her scheming. Creative lying had once been a sort of specialty of hers,
and now she said the first thing that popped into her head and got a
thumbs-up: “I gambled with him and lost.”
Well, it sounded good. People lost all sorts of things when they
gambled: plantations, talismans, horses, castles, bottles of genii. And if it
turned out not to be enough of a reason, she could always say that that
was just the start of her sad story. Best of all, it was in a way, true. Long
ago she’d given her life for Damon as well as for Stefan, and Damon had
not exactly turned over a new leaf as she’d requested. Half a leaf,
maybe. A leaflet.
The Guardian was staring at her with a puzzled look in her true
blue eyes. People had stared at Elena all her life—being young and very
beautiful meant that you fretted only when people didn’t stare. But the
puzzlement was a bit of a worry. Was the tall woman reading her mind?
Elena tried to add another layer of white noise at the top. What came out
was a few lines of a Britney Spears song. She turned the psychic volume
up.
The tall woman put two fingers to her head like someone with a
sudden headache. Then she looked at Meredith.
“Why…are you here?”
Usually Meredith didn’t lie at all, but when she did she treated it as