The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (54 page)

“If you slack off, I’ll just make you start reading all of Ric’s sex self-help books,” she threatens.

I chuckle without opening my eyes. “You know about those?”

“He reads in large enough print on his phone that you could see the pages from the moon,” Elena complains. “And he doesn’t even
have
a girlfriend. Why is he suddenly so concerned about his performance? Wait, scratch that,” she decides. “I’m sure I don’t want to know.”

I wince. “Speaking of Ric, I was kind of supposed to meet him to take care of something this afternoon.”

Elena makes a small, unhappy sound and one hand walks its way over onto my hip and rests tiredly there. “Carry me to the car?”

“Hmm,” I pretend to consider. “That’s going to take some serious bribery.”

She laughs. “Careful what you wish for, Salvatore.”

I am very, very late by the time we finally make it to the car, and by then neither of us are in any shape to carry anybody.

Elena opens the passenger door and fumbles the seat forward, collapsing with an exhausted huff of air onto the backseat.

I lean against the car, my ruined shirt drifting open in the slight breeze as I text Lainie that she’s free to come back to her shop, which Elena insisted we clean up despite the fact that she’s currently acting like sitting upright is beyond her.

In the backseat, my fiancé curls up with her hands beneath her cheek like she intends to nap all the way back to our house, but then she winces and reaches behind her, pulling out a plastic gun-shaped device. She blinks at it in confusion, then looks up at me.

“Damon, did you
steal
this?”

I slide smoothly into the driver’s seat. “Uh-huh.”

“But why on earth would you want a registry scanner?” she asks, sitting up and leaning forward between the seats.

I pause, toying with my keys. I meant to give it to her for a wedding present, though I guess I should have put it in the trunk instead of the backseat if I didn’t want her to find it. It seems unbearably corny now, but she’s looking at me with those irresistible brown eyes, and there’s really no other explanation I can offer her except the truth.

“I don’t. But I
do
want you to have a little magic gun that gives you whatever you want.”

“Damon…” Her free hand rises slowly to her throat, her engagement ring glittering on her third finger as her eyes begin to shine.

We’re having a hugely public wedding, because she said she wants everyone to see her choosing me. I’m plenty happy with that idea but for me, vows are a private thing. And in a lot of ways, she’s already holding mine in her hand.

I duck my head, reaching for her fingers where they’re squeezed tight around the scanner gun, and I rub my thumb slowly across her knuckles and say quietly, “As long as I live, I’ll do everything in my power to give you whatever it takes to make you happy.”

Her breath snags and the first glimmering tear streaks its way down the perfect curve of her cheek.

“What about you?” she whispers.

And I just smile. “Sweetheart, I already have everything I’ve ever wished for.”

*
              *              *

I swing around the doorway and jog down the basement steps of our little rented house, pulling on a fresh shirt as I go.

“You better not tell me you started the fun without me, you scruffy old bastard,” I call out. “I’m not that late.”

When I come to the bottom of the stairs, I wince, realizing that whatever time it is, I’m definitely too late. Ric’s slouching, head bowed, in front of an old card table with nine metal boxes sitting on top, each one lined with lead, locked with steel, and filled with concrete and pieces of Silas.

We’re not supposed to leave until tomorrow on our
road trip across America, depositing the boxes of Silas in oceans and deserts, incinerators and toxic waste dumps. But Ric and I had a date with some power tools today that I appear to have missed in favor of shopping with Elena. After Silas compelled Stefan to take a grinder to Ric’s face earlier this year, I thought it might be therapeutic for Ric to use a Skilsaw to return the favor. But judging by his posture, therapeutic might not be exactly the correct word.

“What the hell am I still doing here?”

The dark growl of his voice sends alarm crashing through me. Since we had our little talk slash drinking game, Ric’s dark side seems to have taken an extended vacation, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it chose today to show back up.

“Beats me,” I say blandly. “Waiting for the new Tom Clancy re-issue?”

I angle my body more firmly between Ric a
nd the stairs and wish like crazy that I would have dropped Elena off on campus to do some homework instead of giving in to her transparent argument that she’d get more done at home with me.

He just gestures with a tired hand at the boxes that hold Silas. “I’m just as bad as this guy. You can stab me, hit me with a car, stake me, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s spells or rings, I always seem to come back. But just…why me?” he asks, almost plaintively. “I’m not Silas, I didn’t ask for this. And so many people have died: Jenna, Isobel, Carol Lockwood. Grandma Shirley and my buddy Roy in eighth grade. Out of all of
them
why would somebody like me keep getting another chance?”

“I leave you alone with a dead body for five minutes and you get all philosophical,” I deadpan. “Jesus, man, lay off the Nietzsche before happy hour, hmm?”

He turns on the cheap folding chair he’s sitting on and looks at me, his eyes as dark as the bottom of every bottle I’ve ever finished alone, sipping my way through long nights silent of answers.

“Do you think it’s because Silas isn’t really dead? Qetsiyah and Esther sent me here to kill him, said that I’d go back to the Other Side when I finished. Do you think by giving Katherine a second chance, I’m getting one by default?” He throws a wild glance toward the boxes he divided Silas into. “Because if I’m buying my chance at life by keeping him alive like a ticking bomb, then maybe it’s not worth it. I mean, seriously, Damon. What if that’s the biggest, craziest mistake we’ve ever made?”

