now. It was inside the mirror. Not in the samedimension as the mirror, certainly, but contained inside it.
Caroline was behaving - oddly. She tossed back her long bronze hair so that it fell in magnificent disarray down her back; she wet her lips and smiled as if at a lover. When she spoke, Damon could hear her quite clearly.
"Thank you. But you're late today."
There was still no one but her in the bedroom, and Damon could hear no answer. But the lips of the Caroline in the mirror were not moving in synch with the real girl's lips.
Bravo! he thought, always willing to appreciate a new trick on humans. Well done, whoever you are!
Lip-reading the mirror girl's words, he caught something aboutsorry . Andlovely .
Damon cocked his head.
Caroline's reflection was saying, "...you don'thave to...after today."
The real Caroline answered huskily. "But what if I can't fool them?"
And the reflection: "...have help. Don't worry, rest easy..."
"Okay. And nobody will get, like,fatally hurt, right? I mean, we're not talking about death - forhumans ."
The reflection: "Why should we...?"
Damon smiled inwardly. How many times had he heard exchanges likethat before? As a spider himself, he knew: First you got your fly into the parlor; then you reassured her; and before she knew it, you could have anything from her, until you didn'tneed her any longer.
And then - his black eyes glittered - it was time for a new fly.
Now Caroline's hands were writhing in her lap. "Just as long as you really - you know. What you promised. You really mean it about loving me?"
"...trust me. I'll take care of you - and your enemies, too. I've already begun..."
Suddenly Caroline stretched, and it was a stretch that boys at Robert E. Lee High School would have paid to watch. "That's what I want to see," she said. "I'm justso sick of hearing about Elena this, Stefan that...and now it's going to start all over."
Caroline broke off abruptly, as if someone had hung up on her on the phone and she'd only just realized it. For a moment her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned. Then, slowly, she relaxed. Her eyes remained on the mirror, and one hand lifted until it was resting lightly on her stomach. She stared at it and slowly her features seemed to soften, to melt into an expression of apprehension and anxiety.
But Damon hadn't taken his eyes off the mirror for an instant. Normal mirror, normal mirror, normal mirror - l¨¤ era! Just at the last moment, as Caroline turned away, a flash of red.
Flames?
Now, whatcould be going on? he thought lazily, fluttering as he transformed from a sleek crow back into a drop-dead gorgeous young man lounging in a high branch of the tree. Certainly the mirror-creature wasn't from around Fell's Church. But it sounded as if it meant to make trouble for his brother, and a fragile, beautiful smile touched Damon's lips for a second.
There was nothing he loved more than to watch self-righteous, sanctimonious, I'm-better-than-you-cos-I-don't-drink-human-blood Stefan get in trouble.
The teenagers of Fell's Church - and some of the adults - regarded the tale of Stefan Salvatore and their local beauty Elena Gilbert as a modern Romeo-and-Juliet story. She had given her life to save his when they'd both been captured by a maniac, and afterward he had died of a broken heart. There were even whispers that Stefan had been notquite human...but something else. A demon lover that Elena had died to redeem.
Damon knew the truth. Stefan was dead all right - but he had been dead for hundreds of years. And it was true that he was a vampire, but calling him a demon was like calling Tinkerbell armed and dangerous.
Meanwhile Caroline couldn't seem to stop talking to an empty room.
"Just you wait," she whispered, walking over to the piles of untidy papers and books that littered her desk.
She rummaged through the papers until she found a miniature video camera that had a green light shining at her like a single unblinking eye. Delicately, she connected the camera to her computer and began typing a password.
Damon's eyesight was much better than a human's, and he could clearly see the tanned fingers with the long shining bronze nails:CFRULES . Caroline Forbes rules, he thought. Pitiful.
Then she turned around, and Damon saw tears well up in her eyes. The next moment, unexpectedly, she was sobbing.
She sat heavily on the bed, weeping and rocking herself back and forth, occasionally striking the mattress with a clenched fist. But mainly she