CHAPTER SEVEN

"Race you to the next corner?" Jay asks as she jogs down the street beside her sister.

"We're supposed to be pacing ourselves." The older girl reminds her, and she rolls her eyes as she continues, keeping pace with Elena.

The girls make it to where they agreed would be their halfway point, and they both stop. Elena looks at her watch and then smiles as she shows Jay. "Shaved five minutes off. Not bad." She smiles as she takes a second to catch her breath. "Wanna head back now?"

"Uh-huh." Elena nods, and she chuckles.

They turn then and see a man running toward them. He's dressed similarly to them — that being, in running gear. But still, it makes them uneasy, or maybe it's just the paranoia. Jay nudges her sister's arm and then motions for them to continue in the direction that they were already headed. Elena nods, and they start running again.

The girls keep going, and he makes every turn that they do. Rather awkwardly, Jay reaches into the deep pocket of her running pants for her phone after they round another corner. Elena grabs a tree branch and uses it to slow her momentum and help her stop, and Jay stops a few paces past her, phone in hand. As the two brunette's look back, they're both expecting to find him still coming toward them, but the sidewalk behind them is clear.

Jay turns to look the other way and ends up bumping into the man who was running behind her and her sister. She gasps as she looks up into his bright blue-green eyes, and he lowers his hood before pulling out a pair of earbuds.

"Sorry." He offers her a small smile as he pants. "I should've been watching where I was going."

She shakes her head. "Don't worry about it." She says, and he nods.

"You two have a nice day." He tells the girls before running past them.

"You think we're just getting paranoid?" Elena asks as her sister looks at her.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't after you." The younger girl says, and she nods. "Come on, let's go home."

A couple hours later, Jay's doing homework at the grill, and Elena's having lunch with Bonnie at a nearby table. The younger girl needed to sit alone to concentrate, but neither of them wants to be too far from the other. They don't want to be alone if they run into Klaus...or Tyler.

Ric walks over Jay, and she holds up her index finger. "One second, please. I'm almost done with my notes for this section." She tells him, and he nods. The little brunette writes down her last few sentences on the Civil War and then looks up at him. "Yes, Mr. Guardian, sir?"

"Did you know that Jeremy got fired last week?" He asks, and she shakes her head.

"No, he hasn't really been around much lately." She tells him, and then sees Damon a few feet away talking to her sister. "Hey, Salvatore!" She calls, and he turns before walking over to her.

"You're having a hard time with this one?" Ric asks, and she shrugs.

"I may live with my History teacher, but your knowledge doesn't make this any less my worst subject." She tells him.

"What do you want, rugrat?" The vampire asks, regaining her attention.

"You were in the Army, right?" She asks, and he nods. "1860's — Civil War time?"

"Mhm. Why?" His expression suddenly turns amused. "Are you asking for my help?"

"Remembering the dates that things happened isn't really a strong suit of mine." She says as he sits down across from her, and Ric walks over to talk to Elena. "Think you can help me make a cheat sheet to study off of?"

"This'll be interesting for the both of us." He says. "Go ahead, pick my brain. Let's see what I can remember."

"Don't mind me." Klaus' voice gets their attention, and Damon quickly gets out of his seat as the older girl makes her way toward them.

"You're gonna do this in the grill, in front of everyone?" The raven-haired vampire questions as the sisters stand behind him. "It's a little beneath you, don't you think?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." He says as he walks nearer to them. "I just came down to my local pub to grab a drink with a mate."

"Lena, that's the guy we bumped into this morning." Jay whispers as she looks at the smirking guy that's standing behind Klaus.

"Get a round then, would you, Tony?"

Damon glances at the two girls and then turns back to look at the smug expression on Klaus' face. "I'm surprised you stuck around town long enough for happy hour." He says as the older girl pulls her sister into her side.

"My sister seems to be missing." Klaus says. "Need to sort that out."

"Cute, blonde bombshell? Psycho?" He says. "Shouldn't be too hard to find."

"Truth is," He starts as he moves closer to the three of them. "I've grown to rather like your little town. Thinking I might fancy a home here." He picks up the darts from a nearby table. "Now, I imagine you're wondering how does this affect you. And the answer is, not in the slightest. As long as I get what I want and everyone behaves themselves, you can go on living your little lives however you choose." He says as he walks over to throw the darts at their board, but then he stops and looks at the sisters. "You have my word."

Jay looks down, unable to meet his blue eyes. She can't get the image of him killing Jenna out of her head. She can still hear Elena's scream echo in her ears.

"What more could you possibly want?" Elena questions, keeping her sister behind her.

"Well, for starters, you can tell me where I might find Stefan." He says as he moves closer to the girls, and Jay pulls Elena back.

"Stefan skipped town the second he saved your ass." Damon says as he moves forward, placing himself between Klaus and the sisters.

"Well, you see, that is a shame." He throws a dart and it makes a loud thud as the entire point buries itself in the bulls-eye on the board. "Your brother stole from me. I need him found so I can take back what's mine."

