CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"I have given my word that only death will take me from you."
~Philippa Gregory
xxxxxxXxxxxx
Elena ran at full vampire speed where everything she passed bled together into one large singular object. And she kept running like this as seconds passed into minutes, the warm stale air burning up her nose. After five such minutes passed she slowed to a stop at a point in the hallway. The walls had turned back from solid concrete to stacked brown river stones.
Damon stopped when Elena stopped. "What is it?" He had taken to carrying Stefan fully, his brother's heavy off breathing echoed off the walls.
The stop in movement was so sudden that Stefan's clawed midway in Damon's tattered shirt for support like he used to do when he had first learned how to walk on the warm oak floorboards of his nursery floor.
They had reached a junction in that split the hallway into a T divide. Elena flicked her head back and forth in all three directions like a butterfly trying to escape a spider's web, studying the stone in the darkness, trying to find a pattern that was familiar to her, but everything became blurred under the weight of her adrenaline.
"Which way?" Damon called out to her in a grounding voice and this time her head turned to face him instead of the darkness in the hallways.
The fear of not remembering crept up on Elena like a chill in her body, one that threatened to tear at her throat like the pack of rabid vampires because if she couldn't find the way back, then she had sentenced them all to die.
"Elena-"
Elena turned and saw Damon, his eyes crusted with drying blood, puncture wounds visible in bright red punch holes all across the veins in his neck. He was holding onto Stefan who looked barely able to stand, his eyes open but glazed, shirt shredded in what had, only minutes ago, been a lethal wound-
She turned to the junction that branched off to the right, and saw something she hadn't before, a jagged pebble, the same size as the one that she had felt pelt down on her from above as Dean had grabbed her away from the avalanche.
"It's this way!" Elena turned back to Damon and Stefan. "This hallway leads all the way back out to the livery, come on," Elena grabbed at Damon's arm to pull him towards the hallway.
After a few steps, Damon took off in a blurred run again, Elena following seconds behind him.
The wind whipped all around Damon's ears, he felt his wounds pull in protest, the bullet holes in his shirt beginning to bleed freely again, but he kept on, following Elena through the maze of stone that he never wanted to see again, dragging his brother with him.
They ran for a span of five minutes again, the distance covered enormous because of their vampire speed. As they neared a pile of stone Elena recognized from where the cave in had happened, Stefan's weight fell out completely from under him and fell forward, throwing him and Damon down in a sideways slant against the stone. Damon caught himself on his elbows, but Stefan pitched completely against the rock, shaking them loose, burying his arms midway up in jagged stone.
"Stefan!" Elena whirled around and fell by Stefan's fallen figure, shoving away the stone.
Stefan tried to dig his arms out of the stone, each movement slow and painful. "Get out of here-" his chest cavity bleeding freely again.
Damon saw the free flow of blood from Stefan's chest, but there was no pull, no need to devour and drink. There was only the need that had everything to do with a different kind of blood.
Stefan grunted on a fire of pain. "Both of you, go!"
"Stop deciding to be the martyr all the time Brother!" Damon grabbed at Stefan's arm lifted it straight out of the burial of rocks, hearing Stefan's grunt grow into a scream that pierced Damon like a railway spike in his chest. He hauled Stefan back up, Elena on the other side taking Stefan's other shoulder.
The sound of a thundered rumble came from far back in the tunnels, but then blew outward towards them, splitting the ground at their feet.
The ground Elena stood on split apart into a fissure that broke outward with such force that she was flung backwards from the force, rolling and toppling a foot away from Damon and Stefan.
Damon was knocked to ground, arms and legs scraping and tearing through the dirt. Stefan had been flung away from Damon and into the pile of stone, landing in a slant against it, up on his back, head thrown back in a growled pain, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
"Stef!" Damon reached a hand out to grab his brother's arm, shaking it, hearing Stefan groan again.
A cracking fissure started to break through the rock ceiling above; the fissure raced across the ceiling and carved out an enormous chunks of stone right above Elena's head.
"Elena," Damon called out her name in a command to get her to look. She turned her head up, sticky with blood from her fall in time to watch the cracking ends of the stone meet together.
