The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by L. J. McDonald

  Soon enough, it wasn’t anything Sternes was concerned about either, nor was he concerned about anything else ever again.

  Elena crouched on the step at the back of the truck with her hair blowing in her face and stared at the rust around the bolts that held the license plate while she listened to the screaming. It didn’t last long, and when it was done she could hear drinking sounds.

  She could smell the blood as well, and it was better than anything else she’d ever smelled in her life. Still, she didn’t move.

  “Remember who you are,” she whispered to herself. “Remember who you are. Don’t give into the bloodlust, you can’t. You can’t.” He’d been an evil man, but to feed off his death, oh she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  “Elena,” she heard through the door. “Hold on. I’m opening the door.”

  How, she wondered, given it was locked from the outside, right before Damon kicked the door on the other side of the truck out and held a hand out to her despite how the late sunlight made the skin on the back of it start to smoke and char. His sleeve and shirt were soaked in blood, and there was blood on his lips and chin, but he was grinning at her as if he’d never been in any danger at all.

  Elena took his hand and let him pull her to him, holding her safely inside the truck. Elena hugged him tightly and pressed her cheek against his chest, trying to ignore the smell of the blood and keeping her eyes shut so she didn’t have to see the source.

  “You’re all right,” she sobbed. “I was so worried. I tried so hard to get to you, I did.”

  He chuckled and stroked her hair. “I know. If you hadn’t been giving me so much encouragement, I wouldn’t have been able to get myself free, so thank you for that.”

  Elena looked up at him, and he was smiling down at her, his eyes filled with that caring glow she’d fallen in love with. “Oh, Damon, I’m so sorry you went through that.”

  He kissed her forehead with sticky lips. “Hey, blame the bad guys. Speaking of which….”

  He took her hand in both of his and kissed it below the metal of the shackle she still wore before slipping her ring off her finger and putting it on his own, barely getting it past the second knuckle of his pinky. Once it was on, Damon let go of her and went back to the open door of the truck. She could see a bridge falling back behind them and signs for the airport. She could also hear distant sirens, heading toward them.

  “Damon, let the Sheriff handle it. Please.”

  She reached for him, but there was still late afternoon sunlight shining on the doorway. Damon winked at her with a smirk, and then he was gone, pulling himself up onto the roof.

  Elena stood where she’d been left, her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes closed, surrounded by death and blood and so relieved Damon was safe that she didn’t care.

  And that frightened her more than almost anything.

  Wilson wasn’t sure what was going on behind him. Nothing good, he guessed, and once he got the hang of driving the truck, having never driven anything so big before, he picked up his cell phone and dialed a number.

  He was pretty sure he heard a gunshot behind him as the line was picked up.

  “Yeah?” Jennings said.

  “We have a problem,” Wilson told him. “That female vamp came after us. We’re almost at the airport, and she’s on the truck. The man you sent is trying to get rid of her.” He heard another gunshot, very definite this time.

  There was a long moment of silence. “If you hadn’t let her escape in the first place, this wouldn’t be happening, now would it?”

  Wilson gritted his teeth at the scorn in that voice. He enjoyed Jennings’ pay, but he loathed the man himself. Wilson was a professional. It took a special sort of person to be able to identify and trap vampires, and while he had job satisfaction, he certainly didn’t have respect.

  If he had any interest in the business side of things, he’d take the blood he harvested and market it himself, but for dealing with the politics involved in selling black market vampire blood, he needed Jennings’ expertise. Jennings, however, was already wealthy, and he didn’t need Wilson as much as Wilson needed him.

  Jennings was waiting for an answer. “No, Sir,” he grated.

  Jennings likely heard the anger in his voice, but he seemed satisfied for the moment.

  “So, here’s what I want you to do. Get that vamp off that truck. I don’t care how. Sternes can do it. But don’t come here until she’s dealt with.”

  Wilson looked out the window as he crossed the river and passed a sign for the local airport. “But … We’re already here. I’m maybe three minutes from your plane.”

  “Well, my plane is taking off and staying in the air until you have the situation under control! Do you think me a fool? Deal with this! That’s what I pay you for!”

  Jennings hung up, and Wilson threw the phone down onto the passenger seat with a curse. He kept driving forward—what else was he going to do—and schooled his emotions back to the bland boredom he’d made his trademark. He shouldn’t have bothered calling Jennings, and the shame burned at him until he purged it. Emotions were too painful, too bothersome, fear as useless as remorse.

  There was more gunfire behind him, and the truck shook as he heard high-pitched screaming that had to be the vampire. He needed to fight the wheel in order to keep control, but it stopped quickly and everything went quiet.

  Wilson stared into the side mirrors, but he couldn’t see anything. Ahead he could see the private runway Jennings rented, as well as a sleek, private jet already lifting up from the end into the sky. He could also hear distant sirens, indicating a completely different problem to deal with.

  He slowed, but didn’t stop, weighing his options. If he hadn’t bloody panicked and called Jennings, they still could have gotten onto the plane. Now he needed to find a way to ditch this truck without losing the vampire he’d captured.

