This SUV is bursting at the seams with all the things people aren’t saying.
Stefan’s barely said a word since Caroline basically announced she was in love with him, though why that left Elena looking so surprised I have no idea. Anybody with eyes can see how flirty they always are with each other. And it sucks how uncertain Caroline must feel right now, but there’s no way we can spare even ten seconds for them to sort their shit out, because if Cali really has a lead on Damon? We need to be there like, yesterday. Before Stefan hands over Silas and starts some kind of apocalypse.
I shift into drive and the tires bark when I hit the gas too fast.
“I know we needed to get on the road,” Elena says, “but now that we’re on our way, can you tell us how you figured out where Damon is? We’ve tried everything…” she trails off, but beneath the careful politeness of her tone, I can hear the waver of something darker. Lately, I can’t look straight at her because there’s something almost animalistic about her eyes. As if at any second, she might snap and do…who knows what?
“I had some time on my hands,” Cali says, looking out the window like she’s fascinated by the bland landscaping of our vacation rental property. My brow quirks. Cali never has time on her hands. “And I wanted to help,” she continued, “so I started thinking.”
I hit the remote to open the gate so I don’t have to slow down once we get there.
“You said the Augustines can’t go out in the daylight, and there are a lot of them. That means either underground compound or windowless warehouse-style headquarters,” she says, fiddling with the tiny ring on her smallest finger that looks like a dragon’s tail. “There’s only one company that does large-scale excavations in western Virginia. I went to their office and flirted like crazy with one of the foremen, who was really proud to tell me about the biggest job they’ve done in the last ten years.”
I grip the wheel a little tighter, fighting not to scowl at the road.
“Wait, flirting is all fine and good, but they didn’t think it was weird that you were interested in excavations?” Ric says from where he and Elena are sitting in the second row of seats.
Cali flicks her hair over her shoulder and looks back at him. “Everybody wants to feel like what they do is cool, Ric. I made out like I was really impressed by heavy machinery and what they could do with it.” She rolls her eyes. “He offered me a ride in his track hoe bucket.”
“Was it fun?” I ask, half-curious.
She smacks me in the arm, smirking. “I didn’t go, Jeremy.”
“Right,” I say, and clear my throat. “Of course not.” I pull out onto the highway and try to change the subject. “So they dug out a spot big enough for an underground Augustine apartment complex?”
“And then some,” she confirms. “About forty minutes from Whitmore College. Except despite all that digging, the only thing you can see there now is a grassy field and a giant barn. I checked it out with binoculars. The back of the barn is lined with garage doors, so that’s where they stash the cars. And the opening to the lair is probably underneath it or somewhere nearby.”
“What if the farmers just wanted, I don’t know, a really big root cellar or something?” Caroline asks.
Cali digs in her messenger bag for her sunglasses. “Yeah, probably not. On the drive here, I called your mom and had her check on the deed. The property is registered to Gus Aurelius.”
“Um,” Caroline says. “Okay?”
“Augustine Aurelius was the full name of St. Augustine, the namesake of their society,” Stefan says quietly. “He believed in pacifism, except in cases where violence was necessary for self-defense. I imagine that’s how they justify building a vampire army to protect the world from vampires.”
“Oh, right,” Caroline says, and I wince at the embarrassment in her tone, but when I look in the rearview mirror, Stefan is taking her hand. She flushes a pleased shade of pink and I snap my eyes back to the road.
“All right, so we need to go in through the farmhouse,” Ric says. “What kind of cover are we looking at, Cali? Are there trees, bushes? Sheds or farm equipment? Do we need to wait until after dark?”
“We could just blow a hole in the ceiling and let the sun do most of the work,” Stefan suggests. “Where is the closest SWAT team based? I could compel my way into their supply of C4.”
“What if they took Damon’s daylight ring to keep him from escaping?” Elena points out. “We can’t blow out the ceiling if we don’t know he’ll be safe.”
I try to focus on the conversation as they begin to hash out a plan, but every time Cali shifts in her seat beside me I get distracted. She smells like smooth skin and record vinyl and rich dark cherries and I can see the hint of her strong thigh through a rip in her jeans. Why didn’t she tell me she was looking for Damon? We’ve been texting back and forth all the time.
If she’s here, does that mean she wants to be more than friends? Is that why she’s trying to get along with my family? She hasn’t touched me since that little skim of my wrist when she got here and that could have been an accident. Wouldn’t it be different if she came back because she had feelings for me?
The thick sexual tension from the backseat for the hour long drive does nothing to help me forget about Cali, and every time I turn to add something to the weapons discussion, Stefan and Caroline are sneaking little looks at each other. I hope whatever happens between them, it goes smoothly. We have enough drama around here.
“Oh, shit,” Cali suddenly breathes, sitting forward in her seat.
