The Vampire Diaries: Out of my Mind (Kindle Worlds Novella) (4 page)

I bellow at him. “TIE ME UP!”

Elena freezes. “I’m going to tie him up,” Ric says and drags me into the hall. I love this house, linen-slash-weapons closet, towels are on the top shelf, crossbows on the bottom. Rope right behind the cute, wrist-mounted stake shooter.

I am sweating and shaking as I hold my wrists together behind my back because the hook hates defeat but who are we kidding, this is not defeat. It’s postponement. Two, three loops and a tight knot around my forearms, four times around and the rope squeezes around my shoulders. It is no match for a psychotic, possessed vampire, but it bolsters the losing team. I let Ric wrangle me down the stairs and I hear Elena behind us. “Stay,” I bark at her.

I perch on the front edge of the passenger seat because my arms plus the rope take up too much room, and I listen to Elena ruin everything.

“Can you handle this?”

“Nope.”

“I mean, can you keep yourself from… switching?”

“I know what you meant.”

“Because he’s not himself, Ric.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He didn’t mean to hurt me, but… please be careful. He’s messed up. I couldn’t stand it if I lost you, too.”

The hook perks
way
up. Shit.
Shit
.

I have been paying attention, I have done the math. What hurts Elena the most? Not direct physical assault, she’s too tough. No, you have to wound the people she cares about. She will jump off a moving train to save her family and friends, she will sacrifice herself a hundred times over. To get to her, you have to hurt someone she loves.

I will break her, whether I want to or not. I’d be an idiot not to see that now. The hook will make sure I break her. So I’m taking charge of the how. I’ve chosen my target and it’s going to work, there’s no way it can’t, but at least it will hurt me more.

Because I have never in my life had a friend like Ric.

Two steps inside Ric’s loft and I drop the surreptitiously untied ropes in a heap on the floor. He lunges at me but I swipe his legs out from under him and the loud crack tells me I broke something. The groan tells me it was something important.

I drag him up as close to standing as he can manage.

“You broke my knee!”

“Good. Now you won’t run.” I press him back into a kitchen chair, easy, then circle around behind him. His calf juts out at an odd, tell-tale angle. I rest my hand on his shoulder and it only looks like I still have a choice. But nothing in me belongs to me anymore. I am a weapon. Elena will be heartbroken, which counts as broken in anybody’s book, it has to. She will be safe and I will be free. She will hate me forever but join the damn club. I am the president.

I run my fingers through his hair and grab, I pull his head back and expose his pulsing, hot neck. I could do it fast, let myself miss it, lose myself in the kill. But I don’t deserve to miss it. If I’m going to kill him, I want it to give me a scar.

I bite slowly and drink. He squirms, harder, curses, tries to fight back. I wish I could vomit. 

I drain more than he can spare but he is still alive. He will black out soon, his heart is weakening, needs blood to pump blood. His organs will fail. He won’t be able to breathe.

I come back around to face him, to show him my face. He’s pale. There’s a thin sheen of sweat and heartbreak covering each of us.

His eyes roll and now he’s trying to maintain eye contact. “Why?”

I want to tell him, I want to tell him every last thing, unburden myself and lay it all out. He’s not going to make it, we are both so hopelessly damaged that the hook has wandered off, it’s tossing back a few celebratory shots. The hook doesn’t care about talking to a dead man. “Because I give up, Ric. I can’t beat her. Even when I fight it, she wins.”

“Rebekah compelled you to kill me?”

The pain is leaking away in anticipation of what this will do to Elena. I am a coward. “You’re just a means to an end. You got the short stick because I don’t give two shits about Jeremy. And you showed up.” I’m killing my best friend because it’s convenient. No one has ever been as low as me. “If I said this hurts me more than you, would you buy it?”

“No. Yeah, maybe. What happened to you in there?”

“Torture. Mindfucking.”

He coughs and I’d know that cough anywhere, it bubbles and it means he’s circling the drain. “So if I’m the means, who’s the end?”

I take a breath because I’m not sure I can say it out loud. I brace myself and give it a shot. “Elena.” It’s more of a grunt than a word.

I hear Stefan’s voice in the street, then Elena’s. They’re stomping and stumbling up the stairs toward us. The door bangs open.

