Cruel leverage
Elena watched in silence has her phone finally stopped ringing, the display telling her that both Caroline and Stefan had tried to call her. Clenching her jaw she looked beyond the phone, held in skeletal fingers in front of her eyes, and up along a withered arm to the face of the hideous corpse before her.
"What do you want?" She spat out refusing to show fear.
Amelie didn't answer, Elena wasn't sure if the zombie could speak. Instead the creature fondled her phone, tapping fleshless fingers over the Perspex as the phone thrummed with an incoming message. Elena wriggled in her bonds, still unable to break free. She hated her weakness; hated her vulnerability. She hated even more that there was nothing she could do for Jeremy, tied and still unconscious at her back, or Bonnie bound to the altar feet away.
"Answer me," Elena pushed, straining her neck to keep her head up off the ground. "You must want something. We'd be dead if you didn't." Elena had been kidnapped enough times by now to know how the game went. The bad guys didn't take living hostages unless they were working the leverage angle or wanted something from one of their captives. Elena couldn't think of anything Amelie could want from her, so that left the prospect that she was being used as leverage against...Damon.
Amelie had risen to her feet but now turned her head to look back at Elena, the torn and dried flesh of her neck splitting and flaking more as she did so. Elena didn't know why but she felt like Amelie could read the thoughts flying around inside her head.
Stubbornly she narrowed her eyes at the dead witch. "It won't work. I won't do anything to hurt Damon. And I won't help you."
Amelie just watched her with empty eye sockets, the stink and cold emanating from her rotted body tangling spectral fingers around Elena's throat, choking her and polluting the air in her lungs. The zombie dropped the phone and it clattered to the dirt right by Elena's nose. Then she walked away towards Bonnie and the makeshift altar.
"What do you want?" Elena demanded again, anger and frustration causing tears to sting her eyes.
She couldn't believe this was happening again. Life had only just started to get back to normal after the whole thing with Klaus and the curse, and now here she and her loved ones were again, pawns in some new monster's twisted plans. Worse even than the Klaus thing was the fact that Elena couldn't use herself as a bargaining chip; she had no leverage with Amelie, no idea what Bonnie's deranged ancestress could possibly want. She watched in sick impotence as Amelie picked up a large, curved blade from the altar beside Bonnie's still form and held it up to the fire light. The flames danced in the icy steel of the blade like a devilish promise. Once again the witch-zombie turned to look over her shoulder at Elena, and somehow the gesture managed to portray a certain amount of sadistic slyness. Amelie was playing with her like a cat with a mouse.
"No," Elena whispered before she could help herself as Amelie casually held the point of the wicked blade over Bonnie's breastbone. Her friend, still completely insensate, didn't even stir as the zombie negligently trailed the tip of the blade up from her diaphragm to the hollow of her collarbone, not pressing deep enough to cut, but making it very clear that she could butcher Bonnie right here and now and there would be nothing Elena could do to stop her. Something cold and hard settled like a rock inside Elena's roiling stomach and she was, quite abruptly, supremely pissed off. She glared for all her worth at the dead witch.
"You won't," she told Amelie, speaking with more confidence than she truly felt. "You want something from us, or you want to use us. That altar and those hearts mean something. You're not going to just kill Bonnie to prove a point to me."
Elena couldn't be sure but she thought she'd struck a nerve (if the witch had any left in that rotted husk of a body) because Amelie turned away from Bonnie and the altar, still clasping the knife in one hand, and advanced on her instead. Elena opened her mouth to capitalise on her success but felt her throat lock involuntarily. Her mouth opened on a silent 'O' of surprise as her lungs flared and surged with a desire for air she couldn't grant. Elena's eyes widened, popping, as Amelie held up one clenched fist, twisting her hand in the air as if wringing the oxygen from her body long distance.
Angry grey spots ate at the corners of her vision as Elena's body jerked and twitched. Blood pounded in her ears and her head rang with the thunder of her heart. A moment later Amelie had the knife notched under Elena's chin and her own involuntary movement caused her to cut herself on the sharp edge. Fighting for control and almost blind from oxygen deprivation she stared up at Amelie and willed the witch to kill her if she was going to because she wasn't going to give in.