Another cracking sound turned Damon's head up a second piece of rock doing the exact same thing over Stefan, pieces of the tumbled rock avalanche falling around him as the last support to the stone ceiling above at that point began to crumble away.
Both the broken started to fall within seconds of each other.
Damon watched Elena backed away from the rock, trying to find footing in the fissured ground, he heard Stefan groan again beside him, trying to move, but not fast enough.
Damon climbed up to his feet and blurred in a single movement, grabbing up Elena by the wrist, and dropped with her into a crouched roll that yanked Stefan out of the way of the way as both pieces of rock fell hard from the ground, and the rest of the stones followed.
Elena shielded her arms over her head, and pressed herself tight to Damon as Damon stood crouched over Stefan's body, rocks dive bombing them.
It took 20 seconds for the air to clear; and when it did Elena pushed her face out from Damon's chest into a brown haze. She brushed off dust from her second avalanche.
The hallway behind them had sustained a lot of structural damage from whatever had caused the explosion. The created rock wall from the first explosion had crumbled half away revealing what looked like a prison cell, a bedframe held a girl in a tattered white dressed half drowned in blood, and Sam Winchester, flung on his back, a track of red claws carved across his right eye.
"Oh my god-!" Elena climbed up and over what was left of the fallen debris wall.
Damon pulled Stefan to his feet against the opposite wall, Stefan grunting, eyes flickering in pain, but he managed to hold to the stones that had shaken loose, eyes tracking as Elena climbed over the fallen stone, kneeling by Sam's head.
Blood was leaking out of the hunter's wounds, trickling into his eye. "Sam-" Elena shook his broad shoulders, he didn't move. "Sam!"
Sam's eyes flicked open, and his hands instantly went out to strangle what was in front of him, but he drew them back down when he saw Elena's face smeared with sweat and blood in front of him. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into a sitting position.
Sam looked instantly behind him, towards the back end of the tunnel. "Where's Dean-?"
"I don't know," Elena pulled harder to get Sam upright, even with all her strength it was hard to do. "Come on, this place is collapsing, we have to go!-"
Sam grabbed along the wall, which took enough of his weight off of Elena that she was able to help him fully.
"Dean!" Sam's voice tore over the sight of the flames, the image of it reflected in his eyes.
"Elena!"
A voice from Elena's left whipped her head around to the sight of Caroline's bright blonde hair running towards her, Bonnie close behind.
"Caroline!" Elena swallowed down the shock at seeing her friend some place where she shouldn't be.
Caroline wore an equally such shocked expression as she took in Elena standing next to a hunter, blood streaked across her face; Damon and Stefan equally bloody beside her.
"Stefan-!" Caroline said his name with such shock that it reverberated, sounding half stunned, half on the verge of tears. "Oh my god-"She ran to him, hugging him over all the blood, Stefan accepting the hug even as he grunted in pain. "You died! We saw you die!" Caroline took in the sight of the hunter, accusation in her expression.
Sam gave her no attention in return. "He said five minutes-" He glanced back down the hallway, like he was waiting for it to reveal his brother.
A trickle of heat crept up on the hallway, the trickle grew more intense like the heat slowly rising with the increase in gas from a furnace. An orange light peaked out from the visible end of the hallway, the outline of flames began to show visibility around the edges of the stone.
Elena turned to the funnel of high heat, growing closer to them, a popping noise was heard, which snapped Caroline's head up as well.
Most of the stones that made up the hallway were brown bricks like the kind in kilns, able to withstand very high temperatures. But the splitting sound came from them. The fire had started to split tiny fissures into them from how hot the flames had become.
Sam turned back to the tumbled down bed and scooped up the dead girl's body, climbing over what was left of the makeshift wall.
Bonnie caught sight of the dead girl, her face going pale, remembering the face of the girl she saw moment's ago. "Oh my god-"
"Take her," Sam held out the girl's lifeless body to Caroline.
"What?" Caroline stared up at the girl's gray body, her skin the same color as a dead vampires'. The comprehension of what must have happened to her evaporated in the way the Hunter held her, like he was still trying to protect her even in death.
"Get her out of here," Sam handed off the body to Caroline so fast that she didn't have time to do anything but grab her.
"Elena!" the shout of her name this time produced Jeremy and Matt, Katherine trailing behind, her shoulder bloody, her eyes a pattern of flames in the light.
