Opposites Attract

I’d been fallowing the vampire for days, since I picked up the trail in New York. I didn’t like that the trail was leading me closer and closer to Mystic Falls. You see, I’m from Mystic Falls and quite frankly I didn’t like the idea of any stupid vampires anywhere near my home. The old town had a lot of history of vampires and I sure didn’t want to repeat any of it. I guess the vampire Hunter side of me was getting territorial.
My skin was tingling from the sensation of vampires close by as I drove through the small Virginia town. I was getting closer. There was a powerful vampire just down this street. My heart stopped when I realized that it was the same street that my cousins, Elena and Jeremy Gilbert lived on.
I pressed my foot further down on the gas. I was six years older than Elena, eight older than Jeremy. Their parents had died not too long ago, before their dad could tell them about vampires and their legal guardian, Jenna Summers, knew nothing about the vamps. I was the only one that would be able to protect them and I wanted to keep this from them as long as I could.
I burst through the front door. Elena’s chocolate eyes were opened wide as she stared at me and she held a blood-covered knife in her hand. “Elena. Shit, what happened?” I exclaimed.
“Margaret?” She stared at me in confusion for a few seconds; I hadn’t seen her since her parents’ funeral nearly a year ago and we hadn’t talked in months. “Jeremy… Jeremy!” She started running up the stairs in the front hall.
I could feel the aura of vampire in the air. “Dammit, Elena. What’s going on?”
She barely glanced over her shoulder at me while she ran up the stairs. “John’s in the kitchen. Go help him, please!”
I ran into the kitchen and found Uncle John Gilbert lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. There was a hole in his chest and the four fingers of his right hand were missing. I blanched at the sight but grabbed a towel and pressed it firmly over his wound.
John Gilbert was my mom’s younger brother. Elena and Jeremy’s dad was the oldest of the three Gilbert siblings. Mom was totally human, although being a part of a founding family she knew the secret of vampires. The McCullough family, Dad’s side of the family, was also a founding family but they were vampire Hunters. As such, we were faster than normal humans and had a little bit of magic to help beat vamps. We could also sense when they were nearby. Vampire Hunters’ first instinct was to kill vampires. I was hardwired to that mission more firmly than anyone else on Mystic Falls’ council- a group of founding families whose job it was to save the town from them.
Paramedics came crashing into the kitchen pulled me from my thoughts. They quickly took my spot and hauled John onto a gurney. A police officer asked Elena and me questions, which I let her handle since I’d only arrived after the fact. After a few minutes of chaos she pulled me up the stairs and out of the medics’ way.
“What are you doing here, Margaret?”
I opened my mouth to let out an easy response, an easy lie, but thought better of it. If vampires were going to be dropping in on my cousin she needed the truth. “Elena, what do you know about the truth of Mystic Falls? What do you know about the founding families and the council?”
The way her eyes widened told me that she knew enough. “You know about vampires?”
I nodded solemnly. “It’s part of being from a founding family. My dad’s side are all also vampire Hunters so that also has a bit to do with my knowing the secret.” She gave me a confused look so I explained what being a Hunter entailed- the speed, the strength, the purpose of ridding the world of vampires.
She pushed some of her long, curly brown hair from her face and glanced at me with pleading eyes. “Jeremy took some vampire blood and then tried to kill himself. He seems fine now but I don’t know if…”
She trailed off. “Shit, Jeremy knows too? Why would he take the blood?”
She just shook her head and started pulling me toward his room. Jeremy sat on his bed looking very pissed off. My violet eyes narrowed at him and I tugged at one of my red curls. I closed my eyes for the briefest second but I didn’t feel anything. I glanced between the Gilbert siblings and shook my head minutely.
Elena sighed. She pulled her phone from her pocket and went out into the hallway. I glared at my little cousin. “What the hell is your problem? Why would you want to be a vampire?”
His brown eyes widened a little. “How did you-? It’s none of your business, Margaret.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes it is, Jer. I’ve seen what they do and it’s my job to stop them before they can hurt anyone. Please don’t make me have to get rid of you.”
He looked hurt for a moment but his older sister walked in before he could say anything. My nerves were on hyper alert when I felt a vampire walk in. I turned slowly and saw who Elena was talking to. The boy was tall with broad shoulders and wild, light brown hair. He looked at Jeremy for a moment to verify if he was still human or not and I gritted my teeth.
