The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unspoken by L J Smith, Aubrey Clark Page A

that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his vampires would bring them closer to killing him.

    Raccoon
, Damon thought, scraping his tongue against his teeth,
is even more disgusting than rabbit.
That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing. He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up throughbranches at the stars, so clear and distant. The night forest was quiet around him.
    He should just discreetly find a girl who would let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but somehow he couldn’t with Elena around. Even though he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seem right to find another companion. Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées.
    How had Stefan managed it, decade after decade, resigning himself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Damon bit his lip and then consciously relaxed, lounging against 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 mind, than to poke again and again 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 them completely.
But there was something else there,
he thought,
something gentler and warmer creeping into her emotions.
He thought—
hoped
—that perhaps it was the way she felt about him.
    Licking his lips, Damon let the blood flowing inside him—disgusting, but full of the energy of life—warm him and quicken his Power. Elena thought Siobhan might be inone of the hunting cabins up here in the hills. So Damon was looking.
    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 someone down. His experiments in killing the synthetic vampires were at a standstill. Nothing worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Damon with dull, resentful eyes instead of fighting back. Restlessly, Damon touched his tongue to his sharp canines. He needed to
do
something.
    He pushed his Power outward, searching, categorizing what he found. There was life all around him. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth, an owl swooped overhead. He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a family of black bears searching for food. Humans down in the town below, sleeping or indoors. One walking a dog at the edge of the forest.
    Nothing
other.
No vampire consciousness stirring. 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.
    Damon looked up at the stars again and thought about whether he should call another animal to him before hewent home. He hadn’t tried bear yet; maybe it would be less vile. All that fur seemed like it would be a pain to bite through, though, which might be even worse than the raccoon.
    Or maybe he should head down into town, find a game of pool or a fight, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power.
    He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when something stopped him short. Tensed, he held his breath and listened.
    There was the lightest crackle, as if someone were carefully stepping across dry leaves. Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness,
wrongness
crept up on him, the faint chemical wrongness that was now all around.
    Jack’s vampires. Now that Jack knew Damon was in Dalcrest, they had been tracking him. The little vampire outside his and Elena’s home hadn’t been there by coincidence. He had been scouting, and only the fact that Damon had captured