Elena kept pulling, using all of her strength as she gritted her teeth and threw her head back, nostrils flared and tendons standing out in her neck. Her hands started to slip on the chain and she took a tighter grip, pulling with everything she had while the desperation and hunger raged inside of her, leaving her feeling weak and helpless.
“I’m not weak,” she whispered, eyes closed against the strain, still pulling. “I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.” It became her mantra, her chant as she kept pulling, throwing all of her desperate strength into breaking the old ring that kept her bound.
The ring didn’t give. Neither did the chain, the metal of both being too strong even for her vampiric strength. Instead the concrete crumbled and the ring flew free into an arc over her head that sent her stumbling backwards with a shriek of surprise.
She went straight into one of the sunbeams and her shriek became a scream of absolute agony as the sunlight burned her skin, instantly setting her to smoking and shocking her with a pain she couldn’t have imagined. She’d suffered minor burns before, which hurt badly enough, but this was agony that felt as if it were burning her very soul, and she threw herself back into the shadow of her cage, huddled against the floor and sobbing in misery.
Elena didn’t know how long she lay there, curled in on herself and clutching the chain as if it were an object of comfort and not imprisonment. Even through her clothes, the skin on her back where the sun had touched her was inflamed and raw, weeping as she wept, without pause.
Finally, though, she had to stop crying, if only because she had no more tears left. She wanted to lie there so much, just let the pain take her and cry until it went away, but Wilson was going to return, and the thought of what he would do to her if he saw she was trying to escape terrified her more than the pain immobilized her. He didn’t see her as being worth consideration. He didn’t care how much pain she was in, only about what he could sell her blood for and what he could learn from it.
He disgusted her. More, he infuriated her, and Elena grabbed onto that anger with everything she had. It was more than her usual temper, which had always caved under before in the face of fear. This was the anger of the vampire, which was endless and without conscience.
Elena pushed herself up on trembling arms, fangs bared and ignored as she grimaced and tilted her head back, taking a deep breath as the charred skin on her back crackled and broke. She didn’t let herself think of the pain or the smell. She only thought about how she was going to get out of here before that man came back to torture her again. She was a vampire, and she was stronger than any human could hope to be.
“I will not be kept here,” she whispered, telling herself that. Still, she was in a cage of light, and it was hours until the sun went down. Wilson would be back by then.
Elena looked toward the workbench, where her ring still sat in a patch of sunlight, innocuous and utterly necessary. If she didn’t get that, she wouldn’t be going anywhere, but it wasn’t as if she could just walk over and take it.
Elena gripped the length of chain in her hands and slowly stood up. The end of the chain still had the ring attached, along with a big clump of broken concrete bound about it. It was heavy and awkward, but she swung it easily and tossed the end toward the workbench.
It didn’t reach, arcing down just shy of the surface. Elena pulled it back and shuffled closer to the bars of her sunlit cage before she tried again. The chain reached and the clump landed heavily on the workbench a foot to the right of the ring, knocking over a set of test tubes with a heavy clatter.
Elena couldn’t help a giggle of excitement and reeled the chain carefully back to her. Her next few tosses kept missing, causing chaos on the workbench that Wilson wouldn’t have been able to miss seeing, even if he somehow didn’t notice that the chain she was still wearing wasn’t attached to the floor anymore.
Her fourth or maybe fifth try finally landed the concrete clump behind and a bit to the left of her ring. Elena sucked in a breath and slowly began to pull the clump back toward her, watching as the uneven edge of it touched her ring and nudged it forward and then, unfortunately, off to the side before she could pull the clump off the end of the bench.
“Almost,” she told herself. “Almost is good.” She tried again, but the clump kept landing off center from the ring and over the next agonizing 10 minutes she wasn’t able to do more than nudge the ring around on top of the workbench and start at every sound that might have meant Wilson’s return.
If he did come back, she promised herself, she was going to whip this chain straight for his head and pray that her aim miraculously improved itself.
Finally, on what had to be her hundredth throw, the clump landed directly on top of the ring. Elena blinked at it for a moment, somewhat stunned that it actually happened, and then began to grin. With exaggerated care, she pulled the chain hand over hand toward her, and the clump slowly moved across the top of the table to the edge.
She had a sudden fear that the lapis in the ring would shatter when it hit the floor, but Bonnie had made the ring better than that, and it bounced intact instead and rolled away from the clump that landed next to it. She had to lasso it again, but the angles were better with the ring on the floor instead of the high workbench, and it was only a half dozen throws before she covered it with the clump again and resumed the slow drag back toward her through the bars of her cage.
A few minutes later, the ring was within the safe circle of her cage and Elena sobbed in relief as she picked it up and slid it on her finger.
Nothing overt happened, but she could almost believe the temperature in the room dropped. Her back certainly hurt less, but that was because it had been healing while she underwent her struggles with the ring. She still felt as if her skin was unbearably tight, and it itched horrendously, but the lack of pain was wondrous.
That didn’t make it any easier for her to step forward into the sunlight. All her life she’d thought nothing special about the sun, and now she was afraid of it. Afraid to take one step out of a prison where she knew she’d be tormented if Wilson found her.
