CHAPTER NINE

"It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood."

~William Shakespeare

xxxxxXxxxx

The hallways were a blur of gray stone and steel and smelled of rot and mold. Those smells were soon joined by the smell of blood, and the 'patter, patter' sound that it made trailed behind Damon as he ran past the emptiness. He hadn't been in these rooms in almost 70 years and the assault of horrific memories were almost as bad the feeling of the vervain bullets that were ripping into his skin.

Damon had endured 5 years-worth of torturous pain, compared to that, the bullet wound was like a mosquito bite. But the pain was still burning, stinging, and he felt them lodged deep inside him. He stopped down an endless hallway of brick and empty steel cells bathed in a gray shadowed light from domed hallogen bulbs above him embedded into the rock. Damon knew they were the same grow bulb lights as in the lab because the light burned and sizzled his flesh and through the gunshot holes.

He came to a cell built over an archway naturally formed from the rocks of the caves that built this entire passageway. Before any of this hell, Damon remembered these caves from his youth. He'd discovered them the summer when he turned 13 during a sunny day of hide-and-go-seek with Stefan, and spent an entire day getting lost in them, listening to Stefan's muffled calls above him as he tried to find Damon's hiding spot, munching on a freshly baked muffin from Ms. Abilene's kitchen.

The smell of the cave now smelled far from hot muffins, it reeked of stale blood, decaying clay falling down on his head like rain. Damon's couldn't fight the pain any longer, and he halted so fast that his feet had a moment to catch up, swaying his body forward. He grabbed onto one of the bars and righted himself before reaching with the thumb and index finger of his other hand deep into one of the bloody holes. The pain came sharp and lightning quick as he pulled the first bullet out from just under his collarbone. The second bullet was right above his navel, had lodged itself somewhere inside his stomach. The pain of the vervain was corrosive enough; but combined with the acid leaking out of his stomach, it felt like a fire lit railway spike was being jammed inside him. Damon jerked his hand out with a stifled grunt, fingers bloody. He turned his head down the hallway, finding nothing but shadows, hearing nothing but his own harsh breathing. He craned his head sideways in-between the bars of the cell, bracing one of them in his mouth, bitting down hard into the iron.

He dug his fingers back into the bullet wound, widening it to get a better reach. The pain this time was blinding, the bullet moving in the acid of his stomach. His grunted scream died on the iron in between his teeth, and he pushed his hand in deeper, reaching, grabbing until he closed his hand on it and pulled it out. He collapsed to his knees, letting the bloody bullet fall away to stain the floor a bright rose petal red. The smell of his blood came on like an opium high and detracted his fangs involuntarily. He pushed forward on the bars, shoving the feeling down as far as it could go. He grabbed a clump of something powdery that reeked of decay from the floor of the cell and smeared it in the bullet holes to throw off the scent of his blood.

There came a noise ahead of him, the sound a rock makes when it's thrown against a wall. Damon glanced at it, but he had been alive long enough to know when there was a planned distraction.

The hallway in front of him continued on in stone for 30 feet before it curved sharply to the right and vanished. The sound from before happened again, echoing once like a skimming stone on the water. A shadow emerged from the hallway.

"Nice try with the crappy theatrics!" Damon called out. Hiding himself wasn't going to do shit, and he was never one to hide himself. So he might as well start what whomever they were wanted to start.

"Damon!"

The voice made Damon's pain take second place. He watched the shadow, "Elena?" His next words died before they were born as Elena shouted again.

"Stefan!"

Damon barely had a chance to process Stefan's name before the horrendous sounds of his brother's screams shook the stone hallway.

Damon didn't call out his brother's name like he did with Elena, didn't take time to process the fact that now he was a cannibal of vampires, a rabid animal let loose on his own kind. He only processed the scream.

He ran the hallway at a blurred speed, rounding a curve and came out to another hallway that matched the length of the one he had just left, lined in cells, the light continuing to burn through his injured flesh.

There was no sign of Elena. A man's body cloaked in a black hoodie was sprawled upon the stone floor, face and legs bent away from Damon, a stake sticking through the back of the black fabric.

Damon ran to the fallen figure, kneeling down. "Stef!-"

The body rolled over and the face shrouded in its black hood, stared up at Damon. "Sorry," The leering smile of someone who was not Stefan opened his mouth and over a dozen miniature fangs detracted "Wrong guy." The other vampire lunged at Damon, ripping the stake out of his back like it was nothing and launched it at Damon's back.

