The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (26 page)

I look over and my sister is wiping her eyes while Ric sits wearily down on one of the hotel beds and opens his mouth to keep arguing with her. But before he can, there’s a sound like splintered wood being ground into fractured cement.

Cali gasps, her wrist jerking unnaturally as the bones re-align, and she stumbles back and starts to fall. Stefan catches her around the waist, trying to avoid her hurt arm, but it leaves her pressed against his chest and she startles, her whole body going rigid.

I take an immediate step forward but he’s already letting her go.

“I’m sorry, I—” Stefan says, eyes wide.

Cali shakes her head, and backs another step away. “I’m fine. It’s better now.” She swallows tightly. “Thanks.”

“Elena…” I hear Caroline say, and then the bathroom door closes behind my sister, the loaded silence behind it reminding me of all the hours our bathroom door stayed locked after our parents died. Elena used to hide in there, muffling her sobs into crumpled towels as if I wouldn’t know she was crying just because I couldn’t hear her.

Cali looks after her, the corners of her mouth turning downward, and I wonder if she’s having the same problem I am. I can’t let go of how they kidnapped Cali and used her, but my anger got lost somewhere amidst the guilt that feels like it’s wringing me out like an old rag, and I can’t blame my sister for anything with the silence throbbing behind that closed bathroom door.

Cali shivers and I suddenly realize her skin is the color of a dirty sidewalk, sweat beginning to shine along her cheekbones.

“Hey, are you okay?”

She blinks, and her pupils seem a little too large. She doesn’t answer me.

“What’s wrong with her?” I ask, alarmed. “Is she having some kind of allergic reaction to the vampire blood?”

God, how much can go wrong in a single day?

“Cali’s in shock,” Stefan says, his voice pitched low and deliberately steady. “Stress and adrenaline and then the injury. She needs to lie down, get her feet elevated.”

“I’m good,” she insists sharply. “My hand’s probably still healing, that’s all. Look, we’re already packed and ready.” Her eyes skip guiltily away toward the door. “Maybe I should wake Matt so we can go?” As she talks, she’s already edging toward the exit, but on the second step she takes backwards, her ankle wobbles.

I catch her around the waist before I think about how pissed she was at Stefan for doing pretty much exactly the same thing. She reels a little unsteadily against my chest, her skin feverishly hot even through her shirt.

“Okay, you need a minute,” I say firmly, pulling the motel card key out of my pocket and then swooping my hand under Cali’s knees, pulling her up into my arms.

“Jeremy, what are you doing?” she protests, but I ignore her and look straight at Stefan, because if he’s not thinking it yet, he will be, and bargaining Silas is
not
an option.

“Don’t call anyone until I get back,
especially
not Professor Maxfield,” I tell him firmly, and before he can argue I head for the door.

Caroline zips around us and opens the door for me with a tight smile. I wince a little at her in thanks and her smile softens.

The door closes behind us, and when we reach our old hotel room, Cali takes the key I’m still holding and unlocks it. I turn around and catch the door with my back, hugging her in close to me so I can fit us both through the door and carrying her all the way to the bed, the sheets still in the tangle we left them in a few hours ago.

I sit her down and she starts to tilt to one side, her lashes fluttering as her eyes roll back into her head.

“Whoa, Cali!” I catch her and she pulls herself back to a sitting position, her head falling forward and her elbows braced hard against her knees. “Are you gonna puke?” I ask nervously, glancing around for a trash can. I spot one by the TV and bring it over.

She shakes her head but I can hear her swallow thickly. She mutters something and I kneel down next to her, tucking back the strands of hair that escaped her twisted bun.

“What?”

“So damned embarrassing…” she says with a weak laugh and lies back onto the bed, her lashes dark against chalky cheeks. “Stefan was right. It’s shock. I get the same thing every time I donate blood, or do more than scrape my knee. It’s freaking pitiful. The night your house burned down,” she says, “you’re lucky I didn’t pass out right in the middle of the big vampire fight.”

I wince, thinking of how the night of the fire, Damon was fighting off vampires with a wrist just as broken as Cali’s just was. I can’t imagine how much pain he must have been in and I have to push the thought away so I can try to focus on helping Cali.

I tug out the chopstick that’s holding her hair because it can’t feel good to lie down on that. “Can I get you some water or something?”

“No, I’ll be all right in a second.” She swallows again. “Sorry. I know we don’t have time for this.”

I nudge the trashcan discreetly closer, just in case. “It’s okay,” I say tentatively, even though my mind is still churning over and over with the problem of how to track the car the Augustines took Damon in when all I remember is the color and kind of how it was shaped. I should have gotten the license plate number.

When I look back at Cali, her eyes are open but focused on the ceiling.

“I was, um, not so much ready to face them all again right now,” she admits. “It’s like seeing double, you know? They’re like these completely different people in my head from when I met them the first time.” Her fingers trace her newly-healed wrist, and she presses her lips together. “And I know they’re trying to make it up to me, but I’m not sure if I could ever be comfortable around them again, especially knowing they’re still doing those things to other humans.”