“He’s fine,” the boy said. I recognized that voice.
“You mean I’m not a vampire? Dammit,” Jeremy hissed.
“Don’t say that,” Elena ordered with her eyes horrified.
I took that as my cue to leave the room to the three. I went back down to the kitchen to do a little bit of my own CSI. There had been more than one vampire here recently so it was a little hard to pick out which one had attacked John. The aura left behind by the vampire was strong, which meant that he or she was pretty powerful, not easy to kill. This was the vampire that I had followed into town, one I easily recognized because I’d been hunting it for years.
The blood from my uncle seemed to only be pooled on the counter and the floor by where I’d found John. It didn’t look like there had been much of a fight. Uncle John was a part of the council, which meant that he knew how to fight vampires and would waste no time in trying to take one down. He had to have been caught by surprise; which, given what I knew, sort of made sense to me.
I picked up a rag and started wiping up the blood spill on the kitchen counter and stretched out my Hunter senses. I could feel the vampire from upstairs getting closer. I heard footsteps behind me and quickly glanced over my shoulder at Elena. “Maggie, I’m going to ride over with John in the ambulance and I have to see Caroline Forbes. This is Stefan. He’s going to stay with Jeremy.” She said the last as a question. I’d actually almost forgotten that the ambulance was still waiting outside with John.
I wiped my hand on a napkin and turned to face them. “So what are you doing back in Mystic Falls?” I asked the vampire.
He smiled lightly at me. “Hey Margaret. I guess I could be asking you the same thing.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can ask, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to answer.”
The confused look on my younger cousin’s face was absolutely priceless. “Wait, do you two know each other?”
“Yeah, we do,” I answered. “He stopped me from killing his sonofabitch brother a few years ago. I’ll tell you all about it when you get back from the hospital. Tell Caroline that I’ll be thinking of her, yeah?”
She threw Stefan another look then ran out to ride with Uncle John. Stefan grabbed a mop and started to help me clean up the last of the blood in the kitchen.
After we were done, Stefan and I went back up to check on Jeremy. Luckily he was already asleep. Stefan stayed with him while I went into Elena’s room to check that everything was fine and dandy in there. After a while I heard the front door open and close and then Stefan running down the stairs. There was a large bang and I realized that my skin was crawling with the sense of a new vampire. This one was stronger than Stefan by far, the same that had been here earlier. My eyes widened and I ran down.
Stefan was there but he had Elena pinned up against the wall. I stopped dead in my tracks on the staircase. My eyes widened for a second and then I realized that she was too calm. No, it wasn’t Elena. It was Katherine. Katherine was an old vampire, the one that had turned Stefan and his brother. She was a pain in my ass and nothing but a bitch. I pulled out a stake from its holster at my back under my hoodie and got ready to throw it. I bit my lip nervously, worried about hitting Stefan.
The door started to open, pulling Stefan’s attention away from the vampire in front of him. She took his moment of distraction to her advantage, snapping his wrist like a twig. Stefan fell and I threw the stake. Katherine’s eyes narrowed at me for a fraction of a second before she disappeared, the wooden stake sticking a couple of inches into the wall where she’d been.
Elena walked in at that moment with yet another vampire. This one was just as easily recognizable as his brother. Damon Salvatore was lean with dark hair and icy blue eyes. The best word to describe him was definitely ‘jackass’.
“Stefan? What happened?” Elena asked.
Stefan’s brother glanced around, eyes wary. “Katherine happened,” he said simply.
“No shit,” I muttered under my breath. I jumped over the banister and calmly went over to the wall to retrieve my stake. I pulled the wood from the wall with a grunt and turned back to them all. “My question is how long has she been here?”
“Who even invited you?” Damon asked with his smartass tone.
I gritted my teeth and pulled my arm back, ready to throw the stake again. “That’s actually none of your concern, Salvatore,” I hissed. “But it would definitely give me great pleasure to drive this stake right through your heart. Then I’m going to drive it through Katherine’s.”
Damon growled at me and I crouched in a fighting stance. Stefan stepped forward so that he was directly in the line of fire. “Now’s not the best time for that, you two. Katherine was here and I think that we should work together on this to figure out why.”
I growled under my breath and straightened up, putting the stake back in the holster. “Fine,” I grumbled.
Elena ran upstairs for a few minutes while the two brothers went into the kitchen. I waited for Elena to come back down before I followed her in, not trusting myself with two vampires or them with me. I took a seat at the table while Stefan walked up to my cousin, asking if she was all right.
