The show opens in Dallas, three years in the future. Caroline is running a television news show from behind the scenes. Her fiancé calls her assistant, Johnny, to see if she can get time off to go back to Mystic Falls. She says they can never go back there.
Back in current time, two college students break into Mystic Falls in the woods searching for spirits. They use an EMF reader and find Elena's resting place. Suddenly, they’re attacked from behind by the heretics. It’s all caught on one student’s video camera. Matt finds them and tries to save the kids. The heretics kill them anyway and then knock Matt out. When he wakes, he has a bandage on his wrist.
Alaric uses his occult studies class to convince the students that nothing is going on in Mystic Falls. Bonnie asks if Rick is okay and says she’s slightly offended that he didn’t approach her about trying to contact Jo. He asks her if she’s heard of the phoenix stone.
Stefan leaves a phone message for Caroline while driving. He hasn’t heard from her for a while. Beau steps in front of his car, causing him to stop. Lily then shows up. She tells him that Malcolm has been killed. She also tells him they have Caroline.
Enzo is tying Caroline to a chair with vervain ropes. She pleads with him to loosen the ropes because they hurt. He steps in to help and she wraps the rope around his neck, breaks the chair and uses part of it to stake his leg and runs. Nora and Mary Louise stop her, knock her out magically, and take her away.
Damon enters his and Stefan’s new home. Stefan confronts him about killing Malcolm. Damon says they made a bad deal. He tells Damon he has to fix things.
Damon goes to Lily and tries to get her to let Caroline go. He admits to killing Malcolm, but makes a joke out of it. Lily is upset and tells him he couldn’t have acted alone. Damon offers to swap himself for Caroline. He tries to step inside, but a barrier stop him. Lily says the deed is no longer in the Salvatore name. She sends him away.
Bonnie looks at the phoenix stone. Rick says it’s supposed to bring people back from the dead. Bonnie tries to unlock the magic of the stone to see what it does. She sees people dying. The stone is evil. Bonnie says they have to destroy the stone.
Stefan makes a plan to enter Lily’s house through the tunnels until Damon tells them they can’t enter the house. Damon has a call in with the registrar’s office to find out who owns it. Damon says having an evil nemesis is a great distraction from losing Elena.
Caroline wakes hanging in chains. They’ve injected her with vervain. Mary Louise asks for Caroline’s opinion on Nora’s funeral dress. Caroline laughs. Nora runs off and Mary Louise threatens to put out Caroline’s eyes with an eyeliner pencil. Mary Louise stabs her in the chest with the pencil.
Enzo tells Lily that she promised Caroline wouldn’t be hurt. She says he promised she wouldn’t escape. She asks him to watch the house while she and her heretics have a funeral for Malcolm. Valerie tells Enzo he should stop caring about Caroline.
Damon calls Bonnie. She tells him that she convinced Rick to drop the stone in a vat of acid. He lets Bonnie know that Lily has Caroline. Bonnie blames herself and Damon says it’s all his fault. Bonnie realizes that he’s covering for her. He asks Bonnie to do him a favor involving the person who owns the Salvatore house.
Bonnie finds Matt at firing practice on a street in Mystic Falls. She tells him that the heretics drained the vervain from his blood, compelled him to sign the deed and not invite Stefan and Damon in and then to forget that he did it. She wants to stop his heart to break the seal on the spell. Matt lets her.
Valerie tells Caroline she was lucky it was Mary Louise who stabbed her because she’s the nice one. She pulls the objects out of Caroline’s wounds and casts a spell on her. Mary Louise come in and tries to hurt Caroline, but Caroline’s skin burns her hands like vervain. Mary Louise injects Caroline with vervain to knock her out.
Bonnie tells Matt that his heart can be stopped for six minutes before anything bad happens to him. She promises it will only takes 10 seconds. Once Matt’s heart has stopped, Bonnie has a vision of the evil she saw earlier with the stone and passes out.
Damon and Stefan get a text saying that Matt’s down and they head for the house. Enzo opens the door to Damon. Damon tries to convince Enzo to let her go. Enzo tells him he kidnapped Caroline for Lily. He tells Damon that they’re going to bury Malcolm in the Salvatore crypt. Damon says it’s sealed because Elena is in there. Enzo reminds him that the heretics are magic syphoners.
Rick pours acid into a beaker and dissolves a regular stone. It works. He picks up the phoenix stone but can’t destroy it when he sees a picture of Jo.
Lily and the heretics arrive at the Salvatore crypt. She tells them to pull out Elena’s coffin and dump her in the river under the falls. They open the gate.
Bonnie wakes up next to Matt. It’s been almost six minutes since his heart stopped. She brings him back.
Stefan enters the Salvatore house through the tunnels and finds Caroline in the girls’ room. He tries to carry her out, but her skin burns him.
Damon goes to the graveyard. He finds the crypt empty. He starts throwing things. Lily shows up. She’s cloaked Elena so he can’t find her. Lily says it’s like when he broke her grandmother’s vase as a child and she took away his toys to make him admit it. He says Elena is not a toy soldier. She tells him Malcom was not a vase. Damon chases her out of the crypt, but the heretics back her up. Damon asks what she wants.
Stefan puts a jacket on Caroline. She said she thought her skin would only burn Nora and Mary Louise. Suddenly they feel like their molecules are being pulled. Stefan flies out the window and Caroline flies down the stairs. Enzo asks Lily to invite her in. When she does so, the pulling stops.
Bonnie apologizes to Matt. He says it’s Damon’s fault. Bonnie admits to helping Damon with everything that’s happened. Matt says he hates the heretics. Bonnie tells him they should do something about it.
Stefan is angry with Damon for leaving him and Caroline at the house. Damon tells him that Lily has asked him to leave and go as far from Mystic Falls as he can for good. Only then can he get Elena back. Damon says Lily is slowly taking away everything they care about. She wants them to be mad at each other. Damon tells Stefan to complain to Lily about his worthless brother who left town. Damon says he’s going to find a missing heretic to negotiate a trade with Lily to get the girls back.
Rick tells Bonnie that he destroyed the stone, but he hasn’t. He goes to the morgue and places the stone on the chest of a dead body. The man awakens after a few seconds. Rick takes the stone back and the body dies again.
Lily asks Enzo if she should ask the girls to release Caroline into his custody. He says no. He asks Lily if she considers him family like the other heretics. She says yes. He says that’s a problem because he doesn’t want to be her child. He wants her.
Nora gives Caroline an old journal of Stefan’s. She says Valerie carries it everywhere. She points Caroline towards an entry and leaves the room. Caroline reads the entry and finds that Stefan once loved Valerie.
Fast forward to Caroline in three years. She’s talking with Johnny again. He tells her that someone named Stefan Salvatore called. She says to tell Stefan that she’s not there next time and she never wants to hear his name again. She starts to walk away and she and Johnny get shot with wooden stakes and collapse.