She made her way through the crowd of hunters and werewolves over to Matt and Andres. "Are you okay?" she asked quietly. Matt was frowning, his gaze on Trinity but his eyes distant, as if he was thinking hard. Andres leaned against him, looking shaky and disoriented.
"Yeah," Matt said, blinking. "Yeah, I'm fine. I have to go do something, though. Can you help Andres? Using that much Power took a lot out of him. He can barely stand." Carefully, he shifted Andres's weight onto Meredith's shoulder.
The Guardian was heavier than she would have guessed. He was practically asleep, dead weight against her. Matt gave her a brief, distracted smile, then slid through the crowd and was gone.
"All right there, Andres?" Meredith asked, nudging him into an easier position and slipping her arm around him. "What does Matt think he's doing, taking off now?"
She wasn't really expecting an answer, but Andres smiled at her. "Matt has been wrestling with his conscience," he murmured. "He's between a rock and a hard place, as I think the expression goes ..."
Meredith tightened her grip on him. "What do you mean?" But the Guardian only hmmed softly, his gaze foggy with exhaustion. His thick black lashes fluttered against the shadows beneath his eyes.
They were ready to move Trinity now, the werewolves carrying her carefully, Jack and Stefan keeping pace beside her makeshift stretcher. Jack was holding Trinity's hand. As they left, he cast a swift glance over the room. "Can you take care of this place?" he asked Darlene.
Meredith looked around the room at the floor coated with blood and gore, the windows shattered, Solomon's body in pieces, vampire corpses scattered through the hallways. Water was running in long dirty stains through the bloody wallpaper. Andres's magic vines, wilting, ran across the floor. Even the suckling pig had smashed. There was no way they could leave the museum this way for innocent curators to find in the morning.
"What does he mean, take care of it?" she asked Darlene.
The older woman smiled grimly, the flamethrower hanging from her hand. "He means burn it to the ground," she said. "Want to help me find some gasoline?"
Chapter 17
Trinity moaned and thrashed her head against the pillow, trying to pull away. Beneath her eyelids, her eyes moved rapidly. She was still trying to fight.
"You're safe now," Elena murmured, trying to soothe her. "We've got you." She stroked Trinity's hair carefully back from her forehead, and the girl stilled a little, whimpering. She was terribly pale. "It's taking her a long time to heal," Elena said nervously, looking up at Stefan.
"I know." Stefan ran his fingers unconsciously across the wrist he had fed Trinity from. "But giving her any more blood isn't safe. She'd rather die than be a vampire; any hunter would."
Elena's breath caught in her throat. Stefan thought that Trinity-funny, sweet-tempered Trinity, who had sparred with her and sympathized over Sammy's death-was dying. Elena didn't want to believe it, but Trinity looked so small and helpless lying there, trapped in her unconscious fight.
Jack nodded, his eyes fixed on his young teammate. His hair and clothes were spattered with blood and his face was exhausted, but he hadn't left Trinity's side. "All we can do now is watch over her," he said softly. "At least we killed Solomon."
Stefan nodded. "It was all thanks to Andres," he said. "Without him, we never could have gotten free."
Andres was slumped in a chair in the corner of the bedroom, completely asleep. Elena could sympathize. It sounded like he had channeled so much Power that he had burned himself out temporarily.
"Everyone fought hard," Meredith said with a brief smile, dried blood cracking on her face. "And we won."
Solomon was dead, Elena reminded herself. With all the worry over Trinity, she hadn't really let it sink in. It didn't feel like they'd won.
Glimpsing her own reflection in the window, she saw a pale, large-eyed girl, one who looked like the victim in a dark fairy tale, not the happy princess. She was edgy and anxious, as if there was some kind of doom hanging over her head. As if there was something terrible still out there in the dark.
Stefan had told Elena that Solomon was the same man who brushed past her outside the bar a while ago, with the yellow-green eyes. She shivered at the thought that he had touched her, and realized how close she could have been to death at that moment. I'm being ridiculous, she told herself. Everything will be all right, as long as Trinity survives.
Trinity shifted in the bed and gave a soft whimper, and Elena forced her attention back to the wounded girl.
The apartment was full, but it was very quiet, just the shuffle of feet in the hall as everyone-hunters, werewolves, Elena's friends-stopped by, one after another, to gaze in at Trinity as she struggled for life. They were all injured in varying degrees, with limps, bruises, and cuts, but no one was hurt as badly as Trinity. Her hair spread out over the pillow, and her lashes were dark against the pallor of her face. She was breathing slowly and shallowly. Elena realized that she was breathing in time with Trinity, trying to make her friend's breath get stronger by sheer force of will.
But there was one person she hadn't seen. "Where's Matt?" she asked Meredith.
"He said he had something to do," Meredith reassured her. "I'm sure he'll be here soon."
Elena nodded. Tension still hung over her, over all of them. Trinity was balanced between life and death now, they all knew it, and the only thing they could do was to wait.
Matt scrubbed fiercely at the blood on his face with a wet wipe he'd found in the glove compartment of his car. He met his own gaze in the rearview mirror, confused and desperate, and looked away in frustration.