The stalemate dragged on for a number of agonisingly slow seconds. Elena lost feeling in her tingling fingers and her legs below the knee. Her vision shattered into a snowstorm of black and white and all she could hear was a high singing in her ears that told her she was about to pass out. Her insides felt like they were ready to explode, heart palpitating and lungs fit to burst with all the carbon dioxide she couldn't expel. Yet she held on, wresting as much control of her body as she could so she didn't accidently slit her own throat on Amelie's knife. She didn't want to die but she wasn't afraid to either. She had learned that there were far worse fates than dying – and living knowing she had failed to protect her loved ones might just be one of them.
As she spiralled towards unconsciousness Elena wondered if Damon had felt this way when he'd drained himself so she could get free. As soon as thought came to her a flash of guilt followed. She hadn't managed to honour his sacrifice all that well, had she? She could almost hear Damon's voice deep in the recesses of her mind, his mocking drawl rolling up out of the pulsating darkness, congratulating her on her ability to endlessly get herself into trouble.
Bravo Elena. Next time I sacrifice myself to save you, do us both a favour and stay safe. This damsel in distress, kidnapped heroine thing is getting old.
Suddenly Elena could breathe again. Gasping like a landed fish she coughed in rafts of air, tears streaming down her cheeks and bile on her tongue. The ringing in her ears diminished by degrees as her body normalised. Yet she barely had time to realise she was still alive before the ropes at her wrists were sliced away and she was thrown across the clearing, falling hard as her ankles were still lashed together. Instinctively she put out her arms to cushion her fall and felt the red hot spike of shock rocket up her arm as her right wrist snapped.
She didn't have time to react to this pain however as Amelie was upon her, tangling dead fingers into her hair and yanking her head back. Elena gritted her teeth and stared straight at the Amelie, putting all her defiance into her eyes. "You could have killed me. You didn't. I was right."
Amelie dragged her upright by the hair and Elena fell against the zombie's body because with her feet bound her balance was shot. Still her hands were free and Elena turned as she stumbled so she could shove at Amelie with all her might. The feel of the dead witch's skin against her palms made her flesh crawl. Amelie felt like old, dry leather over twig bones and yet in places there was a spongy quality to her flesh, like mould. Her sudden attack must have caught Amelie by surprise as the zombie stumbled, the pair falling as Elena's unbalanced weight set them both on a collision course with the hard ground.
Elena ignored the shooting, hot poker pain coming from her right wrist as she grappled for the knife as they fell, her on top. Her fingers had just curled around the handle when a surge of cold hit her and a blast of air sent her flying backward six feet. The impact with the ground winded Elena, all the breath leaving her body again as her lower back smacked painfully into unforgiving dirt. Still she didn't have time for pain. Clenching her fingers around the knife she'd torn from Amelie's undead hand Elena slashed at the ropes at her ankles, slicing her skin in her haste. She then half crawled and half threw herself along the ground to the altar.
Not allowing a moment to panic or second guess herself Elena stabbed the blade of the knife down into the throbbing mass of one of the hearts lining the altar around Bonnie's body. Damon had told her that taking out the heart took out the zombie. Elena had no idea which of the dozen or more hearts belonged to Amelie, or if any of them did, but she didn't care. She'd make mince meat out of all of them. She raised the knife to burst another one when Amelie hit her from behind, body-tackling her away from the altar.
"Repeat; there is a noxious fume cloud headed towards Mystic Falls. All residents of the Old Fell's Road and surrounding area are advised to leave their homes immediately and congregate at the High School."
Alaric looked out of the squad car window as the Sheriff drove slowly down the road, playing the recorded message from a speaker rigged up to the roof of the car. Regular patrol officers were going door to door herding confused residents out of their houses.
"But this makes no sense. If there's a toxic cloud or whatever shouldn't we just stay in our homes with the windows and doors shut?" Alaric heard one woman ask as she was almost pushed towards her car by one of the Sheriff's deputies, her two young children chattering excitedly and running around her feet.
"That's actually a good point," Alaric pointed out quietly. "It's going to be hard to manufacture a toxic cloud that doesn't exist. People will suspect something." He paused before adding. "Even here in Mystic Falls." The propensity of most if the town's population to make like an ostrich when it came to the weird and violent happenings so frequent in their sleepy little town did have a limit after all, Alaric thought that the inconvenience of a forced evacuation on a Sunday evening might just be that limit.
