Meredith Sulez


Meredith Sulez
Lifespan	June 6th 1974 - Present
Species	Human
Cause of Death:	None
Significant Others	Alaric Saltzman (Husband) Jim Bryce (Ex-boyfriend)
Significant Kills:	Klaus Cristian Sulez

Meredith Sulez is part of the core group of friends in The Vampire Diaries. She is pictured here on the cover of The Hunters: Phantom. She has dark hair and gray eyes. She is the daughter of Gabriella and Fernando Sulez and the twin sister to Cristian Sulez.

Early Life[]

Meredith's parents were both hunter-slayers, and as such, they attracted the attention of Klaus. On Meredith's third birthday, June 6, 1974, Klaus came to her home while her parents were away, killed her grandmother and attacked her grandfather to the point of insanity. When her parents returned, they found Meredith trying to feed on her twin brother, Cristian. Klaus had intended to take them both, but Meredith fought back, so he let her parents keep her, taunting them with the fact that if they wanted to keep her alive, they would have to feed her a little blood every week. It is suspected that Klaus had a spell put on his blood that would make it turn others into aging vampires upon ingestion.

Since the attack, Meredith's parents had fed her "blood sausages" and "blood pudding" which she didn't particularly care for, and they also trained her in the art of being a hunter-slayer, making her swear to never tell anyone about it - not even her closest friends. They also changed their name to Sulez, moved to Fell's Church and started celebrating her birthday on May 30, a week before her actual birthday, as the event was too painful. She had blocked the attack and Cristian's entire existence out of her memory, but remembered that she was attacked somehow. She knew that a vampire attacked her grandfather and it made him go insane, so she thought that he killed his wife and tried to kill her, too. In The Fury she says this was before she was born, but in Dark Reunion, she says it was on her third birthday. Her parents probably gave her that information after the truth about everything was revealed to the whole town at the end of The Fury.

As a teenager, Meredith is extremely smart and studies hard to get excellent grades, even with all of her training in the background. She is the calm one who keeps the others in check and rarely gets nervous or frightened, and she also seems to be the only one immune to Damon's charm.

The Awakening[]

Beginning her senior year in this book, Meredith is a supporting friend to Elena and goes along with all of her plans to get Stefan.

The Struggle[]

Again, Meredith supports Elena in this book and helps try to steal her diary back from Caroline. She seems intrigued by the true reasons of Alaric Saltzman's appearance in town after he takes the place of their mysteriously murdered history teacher and investigates him. This is probably because of her knowledge of the supernatural.

The Fury[]

After Elena's death, Meredith throws out false information while giving a speech at Elena's funeral, thinking that Elena may have fallen into the supernatural world that seemed to be coming to Fell's Church, and that she may have been listening (she later explains this by saying that her grandfather was attacked and said it was by a vampire). She was right, and Elena goes to her window that night, asking to be let in. Meredith is still shocked and did not really expect anything to come of it, but Elena explains what had happened and that she is a vampire. Meredith understands and does not reveal anything about herself, and they call Bonnie over to explain everything to her as well. They agree to help Elena investigate the other power that seems to be in Fell's Church. Later in the book, Meredith reveals Alaric's true role as he is confronted in his attic. He is a parapsychologist who was asked to replace Mr. Tanner by the school principal just in case anything weird was happening. On December 11, she is part of the group that follows Bonnie to Honoria Fell's grave as she is possessed. As a battle ensues, she goes back to the Gilbert house to protect Margaret, Aunt Judith and Robert as the town's pets attack their owners and go on a rampage. At the end of the book, Bonnie writes that she thinks there is something between Alaric and Meredith.

Dark Reunion[]

Six months later, Bonnie asks Meredith to come to Caroline's house on June 6, where she is presented with a surprise birthday party. Bonnie remarks that at least it isn't her real birthday, and Meredith says that it is, explaining why her parents celebrated it a week early. That night, the group tries to contact Elena with a ouija board, and they succeed as the board goes crazy telling them to watch out as "he" is in the house. In the midst of it all, Sue Carson ends up dead, having fallen out of a window. Determined to know why, Bonnie performs a summoning spell to bring Stefan and Damon back to town, knowing they would need their help. Vickie Bennett once again begins acting strange, and through interrogating her, they find out that she is now the toy of a man in an old trenchcoat with blonde hair and electric blue eyes. They begin to wonder why someone else would terrorize the town and suspect that it is Klaus, the man who turned Katherine into a vampire in Germany, come to avenge her death. Later, Klaus appears in a dream he gives to Stefan, telling him that he is one of the Old Ones, the very first vampires to have appeared on the Earth thousands of years ago. Meredith thinks that he is the one who attacked her grandfather, and the group goes to visit him in his nursing home. Once they question him about it, all he can scream about is the need for white ash wood, making them realize that that is what they need to kill Klaus.