My fingers clench uselessly at my sides. I want to hold her, but I hate it when people touch me when I’m sick so I just sit down on the bed next to her and pull a pillow down to tuck it under her ankles like Stefan said to.

“Look, Cali, you don’t have to stay here with them. You heard the Augustines: they aren’t going after humans. You and Matt will be safer at home, especially…”

“Especially what?” she asks, instantly suspicious. “If you already have a plan for how we can get Damon back, I want to be involved. I’m the reason they caught up with him.”

I shake my head. “No, it was—”

“No, Jeremy, it wasn’t,” she interrupts. She makes a frustrated sound. “God, I never
think
when I’m pissed off,” she growls, sitting up and shoving a hand back through her hair, “and I
know
that about myself, so I should have known enough to wait and not leave until I had a plan. Because it doesn’t exactly help anything to run away from one set of kidnappers straight to another one, now does it?” She rolls her eyes. “Idiotic.”

“You had every right to be upset,” I reassure her. “I should have known better, too. And no, I don’t have a plan yet. I just know that if the Augustines won’t go after humans on their own, then you’ll be safer far away from all of us.”

“If you don’t have a plan, then why’d you tell them not to call Professor Whoeverthehell?” she asks, her eyes focused sharply on my face. I try to urge her back to lying down but she resists, raising her eyebrows at me.

“Because he’s our only contact with the Augustines, and they want Silas because his blood is the cure for a whole bunch of stuff, even though they don’t know yet that the blood came from him. I’m afraid Stefan will call them and offer to trade,” I admit.

“Silas? The guy you’ve been hauling around in a coffin?” she asks skeptically. “First, that’s a super creepy ransom demand, and second, I don’t really think you can get that much blood from a dead guy.”

“Well, he’s immortal, but they’d have to feed him and let him heal to get more blood to make the cure for human disease. Of course, once they did that, he could mind control all of them into being his own personal army until he could destroy all vampires for good.”

Cali blinks at me. “Why did I think for even a second that this couldn’t get worse?”

I press my lips tightly together. “Look, ransom isn’t an option, but we’ll find a way to get Damon back. We always do. But I don’t want you to be anywhere near here when we are forced to take on the Augustines.”

“Well then you shouldn’t be either!” she bursts out, curling her legs under her as she leans forward. “You may not be exactly human but you’re sure not immortal and I’m not the kind of girl that can bring you back from the dead, Jeremy!”

“Yes, but it’s
Damon.
” I explode off the bed but then stop, my shoulders slumping a little bit because I have nowhere to go. “He threw me his keys, Cali. He—”

I don’t have the right words but I want to tell her he stayed in Mystic Falls even though I could hear the longing in his voice when he was on the phone to my sister, and I could read the restlessness in the rhythm of his pacing for hours every night after he hung up the phone. He stayed at the lake house with me and Matt and trained me relentlessly, his eyes intent on every flaw in my movements even while he was listening to her voicemail for the twentieth time. I used to think he did those things for Elena, but now I know that’s not true, even though I’d be too embarrassed to try to explain the difference to anyone else.

“Don’t you think I get that?” Her back is painfully straight, her tousled hair swinging free. “Two weeks after my grandma had her first stroke, I was back at college, rehearsing three times a week, playing a show every weekend, barely making it up five minutes before my first class and pulling lattes at the fucking
Starbucks
, Jeremy.”

I hesitate, confused by her sudden switch in topic and frozen in place by the tears suddenly shimmering in her eyes.

“I’m the girl who
didn’t
go home when her family needed her,” she says with a catch in her normally confident voice that just destroys me. “So yeah, I get it.”

She looks up toward the ceiling, blinking rapidly like Caroline sometimes does when she’s trying not to cry, and I take a step back toward the bed before she holds up a hand to stop me.

“But if you’re going to be on the front lines, I’m going to be too,” she says, and fear rattles through me at the proclamation. She pulls one knee up and wraps her arms around it, ducking her head slightly as she says, “He told me the
truth
, Jeremy. He didn’t have to, and he sure didn’t have to make Stefan give me my original memories back, including every ugly minute of exactly how it happened. But he did.”

I swallow and drop my eyes because I kind of wish he wouldn’t have. Whatever she remembered, it obviously haunts her and maybe it would have been easier to have just the facts. But that’s Damon: all or nothing. It’s something most people hate about him.

“We left someplace we knew was safe, and when we struck out on our own we endangered every one of your friends and Damon came to help us anyway,” she says quietly. “And yeah, I know he wasn’t there for me. But he could have thrown me to the Augustines as a distraction and zoomed off with you, and he didn’t.”

This time there’s no holding the tears back and I shove the heels of my hands against my eyes and tip my head up to the ceiling, pressing hard because I want to growl, or scream or break something and I need to get back to Stefan’s room and make a plan but all I want to do is hit my knees and just
collapse
because she’s right.

Damon did all of this for me.

He told me, inside this same damn room, that he only gave Cali the truth because he knew how much she meant to me.

And just like that, I know what I have to do. I’ve heard Damon use me against Elena dozens of times. It was even how he got her out of the burning boarding house, because he knew I was the only thing she cared about enough to even
think
about leaving him behind.