She had to close her eyes to do it, her hands clenched as if the ring would leap off her finger if she didn’t hold onto it. “I can do this,” she said as she forced herself to take a trembling step forward, every inch of her tightening at the remembered pain of the sun burning across her body.
Sunlight kissed her face, warm and comforting the way it used to be, and Elena opened her eyes and looked up. She was standing directly underneath a skylight, bathed in the sunbeam that fell through while dust motes danced over her head like miniature fairies.
Perhaps not surprisingly, she started to laugh, and even less surprisingly, there were tears on her cheeks while she did so.
Damon picked up Elena’s scent around the same time that his phone rang. He was on the edge of town, in an area of warehouses and junkyards that shut down when the country’s economy tanked. The smell of her blood was strong on the wind to a predator who could hear a heartbeat a block away or smell a pinprick on a woman’s finger when she’d poked herself with a needle.
This was no pinprick. Someone had bled his Elena to the point where she had to almost be starving for blood, and the hints of that hunger taunting him on the wind made him want to roar with rage. Instead he bared his fangs and moved forward, tracking her through the maze of buildings, most of them run down from neglect. It was a part of Mystic Falls he wasn’t familiar with. It wasn’t a good place for hunting, after all. Not when there weren’t humans around to target.
His phone rang, and his senses were so attuned to any sounds that he jumped at the sudden beep, not that he’d ever admit to it. He grabbed it and flicked it open.
“What the hell is it, Bitchy?” he growled, his voice made slurry by his fangs.
“Have you found anything?” Bonnie asked and she sounded exasperated. He would have teased her about her obvious failure if his blood weren’t up so high.
“I can smell her,” he growle
d and inhaled deeply, cherishing that scent even as he wanted to murder the one who caused it.
Bonnie’s voice was instantly excited. “Where are you? Have you found her? Is she okay?”
“At the old warehouse complex on the edge of town,” he answered. “Not yet, and I can smell her blood, so what do you think?” The witch started to say something, but Damon closed the phone and shut it off for good measure. He didn’t have time to answer her questions, and he didn’t want the thing going off and warning whoever he was about the rip the throat out of that he was there.
Damon shoved the phone in his jacket and started forward again, staying in the shadows and moving in silence, every inch the predator.
Elena wrapped the chain around her arm, the clump at the end hanging by her side as an impromptu weapon should she need it. She’d tried to find the key to her shackles on the workbench, but it seemed Wilson took it with him when he left. She still hoped that he was going to be gone for a good long while; at least long enough for her to escape and go home.
They’d have to do something about him, before he kidnapped any other vampires, and also about this Jennings person who was buying the blood. The fact that it could be used to heal human injuries was good, but the unfortunate reality that anyone who had vampire blood in his system and died would rise again as a vampire was not. That was what had happened to her, and she’d been lucky because Damon and Stefan were there to guide her in her new life. Someone who bought her blood and then ended up rising by accident wouldn’t be so lucky, and she shuddered to think what could happen as a result. Death, chaos, their entire existence proven to the world. All of them being hunted down, killed, or caged as she had just been. Elena didn’t like the idea of keeping her blood’s healing abilities to herself, but she liked the thought of the possible repercussions of it getting out even less.
There was only one door out of the room. It was locked, but the lock mechanism wasn’t as strong as the concrete she’d pulled out of the ground, and she easily broke it open, even with the hunger growing in her belly from blood loss and the weakness due to healing her wounds.
There was another room on the other side of the door, one filled with clutter and trash, the floor covered by a scattering of loose tile and cardboard. Another door lay on the other side, hopefully leading outside.
Elena bit her lip. There was still no sign of Wilson, but the room made her nervous. It looked oppressive, and her imagination could come up with all sorts of things that might jump out of the hiding places scattered through the chaos.
How could she know this room was safe to cross? She had to be reasonable, she reminded herself. She had enough things to worry about without making it worse by inventing extra dangers.
Still, she was afraid, so instead of taking the straight route across the room, Elena hugged the wall, creeping behind the towering piles of old furniture and garbage and testing every frightened step as she progressed.
The wall beside her was dark with grease and old graffiti, broken every 10 feet by windows that had been boarded up. There was also an emergency door, hidden behind a couch stood on its end with what looked like part of a tractor engine leaning against it.
Elena was wondering if it was best to go out that way and risk there being a functioning alarm on the emergency exit when she heard something. She heard the distinct sound of a door at the front of the warehouse opening hard enough to slam against the wall. Her head snapped in that direction, so afraid that she couldn’t even inhale, and in an instant she had the blessedly silent emergency door open and was fleeing into the warm afternoon outside, racing for the safety of the road that led back to the town.
Damon stepped into the small warehouse and paused, waiting for the sound he’d just heard to repeat itself. It sounded like a door, and now he could hear footsteps hurrying away.
The century-old predator inside of him kicked in, and he lunged forward with a snarl, straight toward that sound. He sprinted through the center of the room, mostly cleared of all but the detritus on the floor; his speed wasn’t enough to save him as the unsupported surface beneath his feet gave way, and he crashed into the pit Wilson had dug below, onto the five foot spikes that stuck up into the air.