“What do you mean ‘giving Katherine a second chance’?” I scoff, because I refuse to lie to his face, but I heavily implied that I intended to kill her.

Ric’s eyes focus for long enough to give me a disgusted look. “Come on, Damon, I’m no dumber than you are. There’s no way you left a paper trail across United Airlines showing you flying with Katherine all the way to California just so you could murder her. Now answer the question.”

I take a short step toward him, keeping an ear out for Elena because he hasn’t flipped yet, but he always gets agitated right before his alter ego comes out, and
Christ
this all feels so surreal and hundreds of miles from the golden moments in the flower shop this morning.

“No,” I say. “I don’t think you’re still alive because of Katherine. And I don’t think we should have drained her to cure Silas, as much joy as it would have given me to kill the cocky old bastard.” I bob my head wryly in Ric’s direction. “Judging by the evidence, the Other Side isn’t a much more permanent placement than our current solution.”

Ric snaps up out of his chair, shoving both hands back through his hair. “But even if we strap one of these boxes to the Space Shuttle, we’ll never be sure when he'll return, no more than we know when I’m going to disappear.” He takes a step like he might start pacing, but then just whips back around. “Every time I leave the house I put letters for Elena and Jeremy on my desk in case I never come back. And it’s getting to be like I just can’t take it to not
know
how much time I have left. How am I supposed to live like that, Damon?”

I shake my head derisively. “Get over yourself, Ric. That’s how everyone lives. It’s just that most of them are too oblivious to realize it. You’re alive every damn second until the first one you aren’t. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

“Yeah, but I already
died,
so what now? As far as I can tell, my dark side is gone, maybe even for good. So doesn’t that mean I should have found peace? Or I don’t know, at least a damn job and a girlfriend?”

“Just say the word, buddy,” I say casually. “I helped Elena and Caroline set up your Match.com profile last week and you’re just a button push away from going live.” I pull my phone out of my pocket and waggle it threateningly at him. “Come on, I have it on good authority that you love Hugh Grant movies and long walks to Walmart late at night for emergency Chunky Monkey rations.”

He huffs out a half a laugh that sounds more incredulous than amused, and scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t think I came back from the dead just to suffer through a bunch of internet blind dates.” He drops back into his chair, the cheap metal creaking on impact.

My cell phone buzzes in my pocket but I don’t check it, uneasy in the silence of the basement.

It’s not like Ric’s the first one to think about this shit. I’m sure Stefan’s burned through thirty or so journals in pursuit of the same answers, just like most of the undead who last longer than a year or two. It’s not my bag, not usually, but somehow I feel like I can’t leave Ric alone with this kind of shit churning through his mind.

I pull up a chair on the other side of our makeshift workbench and sit with him, the dim light of the sixty-watt over our heads highlighting the dust motes drifting through the air so their slow patterns look almost beautiful.

“I had to give up on asking why a long time ago,” I tell Ric. “Because with all the shit in my life, it was making me crazy.”

It was in those long, empty decades after my transition when I lived alone in a series of barren little cottages. I didn’t go near humans except to feed and I had no interest in getting to know other vampires. Books were my only company but after a while I couldn’t stand them either because they asked all the same questions that were throbbing inside my own mind. Why? Why are we here, what is the point? Why do some bad people live and some good people die?

Whatever a worthy life was, I was sure that I wasn’t living it, alone in a stolen house, only leaving to kill strangers because I had no other way to survive. So I fixated on Katherine. She was, in a very real way, the reason I was still alive. Every year that she stayed out of my reach, my fascination with her grew until I was convinced that my purpose on earth was to save her from the tomb so we could be together.

That was bullshit, of course, but it kept me going for a long time when the truth—that the life I was actually intended for wouldn’t start for another century or so—would have been too depressing to accept.

So I get why Ric is asking these questions and why he
needs
the answers. But I don’t think it will help him if I say that a fake purpose is better than none at all, or that he’s probably still here for a lot of reasons, some of which he’ll never know.

“You know, I wouldn’t have escaped the Augustines if Katherine hadn’t set that fire.”

Ric looks up with a surprised lift to his eyebrows.

“Their jail was tight as a drum. I could have figured it out given enough time, but with their brainwashing, I wouldn’t have been trying for much longer.” I snort a quiet breath out through my nose. “The first time I heard Katherine with my brother, in 1864, I sure didn’t think I’d eventually need her to save me from a bunch of mad scientists who were trying to enslave me. And now she’s in California, thinking she’s starting a whole new life when she has no idea how many she’s already lived, and how many things she’s been to different people.”

He just gives me a sideways look and chuckles lightly.

“Reincarnation, Salvatore style.”

“Yup.” I smile slightly.

Maybe I should go, and leave it at that. This is already more soul searching than I’ve done in decades, and I’ve never been great at comforting people, but I’m still high on the idea that today is going to be a happy memory for Elena and me. That we not only have a future together, but we’re making a past that I’ll actually want to reminisce about. I really, really want to believe that my buddy will have that too, someday.