Grams' living room smelled like sage and old paper.
Books covered every surface—grimoires, journals, historical accounts of Mystic Falls dating back to the founding era. Bonnie sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by loose pages, while I occupied the armchair by the window, keeping one eye on the street outside. Old habits from months of vampire encounters.
"Emily Bennett's grimoire is the key," Grams said, pacing despite the obvious pain in her joints. The January cold made her arthritis worse, but she refused to sit. "Without it, Damon can't open the tomb. With it, he can release every vampire sealed inside."
"How many?" Bonnie asked.
"Twenty-six at last count. All of them starving, all of them furious, all of them ready to feed the moment that seal breaks." Grams stopped pacing and fixed us both with her ancient eyes. "If we find the grimoire first, we control whether that door ever opens."
The weight of that responsibility settled over the room like a physical presence. Twenty-six vampires. A town of innocent people. The grimoire sitting somewhere in Mystic Falls, waiting to determine which future came to pass.
"How do we find it?" I asked. "Stefan and Damon have been searching for weeks. They haven't found anything."
"They're searching like vampires—following old leads, interrogating people, using brute force." Grams smiled, the expression carrying centuries of Bennett wisdom. "We're going to search like witches. Emily used blood magic in the sealing spell. That means there's a connection between her power and yours."
I straightened in my chair. "You think I can sense the grimoire?"
"I think your abilities and Emily's work share a common root. Blood and magic have been intertwined since before recorded history. The same forces that let you manipulate blood let Emily bind those vampires." She moved to stand before me, her hands—swollen at the knuckles, lined with age—reaching for mine. "Close your eyes. Extend your awareness like I taught you. But instead of looking for heartbeats, look for resonance. Look for something old and powerful calling across the years."
I closed my eyes and let my blood sense expand.
The familiar awareness spread outward—Bonnie's heartbeat on the floor below, Grams' slower rhythm before me, neighbors moving through their evening routines in adjacent houses. I pushed further, extending my perception block by block, feeling the town's pulse like a map drawn in crimson.
Look for resonance. Something old. Something powerful.
There. At the edge of my range, something different. Not a heartbeat—older, stranger, a frequency that didn't match anything living. It felt like dried blood, like preserved power, like a whisper across a century and a half of silence.
"I feel something," I said, my voice coming from far away. "Near the old church. Near the tomb."
"Push harder. Find the exact location."
I pushed until my head ached, until my nose started to bleed, until the resonance crystallized into something I could almost touch. An image formed in my mind—a grave marker, old and weathered, with a name I recognized from Stefan's stories.
Giuseppe Salvatore.
"It's buried with Giuseppe Salvatore." I opened my eyes, blood dripping onto my lip. "Emily hid the grimoire in his grave."
Grams' face showed no surprise—only grim satisfaction. "Of course she did. Giuseppe led the 1864 roundup. He killed her. She hid the key to undoing his work in his corpse's pocket, right under his descendants' noses."
"Emily had a dark sense of humor," Bonnie muttered.
"Emily was a Bennett witch. We all have dark senses of humor." Grams finally sat, lowering herself into her chair with obvious relief. Bonnie immediately moved to her grandmother's side, rubbing the old woman's hands to ease the joint pain. The gesture was automatic, practiced—something they'd done a thousand times. Real love, visible in small actions.
"So we dig up a grave," I said, wiping the blood from my face. "Tonight, before Damon figures out the same location."
"Not we. You and Bonnie." Grams' tone left no room for argument. "I'm too old for midnight grave robbery. I'll stay here and prepare protective spells in case things go wrong."
"What could go wrong?"
"Child, when vampires are involved, everything goes wrong eventually." She squeezed Bonnie's hand. "Take weapons. Take vervain. And take your blood powers—you'll need them before the night is over."
We spent the next three hours planning. Routes to the cemetery that avoided main streets. Timing that accounted for the groundskeeper's patrol schedule. Equipment for digging through frozen January earth. Contingencies for if Damon or Stefan showed up.
By midnight, we were ready.
Or as ready as anyone could be for robbing the grave of a vampire patriarch.
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