Reven looked up, running her tongue
over her lips almost fastidiously. She cast a surreptitious glance around the
clearing. The wind blew quietly through the leaves of the elm trees surrounding
her, sending a haunting melody wafting gently around her. The soft drip of the
water falling from the trees beat in time with the gentle pounding of her
heart. There was a calmness there in the place that belied the struggle it had
just seen.
She looked down at the body of the
limp deer at her feet in regret. Hesitantly, her hand hovered over its soft
white muzzle before dropping gently into her lap. There was nothing that could
be done for it now.
With a sigh, she turned away. She
didn’t want to look at it lying there so brokenly, its purity replaced by something
so ugly as death. It was her own fault. She should know better than to wait so
long between feedings. But… She hadn’t wanted to feed.
The temptation had almost been too
great tonight, when she had been back at headquarters with the other members of
Circle Moonbeam. All of those lovely, long white necks just calling to her… But
of course that was just something one didn’t do, especially not when one was
trying to save the human race. So she’d waited until she could slip away
unnoticed and, well, it was rather obvious what had happened then. She was
going to have to be more careful in the future. She hadn’t meant to kill
tonight, animal or otherwise.
Her soulmate would not
approve.
What was done was done, though, and
there was no taking it back. The best she could do was hide the evidence. It
wouldn’t do at all for some unsuspecting human to find the deer, drained of
nearly all its blood. Panic would ensue and things would get out of control.
Then she’d have far too much to explain. It would be better if she just buried
it and returned quietly like nothing had happened.
"Reven?"
She groaned. So much for that idea.
Although, if anyone would understand, Damon would. He probably would have found
a willing donor, on the other hand, and not been reduced to such a thing. She
imagined that she could even hear the amusement in his voice.
She turned around to face him,
cringing in embarrassment. He read her expression correctly. "I’m sure someone
would have donated," he said, smirking. Damon never needed to resort to
animals to feed. There was always an army of willing females ready to swoon
into his arms. And they never even knew what happened to them. He made sure of
that.
She looked down, somewhat
remorseful. "Yes, but I needed more than they could have given." She
gestured toward the deer, which was still lying sadly in the middle of the
grove.
He flinched, just a little.
"Why did you wait so long? That wouldn’t have happened if you’d listened
to yourself."
She smiled without humor. "Yes,
but with all the talk about the millenium and everything, I just couldn’t bring
myself to do it." She snorted in self-derision. "Believe me, I’ve
learned that lesson."
"As have we all," he
returned. "Let me help you get rid of it and then we’ll head back."
She nodded quietly in agreement. As
she was about to pick the deer up to drag it somewhere that was more concealed,
a thought struck her. "Wait," she said, "what are you
doing out here?"
If Damon had been the type to blush,
she was sure he would have. "I had a date," he replied calmly, as if
meeting someone in the middle of an abandoned forest were an everyday thing.
She raised an eyebrow. "In the
middle of the woods at midnight?" The skepticism in her voice was so thick
it could have been cut with a knife.
He looked up at the nearly cloudless
sky, staring into a dense patch of stars. "Yes," he said shortly,
clearly not wanting to talk about it.
She wasn’t going to let him get away
with that. "Well," she prompted, "are you going to tell me about
it?"
"No," he answered without
rancor.
"Okay," she muttered
quietly, almost under her breath. It wasn’t like Damon to keep quiet about his
conquests. He was usually more vocal about… Well, everything. She wondered what
made this so special.
He changed the subject abruptly
then, trying to take her mind off of what he had or could have been doing.
"What do you think about this new wild power? Do you think they’ve really
found them all? That this one really is the fourth and last?"
She blinked. "I don’t know.
There are always so many rumors about that kind of thing. It could be just a
fluke."
He absently pulled a bush out of the
ground, starting what could be considered a good-sized hole. "It could be,
but something tells me that this is the real thing." Then he shrugged.
"Poppy knows more about it than I do."
"I guess so," she
murmured, grabbing a branch and idly swiping at the dirt with it. "But
then, Poppy has seen the girl they think is the wild power."
He took the branch out of her hands
and started to dig more seriously than she had been. He was quiet for a few
moments. "Do you think it’s possible for there to be two more wild
powers?"
She shook her head definitively as
she hefted the deer up and heaved it into the hole. "You know the prophecy
as well as I do," she answered. "It says that there are only
four wild powers. That means one more, not two."
He didn’t answer. She looked at him
sharply, asking, "Why?"
"I don’t know," he
shrugged. "I just wondered."
She watched him through narrowed
lashes as he scraped the dirt over the deer, back into the hole it had come
from. "This has something to do with what you were doing out here just
now, doesn’t it?"
If she hadn’t been scrutinizing him
so carefully, she never would have noticed the telltale pause in his movements.
"Of course not," he said. His voice was carefully controlled, almost
too carefully controlled.
"Damon, what’s going on?"
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