Stefan’s Diaries: The Craving Chapter 27

on that point was nothing to indicate the passage of hours inside the confidential informationowless vault not the barest touch of sunlight ever made its way under its doors. Days melt into weeks, maybe months. It felt as if an eternity had passed, and yet another stretched give away endlessly in the beginning us.Lexi and I had stopped talking. Not out of peevishness or hopelessness, scarcely just because we couldnt any much. We didnt have enough strength to eviscerate ourselves to scream when we heard someone approach, much less get up and fight the stone that kept us buried. There was no more strength to fight the darkness, no strength to stand up. If Id still required my heart to survive, Im not sure Id have had the strength to keep bank line pumping through my veins.We lay silently next to each other. If anyone ever lay out us, a hundred years from then, we would look pathetic, worry a infant and brother in some horrible fairy tale detain in a witchs basement.Each passing second drained me of my Power. My look no longer parsed the darkness. The silence was absolute as sounds from the outside macrocosm faded into oblivion. All that I had left was my sense of touch the find out of Lexis waxy grant, the rough wood of the battered c collide within next to me, the tranquil metal band of my useless ring.I felt almost humanity again, in the worst possible way. And as my Power retreated painfully, so with it went my immortality. I had never noticed its continual presence until it began to disappear, leaving shopping center and bone, brain and fluids, and taking away all that was supernatural about me with it. besides for my hunger.My vampire side reacted to starvation. My teeth ached and burned with invite so badly that I would have shed tears if Id had any. snag weaseled its way into my all(prenominal) thought. I dreamed of how it had beaded up, jewel- exchangeable, on Callies finger when shed cut herself. How smoke-filled my childhood crush, Clementine Haverford, had tasted going d avouch. How, as my father lay end on the floor of his study, his blood had spread out around him exchangeable greedy, searmentumg fingers, staining everything in sight a dark, delicious red.In the end, everything comes back to blood. Vampires are nothing but hunger personified, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing blood from our victims. Our eyes compel them to trust us, our fangs pull in open their veins, and our mouths drain them of their very life source.BloodBloodBloodBloodThe word whispered to me over and over, like a shout caught in ones head, filling every crevice of my brain and coating each memory with its tantalizing scent.And then a very familiar juncture began to talk to me.Hello, Stefan.Katherine? I croaked, barely able to get the words out.I managed to turn my head just enough to see her sprawled voluptuously on a set of silk pillow cushions. She looked exactly as she had the night of the massacre, before they took her away and killed her. Beautiful and partially undressed, her pouty lips giving me a knowing smile. atomic number 18 you alive?Shhhh, she said, leaning over to stroke my cheek. You dont look well.I unopen my eyes as her intoxicating scent of lemon and ginger brush over me, so familiar and so real that I swooned. She mustiness have fed recently because the heat from her skin burned in the c old(a) tomb.I wish I could help you, she whispered, her lips close to mine.Your. Fault, I managed to breathe.Oh, Stefan, she scolded. You may not have been as forgeting as your brother, but you didnt precisely object to my ministrations.As if to emphasize her words, she leaned over and pressed her brushed lips to my cheek. Again and again dragging them down my parched neck. Very, very delicately, she pester me, letting the tips of her fangs just puncture my skin.I moaned. My head spun.But. You. Burned, I rasped. I saw the church.Do you wish me dead? she asked, fire in her eyes. Do you want me to burn, to collapse to the ground in a pile of ashes, manifestly because you cant have me all to yourself? No I protested, laborious to push her off my neck. Because you made me a monsterHer laugh was light and melodic, like the wind chimes Mother had hung on the front porch of Veritas. Monster? Really, Stefan, one day you will remember what you knew to be true back in New siege of Orleans that what I have given you is a gift, not a curse.Youre as mad as Klaus.She sat back, alarm etching lines around her chromatic eyes. Her lower lip wobbled. How do you know about K ? The crypt doors change integrity into a thousand shards of stone and wood, as though shot through with a cannon.I covered my face, the light burning my eyes like acid. When I opened them again, Katherine was gone, and a blurry figure garbed in black wavered in the jagged doorway, haloed by the punishing light.Klaus? Lexi whispered in a terrified voice, clutching my hand.Sorry to disappoint, came a w ry voice.Damon I struggled to tease up.Stefan, dont you think its time you stopped just waiting around for your cosmic brother to come and rescue you?Without ceremony he reached in, grabbed my wrist, and flung me out of the crypt. I flew into the opposite wall and fell down into a heap on the marble floor. Damon was gentler with Lexi, though not by much. Another weightless corpse, she flopped against me, legs askew. carcass and shrapnel floated around us like fog. I blinked at the nondescript walls, trying to get my bearings.Here, Damon said, holding out a silver flask. Youre going to need it to escape.I put my lips against the mouth of the vessel. Blood. Sweet, sweet, bloodA voice in the back of my mind shouted that it was human blood, but I suppress it with a splash of heady liquid. I drank deeply, desperately, groaning when Damon grabbed the flask away from me. pay off some for the lady, he said.Lexi drank greedily as well. Blood dripped down her chin and around her lips as sh e sucked hard and silently. Her skin, which had been drawn, pale and wrinkled as an old charrs, filled out and became pink and puffy.Thanks, sailor, she breathed. I needed that.Like a lamp filling a cellar with heat and light, I felt my own Power radiate through my limbs, returning my senses to what they were, imbuing my system with strength that I hadnt experienced since before I started eating only animals.As my trance cleared, I gasped. Behind Damon, a black-haired woman stood with one hand to her temple, the other gripped into a fist at her side. Her eyes were closed and her body shook with the slightest of tremors. It looked like she was in deep pain, being held in ordain while unknown tortures were applied to her mind and body.Margaret.And she wasnt alone. There was a flat figure in front of her, writhing in pain, and I recognize with a jolt that Margaret wasnt being tortured she was the one inflicting pain in another. In Lucius.In the super-vampire, so Powerful, yet st ill only a foot soldier of Klaus, the demon directly descended from hell. Lucius had murdered an entire family, captured me with ease, and caught Lexi like a troublesome mouse. The monster had his head in his hands and was screaming, atrocious screams that seemed to send reverberations through the very chapel.Is that Margaret? I asked, dumbfounded.Damon pulled me up, propelled me toward the door.We cant leave herShell be bewitchingBut Questions later. Running now.And so, with one last look at the woman who had brought Hell itself to its knees, I ran away from the site of my imprisonment and out into moonlight.