Bonnie found Elena running down the side of the road toward town, a length of heavy chain wrapped around her arm with the end flapping behind her like a gothic streamer. She wasn’t running at full vampire speed, but she certainly managed a clip fast enough that she wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Olympics.
Bonnie slammed on the brakes, yelling her name out the window, “Elena!” Her friend saw her and a second later she was pulling open the passenger door and jumping in. Bonnie hit the gas and spun the car 180 degrees, heading back the way she’d come with the gas pedal floored before she even consciously thought about it.
“I was afraid you were dead,” she gasped. “What happened?” Bonnie spared her a look out of the corner of her eye.
Elena was a mess, covered in dirt and grease, with her usually immaculate dark hair a tangled cloud around her face. There was dried blood on her shirt and forehead, and she carried a length of heavy duty chain that was attached to shackles enclosing her wrists. Bonnie saw the dried tear stains on her friend’s face and reached with one hand to take her hand. Elena’s returning grip was almost painful.
“Who did this to you?” Bonnie asked, more quietly this time.
Elena shook her head, tangled hair hiding her face as she looked down. “No one … he was no one. His name’s Wilson. He captures vampires for their blood, sells it as a cure for people. He does experiments with the rest.” She managed to lift her head, and Bonnie felt her heart clench at the pain in Elena’s eyes. “He didn’t care how much he hurt me.”
Bonnie swallowed and squeezed Elena’s hand before she returned both hands to the steering wheel. They were already past the edge of town, and she dropped their speed to something that wouldn’t get them pulled over for reckless driving as she headed back to the Salvatore Boarding House.
“How did you get away?” she asked. The next question, did you kill him, was one she was afraid to add.
Elena looked down again. “He locked me in a room with skylights that let sunlight in. He took my ring. I … I was able to get my ring back, and I just ran.” She took a deep breath. “We have to stop him from doing this to anyone else.”
Bonnie nodded. That Elena would think that was a given. “Later. Trust me; none of the vampires here will let him get away with this. For right now though, let’s just take care of you.”
Elena nodded and leaned against the passenger side window with a sigh of relief that sounded like a thank you to Bonnie’s ears.
Damon woke up in chains, tied to an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of a windowless room where light came from skylights overhead, numerous enough to form a cage around where he sat. He hurt from the spikes he’d landed on and, from the feel of it, a heavy infusion of vervain into his bloodstream. He felt sick and weak, as well as exceptionally pissed off.
His kidnapper was only a dozen feet away, but Damon didn’t have to bother with demanding to know what was happening and what the man expected to try and do to him, because his kidnapper was talking on a cell phone. And even filled with vervain, Damon was strong enough that he could hear both sides of the conversation.
“The girl escaped,” the man was saying as Damon raised his head, and the vampire couldn’t help a grin of triumph at that. Still, he found himself more than a bit embarrassed to have been caught in a trap she’d managed to get out of.
“What’s wrong with you?” came the voice on the other end of the phone. It was male and officious, as well as angry, and the man’s shoulders tightened and hunched up. “Wilson, her blood is worth a lot more than you are!”
“It’s all right,” Wilson said. “I promise you, Mr. Jennings. She got away, but I caught another vampire. A male this time, an older one. You know the males hold more blood anyway. He’s got to be worth more than s
he was.”
“Excuse me,” Damon said. Wilson gave him a quick glance over his shoulder, but otherwise ignored him.
“Are you sure you can keep hold of this one?” Jennings said. He sounded a lot more in control than he had a few moments ago.
“Of course. I have him tied up a lot better than I did her, and I’ve pumped him full of vervain, too.”
Jennings immediately sounded furious again. “Vervain? His blood is useless if he’s on vervain!”
Wilson cringed again, and Damon smirked. Toadies always got what they deserved.
“I had to,” Wilson whined. “I don’t know where the other one went. I don’t know if she’s going to be coming back. This one came here looking for her; she might try looking for him. I have to get him out of here and find a new place to set up.”
“So why are you wasting time talking to me?”
Wilson hesitated, shifting from foot to foot. “Uh …”
“Oh, for the love of … You want me to bail you out? On top of everything I’m paying you for this?” Wilson rubbed at his temples while he listened to the ranting. “Fine. I’ll send one of my men with a truck for you both. It’ll be there in an hour. It’ll take you to my private jet at the airport, but I’m taking the cost of all of this out of your pay, understood? No more idiocy.”
“Yes, Sir. Thank you. I appreciate it.” Wilson brown-nosed until Jennings hung up, and he slammed the phone down, giving a heavy exhale as he bent his head and forced his shoulders to relax.
Damon tested his chains. There was no give to them. “Hey,” he called. Wilson didn’t react, but Damon was sure he was listening. “Undo these chains now, and I won’t rip your liver out through your nose and feed it to you.”
Wilson turned around at that and blinked at Damon as if he was surprised he could speak. He did move closer, peering at him as if he were some sort of strange animal under glass.
The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 3
