The Vampire Diaries: Out of my Mind (Kindle Worlds Novella)
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Authors: Jenna Elliot
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Out of my Mind
by Jenna Elliot
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Allison Carter for the premise of this story
and for her insights along the way.
Chapter 1
The pain rises and rises in waves, long slow ripples deep as the ocean, and in shards, shuddering and shocking. I stand perfectly still and the ragged slip of unmending slices finally calms. Then the inevitable weakness overtakes me. I slump, I hang, and the teeth of the bear traps shred my skin, digging further, scraping along tendon and bone.
The pain never stops. It. Never. Stops.
Sometimes Rebekah is a goddess and sometimes a monster. Always that same petulant pout, that baby face like an overgrown pre-teen, those audacious freckles, and inside an abyss of need and rage and hell. She is Circe, Medea, Gaia. She is Death.
I anticipate her visits. They are something at least and maybe the end. She talks, mostly to herself. I respond: I bob, I weave. I make grandiose promises we both know I can’t keep. I scream, moan, wail. I taunt her so she’ll stake me and the pain will stop.
She is impenetrable. I am mesh.
She saunters in. “Kiss me,” she says. I spit in her face. She cuts a long, slow slice in my thigh, along a vein. It’s sickeningly wet and then there’s a new pulse of pain. She watches but doesn’t stay long.
I have been here forever.
The tarp is covered with stains and splotches of my blood. I gaze at them like the clouds on an autumn afternoon. A duck, the letter Q, a hammer, the silhouette of a woman’s body. Torture Rorschach tests. Ha. Then Dr. Rebekah visits and all the shapes are new. The hammer is a tree.
Rorschach… therapy… delusions… day dreams. That’s where I get the idea.
I have nothing but time and pain. First, just Elena’s face. Deep brown eyes, sparkling with life and spunk and joy, skin the color of café au lait, lips soft like a ripe raspberry. Her mahogany hair, blown back from her face, little wisps against her forehead. My Elena – his Elena. Screw it; here, my Elena. Ten seconds of less pain. It comes back worse, but it’s worth it. Her face. Again.
I push further. Elena is cooking, we are laughing. I hand her a pepper. I get the oil out of the cupboard, grab the garlic too. She asks for a knife. I pull one from the block and it’s covered with blood, it’s Rebekah’s knife, it’s my blood. I scream, howl, and she dissolves along with the smell of dinner.
Dreams are perilous. They show you what you fear, what you want, who you are.
The pain surrounds me, squeezes me in a terrible embrace. I have to stay awake. I mumble old poems no one remembers anymore, one after the other from my lessons so long ago. Keats and Wordsworth are not helping, not horrible enough, so Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, someone I recognize. Now passages from new books, movies, songs, I don’t care. I need words that are real. I dig them all up; soon the recalled words float and swirl. I seize on Emily Dickinson because she was tortured too, I can tell now, she understood pain: “It cannot recollect when it began/or if there was a time when it was not/it has no future but itself.” I have no walls. I want to weep for Emily but I can’t, I have never been as dry as this.
I cannot trust my dreams but they come and I don’t know whose they are. I remember Stefan as a child, following me down to the quarry because I don’t bother to stop him. Father insists he is my responsibility but I just want to swim. I never swam in the quarry. I don’t remember this. I just want to swim but Stefan can’t swim. I call for someone to watch him, I know they are inside, I know they will come but this time no one comes and I am alone with Stefan. Where is he? I spin, scanning the bushes, the trees. I begin to run but I know, I have no way of knowing but I know he is under the water. I call for him, scream, but I know he is sinking. The water is dark, it’s impossible to see deeper than a few inches and he is just gone. I dive in, thrash around, I am so young but he is younger, too little, I reach senselessly in every direction, scream Stefan’s name under the water. He is gone, he is gone, he is gone.
Rebekah stands at the shore. I am nine and weeping.
“Kiss me,” Rebekah says. I close my eyes. This is not happening. Please let this not be happening. “No? Fine.” She slices through my carotid artery and licks the knife clean. I tell her I shouldn’t have taken advantage of her with Sage. She throws the knife at my chest and it nicks a little triangle; the blood rises and overflows. Then she goes upstairs and sings in the shower.
The fire crackles. Elena’s face again, her breath, closer and closer. She is here, she is actually here, she wants to rescue me. She cannot fathom the pain and I won’t tell her. Rebekah will kill her, I am certain of it, but I am too weak to resist so I tell her how to undo the traps. Do I know how? When she opens the left one I dangle from the right. She tries to catch me but she’s not prepared for it so my hand almost rips off. I’ve never seen a one-handed vampire but it must be possible; mending and regenerating are not the same. She’s supporting my weight while I hobble down the hall. I have never been big but still she carries my weight too easily.
I am exhausted. She can’t carry me all the way to the car. I collapse in the middle of the room; I just need a minute. Isn’t this the same room? Where is the tarp? Elena insists I go on but I have nothing left. She has to leave, she’s being an idiot. Rebekah is near, I can feel it, she will stick her like a pig and I will be powerless to stop it. I won’t be able to save her and I can’t take it, Elena, get out of here. She is coming.
I search my hollow mind for some way to make Elena leave, but she holds her wrist at my lips. I need it so badly I can’t find the strength to refuse. She doesn’t flinch when my fangs puncture her skin and she tastes like the sun, she tastes like salt and meat and love. I suck and suck, my eyes locked with hers. They tell me she loves me, clear as words. Now she can’t spare much more blood and I can make do with this, but my lips ache for more of her and she wants it too, she’s leaning in to kiss me. I can’t kiss her with her blood on my lips but where is the blood?
