The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) (11 page)

“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 the 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.