Katherine eyed Sam like a threat, Damon as well, before her eyes settled on Stefan and a breathless whisper of his name came from her mouth.
"Go back down this hall as fast as you can!" Sam shot the same look back to Katherine that she had shot at him, but next words encompassed her too. "all of you-"
Elena turned to him. "What are you going to do?"
Sam turned around to the flames that grew close enough to see "I have to find Dean-"
"This place is on fire!" Elena shouted over the flames that grew so bright that the lit the hall in a glow of orange, popping and melting the Grow Bulbs above
"I'm not leaving my brother back there!" Sam shouted back over her. He stepped back into the rubble of a room once more, digging through fallen stones frantically. He pushed aside one large flat piece of fallen rock, closing his hand two on objects. He ran back over the rubble, what he held glowed in the light of the flames: Damon's daylight ring, and a syringe filled to the five millimeter mark with blood.
He pushed both of them to Elena. "Go!"
Sam waited only until she closed her hand around them then ran headlong back down the hallway.
"Sam!" Elena shouted after him, watching as he moved past a crumbled piece of smoldering stone, the orange light swallowing him.
The flames leapt higher like it had received a sacrifice. Caroline and Bonnie's heads raised to the flames, hot orange fingers of light now only yards away from them.
"We have to get out of here!" Jeremy shouted. The flames shadows crawled up his t-shirt damp with sweat.
Smoke began to billow out from the glowing hallway like a black cloud, rising clear up to the low ceilings.
"Elena!" Jeremey yelled for her.
Elena stared where Sam had gone, the hallway wasn't even visible anymore, there was nothing left to see but orange and black. "I'm going back!"
"Are you crazy?!" Damon shouted at her. "The fire will kill you!"
"I can't leave them there!" Elena shouted back to him, the smoke blew past them, almost as hot as the flames.
"You saved them once already!" Damon shouted. "You don't owe them anything else!"
"I'm not going to let them die Damon!" Elena shouted back. "They saved me, and Stefan, and you!" She looked over to all of them, even Katherine. "Get out, I'll meet you at the front!"
"How is death ever good plan?" Kathrine retorted.
Damon glared at Katherine in a heat that was equal and above the fire that closed another foot of the gap between it and them. He then turned to Caroline, holding the body of the girl Wes had turned, that he had fed on in his cell. He reached over and grabbed her out of Caroline's grasp and shoved her into Kathrine's
"What the hell?" Katherine jerked to catch the girl's body before she dropped her.
Damon turned to Caroline who still stood near Stefan. His brother was holding to the wall like it had taken the structural supportive place of his skeleton.
Damon pulled Stefan off the wall and shoved him into Caroline, staring her down like he was deciding if she was worthy of what he was about to ask. "Get him out of here!"
"What?" Caroline retorted, catching Stefan's heavier weight, righting him with her body before he fell over.
"Take the hallway all the way down to the livery, then get as far the hell away from here as you can!" Damon glowered at Caroline. "I'm trusting you Blondie, don't make me regret it-"
"Damon don't-!" Stefan's eyes were half open, his voice a rattled, hoarse thing.
Damon stared hard for a moment at Stefan, watching his brown eyes staring back at him. "You better not be dead again by the time I get back." His fingers curled over Stefan's shredded shirt, and through to his shoulder, letting go slowly giving a silent nod to Elena.
"Damon!" Stefan shouted watching as Damon and Elena took off in a run into the orange light.
xxxxxXxxxxx
Damon both cursed Elena for being so stupid and tried not to lose sight of her in as he followed her back through the tunnels, the fire getting hotter and brighter the further back they went. Elena's hair soon became the only thing he could still see of her in the black smoke and orange flames.
The splitting sounds of the bricks rang like fireworks in Damon's ears as he ran, the smell of burning bricks echoing a moment in his memory when he and Stefan used to sneak down to the livery in Mystical Falls and watched as the blacksmith cast horse shoes. As they ran Damon saw no sight of the hunter, only signs of flames, and heat, and acrid smoke that choked its way up his lungs.
A beam dug high up into a section of the stones was released by the outline of fire surrounding it and fell directly into a diagonal right near Elena.
