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" – or your duty? Do you love her enough to give that up as well?"
"Yes," Stefan said defiantly. "Enough to give up everything."
Damon gave one of his sudden, disturbing smiles. Then he turned back to Katherine. "It would
seem," he said, "that the choice is yours alone. You have two suitors for your hand; will you take one
of us or neither?"
Katherine slowly bowed her golden head. Then she lifted wet blue eyes to both of them.
"Give me until Sunday to think. And in the meantime, do not press me with questions."
Stefan nodded reluctantly. Damon said, "And on Sunday?"
"Sunday evening at twilight I will make my choice."
Twilight… the violet deep darkness of twilight…
The velvet hues faded around Stefan, and he came to himself. It was not dusk, but dawn, that stained
the sky around him. Lost in his thoughts, he had driven up to the edge of the woods.
To the northwest he could see Wickery Bridge and the graveyard. New memory set his pulse
pounding.
He had told Damon he was willing to give up everything for Katherine. And that was just what he
had done. He had renounced all claim to the sunlight, and had become a creature of darkness for her.
A hunter doomed to be forever hunted himself, a thief who had to steal life to fill his own veins.
And perhaps a murderer. No, they had said the girl Vickie would not die. But his next victim might.
The worst thing about this last attack was that he remembered nothing of it. He remembered the
weakness, the overpowering need, and he remembered staggering through the church door, but nothing
after. He'd come to his senses outside with Elena's scream echoing in his ears – and he had raced to
her without stopping to think about what might have happened.
Elena… For a moment he felt a rush of pure joy and awe, forgetting everything else. Elena, warm as
sunlight, soft as morning, but with a core of steel that could not be broken. She was like fire burning
in ice, like the keen edge of a silver dagger.
But did he have the right to love her? His very feeling for her put her in danger. What if the next
time the need took him Elena was the nearest living human, the nearest vessel filled with warm,
renewing blood?
I will die before touching her, he thought, making a vow of it. Before I broach her veins, I will die
of thirst. And I swear she will never know ray secret. She will never have to give up the sunlight
because of me.
Behind him, the sky was lightening. But before he left, he sent out one probing thought, with all the
force of his pain behind it, seeking for some other Power that might be near. Searching for some other
solution to what had happened in the church.
But there was nothing, no hint of an answer. The graveyard mocked him with silence.
Elena woke with the sun shining in her window. She felt, at once, as if she'd just recovered from a
long bout of the flu, and as if it were Christmas morning. Her thoughts jumbled together as she sat up.
Oh. She hurt all over. But she and Stefan – that made everything right. That drunken slob Tyler…
But Tyler didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered except that Stefan loved her.