The Vampire Diaries: Out of my Mind (Kindle Worlds Novella) (2 page)

Klaus wants to punish Stefan for lying by compelling me again, something horrible. The suggestion pokes at my brain like a fork testing if I’m cooked. Chew my tongue out? Yes, please – can I trade that one for the one I’ve already got? Torture Monopoly, never ever pass go. Ha.

Now Klaus is railing at Stefan, I’m not following but I don’t have to because I know what he is going through. Stefan’s love is complicated. Klaus craves it in a way I once did. Klaus riles him and I remember that too and then Klaus lets him pin him against the wall, one stashed stake poised above his heart. Stefan is fooling no one, Klaus and I both know he won’t kill him, he couldn’t kill me. He hates that he needs a brother, can’t love him, can’t kill him, even when the him is only a substitute.

“This is ridiculous,” Rebekah whines. She is prowling toward me too quickly, I can’t prepare, all I have time to do is scan her hands for the knife. She releases my left hand and I swing from the right trap like a monkey. Now it’s open and I crumple on the tarp, my knees bend, crash against the hard floor. “Take your brother as a sign of good faith,” she says but we both know it is an act of destruction. She winks at me before she leaves and I want to hurl but I have bled everything, it is all gone. I am all gone. Nothing is left in me but her hook.

In the car, Stefan doesn’t speak. I don’t speak. I groan. He grits his teeth. He is silently berating himself but he should save it for me, for when I flay the skin from his girlfriend’s bones and lick them dry while she watches.

We’re home. Basement cell, Stefan. Think. Be smart and figure this out because if I tell you then I can’t do it and I have to do it.

Is Elena here? Where is Elena?

I am a bomb.

He supports my weight, not gently enough, in the wrong direction, to my bathroom. Turns on the water, tries to help me with my shirt. I scowl, he leaves. Steam clouds the mirror but I can still see myself behind it. I am a bloody smear.

My shoulders ache in every position. I feel heavy. I am not used to being responsible for my weight. The water pounds against my skin. I sit in my shower, on that ledge where Andie’s perfect toes perched while she shaved her impossibly long legs. I miss her, I miss them, I miss then. The water pries the slits apart. Weak, pale blood runs and I cannot come clean. I will never come clean.

I long for Elena and I don’t trust the reason.

Safety is unfamiliar. Rebekah will appear, Stefan’s dismembered head will wobble on my bed, the ragged, gruesome wound exposing meat. I can feel the tarp slip against the hard wood when I take a step. I cower when my hip grazes the corner of the vanity, I am certain it’s her knife.

The hook aches. It is impossible to ignore.

I wrap a towel around my waist and register the fleeting gratitude that Rebekah didn’t slice my dick off. It must have crossed her mind, but then, she would have to know what damage I could wreak with it intact. And now I can think of nothing else because the hook has skewered that thought and I am watching myself violently drill a screaming Elena into her bed. I dry heave; I pinch my thigh to bring me back. I will not. I will not. The hook pierces, tugs. It is not happy.

“Are you okay?” Stefan is brooding on the edge of my bed. He steals a glance at me; my chest is raw with new scars. I could teach anatomy class with my wrists, still. He winces, tries to chuckle. “Of course not.”

“Right,” I say.

He’s all business because he has no real idea how to help me. “Look, I have to go over to Alaric’s to get that stake back. Will you be all right here? I brought you some bags --”

We both hear Elena’s car in the driveway and I am pulling pants on before he can form the first word. “No, I’ll go.”

“What? Damon, no, you should rest. You look terrible --”

I’m dressed. I’m clean. I’m Damon on the outside. Watch me get the fuck out of here before I kill the girl I love. “Got to go – hot date with Dr. Jekyll.”

I am downstairs before she is on the porch but I can’t find my keys. I haven’t touched them since before. They are antediluvian like everything else in this place, nothing here knows what happened. I blur around the room looking for them but it costs me – I should have grabbed a blood bag upstairs. I am near panic. Here she comes and
dammit where are they
? Something shimmers beside the staircase. I snatch them up, they feel like knives. She’s already opening the door.
Get out now.
I am caught.

Elena pauses, worried. She can see almost none of what is wrong with me. “Oh my God, Damon, how are you?”

