The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (33 page)

Dr. Penfield’s eyes widen and he glances at Lia again. "I told you, it's not safe to do this with unwilling patients," he says in a low voice. "You don't understand the ramifications here…"

"It wasn’t my call," she says tightly. "Just start with the Beta Protocol. That will smooth the way for everything else, and the metabolic catalyzer won’t be an issue either way."

I cluck my tongue. "Decisions, decisions. Do you take my balls first, or maybe my free will? Tell me, are you going to take me shopping for my prayer flags and green tea once I join the Make Love Not Corpses Club?”

“Damon, it’s not like that,” Lia says, but her fists are clenched and she still won’t look me in the eye.

Dr. Penfield steps around in front of me again. “The procedure involves applying electrodes to introduce mild electrical currents to different areas of your brain. There are no pain receptors on the cortical surface, so you shouldn’t feel a shock or any pain. If you experience discomfort, we’ll need you to describe it exactly because it is indicative of the neural pathways we’re activating, not any injury we’re doing to your brain. Do you have any questions?”

“If you’re not used to doing this to unwilling patients, why exactly do you have a chair equipped with enough restraints to hog-tie an elephant?”

Dr. Penfield looks unhappy. “All our patients have been volunteers, Mr. Salvatore. But it is absolutely essential that you remain motionless throughout the whole operation. If you move, or are not completely honest about your experience, we may end up altering the neural pathways in ways we never intended. This is new technology and we need your feedback to be sure that we’re changing the right things. If you lie, the potentiation of certain synaptic connections may be reconfigured in an…undesirable fashion.”

“So if I lie, I might end up thinking a push up bra is a feather duster, and barking whenever the Aflac duck quacks, right?”

His lips thin. “There is also a possibility of motor function compromises.”

“Awesome.”

Dr. Penfield shares a look with Lia, who nods. He pulls on latex gloves and picks up a syringe. “Just cooperate, Mr. Salvatore, and I promise you’ll recover feeling better than you ever have before.”

My eyes are locked onto the syringe so hard it might as well be tattooed on the surface of my eyeballs.

Blink, asshole, I tell myself. Blink or you’re going to look like a little girl who is afraid of needles.

Fucking blink.

I snap my eyes closed, but then I can’t bring myself to open them again. The needle enters the skin of my forehead, and a moment later, there’s the sting of a second shot, but it feels blunted, like an echo.

“That was just a local anesthetic,” the doctor murmurs. “So we can open for surgery without any discomfort. The second injection was a serum that will produce temporary paralysis. Please try to stay calm; it will fade shortly after the incisions have been made, and then you’ll find yourself able to speak again, though we’ll be clamping your head into place to avoid accidental movements.”

Wait, what kind of “incisions” do they need to make to reach the surface of my brain?

A strange sensation begins in my scalp, like cold water dripping slowly down my face, but underneath my skin.

So many kinds of fear are splitting through me that I’m glad I’m paralyzed, because I’ve finally found a kind of torture I can’t endure. And yet in spite of all that, I have only one wish, in this last moment before they begin to erase the lines that define my personality.

Please. Whoever I am tomorrow, let him love Elena as much as I do, and let him take care of her the way I promised to.

And then I hear the whirr of a small engine as the bone saw kicks on.

From the text inbox of Jeremy Gilbert’s phone

C: Have you ever googled the lyrics of any Iron and Wine songs? This shit is unbelievably cracked out.

J: you don’t have time for a boyfriend, but you have time to troll azlyrics dot com?

C: I have plenty of time for a boyfriend if you’re into hot dates in doctors
' waiting rooms, since that’s apparently where I’m spending most of my twenties. We could make picture poems out of old issues of Women’s Home Journal together...

J: sounds wild. i’m in.

C: Next month is mammogram awareness. I’ll pack a picnic, and my best scissors.

J: can’t wait ;)

J: dr’s office, not hospital, right?

C: Just her normal checkups. Everything’s okay. You guys having fun playing Jason Bourne meets Twilight?

J: we prefer james bond meets bram stoker, but right now it’s more like the frustrating montage in a detective movie BEFORE they find any clues.

C: Anything I can do?

J: drop some acid, dig into azlyrics and call me when you figure out what the rats stand for in flightless bird

C: 10-4.

C: I’ll be up late tonight if you want to talk.

J: 10-4

ELENA

It has been four days since Damon was taken and I can feel every hour of it all the way to my bones.

The stucco of the balustrade scrapes my elbows as I lean against it, but I hardly notice. I’m watching the raven perched on a tree branch in the courtyard little more than an arm’s length from me. His black eyes flash with an almost eerie wisdom and the wild part of me that rides far too close to the surface these days wants to bite him apart to get at it.

He’s about the right size: this could b
e Damon’s raven. He told me after he’s been inside a bird’s mind, they are drawn back to him even when he doesn’t call. I’m a vampire, too, and if this bird has seen him I can pull his location straight out of its head.