Damon deflected the attack, jerking the stake a hard left into the air where it broke it half against the stone floor. He lit to his feet, slamming the other vampire against the wall. The other 'vampire' was one of the ones that Damon had seen lurking just out of the way in the labs when Wes was vivisecting him. The vampire would have matched his strength blow for blow, had the serum Wes injected him with not given Damon, besides the obvious mind tearing side effect, ultra heightened strength even beyond his own capabilities.

Damon squeezed the sinews of the vampire's neck as easily as if he were juicing an orange. The vampire grunted, but he didn't look as shocked as someone, vampire or not, should when they were being choked under. "You might not have gotten the memo, but I'm a cannibal now, which means you're going to pay so hard for this in a second!-"

The vampire's lips pulled back into a sneered laughter half died out form his lack of breath. "You're getting pretty strong there tiger."

Damon squeezed harder, rushing the blood up to the other vampire's neck, like a fire cracker about to pop.

"Cocky son-of-a-bitch aren't you?"

The shadow that spoke those words broke away from the cell it spooned and became a man in black leather. He was a good head taller than his vampire counterpart, black hair spiked to match his clothes holding out a cellphone with a prominent base speaker like he was advertising it for sale. The phone had an audio track display paused in mid recording, the lines of audio feedback glowing brightly the shadowed lights of the tunnels. "You're probably entitled, we did just jerk you around with our little baiting trick-" the vampire backed the track up and the sound of Elena's voice came through the speaker. He paused it there again when Damon looked two seconds away from ripping out his throat. "But maybe you should question if we are tricking you?" The vampire had a thick accent, resembling someone Scottish who had lived a fair share of their life on the Louisiana Bayou. "Clearly your loved ones are not here, Damon. But then, how did we get this-?" He unpaused the audio again.

During that same game of hide-and-seek when Damon had first discovered these caves, Stefan had wandered off on the edges Abilene's property to look for him and had walked right into a steel bear trap laid out by poachers; Damon had heard Stefan's scream through the cave walls.

It was the same kind of sound coming from the speakers. The realization of just what that meant froze the blood to a standstill in Damon's veins.

The second vampire turned towards the first, an amused look was shared between them before the first vampire shifted the look over to Damon. "Your brother's a screamer," the amusement turned cocky, masochistic, "He must make the women happy-"

The frozen feeling melted from lava hot anger. Damon rushed the vampire, jumping on him so fast that the other vampire's reaction time seemed almost human. Damon bit hard into his neck, biting, tearing, blood pouring into his mouth.

The blood became hot, corrosive acid hot, in Damon's mouth and he recoiled as it burned down his throat, gagging with a hand to his neck to try and breathe around the burning. He plummeted to his knees, colliding hard to the packed dirt, vomiting up blood gone black in his stomach.

A pair of black shoes and the tails of a blood stained lab coat hung on the top of Damon's vision. "Your reaction time is improving Damon," Wes's voice echoed around the empty cells. "And your speed-" Wes sighed in a euphoric tone like he had just discovered a cure-all for all childhood diseases. His lab coat collar was also stained in blood and he bore massive black bruises on his face.

"You're a dead man!"

"Why is that?" Wes looked down on Damon's form as he writhed on the ground. "In the interest of science I need know. Is it because I tortured you? Or because I tortured Stefan? -As your body starts to scream from starvation, which will become more important, Family Blood, or Vampire-Blood?"

Damon's insides felt like they were being vacuum sucked out of him and dropped steaming into a pile of acid; his mind felt lit on fire. He would have gladly accepted dying if it weren't for two things: the first was finding whomever made his brother scream like that and shredding their limbs into ribbons; and the second, which came slower, but was still there- the fact that he had taken in vampire blood, but his body rejected it the way he had done with Wes' blood when it had been forced on him, and he needed to understand why.

Wes glared in superiority down at Damon like he was about to put down a stray dog.

Damon groaned, and gaged again, rolling up on his arms, he reached out with his hand, and like a trip wire, knocked Wes's feet out from under him.

Wes hit the ground hard and Damon rolled up on him slamming his head down hard against the rock. He dug his thumbs into Wes' eyes pulling back the lids, moving his fingers under Wes's eyeballs. "It's because you tortured Stefan-"

Wes screamed, and blood began to stream from his eyes like tears.

Damon dug in deeper, feeling his thumbnail tear through the muscles in the back of Wes's eyes "And because you tortured me!-" He scooped Wes' eye, only one tug away from removing it.

