The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) (4 page)

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.

Elena
kept pulling, using all of her strength as she gritted her teeth and threw her
head back, nostrils flared and tendons standing out in her neck. Her hands
started to slip on the chain and she took a tighter grip, pulling with
everything she had while the desperation and hunger raged inside of her,
leaving her feeling weak and helpless.

“I’m not
weak,” she whispered, eyes closed against the strain, still pulling. “I’m not.
I’m not. I’m not.” It became her mantra, her chant as she kept pulling,
throwing all of her desperate strength into breaking the old ring that kept her
bound.

The ring
didn’t give. Neither did the chain, the metal of both being too strong even for
her vampiric strength. Instead the concrete crumbled and the ring flew free
into an arc over her head that sent her stumbling backwards with a shriek of
surprise.

She went
straight into one of the sunbeams and her shriek became a scream of absolute
agony as the sunlight burned her skin, instantly setting her to smoking and
shocking her with a pain she couldn’t have imagined. She’d suffered minor burns
before, which hurt badly enough, but this was agony that felt as if it were
burning her very soul, and she threw herself back into the shadow of her cage,
huddled against the floor and sobbing in misery.

Elena
didn’t know how long she lay there, curled in on herself and clutching the
chain as if it were an object of comfort and not imprisonment. Even through her
clothes, the skin on her back where the sun had touched her was inflamed and
raw, weeping as she wept, without pause.

Finally,
though, she had to stop crying, if only because she had no more tears left. She
wanted to lie there so much, just let the pain take her and cry until it went
away, but Wilson was going to return, and the thought of what he would do to
her if he saw she was trying to escape terrified her more than the pain
immobilized her. He didn’t see her as being worth consideration. He didn’t care
how much pain she was in, only about what he could sell her blood for and what
he could learn from it.

He
disgusted her. More, he infuriated her, and Elena grabbed onto that anger with
everything she had. It was more than her usual temper, which had always caved
under before in the face of fear. This was the anger of the vampire, which was
endless and without conscience.

Elena
pushed herself up on trembling arms, fangs bared and ignored as she grimaced and
tilted her head back, taking a deep breath as the charred skin on her back
crackled and broke. She didn’t let herself think of the pain or the smell. She
only thought about how she was going to get out of here before that man came
back to torture her again. She was a vampire, and she was stronger than any
human could hope to be.

“I will
not be kept here,” she whispered, telling herself that. Still, she was in a
cage of light, and it was hours until the sun went down. Wilson would be back by then.

Elena looked
toward the workbench, where her ring still sat in a patch of sunlight,
innocuous and utterly necessary. If she didn’t get that, she wouldn’t be going
anywhere, but it wasn’t as if she could just walk over and take it.

Elena
gripped the length of chain in her hands and slowly stood up. The end of the
chain still had the ring attached, along with a big clump of broken concrete
bound about it. It was heavy and awkward, but she swung it easily and tossed
the end toward the workbench.

It didn’t
reach, arcing down just shy of the surface. Elena pulled it back and shuffled
closer to the bars of her sunlit cage before she tried again. The chain reached
and the clump landed heavily on the workbench a foot to the right of the ring,
knocking over a set of test tubes with a heavy clatter.

Elena
couldn’t help a giggle of excitement and reeled the chain carefully back to
her. Her next few tosses kept missing, causing chaos on the workbench that Wilson wouldn’t have been
able to miss seeing, even if he somehow didn’t notice that the chain she was
still wearing wasn’t attached to the floor anymore.

Her
fourth or maybe fifth try finally landed the concrete clump behind and a bit to
the left of her ring. Elena sucked in a breath and slowly began to pull the
clump back toward her, watching as the uneven edge of it touched her ring and
nudged it forward and then, unfortunately, off to the side before she could
pull the clump off the end of the bench.

“Almost,”
she told herself. “Almost is good.” She tried again, but the clump kept landing
off center from the ring and over the next agonizing 10 minutes she wasn’t able
to do more than nudge the ring around on top of the workbench and start at
every sound that might have meant Wilson’s return.

If he did
come back, she promised herself, she was going to whip this chain straight for
his head and pray that her aim miraculously improved itself.

Finally,
on what had to be her hundredth throw, the clump landed directly on top of the
ring. Elena blinked at it for a moment, somewhat stunned that it actually
happened, and then began to grin. With exaggerated care, she pulled the chain
hand over hand toward her, and the clump slowly moved across the top of the
table to the edge.

