The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (42 page)

I squeeze the extinguisher trigger and again, white beats back crimson. Lia surges forward at my side as my squinted, watering eyes glimpse strange shapes that smell like hot metal. One more tiny burst and we move forward as I catch the sound of someone breathing hard from further down the hall.

“Damon!” She screams my name, terrified and defeated, her voice hoarse like it’s not the first time.

“Elena?” I shout back without thinking, sucking in smoke and bitter chemicals that cling thickly inside my throat.

“
Damon
!”

There’s a sharp clash of banging metal ahead of me and heat explodes at my back. Lia cries out, and then starts choking on the breath she accidentally took. I turn and blast the flames behind us. I can tell by the lightness of the canister in my hand that it’s nearly empty.

“Damon, I can’t get through! All this shit fell down in front of the door and it’s too fucking
heavy
…” Her words dissolve into a hacking, breathless cough that sounds way too human to be Elena, even if the cursing wouldn’t have already clued me in as to which doppelganger was on the other side of this landslide.

I can see where the doorway should be, but it’s blocked by something that looks like pieces of a collapsed ventilation system: all charred metal tubes and ducts amidst the still-burning pieces of wood and Sheetrock that used to hold it up.

“Katherine, get back!” I shout, breathing as little as I can manage and still speak.

I look at Lia and she nods, her eyes wild, and so I don’t waste words telling her what she already knows. We have to get out, but it’s going to hurt.

I squeeze the handle of the fire extinguisher, emptying it in a blast that’s over far too soon, and then I turn and toss it into the flames already pushing in behind us as Lia and I dive forward into the pile of metal.

I grit my teeth against a scream of pain as I feel my skin rip and scorch against sharp, furnace-hot pieces of steel. The extinguisher chemical cloud lingers in the air, mixing with the smoke so we’re working completely blind as we heave things out of our way and throw them behind us. My every muscle strains against the weight of pieces that are almost too much for me to pick up as I pray that we don’t accidentally crush each other with a careless throw.

Sunlight lightens the filthy air and I reach out, my destroyed hands finding Lia and pain exploding through me as I close my fingers around her arm, thrusting her up into the unseen wreckage and closer to the light. She scrabbles forward, too panicked by the flames to even worry about what she’s crawling into and I can smell her blood and fear and the stomach-churning barbecue scent of cooking flesh. For a second, I almost think I scent the black-powder blast of firing muskets but I clamp down on my instincts and hurl myself after her.

This is not the war and this is not a burning forest, lit by our own men to cut off the retreat of the Union army.

I push faster, my hand tangling with Lia’s ankle as I catch up with her and then we’re both falling down the other side of the mound of broken pieces of the Augustine’s state of the art ventilation system.

My shoulder joint impacts concrete as I sprawl onto the ground and I blink rapidly, trying to clear my stinging eyes enough to see where we are. There is a narrow staircase leading up to ground level, the opening at the top still partially blocked with whatever was disguising it from the outside world. So that’s why Lia took me this way: that hallway probably dead ended into what looked like a maintenance room, but actually was a secret emergency exit in case something ever went wrong in their earth-toned, yoga-matted little bunker paradise.

Katherine’s face appears above me, her hair half pulled back in a ponytail, half whipping free in the wind, blackened with the ash that’s falling out of the smoke that pushes up the staircase and toward the sky. She’s holding a shovel and tears stream down through the soot that covers her cheeks, but I can’t tell if it’s from emotion or just the poisonous air down here. Her whole body shakes with coughing but she’s trying to speak anyway.

“Tried…find you…caught…scientist tried to stop…Had to…So sorry…couldn’t…”

I can hardly make out one word in ten and I don’t have time to hear whatever left her trapped outside, trying to dig her way back in. I flip over, my body a bloody and partially scorched ruin that obeys me only reluctantly. Katherine's waist feels tiny and breakable in my hands as I shove her up the stairs, the shovel falling from her fingers.

I stagger to my feet and turn back for Lia, but she’s cringing in the shadows of the stairwell, the flames already visible through the hole where we climbed out.

“Go!” she shouts. “The barn over that way, it’s actually a garage. Get the panel van and you can come back for me.”

She’s terrified, the bloodshot whites of her eyes visible all the way around the irises. Burning embers are starting to whoosh out of the pile blocking the doorway behind her but she can’t go more than two steps forward before the late afternoon sun slanting down the stairs would catch her.

“Damon get out of here!” she shrieks, fresh tears filling her grey-green eyes.

I don’t stop to think about her voice in the labs for the last week, or the bars and bricks that used to separate my cell from hers. I just rip my shirt off, its plastic buttons soft from the heat as they rain down onto the ground. I toss the shirt over Lia’s head and push her up the stairs.

“Keep your hands covered,” I order, and then I’m guiding her into the sunlight, her hands clutching tightly at the fabric. I can hear her breath hiss in as the sun starts to bleed through all the places where the fire burned tiny holes in my shirt. We reach the top of the stairs and suddenly we’re in the long grass of a meadow bordered by trees, the roof of the Augustines’ underground hideout.

Katherine’s waiting for us, her eyes wide as she takes in the craters in the meadow billowing smoke from where pieces of the roof have caved in.