Liz Forbes sighed, "I'll gladly take the criticism afterward if it means no more people die." She turned down one of the off-shoot roads leading off from Old Fell's Road. "Most of the attacks have occurred in this area and in the backwoods. If we can clear a radius of a few miles we might be able to box in and capture these monsters."
Alaric shifted in his seat, sitting up a little. "Right, do we have a plan of how to do that? These things aren't super strong like vampires, but they also don't have a pain reflex. Shooting them isn't going to stop them, or even deter them."
"True," the Sheriff agreed darkly her hands clenching around the steering wheel. "But I'm hoping if we, and my deputies, can herd them all into one place we can just hack them to bits until the pieces stop moving." Liz shrugged her shoulders in a quick tense movement. "That or we push them into the woods, set a fire, and hope the inferno takes the zombies out with the rest of the deadwood."
"Oh," Alaric blinked and looked over at the woman beside him with new insight. "You know, I think I just realised why you and Damon are friends." He said slightly impressed and a lot disturbed.
Elena twisted, kicking and stabbing with the knife like a wild cat as Amelie clawed and bit back; the stench of the dead witch's body suffocating her just as well as Amelie's magic trick earlier. Still, as ferocious as Elena was, she was still capable of feeling pain and growing fatigued, while the zombie was not. Elena's repeated stabbings had no impact on Amelie's corpse and her arm began to tire. It was then that Amelie threw Elena again, sending her hurtling across the clearing away from the altar.
Elena scrambled up as fast as she could, ready to go down ripping Amelie to shreds with her bare hands if she had to, but as she sat up, shaking her tangled, leaf strewn hair from her face she realised that Amelie had another weapon to use against her.
Jeremy.
Amelie had hauled Jeremy upright and now held his body like a human shield, one hand sneaking around his torso so she could dig her yellowed nails into his flesh right over his heart. The threat was explicitly clear. Amelie would rip out Jeremy's heart, just as she and her minions had done to over a dozen other innocent people.
"Don't hurt him." Elena felt the fight rush out of her, her mouth dry as dust. Jeremy's head lolled limply against his chest. He was still completely unconscious and his hands and feet were tied. He was defenceless, utterly helpless. Amelie's nails, cruel as claws, dug into the fabric of his t-shirt, puckering it, and penetrating the flesh beyond. "Let my brother go."
Amelie cocked her head to the side and, still holding Jeremy upright with one arm notched under his chin, used her other hand to point down at the ground. Elena realised that she was pointing at her discarded cell phone.
Elena's heart contracted into a tight, hot knot. She had no choice. Amelie would kill Jeremy, Elena didn't doubt that. Whatever value Elena had as leverage didn't extend to Jeremy. No, her brother was here as leverage against Elena - to force her to draw Damon, or even Stefan, out here.
Staring into the emptiness of Amelie's eyes Elena knew she had to make a choice, when really there was no choice to make. She reached for her phone, never taking her eyes from her brother's pale, slack face, and dialled.
Caroline stared out at the sky from the doorway of the abandoned storage unit. The late afternoon had almost given way to full evening, the night eager to begin, but the sun still lingered on the edge of the horizon. She huffed out a sigh of frustration and turned back around to the other person sitting well back in the shadows of the building. There were a lot of slurping, growling sounds coming from the corner. Caroline's face creased in distaste as a crumpled, spent blood bag bounced across the cracked concrete, thrown away like all the others. A pale hand darted out from the shadows to snag another full one and the gross nom-nom-nom, slurp, slurp, noises started up again in earnest.
"You're disgusting." She told her least favourite Salvatore brother as she stepped further into the unit. Damon was sprawled against the far wall, well away from the dwindling light of day, legs stretched out and body slouched like a broken puppet. He tilted his head up and back, almost throwing the blood down his throat and ignored her.
"Why do I have to stay here and babysit you anyway?" She asked, more or less rhetorically as Damon finally stopped gulping blood long enough to take a few breaths of air and wipe the sticky red trails from his chin. "Why couldn't I go with Stefan?"
