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

  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.

  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 h
urried 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 el
se, 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.

  Elena looked around at the sunbeams that enclosed her. The center of the room was still in shadow but no more than 10 feet across, smaller than her bedroom back at the Boarding House. Elena was careful to keep to the center, where the shadows were darkest. She didn’t relish the idea of getting close to the edge, not with the light falling across it. She’d seen vampires burned by the sun before, and the thought of experiencing that pain for herself terrified her.

  She studied her shackles instead. They were made from a heavy, rough metal, closed tightly enough that even with her small hands, she couldn’t slip free. She’d have to break every bone in her hands to do so, and she wasn’t sure she could. Nor was she sure if they’d heal back into the proper alignment if she did. She just might end up crippling herself and guaranteeing she couldn’t escape.

  The chain leading from the shackles went to a ring that was embedded in the cement floor. It was stained and old, the cement around it discolored, and she touched the tips of her fingers to the ring while she chewed on her lip and wondered if she was strong enough to pull it free. It wouldn’t get her out of this cage, but she had to do something.

  Elena took a firm grip on the chain with both hands, close to where it came out of the ground, braced her feet against the floor, and pulled. The chain went taut and the metal scraped with a sickening sound, but the ring didn’t give.