"I think I can see better in the dark now," Elena told Stefan as she pushed back a tree branch and held it so that he could pass.
The night seemed alive with sounds and motion, from the rustle of leaves to the scurry of some sort of tiny rodent in the undergrowth. It felt so different from the last time she and Stefan had patrolled the woods together. Elena didn't know if this new awareness was directly linked to the Power she could feel spreading steadily inside her, or if knowing she had the Power just made her more alert to everything else.
Stefan smiled, but didn't answer. She could tell that he was focused on sending out his own Power, looking for vampires in the woods.
When she concentrated, she could see that Stefan's aura was a beautiful clear blue, shot with tendrils of soft gray that she thought might be the doubts and guilt that never fully left him. But the living blue was so much stronger than the gray. She wished that Stefan could see his aura for himself.
She reached out and touched it, her hand hovering right above his skin. The blue enveloped her hand, but she couldn't feel anything. She wiggled her fingers, watching Stefan's aura flow around them.
"What're you doing?" Stefan said, turning his hand to thread his fingers between hers. He still looked out at the darkness around them.
"Your aura - " Elena said, and then stopped.
Something was coming.
Stefan made a soft questioning noise and when Elena drew a breath to speak again, something dark and clammy swept over her, chilling her as thoroughly as if she'd been swept beneath an icy river.
Evil. She was sure of it.
"This way," she said urgently, and pulling Stefan by the hand, started to run through the forest. Branches slapped at her as she pushed past them, one leaving a long stinging scratch on her cheek. Elena ignored it. She could feel something tugging at her, its urgency claiming all her attention.
Evil. She needed to stop it.
Her feet slipped and skidded on the dead leaves underfoot, and Stefan caught her by the arm before she could fall, pulling her upright. She stood still for a moment, gasping to catch her breath.
Ahead, she could see streaks of a dirty rust-red cut with sickly bile-yellow. Nothing like the soothing colors of Stefan's or Andres's auras, not at all. As Elena watched, the rust-red - the color of dried, old blood - contracted and expanded around the bilious yellow in a steady pulse. Two auras, she realized - one dominating the other. Elena's sense of urgency grew.
"I can see it," she said desperately. "Something bad is happening. Come on."
They ran on. Elena could tell when Stefan's Power picked up on what she was sensing, because he suddenly sped up, pulling her on instead of following her.
A vampire was pressing his victim back against a tree; the two figures huddled together into one dark, hulking shape. The pulsating auras wrapped around them, almost nauseating to watch. Elena barely had a moment to realize she'd found what she'd been hunting when Stefan yanked the vampire off the human and snapped his neck with one efficient twist of his hands. Then he tore a branch from the tree and staked him through the chest.
The vampire's victim fell to his hands and knees with a muffled thump. His yellowish aura lost its sickly tint almost immediately, but dimmed to a thin gray as the guy slumped down into the heap of leaves beneath the tree.
Elena dropped to her knees beside him and dug out her flashlight to check him over as Stefan dragged the vampire's body - one of the Vitale pledges - away into the bushes. The victim had very short black hair and was pale, but his pulse was steady, and his breathing shallow but regular. Blood trickled from a bite on his neck, and Elena pulled off her jacket and used it to put pressure against the wound.
"I think he's okay," she told Stefan when he came back to stand beside her.
"Good work, Elena," he told her, and then inhaled deeply. "There's blood still flowing somewhere on him, though."
Elena ran the flashlight over the guy. He was wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt and his feet were bare. The soles of his feet were bleeding.
"The vampire must have compelled him out of his dorm," she realized. "That's how he ended up in the woods."
"They're getting more skilled," Stefan said. "We'll organize more patrols around campus. Maybe we can stop some of them before they catch their victims in the first place."
"For now, we'd better get this guy back home," Elena said. The black-haired guy whimpered as Stefan and Elena gently pulled him up. The grayness of his aura began to fill with agitated strands of color, and Elena could tell he was starting to wake. "It's all right," she said soothingly, and felt a whisper of Stefan's Power as he began to murmur to him, calming him for the trip back to his dorm.
She couldn't focus on helping him, though. Her skin itched and she felt a tugging deep inside. There was still something out there. Evil, close by. Elena let Stefan take the full weight of the vampire's victim and stepped away, reaching out with her Power to try to sense in what direction the evil lay.
Nothing. Nothing specific, anyway - just that heavy, dreadful certainty that something was wrong, not too far away. She strained her senses, looking and feeling for a trace of some aura.
Nothing.