The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) (6 page)

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.”