The sun is right in my eyes and I have to squint to see what caught her interest. Once I do, cold flashes through my whole body so hard that for a second, I wonder if I’m about to have a seizure.
“Cali, that’s not…is it?” I whisper, trying to keep the others from hearing.
“What’s going on?” Elena asks. “Jeremy?”
“Get closer,” Cali says, and I stomp on the gas.
She cranes her neck to see the next street sign we pass as we speed down the highway.
We’re within a mile now and even I can smell charred wood in the air, but Elena either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t want to believe it because she asks again, “Jeremy? What’s wrong?”
There’s a click as Ric pops his seatbelt and leans forward between the front seats, staring at the huge column of black smoke shuddering up into the sky.
“That’s a lot bigger than one burning barn,” he says, glancing at Cali like he’s waiting for her to tell him this isn’t where we were headed.
Cali says a word so dirty I’ve never even heard Tyler use it, and then she looks at me, her eyes wide. Her hand lands on my arm and my skin has been begging for her to do that for this whole drive but now I can’t feel a thing.
“Jeremy, that’s it,” Cali says softly. “That was the place.”
I can’t speak. If that’s where Damon was being held, then he’s dead.
We’re too late.
* * *
DAMON
This is hell.
The flames are almost cliché, and they’re not the worst of it. I’ve burned before: in sunlight and at the touch of glowing red metal, and while fleeing more than one building while the shirt on my back caught fire and scorched my skin. Fire has always seemed to follow me, like a reminder of the death I’ve been cheating all these years.
I don’t fear fire any more than other physical pain, the horror of them all dulled by long experience until I’m left with little more than an automatic aversion, the way you avoid a paper cut but barely bother to curse if you get one anyway.
No, what makes this my hell is the reinforced metal walls heating like an oven, punishing me for every effort I make to break free until I’m stuck standing in the center of the room, dripping with sweat as my body dries out like a piece of overcooked meat.
Helpless.
I grind my teeth together and try to force myself to think. I’ve snuck, bargained, or beaten my way out of every prison I
’ve ever been locked in. This can’t be the end. This isn’t the end.
Elena’s counting on me to come back and I know her: she’ll blame herself if I don’t make it. And I’ll be damned if I made it through that many decades of shag carpet and Prohibition and Leave it to Beaver just to die before I get to attend my own wedding.
I’d give up every single other day of my life if I could just live to see that one.
There’s a new sound outside my door, rhythmic like running footsteps.
“I’ve got a daylight ring in here!” I shout immediately, coughing on the smoke I had to inhale to talk. Whoever is still left out there, it’s definitely not a human. “I know how to make it work for both of us and if you unlock this door I’ll help you escape!”
The bolts slam back and my door bursts open.
I hear a hissing curse as Lia shakes out her hands, burned even through the sleeves of her shirt she tried to shield them with.
“Lying to your rescuer, Salvatore?” Lia teases. “That’s low, even for you.”
As soon as I see her, urgency tugs at my mind with a foreign hand. I need to get her out of here, because Lia’s safety is the most important thing. She must be protected.
I take a step forward but then hesitate at the sight of what lays beyond my door.
In movies, burning houses are all red-gold and crackling, like tiny campfires around the edges of a room. The reality is far more nebulous, with smoke clogging the air until it’s almost too much of a solid to use to form words. It attacks my eyes so I can only open them into slits, and what I can see through that is ominous, seething darkness in dirty shades of charcoal and gunmetal and hellish black. Through the haze, the crisis-colored brightness of flame flickers erratically as it chews through the edges of this ruined air.
We don’t have long before our bodies will be the fuel it devours.
I shove Lia frantically toward the waiting room where I woke up when they first brought me here, my thoughts feeling strange and simplistic but I don’t have time to wonder why because Lia resists.
“Not that way,” she says, the whites of her wide eyes flashing through the gritty haze. “Everyone went for the main exits and they’re—” She breaks off and I hesitate at the agony in her face.
I’ve seen people in fires before so I know the Augustines are probably trampling each other, clawing for the doors. But it’s daytime, and they’re vampires, and when they get out, they’ll just burn in a different way. Lia knows every vampire clogging those hallways and yet somehow, she left them and ran back into the heart of the fire because she knew I was still here.
“We’ll never make it out that way,” Lia says, and suddenly, I remember Elena screaming my name when Stefan saved me from the fire on Founder’s Day, and my mind clears. It’s the brainwashing that’s tugging at me to save Lia. But that doesn’t explain why she came back for me.
There’s no time to sort out the knotted mess of my loyalties and instincts. We need to get outside; after that I can decide whose side Lia is really on. And whose side I’m really on.
She pulls me toward another hallway, but immediately, I see why nobody went this way. There’s a sickeningly hot wind rushing out of the passage and I can see new flames growing in front of us, fed by the wash of oxygen.
