Chapter 17: The Man I am Today
From the text inbox of Jeremy Gilbert’s phone
J: how is it being home again?
C: It’s all champagne and autographs, babe, living the dream.
J: that bad, huh?
C: No, it’s fine. Gram’s doing good. But I forgot to bring a vampire back to compel my boss, so I’m on official probation and unofficial passive-aggressive punishment of being assigned all the worst jobs in the care center. Which, when you’re a CNA, can get pretty darn ugly.
J: when are you going to quit?
C: When I can pay the bills with wishes and pixie dust, Junior.
J: you could get one you don’t hate.
C: I don’t hate it! I adore Betty Jo, and Mrs. Berber, and Mr. Thomas. And Jarvis.
J: and…
C: And I hate everything else. Shut up.
J: try this one on for size
C: I’m listening…
J: Coyote Ugly.
C: In your wettest dreams.
J: a. yes
J: b. you’d love it. C’mon you’d be the best bartender in 6 states!
C: I’m too mean.
J: everybody loves mean when it comes with pretty.
C: YOU love mean and pretty.
J: guilty.
J: call me tonight?
C: Not a chance, Romeo. I’m on to your tricks. ;)
J: you haven’t seen all my tricks.
C: Okay, maybe. If you get your homework done and eat all your vegetables and don’t wear a shirt when I call.
J: done.
DAMON
I wake to the smell of disinfectant and steel. I'm groggy, so at first I'm not sure if it's the last wisp of a nightmare, the olfactory memory of the Augustines' operating rooms poisoning my sleep yet again. But when I go to stretch, my arm strains against a wide leather cuff and my eyes blare open.
Fluorescent lights, metal tables, trays of medical instruments.
Scalpels.
No.
I erupt into motion, focusing every year of my strength into shredding the wrist and ankle cuffs that hold me bound to this chair. My body feels scorched inside with vervain, but I'm not starved, not weakened. The Augustines have nothing that can cage me now.
"Hold him!" a male voice shouts.
A more familiar voice calls, "Damon! Damon, please!"
There's a strap across my lap and another over my chest and I can't get any leverage, can't buck more than a centimeter or two. My lungs are crushed by the pressure as I choke on panicked breaths, my thrashing not budging the steel chair, which must be bolted to the floor.
Fight.
"Damon, calm down! You're safe, you're safe!"
I heave against the reinforced straps and hear a crack as one of my ribs gives way.
There's pain and pressure from every direction, explosive movement and shouting and I just know I have to beat this, get out of this, go, go, go.
My thoughts vanish into sheer animal panic, and it’s seconds or centuries before the tide of it breaks over my head.
My muscles fail and seize up before I register their exhaustion, my arms and legs foreign things withered inside the clasp of the sweat-slicked cuffs that are warped from my efforts but far from broken. A new sensation I can’t name slowly filters in as I sag against the straps, my lungs torched because I forgot that I don't have to breathe.
"Focus on my hands in your hair," a soft voice murmurs. "Just breathe and think about how good it feels, how you can feel the vibration of each strand all the way to your scalp when I touch it."
I'm dripping with sweat and Lia's fingers are cool and steady. I can feel her pressed against my shoulder as she perches on the wide arm of the chair.
My muscles aren't relaxed so much as finished, every joint hanging limp. I have no idea how long I was fighting. I only know I failed.
"Remember how you used to do this for Stefan when he was a little boy?" Lia says softly. "Just stroking his hair and talking to him until he could relax and go to sleep. You're a good brother, Damon."
I had forgotten I told her about that. It was on one of the bad days, when the latest experiment was to see if a vampire's body knew its correct structure. The Augustines would sew pieces of us together wrong just to see what the final result might be. Lia was bursting the stitches, her skin splitting apart as it tried to line itself up correctly to heal. She was half hysterical with the pain and I stayed up all night, stroking her hair as she lay against the bars. Telling her story after story, some true, some made up. Anything to take her mind off the pain.
"What are you doing to me?" I rasp as my eyes flee from scalpel to syringe to the complicated looking machines near my chair. My body may be spent but it hasn't made a dent on the storm of panic still screaming through my mind.
"They're not going to experiment on you," Lia says quickly. "And there will be anesthesia this time; you won't feel a moment of pain, Damon, I promise you. I would never," she says, moving until she's kneeling in front of my chair, "let that happen to you again. Never."
"Then what am I doing here?" I growl, my voice so raw that the sound embarrasses me. "I'm not into playing doctor, Li."
"I'm so sorry, Damon. They wouldn't let me wait," she says, her face twisted with regret.
What does she mean wait? I've been here less than a day. How can they have run out of patience already?
"Until you made your decision, I mean. They said we couldn't risk it, that the procedure must be done now or you would have to be put down."
"What procedure, Lia?" I demand, then swallow, refusing to lose control of myself again while she’s watching. "Are we talking Popeye biceps and Roadrunner speed or switching over to the cannibal menu here? Am I going to be calling you Master by tomorrow morning?"
She looks away, her body a hunched comma of tension.
"What, you prefer Sensei?" I joke, my voice feeling like something sickeningly weightless that I'm forcing out of my throat. I’m painfully aware that my words are the only part of me that can escape the bonds of this chair.
"Just the necessary procedures," Lia says unhappily. "You won't be a full Augustine.” She looks me straight in the eye and right now, she looks exactly like the girl I remember. "I’m sorry. I wanted it to be your choice."
My stomach clenches weakly at the implication of her words. This is it: I'm strapped to their chair with every kind of body and brain-scrambling equipment laid out around me. I’ve been their prisoner for less than twenty-four hours but if the cavalry doesn't show up in the next five minutes it's bye bye Damon and hello who the hell knows. Whoever they deem it safe for me to be, I guess.
They can make me feed on vampires, they can make me non-aggressive and totally obedient to Lia, and they can jack me up to Klaus’s fighting weight. Why do I have the feeling I’m not going to get the nice options on that surgical menu?
She stands up.
"So does our deal still stand?" I ask, trying to catch Lia’s gaze again, but she won't look at me. Is she still going to get me out of here after this, or did that go south along with her power to postpone whatever lobotomizing they are about to do to me?
"Dr. Penfield is going to explain the procedure to you," Lia says, stepping back. "But it's not like it was before, Damon. It's very gentle, professional. It won't hurt."
A man in an ironically pristine lab coat steps forward with a smile. "Hello, Mr. Salvatore, how are you feeling?"
"I'm three blondes and a bottle of Dom into a fan-freaking-tastic party," I snap. "How does it look like I'm doing?"
He fidgets with the papers on his clipboard and throws an uneasy look at Lia. "This is a lengthy procedure, and we're going to require your full cooperation as well as your honest assessment of any sensation or pain you might experience. Please don't try to play tough, Mr. Salvatore. We're here to do the best job we can do, and we're very good at it, as long as you are honest."
"Super,” I say, and my eyes flare. “Then I can honestly tell you th
ere's no mindfucking you can do to me to make me forget the lengthy procedure I’m going to use to remove your lungs from your body, once I get free of this damned Auschwitz meets General Hospital stage set. So if you have kids, kiss them goodbye soon, and just between you and me? It wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade the life insurance."
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.
Chapter 18: Bouquet of Black Feathers
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 be 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 soun
d 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?
The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) Page 23