  Realistically, all he could do was abandon both the truck and the vampire and try to catch a new one later to replace him. Unless Sternes had a much better idea, that was all they could do.

  What a waste of time and resources, as well as all the experiments he’d have to abandon and start over. Wilson’s face remained impassive as he drove the truck past the landing strip where Jennings had taken off rather than face any sort of chance of meeting up with an unbound vampire. The coward. Vampires were dangerous, but they were hardly uncontrollable for an expert. At the end, they were just dead things made slave to their obsessions.

  Damon Salvatore dropped off the roof of the cab and onto the hood, crouching down to grin through the windshield at Wilson. His face and clothes were covered in blood. Wilson slammed on the brakes, but the vampire hardly even shifted his position, and the grin only widened.

  “If you want to survive even the next five minutes,” Damon told him, “you and I are going to have a conversation about your employer.

  “How long you live past it depends on how good you are with your answers.”

  Mark Jennings was a very wealthy man, his fortune built on an empire of drugs, prostitution, weapons, and illegal medicines. He had an army of employees with many different skills and a team of lawyers to keep him out of jail.

  By this point, the money was just a way of keeping points, and he was well set in his ways, all of which involved other people taking the risks. He existed to make money, not to endanger his very expensive hide, and if people considered that to be cowardice, then he had a lot of bodyguards to dissuade them of their belief.

  At first, the vampire blood had been a whim, a market he got into when he still thought it was just snake oil and a unique way to bilk the stupid of their cash. He found out it was real later on, and he’d been debating its value ever since.

  It was definitely dangerous work. For all his lack of a self-determining thought in his head, Wilson had lasted easily the longest out of all the vampire wranglers Jennings had hired.

  It had been lucrative, but Jennings thought it might just be time to shut t
he market down. The blood was indeed priceless for its ability to heal wounds, but only so long as it remained rare, and he’d rather his enemies not be able to get hold of it. It was against his interests for them to use it to delay any convenient deaths he might want to cause them. He was more interested nowadays in simply maintaining a supply for his own uses. That was why he was willing to put up with Wilson’s pseudo-scientific mandate after his previous specialist was turned inside out by a vamp that escaped its cage. Wilson could use as much of what he gathered for his experiments as he wanted, so long as Jennings remained well stocked.

  At the moment, those stocks were lower than he liked. If that idiot managed to get himself either killed or arrested, Jennings would have to find someone else to finish his work. If Wilson squealed to the police, he’d have him eliminated, either by burying him in so much legal paperwork and countersuing for slander that no one would be able to point a finger toward one Mark Jennings. Or he’d have someone reliable, such as Sternes, take care of him. He had a lot of men with a lot of different skills to draw from, and he paid them well enough to be mostly assured of their loyalty.

  Jennings walked into the home office in his contemporary mansion, with its view of a lake that he owned and kept wholly private. Everything was in shadow, the shapes placed by the designer in such a way that they were serene and elegant even as silhouettes and turned on the light.

  A man was sitting in the chair behind his desk, his fingers steepled and one ankle crossed over his knee.

  Jennings blanched at the sight of him. He didn’t recognize the man, and no one who worked for him would ever be so stupid as to sit in his chair. “Who are you?” Without waiting for an answer, he slapped a hand to the intercom mounted onto the wall beside the door. “Get in here!” he barked. “There’s an intruder.”

  “Don’t bother,” the man said with a smooth voice. “Nobody’s going to bother us. I already took care of them.”

  Jennings looked back toward the intruder and watched the man rise to his feet with a litheness that couldn’t possibly be human. He never took his eyes off of Jennings as he walked around the desk, and Jennings stood frozen, sweat suddenly trickling down his face in a way that hadn’t happened during decades of power and abuse. He couldn’t move, he realized, couldn’t even get his eyes to blink. His terror spiked, sending his heart pounding, but still he could only stare into those monstrous eyes while the man moved closer.

  He paced around him, so close that Jennings could feel the chill coming off his body, despite the warmth in the room, and his heart pounded even harder in horrified realization.

  “I understand you wanted my blood,” he purred and the businessman was barely able to swallow. He wanted to explain, wanted to beg, but his voice was kept as immobile as his legs, held out of his control.

  “Well, you may not have my blood, but you have something so very much worse.” He stopped in front of him.

  “You have my attention.”

  He smiled and that smile was full of teeth.

  “My car,” Bonnie mourned.

  “I’m so sorry,” Elena apologized. “I really am.”

  The two of them stood on the side of the road, watching the tow truck haul Bonnie’s wreck up to where it was going to be dumped on a flatbed. The Sheriff was there, Caroline standing near and listening to her mother make sure the tow truck men didn’t harm the chain of evidence she was gathering up. Bonnie and Elena had already spent a long time talking to the woman about what happened, and both of them hoped they wouldn’t have to again. She doubted it. Caroline had convinced her mother to give them a break but the Sheriff, she was sure, would have lots more questions for both of them and for Damon when he got back. Caroline likely would as well. She’d been as relieved to see Elena as Bonnie, and all three of them had ended up hugging each other and crying in relief once they were reunited. It only happened again when they got here and saw what had happened to Bonnie’s car.

