The Vampire Diaries: Bound By Blood (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Online Free PDF

Just someone who appreciated nature, perhaps a little too much.
    As I stood there with my hands at my side, I was all too aware that the wind had completely died down.
    And because I was weird—and because I had spent far too much time alone with my imagination as I waited for cheating spouses to emerge from seedy hotels, or perhaps read far too many Harry Potter novels, I raised my hands slowly.
    Just a little.
    I wasn’t delusional. Obviously, it was a coincidence that the wind had died down when I lowered my hands. The wind was like that. A fickle friend. And, like the rain, I was always sad to see it go.
    Except … something happened as I continued to raise my hands.
    The wind picked up.
    Coincidence? I was just being silly. I was like a kid running around the neighborhood with his arms outstretched, thinking that at any moment now, he was going to lift off and fly like Superman.
    I lowered my hands and, coincidentally again, the wind stopped.
    Weird , I thought, and went back to surveying the crime scene.
    Except something had come over me.
    A sense of excitement.
    I couldn’t focus on the crime scene. In fact, I nearly forgot why was here.
    Two people had been killed. Right here in this spot. No, there were no witnesses, but that was not true, was it?
    No, I think. Not true at all.
    Nature was here. The trees were here. The animals were here. The Earth itself was here. The waterfall was here. They say when someone dies, that the tragic event is forever imprinted at that very spot on the land, to replay itself over and over for those sensitive enough to “see” it.
    I, of course, wasn’t sensitive enough to read the clues. I had never seen a ghost—and I never wanted to.
    But the thought that nature was here, that something beyond the human experience had seen something, took hold and I couldn’t quite shake it.
    “How’s that for looking beyond the obvious?”
    Of course, my old mentor would have been disappointed. He did not believe in the supernatural. He believed in facts that could hold up in a court of law.
    Except when one lived in Mystic Falls and almost had to believe in curses. There were just too many strange occurrences here. Too many dead. Too many disappearances. Too many whispering of things that went bump in the night. Hell, for that matter, they went bump in the day.
    My hands were down by my sides. The air was still. I could smell moist soil, the aromatic cedars, and the sweet grass. Other than the cascading waterfall, I could hear nothing. The wind that had been blowing so powerfully just seconds earlier was now just a memory. Perhaps I had imagined it.
    Perhaps.
    I slowly raised my hands and a cold chill swept through, and almost immediately the wind in the forest picked up. Almost immediately, it began howling around me, over me, and hell, it went through me.
    “What the hell?”
    I raised my hands higher and higher, and the wind picked up faster and faster. As I stretched my arms out high over my head, the treetops were virtually bending sideways and branches cracked and crashed throughout the forest.
    “Oh my God,” I said, except, of course, the sound of my voice was swallowed up in the howling wind.
    I lowered my hands slowly and the wind died down.
    “I’m dreaming,” I said when my hands were by my side and the wind had completely ceased. “I’m dreaming.”
    I would have chalked it up to a dreamy imagination except for one thing.
    Resting on the ground in front of me was something very tangible … a tree branch dripping in blood.

Dear Bloody Diary,
    There is something different in the air. Literally. Stefan seemed to notice it as well. I caught him on the balcony, drinking, looking out across our grounds. I asked him what he was thinking. Actually, I asked what he was moping about this time, but he ignored my jibe and looked at me oddly. He cocked his head and pointed to the sky.
    “Do you hear it?”
    “Hear what?” I moved over next to him, drinking my own nice