethings better told as a lie Elena."
"What do you want from us?" Bonnie asked, suspicion wrapping itself like a mantle.
"Only for you to be safe. For now, for the next few hours, for as long as it takes for you to understand that the two is a dangerous place." I told her.
"We need to get you both somewhere safe. I will take you to Sheila's."
Bonnie's eyes flicked up at the mention of her grandmother. She hesitated for a moment but then nodded in agreement. Elena didn't protest either, still trying to process everything that had just happened.