"John?" Elena asked.

John appeared in the hallway, but he didn't say anything, he just looked at her with a knowing look.

"I'm ready to speak to you with respect." Elena sighed, defeated.

"Go on," He said calmly.

"I was, wrong. You are my father and you were right in taking me. It was dangerous in Mystic Falls and you need to protect me. Thank you," She sighed.

"There you go Elena, was that so hard," John said.

"Please, it's been two days, and I'm starving," She said sweetly, "would you go get me some food?"

"Well you've been quite for two days, so you've earned it," he said slowly, "but I just ate the last in the fridge, so I'm going to have to go out. Walk towards me so I can test the spell on the door."

She did as she asked to convince him she couldn't escape, even though she knew she could. When she reached the doorway, she was shoved back a foot by the elastic magic that was woven in the door space. Once John was satisfied that she couldn't get out, he turned and went out the front door. She heard the car door slam and then Elena peeked through the corner of the window to see which way John turned. She needed to follow him to town to find out where she was, and to find a pay phone so she could call Damon.

Elena's heart was racing; she couldn't wait to test out the window, but she wanted to wait for John to drive a few miles before racing to escape. Elena walked over to the window and reached for the latch. She pulled towards her, and the latch didn't budge. She wrapped her right hand around the latch and pulled with all her strength. The latch creaked open a centimeter. She tightened her grip and leaned against the window with the rest of her body to try and push it back. The window finally fell open with a final creak from the latch. What Elena didn't notice was that when the bent bar of the ledge snapped straight, its sharp edge trapped her left hand and ripped open the skin above her knuckles. Elena didn't even feel the initial cut, only the cold burn that started a few seconds later. She cried out in pain as blood started seeping out of her wound.

This cut wasn't going to stop her though, plus if John came back, he would know she was up to something.

Elena sat on the window ledge, and then turned around and shimmied down the bricks of the house into the bushes. She then scrambled out onto the front lawn of the shack and then started running down the road the same direction John had gone. She was tired, even though she had tried to sleep, she had tossed and turned on the cold hard floor, and she hadn't had anything to eat since the party three days ago. She had to run though; she wanted to be able to hug her brother again. She wanted to be able to smell Damon's cologne and Bourbon breath again. These motivations kept her running as she ran down the one way road through the middle of nowhere.

"Come on there must be something in this house that's his!" Damon said as he threw journals to the floor looking for something belonging to John, so that Bonnie could do a tracking spell.

Bonnie, Jeremy, Caroline, and even Matt and Tyler had come to help Damon look for one of John's possessions. In the rush that they had to find something, they had each taken a room or closet, and spent the morning ransacking it as they tore through dusty boxes and threw clothes onto the floor looking for trinkets hidden in the back of drawers.

"Remind me again why we are looking for something of Johns instead of just easily grabbing something of Elena's from her room?" Jeremy asked confused, he had been informed that Elena was taken, but only recently learned that it was by John, his uncle.

"For some reason my tracking spell wouldn't work on Elena, but now that we know that John took her, if we have something of his, I can try and track him," Bonnie explained.

Jeremy started, "Well why don't you use his ring? It's had lots of owners since John gave it to Isobel, than she gave it to Alaric, then John got it back from Alaric to give it to Elena, but technically, it's still his since it was made for him by Emily Bennett."

"Jeremy, you're a genius! Who has it now?" Damon asked frantically.

"I already knew that, and doesn't Rick have it?" Jeremy asked.

"Dammit, Alaric's not here!" Damon shouted, about to lose his temper, "He's not here! And he has John's ring! That is just great!"

"Damon, it's okay, we'll get her back," Bonnie said calmly, "just go into the kitchen and take a break. You've been running around the house at vamp speed all morning, and it's wearing you out. Jeremy, call Alaric and tell him he needs to come home, explain that we can't find Elena without his ring."

Jeremy took out his phone and went into the front room to call Alaric. Damon took Bonnie's advice and went into the kitchen to grab a blood bag that Elena kept in the back of the fridge for supernatural emergencies. He poured the blood into a mug and went to put it in the microwave.

As Elena was running, every time she heard a car coming, she would run into the bushes in case it was John driving and he saw her. As she heard the whirring sound coming towards her heart rate would increase even higher than when she was running. She then ran down into the ditch running parallel to the road, climbed out the other side and scrambled into the bushed. She had several scrapes, but none that burned as much as her now aching hand. That window bar had really cut deep, and even though Elena only looked at it once, since once was enough for the gore, she could see layers of muscle exposed by the torn skin.

Her fears were worse when a car was coming up from behind her, instead of towards her, because she was never sure if the car could see her before she ran into the bush. Elena had already been paranoid, but this fear was too much for her. Thank goodness there was little traffic today, or else Elena would have to run through the forest in fear of someone seeing her and getting suspicious.

As Elena reached a junction in the road, she turned left and saw something that made her cry out in happiness. A gas station! She didn't even need to go all the way into town, and fear John seeing her. Although she was fairly sure that she had passed John on the road a while ago, and he had arrived home to find her room absent, with a wide open window smeared with blood. She shivered and tried not to think about a furious John running around trying to find her.

Elena sprinted the rest of the way to the gas station and then took a couple of deep breaths outside before pushing open the steel barred door and being met with a gust of conditioned air.

"Hello, how can I help you?" the high school age cashier said.

"Um, yes. My family and I are on a road trip, and we have a flat. Where are we right now?" Elena asked.

"Oh, you're in Blackstone, Virginia, right off of 460," the girl said.

"Thank you, um once I got here I was supposed to call them, but I don't have any money." Elena said near tears. Why didn't she remember she needed money to use the phone. How was she planning on talking to Damon?

"Oh, it's okay. I have money! Don't worry about it. Here you go" the girl said worried as she handed Elena a couple quarters, "what's your name?"

"Elena," she sniffled.

"Elena, my name's Alice. And around here, we help people out, even with a something as simple as a phone call, so don't worry, your family will be back on the road in no time."

Elena nodded in thanks as she sniffled. Elena went to the back of the gas station where the rust pay phone was hammered into the wall. She inserted the quarters and typed in the number she had memorized after using it so much for emergencies.

With each ring, Elena's heart began to beat quicker and quicker. Each ring was quick, but the silence in between was what made her heart sink to the floor like thick syrup. Elena was running out of options. She had taken the risk to come this far, but she had nowhere to go now. John was going to find her, and she was scared for her life now, more than she was before. John was her father, she shouldn't hurt her, but he had proven himself unpredictable before. There was no telling what he would do if he found her trying to run away from him. Just as Elena's heart was about to touch the floor, it rushed back into her chest and started beating in double time when the ringing stopped and was replaced with a quick and urgent:

"Hello! Elena?"

"Damon!" She cried out, and then she started gasping for air as her heart filled with hope at being safe in his arms again.