“Don’t you realize who’s in control here?” he asked. His expression was now bland and calm, as if he hadn’t just been grovelling to his employer.
In response, Damon lunged at him. He was weak and chained, without even a third of his usual strength, but the man jumped away in fright at his glowing eyes and bared teeth, and Damon settled back in his chair with a grin.
“Oh, I know, don’t worry.”
Elena didn’t think she’d ever been so happy to come back to the too old, too dark, too big expanse that was the Salvatore Boarding House. She was tired, stressed, sore, and hungry enough that Bonnie smelled better than the best hamburger in the world.
Bonnie pulled up in front of the house, turned off the engine and looked at her. “Uh, I think you need to eat. You’re turning all veiny.” She gestured at Elena’s eyes.
“Oh, God.” Elena wanted to tear into Bonnie’s throat, but the idea of turning on her best friend was so repulsive that she opened the car door instead and nearly threw herself out, tripping over the chain she was still dragging along in the process. She ran up the steps to the front door and almost started to cry at the realization that she’d lost her purse and with it her keys.
Bonnie was beside her in a moment, fitting her own key into the lock. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Elena. I promise.” The door opened, and Bonnie ran into the house, straight for the kitchen.
Damon preferred to drink human blood. In fact, he refused to drink anything else and had been teaching her the value of drinking from humans, as well as the ways to manage it without them either knowing or being harmed by it. Stefan, on the other hand, was strictly off human blood again after his fall, and he had different techniques and tricks, all based around the use of animal blood instead of human. Damon thought he was largely an idiot for it, but he hadn’t complained about his brother’s attempts to help her, at least not all the time.
There was a large jar of pig’s blood in the fridge, untouched until now but still good. Elena craved warm human blood instead, but right now she was so hungry that she didn’t trust herself to be able to stop with a human, and the sight of the red liquid in the big bell jar only made the feeling worse. The hunger clawed at her, tore gouges in her, and screamed in her ear to feed, to kill, to survive. Elena hauled the jar out and was barely able to unscrew the lid with her shaking hands before she was holding it up to her mouth and drinking, pouring it down her throat as fast as she could while the excess dripped down her chin and onto the ruins of the shirt she was wearing.
It was vile and disgusting, half coagulated, and cold, and it was the best thing she’d ever tasted. It poured over the hunger in her belly, swamping and drowning it and returning her senses to her, the humanity that she so desperately didn’t want to give up.
When the jar was finally empty, she lowered it, breathing deeply through her mouth, and looked over at Bonnie standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Yuck,” was all her friend had to say as she went to get a towel for her to wipe her face.
Elena couldn’t help it. She had to laugh.
Wilson packed his equipment as fast as he could, and Damon worked on keeping him as scared and off balance as he could while he did. He also tried to work his way free of his chains, without success. He wasn’t sure that he’d have been able to get out even if he weren’t half dead from vervain poisoning. He just didn’t have the leverage. He couldn’t even get enough slack to break a bone or two and pull his hands free out of his shackles. He’d do it too, in a heartbeat. He didn’t need a fully functioning hand to tear Wilson into gobby chunks, and it would heal soon enough afterwards anyway.
“I’m going to eat you,” Damon told him in a conversational tone while Wilson packed up his test tubes and spare blood bags. The calm tone seemed to make him more unnerved than yelling did. He tried to hide it, and was actually very good at doing so, but Damon had spent decades perfecting the skill of reading a person’s body language, and Wilson might as well have been screaming at him that he was afraid. Afraid of him, afraid of Elena. Afraid of everything.
“I thought about tearing out your throat,” Damon continued, “but that would be too quick. You can’t live without a throat. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. Now those a man can do without.” He grinned, his teeth even and white. “You’re going to do without.”
Wilson taped up the box with fingers that shook ever so minutely and carried it out.
