Elena’s P.O.V

I was shocked into silence. Elijah had been my best friend, my confident, my shoulder to cry on for these past two years, and the whole time he’d been manipulating me. Tampering with my memory, with my mind, to fit his own personal agenda. That bastard would pay. 

“Forget him. I’ll deal with him later. We’ve got to focus on resurrecting Bonnie. Elijah can wait.” I said to Webb, as I ushered him and Owen through the door. I knew they could sense the new aura of fury around me, but that they knew I’d only use my anger to push me forward, not to hold me back.

I led them into my living room where my other witches were. Cassie had called around to her contacts and six witches had arrived because of her. So in all, we had twelve witches. A coven’s worth. Enough magical power to bring Bonnie back from the dead, because if it didn’t work, I’m unstable enough to kill half of them. They all turned to look at me as I walked into the room. Shania’s eyes were full of hatred for me, which made me smirk.

“Moon’s up. Let’s go raise the dead, shall we?” I grinned, as all the witches in the room exchanged a look that pretty much told me they all thought I was crazy. “Unless you want me to kill you all and me and my friends will have a mass funeral instead?”

The witches glared at me, but rose from their seats. I smiled fakely at them, and gestured for them to march out of the room. I kept up the fake grin as they all brushed past me. Webb and Owen stayed behind with me, as did Cassie, while I grabbed a leather jacket and shrugged it on.

I glanced up at the trio of witches.

“Let’s go.”

~*~

We made our way to the witches house in the middle of the woods, and I instantly felt ill at ease. I had considered the possibility that the dead witches wouldn’t let me inside. I could remember that vampires weren’t high on the list of things those witches were fans of. All of my witches all filed into the house, and I hesitantly followed with Nora and Cassie on my flanks and Owen and Webb behind me. 

We all made our way to the basement and it looked like a tight squeeze with the amount of bodies, including Bonnie’s, which was laid in the centre of the room on a thick blanket. I noticed how her skin had taken on a pale, waxy quality; a quality that was mostly found in Madame Tussaud’s or in a funeral home. It didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. 

“We must make a connection to the other side. I assume you brought something personal of hers.” Shania questioned, her hatred still clear in her eyes, but her face was the mask of professionalism. 

There were black candles laid out in a pentagram - well the candles were laid at the points of the salt pentagram that had been drawn - around Bonnie’s body, and Shania’s daughter, Delia, and her daughter, Susan, were beginning to light them, and a couple of Cassie’s friends were lighting the various other candles around the room. 

Wordlessly, I held up Bonnie’s necklace, tossing it to Shania. Since she was expecting it, she managed to catch it, but she shot me a withering glare that I rolled my eyes at. Shania didn’t scare me. Nor would she ever scare me. She was a tiny bug on the windshield of my life. 

I walked towards Shania. She was leading the other witches in the spell, and was standing by Bonnie’s head. I would stand at the centre of the pentagram with her and Bonnie, while the other’s formed a circle on the outside of the pentagram and awaited Shania’s instruction. 

“We need a drop of blood from someone close to her.” Shania said, as she read through one of the grimoires we’d brought with us. I wasn’t a big fan of them. They were heavy, dusty, musty books, and I couldn’t understand why witches couldn’t rewrite the spells from these old grimoires to newer, cleaner, nicer smelling books. It baffled me.

I held my hand out, sighing. I knew she meant me. I was the only one here close to Bonnie. One of Cassie’s witch-friends almost gleefully cut my palm and caught the dripping blood into a bowl.

“Wasn’t that a little excessive. She said a drop,” I sneered at the stranger, and she narrowed her eyes at me. I shook it off, and paid attention to Webb and Owen who were exchanging some unsure expressions, until they noticed I was staring at them. “This will work. It has to.”

“We don’t want you to get your hopes up, Elena. This has only been fully achieved one or twice. Bringing people back from the dead is practically unheard of.” Owen said, and I glared at him. 

“This will work, Owen. There’s not a prophecy without Bonnie. I need Bonnie. Cassie won’t be enough power to change me back to a human when Klaus comes for me. Bonnie and Cassie will need to work together, which means Bonnie has to come back to the land of the living.” I hissed at him, and he shook his head, knowing that nothing that he or Webb said was going to deter me from trying to bring Bonnie back.

