The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (28 page)

Elena tucks Damon's jumper cables carefully under the backseat before she gets in beside me.

"So were you followed when you got the new cars?" I prompt.

Stefan flicks a quick glance away toward the side mirror, but it doesn't hide his irritation that I felt I needed to ask at all. Whatever. I have no reason to have faith in his villain-dodging skills, and somebody needs to be man enough to point out the fact that we've all been totally sucking at not being spotted. If we act like it's fine, as Stefan prefers to do, then we won't ever get any better.

"Nope," he says.

Caroline rolls her eyes. "You guys, play nice. We're all on the same team here. Jeremy, just so you know, after you dropped us off at the airport, we compelled our way through security to lose whoever might have been tailing us, watched the checkpoint for half an hour to make sure no one else compelled their way through without tickets, then slipped out through another terminal, rented cars, took the employee hallways to the rental car pickup lot, and broke a lock so we could drive out through a service entrance just in case they were smart enough to watch the rental car exit."

I'm impressed, but I don't want them to think I wouldn't have thought of all that myself, so I just nod.

“So where are we going?” Stefan asks, heading through quiet neighborhood streets back toward the highway. The Suburban doesn’t follow right behind us. Before we split up to get the new cars, I told them that we needed to stay further apart so if one of us got caught, the other car could still get away. We’ll just have to rely on texts to keep in contact.

“We need a new plan for hiding from the Augustines,” I say. “Staying on the move hasn’t helped us and I think if we keep it up, they’ll figure out we switched cars. We need to hole up somewhere before they get a fix on our new vehicles. Somewhere close enough to Whitmore so we can start to search for Damon, and isolated enough we’ll be able to keep watch for any of the Augustine’s spies coming around. Maybe a really small town, or something.”

“Not a small town,” Stefan says. “We’ll stand out too much.” He pauses, turning on his blinker to change lanes. “Damon used to use this trick with vacation rentals when he was trying to hide from someone…he’d call around to find out who bailed on their reservations at the last second and he’d swoop in and take them, but compel the owner to keep the name the same so he wasn’t traceable.”

“Why didn’t he just compel the owner to write down a fake name?” I ask skeptically.

Stefan sighs and accelerates as if he just realized he wasn’t quite going the speed limit. “Damon has always had this thing about his name. He refuses to use a fake name, not even when he needs to disappear for a while. I think it’s because our father threatened to disown him so many times. Living exactly as he pleases with our father’s name is his weird way of getting back at the old man. But it makes it a lot harder over the years to keep people from realizing you’ve never died, or grown older. Especially with a name as uncommon as his.”

“You know, I think a vacation rental would be perfect,” Caroline puts in from the passenger seat. “There are some like little walled estates, and we could all stay together in one big house instead of taking up a whole floor of a motel.” She glances at Elena and her voice drops. “It might be nice to all be together. At a time like this.”

Elena crosses her arms, her neck steel-cable taut. “Don’t pretend like you care, Caroline. It just makes it worse.”

“Just because Damon’s a jerk doesn’t mean I want him to be tortured by a bunch of freaks in a lab!” she protests, looking wounded. "I want to find him too, Elena, jeez.”

“We could compel the owner to use a fake name,” Stefan interrupts in a pointedly mild voice. “And find a rental with surveillance cameras around the property.”

I open a search window on my phone for vacation rentals within a four-hour radius of Whitmore College. There’s a squeak of windshield wipers and I look up to see a light rain streaking the windows.

"Look, staying hidden isn't enough," Elena says impatiently. "We need to find Damon and either figure out how to rescue him, or call the Augustines and make some kind of a deal."

"No," I say firmly before she can say another word. "Listen, how many times has one of us been kidnapped? And we always rush into a plan to save them and end up giving up all our leverage or we take on people we have no business trying to fight and every single time it blows up in our faces. I'm not doing that again," I tell them. "We're going to be smart about this. Besides, if they wanted to kill Damon, they could have staked him at the bus station. And one vampire said they were supposed to take him alive. Which means we have time to outsmart them."

"Of course they didn't stake him!" Elena explodes. "Because they want to torture him, to make him pay for what he did to the Society back in the fifties. They probably want to experiment on him and turn him into one of their sire-bonded freaks!" Her voice wrenches and she dissolves into tears.

My shoulders sag and Caroline reaches into the back seat to squeeze my sister's knee.

"They can't sire bond him to anyone, Elena," I mutter. "He's already a vampire."

"Yeah, but they can make him feed on vampires and you don't know what that would do to..." Her voice contorts into sobbing until I can't even tell what she's saying anymore.

Caroline gives me a narrow-eyed look and unbuckles her seatbelt, gesturing for me to trade places with her. She climbs over the wide console and I slip past her into the passenger seat, feeling like dirt. But Damon wouldn't want Elena to put herself in danger to save him, and that's exactly what she'd be doing by trying to contact the Augustines and bargain with them.

Caroline wraps her arms around my sister, pulling her into a tight hug. Elena blows out an unsteady breath and hugs her friend back, her eyes squeezed shut. She looks like she’s had absolutely as much as she can take for one day.

