The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) (3 page)

By the
time the sun rose, Elena was feeling better. The vervain that had crippled her
was fading out of her system, and she could feel her strength returning to her
enough to stand up and look around.

Her
chains didn’t have much reach. She couldn’t get to the table or the door, and
there were no windows she could look out of to try and figure out where she
was.

“Help?”
she tried yelling. “Someone help me! I’m locked in here, come and help me!
Please!”

There was
no answer, and she yanked futilely on the chains. Wilson had chosen them well, and her shackles
were too tight for even her small hands to slip through.

“Come on,
come on, please! Someone has to be able to hear me!”

Still no
one answered her, but that was when she saw it and her startled gasp sounded
more like a whimper.

Her ring
was sitting on the table, next to the beakers and a pile of blood bags. She
grasped the finger where it should have been with her other hand and looked up
at the skylights overhead, already lightening with the rising of the sun.

“No….
Please! Help me!” She yanked on the chains as hard as she could and dropped to
her knees, sobbing with her hands covering her face. “I want to go home; I want
to go home….”

Bonnie
pulled up outside of the Salvatore Boarding House and jumped out of her car, digging
through her purse for the spare key Elena gave her as she hurried up onto the
front porch.

Once she
let herself in, she ran up the stairs to Elena’s room.

It had
been hours since Elena went missing. She didn’t answer her phone, which was off
so they couldn’t use it to track her, and no one had seen her. Given their
history, Bonnie felt she was well within her rights to have a good old panic
about it.

That was
why she was here. She had a spell she’d used before to track a person, but it
required the use of blood, and she didn’t have any. It was a long shot that
she’d find any here, but long was better than none, and the young witch headed
straight for the makeup table, hoping to find a tissue with a bit of blood on
it or a nicked razor blade or
something
.
She made a huge mess of the makeup table and then the rest of the room,
muttering under her breath the whole while.

“I swear,
I’m going to put one of those microchips they use for dogs on you. Can’t you
even go a single day without getting into trouble?”

She spent
a good 20 minutes searching through the room, but she found nothing. Elena
might be a vampire, but they
drank
blood, they didn’t bleed it much, especially with their super healing, and
Elena wouldn’t have just left it lying around anyway.

Bonnie
flopped down on the edge of the bed in frustration. “Why,” she groaned, “can’t
I know a tracking spell based on all the good old voodoo stuff they have in
movies? Like hair?”

She
flopped back onto the bedspread for a moment, sulking, and then pushed herself
back to her feet and headed over to check the bathroom. She wasn’t ready to
give up yet. She’d find Elena if she had to track down the Gilbert Compass
first. Or make one.

Did she
know how to make one? Bonnie huffed and resumed her search.

By the
time Wilson
came back, the sun was high in the sky and Elena stood still and frightened in
the very center of the room, clutching the length of chain as if it could
reassure her.

All
around her, sunbeams speared down through the skylights to the floor, and the
arrangement of the skylights was such that columns of killing light circled
her, forming the bars of a cage that would hold her even more securely than the
shackles she wore.

Her head
snapped around as the door opened and Wilson
walked in. The indirect light was making her skin painfully tender, but if she
stayed still, it didn’t burn her.

She
watched the scientist as he slouched over to the workbench, a put-upon
expression on his face.

“Please,”
she tried. “Please, you have to let me go. You don’t want to do this.”

He didn’t
respond. Instead he rummaged through the mess on the bench and turned with a
pistol in his hand. Before she could realize more than that he was actually
pointing it at her, he shot her in the shoulder.

Elena
screamed. She stumbled backwards, hand to the wound as she barely managed to
stop herself from falling into the beams of light that surrounded her. It
didn’t hurt all that much, but the shock of it happening at all had her gaping
at him with tears in her eyes.

“Why?”
she gasped, even though she already knew. “Why are you doing this?”

Wilson didn’t answer. He
just frowned and then shot her in the head.

None of
his surviving enemies knew where Elena was.

It was
well past dawn, and Damon was in a foul mood, enough that anyone he passed on
the sidewalk got out of his way, sensing the predator in him.

His fear
was eclipsed by his anger. Someone had taken his Elena. He’d tracked her scent
from the Boarding House to an alley just a few blocks away from the Grill, one
that had been cleaned up and turned into a chic little tourist attraction by
the town, complete with doors into little hole-in-the-wall stores selling all
sorts of crap.