Something solidly heavy, dropped down on the back of Damon's head, shattering into powder and pebbles. The blow dazed him, even with his new found strength. He lost focus on his torture and turned.

A face emerged from the shadow that he didn't understand. So he did the only thing he could, he lunged at the confusion.

The sound of his neck breaking rang in his ears before he dropped and the stone and earth dissolved to black.

xxxxxXxxxx

Route I-90

"How do we even know they came here?" Matt drove Caroline's Toyota around the road that hugged to the Virginia forest like a skin tight dress. High above the trees scattering of stars had emerged in white dots across the early night. "The car was ditched back more than three miles away-"

"This road is east," Caroline's blonde hair flicked back and forth like a lightning bug's glow in the passenger seat. "Okay? Parkesburg is east, they came this way!"

Matt had come back to the Boarding House with Jeremy and told them what had happened at the Grille. He had also told them Elena's request, which no one had wanted to honor. They had left town in 10 minutes, but Caroline's car blew a tired 30 minutes into the drive making them even further behind then they were already to Elena and Stefan.

"How do we know that this isn't a trap made by those Hunters?" Jeremy asked from the backseat.

"We don't, "Matt went for brutally honest, which did little to help the situation, but he was to on edge to offer even made up reassurances. "But it doesn't matter-"

"You let Stefan and Elena wander off with Hunters Matt!" Caroline jerked her head at him like a blow, "Their safety matters okay?" Her voice was high and as close to being panicked as she could get without actually being panicked. Two hours ago Matt had come into the boarding house without Stefan, or Elena, or even Katherine and had told them all what had happened. And Caroline had gone from begrudgingly listening to her mother's orders to stay out of the FBI's way, to fighting off Matt's attempt to block her getting into her own car. "Whoknows what they did to them, what if tortured them for information, or just tortured them?-"

"If this is a trap Caroline," Matt cut Caroline off mid panic. "It doesn't matter, because they're out friends, we're helping them either way" The scenery became a dizzying blur as he white knuckled the wheel and floored the accelerator.

"I can't believe you let Elena talk you into going off alone with those guys," Jeremy's head poked up from the back seat, his expression angry.

"I didn't let her," Matt growled out these words. "There wasn't any time to refuse Jer-"

"They're Hunters, Matt, "Jeremy growled right back. "Their first instinct is to kill vampires!" He may be younger than Elena (undead or not, he still considered himself her little brother). But he was fiercely protective of his sister. There was forever a running joke about how Elena had throngs of people willing to throw themselves into danger just to save her life. But before Original Hybrids out for her Doppelgänger blood, or even Stefan and Damon came along, he had been there to watch out for her, even during his stoner phase.

"You don't think I don't know that?" Matt turned his head almost completely around, nearly colliding with Jeremy. "You weren't there! You didn't have a gun held to your face-"

"Yeah and if I did I would've stopped them from dragging Stefan and my sister into some sort of trap-"

"We don't know it was a trap!"

"Stop it!"

Bonnie's voice was loud in the back seat, heavy. "This isn't going to bring them back!" She was still technically a ghost, but because she straddled the divide between the corporeal world and Purgatory, she was allowed to feel human senses, touch taste, smell, even her own organs functioning within her body. And the thing that she felt most right now was the hammering of her heart.

"Matt look out!"

Caroline's scream jerked Matt's head around back towards the windshield, where the road curved sharply to the left. Matt jerked the wheel hard, but a second later realized that Caroline hadn't been screaming about the curve but rather at the sight of a red Mini Cooper halfway down in an embankment and halfway in road in front of them.

Matt slammed on the breaks hard, the car swerved on the road, tires smoking, the front end smashed into the Mini Cooper's bumper, stopping midway in the metal.

Matt was the first one to come out of the shock that had just happened, a mass of dusty airbag sat under his face and he pulled it away like extra skin.

"Matt!" Caroline's voice was to his right, "Are you okay?" She felt his hand on her arm, the passenger side airbag kept her from going through the windshield, but she was a vampire, and wasn't worried about herself.

Matt coughed hard from the pain of the impact of the airbag on his chest.

Caroline jerked her head back to Bonnie and Jeremy in the backseat, they were a tangle of arms, as Jeremy had thrown himself over Bonnie moments before the car had made impact. "Bonnie!" Caroline could only see Jeremy, but after a moment Bonnie's form wriggled out from underneath him.