“Your spleen too!” Damon shouted after him. “Lots of people survive without a spleen. Mind you, most of them don’t have it shoved up their ass, but we can’t all be that lucky.”
Wilson vanished, and Damon immediately went back to fighting to work his way out of his chains. He still didn’t have the leverage or the strength and the rough edges of the chain cut into his skin, making him even more pissed off than he already was.
Finally, he gave up in frustration and glared at the ceiling, at the shadowy part that wasn’t pierced by skylights and their killing rays.
“Bonnie,” he muttered. “You great big idiot of a wanna-be witch. Remember that I called you and told you where I was, and get your butt over here. Now. This is getting old.”
Rescued by a teenage witch. The idea was more humiliating than that of being farmed for his blood so it could be sold on the black market.
Almost.
Elena stood in the shower, washing what felt like a thousand pounds of dirt and filth off of her body.
Amongst the rest of the clutter, there had been a heavy set of bolt cutters in the basement. They’d been enough to get the chain off, but she still wore the shackles on her wrists. There hadn’t been enough room to cut them off.
Elena shampooed her hair, wishing she could spend hours in here enjoying the hot water, but Bonnie was right outside the door in her bedroom, likely playing guard dog for her friend. Elena had to smile. Some days she needed a guard dog, it seemed. Or at least a bodyguard.
“I hope that Damon has some ideas about how to get these shackles off,” she shouted toward the other room. “They make very ugly bracelets.”
There was a sound from the other room, something like a gasp that she heard over the rush of the falling water, and Elena stuck her head out of the shower, suddenly worried again.
“Bonnie?”
Bonnie appeared in the doorway to the bathroom, and her dark skin had gone pale. She had her phone in her hands, clutched to her breast.
“Bonnie …?” Elena’s voice came out faint.
Bonnie swallowed. “I forgot. With everything and finding you, I forgot. I can’t believe I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
Bonnie looked devastated. “I went to that part of town to find you because Damon told me you’d be there. He called me to say he was going to go in and get you. I … I haven’t heard from him since.”
Elena stared back at her in horror, shampoo and water dripping down her face. Bonnie met her frightened gaze for a long moment, and then she frantically started typing in the number for Damon’s cell on her phone and held it to her ear. A moment later, she winced.
“It’s turned off. What if he’s in trouble?”
Elena stared at her friend for one more moment of shared horror, and then she was under the spray, frantically washing the shampoo out of her hair. Once she was done, she jumped out and towelled herself dry. Bonnie was back in the bedroom, trying to text Damon while grabbing some clean clothes for her friend to wear.
“Still nothing,” she said.
Elena pulled on her shirt and finger combed her wet hair. The thought of Damon in danger made her more frightened than she was when she herself was trapped. Wilson had taken her easily enough. No one who hunted vampires could survive to do so unless he was very dangerous himself.
“We have to go back,” she whispered and hurried past Bonnie into the hall.
Bonnie stared after her. “But, Elena….”
Elena spun toward her. “We have to go back!” she screamed.
Bonnie put up her
hands. “All right, no arguing. We’ll go back.”
Bonnie was right. It was dangerous and she’d barely escaped herself, likely only because Wilson hadn’t been expecting her to be able to. How could she possibly hope to save Damon when he was so much older and stronger than she was?
Elena’s doubts chased her all the way to the car, where she sat biting at her nails while Bonnie hurried to join her. She gave her friend a look as she got behind the wheel and turned the car’s ignition on, but she didn’t say anything as she pulled out of the driveway and headed back to where she’d found Elena.
Damon opened his eyes when he heard a second heartbeat in the building. He was feeling poorly from the vervain, but not nearly as much as his captors likely expected, or as he pretended to be. Not after all the time he’d spent building up a resistance to the plant. It wasn’t enough to be able break his bonds, but enough that he wasn’t going to pass out and could think clearly through the nausea and his growing need for food. That he had next to no control over. His hunger was immense, and he knew his eyes were bloodshot and red, his face distorted by the fangs he couldn’t keep withdrawn anymore.
