Unseen

"I can't believe Bonnie just took off like that," Elena said, swinging Stefan's hand as they walked. They'd had lunch with Meredith, but then she had gone to the law library to do some studying-law school seemed to mean constant deadlines-and now they were heading back to their apartment alone. Zander had driven Bonnie to the airport that morning.

"She'll be back," Stefan said. Bonnie had left them with as many safety provisions as she could: charm bags for their cars and apartments, herb mixtures to drink or scatter for protection. She must have been up all night making them.

"I know. But I'll still miss her." Elena leaned against Stefan for a moment. "I just worry that someday ... I'll lose her for good. And Aunt Judith told me the house is officially listed with the realtor now. She's looking for a place in Richmond."

"Bonnie will be back," Stefan said reassuringly. "And your family won't be far away."

"I know," Elena said, sighing. "But can you indulge my self-pity, please?"

"I'll indulge." Stefan tugged her closer as they reached the building. "Let me distract you for a while. Tell me what we'll do once we get rid of Solomon."

Hand in hand, they wandered through the double doors of their apartment building and started up the two flights of stairs.

"I'd like to go back to Paris," Elena said dreamily. "I spent the summer there just before we met, did you know that?"

Stefan, putting his key in the door, was about to answer-of course he knew that, he remembered everything Elena had ever told him, everything he'd ever been told about her-when he stopped.

"Stefan, what's wrong?" Elena asked, sounding worried, and he held up his hand to quiet her. He smelled blood.

"Stay here." He heard Elena's heart begin to pound faster, and he squeezed her hand reassuringly before letting go. "There's blood in there. I need to check it out." He carefully opened the front door and went inside. Everything looked normal, but the scent of blood grew stronger. Elena gave a faint, choked-off cry, and he knew that she could smell it now, too.

Gesturing at her to stay back, Stefan crept silently toward the kitchen, staying close to the wall. He sent tendrils of Power through the apartment, but found nothing-no one, human or otherwise, inside. But the smell of blood was overwhelming, hot and sticky and flooding through his senses. He felt his canines lengthening, beginning to ache, and his senses sharpened.

There were drops of blood scattered across the kitchen floor, leading toward the closed bedroom door.

Not just drops, he realized, as his heart sank. Paw prints.

Stefan swung open the bedroom door and the smells of blood, of pain, hit him like a physical blow. There was something small and pale on the bed. Blood was spattered across the comforter, leaving it soaking wet and dark red in places. The pale thing, Stefan realized, was Sammy. Their cat had been torn to pieces, his white fur matted with gore.

"Stefan?" Elena's voice reached him from the kitchen.

"Wait-" he said, but it was too late. A soft, hurt cry burst from Elena as she stepped inside. She rushed to the bed, to the sad remains of her pet.

"Elena!" Stefan said. "Don't look."

But Elena shook her head and stretched out a hand, carefully touching Sammy's head with one finger. The blood was dripping-Stefan could hear it falling off the comforter to pool on the floor. "Who would have done this?" Elena asked, tears running down her face. "He was just a harmless cat."

"Elena," Stefan whispered in warning, pulling her close to him. Something was very wrong.

With a loud crack, the windows began to frost over. The mirror turned silver with ice. Elena shuddered, and Stefan could see her breath coming in small clouds of vapor.

"What's happening?" she whispered. Stefan just held tight to her. He wanted to protect her, but how could he when he didn't know what they were facing? He turned toward the door, but that was freezing over, too, the lock encased in frost.

Everything was turning to ice, even the pool of blood on the floor hardening at the edges. As Stefan looked around helplessly, the ice over the windows and mirror gave a loud snap and split from top to bottom, the cracks forming a jagged S.

In the sudden stillness, Stefan and Elena stared at each other, shocked. Her face was pale, her lapis lazuli eyes wide with terror.

"Solomon," she said, her voice shaking. "S is for Solomon. He's been here again."

#TVD11SolomonWasHere

The walls were dripping. Matt wiped the floor below the kitchen window with a dish towel, but the long trails of water from the melting ice had streaked the paint all the way down the wall. It was too big a mess to fix with a few minutes and a towel. After swiping at it a few times, he gave up and settled for taking a cup of tea out to Elena.

She was sitting on the sofa between Stefan and Meredith, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. "Thanks," she said weakly when he handed her the cup. Matt had known Elena long enough to see that her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Poor little Sammy's body had been tucked into a box by the front door; they would bury him tomorrow when it was light out.

Alaric and Zander came back in the front door of the apartment, the door banging behind them. They'd been patrolling the halls of Stefan and Elena's building, checking to see if there were any other signs of Solomon's invasion.

"Not a whiff of a scent," Zander said, in response to the others' anxious looks. "And no one I talked to had seen any strangers."