"That sounds like a Klaus and Stefan problem." Elena says, and Klaus starts to walk toward them again, but Damon gets in his way.

The hybrid chuckles as he looks at Damon and then returns his attention to Elena. "Well, this is me broadening the scope, sweetheart." He tells her.

—

"Yo, Tyler, come on in!" Jeremy yells from the kitchen, and Jay freezes halfway down the stairs as the front door to her house opens.

"What the hell are you doing here?" The little brunette questions as she looks down at him.

"He's here for dinner." Jeremy says as he walks over to them.

"Like hell he is."

"I'm sorry, Jay." Tyler says as she walks the rest of the way down the stairs.

"For which part?" She questions. "For accusing me of lying to you? For taking my choice away from me? For hitting me over the head so hard that it knocked me out cold so that Matt could babysit me all the way home? Or are you just sorry that I didn't let you apologize so that I could forgive you immediately like you'd hoped?" She asks as she crosses her arms over her chest.

"I was afraid that you'd get hurt. I couldn't— I can't lose you." He tells her as Jeremy's phone starts ringing, and the younger boy walks away from them. "You're too important to me, Jay."

"Tyler, I told you how much what you did to your football coach bothered me, and I explained why. And what you did to me was even worse!" She shakes her head. "You need to leave. Get out of my house."

Tyler walks back out the front door, and Jay heads into the kitchen. She's only talking to Elena for a minute before she heads into the front living room to yell at her older brother for bringing and inviting Tyler into the house, but he's not there anymore. She sees something sitting on the coffee table and walks over to find his ring laying there on the wood surface — the one that protects him from death by supernatural creatures.

"Lena? Ric?" The little brunette calls, and they both walk to her.

"Where'd he go?" Ric asks after he sees what she's holding, but she shakes her head as she tells him that she has no idea.

The three of them all start for the door, and Elena sees the younger boy standing in the middle of the street. "Jeremy?" She calls as they walk down the porch steps.

"What's he doing?" Jay asks, but then they hear car tires squealing as it rounds the corner onto their street. "Oh my God." She mutters as it starts racing right toward her brother.

"Jeremy!" Ric starts running when the teenager never makes any motion to get out of its way.

"Jeremy, move!" Elena yells as he continues to simply stare at the huge oncoming car.

Ric pushes him out of the way, and then the car hits him instead. His back slams against the windshield, creating a spider-web crack all across it, and then he rolls off of the hood and back onto the street.

"Oh my God." Jay runs out into the street and kneels down beside Ric before quickly rolling him onto his back.

"There I go again, bumping into people." The hybrid driving the car says, and Elena immediately checks for the ring on Ric's finger.

Jay rushes over to her brother's side and checks for any injuries. "Are you okay?" The little brunette asks as she finally meets his eyes, confident that he's not in immediate danger.

"I don't understand." Jeremy says as he looks from Ric and Elena back to her.

"Who called you while I was arguing with Tyler?"

The older boy thinks back on the conversation for a moment before his brown eyes meet hers again. "It was Klaus." He tells her, and she sighs.

"He compelled you." She says as they both get up. "We've got to get Ric inside. Come on."

They get Ric into the house and lay him down on the couch, and then Jay goes upstairs. She hears Jeremy yelling a little while later and then the front door slamming shut behind him as he leaves the house. She's too afraid of everything that's currently going on for her to go down and see what just happened.

It takes hours — longer than usual — before Ric's ring finally brings him back from the dead, but it didn't heal his injuries this time like it usually does. So Elena calls 9-1-1, and the paramedics show up quickly. Jay's standing on the stairs as she watches everything, trying to refrain from panicking. She honestly doesn't think that she'll survive it if she loses Ric too.

"Let's move." One of the paramedics leaning over Ric says.

"Let's not, and say we did." The hybrid from before leans in the doorway. "Why don't you two meet us at the hospital?" He compels them to leave.

Elena tries to beg them to stay as her sister makes her way down the stairs and heads for the kitchen. The paramedics are leaving as the hybrid tries to blackmail his way into the house, and then she hears him groan before the thud of him hitting the porch. She knew that Jeremy was on his way back, and that he has Ric's crossbow. The little brunette walks back over to them with a meat cleaver in her hand, and Elena questions what she's doing as the younger girl walks outside.

Jeremy looks around at their surroundings as his sister kneels down beside the temporarily incapacitated hybrid. Jay takes a deep breath as she raises the cleaver, and Elena screams as she turns away from them when she realizes what her sister's doing. The youngest cuts off the hybrid's head, and her breathing picks up rapidly after she sees it severed from his body.

"You guys get Ric to the hospital. I'll call Damon." Jay says as she stands up straight and then drops the meat cleaver to the porch at her feet. It lands with a clatter, and then Jeremy's rushing past her, him being the strongest to get Ric to the car.