Free The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unseen by L. J. Smith, Aubrey Clark

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