The pain roars. Elena is gone. Rebekah is here. “You bitch.”
Dreams are perilous. They show anyone with the power and will to eavesdrop exactly what you fear, what you want, who you are.
I want that dream again.
Elena’s face, her breath, she is here to rescue me. She has no idea what this kind of pain is like but she would take it on herself, for me, I see it. Rebekah is coming but I am too weak so I tell her how to undo the traps. I forget, remember next time to prepare her for the weight, but I forget so my arm almost rips clean off. She nearly carries me down the hall. I collapse in the middle of the room; give me a minute, the pain, I can’t think. Isn’t this the same room? Elena insists I go on but there is nothing to compare to this pain and Rebekah is coming. Elena has to leave, she’s being an idiot.
She refuses to leave, to leave me, and now she feeds me, fills me with light and lust and love. I have to be careful, I have to be careful, I have to be careful. Not too much, if I kill her I can’t kiss her, but the blood comes rushing into me and she is wilting in front of me. I am killing her, stop, stop, STOP. She is gray, she topples like an old building.
Rebekah grins at me, traces an old wound with her knife. She is a snake.
It is too much but I want it. The dream comes back to me and I am powerless to stop it. I want it, I think I can change it, but it gets worse every time. Elena is stabbed, staked. Tortured in my place, beheaded. Beheaded while kissing me.
Rebekah grabs my hair and I’m back on the tarp. The pain is intolerable. How is it possible that I am still alive? She tugs my head to the side and blood spurts from the wound in my neck and I wonder when there will simply not be enough blood to bleed. It has to be soon. She points my face at hers.
“Kiss me,” she says, squinting, stepping back.
I don’t want to but then I do. I feel the tug of her fingers in my hair but it’s nothing like the pull of her mind on mine, like a hook spearing through my will. She is too far away but I reach, God help me, I will rip my arms from my hands but I have to kiss her. I feel my left wrist tearing.
“Come closer,” I beg.
“No.” She flashes a sickening smile.
The tendon tears and I am sobbing from the pain but I am closer to her lips, one more fraction of an inch and now I’m close enough to feel them. Relief. Horrifying, ugly pain but the hook in my brain is out.
“Finally,” she says. “Now we can get started.”
I moan. I want to be done forever. “Why don’t you just kill me already?”
“Because then I can’t play with you. And what good is revenge if it’s not fun? I’ve even prepared. I’ve done research.”
I tremble in fear. I actually tremble. She is everything and I am an aching, terrified nothing. This is what it is like to be entirely at someone’s mercy.
She runs her fingers through my hair and it’s tender in a way I pretended to be tender with her. It reeks of mockery. Then her hand is a fist in my hair and my neck is craning too far again and her eyes lock on mine.
I can feel the hook poised there, ready to stab through my mind.
“I want you to hurt Elena. I don’t care how. You’re a smart boy: be creative. Impress me. Take your time, but break her. Oh, and no more vervain for you.”
She looks away but the hook is in and it hurts more than all of the cuts combined.
Chapter 2
A new dream, the same game. Soft footsteps from the hall, closer, Stefan’s silhouette. My mind crouches to spar with Rebekah. “This was much different in my head,” I say, as if this isn’t in my head. As if she isn’t.
I can tell it’s not real because Stefan doesn’t care. I am howling from every pore and he looks disappointed.
“Klaus, I’m here,” he calls into the enormous echoing room. “Let’s do this.” He’s carrying a giant duffle bag full of firewood. Firewood? No, stakes. Our stakes. Good lord, she knows. How does Rebekah know about the stakes?
Rebekah is here and so is Klaus. The stakes are news to her. This is worse, so much worse: this is real. Stefan is spilling it, all of it, every bit of what we had over them, pouring it out like sour milk. It is too horrifying not to be real and if I get out of this he will never get to be in charge of plans again. He wants to trade our only chance against them for my life and I am the most dangerous weapon of all.
A wave of old pain rises, crests, breaks. It feels stale, brittle. My eyes roll back.
Stefan says there are eight stakes but there are eleven stakes, eleven, I whittled them my damn self and I am going to sing like a twelve year old mafia canary.
Klaus wants to know, Rebekah hasn’t told him about our game, he wants to test if the vervain is out. He whispers in my ear to go home. I refuse to admit in front of Stefan that I can’t deny him. Even without his eyes in mine I fight not to obey. “No,” I growl. Stefan can’t know and maybe that is pride but maybe I want to keep it a secret so I can do what Rebekah told me to do. No, I will not hurt Elena.
Rebekah’s hook tugs against my impertinence and I swear I feel my head yanked to the side.
Maybe I will, a little.
Another tug, harder.
Maybe a lot.
Klaus grabs my face and tears the slit in my neck again and he insists. Two hooks now but this one is barbed and requires my immediate attention. I say goodbye to my hands and pull, I pull. The wounds grow wider, tendons stretch too far, they are not elastic. I grunt. I bear down against the searing, impossible sensation of flesh being torn from muscle.
He is laughing. “Stop, stop, before you hurt yourself.” I stop. Hilarious, you sick fuck.
Now he asks me so I can finally tell him there are eleven, I can tell him every detail, how you can still just barely make out the W on one of them. There is markedly less pain for a split second. Ask me something else. I am full of answers.