He lifted his head and glared toward the door as Wilson, who’d stepped out to meet the newcomer, returned with him in tow.
The new man was shorter than Wilson, who was all tall, gangly limbs, but he was stockier and from the look of it, heavier. He also had the air of a predator about him, a lion versus Wilson’s praying mantis, and Damon could smell the gun oil on the weapon he carried on him somewhere. Given a choice between the two, Damon suspected he was the more dangerous. Not because Wilson had any sort of conscience, but because this man wouldn’t hesitate to attack, where Wilson preferred to keep his hands clean and use ambushes and traps.
“Well,” Damon said, enunciating very clearly so that his fangs wouldn’t cause him to slur his words. “Is this the second course?”
Wilson barely gave him a flat look, not that Damon was expecting more. It was the reaction of the second man he cared about. He narrowed his eyes, judging Damon as to just how much of a threat he was, and turned away when he saw it was only a bluff.
Damon hated enemies that were in control of themselves.
“There a place to take a piss around here?” the man asked of Wilson, who looked unimpressed.
“Through the back door. Hurry. I want to get out of here before the other one comes back with reinforcements.”
“I’ll be quick. Start dragging him.” He sauntered off, unconcerned, while Wilson looked at Damon.
Damon grinned at him. “Come right up close. I’m hungry.”
Wilson didn’t react to the taunt this time, obviously emboldened by the fact he was no longer alone. Instead he walked back to the workbench and dragged a folded canvas tarp from underneath it. He unfolded it and after a few failed tries because of Damon’s squirming, got it over him, leaving him in darkness. That only made him struggle more, and the chair rocked from side to side as he made a serious effort to knock it over.
“I have your ring,” Wilson said. “If you want us to drag you outside without any protection, I can do that.”
Damon froze. His hands were chained so securely he hadn’t realized his ring was taken off. Of course it had been. Why else would he be tied up in the only dark place in a room filled with sunbeams? Elena had him too worried; he was being such an idiot today.
While he cursed himself and both men, Wilson used regular rope to tie the heavy canvas on, covering Damon so completely that he was safe from the sun. The canvas muffled sound, but he could still hear the second man when he returned.
“I’ll need help with this,” Wilson said.
“I’m paid to drive, not to lug monsters,” the man retorted, and the two of them started bickering about it. Damon let them, trying to think of a way out of this before Elena and Bonnie realized he was missing and decided to do something stupid.
The two men reached a consensus in their argument and tipped his chair back. Together, they dragged it out of the room and through the cluttered warehouse area, around where he’d been idiot enough to fall through the fake floor. The metal feet of the chair made a horrendous screeching sound that was nearly enough to drive a vampire mad. It was certainly more than enough to make him wish he were currently deaf instead of blind.
“So, how much?” he asked.
There was a long moment of dragging before the second man finally answered. “What for?”
“To work for me?”
The man snorted. “You couldn’t afford me.”
There was a spark of greed there. “I’m very rich. I’m sure I can. Name a figure.”
“No,” Wilson interjected. “You know what Jennings will do if you cross him.”
“Screw Jennings,” the second man retorted, but he sounded uncertain.
“Money,” Damon said. “All the money you want. All you could ever want.”
They’d stopped moving, the chair dropping back onto all four legs with a jarring thud. Damon felt a thrill of hope fill him. He couldn’t compel with so much vervain in his bloodstream, but there were so many other ways to win someone over.
“Anything you want,” he purred. “All of it.”
“Anything?” the man asked. “Would you give me all your money?”
“Sure,” Damon agreed. “It’s no use to me when I’m tied to a chair and half the fun’s in earning it anyway.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Wilson snapped. “The second you untie him, he’ll gut you like a fish. How long have you worked for Jennings that you don’t know that vamps can’t be trusted?”