“No, I’m not all right. I thought with all the tomb vampires gone things would get better,” she answered. I wracked my brain to remember that the tomb vampires were all of the ones that had been in Mystic Falls back in the Civil War era. They were supposed to have been burned in the church back in the 1800s but apparently that had somehow failed. I was just glad to hear that they were gone now- one vampire was enough to worry about.
“Katherine was in this house,” Elena continued slowly. “That means she’s been invited in. What are we going to do?”
Damon leaned up against the counter and let out a gust of air. “Move,” he shrugged. I rolled my eyes at his stupidity.
“Very helpful,” Elena said with sarcasm. “Thank you.”
“Katherine wants you dead there’s zero you can do about it. You’d be dead. But you’re not. So clearly she has other plans.” Ugh, that stupid vampire was already pissing me off.
“Right,” Stefan agreed, probably trying to stay in progress, “and we need to find out what those other plans are and not provoke her in the process. What happened tonight when you thought she was Elena?”
“Whoa, time out,” I interrupted as puzzle pieces tried to arrange themselves in my head. “You thought that she was Elena?”
“Yeah, so?” Damon answered with a roll of his eyes.
“Well, that means that she could have been trying to pass herself off as Elena for a while and no one would have been the wiser. Whatever she’s planning, she could have been working at it for quite some time without you knowing.”
“Which brings us back to what happened tonight,” Stefan tried to stay focused.
Damon hesitated for a few moments. “To risk another encroaching frown line on your very crowded forehead, we… kissed.”
Stefan’s face immediately fell. Elena’s eyes grew wide in shock. I actually gagged a little but luckily everyone ignored me. “And you thought it was me?”
“What do you mean you kissed?” Stefan demanded of his brother.
“Well you know when two lips pucker and they go-“ he made kissing noises. I thought it was totally stupid that he could make a joke out of it.
Stefan did not. He charged at the older Salvatore who ran in a blur behind where Elena was sitting. “Don’t be obvious, Stefan,” he teased.
Stefan took a step forward but Elena jumped to her feet. “Stefan, wait. He kissed Katherine, not me. I wouldn’t do that.” She added the last part pointedly to Damon. His expression fell and he looked almost sad. Elena glanced at me with a pleading look.
I stood up from my spot and shook my curly red hair back. “Both of you should just get over it for the time being. It’s obvious that you both want to protect Elena so you’ll have to suck it up. The thing is that I can’t kill Katherine myself or I would let you both go at it right now.”
Elena glared at me for that comment but then turned back to the boys. “We don’t have time for this, guys. John must know something. There has to be a reason Katherine tried to kill him.”
“She’s Katherine!” Damon hissed as if that would explain it all. “She loves to play games and you’re fooling yourself if you think you’ll find out what she’s up to before she wants you to know.”
“No, Elena’s right. John could know something through Isobel. You mother was in touch with Katherine so maybe we can go to the hospital and get him to talk.”
I tugged at one of my long curls. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but Damon’s right. No offense, Elena, but Katherine and Isobel are both a couple of crazy ass bitches. I highly doubt that they would have told John anything. Isobel probably didn’t even know Katherine’s plan…” I trailed off after that. My violet eyes grew round and my head tilted to the side. “Wait. Isobel is your… mother? I’ve met her before and she is so not the motherly type.”
Elena nodded. “Yeah, she is. I found out that I was adopted and I went looking for my birth mother. I know what happened to her. And John’s my father.”
I felt my heart go out to her. I didn’t like Isobel one bit and Uncle John wasn’t exactly my favorite relative. “Oh, honey. You know, Grayson and Miranda were a million times better than John and Isobel, if that helps.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Damon roll his blue ones. “I’ve got a better idea. I’m just gonna ignore the bitch. If Katherine thinks she’s being ignored, she’ll make a move.”
“Then what?” Stefan challenged.
“Stake her. Rip her head off. Something poetic.”
I snorted. “That has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Do you really think that she gives enough of a rat’s ass to go after you if she thinks you’re ignoring her? Sorry, but I really don’t think she cares that much.”
Damon had me pinned to the wall in a heartbeat. His eyes darted from mine down to my neck a few times. My breathing got a little shallow but I kept my composure. “Try it,” I dared. “It won’t make any difference about how she feels.”
He let me go and was out of the house in an instant.