"I don't understand why we're arguing," Caroline says. "We all want the same thing, and we already have what the Augustines want more than Damon or any of us: Silas." She takes a deep breath. "And I can't believe I'm saying this, but why don't we take his head, concrete the rest of his body into the coffin and hand it over? Even if they figure out a way to heal him back together to get his blood, he can't mind-control anybody without a head, right?"

"Wow," Stefan says without inflection, slanting a look at Caroline in the rearview mirror. She sticks her tongue out at him, and a faint smile crosses his face. "That was a very disgusting and very creative idea, Caroline, but even without his head, Silas is a powerful tool. Do we really want to give the ability to cure all human disease to a secret society with a super strong vampire army who can also compel anyone who stands against them? With just those two things, they could exert a lot of control over humans and vampires alike."

"Okay, actually, Stefan's right," I agree. "And like I've been saying, I don't think we should give them Silas. Not any piece of him. But they aren't the only ones who have a super strong vampire on their side."

"Ric," Stefan says, braking softly for a traffic light.

I nod. "He can rescue Damon. All we need to do is figure out where they're holding him, and the best way to sneak in."

Elena says something that's garbled by sniffling. Caroline finds her a tissue and she blows her nose, raising her swollen dark eyes to mine. A guilty ache throbs behind my sternum.

"Damon left his phone behind," Elena says. "He's been compelling humans to scout around Whitmore looking for clues about the Augustines. As long as we have his phone, we can have them keep spying for us." She bites her lip, fingers shredding the tissue in her lap. "I thought we could pay them for helping us, when this is all over."

More compelling humans? Don't they ever get tired of messing around with people's lives? I can see by Elena's crestfallen expression that she knows exactly what I'm thinking and I can't decide if paying them really makes it better. I mean, it's not like they're agreeing to help.

"It's really smart, actually," Caroline pipes up. "If they're human, the Augustines won't hurt them if they get caught." She gives me a level look and I turn back around, frowning at the front window.

But she's right.

"All right," I tell them, going back to the search on my phone for vacation rentals. "That's where we'll start."

I can't help but sneak a small look into the backseat, and when I see my sister's expression, I try to dig up a reassuring smile for her because I know she's thinking about Damon's face, the day he told us about what the Augustines did to him, and with her eyelashes still spiky with tears, I can't pretend I'm not thinking about it, too.

"We'll get him back, Elena," I promise.

She nods furiously, and her eyes sparkle with fresh tears, but she smiles back at me anyway.

*
              *              *

The next morning, when I dump my suitcase onto a bed, it’s not in a motel. I found us a vacation house on a walled, heavily wooded property with enough cameras to make it a voyeur’s paradise. It’s in the forest, but built Mediterranean-style with a courtyard opening in the center and benches around a gently burbling fountain crisscrossed with leafy strands of shade.

Cali would have loved it.

I didn’t even take the guitar she left me out of the SUV because I can’t look at the courtyard without picture her playing there.

I yank off my tee shirt and toss it across the room, letting it hit the wall and fall there. No point in staying packed because we’re not going to have to leave in a few hours. No one followed us here and as long as we stay out of sight, we’re home free for a while.

I zip open my duffel to get some fresh clothes and that’s when I see it: Cali’s iPod, ear
buds neatly coiled around it, lying right on top of my hastily folded jeans. When I click it on, the screen opens to show the artist name Aperture, and an album name I don’t recognize. My fingers squeeze tighter.

The second, unreleased album. It has to be.

There are only four tracks.

I plug in the ear buds and jab the button so eagerly that it sticks for a second. In the first track, there are no drums. Nothing but guitar, her smoky alto and some dark bass that comes in late and low.

I sink down on the bed, and as I check the name of the song, I see the date across the top of the screen. October 13.

It’s my birthday.

I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry because I got the album I’ve been waiting forever for but I’m also back to only being able to hear Cali Jameson through my ear buds. And it hurts so much more now that I’m in love with more than her voice.

*
              *              *

DAMON

When I wake up, the first thing I notice is the handcuffs. They’re twice as thick as the kind the human cops use and they’re biting into my sacrum. I shift with a groan so I’m not lying on top of them anymore.

The second thing is that my body is heavy with an aching kind of sting, like I drank a poison ivy smoothie before going a few too many rounds on the sparring mat with Ric. That’s wrong: I should be waking to the sandpaper-over-nerve-endings tingle of a healing spinal column, not a vervain hangover.

The
third thing is that I’m in the Twilight Zone.

Under my cheek, the couch upholstery is a smooth peachy-beige and as I blink blearily I see that the carpet is industrially short and dyed in mild variegated colors: the better to hide the kind of nasty spills you expect in a doctor’s office. The room is heavy with the unmistakable odor of Yankee Candle’s best attempt to make wax smell like baked goods.

The other heartbeat in the room is slow.

Too slow to belong to a nice human receptionist who could provide both a tasty vervain hangover cure and a burst of strength that might be enough for me to break out of these suped-up handcuffs.