“Fine.” I grit my teeth against the hook. I squint, I’m thinking. Absolutely not, leave. Do not hurt her, do not speak, do not touch. Leave. Yank. “No thanks to you.”

Her mouth opens and closes. She is hurt.
Now
I can leave.

Chapter 3

I was hoping for a little help but Alaric has his own crazy to worry about, having managed to steal his own stake from himself. We are neck and neck for craziest motherfucker in Mystic Falls, and that is saying something. Stefan is useless for figuring this stuff out and I need someone to figure it out. I need someone to stop me.

I’m home again, home is empty, and I come home empty-handed. I am the Gertrude Stein of home and emptiness. I tramp down to the basement but dammit if you cannot lock yourself in a dungeon. I stand in the dank, floorless room, nothing here but dirt and history and brick. Could I rig the door to lock when I pull it from the inside?

The hook does not like where this is going. It prefers the plan it hatched, with only the tiniest suggestion from me, which involved throwing Elena from the top of the Lockwood mansion. It even drove me over to her house to pick her up so I could play Elena Shotput and it wasn’t until I saw her peering out at me from her front window that I realized where I was and sped away like a criminal.

I wish the hook could be satisfied with passive-aggressive comments but it says no, it says be creative and we both know that repetition doesn’t qualify. It wants me to be an artist. It hurts to refuse, hurts like nothing I have ever felt before, not like knives or the teeth of bear traps, not like burning alive. Nothing hurts like the hook.

The front door squeaks open upstairs. “Damon?” Her voice tip-toes down to me.

Before I can stop myself I am dutifully, diabolically shouting, “down here!” I clamp my hand over my mouth too late. I am a cartoon character, holding words in with my fucking
hand
.

She is at the top of the basement stairs. I peek my head out the door of the cell and she smiles an apologetic request. She has everything backwards. I am desperate to warn her but if I do
that
then I can’t do
it
and I have to do it so I blur up the stairs and am standing right next to her. I give her no breathing room and she smells better than anything I have smelled in a very long time, she smells like lilacs. She smells like sugar and skin. “Elena,” I murmur and the rest of that sentence is
get out of here
, only she can’t hear it.

I gesture an invitation downstairs. She takes a step but my foot is just a little in the way so she trips, falls, face-plants in the dirt at the bottom of the stairs with a resounding thud.

“Ow,” she mutters to herself.

I am a freak show. I can’t control my own damn feet.

“Clumsy of me,” I say. I take the stairs slowly and watch her brush the dust from her jeans, maybe more careful over her knees. Did she break something? Just a tiny fracture perhaps?

“Are you okay?” Say no.

“Yeah,” she says. Damn. “What are you doing down here?”

I pause, I stall. Talking is very complicated. The hook has its own agenda, it rips through my brain to can get access to my mouth so the cowering part of me can tell her every horrible thing I have ever half-thought about her.
You dick-teasing, hopeless martyr, at least Katherine would suck me off before she ran off to Stefan’s bedroom, and she moaned like a very bad kitty with him, not like your cheap little grunts
. I bite my lip to keep it in and consider volunteering again to chew out my tongue, thanks Klaus, great idea. Another part of me, I am seriously in danger of a psychotic break, the part of me that is clinging white-knuckled to some old image of myself is screaming
get out of here, save yourself for once in your life you stupid danger-sucking whore
and see? The hook is winning again.

I clear my throat and wonder what is about to come out of this treacherous hole in my face. “Looking for something.” Like my sanity. Peace. A bat to smash your head with. My head with.

“Can I help?”

Under no circumstances. Yank. “Sure. Come on in.”

She steps across the threshold and I slam her into the doorjamb by accident on purpose. “Oops,” I say. She looks at me like
what is your problem?
and I want to Pavarotti the whole blessed story to her, every stab and twist, ending with
now will you please just get out of here before I eat you?
Instead I attempt a gracious smile. “You first,” I offer lamely, too late.

I follow her into the cell and now the hook is much happier about this whole cell situation, it is squealing with delight because if I could figure out how to lock us both in imagine the torture I could unleash on this girl. And then I do imagine it, I can’t not. There is wall-slamming and gut-punching and hair-pulling; there is nothing here to slice her with except my fangs but that’s all right because now there is chomping and ripping and blood-draining and of course there is always verbal cruelty, I have a black belt in that.