Stefan does more investigating and finds out that Klaus helped Tyler Smallwood kill Sue Carson so that he could become a werewolf. At graduation practice, Meredith and Bonnie have a fake fight about respecting Elena that ends with Meredith saying that she will go her grave that night. Tyler shows up hoping to rape her like he had wanted to do with Elena, but the others stop him and interrogate him. At the end of the book, Stefan receives Caroline's scarf in the mail, meaning that Klaus had taken her. Stefan goes off to face him, and Meredith, Bonnie and Matt follow after him despite his commanding them not to. Meredith rescues Caroline, but then Tyler claws her leg down to the bone. Elena uses Klaus' power to become visible and summons the restless spirits of Fell's Church to take him away. She then heals everyone of their wounds and then a new body is created for her, probably by the spirits.

In Blood Will Tell, the short story about what would have happened in Stefan had drunk his friends' blood like he said he wouldn't, Meredith is intimidated by the idea because of the attack on her grandfather, although her own experience with Klaus factors into this as well.

The Return: Nightfall[]

Meredith, Bonnie, Matt, Caroline and Damon sign an oath not to tell anyone about Elena's resurrection. The four teenagers go to visit her, but Caroline uses black power which Elena combats with white power. The group is very confused, and Meredith, Bonnie and Matt are eventually attacked in Matt's car by possessed trees. Damon rescues them, however, and when Elena gets her mind back, they all go on a picnic to discuss what should be done. Afterwards, they have a Christmas for Elena since she missed last year's in the short story Elena's Christmas. When the malach start taking over the teenagers of Fell's Church, Meredith and Bonnie investigate Isobel Saitou, the possessed girlfriend of Meredith's former boyfriend Jim Bryce. Isobel's grandmother says that a kitsune is behind the possession. Meredith and Bonnie go back to the boarding house where Mrs. Flowers tells them that she is a witch and will help with the problem. In the woods, they meet up with Dr. Alpert who also reports strange activity, and in the boarding house, they meet Jim and Isobel's grandmother who kiss each other and shapeshift into Shinichi and Misao, the kitsune twins. They eventually start to have a ritual with everyone behind the boarding house and the kitsune on the roof. They call up Meredith and say that they are going to make her cut her own tongue to pieces, but then Elena swoops down on her Wings of the Wind and grabs Misao, making her give clues as to the locations of the pieces of the key to the cell where they have taken Stefan. Shinichi and Misao end up getting away, but Damon knows where to look for Stefan.

The Return: Shadow Souls[]

Damon takes Elena on a road trip to the far end of the country in hopes that the kitsune will lose their trail when they finally take a gate to the Dark Dimension. After Matt abandons them to go back to Fell's Church, Meredith and Bonnie quickly join the two on their quest. Damon takes the three girls into the Dark Dimension as slaves, and they find temporary residence in a doctor's home. The group helps a slave Elena rescues to become a member of high society, afford servants and build up her mansion where she then lets them live. They even buy her fiance, Lucen, out of slavery. The woman, Lady Ulma, is a fashion designer, and desings outfits for the group to wear to Lady Fazina's ball. The first clue Misao gave was that one half of the key is in the Silver Nightingale's instrument, and Lady Fazina is the Silver Nightingale, but her instrument is her voice. Damon and Elena search around her palace and eventually discover a little stone fox in one of her pens. The other clue was that the other half is in Lady Bloddeuwedd's ballroom. Lady Ulma again makes outfits for the group, and Damon and Elena search around Bloddeuwedd's palace during her ball, but she discovers them and tries to kill them, as she hates humans (or once-humans, as is the case with Damon). Elena rummages through Bloddeuwedd's star ball collection, completely trashing it and enraging her. She finds the other half of the fox key in her "nest" and takes as many star balls as she can, getting away with Damon, Bonnie, Meredith, Sage, Saber and Talon. As they look through the star balls, Bonnie discovers that one is Misao's. They keep it and rescue Stefan from the shi no shi. Bloddeuwedd comes crashing down into the building, zeroing in on Elena as she uses her Wings of Protection to shield her and her friends, killing Bloddeuwedd as she crashes into them. The group then takes the Mystical Elevator back to Fell's Church as the white kitsune Stefan talked to while in the shi no shi hands them a bouquet. Back at Fell's Church, they face off with Shinichi who eventually retreats, and Damon opens up Stefan's flower which contains a spell to restore his life, curing him of his vampirism.

