Caleb's knees seemed to give out, and he slid to the floor with a muffled thump. He looked sick. "Tyler wouldn't do that," he said, but his voice was unsteady. "Tyler was like a brother to me after my parents died. He wouldn't kil anyone. I don't believe you."
"He did," Meredith confirmed. "Tyler murdered Sue Carson. We negotiated for her to come back to life, but it doesn't change the fact that he did kil her."
Her voice held the unmistakable ring of truth, and al the fight seemed to go out of Caleb. He sank lower and rested his forehead against his knees. "What do you want from me?"
He looked so thin and rumpled that, despite the urgency of their mission, Stefan was distracted. "Weren't you tal er than this?" he asked. "Bigger? More... put together? The last time I saw you, I mean."
Caleb mumbled something into his knees, too muffled and distorted for even a vampire to hear properly. "What?"
Stefan asked.
Caleb looked up, his face smudged with tears. "It was a glamour, okay?" he said bitterly. "I made myself look better because I wanted Elena to want me." Stefan thought of Caleb's glowing, healthy face, his height, his crowning halo of golden curls. No wonder he had seemed suspicious; subconsciously Stefan must have known how unlikely it was that an ordinary human would look that much like an archangel. No wonder he felt so much lighter than I expected when I threw him across the graveyard, Stefan thought.
"So you are a magic user, even if you aren't a werewolf,"
Meredith said swiftly.
Caleb shrugged. "You knew that already," he said. "I saw what you did to my workroom in the shed. What more do you want from me?"
Meredith stepped forward warningly, stave at the ready, her gaze clear and pitiless, and Caleb flinched away from her. "What we want," she said, enunciating every word distinctly, "is for you to tel us how you summoned the phantom, and how we can get rid of it. We want our friends back."
Caleb stared at her. "I swear I don't know what you're talking about."
Stefan prowled toward Caleb on his other side, keeping him off balance so that the boy's eyes flicked nervously back and forth between Stefan and Meredith.
Then Stefan stopped. He could see that Caleb looked genuinely confused. Was it possible that he was tel ing the truth? Stefan knelt so that he was at eye level with Caleb and tried a softer tone. "Caleb?" he asked, depleting his last remnants of Power to compel the boy to speak. "Can you tel us what kind of magic you did? Something with the roses, right? What was the spel supposed to do?"
Caleb swal owed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I had to find out what happened to Tyler," he said. "So I came here for the summer. No one seemed worried, but I knew Tyler wouldn't just drop out of sight. Tyler had talked about you, al of you, and Elena Gilbert. Tyler hated you, Stefan, and at first he liked Elena, and then he real y hated her, too. When I came here, though, everyone knew Elena Gilbert was dead. Her family was stil mourning her. And you were gone, Stefan; you'd left town. I tried to put the pieces together about what had happened - there were some pretty strange stories - and then lots of other weird things happened in town. Violence, and girls going crazy, and children attacking their parents. And then, suddenly, it was over; it just stopped, and it was like I was the only one who remembered it happening. But I also remembered just a normal summer. Elena Gilbert had been here the whole time, and no one thought anything of it, because they didn't remember her dying. Only I seemed to have two sets of memories. People who I'd seen get hurt" - he shuddered at the memory - "or even kil ed were fine again. I felt like I was going crazy."
Caleb pushed his shaggy dark blond hair back out of his face, rubbed his nose, and took a breath. "Whatever was going on, I knew you and Elena were at the center of it. The differences between the memories told me that. And I figured that you must be connected to Tyler's disappearance, too. Either you'd done something to him, or you knew something about what had happened to him. I figured if I could pul you and your friends apart, something would come out. Once you were set against one another, I'd be able to work my way in and find out what was going on. Maybe I could get Elena to fal for me with a glamour, or one of the other girls. I just had to know." He looked from one to another of them. "The rose spel was supposed to make you irrational, turn you against one another."
Alaric frowned. "You mean you didn't summon anything?"
Caleb shook his head. "Look," he said, pul ing a thick leather-bound volume from under his bed. "The spel I used is in here. That's al I did, honest."
Alaric took the book and flipped through the pages until he found the right spel . He studied it, his forehead crinkling, and said, "He's tel ing the truth. There isn't anything about summoning a phantom in this book. And the spel here fits what we saw in Caleb's workshop and what I've been reading in his notebooks. This rose spel is a fairly low-level discord spel ; it would make whatever negative emotions we were feeling - hate, anger, jealousy, fear, sorrow - just a little bit stronger, make us a little more likely to blame one another for anything that went wrong."
"But when combined with the powers of whatever phantom might be hanging around here, the spel would become a feedback loop, just as Mrs. Flowers said could happen, strengthening our emotions and making the phantom more powerful," Stefan said slowly.
"Jealousy," said Meredith thoughtful y. "You know, I hate to admit it, but I was horribly jealous of Celia when she was here." She glanced apologetical y at Alaric, who reached out and gently touched her hand.