The hook reminds me that I don’t need a lock. I could accomplish any and all of those things right now because I am a monster and was even before. I could crush her in a heartbeat, no warning, just do it.

I bear down against the yank I know is coming. Suck it, Rebekah. “Actually Elena, you should go.” I am yowling with pain on the inside, skewered, a vampire-kabob.

She is resolute and I know those eyes, those are eyes that need to confess. Father Damon, that’s me, say three Hail Marys and lean your head back for just a second. She breathes, she won’t relent. “I wanted to rescue you first but Stefan thought you would want us to go through with the plan. I shouldn’t have listened to him. I am so, so sorry.”

I close my eyes but all I can see is bloody, decapitated Elena so they fly open again. “Fine. Now go.”

“But I want to help you.” She cannot take a hint. She can’t even take direct motherfucking instructions. “You’re still feeling vulnerable, Damon, maybe still scared. I know you don’t want to admit it. But listen to me: everything you’re feeling, it’s normal. And it will get better. I can help.” She waits but she will get nothing from me and that’s better than the indeterminate violent something I am ready to give her. “It’s good that you’re still feeling. That you didn’t flip the switch.”

I wouldn’t be able to tolerate this patronizing crap even if I was the king of perfectland with an assfull of sunshine. “Leave.”

“Damon, you have to let someone in. I want to help you.”

“Get out of my house.” I slam my right fist against my thigh because damn if it wasn’t getting ready for an upper cut without telling me.

“Don’t shut yourself away like this. Don’t shut me out. I know, I should have found you sooner and saved you. You would have saved me and I should have saved you.”

Yes and this is me saving you because if you don’t leave this instant I am going to bash your head against these bricks and watch your cute little doppelganger brains slide down the wall, after which I will bash my own head there until it is no longer attached. So if you want to save me, now is your chance. Leave now leave fucking leave
you have to leave
.

The very best I can do, and I give it a solid 10 for technique, is keep my trap shut. Trap. Ha. I will never not be thinking about that room.

Her expression starts out hopeful but I am still not saying anything and my hands are fists at my sides, so tense I am getting actual finger cramps, what’s one more kind of pain really. And now those beautiful eyes that did save me, Elena, they did, those eyes are losing their luster and sliding into something mournful because maybe, just maybe she is more than a dick-tease, maybe she is just a confused teenager who loves two boys and one just a little more than the other. Sucker, that’s not even a little bit true.

“Fine.” She waits a second more for me to stop her but I am too busy stopping myself. She leaves, finally, I hear her footsteps on the stairs and I take a breath, I relax for half a second, less, and that’s it, I lose.

She is by the door but I am not done with her. I jam her fragile, pulsing body against the wall. I pin her, hold her there with my hips and God help me but I am hard as a rock and that is the hook too because this is the opposite of sexy, it’s just another way to scare her and I can see it in her eyes, she’s definitely scared but she’s hiding it, we are both so damn good at hiding from each other. My elbows crash against the wall, I frame her face, I surround her. Her indignation feels familiar, like old jeans.

“Damon, you win. I’m going. Okay?”

“Don’t come back,” I snarl and the snarling is the hook but the words are me, just listen to the words Elena. And then the tiny portion of me that can still think its own thoughts does. Be sneaky, plant a seed that she might be able to figure out or hey, she might not and I could just torture her until she doesn’t resemble a person anymore. The seed is barely an idea but it’s all I’ve got so I muster all of my strength, it takes everything in me but I beg her, I whisper into her neck, “please.”

It is a message in a bottle. It is code. Help me, Elena. I never say please.

Chapter 4

I am thirsty. I’m pretty sure the hook is an alcoholic.

Elena hasn’t been back. She didn’t get it. I knew it was a long shot. I am on my own. Always have been.

The night was long and today feels like forever. It doesn’t matter if I sleep, the dreams transform, they are just below the surface. Stefan, a child, I know what’s coming so I won’t let go of his hand, my fingers are a vice around his, and he doesn’t drown but suddenly I am now, I am me, I don’t know my own strength and I rip his tiny arm out of its socket. Then another, Elena’s face and I refuse, categorically refuse all dreams of Elena, I tear open a wound on my wrist and pour bourbon over it to keep the dream away.