The Vampire Diaries: A Cage of Burning Light (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Free Page B

didn’t have much reach. She couldn’t get to the table or the door, and
there were no windows she could look out of to try and figure out where she
was.
    “Help?”
she tried yelling. “Someone help me! I’m locked in here, come and help me!
Please!”
    There was
no answer, and she yanked futilely on the chains. Wilson had chosen them well, and her shackles
were too tight for even her small hands to slip through.
    “Come on,
come on, please! Someone has to be able to hear me!”
    Still no
one answered her, but that was when she saw it and her startled gasp sounded
more like a whimper.
    Her ring
was sitting on the table, next to the beakers and a pile of blood bags. She
grasped the finger where it should have been with her other hand and looked up
at the skylights overhead, already lightening with the rising of the sun.
    “No….
Please! Help me!” She yanked on the chains as hard as she could and dropped to
her knees, sobbing with her hands covering her face. “I want to go home; I want
to go home….”

    Bonnie
pulled up outside of the Salvatore Boarding House and jumped out of her car, digging
through her purse for the spare key Elena gave her as she hurried up onto the
front porch.
    Once she
let herself in, she ran up the stairs to Elena’s room.
    It had
been hours since Elena went missing. She didn’t answer her phone, which was off
so they couldn’t use it to track her, and no one had seen her. Given their
history, Bonnie felt she was well within her rights to have a good old panic
about it.
    That was
why she was here. She had a spell she’d used before to track a person, but it
required the use of blood, and she didn’t have any. It was a long shot that
she’d find any here, but long was better than none, and the young witch headed
straight for the makeup table, hoping to find a tissue with a bit of blood on
it or a nicked razor blade or something .
She made a huge mess of the makeup table and then the rest of the room,
muttering under her breath the whole while.
    “I swear,
I’m going to put one of those microchips they use for dogs on you. Can’t you
even go a single day without getting into trouble?”
    She spent
a good 20 minutes searching through the room, but she found nothing. Elena
might be a vampire, but they drank blood, they didn’t bleed it much, especially with their super healing, and
Elena wouldn’t have just left it lying around anyway.
    Bonnie
flopped down on the edge of the bed in frustration. “Why,” she groaned, “can’t
I know a tracking spell based on all the good old voodoo stuff they have in
movies? Like hair?”
    She
flopped back onto the bedspread for a moment, sulking, and then pushed herself
back to her feet and headed over to check the bathroom. She wasn’t ready to
give up yet. She’d find Elena if she had to track down the Gilbert Compass
first. Or make one.
    Did she
know how to make one? Bonnie huffed and resumed her search.

    By the
time Wilson
came back, the sun was high in the sky and Elena stood still and frightened in
the very center of the room, clutching the length of chain as if it could
reassure her.
    All
around her, sunbeams speared down through the skylights to the floor, and the
arrangement of the skylights was such that columns of killing light circled
her, forming the bars of a cage that would hold her even more securely than the
shackles she wore.
    Her head
snapped around as the door opened and Wilson
walked in. The indirect light was making her skin painfully tender, but if she
stayed still, it didn’t burn her.
    She
watched the scientist as he slouched over to the workbench, a put-upon
expression on his face.
    “Please,”
she tried. “Please, you have to let me go. You don’t want to do this.”
    He didn’t
respond. Instead he rummaged through the mess on the bench and turned with a
pistol in his hand. Before she could realize more than that he was actually
pointing it at her, he shot her in the shoulder.
    Elena
screamed. She stumbled