“Hey, he’ll give us the money.”
“No! You’re a fool! You can’t trust monsters. He won’t give you a dime unless you untie him, and even a weakened vampire is dangerous. I’m not losing him because you’re greedy.”
“You just let me worry about Jennings. He and I go way back.”
“Oh really, you think I believe that? Let’s prove it, I’ll call him right now, watch me!” Damon heard him dialing. “He’ll hunt you down for your head!”
“Oh, you idiot, put that away. Damn it, he was buying it. He would have paid us both out, and I would have given him to Jennings afterwards anyway. You just cost me my bonus, you ass.”
Damon sagged in disappointment as Wilson stammered something that sounded like a confused apology. A moment later, they both resumed dragging him out of the warehouse. It would have been nice to just be able to pay his way out of this.
Still, he was getting a good idea from all of this as to just what sort of person the missing Jennings was. Obviously unscrupulous, rich, and corrupt. A man who controlled his people with money or fear.
That sort of person could be negotiated with, and Damon would happily hand over a half dozen or so of his least favorite vampires in order to buy his own freedom back. It might even turn out to be a tidy way to get rid of a few enemies.
Then they were outside. The sun couldn’t touch him, but he still sensed it when they dragged him out from underneath a roof. Without his ring, the light that warmed the canvas covering him felt wrong, and his muscles involuntarily tightened at just the thought of what it could do to him. He’d been burned before, and it was one experience he never wanted to go through again.
He’d wait and talk to this Jennings person. At some point, Damon knew, he’d show up to view his new acquisition. That’s just how his sort was. They needed to see what they’d conquered, to count coup on it, especially when the danger was faced by someone else. Damon would talk his way out of this then, which made these two useless to him except as transport.
He didn’t talk to them again as they dragged him across the parking lot to whatever vehicle it was that Greedy brought. Given they dragged him up a ramp, he suspected it was some sort of cube truck. They hauled him in and set him against the back wall before heading back down the ramp, Wilson coercing Greedy into helping him carry the rest of his equipment.
Damon resumed working on his bonds on
ce they were gone. The effects of the vervain were starting to fade, leaving him still weak but getting stronger. Maybe in an hour or so he’d be able to break his chains. Perhaps not. He’d keep his plan of negotiating with Jennings, but it would certainly work more in his favor if he wasn’t chained when they pulled this canvas tarp off of him.
He heard the two men come back, carrying the last of the boxes, and took in a deep breath, smelling the must of the canvas, the rubber and metal of the truck, the dust of the parking lot, and the blood. He could always smell the blood, and along with the thick, rich scent of Wilson and Greedy, whatever his actual name was, he could smell his sweet Elena and her witchy little friend.
He tensed at that, struggling against his bonds with force again. No matter how much danger he might actually be in, Elena should never have come after him. These two weren’t witches, werewolves, or vampires, but the status of being human didn’t make them harmless, and unlike the two women they were both killers.
“Hey, cut it out.” Something hard and blunt slammed into the side of his head and Damon reeled while he heard Wilson snapping at Greedy to hurry up down the ramp while the truck’s engine started up.
They had a good lead, Damon assured himself. They’d be out of this place before Elena got here and realized that he was being moved. He hoped.
He really hoped, given he was almost positive that Greedy clipped him across the head with the butt of a pistol.
Elena grew increasingly anxious as Bonnie drove them back to the warehouse complex. There were “For Sale” signs on the outer front fence, showing just how Wilson managed to set up his torture chamber without anyone noticing it.
There were half a dozen buildings in total, all of them low and squat, abandoned when the economy collapsed by whatever venture capitalist put them up for sale. Weeds were growing up beside the buildings, and she recognized the road she’d taken to get away from the ugly green square where she’d been held prisoner. It was late afternoon now, and it looked ominous between her memories and the growing shadows. She stared at it, her hands clenched together underneath her breasts.
The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 4