I spot the barn five hundred yards away, barely visible through the smoke that’s thick even in the open air, but not dark enough to block Lia’s vulnerable flesh from the killing sun. It’s too far for my tattered shirt to protect her while she’s running blind and far too slowly.

My legs already feel wobbly, weakened by the dozens of injuries my body is trying to heal, but I boost Lia up over my shoulder and start to run, knowing without looking that Katherine will follow as fast as she’s able.

With Katherine's instincts, every bone in her body would have to be broken before she would fail to run for safety, and I still can’t wrap my head around the idea that she was trying to break back
into
the building to get to me, even after her original rescue plan so obviously failed.

When we reach the barn, I don’t even try the knob to see if it’s locked. I just turn the shoulder that isn’t supporting Lia and bash my way straight through, the weak wooden doorjamb exploding into splinters.

I stumble, dropping Lia to the floor less gently than I intended to and then just staying bent over, bracing my hands against my knees as my body sways dangerously. My burned skin itches as it heals and my lungs feel scratchy and torched from all the smoke and fire suppressant chemicals I accidentally inhaled. Blood and ash streaks all of my clothes and I slowly shake my head, trying to register the fact that the wooden walls around me are cool to the touch. Safe.

“I have spent way too much time running from fires in the last two years,” I complain. “I am going to move to a tiny island, with no trees on it, surrounded by
water.
Cold water,” I decide, wiping sooty sweat off my face and glancing disgustedly at the gore and grit smeared across my hand.

Katherine bursts through the door behind me, panting and coughing as she leans weakly against the wall of the barn.

“Okay?” is all she manages to get out and I lift an eyebrow at her as she hacks unattractively, clutching her stomach in a vain attempt to ease her body’s rejection of all the very un-nourishing substances she’s inhaled in the last hour.

“Yeah,” I finally answer her. “I’m fine.”

She, on the other hand, needs a doctor since vampire blood no longer heals her and that is just one more complication that I don’t need today.

Lia’s clawed my shirt off her head and is lying flat on the ground, her breathing stuttering with pain while her skin begins to smooth away the blisters left where the sunlight reached her.

I glance into the garage and sure enough, there are neat lines of cars. Stepping closer, I see keys dangling helpfully from ignitions. The side of the barn that faces the distant highway is regular, weather-beaten wood, no different from any other aged outbuilding in the rural parts of Virginia, assuming that’s where we still are. But the part of the barn that faces back into the forest is lined with wide, automatic garage doors so the cars can leave easily.

Except none of them have. Whatever Katherine’s setup was before the fire, it worked. No one escaped the fate she planned for them, not even Dr. Maxfield and the other humans who should have been free to run outside. My stomach lurches weirdly at the thought of those vampires all packed into doorways, terrified eyes darting between the flames and the gentle but toxic glow of the afternoon sunshine outside.

I push the image away. They all left me to burn. The least I can do is return the favor.

But that doesn’t mean I want to hang around thinking about it, especially since I can hear faint sounds from the direction of the fire that I don’t care to focus on too much.

Lia must hear them too, because she pushes herself to her knees, shoving her wild curls out of her face.

“Hurry, Damon, there might still be time! If you get the panel van, we might be able to get some of them out. I can ride in the back and tell you where the hidden entrances are, and where the ground is solid and safe to drive on. If you drive right up to them, they could get from the building to the van before the sun can do too much damage.”

I feel the tug of instinct that wants me to obey, and I look away from her so I can resist, trying to reason it through. She needs me to drive because she can’t do it. There’s
a special kind of glass that blocks UV enough for vampires to sit right behind it, but no one ever bothers putting it into cars because one fender bender and poof! You’re up in smoke and the cops have a very suspicious corpse on their hands. Of course,
Katherine
could drive but Lia never trusted her, even though she doesn’t know it was Katherine who set the fire.

I hesitate, glancing to Katherine, who is still clinging to the doorway, her watering eyes coming back to me in between bouts of coughing. She can’t speak but I can read the tension in her shoulders, so I know that she’s waiting for me to deal with Lia so we can escape together.

I let out a slow breath, crossing my arms.

Suddenly, I have nothing but choices.

I can take the van keys and save the Augustines, the minions of a society that burned my home, kidnapped me and tried to eat my family. And yeah, I’ve been a soldier so I get that they were just following orders. I know the ones who came to the boarding house are already dead and I know exactly what kind of agony the rest of them are in right now, with flames burning their flesh even as it tries to heal, prolonging their suffering until the last possible moment when they give in to final death.

I can push Lia back out the door into the deadly sunlight and escape with Katherine, who really did try to save me just like she promised. Her plan for the future of the Augustine vampires sounds insane, but I’ve also been around long enough that I know she’s right. I can read the signs in the news, in the weather, in the numbers. With this population, the food won’t last and without food, peace won’t last. The world in the next few hundred years is going to become a very uncomfortable place, even for vampires. I wouldn’t even have to get my own hands dirty to stop all that. I would just have to back away and let Katherine finish the job she started. I bet for old time’s sake, she’d even give me a free pass on becoming one of her Captain Planet Approved cannibal vamps.

Or I could reach over and snap Katherine’s neck. For every time she’s ever hurt me, and my brother, and Elena, and Jeremy. For every innocent human she is going to kill so she can go to her grave satisfied she made a difference.