No one
had seen her from those stores, and if people were lying about that, he would
have known. He tracked her scent down along the alley to a section where it was
quiet, and then he picked up a second scent that definitely didn’t belong
there. Vervain.

He’d
nearly punched through the nearest wall when he smelled that. He was going to
find the person who used that wretched flower on his Elena, and he was going to
turn off his humanity and make him wish he was in Hell as a respite from what
Damon would do to him.

Once he
found them. Damon had tracked the vervain and his Elena farther into the
twisting alleys to the sections that hadn’t been gentrified and still held the
pallets and dumpsters used by the stores, but then he’d lost them. Whoever took
her had put her in some sort of vehicle and driven away, taking the lovely
smell of her away. Now Damon was left with no way of knowing where she was.

He
clenched his fists, nails biting into the flesh of his palms, and let out a low
growl that had anyone walking by on the sidewalk retreating in startled fright.

He wasn’t
beaten. Not yet. Not ever. He set off down the road, moving fast, senses at
their highest as he searched for any trace of a heartbeat, a scent, or a breath
he knew as well as he knew his own.

Elena
woke up with a headache that was already fading, as was the bullet wound that
knocked her down and out. Slowly, she lifted her head and saw Wilson with his back to her, busy at his
workbench.

She could
smell blood, her blood, and while the bullet holes had already healed, the
scent was still fresh. Wilson
turned, holding a full blood bag that he put into an insulated carrier, and she
realized that while she was unconscious, he’d bled her.

Now she
was starving and more frightened than before. The smell of the blood he was
bagging, the smell of
his
blood still
rushing and alive in his veins, had her mouth salivating, even as she climbed
to her feet and clung to her chains and wanted to go home.

She was a
mess, dusty and tear stained, with her own blood soaked into the collar of her
shirt. Part of her wanted to suck on the fabric, just to get some of that blood
back into her, but the rest of her was nauseous at the very thought.

“When.”
She swallowed. “When are you going to let me go?”

It might
have been the question, it might just have been because he’d bagged the last of
the blood he’d taken from her and was in a good mood, but Wilson turned to regard her while he shut the
cooler.

“Why
would I?” he asked and latched the cooler. “There’s so much research to do. So
many experiments to run. This blood of yours is unlike anything in the world,
wholly unique. There’s an entirely new field of study to be found in working
with it and I’m at the forefront of all the research. It’s incredible!”

“But …
you can’t keep me here. You wouldn’t ever get away with it!”

He
shrugged. “I always have before.”

Elena
went cold at that. He’d done this before? Neither Damon nor Stefan ever said
anything about vampires being taken prisoner for their blood, so that could
mean he was lying to her about it. She’d love to believe that, but it also
might mean that whoever he’d taken before wasn’t around anymore to either
provide blood for him or to tell anyone else what he was up to. Certainly
something would have been done about this if anyone had. Vampires tended to be
a solitary sort, but even the most isolationistic of them all wouldn’t let
their brethren go unavenged if there was even the slightest chance that they
could end up in a cage of light like this one next. Even if he decided he
didn’t need her anymore, there wasn’t any way that Wilson could ever take the chance of letting
her go.

Wilson turned his back to
her, obviously not seeing her as any kind of threat, and hefted the cooler in
his hands, carrying it to the door and walking through the gauntlet of sunbeams
without any concern. After all, it was harmless to him.

Elena
watched him go, off to sell her blood as a healing elixir or use it for his
ambitions to be some kind of mad scientist. Once he was gone, she sank down to
her knees, the chain clinking as it pooled beside her.

No one
was going to find her. Bonnie had to have realized she was missing by now and
she’d have told Damon, but how could they find her? She didn’t know where she
was, and if Wilson
had been doing this for a while, he must know how to avoid vampire detection.

She wept
for a time, not feeling able to do anything else, and the cage of sunbeams
moved around her as the sun travelled by overhead. Come nightfall, they’d
vanish, but what other tricks did Wilson
have to keep her here? She already had the chain to keep her. He could bring in
artificial sunlight lamps, or just drug her up with vervain again. Waiting for
nightfall was the last thing she should do. Right now, Wilson must be taking her blood to Jennings. That meant if
she was going to escape, she needed to do it now.