Alaric carried a small brass triangle, from which hung a crystal on a chain. He tilted it from one side to the other, the crystal swinging, then shook his head. "There's nothing paranormal resonating anywhere in the building, so far as I can tell," he said. "Not even in here."

"Jack said that Solomon could go anywhere without leaving a trace," Meredith said.

"Are we sure it was him?" Matt asked, his gaze drawn to the sad box by the door. "I don't understand how he's getting in and out of the apartment. No one invited him."

Elena drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, resting her pointed chin on top. "I don't know," she said. "But who else could it be? In some ways, it's more frightening to think that we might have two enemies."

"Or maybe," Matt began, hesitant, "maybe he doesn't need to be invited."

They all fell silent as the implication sank in. If Solomon could come into their homes without an invitation, then the normal rules that governed vampires didn't apply to him. Nowhere was safe.

There was a soft knock on the door. Zander answered it, his usually genial expression tense and wary. If he'd been in wolf form, Matt thought, the fur on his hackles would have been bristling.

"It's Jack and his team," Stefan told him, rising to greet them, and Zander stepped back to let them enter.

"Thanks for coming so quickly," Stefan said, clasping Jack's hand. He gestured back toward Matt and the others. "We haven't found anything yet."

Jack's face was grim. "Meet my team. This is Roy, and Alex"-two tall dark-haired men who might have been brothers each raised a hand in greeting-"Darlene"-an Asian woman probably in her thirties smiled tightly at them-"and Trinity." Trinity, younger than the others, had light brown shoulder-length hair and large blue eyes. She gave a dorky little wave when Jack introduced her.

They were all different physically, but Matt thought that he would have recognized them as hunters without being told. They shared a kind of competent grace, as if they were fully in control of what every part of their bodies was doing at any time. They all had those wary, alert eyes that took in everyone in the room.

"Give me all the details," Jack said, looking at Meredith. She told him in just a few sentences about the slaughter of Elena's cat and the ice that had cracked to reveal the letter S.

"Thank you, that was very clear," Jack said approvingly. Meredith's olive cheeks flushed slightly with pleasure, and Matt felt his eyebrows lifting. It wasn't like cool, suspicious Meredith to care what a newcomer thought of her.

Then again, Meredith was a hunter by nature. Her parents had cut off contact with others of their kind when they stopped hunting themselves. Of course Meredith would be excited to finally meet more hunters.

"Are you sure it was Solomon?" Elena asked. "You said he wasn't flashy like the other Old Ones, that he hardly left a trace. This was flashy, and took a lot of Power. And the blood ..." Her voice trailed off unhappily, and she twisted the edge of her shirt between her fingers.

The young brown-haired hunter named Trinity knelt down next to Elena. "I'm so sorry about your pet," she said sympathetically, laying her hand on Elena's arm and stilling her anxious movement. Trinity's eyes were warm with sympathy. Elena smiled weakly at her.

"It's definitely Solomon," Jack said. "You're right; he doesn't usually show off like this. As long as I've been tracking him, he's managed to be practically invisible."

"He doesn't even leave bodies behind," Darlene added. "People just disappear into thin air if he wants them to. He doesn't typically leave any evidence at all."

"So he wanted you to know he was here," Jack said. "He's sending you a clear message. He wants you to know he's after you."

"I have tracking Powers," Elena said. "Usually. But I haven't been able to find him."

"I wish Bonnie were here," Zander said. "Maybe she could do a spell that would show us something."

But Jack was shaking his head. "We've tried magic," he said. "Somehow Solomon's able to block it. It's like he's invisible and intangible to every sense we have, even the magical ones."

"How can we search for someone who's invisible?" Meredith snapped. Her hands had balled into fists, and she looked ready to leap up and start fighting.

"I wish I knew," Jack said, sighing.

"There's a funny smell in here," Zander said suddenly, cocking his head.

"Blood?" Matt asked. He could smell the coppery scent of blood throughout the apartment, and it was making him feel sick.

Zander shot him a wry look. "Something else," he said, prowling across the living room to the kitchen, sniffing. "Over here, maybe," he said, sticking his head through the kitchen doorway.

"I don't smell it," Stefan said, following him. He said it mildly, though: They all knew that Zander's sense of smell was stronger than anyone's, even Stefan's.

In the doorway between the kitchen and bedroom, Zander bent down and scraped his nails across the floor, then straightened and brushed something into his palm. "Huh," he said. Matt craned forward to see what looked like plain old dirt in Zander's hand.

"What is it?" he asked.

Zander looked up, then came back into the living room, his hand extended. "It smells like apples," he said.

"There's that apple orchard to the west of town," Matt said thoughtfully. "Have you guys been there lately?" Stefan and Elena shook their heads.

"Could it be a clue?" Zander said, looking hopeful.

Jack's eyes widened, then he grinned and slapped Zander on the back. "Maybe what we needed was a werewolf's nose," he said. "Looks like we're going apple-picking tomorrow."