“Damon? Alaric, no!” Elena shrieks. She’s at his feet, hands ghosting over his obviously broken leg. The hook does a backflip. I hear a crunch.

When someone breaks your neck, things come back in an unsettling order. First the brain, the ears and eyes, but the spine is still knitting itself together, a mess of nerves doing their little square dance so you wake up paralyzed.

I’m flat on something higher than the floor. Ric’s bed. They’re talking in the next room. It’s muffled. No one is crying.

“I should have known.” Stefan. Yes, baby bro, you should have. “Klaus compelled him right in front of me. I should have guessed.”

“None of this is your fault.” Elena. Confident, strong, and not in the least bit broken. Seriously?

“Did he tell you what the compulsion is?” Figure it out, Stefan.

“Something to do with Elena. I don’t know what.” Alaric! Alaric, Alaric! Unimaginably bizarre to feel absolute glee but not be able to make your lips into a smile. “But if he was going to kill her, he would have done it.”

That’s my boy, that is exactly right. Killing her would have been simple but my instructions are to be creative, my instructions are to break her and she is far from broken so I am far from done. I know the rules now and I know how to do this. I am already hatching a new plan because listen to her, she’s fine, she’s still just fine.

The feeling comes roaring back all at once, like slipping back into my own skin, but the control takes a moment longer. Come on,
come on
. I have to get out of here. The bedroom window is open and I have work to do.

Chapter 6

I am hopeless and I am looking for a gun.

I climbed out of Ric’s window believing I was on the verge of a breakthrough, some sort of plan that would satisfy Rebekah but leave Elena intact. Some way to save her, to save myself.

But then I realized with the full force of incontrovertible truth that that was impossible.

I can’t trust my thoughts. I wanted to beat this and I have fought it but it is stronger than I am, Rebekah is stronger, she wins every time. Her and her damn hook. She’s in here, she’s got the wheel and I can’t beat her. I think a thought and I’m sure it’s mine but then it’s not, obviously not, and I am ripping into Alaric’s jugular because I think it’s a good idea. I am fired from thinking.

And yet I have no choice so I have been pondering Elena and her infinite reserve of forgiveness. Now that she knows that I’m compelled, that I’m a weapon Rebekah is wielding, that I am a damn
victim
, there is literally nothing I can do that she won’t forgive me for, nothing she will hold me accountable for. Nothing I can do to break her.

Except kill her. Because dead always equals broken. It has to.

But I can’t do it up close and personal. I can’t watch the spark that I would have given my last breath for just a few days ago ebb and blink away before my eyes. I am a coward, I think we can all agree that I lack anything remotely resembling a spine, and so I will hide in the shadows and shoot her through the head. I will do it in the daytime, soon, before the sun goes down, so I can slip my ring off and step into the light and finally be finished.

If I could just find that gun.

I admit there is still a small corner of me that wants to fight but it is damaged beyond repair. It is bashing its tiny, crucified self against the hook and making wild, ridiculous suggestions. It is weeping and I might be weeping too. It seizes on an idea that terrifies me to my bones, it is a miserable idea, not even worth a shot and yet I find myself listening.

It’s this: one quiet request to take it all back, or several loud, begging, moaning requests, and I lay myself prostrate before Rebekah. I promise her anything, I will indenture myself to her forever, if she’ll take it back. The humiliation seems appropriate, I deserve no more than this, or maybe it just feels appropriate to return to where my end began. She is omnipotent and I have nothing left to lose. The worst she could say is no, but that is not true, the worst she could say is here is your heart, isn’t it pretty, or here is Elena’s heart, isn’t it delicious? I swallow the fear because it is the least of my pain.

When begging doesn’t work, because it won’t work, and she turns me loose again, at least I know how it all will end.

Found the gun. Knew it was here somewhere.

I am frozen, I am nailed to this junky welcome mat that says ‘Beware of Dog,’ hilarious. The screaming terror rushes back full force, it belongs to this place, it soaks through my pores. I am back in there, hanging from shredded wrists, laid wide open and I want to die. Now even that little cheerleading fraction of myself is thinking this was a shitty idea.