“There’s a sprinkler system,” Lia coughs. “It should have been triggered by the fire alarms. It has to kick on soon.”
I clench my jaw grimly. Katherine set this fire, and she’s far too meticulous to have overlooked an emergency sprinkler system.
“Hurry!” Lia screams, bolting forward. Her shirt catches fire and I lunge to pull her back, though flames are following the billowing smoke toward us in both directions. There’s no safe place to stand, much less any escape route from this damned windowless bunker.
I’m seething, letting anger overshadow my growing sense of dread even as I slap out the fire on Lia’s shirt, her skin blistering and then smoothing as it heals. I curse and shake out my throbbing hand, and that’s when I see it.
I dart over and break the glass with my elbow, wrenching the fire extinguisher out of its wall-mounted case and sprinting back to Lia. I try not to think about how bad the fire must be in the rest of the building if the Augustines were so panicked that they ran right by the fire extinguisher box. And it’s a drop of water against the biblical flood we need to get out of here, but we don’t need to dry up the Red Sea: we just need to part it.
“Don’t breathe,” I remind Lia and yank the pin on the fire extinguisher.
I spray a short spurt into the hallway, the white cloud of fire-suppressing chemicals blinding me even as it temporarily beats back the flames. I grab Lia, dragging her along with me.
The heat is beyond anything I’ve ever felt before and I have to fight my instincts every second to keep from turning and running the other way, because I know it’s no better behind us. I can already hear the crackling and settling of the wooden supports above my head as they weaken and I'm guessing we only have seconds to make our escape before the ceiling in this part of the building goes.
I let go of Lia and spray another burst from the extinguisher, my chest tight with the strangeness of not breathing as my body begs for air to soothe the heat that’s pressing in on every side of me.
The wind is getting stronger but it only fans the flames and I have to use too much of my precious extinguisher to buy us a few more feet. There’s a new sound now, an irregular scraping and banging of metal on metal, and for a second I think I almost glimpse daylight before red and orange leaps again through the fog that’s drowning us.
I squeeze the extinguisher trigger and again, white beats back crimson. Lia surges forward at my side as my squinted, watering eyes glimpse strange shapes that smell like hot metal. One more tiny burst and we move forward as I catch the sound of someone breathing hard from further down the hall.
“Damon!” She screams my name, terrified and defeated, her voice hoarse like it’s not the first time.
“Elena?” I shout back without thinking, sucking in smoke and bitter chemicals that cling thickly inside my throat.
“Damon!”
There’s a sharp clash of banging metal ahead of me and heat explodes at my back. Lia cries out, and then starts choking on the breath she accidentally took. I turn and blast the flames behind us. I can tell by the lightness of the canister in my hand that it’s nearly empty.
“Damon, I can’t get through! All this shit fell down in front of the door and it’s too fucking heavy…” Her words dissolve into a hacking, breathless cough that sounds way too human to be Elena, even if the cursing wouldn’t have already clued me in as to which doppelganger was on the other side of this landslide.
I can see where the doorway should be, but it’s blocked by something that looks like pieces of a collapsed ventilation system: all charred metal tubes and ducts amidst the still-burning pieces of wood and Sheetrock that used to hold it up.
“Katherine, get back!” I shout, breathing as little as I can manage and still speak.
I look at Lia and she nods, her eyes wild, and so I don’t waste words telling her what she already knows. We have to get out, but it’s going to hurt.
I squeeze the handle of the fire extinguisher, emptying it in a blast that’s over far too soon, and then I turn and toss it into the flames already pushing in behind us as Lia and I dive forward into the pile of metal.
I grit my teeth against a scream of pain as I feel my skin rip and scorch against sharp, furnace-hot pieces of steel. The extinguisher chemical cloud lingers in the air, mixing with the smoke so we’re working completely blind as we heave things out of our way and throw them behind us. My every muscle strains against the weight of pieces that are almost too much for me to pick up as I pray that we don’t accidentally crush each other with a careless throw.
Sunlight lightens the filthy air and I reach out, my destroyed hands finding Lia and pain exploding through me as I close my fingers around her arm, thrusting her up i
nto the unseen wreckage and closer to the light. She scrabbles forward, too panicked by the flames to even worry about what she’s crawling into and I can smell her blood and fear and the stomach-churning barbecue scent of cooking flesh. For a second, I almost think I scent the black-powder blast of firing muskets but I clamp down on my instincts and hurl myself after her.
This is not the war and this is not a burning forest, lit by our own men to cut off the retreat of the Union army.
I push faster, my hand tangling with Lia’s ankle as I catch up with her and then we’re both falling down the other side of the mound of broken pieces of the Augustine’s state of the art ventilation system.
The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) Page 29