I want to see him again so badly that my memories of him feel almost solid against my palms. I focus that desire until it writhes with the energy of a living thing, just like the fog when we were all huddled in the Camaro and I needed to make us invisible to the Augustines.

Human blood thrums hot under my skin and the raven caws once, sharply.

I have a fleeting sense of clean, cold air, ephemeral like a passing thought, but it tastes just a little like Damon so I clutch at it as if it means something, tightening all of the terrible focus of my mind around it.

The bird screams and stretches out its wings, beating at the air, but its talons stay locked on the branch and my pulse surges, thumping hard in my throat. I'm not sure if I’ve connected to the bird’s mind and if I have, how I should communicate what I want.

Vertigo spirals up through my legs as though I’m falling, or maybe flying, but I just grip the balustrade and stare hard at black feathers and obsidian-shiny eyes.

I build images in my head, perfect in every detail like I’m inhaling a hallucination: the finger-ruffled chaos of Damon’s dark hair, the exact line of his pale jaw, the V of his collarbone rising above the open collar of his shirt. Then the quad at Whitmore, green lawn threaded with sidewalks and scattered with old brick buildings, Professor Maxfield’s smug smile.

There’s a voice behind me, but I let the sound of it fall away from me, vague and meaningless like the rest of the world.

Damon. Whitmore. Maxfield.

My need to find him is so sharp that it feels like it’s shredding me, clawing through everything left inside my body. It feels more real than I am.

I exhale, and the bird flies.

My vision shifts and I’m looking down on the trees from above, leaves shrinking as I pull away. I blink, and the trees are in front of me again, my hands on the balustrade feeling foreign and oddly shaped. I flex my fingers, half-surprised when they move at my command, and the sound I’m hearing abruptly makes sense. It’s my name.

“Elena!”

I turn around, swaying as I balance myself atop my legs. My brother catches my shoulders. His fingers circle almost my entire upper arms and that’s disorienting too. It’s been years since he grew taller than me, so how is it that it still catches me off guard that he’s so big?

“What’s wrong?” Jeremy asks, ducking his head to get a better look at me.

“Nothing,” I tell him, sagging a little in his hands, and even the breath I have to use to form the word feels heavy.

“I called your name like seven times. That’s not nothing.”

I brush him off and step away, leaning wearily back against the balcony. The air out here tastes crisp, but it doesn’t have the clarity it did a moment ago. Does that mean it worked? Was that the raven’s mind, brushing my own, or was it just my imagination?

“When was the last time you ate?” Jeremy demands, folding his arms.

My gaze falls guiltily. “A couple hours ago.”

It’s the truth. The rest of the truth is that in order to not drain anyone, I had to hit three different gas stations and a donut shop in a strip mall. Damon said all these vampire tricks were easier with more blood and if I’m going to use a raven to find him, I need to be strong.

But I don’t feel strong. Now that my focus has broken, my body seems heavy and too flexible, like it takes all my effort just to stand up straight. And everything is too damned loud, the leaves clapping together all through the courtyard and the wind scraping over the Spanish tiles of the roof. The clouds are moving so fast above us that I almost feel like I can hear them, too, wet and weighty with a storm that won’t break for hours yet.

“What did you need, Jeremy?” I ask, a little more sharply than I meant to.

His heartbeat is just as deafening as everything else, booming like he’s pumping buckets of blood through his veins to do nothing more strenuous than stand next to me.

“I just wanted to ask if you’d talked to Ric. I haven’t seen him since last night and he’s not answering his phone.”

I stiffen, but in my mind I can hear Damon teasing me for always assuming the worst, so I blow out a breath and force myself to chill out a little.

“He probably went to town,” I say, and then abruptly realize that I don’t know how Ric’s been feeding. Now that Damon’s gone, who is helping him learn snatch, eat, erase? Has he been stealing blood bags somehow? Guilt creeps through me as I register that I should have thought of this days ago, that I should have been helping him. “Have you called Stefan? Maybe he took Ric somewhere to feed.”

Ric’s stronger than all of us if he gets out of control, but with Damon gone, Stefan’s the one with the best chance of handling him.

Jeremy gives me a strange look. “Stefan’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” I snap, my muscles tensing all over again.

“I told you yesterday. Do you ever even listen when I’m talking to you?”

I open my mouth to argue with him, but I have absolutely no memory of him telling me Stefan was going somewhere, or that something had happened to him. Jeremy would be more upset right now if Stefan were the kidnapped kind of gone, right?

“Just—” I sputter. “Never mind. Where’s Stefan?”

“He found a witch in West Virginia who might help us do a locator spell to find Damon,” Jeremy says, watching me a little warily.

I run a hand through my hair and try to let out my breath slowly, so he won’t notice. With all this human blood running through my system, and Damon gone, I need to make sure and stay calm and in control.

“So, you told me he found a witch that could help us?”

“I told you he was following a lead,” my brother says defensively.

“I would have gone with him if I knew the lead was a witch!” I snap before I can stop myself.

“Why, Elena? She only needed Stefan’s blood to do the spell so there’s no point in the rest of us going.”