The Return: Midnight[]

Determined to become a vampire as strong as he was before, Damon wants to leaves for the Dark Dimension using Misao's star ball, where he hopes to find a vampire princess with "the bluest blood in the land". Meredith knows that she must stop him as they can not anger the kitsune anymore, and she confronts him that night with the staff she found in her attic after battling Klaus. She reveals to him that she is a hunter-slayer, but she still fails to stop him from going back into the Dark Dimension and accidentally taking Bonnie with him. Later the next morning, Stefan needs to Influence some officers who have to arrest Matt for supposedly raping Caroline, but since he had starved without blood in the Dark Dimension, he needs to quickly take some from Meredith. This triggers some hidden memories of her brother, which Stefan also sees while connecting with her mind. When telling the others about this, Meredith has to confess to them that she is a hunter-slayer as well. Meredith later goes to her parents and asks them what happened to Cristian, and her mother becomes terrified and starts crying, not wanting to go into it. Her father tells her everything and also shows her a special file containing photos of Cristian on his birthday that Klaus sent them every year for a few years before they stopped. Then, all of a sudden they received one last year. In each of the photos, Cristian had fully elongated canines like a real vampire. Meredith takes the file back to the boarding house to show everyone, and realizes why she has such sharp "kitten teeth". Since she did not consume as much blood as Cristian had under Klaus' influence and had just the bare minimum of animal blood for survival, she lived an essentially human life, oblivious to her condition. She breaks down, saying that she'll kill Cristian and then herself. Later, the boarding house is seized by the kitsune as the malach literally begin to tear it down. The group takes Misao's Master Key and Stefan and Elena escape to Lady Ulma's house, where Damon has safely placed Bonnie, while Meredith, Matt and Mrs. Flowers relocate to Matt's basement. As the days go by, they also begin to take in more children who have yet to be possessed. In the final hours before the last midnight, when all of the children and parents are going to kill each other and completely empty the town of life, Meredith puts the clues together and realizes that Isobel's grandmother is actually Inari, the kitsune goddess, who has been toying with them and pretending to help. Matt drives her and Mrs. Flowers over to their house as Mrs. Flowers does a spell to reverse her age so that she is around Matt and Meredith's age. Outside, they meet Inari, also looking young, on the front porch, who confesses that she made the Saitou family pretend she was part of them and sent Isobel's father away to Japan when he started to speak of the truth. Inari needed to destroy Fell's Church and lay the blood of its citizens on it so that she could have access to all the power of intersecting ley lines underneath it, much like she had done before on the Island of Doom. She and Mrs. Flowers do battle while Matt and Meredith rescue Isobel and her mother, who are tied up inside the burning house. As they come back out front, they see Inari shrivel up and die, as Elena had just destroyed her star ball. Mrs. Flowers heals and ages back to an old woman while Matt and Meredith hug.

Later, they find themselves in a restored Fell's Church where everyone's memories are different so that nothing bad ever happened, due to Elena's deal with the Guardians. Stefan informs them of everything that happened.

The Hunters: Phantom[]

