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

felt the girl’s wrist for a pulse. They were both dead, but their skin was still warm, their blood still wet.
    Elena’s heart pounded, blood rushing dizzyingly in her ears. She had been just a few moments too late.
    On the flickering black-and-white screen above Elena’s head, Mina, her voice full of horror, was telling the vampire hunter Van Helsing, “She looked like a hungry animal… a wolf. And then she turned and ran back into the dark.”

    Elena turned the steering wheel and noticed, with a shiver of disgust, that there was a smudge of blood on the back of her hand. Pulling a tissue out of her glove compartment, she wiped it away.
    In the end, she’d left Siobhan’s victims where she found them. Everyone in the audience had their eyes fixed on the screen above them; no one had seen her. It hurt to abandon them like that—their broken bodies gazing glassily at her, as if silently asking for some kind of acknowledgment—but getting tied into a police case would cause complications.
    Once, finding two dead bodies would have horrified and traumatized Elena. The girl she used to be would have called the police, would have wept. She’d seen so much since then. Now all she could muster up was pity and a hard determination to
catch
Siobhan, to stop her. Elena didn’t know when she had become this colder, tougher person.
    Before she could really think about it, about how she had changed, she caught a flicker of a peacock blue and rust-red aura in the woods to the side of the highway.
Damon.
Their bond tugged insistently in her chest, and she pulled over.
    She could feel him coming toward her, and a moment later, the passenger side door opened and Damon climbed into the car. He was smiling, and Elena felt a sharp pull of excitement, not her own. Damon was up to something. She found herself smiling back at him, her heart lifting.
    “What’s going on?” she asked.
    “I could ask you the same question. You’re a little underdressed.” Damon said, his gaze skating curiously across her lacy nightgown. Then he stiffened. “Are you bleeding?”
    “What?” Elena said, and realized. “No, not me. I got a Guardian task and I wasn’t… I didn’t find the vampire, but I found some victims.”
    “Jack’s your task?” Through the bond, she could feel his pleasure that the Guardians might finally be on their side.
    Elena sighed. “No,” she said. “A different vampire, a real one.”
    “Don’t let this distract you,” Damon said quickly. His voice was flat, but there was urgency underneath it, and pain. “Jack’s the most important thing. For Stefan.”
    “Damon…” she said, reaching for his hand.
    There was a cracking noise like a gunshot, and the roof of the car suddenly dented in. Elena screamed as a figure leaped from the roof of the car, kicking in the window. Damon was outside in a flash, blue pieces of safety glass scattering everywhere.
    Elena barely had time to draw a shocked breath when Damon ripped the back door of the car open and shoved in a struggling figure dressed in black.
A vampire
, she realized. One thin-fingered hand flailed out and caught Elena’s hair, dragging her head back against the seat. She shrieked as sharp pain shot throughher scalp, and then again as Damon jerked the vampire’s arm back, long strands of Elena’s hair still dangling from its fingers.
    “Don’t touch her!” Damon hissed, throwing himself on top of the other vampire and clamping one heavy hand on the back of its neck. Elena could feel Damon’s vicious satisfaction in the violence, his pleasure in being able to act, to win against an enemy again.
    “What are you doing?” Elena asked, pressing a hand against her aching scalp as she twisted around in the driver’s seat to get a better look. The vampire was young, looked younger than she was. He writhed and growled as Damon shoved his face down against the seat and hit him hard between the shoulder blades. Finally, he grew still, trapped beneath Damon