Page 10 (2/2)

Still, that man would be helped here They all would That’s what Jasmine did--she helped people In that way, she’d always been one of theht monsters to protect the innocent, and Jasood thing to do--no shades of gray, no occasionally evil vampire allies, no icy Guardians--that Matt’s heart swelled with love for her Jasent eyes, was good all the way through And she loved hi he had seen and done

Matt leaned back against the vendingat the elevators Soon she’d be here His heart fluttered in his chest at the thought that any minute now, those elevator doors would open and he’d see Jasmine

His phone vibrated, and he took it out to see a text fro I want to show you

Matt rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, found roohtly on the closed door It immediately jerked open, and Jas with excite him by the arm She yanked hiainst it, grinning

"What’s going on?" Matt asked, looking around This was obviously some sort of lab, full of shiny white-and-chroave him the faintest clue to its purpose

"Look at this," Jas the way across the room, she hopped up on a stool in front of one of thedials, her fingersgraphs showed up on the screen, one above the other

"I have no idea what you’re showingat the screen

"I ran an analysis of the two samples of blood I took," Jasenetic breakdown of Daraph "--and this is the raph "They’re ridiculously similar Much more similar than either is to normal human blood"

"I still don’t knohat thatstory short?" Jasmine arched an eyebrow, a pleased little smile on her lips "Jack may have made his vampires in a lab, but he didn’t do it without help There are all kinds of che on here," she said, pointing to one edge of the lower graph "But the basic structure of the blood shows that Jack didn’t start with just ordinary human blood He used real vampire blood That’s not in the lab notes Damon stole from him, but it’s definitely true There was a first step he didn’t document in that notebook"

"Wow" Matt ran his eyes across the screen as Jasmine explained her conclusions into hi about "It’s a to help us kill them?"

Jasmine’s face fell "I don’t know," she said "Thevulnerable to the things vaeneticist"

Seeing the disappointh," he said hastily "The lad to see Jasain into a smile And it was true He had to believe that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his va hiainst his teeth, is eventhan rabbit That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up through branches at the stars, so clear and distant The night forest was quiet around hiirl ould let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but soh he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seeht to find another companion Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées

How had Stefanhimself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Daainst the tree, pushing the thought away He wasn’t going to think about Stefan

Instead, he reached for his connection with Elena It was better to think of her, of her soft skin and shining eyes, of her proud spirit and sharp, fierce ain at the painful scars left by Stefan’s loss

Her grief was still there, haunting the bond between them It would never leave her, he supposed, never leave either of theht, so into her eht--hoped--that perhaps it was the way she felt about hi inside hiy of life--warht be in one of the hunting cabins up here in the hills So Da

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 so the synthetic va worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Da back Restlessly, Daue to his sharp canines He needed to do soorizing what he found There was life all around hirowth, an oooped overhead He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a fa for food Hu a dog at the edge of the forest

Nothing other No va 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

Daht 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 seeht be even worse than the raccoon

Or aht, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power

He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when so stopped him short Tensed, he held his breath and listened

There was the lightest crackle, as if so across dry leaves Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness, wrongness crept up on hiness that was now all around