Everyone goes to meet Alaric at the train station with his friend Celia Connor, but Celia is almost killed when her scarf gets caught in the train and it rushes past. Stefan saves her, but the remnants of her scarf spell out "Meredith". Everyone thinks Meredith is in dagner, as earlier Bonnie's blood had spelled out "Celia". When they all go out to a swimming hole, Meredith almost drowns as seaweed tightens around her leg, spelling out "Damon". Everyone is confused as they think Damon is dead. As everyone investigates what is happening, Bonnie's name is called out next by Mrs. Flowers' yarn, and she goes into a coma one night after trying to do a spell to contact Damon. Elena tells this to Damon, who has come back to visit her but told her not to tell anyone until the time is right. Intrigued, he lets the same darkness that took Bonnie overtake him in crow form. Stefan thinks that the new boy who Aunt Judith hired to work on her house, Tyler's cousin Caleb, is evil, as evidenced by the newspaper clippings and photos in his shed. Some are about real events and some are from the fake memories the Guardians implanted. Stefan and Elena think that Caleb must be supernatural, and that allowed him to retain some of his memories of reality. Not only could he be a potential werewolf, but he also seems to have some magical properties as well, since he cast a spell on the floor to make everyone jealous of each other. Meredith, for instance, had become jealous of Celia for taking up most of Alaric's attention. After Elena ends up in a coma, too, Matt, Meredith and Stefan go to Tyler's house where Caleb is staying to interrogate him. Matt stays downstairs as guard when the darkness overtakes him, too. Caleb confesses that he realized that their group was behind the contradicting memories, and he figured they must know what happened to Tyler, so he cast the spell to make them all jealous of each other, hoping that he could get closer to Elena and she could tell him of Tyler's fate. Meredith confesses that they truly don't know where he ran off to, and she and Stefan take Matt back to the boarding house where they do a ritual in the garage with Alaric, Celia and Mrs. Flowers to summon what Mrs. Flowers has determined to be a phantom - the source of their problems. The phantom suddenly appears in the garage with Bonnie, Elena and Matt and Damonbattling it. Their comatose bodies had disappeared, as they had gone over to the center of the garage to receive their respective spirits. Everyone is surprised to see Damon, but Mrs. Flowers tells everyone to light a candle and cast out their jealousy in front of the phantom, since this particular phantom clearly fed off of the jealousy between them. It was visible and could interact with the world because it is an original phantom, one of many that was trapped on the Dark Moon by the guardians at the beginning of time. However, when Elena destroyed everything on the moon, she destroyed their prison, too, and this phantom followed her. One of the rules of original phantoms, though, is that it must warn about its next victims, hence the appearances of the names. As everyone casts out their jealousies, their candles go out. Damon throws his at the icy phantom, but it is just as powerful on fire. Elena reaches into its solid core and pulls out the rose in its heart, killing it. Damon gives her blood to heal her burns as firetrucks come and put out the garage.

Part of the changes to everyone's memories included that Klaus had never come to Meredith's family, even though they still lived in Fell's Church since the Guardians didn't change that. This did mean, though, that they (supposedly) took away Meredith's vampiric aspects (although maybe she only assumes that, since L. J. Smith said that Damon would help control her bloodlust when she went off to college and stopped taking the blood sausages and blood pudding) and also restored Cristian's humanity and removed his vampirism. In everyone's memories, he was the problem child of the family who had gone to boarding school at age 12 (and as such, did not get much hunter-slayer training) and joined the military when he turned 18 two months ago. Interestingly enough, Meredith's last name seems to be "Suarez" in this book. It can be assumed that the family changed their name to Sulez when they moved to Fell's Church to avoid future vampire attacks. Klaus had tracked them, though, as he was still able to send them pictures of Cristian, whose name now seems to be spelled with an "h".

The Hunters: Moonsong[]

Meredith's last name is Sulez again in this book. She probably goes back to using it in college as she is more familiar with it.

Meredith decides to go to Dalcrest College and rooms with Bonnie and Elena, despite being accepted to Harvard, so that she can continue to protect Fell's Church if she ever needs to and come back, but mostly to stay with Elena, Bonnie and Matt after everything they went through and going to the Dark Dimension. Alaric also watches over Fell's Church for now.

She meets a girl, Samantha, with just as much skill as her while practicing in the gym, and they become workout partners. Eventually, after the attacks on campus start, Samantha confides in her that she has a duty to protect civilians from harm. Meredith reveals that she is a hunter, and Samantha does as well, saying that her parents were killed when she was 13. Meredith feels a different closeness to her than with Bonnie and Elena as such, but she soon discovers Samantha brutally murdered in her room with blood everywhere, just like when Vickie Bennett was murdered.

This causes her to train even harder than before, and she and Elena have an arguement with Bonnie when they tell her that she and Samantha had found someone who may have looked like her new boyfriend, Zander, running away from an attacked person. At the end of the book when Matt reveals what the Vitale Society is doing, she and Damon go down to their lair and defeat the newly turned vampires, who were responsible for Samantha's "sloppy" death, among many others. Matt notices that this may be the start of a friendship between her and Damon, whom she had always disliked.

It should also be noted, as stated above, that L. J. Smith planned for Damon and Meredith to grow closer in this book, by him sort of being her mentor. Having found a new friend who is also a hunter, Meredith struggling with her vampirism would have surely made an excellent plotline.