Bonnie looked shaken but unhurt. She turned her brown eyes over to Jeremy, furious. No matter how her friends skirted around and avoided it, she was dead, she had no life to save, but they did. But before she could release the anger and fear that she had about, especially to Jeremy, there came a hard ripping sound that tore her thoughts away from her.

Caroline ripped apart the canvas of the airbag that was still surrounding Matt, allowing him more air to breathe, which he did with a painful sounding gasp, then did the same with herself.

The airbag came away like a stage show curtain revealing the damaged and torn end of the Mini Cooper, bearing Elena's license tag.

"Oh my god!" Caroline ripped off her seatbelt and was out of the car in a flash.

The doors on the right side of the Mini Cooper both stood wide open.

"Elena!" Caroline ducked her head inside the car, it was completely empty, but the wheel was turned at a jagged angle, the passenger seat was lifted forward and a crimson stain of blood was splattered on the back of the headrest. Caroline could still smell its coppery smell, which meant that the blood was still fresh.

A foot ahead of the Mini Cooper stood a black muscle car. Jeremy ran to it, its doors were shut, and when he jiggled the door handles, he found them all locked.

Matt climbed out of the car, almost at a slanted angle. "Are they in there?!" He asked this both to Caroline and Jeremy.

"It's empty!" Jeremy was the first to answer, he pounded on the glass, trying to get the window to smash.

"There's blood on the backseat!" Caroline emerged from the Mini Cooper. "Smells only a few hours old!-"

Jeremy abandoned banging on the empty Impala and swept his eyes in a circle around the tree line that grew like weeds along the side of the road. "Elena!" his sister's name echoed through the landscape.

"Stefan!" Caroline's shouted into the trees. Nothing echoed back except the sounds of the forest.

"Elena!" Bonnie picked up the shout. Her eyes swept over the landscape in a circle, into the shadow of the trees. "Can you hear anything?" Bonnie demanded of Caroline.

Caroline listened, but shook her head, she was about to try again, but then a fierce pungent smell assaulted her nose. She turned her gaze up to the embankment to where the smell was coming from.

At the base of an old rain drenched pine tree, a group of black crows were cawing and plucking at the bark, fighting each other for a chance to get at the tree. At first Caroline thought they were picking apart a dead animal, but as she drew nearer, instead of an animal carcass she saw a long bladed half buried in the grass, circled by a thick puddle of blood.

Caroline's heart ramped up to a triple beat, she picked up the bloody knife, when her friends saw it, their eyes transferred into horrified shock.

"Stefan!" Caroline's shout was echoing and loud. "Elena!-Are you happy now?!" Caroline thrust her anger onto Matt, throwing the knife down hard at her feet, the world spinning dizzyingly around her. "This was all a trap! Those Hunters probably dragged them into the woods and ripped them apart!-"

"They're not dead Caroline!" Bonnie insisted. "Elena and Stefan are both vampires, if either one of them died I would have seen it-which means we can still find them!-" Bonnie stepped over to Caroline and lowered her friend's hands down from where she was tearing them through her hair. "We're going to find them-"

Jeremy roamed his eyes over the forest floor, looking past the fallen branches and dead leaves to the dirt underneath. Ever since he had become a Hunter he had developed a heightened sense for finding things. It wasn't a true heightened sense like vampire super hearing or night vision. He was simply able to notice things more acutely. Over the fallen brown and dead debris were a set of ridged treadmarks "I count over ten sets of tracks-" he thrust his chin out towards the forest thick with trees. "Some of them are thicker like something was being dragged- they lead over that ridge," Jeremy didn't waste time pointing again, he simply climbed up over the crest of the grass without waiting for the others.

"We can get to Parkesburg faster if we drive," Matt insisted.

"Our cars are useless," Bonnie insisted, staring at the torn and broken Mini cooper and Camry.

"Not all of them," Jeremy grabbed a jagged rock from the roadside and smashed a hole through the driver's side window of the black Impala. He reached his hand through the hole and popped the lock, opening the door. He slid in the e driver's seat and reached under the dash by the steering wheel, smelling more blood inside the car. He pulled out the steering wires and connected them, the car roared to life with, the A track player blasting out AC/DC at his face. He popped the passenger side door open. "Scout out that trail!" he shouted to Caroline. "Bonnie and I will meet you in Parkesburg! Call if you find anything!"

