Matt stepped deliberately onto the picture and ground it beneath his heel. The wooden frame snapped. The feel of the glass shattering under his foot was oddly satisfying. Without looking back, Matt stomped across the living room toward the stairs. It was time for him to deal with the monster who had ruined his life.
"Confess!" Stefan growled, doing his best to compel Caleb. But he was so weak and Caleb kept throwing up mental blocks. No doubt about it - this boy had access to Power.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Caleb said, pressing his back against the wal as if he could tunnel into it. His eyes flicked nervously from Stefan's angry face to Meredith, who was holding her staff balanced between her hands, ready to strike, and back to Stefan. "If you just leave me alone, I won't go to the police. I don't want any trouble."
Caleb looked pale and shorter than Stefan remembered. There were bruises on his face, and one of his arms was in a cast and supported by a sling. Despite everything, Stefan felt a twinge of guilt as he looked at him.
He's not human, he reminded himself.
Although... Caleb didn't seem al that wolfish either, for a werewolf. Shouldn't there be a little more of the animal in him? Stefan hadn't known many werewolves, but Tyler had been al big white teeth and barely repressed aggression. Next to him, Alaric blinked at the injured boy. Cocking his head to one side and examining him, he echoed Stefan's thoughts, asking skeptical y, "Are you sure he's a werewolf?"
"A werewolf?" said Caleb. "Are you al crazy?"
But Stefan was watching Caleb careful y, and he saw a tiny flicker in Caleb's eyes. "You're lying," Stefan said coldly, reaching out with his mind once more, final y finding a crack in Caleb's defenses. "You don't think we're crazy. You're just surprised that we know about you."
Caleb sighed. His face was stil white and strained, but a certain falseness went out of it as Stefan spoke. His shoulders slumped and he stepped away from the wal a little, head hanging wearily.
Meredith tensed, ready to spring, as he moved forward. He stopped and held up his hands. "I'm not going to try anything. And I'm not a werewolf. But, yeah, I know Tyler is, and I'm guessing that you know that, too."
"You've got the werewolf gene," Stefan told him. "You could easily be a werewolf, too."
Caleb shrugged and looked Stefan straight in the eye. "I guess. But it didn't happen to me; it happened to Tyler."
"Happened to?" Meredith asked, her voice rising with outrage. "Do you know what Tyler did to become a werewolf?"
Caleb glanced at her warily. "What he did? Tyler didn't do anything. The family curse caught up with him, that's al ."
His face was shadowed and anxious.
Stefan found his tone gentling despite himself. "Caleb, you have to kil someone to become a werewolf, even if you carry the gene. Unless you're bitten by a werewolf yourself, there are certain rituals that have to be performed. Blood rituals. Tyler murdered an innocent girl."
Caleb's knees seemed to give out, and he slid to the floor with a muffled thump. He looked sick. "Tyler wouldn't do that," he said, but his voice was unsteady. "Tyler was like a brother to me after my parents died. He wouldn't kil anyone. I don't believe you."
"He did," Meredith confirmed. "Tyler murdered Sue Carson. We negotiated for her to come back to life, but it doesn't change the fact that he did kil her."
Her voice held the unmistakable ring of truth, and al the fight seemed to go out of Caleb. He sank lower and rested his forehead against his knees. "What do you want from me?"
He looked so thin and rumpled that, despite the urgency of their mission, Stefan was distracted. "Weren't you tal er than this?" he asked. "Bigger? More... put together? The last time I saw you, I mean."
Caleb mumbled something into his knees, too muffled and distorted for even a vampire to hear properly. "What?"
Stefan asked.
Caleb looked up, his face smudged with tears. "It was a glamour, okay?" he said bitterly. "I made myself look better because I wanted Elena to want me." Stefan thought of Caleb's glowing, healthy face, his height, his crowning halo of golden curls. No wonder he had seemed suspicious; subconsciously Stefan must have known how unlikely it was that an ordinary human would look that much like an archangel. No wonder he felt so much lighter than I expected when I threw him across the graveyard, Stefan thought.
"So you are a magic user, even if you aren't a werewolf,"
Meredith said swiftly.
Caleb shrugged. "You knew that already," he said. "I saw what you did to my workroom in the shed. What more do you want from me?"
Meredith stepped forward warningly, stave at the ready, her gaze clear and pitiless, and Caleb flinched away from her. "What we want," she said, enunciating every word distinctly, "is for you to tel us how you summoned the phantom, and how we can get rid of it. We want our friends back."
Caleb stared at her. "I swear I don't know what you're talking about."
Stefan prowled toward Caleb on his other side, keeping him off balance so that the boy's eyes flicked nervously back and forth between Stefan and Meredith.
Then Stefan stopped. He could see that Caleb looked genuinely confused. Was it possible that he was tel ing the truth? Stefan knelt so that he was at eye level with Caleb and tried a softer tone. "Caleb?" he asked, depleting his last remnants of Power to compel the boy to speak. "Can you tel us what kind of magic you did? Something with the roses, right? What was the spel supposed to do?"
Caleb swal owed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I had to find out what happened to Tyler," he said. "So I came here for the summer. No one seemed worried, but I knew Tyler wouldn't just drop out of sight. Tyler had talked about you, al of you, and Elena Gilbert. Tyler hated you, Stefan, and at first he liked Elena, and then he real y hated her, too. When I came here, though, everyone knew Elena Gilbert was dead. Her family was stil mourning her. And you were gone, Stefan; you'd left town. I tried to put the pieces together about what had happened - there were some pretty strange stories - and then lots of other weird things happened in town. Violence, and girls going crazy, and children attacking their parents. And then, suddenly, it was over; it just stopped, and it was like I was the only one who remembered it happening. But I also remembered just a normal summer. Elena Gilbert had been here the whole time, and no one thought anything of it, because they didn't remember her dying. Only I seemed to have two sets of memories. People who I'd seen get hurt" - he shuddered at the memory - "or even kil ed were fine again. I felt like I was going crazy."