Лиза Смит: The Craving

‘ Recompense .’ He said each syllable carefully.

‘Recompense?’ I echoed.

He bared his teeth. ‘Yes, recompense. For taking Katherine. And destroying any chance to break the curse.’

Katherine ? What did she have to do with all of this, with this abomination in front of us? With the Sutherlands? And what curse?

I looked over at Damon. She had always shared more details of her life, of being a vampire, with him. But my brother was wide-eyed and gaping like a fish, even more stunned by hearing her name than I was.

I thought about the blissful, ignorant weeks I’d spent as her slave and lover, never imagining that she would lead me straight into hell.

The man backed up a few steps, including Damon in his foul stare.

‘Yes, you understand now,’ he said, nodding. But we didn’t.

‘I—’ Damon began to speak.

‘ SILENCE! ’ the man roared. Suddenly he was pressed up against the bars, a blackened fingernail inches from Damon’s throat. ‘Do you dare deny it?’

With a chilling deliberateness he pushed an iron bar aside like it was a curtain. The metal screamed in agony. In a flash of darkness he had stepped through, and wrapped a giant hand around each of our throats.

‘You took Katherine. I take your new life from you. An eye for an eye, as you people are fond of saying. Right?’

‘I…don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, choking.

The monster threw back his head and laughed.

‘ Of course you don’t .’ He snapped his head back, suddenly fixing me with his eyes and a sneer on his lips. He didn’t believe me. ‘Katherine never mentioned Klaus?’

Even after her death, Katherine continued to haunt us. I looked over at Damon. There was a pained, heartbroken look on his face. It was gone in an instant, but for that one moment I thought I saw through to my old brother. He was shocked by the fact that Katherine, the love of his life, had been involved with a creature as heartless as the one that stood before us. I felt for him.

Unbidden, half a dozen images of Katherine came to my mind. Her amber eyes that commanded attention. Her long black hair hanging in waves around her neck, as if she had just done something that might have dishevelled it. Her tiny waist and mischievous smile. She had been irresistible. And Damon and I weren’t the only ones to have felt her pull.

The man tightened his grip on my throat, and I could hear the groaning of vertebrae. In a moment we would be on the floor, our necks snapped as easily as that of the prisoner Damon had killed.

Then suddenly I was free. Damon fell to the ground beside me, also released from the stony grip that held him.

From outside the cell, the monster smiled viciously.

‘I will see you two later,’ he promised.

And then, almost as an afterthought, with one finger he delicately pushed the jail bars back into place.

‘And remember, I am always watching.’

Damon and I remained in the cell for several minutes after the man left, too stunned to even contemplate escaping. The guards didn’t come back in with the keys. I didn’t blame them.

I cursed, slamming the bars. It seemed that no matter what I decided to do, which way I turned, things got worse. And the Sutherlands…they had been innocent bystanders, swept up in the path of destruction just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. While my brother didn’t actively cause their deaths, he was no less responsible. I turned on him, ready to tear him apart.

And then I saw the look on his face.

Damon’s eyes had glazed over and he leaned against the wall for support. He’d worn the same dazed expression for weeks after he’d woken up as a vampire and discovered that Katherine was dead.

‘What was that?’ he whispered, finally looking at me.

But I had no idea what that was. All I knew was that it was more powerful, more dangerous, more deadly than any creature I’d ever encountered. Anger at my brother drained away and something like exhaustion set in. ‘I’m not sure, though I think he left me a message,’ I said, remembering the bloody scrawl on the side of the Sutherlands’ home. ‘But what was that about Katherine? What was he to her?’

Damon shrugged. ‘I have no idea. She never told me about that…thing.’

‘He said we took her from him . What the hell does that mean? What curse is he talking about? Did Emily cast a spell on someone?’ I said. I began to pace, my mind racing.

‘I’m guessing it means he believes we killed her. Which you did, brother,’ Damon said.

In a pique, he sat down, stretched his legs out and put his hands behind his head, pillowing it against the stone. I would get no more answers out of him.

I slid down against the bars and buried my head in my hands, thinking of my time with Katherine. Had she ever said anything about her past? Let anything slip? But I had been so completely under her thrall that it was impossible to know what had been real and what she had compelled me to believe. Though I remembered biting her, I didn’t have any memory of her feeding me her blood. But she must have often, as I had enough of her blood in my system to come back as a vampire after my father shot me. In a funny way, Katherine had made me. We were almost like her children.

My mind snagged. ‘Did Katherine ever tell you about her sire?’ I asked, putting words to a horrible thought forming in my mind. ‘The vampire who made her?’

Damon looked up at me, shocked out of his sulk. ‘You think. .. ?’

I nodded.

He leaned back and knocked his head against the wall. He had been genuinely in love with Katherine. I wondered if meeting her maker made our little tryst in Mystic Falls seem like a speck in the vastness of eternity.

‘I suppose we should call a guard over and compel him to free us,’ he said tiredly.

A sound of commotion from the lobby stopped us. There were muffled thuds, like bodies hitting the floor.

There was a scream. It was high-pitched and hard to tell whether it came from a woman or a man, so great was the pain. Then came the grating sound of a desk being moved, and what might have been a wooden chair being shattered against the wall.

I stood. So did Damon.

We glanced at each other. The pocket watch Winfield had given me ticked loudly in the sudden silence.

The door to the stockade opened once again and in came a girl wearing men’s trousers and black braces, a long blonde braid over her shoulder.

‘Lexi!’ I gasped.

‘I’m growing tired of bailing you boys out,’ she said as she shook the key at us. ‘I should leave you in there overnight, teach you a lesson about making trouble,’ she joked.

I reached through the bars to grab her free hand. ‘I’ve never been happier to see anyone.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Lexi said drily, but a small smile curved the edges of her lips.

Damon rolled his eyes. ‘We were just about to free ourselves, thank you very much.’

‘I don’t doubt that, either. Just figured I’d speed up the escape,’ she said. Her nose twitched, and her flat tone indicated she didn’t entirely approve of his existence. The last time she’d seen him, he’d just gotten through killing Callie and was starting in on me.

‘So did you knock out the entire precinct?’ Damon asked, straightening the shoulders of his jacket.

She undid the final lock on the door. It sprang open and I rushed to hug her. ‘No, only some of them. The rest I compelled. Some of us don’t like needless violence – or messes that need to be explained later,’ she said into my shoulder. I released her and she motioned us towards the door. ‘Now let’s get out of here before anyone else shows up.’