Bonnie opened the passenger side door with a squeak and climbed inside. Jeremy roared the Impala to life just as Caroline grabbed Matt before he could protest and disappeared into the woods in a blur.

xxxxXxxxx

The sound of the water drops magnified like a storm with how fast Stefan was running; when he had first started running at the livery, he had no idea how long the hall actually was. Abilene's plantation house was at least 5 miles back, but the tunnel seemed to run longer than that, zigzagging back and forth so that he had to keep avoiding the walls, and avoid smacking Sam into them.

Even with all his super strength and endurance, the laws of physics still applied, in that Sam, who couldn't run at the same speed, ended up being dragged for most of it. As well as avoiding the walls, Stefan also resorted to pulling Sam onto his back up doing a weird "spider monkey/piggy back" maneuver, otherwise the speed he was going would have torn the Hunter's legs clean off his body. If Sam Winchester had any objections with being carried, the super high speed drowned out any of his complaints.

What stopped Stefan from his flat out running, was not another wall, or even another vampire, it was a cat: a orange tabby that shot out of the air like it had been catapulted. Stefan jerked to a stop. The momentum jerked Sam forward into Stefan, then back like a derailing train, slamming the 6'4 man into him.

But both Hunter and Vampire managed to turn on their reflexes in time and righted themselves onto their feet before they met with the ground.

The cat hissed and spat at them, ears bared back, its eyes luminescent in the light of long florescent bulbs that hung suspended from the stone ceiling. It swiped with a paw of needle like claws, turning from Sam to Stefan, backing up in high agitation like it recognized Stefan as something unnatural.

Elena was breathing in a hard, startled kind of way, her neck and shoulders a ring of deeply colored welts the size of finger marks. Even with all of her supernatural strength, Dean Winchester was still over 6 feet tall and weighed more than twice her size, so having to haul him across the cave as she ran wasn't something that didn't come without consequences.

"How did a cat get in here?" Elena watched the tabby run a hard left, it's orange fur dying out down a long hallway. "I didn't see any cracks big enough for an animal to squeeze through."

"Somebody must've brought it in," Dean rationalized.

Elena turned to him, half confused. "Why would they do that?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, maybe Darius wanted to make a Kitty Vamp." Dean fumbled into his jacket and pulled out a small black flashlight and shined the light in down the corridor where the cat had disappeared. He rubbed a hand hard at his eyes, and Elena saw that they were still opaque, and unfocused. Stefan's blood hadn't healed him enough yet, but he didn't give any indication other than the swipe at his eyes that he was injured.

Dean glanced down the hallway, then back over to Stefan, "So which way?"

"I'm not sure," Stefan answered.

"What do you mean you're not sure?" Dean didn't sound very happy with Stefan's answer.

"I've never actually been down here," Stefan responded to the Hunter.

"You said you came here for summer camp every year," Dean snapped back.

"Above ground," Stefan snapped back just as harshly. "Damon was the only one who ever came here. After what happened, we weren't allowed out of our father's sight."

Elena's brows knit into confusion "After what happened, Stefan?"

One of the things that Stefan would always love about Elena was her concern and compassion for people, and that included him. But there were still things that he still couldn't tell her; because it ran much deeper than just himself. "I'll tell you when we get Damon and get out of here, alright?"

Elena heard the way Stefan said his brother's name, the way it sounded like a longing for air, and she responded with a nod.

Stefan turned to the uneven stone wall on his right. The wall was solid, made up entirely of a gray rocks that had been piled one on top of the other like masonry bricks without any mortar. The stones were covered in so much peppered black dirt it was hard to decipher if it was the rock that was gray, or the dirt that almost enveloped it. He passed his hand along the rough edges of the wall, and felt as something tickled his palm.

"There's air moving behind here."

Dean stepped forward, using his hands to feel forward until he was at the stone wall. He tapped the butt of his flashlight against the rock, the noise resonated. "It sounds hollow, there's something back here."

"Like another hallway?" Elena asked.

"There's a way to find out," Dean returned, turning Stefan. "You need to pull a Vamp strength move and punch through this."

"Dean-" Sam stepped over to Dean and Stefan, holding up the beam of a flashlight he produced from his jacket pocket. He shined the light up to the roof of the cave. The rocks formed half a vaulted ceiling, curved in two places. The wall resting on the arched apexes that were lined in cracks like the skin of an aged woman, branching outwards to the seam of the wall. "This wall is load bearing- If we try and knock it down those cracks will bring it down on top of us."