"Because that's not the plan," Damon's voice was rough and it sounded like speaking hurt him. All the same the blue eyes he turned on her were sharp, keen, and utterly without sympathy. "You want on the team? Then you play by our rules."
"More like your rules," Caroline snapped careful to remain out of grabbing reach. Damon might still look kind of grey and haggard but there was something about him right now that reminded her why she was still very much afraid of him. "I don't know why Stefan agreed to..." she began only to be cut off by Damon.
"Stefan knows how to play ball, Blondie."
"Yeah but..."
Damon moved then, one arm shooting out like a striking snake. Caroline yelped and jumped back, anticipating an attack but all Damon did was snatch up another of the dwindling supply of blood bags. He tore into it as if he wished it was someone's neck and looked at Caroline with contempt.
"Relax, killing you is so not part of the plan." He paused for a beat, cocking his head to the side, "Yet."
Caroline straightened out of her crouch slowly as Damon went back to knocking back blood like continuous shots of Tequila and more or less ignoring her. She felt foolish but at the same time no one would ever convince her not to be afraid of Damon. Shaking her hair from her face and propping her hands at her hips she tried to get back a bit of composure. "Okay, so what is the plan then?"
As much as Caroline had tried to follow Damon and Stefan's whispered conversation earlier, the one that had resulted in Stefan driving off to go fetch something or other that Damon had hidden somewhere on the boarding house grounds, she'd soon gotten lost in the furious flow of coded looks, gestures, and half sentences the brothers had slipped into. It really had been like a whole other language that only someone with the name Salvatore could possibly hope to understand.
Now Damon lowered the blood bag from his bloody lips and rested the back of his skull against the cinderblock wall. He looked at her through heavy-lidded eyes, his slight smile secretive and weirdly indulgent. He raised one hand and quirked the fingers. "C'mere," he purred running his tongue over his bottom lip to lap up the last of the blood. Hunger smouldered in the almost colourless slits of his eyes.
Caroline baulked skittering a step back. "Uh, no, pass."
"Get over here." The lazy quality had left Damon's voice and his eyes opened fully wide, almost popping, in that way of his that screamed: 'I'm a complete psychopath, do what I say before I feed you your own liver.' Caroline swallowed and shook her head. She didn't want to be afraid, she knew Damon was still weak, and more to the point, unable to travel in daylight without his ring, yet she couldn't help it.
Damon growled low in his throat, not even trying to sound human. "Caroline." He gritted out, using her given name for once. He shifted against the floor, the soles of his boots scraping over the ground as he dragged himself up right. Caroline took another step back towards the light. She didn't think Damon was going to hurt her, and she was way more able to defend herself now than when she'd been human, but the rational part of her brain that told her that Damon hadn't lifted a hand against her since Elena convinced him to let her live after her turn wasn't enough to break through Caroline's mounting panic.
Damon had propped himself up against the wall, but Caroline could see the tremors running up and down the muscles of his legs. He was standing, but she doubted he'd be able to stay that way without the wall for support. She told herself that she had all the advantage right now, full use of her vampire strength, immunity to sunlight – even if Damon was planning something bad she had the means to stop him. It helped her push back the panic.
"What do you want?" She asked him hoping to sound confident and belligerent and failing miserably.
An odd expression passed over Damon's face, he looked uncomfortable and pained, like he was about to say something he really didn't want to. Swiping one hand over his sallow face he sighed and looked straight at her. "I want...to teach you." He ground out reluctantly.
"What?" Caroline forgot all about her fear then.
"You're a vampire." Damon said slowly as if he was disgusted with himself for even continuing this conversation. "A very new vampire; you're barely even dead."
Caroline crossed her arms over her chest, it was kind of stupid but the way he said 'barely even dead' left her feeling vaguely insulted, like being not as dead as him was a bad thing or something. "Oh yeah, well just because I'm not some washed up hundred year old fossil doesn't mean..."
"The younger a vampire is, the more resistance they have to necromancy." Damon snapped interrupting her again. The look he shot her quelling any further questions bubbling on the tip of her tongue. "I had to mummify myself to get free of the curse. Stefan doesn't have the strength to do even that. We can't fight Amelie." Damon pushed himself off from the wall, bracing his feet far apart to keep his balance. "But you can."