Damon yelled her name and she ducked back just in time, the fire burning up high from the movement, flaming particles of ember rising up like escaping fireflies into the blackened air.
"Dean!" The voice echoed over the cracking of the flames.
Over the fallen diagonal of stone stood a long hallway lined in rubble, a flaming hole rose up high by the hunter who crouched over his fallen brother. The air smelled of kerosene and blood. The embers from the fallen beam fluttered down to the ground igniting a still wet trail of kerosene, the flames consumed the accelerant and leapt up into the air.
Elena jumped back with a gasp as she felt the heat singe the sleeve of her jacket, the fabric smoked but didn't burn. She glanced over all the flames. A vampire's body was caught in the burning flames, being swallowed by them, fire ran in high lines everywhere, licking up where Dean was struggling to get up to his feet.
The left side of Dean's face was a line of matted blood snaked in between a mass of red blisters. He reached up and out with his hands to grasp the collar of Sam's jacket. "Sammy-"
"I got you, c'mon!" Sam lifted Dean up off the ground, draping his arm over his shoulder, pulling him stumbling towards a way that had no exit except flames. Dean's gait was off, like he had been injured more in the last than just his face.
A thundering crack echoed high above them, Elena craned her head up to see the entire wooden support system of the stone roof above where Dean and Sam were devoured completely by flames, Elena heard the wood shredding apart like a million sounds of gunfire.
"Elena!"
Elena heard her name at the same time she heard a heavy grunt and turned in time and saw Damon as pulled up beam that had fallen across the hallway, flames singing up his tattered shirt, getting closer to his skin.
Dam felt the trickle of flames reach his right elbow. "Hurry up!"
Elena ran to Sam and Dean, taking Dean's other arm under hers and pulling the weight of both brothers through the break in the flames.
Damon raised it up against the side of the stone, the heat traveled red hot up his body but he pulled harder until he dropped the flaming stone to the other side of the hallway, beating out an orange line of fire that caught up his shirt sleeve. He ran fast and grabbed Sam Winchester's arm, shoving its weight under him. "Run-" he told Elena as the sound of the wood cracking above reached its zenith. "Run!"
Both vampires blurred at full speed, the hunters supported between them as the roof of fire collapsed inward, all four figures lost to the blaze of orange.
xxxxxXxxxx
"Stefan stop it!" Katherine stood over the passageway doors, hands tight on Stefan's shoulders, just barely able to keep him back with the human strength that she now possessed.
"Get out my way-"Stefan's voice was something masticated and spat out on the ground, feral, threatening. "Damon's down there-Get out of my way before I kill you!"
"Then kill me Stefan," Katherine said in the same tone of voice she had introduced to Stefan long ago on the first night she revealed herself to him as what she really was. "Because I'm not letting you kill yourself going back down there-"
The sun had long gone under the blackness of the sky, taking any excuse for shadows with it except the street lights and lanterns that hung over the livery.
The blood drew high to Stefan's still ashen face. Even in the darkness, his eyes went almost blood red, his fangs descended and he roared a thunderous scream. "Get out of my way!-"
Katherine stood her ground, dark eyes stoic. "I said no-" Her voice choked off as Stefan shot out and grabbed a hold of her neck.
"Stefan don't!" Matt stepped in front of Stefan, yanking at his fists, trying to pry it off of Katherine's neck who gasped and sputtered.
Stefan's free arm shot out backwards and threw Matt hard to the ground, where he slid and landed hard on the packed dirt.
Caroline ran at Stefan and jerked him backwards, pulling hand off Katherine, Katherine fell to the ground in a gasp.
"Stefan,"- She blocked him with her body when he tried to run again at the trap door entrance. "Stefan stop it!" Caroline snatched his shoulders. "The tunnel is on fire!" Her voice tore into emotions at what that meant. "They'll come out, Elena and Damon-they'll both come out!
"Move Caroline!" Stefan screamed at her, he could feel what left of his reserves ebb away to a single thin line a blink away from severing; the adrenaline bore hot and heavy over all his body's screaming that he was finished.
"'No!" Caroline grabbed his shoulders again in 'one, two' tackle when he struggled again to break her hold. "I'm not going to let you die down there!- Damon wouldn't want you to either!"
