The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) (2 page)

She
couldn’t shake the feeling, however, that something was wrong.

Once the
Town Council meeting was over, Damon headed back to the Salvatore Boarding
House. It was an hour after sunset, and his stomach was starting to rumble. It
was time to get Elena, go out, and convince her again to surrender her
inhibitions enough to have a good feed with him. It still took effort to get
her to relax and trust that a vampire who didn’t resist his nature was less
likely to kill a human than one who did, but when she did let herself give in
and enjoy it, being with her was glorious. It was like hunting at Katherine’s
side again, only without any of the sadistic cruelty the older Doppleganger was
known for.

He
smelled Bonnie before he saw her, sitting as she was on a bench behind the
obscuring structures of the porch columns. She smelled of magic, woman, and … fear?

“Hey,
Bitchy,” he taunted as he came up the porch steps with his hands shoved in his
pockets.

Bonnie
gave him a glare filled with more hatred than usual. “Why the hell weren’t you
answering my texts?” she snapped.

Damon
pulled his cell out of his pocket and shrugged. “Turned it off. Why? What did
you blow up this time?”

“Where’s
Elena?” she demanded.

He stared
at her. “What?”

Bonnie
stomped closer, her angry face as clear to him in the darkness as it would be
in the sunlight. “Where. Is. Elena?” she repeated.

“Inside,”
he said and shoved past her to stick his key in the lock and open the front
door, as if doing so would prove it. He scented the air as he moved, straining
his ears to search for anything other than the empty house he already knew
waited for him.

“She’s
not in there!” Bonnie yelled as if he couldn’t already tell. “I don’t know
where she is. She was supposed to meet me for coffee at the Grill hours ago and
she never showed. What did you do to her?”

Damon
slammed into the house and flicked the foyer light on. He saw immediately that
Elena’s jacket and purse were gone, and his mouth went dry as a familiar,
inhuman rage filled him. His first instinct was to take it out on Bonnie, but
he clamped down on that urge and turned back toward her instead.

“I didn’t
do anything to her. I’ve been with the Council all day. I’m just finding out
about this now, so take your self-righteous bitching and cram it.”

Bonnie
pressed her lips shut and obviously took a moment to control her own frightened
temper. Just the thought that she cared helped Damon resist ripping her throat
out. As did the vervain she wore in her jewelry.

“Fine. We
need to find her.”

“Tell me
something that isn’t blindingly obvious,” he snapped and pushed back past her
and out the door again. Bonnie clenched her fingers into her palms, biting back
a scream of frustration, and followed him.

Elena
didn’t know where she was when she woke up.

At first,
all she knew was pain. Every part of her body hurt, and with the senses of a
vampire, the agony was so much more intense than any she’d felt before. She
wanted to weep, but she felt so weak she wasn’t sure that she could move.

She was
lying on concrete. It took her long moments to realize that, to understand what
the texture her hands and cheek were pressing against was. It was unforgiving
and cold underneath her sprawled body.

When
she’d become a vampire, Elena hadn’t thought she’d feel cold again. She could
feel temperature differences, but the contrast between cold as a sensation that
was as intense and honestly marvelous as that of a breath or a kiss versus cold
as a horrible, sucking feeling was immense. Lying here, it had gone back from
being a fascinating experience to something she wanted gone, and she shivered
as she lay there, still too drained to even open her eyes.

She
wasn’t too weak to have her thoughts race, however, and what they told her made
her want to scream. Someone had kidnapped her? Again? What for this time? Her
Doppleganger blood? As bait? She was a vampire and she still had to end up
playing the victim?

Elena was
so furious that tears finally leaked out of her eyes and hazed her vision when
she forced them to open. It was a long moment before she was able to blink
everything into focus.

She lay
on a concrete floor in a large, dusty, mostly empty room, the walls bare and
old, and the floor covered in grease stains and rat droppings.

It hurt
unimaginably to do so, but Elena rolled onto her back and stared up at the
ceiling. It was metal and flat, some sort of corrugated steel with skylights
cut through it. She could see the clear night sky overhead, a bit of the half
full moon showing at one edge.

Bonnie
must have been worried when she didn’t show up at the Grill. Elena really hoped
she was looking for her. Bonnie would be able to find her without any trouble
at all. She had a spell she’d used before that would track people she wanted to
find. She just needed some of Elena’s blood in order to cast it.

She
didn’t have any of Elena’s blood.

Elena let
out a low breath and focused on trying to lift her arm. It didn’t really want
to move, but she managed to shift her hand enough to push her tangled hair out
of her face.