Rebekah swings open the door and there she is, sunshine and rainbows, cute as a button, and we both know she is Shiva.

“Come in, love,” she grins and walks away. I trail after her. Can you hear me howling? I am howling.

I follow her past The Room but I cannot look, I place one foot in front of the other, one two three four keep going five six and I am past it. She opens the very next door, it’s a sitting room, art books and tea on a low table in the center, upholstered side chairs with too many throw pillows, curtains pulled back to reveal bright afternoon sun. It is conspicuously charming and was here the entire time my blood was swirling around on that tarp. I hate this room.

I hover just inside the doorway. It is too late to bolt.

“I have to say,” she purrs, sinking into a chair facing me, “I am not impressed. Elena is the picture of happiness. Frankly, I’m disappointed as hell.”

The hook is disappointed too, it scrapes a jagged groove along my resolve and my breath rushes out but I don’t scream.

“You’re smarter than this,” Rebekah taunts. “You may be an ass, but you’re clever at least. I expected more from you.”

The hook is roaring at me, it is eager to get on the road, to give it another go. Send me back in, coach, this time I’ll do you proud. I pinch my thigh to shut it up.

She waits, squints. She must be used to broken people by now. This can’t be her first rodeo. “Well then, to what do I owe the unexpected pleasure of your visit?”

Here it is. I am on the precipice. I choose the simplest, most obvious parachute and I leap. “I’d like a harder assignment, somewhere else, on a larger scale. This is beneath me.”

“Beneath you? But you haven’t done anything yet.”

Lie. Lie big and lie proud. Incorporate truth. “Because it’s too easy. It’s boring. I can be downright diabolical. All that evil Stefan used to perpetrate, that you adored – he learned those tricks from me! Give me something that lives up to my potential. This? Not worthy of me, not in the slightest.”

She studies me, that infernal pout moist and glinting in the light. “No.”

“No?” Keep it together.

“Damon, it’s not boring. Not for me. Eventually, somebody is going to turn up in pieces.”

“
Me!
” I am likely to crumble any second. “You want
me
in pieces. I’m the one that hurt you, that humiliated you.
It should be me
.”

She sees the cracks. She loves it. I am her clown. “Watch out, dear. Don’t get all riled up on my account.”

“I’m the one that screwed you twelve ways from Tuesday so Sage could take a walking tour of your head. Elena’s not your enemy, I am.”

“Indeed.” I’m getting to her, I know it, I feel it. This might work.

“So
hurt me
! Cut out my eyes. Rip out my heart. Compel me to take a never-ending walk on the bottom of the ocean. But leave Elena out of this.”

“Tempting… I do hate you. But hurting Elena wounds you, obviously. And that, darling, is the essence of the plan. She means everything to you.”

“But I mean nothing to her.” Truer words were never spoken.

“All evidence to the contrary. Perhaps if you try harder, love. I believe in you.” Sarcasm drips from her like sap.

This is not working and I am desperate. I wilt. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain, I am nothing. My voice breaks, it is too soft. “Rebekah, I’m begging you. Take your compulsion back.”

Her eyes narrow to slits and a smirk blooms on her lips. My desperation has made her glow. The smirk widens to a smile. “I don’t think so.”

“Take it back. I will do literally anything you want me to but please take it back.”

She leans back in the chair. “Damon.”

I am gutted. My knees buckle, they slam against the floor and I am kneeling before her, offering up nothing less than my entire self. “Please.” Check me out, using the magic word twice in one week.

Rebekah smoothes her dress against her legs as she stands. She slinks over to me. I sway, I shake. I am fighting to stay in one place. I am at her mercy, where is her knife? She kneels beside me, it feels sickeningly intimate again, she traces a line up my arm with her finger, winds an arm around my waist from behind. “I already told you what I want from you.”

“Anything else.
Anything
.”

She fingers the buttons on my shirt, the fly of my jeans. She can feel me trembling, I know it, feel the muscles in my torso thrum against her body. “What makes you think I’d want what you could give me?”

“I can be useful.” I force myself to turn my head, to meet her eye. I have to be persuasive. This is Elena’s last chance. “You need minions if you’re going to hold your own against your brothers. I’d be an excellent minion.”