𝐚 𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐲'𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 ━━ stefan salvatore

viii. Killer Queen

         She could still hear Ms. Crumblebottom, who owned the flower shop in town, whispering to her and Caroline to not hang around Vicki. She's in the wrong sort of crowd, Ms. Crumblebottom eyed Vicki distastefully, best not to associate with her.

         Vicki wasn't proper or perfect. Pretty enough, but always working and under the reputation of less-than-good reputation of Kelly Donavan. Vicki, who ran with stoners, was seen drunk and high by people in town more times than Lux could count. Exactly the girl no one with a good reputation in town wanted to be seen with.

         But she was still a girl turned into a vampire without proper knowledge of the world. Life flipped upside-down out of nowhere.

         "Yeah," Lux confirmed.

         "Anyone else I should know about?" Vicki turned to the Salvatore brothers. Lux eyed them as well. Stefan shook his head, Damon sent them a less than pleased look.

         Well, that's good at least.

         "How you holding up?" she asked the older girl, finally taking a seat on the couch beside her.

         "Suffocated," Vicki rolled her eyes, "I don't understand why I have to stay cooped up here. Why can't I just go home?"

         "Because you're changing, Vicki, and it's not something you wanna do alone," Stefan told her.

         Lux raised her hand. "I second that. Transitioning sucks, especially when you don't know what's happening."

         She shuddered to think about herself just a few months ago, face covered in blood with a dead body on the ground. Crumbling into tears, blearing trying to see through with confusion. She didn't know what was happening, and everything was so loud. And nothing would stop. She wished she had someone to guide her through it.

         Damon flipped through the news. "There's nothing about that Logan guy I killed in here. Not a word. Someone's covering it up."

         Lux frowned. "Why would they do that?"

         He ignored her, she huffed. Damon pulled out a compass from his pocket, tossing it up and down then staring at it.

         "What is that?" Vicki asked.

         Damon presented the item to her, "This is a very special, very old compass. What was Logan Fell doing with it? Aren't you curious?"

         "Well, if you're so worried that somebody's onto you, why don't you just leave town, Damon?" Stefan asked, pointedly inferring that he didn't want his brother in Mystic Falls.

         Lux looked between the two brothers, eyebrows furrowing. "Who could be onto us? Do people in town know about vampires?"

         Stefan sighed, hesitating, "The founding families are apart of a council. That's how Logan Fell knew to hunt us."

         "The founding families?" she repeated, and if her heart could beat so quickly, it would be running out of her chest. Everyone she knew belonged to founding families practically – she belonged to one.

         Was Uncle Timothy a vampire hunter? Did he know? Did he know about her?

         "We should all be worried," Damon stated. She wanted to laugh, like she wasn't already panicking. Logan Fell was a founder; and the founding families knew.

         Wonderful.

         "Hey, um, I'm hungry," Vicki spoke up, "Do you have anything to eat?"