“We’re ready. Elena, you must keep your thoughts on your friend. Think of your memories with her, of her alive. We will chant the spell, as the moon reaches its apex, and if it succeeds the young witch will once more be amongst us.” 

I could tell that Shania was completely against this. It defied the balance of nature, but so did I. I was immortal. A vampire. I defied the balance of nature when I died and came back as an eternal being. But witches were opposed to anything that disrupted the balance of nature, even if it meant bringing back one of their own. 

I dropped to my knees at Bonnie’s side, and held onto her cold hand, closing my eyes and thinking of all the good times we had shared. Like kindergarten, middle school, the beginnings of high school, discovering she was a witch, finding out she was in love with my brother, her pregnancy, all the sleepovers, parties, and girl talks with her, Caroline, Rose and Vicki. I thought of these and repeated them over and over. 

I registered the fact that Shania, Webb, Owen, Cassie and the other witches had begun to chant the spell, but kept the thoughts of Bonnie in my head, so I didn’t break any connection they managed to make.

I could hear the rush of wind, the whispering of the dead witches growing louder into moans and shouts, the flames of the candles flickering and growing taller and the rhythmic chanting. 

And then there was a second where a heart stuttered into life. 

My eyes snapped open, and I gaped down at Bonnie, but her eyes weren’t open, and her face hadn’t changed. I placed my head on her chest, listening to the faint, irregular, slow thumping, until it stopped again. The candles blew out and the shouting of the restless dead witches ceased back to the quiet murmuring. The living witches and warlocks in the room stopped chanting. The spell was over, and it hadn’t worked. 

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and looked up with tear filled eyes at Nora. 

“I’m so sorry, Elena.”

“She’s dead. She’s still dead. I-I thought it would work. I’ve s-seen it work!” I said, staring down at Bonnie’s lifeless body, her cold hand still in mine. 

“We told you that it might not work, Elena.” Webb said softly. 

“She wasn’t supposed to die. I didn’t wake her from that coma for her to die,” I cried, tears rolling down my face. Cassie ushered the other witches out, knowing that I didn’t want them to see me fully break down. But I saw the sadness and pity on Shania’s face as she left, and that felt like a white-hot poker in between my ribs. “She was supposed to marry my brother, raise Faith, rock her grandbabies on the porch of my old house and grow old, happy and loved. This wasn’t what I w-wanted for her. She was supposed to have the happy life that I couldn’t. The husband, the children, the grandchildren, the future…”

“You can still have that, Elena! All of those things! Once we turn you back human!” Cassie exclaimed.

“Don’t be so stupid, Cassie! Klaus is going to kill me, and even if he didn’t, I couldn’t have a family. Even if Klaus didn’t sacrifice me in his ritual, I could never have kids because the man I’m in love with is a vampire! There’s no hope. I had it for Bonnie, but she’s dead,” I gasped, with the full realisation. I don’t think I had actually come to terms with the fact she was dead, until I had tried to bring her back and failed. She was dead and there was no coming back from it. “She’s dead! She’s been dead this whole time!”

I jumped up and stumbled backwards away from her body. Bonnie, my best friend, was dead. She was actually dead. I placed my hand over my mouth in an attempt to stop the cry of pain from escaping. Nora tried to embrace me, but I shoved her away and collapsed into a tearful heap in the cob-web infested corner of the filthy room. I clutched my stomach as I cried out in pain. She was dead. Just like my parents. Like Vicki. 

“It hurts! Make it stop! Make it stop!” I shouted at no one in particular, gasping for air that seemed to be restricted in my lungs and crying uncontrollably at the pain. “It hurts! It hurts!”

“Elena, you need to calm down!” Owen instructed me, but all I could see was my own blurred vision and pain. It hurt too much. Bonnie was really dead.

“No! I need to stop feeling this pain!” I hissed at him, before an imaginary light bulb flashed about my head. “I need to stop feeling.”

Four pairs of eyes widened in realisation, and they all opened their mouths to talk at once, but it was too late.

I was empty. Unfeeling. Emotionless. I had flipped the switch. I had turned my emotions off.