She had a
sudden fear that the lapis in the ring would shatter when it hit the floor, but
Bonnie had made the ring better than that, and it bounced intact instead and
rolled away from the clump that landed next to it. She had to lasso it again,
but the angles were better with the ring on the floor instead of the high
workbench, and it was only a half dozen throws before she covered it with the
clump again and resumed the slow drag back toward her through the bars of her
cage.

A few
minutes later, the ring was within the safe circle of her cage and Elena sobbed
in relief as she picked it up and slid it on her finger.

Nothing
overt happened, but she could almost believe the temperature in the room
dropped. Her back certainly hurt less, but that was because it had been healing
while she underwent her struggles with the ring. She still felt as if her skin
was unbearably tight, and it itched horrendously, but the lack of pain was
wondrous.

That
didn’t make it any easier for her to step forward into the sunlight. All her
life she’d thought nothing special about the sun, and now she was afraid of it.
Afraid to take one step out of a prison where she
knew
she’d be tormented if Wilson
found her.

She had
to close her eyes to do it, her hands clenched as if the ring would leap off
her finger if she didn’t hold onto it. “I can do this,” she said as she forced
herself to take a trembling step forward, every inch of her tightening at the
remembered pain of the sun burning across her body.

Sunlight
kissed her face, warm and comforting the way it used to be, and Elena opened
her eyes and looked up. She was standing directly underneath a skylight, bathed
in the sunbeam that fell through while dust motes danced over her head like
miniature fairies.

Perhaps
not surprisingly, she started to laugh, and even less surprisingly, there were
tears on her cheeks while she did so.

Damon
picked up Elena’s scent around the same time that his phone rang. He was on the
edge of town, in an area of warehouses and junkyards that shut down when the
country’s economy tanked. The smell of her blood was strong on the wind to a
predator who could hear a heartbeat a block away or smell a pinprick on a
woman’s finger when she’d poked herself with a needle.

This was
no pinprick. Someone had bled his Elena to the point where she had to almost be
starving for blood, and the hints of that hunger taunting him on the wind made
him want to roar with rage. Instead he bared his fangs and moved forward,
tracking her through the maze of buildings, most of them run down from neglect.
It was a part of Mystic
Falls he wasn’t familiar
with. It wasn’t a good place for hunting, after all. Not when there weren’t
humans around to target.

His phone
rang, and his senses were so attuned to any sounds that he jumped at the sudden
beep, not that he’d ever admit to it. He grabbed it and flicked it open.

“What the
hell is it, Bitchy?” he growled, his voice made slurry by his fangs.

“Have you found anything?”
Bonnie asked
and she sounded exasperated. He would have teased her about her obvious failure
if his blood weren’t up so high.

“I can
smell her,” he growled and inhaled deeply, cherishing that scent even as he
wanted to murder the one who caused it.

Bonnie’s
voice was instantly excited.
“Where are
you? Have you found her? Is she okay?”

“At the
old warehouse complex on the edge of town,” he answered. “Not yet, and I can
smell her blood, so what do you think?” The witch started to say something, but
Damon closed the phone and shut it off for good measure. He didn’t have time to
answer her questions, and he didn’t want the thing going off and warning
whoever he was about the rip the throat out of that he was there.

Damon
shoved the phone in his jacket and started forward again, staying in the
shadows and moving in silence, every inch the predator.

Elena
wrapped the chain around her arm, the clump at the end hanging by her side as
an impromptu weapon should she need it. She’d tried to find the key to her
shackles on the workbench, but it seemed Wilson
took it with him when he left. She still hoped that he was going to be gone for
a good long while; at least long enough for her to escape and go home.

They’d
have to do something about him, before he kidnapped any other vampires, and
also about this Jennings
person who was buying the blood. The fact that it could be used to heal human injuries
was good, but the unfortunate reality that anyone who had vampire blood in his
system and died would rise again as a vampire was not. That was what had
happened to her, and she’d been lucky because Damon and Stefan were there to
guide her in her new life. Someone who bought her blood and then ended up
rising by accident wouldn’t be so lucky, and she shuddered to think what could
happen as a result. Death, chaos, their entire existence proven to the world.
All of them being hunted down, killed, or caged as she had just been. Elena
didn’t like the idea of keeping her blood’s healing abilities to herself, but
she liked the thought of the possible repercussions of it getting out even
less.

There was
only one door out of the room. It was locked, but the lock mechanism wasn’t as
strong as the concrete she’d pulled out of the ground, and she easily broke it
open, even with the hunger growing in her belly from blood loss and the
weakness due to healing her wounds.