Children Of The Damned

Stefan

“I can’t promise this will work, but I’ll try,” Bonnie said as she rolled out a map of Mystic Falls on her kitchen table. I could tell she was afraid by the way her hands shook, and I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be alright; that Damon wasn’t going to harm her if she couldn’t complete the spell, that her human friends were going to be rescued one way or another. However, I knew that I couldn’t be sure of anything.

I had never seen Damon quite like this before, not even when he was searching for Katherine.

“Give me the shirt,” she said to Damon after having lit candles in a circle around the map. She filled a bowl with rubbing alcohol, and when Damon put the chiffon over-shirt into her outstretched palm, she put it in the bowl, letting it soak in the alcohol.

She held a crystal on a chain like a pendulum, swinging it back and forth over the map.

She dropped a lit match into the bowl, and the shirt caught fire, flickering with blue and purple flames.

The flames shot up higher from the bowl and the candles as Bonnie started to mutter a chant in a language I couldn’t understand. It was like Latin, but somehow more crude than that.

Damon tensed beside me, waiting for something to happen. I knew he wasn’t very trusting of witches, and for good reason. Bonnie had given him plenty of reasons to be worried, but we didn’t need to be worried about her sincerity this time. She knew that innocent people were at stake, and she had been friends with Matt since they were only children. She would do her best to find them.

The crystal started to swing into a circle over one area of the map, and a wind started to blow through the kitchen, lifting Bonnie’s hair around her like a dark halo. The crystal seemed unaffected by the sudden wind, and then the crystal seemed to pull directly to a point on the map, the point of the crystal sticking to a spot on the map as if pulled there by a magnet.

The flames went out, and the wind died down. Bonnie stopped chanting. As she looked down at the map, Damon and I followed her gaze.

“It’s the old warehouse where I found Logan Fell after he was turned. It’s where he was sleeping, taking shelter from the sun, hiding the various rotting corpses of his carelessly acquired victims,” Damon rattled off when he recognized the location.

He didn’t even bother to acknowledge Bonnie before walking out the front door, obviously heading to the car, anxious to get to Ana.

“Thank you, Bonnie,” I said before making my way to the door after Damon.

“Be careful,” she said gravely. “And good luck.”

___________________________________

Eliana

My feeling of panic grew as the minutes ticked by. Surely, he would be back soon. And then what fresh hell would be reserved for Matt and me when Richard came back and discovered what I had done?

Knowing the consequences could be fatal if I failed, I kept moving down rows of shelves, looking for anything that could be used to free us.

Soon I reached an area closed off by a chain linked fence. The gate was pad-locked, but the height was climbable, if it weren’t for the spirals of razor wire that topped the fence.

On the other side of the fence were boxes that looked as if they had recently been put there. There were tracks in the layers of dust of the floor to show that the boxes had been pushed to their place on the far wall, far away from the fence. I could also see the faint impressions of footprints in the greasy layers of dust. There were no layers of dust to speak of on the boxes themselves.

Knowing I didn’t have any other options, and thinking of Matt, I took off my coat and held it in my teeth. I knew I wouldn’t be able to throw it over and get it to cover up enough of the razor wire from where I stood.

When I started to climb the chain links, my battered wrists seemed to scream in protest, but I pressed on, thinking of Matt still bound up and freezing (maybe even losing consciousness) every time I felt like giving up.

Once I had almost reached the top of the fence, I took one hand off the fence and grabbed one side of my coat, tossing it over the side. My arm made contact with the barbed wire, nicking my skin like a large thorn on a rose would, only this thorn was steel and cut like a newly sharpened razor blade, making crimson beads well up on the tender flesh of my inner arm.

I shook it off, instead pushing myself over the side of the fence, my jacket shielding me from further injury by the barbed wire.

However, I was so shaky after my climbing that I landed wrong, and felt a sickening crack as my ankle rolled and I fell over.

Seconds passed as my mouth yawned open in a silent scream, the silent shock before screaming pain.

Yet somehow I managed not to scream. I whimpered and groaned, but crawled over to the boxes, praying their contents were worth the injury.

I threw the first box open to find it stocked full of stakes. I sighed when I saw the box cutter than lay on the floor next to the boxes. Tears welled in my eyes, and I took two stakes, sliding them in each boot, and wincing as the one in my left boot brushed against my swelling ankle.

Now I just needed to get back over the fence with a broken ankle.