"I have to save him!" Stefan shouted so loudly that it sent the horses around the livery into a frenzy, whining and rearing in their stalls. "He's my. BROTHER!" a wet, black mass of blood coughed its way of Stefan's mouth when he screamed next, spraying Caroline across the face.
Caroline reared in shock, not one of disgust, but of fear. "Stefan-" she grabbed him up when he started to slide.
The ground beneath them shook like an earthquake, taking with it any signs that Stefan's slide was purely an involuntary action from him. From the depths of the opened door a tremendous rush of heat and orange light billowed upwards, the boards of the livery floor began to shake, the horses reared absolute terror in their stalls, knocking against the wooden walls.
"Damon!" Stefan choked on blood as he called his brother's name. He finally broke Caroline's hold and sprinted in a stance that shouldn't have held him up, but did so on raw adrenaline.
Flames began to spring up from the opened trap door.
"Stefan!" Bonnie shouted Stefan's name bathed in all the shock that moment produced. She ran to grab Stefan back, the boards under her feet jumping up, glowing solid orange beneath the cracks.
Stefan jumped over a creeping orange snaking flame, collapsing onto his knees, staring down directly into the heat, blisters popping and trying to heal themselves on his skin. He shoved his hand through the doorway and the flames, hearing Bonnie scream his name again above his own scream as the fire crawled up his arm.
A hand grabbed into his, and he pulled up hard still screaming. Damon emerged out of the orange light just as the doorway to the underground maze began to collapse on itself.
"Come on!" Stefan pulled him up through the flames in one hard swipe, his brother emerging first, then, Elena from the orange glow, dragging the form of Sam and Dean Winchester through the trap door.
Sam turned and snagged Dean by the shirt hauling him up over the burning piece of wood that caught on his boot.
"Elena!" Jeremy reached out over the orange void and grabbed his sister's hand pulling her hard away from the falling floorboards, grabbing Bonnie back with his free hand.
Stefan pulled Damon back out of the flames, dragging the hunters back with his movements. Caroline snatched the dead body of the vampire up where Katherine had laid her before the falling floorboards claimed the girl.
The floorboards turned molten hot and began to flip backwards from the heat, then collapsed down falling into the fiery tunnel.
Matt ran sideways through a gap in the flames and around to the other stretch of dirt where the horses whinnied and cried in fear behind their stable doors. He unlocked the latches on the door, screaming at the animals to run, which then did in a thundering gallop out into the town's streets.
Katherine wobbled on floorboards like she was on a wave, arms thrown forward then backwards leaping over a chasm in the floor that glowed orange light like hell only to have the floor in front of her swallowed into fire.
Matt heard her scream as the fire caught on her boot, and she tried to kick it away. He ran back though the gap across the floor flaming floor as far as he could to the flaming hole. "Katherine!-" He craned his hand over the hole. "Katherine grab my hand!" He saw just a moment of fear in Katherine Pierce's eyes, half believing that he would drop her to her death, half pure fear of the flames themselves. "I got you-jump!"
Katherine stared at Matt over the heat and the fire and leapt, Matt snatched her hand in midair yanking her sideways and dragging her into a broken run over the flames and out onto the street.
They panted and gasped as one unit on the street, feeling the heat racing up their backs.
Sam turned to see the flames crawl over the dirt, finding fallen tree branches as tinder, snapping them up, moving further until it crawled in a direct path to the old white Lincoln.
Caroline and Damon turned around the same noise. the fire rapidly closing the distance between the ground and the gas tank of the car.
"Caroline-" Damon's voice a bullet about to be ejected from gun "You need to run-," the fire found the back tire of the car. Damon reversed the hold Stefan had on him, so that he grabbed his brother by the front of the collar. "Now!"
Sam did the same for Dean, pulling him back. Dean seemed to come out somewhat from his daze and found his own footing pulling back in almost perfect synchronization with Sam.
"Go," Dean's voice was thunderous. "Go, GO!" His boots broke apart the street as he ran at the end, shoving Sam forward hard in between his shoulder blades.
The fire jumped to its last destination.
Damon turned at the sound of the explosion, watching as the fire blew apart the car, throwing a huge fireball into the air like a miniature sun, swallowing the night.