"There's something on the other side of here, Sam," Dean returned. Dean raised the beam of his flashlight to the same spot that Sam's light was shining. "And given what this place is, it's no accident in the architecture-"

"But those cracks aren't architecture Dean," Sam practically growled out to his brother. "This cave is over a hundred years old, the amount of moisture in the air probably rotted half these stones away."

"No," Stefan stepped between the two of them, not needing a flashlight to see the stone above them like Sam and Dean had. Upon a second glance he saw that the marks in the stone weren't webbed or cracked design that would come from a rock being naturally worn away with time, but in deliberately deeply carved grooves Stefan drew to an image he had almost long forgotten. The very first summer he had visited Abilene. He had snuck down to the kitchen well after dark to swipe an apple from the pantry. It had been past 10 at night, and only the cook, an aged woman with ebony skin was still up. The pantry was wide open, it's shelves stocked with canned goods, hanging vegetables and fresh fruit. Stefan watched the woman root through the dried jars of spices at the back of one of the shelves. He had slowed his pace down to a tip toe and snatched one of the red apples sitting in an overly full barrel just behind the cook. He was about to make off with his stolen treasure, when he had heard whispering, then the heavy sound of something being pushed away. He hadn't been able to see anything behind the form of the cook because she hadn't been a small woman, but as he had backed away he had felt a pile of dust fall on his head, and when he had looked up he saw a section of wood being scraped along the pantry roof, having followed a groove.

"He's right," Stefan said this to Sam about Dean. "This tunnel was designed as a passage for the Underground Railroad, it would have been made with dozens of secret passages for runaway slaves to hide in case bounty hunters ever found this place-" Stefan backed away from the stone and studied the wall in its entirety, looking up from the topmost stone hidden the shadow, to the very bottom stones fused to those on the ground. He felt along the stones with the flat of his hands, until he felt the rush of air on his hand from before, he pushed the stone under his hand in, and felt it give, until it formed a handhold big enough for him to grip with his fingers, he pulled at it hard, and felt the wall give just the slightest give.

"Elena," Stefan didn't let go of the grip he had on the wall as he called out to her, "there should be another handhold near this one-"

Elena spanned her hand next to Stefan's and slid it away from him in a parallel along the stone wall, until she reached a place where the stone was jagged, and cut into her palm, but at the same moment she felt the thin trickle of her blood, she also felt something blow against it.

"I got it!" She pushed her hand into the stone like Stefan had done and it gave into a handhold slightly larger than her hand. She jammed both hands inside the small space for better leverage and pulled, hard.

The wall moved like a warped sliding door. Even with as hard as she and Stefan were pulling with their combined strengths, the progress they were making did nothing to reveal what was on the other side. Elena dug her boots into the stone and pulled harder, her muscles turning to molten liquid.

The wall finally came apart more like a hidden panel in a palace suite.

Stefan barely had time to take in the image of more stone, and a shallow light coming in from somewhere before he heard booming crack from above them.

The archway that the movable wall rested on had cracked deeply upwards. The hallway began to shake like it was in an earthquake, and pieces of the stone ceiling smashed to the ground like a hail storm.

Dean jumped back, narrowly missing a piece of rock the size of a dinner plate being impaled into his head.

"Elena!" Stefan called out Elena's name as an enormous piece of stone broke free from the highest part of the archway and hurled itself towards her.

Elena looked up and saw the falling mass, but before her instinct to run at high velocity kicked in, she felt herself being yanked backwards by Dean.

The rock face ceiling had it, whatever moving the wall had done to it was a lethal move, pieces of the stone above began smashing down the wall like crushing a soda can, an entire foot of the wall blew away into pebbled powder.

"Elena!" Stefan coughed out the dust that threw itself down his windpipe, "Move!" A crack, louder than anything he had heard before shook the entire hallway like a roar, a rock the size of a baseball, dropped and smashed right into the side of Sam's head. Sam dropped to his knees, dazed, blood matting into his hair.

The ceiling finally fell apart, another baseball sized chunk of rock dropped down towards Sam, who still struggled to get to his feet.

"Sam!"

Dean yelled his brother's name, and Stefan saw Sam's hunter instinct kick in; he tried to roll away from the stone, but the blow to his head left him stunned, and he wasn't moving fast enough.

Stefan shot forward and grabbed Sam under the arms and sped him backwards into the passageway the wall had opened up as the stones and rocks collapsed apart, swallowing them both.