Caroline opened and closed her mouth on thin air, only managing to squeak out, "Me?"
"Yep," Damon's lips pulled back in a savage grimace, teeth sharp edged and vicious. "Now get your pert little ass over here. Daddy's got some things to teach you."
"Damn it Damon," Stefan hissed as he upended another drawer from the bureau onto his brother's bed, having already ransacked the closet and the hiding space under the loose floorboard. "You said it would be in here."
Stefan raked a hand through his hair and let out a slow breath from his nose. He supposed he should make allowances, Damon had just revived from mummification and it was possible he'd confused where he'd hidden Ambrose's spelled lock of hair and grimoire in his own mind. All the same Stefan was wasting valuable time rooting through his brother's stuff. He needed to think about where Damon would hide these things, rather than look where Damon said he'd hidden them.
His gaze wandered over to the bathroom, still looking like the backdrop for a Saw movie, blood stained tub and all. It wasn't hugely likely that Damon had hidden a century old lock of hair in with his soaps, but he'd better make sure. Twenty seconds later Stefan could confirm that his brother's fetish for hoarding a staggering number of perfumed soaps was still going strong, but he was no closer to finding the hair and grimoire.
Growing frustrated Stefan walked back out of the bathroom. Sometimes when looking for something someone else had hidden it helped to put yourself into the other person's mindset, but Stefan had been trying to get a handle on his brother's way of thinking for the best part of two centuries and hadn't managed it yet, so that stratagem wasn't going to work.
Damon had moved the items from their original hiding spot when he became suspicious about the Maudeville murders. He'd admitted as much. Of course he'd also subsequently forgotten where he'd moved them to, so that didn't help much. Maybe Stefan should take a leaf out of Sherlock's book? When all the possible places to hide them had been exhausted then the most improbable place, no matter how seemingly unlikely, was the only solution.
"Oh you didn't," growling in exasperation Stefan hurried out of his brother's room and bounded up the attic stair to his own room. In three strides he had made it to his dresser and the little enamel box where Elena kept some of her hair supplies, including a spare hairbrush, for the times she spent the night over with him. Flipping open the lid Stefan pulled aside a number of coloured scrunchies and, groaning in annoyance –because seriously of all the stupid places -pulled the dried tuft of witch hair from the tines of Elena's hair brush.
"One down, one to go," shoving the spelled hair into his pants pocket Stefan skimmed his eyes over his room, but he was already fairly sure Damon hadn't hidden the grimoire in amid his shelves. It would be too obviously out of place. Stefan already knew the grimoire wasn't in Damon's room so where could it be? Knowing Damon it would be somewhere obvious yet simultaneously inexplicable.
Stefan remembered that Elena said Damon had gone nuts and started trashing the library for no reason during their entrapment in the house. Now Stefan wondered if perhaps Damon had had an ulterior motive for his rampage. Just as he must have slipped the hair into Elena's hair supplies right under both Amelie and Elena's noses at the same time, Damon could have used his drunken destruction as cover for a new hiding spot for the grimoire. Amelie was watching both he and Elena at the time, and it wasn't unreasonable to suspect that she knew about the Grimoire at the very least, if not the hair. So Damon would need to put on a fairly significant distraction while he hid the book in order to stop either Amelie or Elena from realising what he was doing.
Blurring down the stairs and into the library Stefan took a moment to be annoyed with the damage Damon had done to the wood panelling and the table before checking the debris a bit more carefully. Tattered books and large splinters of wood covered the carpet, but lying on the battered chaise-longue was a pile of old newspapers. Despite himself Stefan felt his lips quirking up as a half-chuckle tried to push out from his throat.
"Only you brother," shaking his head Stefan stuck a hand into the mound of newspaper and sifted through the loose broadsheets until his fingers closed around a slim, leather bound volume hidden inside the pile. The book didn't have a title but as soon as he flipped open the covers and glanced over the first few faded lines upon the yellow pages, written in some language he couldn't read, Stefan knew he'd found the grimoire of Ambrose Bennett. He'd also guess the dog-eared page near the back of the book was most likely the spell they needed as well. He closed the book and tucked it under his arm.
He was just leaving the library when his cell phone rang.