“This
isn’t
fair!”

That was
what she was thinking, but she definitely hadn’t said it. Elena licked her lips
and shifted her head enough to look over to where the voice came from.

To the
right of where she lay, a long work bench stretched along the length of one
wall. It was littered with the sort of paraphernalia that she’d had to use in
chemistry class, and a man was bent over it, working with something she
couldn’t see.

“Why does
everything have to be so difficult!” he growled to himself.

Elena
licked her lips. “Hey,” she whispered. She had to clear her throat and tried
again. “Hey.”

The man
heard her the second time and turned around. It was the stranger she’d bumped
into on the sidewalk.

What
possible reason could he have to kidnap her? She didn’t know him, and she’d
certainly never done anything to him. Did it even really matter, now that she
was here?

“Please,”
she whispered. “Let me go.”

He left
what he was doing and walked closer in order to look down at her face, his own
without expression. Elena couldn’t figure out anything about him, her senses
dulled and painful, and even if she hadn’t been a vampire for long, she still
missed the absolute awareness and power she’d felt before.

He’d used
vervain on her, crippled her for whatever reasons he had, and bound her wrists
together with shackles.

“You’re a
witch,” she managed to guess, her voice hoarse and strained. Normal humans
generally didn’t believe vampires were anything more than stories or characters
on television or in movies. Maybe he was a werewolf instead. “Werewolf?” she
hedged when he didn’t reply to her first guess.

He shook
his head. “No,” he said to both.

“Please,”
she cried. “I haven’t hurt anyone.”

He
snorted. “As if that would matter.” He looked up at the ceiling and then went
back to the work bench. He dragged a box out from underneath it, one that was
obviously heavy just from the way he had to strain to move it, and returned a
few minutes later with a long length of chain in his hands.

“No,
please, don’t. You can’t do this.”

He
ignored her and attached one end of the chain to the shackles around her
wrists, the other to a bolt inset in the floor. With the vervain in her system,
the weight of the chain in addition to the shackles made her arms too heavy to
lift and she could only lie there as he finished what he was doing. Once she
was secure, he tossed the long length down and stomped back over to his
equipment.

“Please,”
Elena tried again. “Why are you doing this? What do you want with me?”

He didn’t
answer her, didn’t even acknowledge he’d heard her. Instead he picked up a cell
phone from the table, and she heard him typing a number on the keypad. Elena
held her breath, hoping to yell for help to whoever he was calling on the other
end, but she realized quickly enough that it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Jennings, I caught a
vampire. It’ll take longer than I hoped to get the product to you, though.”

Another
man’s voice sounded through the phone, tinny but still somehow cold.
“That’s not what you promised, Wilson.”

Wilson turned his back to
her, still talking. “I know, but the vervain I used on her is affecting the blood.
It’s too weak to heal anybody this way. I have to wait for it to clear her
system before I can try again.”

So she
wasn’t bait or being used to make hybrids this time. She was just a random
vampire taken hostage for the healing qualities in her blood. Somehow that was
even worse than having Damon, Tyler, Rose, or Stefan grab her.

Jennings snorted on the
other end of the phone.
“You think you
can contain her without vervain in her blood?”

She saw Wilson’s back tighten.
“I’m a researcher. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Jennings gave another
snort.
“I want the first delivery of the
goods in the next twelve hours, or I’ll find another source for my blood
suckers.”
He hung up.

Wilson grumbled something
that Elena couldn’t quite hear through the terrified, silent screaming inside
her mind. He put the phone down, leaning against the table and glaring at it,
before he turned to study her.

He didn’t
see her as anything other than an insect, she realized, something he could make
money off. She stared back at him, but no words were able to get past her lips.
He wouldn’t care, and when he finally turned and stomped out of the room,
slamming the metal door behind him, she closed her eyes.

Damon,
she prayed.
Bonnie. Find me, please.

Bonnie
was spreading the word about Elena’s disappearance. She’d called Caroline and
was at Sheriff Forbes’ station telling Caroline and her mother what happened.
It was supposed to be 24 hours before the police looked into matters of missing
people, but Bonnie was fairly positive the Sheriff would make an exception for
her. Damon just shrugged and told her to do whatever, but if the Sheriff didn’t
give him this favor, he was going to have long and bloody words with her about
debts owed.

For the
most part, he was confident that he could find Elena on his own. With his
heightened senses and absolute familiarity with the very smell and sound of
her, he’d track his Elena down.

Damon
moved through the darkness to start his hunt, and no one saw him go.