  Bonnie’s shoulders slumped, still staring at the remains of her poor car. The entire front was buckled in with the hood crumpled up like a piece of really bad modern sculpture from where it wrapped itself around a tree. The windshield was gone, scattered through the foliage, and both front tires were pointing in the wrong direction. From the look of it, once it was out of there and done being used as evidence in whatever trial the Sheriff thought she could get started without exposing all of them, it would be on its way straight to the junkyard. Bonne wasn’t sure that her insurance included friends driving it in high speed chases in order to rescue kidnapped vampires. She rather doubted it.

  “Since you’ve survived, can I strangle you for this for a while?”

  Elena looked at her a bit uncertainly. “I don’t think you can really hurt me that way.”

  “I know. That’s why it might actually make me feel better.”

  The two women peeked sideways at each other and at the same time, they both started giggling. The situation was just too absurd not to, and Bonnie hugged her friend, relieved that she was safe, despite what had happened to her car.

  “That was too close,” she murmured.

  Elena’s arms were cooler around her shoulders than she remembered, but still as loving as ever. “I’m all right. Damon’s all right. We’re both okay.”

  Bonnie didn’t care about Damon’s health nearly as much as her friend did, but she didn’t bother to mention that as she drew back. “How long? If people are crazy enough to think that vampire blood is actually worth gathering as a commodity, then eventually someone will be back here looking for some.” The vast majority of vampires could protect themselves, naturally, but not all of them were instant killers and being hunted could force even the most peaceful of them into surrendering their humanity. Bonnie hated the idea of seeing that sort of fate for Elena.

  Elena shrugged, her eyes cast downwards to the skid marks that cut through the dirt on the road’s shoulder. Bits of glass were mixed in with it, glinting when the dappled sunlight hit them.

  “Damon is looking into it,” was all she said. “He’ll find the man those two were working for and make sure that this never happens to anyone again.”

  Neither of them said anything more about “those two,” or what happened to them. Bonnie hadn’t seen the bodies, and Elena hadn’t wanted to talk about it, though she had been pale when Bonnie first met up with her. Bonnie tried to put any speculation out of her mind. They’d tortured her friend and she had a strong suspicion of what she would have wanted to do to them if it had been her standing in front of them at the end of that chase.

  Bonnie reached down and clasped her friend’s hand, giving it a squeeze. Elena lifted her head and smiled at her.

  “I’m proud of you,” Bonnie told her.

  Elena looked puzzled. “For what?”

  “For what? For everything! For not hurting anyone. For not taking advantage at the end and joining in when Damon did.”

  Elena sighed and looked down. “I couldn’t. I really wanted to but … I couldn’t.”

  Bonnie grinned at her. “And that’s why you’re my best friend, even if you can’t drive.”

  “Hey!”

  “You owe me a new car.”

  “Hey!”

  Bonnie laughed, and they waited for the Sheriff to finish securing the wreck and come back over to ask them enough new questions she hadn’t already brought up that they’d fill the rest of the day.

  Elena had just walked into the darkened living room at the Salvatore Boarding House when she sensed a presence arrive there. She definitely didn’t have these new abilities down, but she had enough instinct to recognize that this was someone she didn’t have any reason to fear.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Damon stepped forward out of the shadows with a nod and wrapped his long arms around her. They were both still getting used to this easy intimacy with one another, but she put her arms around him without any hesitation and settled her cheek against his chest, his cool skin no longer a
shock when it touched hers.

  He kissed the top of her head. “How are you doing?”

  Elena sighed. “The Sheriff asked me enough questions to fill a book, and I think I took about four showers when I got home, but I’m okay. At least the Sheriff knew someone who could cut the shackles off.” She tilted her head up to see he was smiling down at her. “What?”

  His smirk grew. “I was just thinking that you’re cute,” he told her, and Elena pouted but hugged him tighter, her arms still wrapped around him. More and more, she was finding herself feeling that around him was exactly where she always should be.

  They stood there for a few minutes, just holding each other and both enjoying each other’s presence and the fact that they were finally safe. Finally, however, Elena found she just couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  At first, she didn’t think that he was going to answer her and instead would keep whatever it was he’d learned and done a secret for himself. It was what he always used to do in the first years of their acquaintance with absolutely everything, and she wondered if that was a part of him that wasn’t ever going to change for her. She found herself mourning the possibility. She wanted Damon to trust her, as she’d found she could utterly trust him. She was wondering how to get him to understand that when he sighed and actually did give her an answer.

  “A very rich man with a lot of power and next to no common sense decided to dabble in the supernatural as a money-making scheme. Not being quite stupid enough to go hunting for us himself, he hired a sociopathic researcher to kidnap vampires for him. They’d been doing it for a while, with a lot more success than I ever would have expected. I guess we should stop underestimating humans. The whole fact that we did underestimate them was what let him get away with it for so long. He had a lot of blood stored up, most of it gone bad, of course. He was saving it for himself a lot more than he was using it to heal other people.” His hand rubbed up and down on her back.