Free The Vampire Diaries: Out of my Mind (Kindle Worlds Novella) by Jenna Elliot

Chapter 1
     
    The pain rises and rises in waves, long slow ripples deep as the ocean, and in shards, shuddering and shocking. I stand perfectly still and the ragged slip of unmending slices finally calms. Then the inevitable weakness overtakes me. I slump, I hang, and the teeth of the bear traps shred my skin, digging further, scraping along tendon and bone.
    The pain never stops. It. Never. Stops.
    Sometimes Rebekah is a goddess and sometimes a monster. Always that same petulant pout, that baby face like an overgrown pre-teen, those audacious freckles, and inside an abyss of need and rage and hell. She is Circe, Medea, Gaia. She is Death.
    I anticipate her visits. They are something at least and maybe the end. She talks, mostly to herself. I respond: I bob, I weave. I make grandiose promises we both know I can’t keep. I scream, moan, wail. I taunt her so she’ll stake me and the pain will stop.
    She is impenetrable. I am mesh.
     
    She saunters in. “Kiss me,” she says. I spit in her face. She cuts a long, slow slice in my thigh, along a vein. It’s sickeningly wet and then there’s a new pulse of pain. She watches but doesn’t stay long.
    I have been here forever.
    The tarp is covered with stains and splotches of my blood. I gaze at them like the clouds on an autumn afternoon. A duck, the letter Q, a hammer, the silhouette of a woman’s body. Torture Rorschach tests. Ha. Then Dr. Rebekah visits and all the shapes are new. The hammer is a tree.
    Rorschach… therapy… delusions… day dreams. That’s where I get the idea.
    I have nothing but time and pain. First, just Elena’s face. Deep brown eyes, sparkling with life and spunk and joy, skin the color of café au lait, lips soft like a ripe raspberry. Her mahogany hair, blown back from her face, little wisps against her forehead. My Elena – his Elena. Screw it; here, my Elena. Ten seconds of less pain. It comes back worse, but it’s worth it. Her face. Again.
    I push further. Elena is cooking, we are laughing. I hand her a pepper. I get the oil out of the cupboard, grab the garlic too. She asks for a knife. I pull one from the block and it’s covered with blood, it’s Rebekah’s knife, it’s my blood. I scream, howl, and she dissolves along with the smell of dinner.
    Dreams are perilous. They show you what you fear, what you want, who you are.
     
    The pain surrounds me, squeezes me in a terrible embrace. I have to stay awake. I mumble old poems no one remembers anymore, one after the other from my lessons so long ago. Keats and Wordsworth are not helping, not horrible enough, so Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, someone I recognize. Now passages from new books, movies, songs, I don’t care. I need words that are real. I dig them all up; soon the recalled words float and swirl. I seize on Emily Dickinson because she was tortured too, I can tell now, she understood pain: “It cannot recollect when it began/or if there was a time when it was not/it has no future but itself.” I have no walls. I want to weep for Emily but I can’t, I have never been as dry as this.
    I cannot trust my dreams but they come and I don’t know whose they are. I remember Stefan as a child, following me down to the quarry because I don’t bother to stop him. Father insists he is my responsibility but I just want to swim. I never swam in the quarry. I don’t remember this. I just want to swim but Stefan can’t swim. I call for someone to watch him, I know they are inside, I know they will come but this time no one comes and I am alone with Stefan. Where is he? I spin, scanning the bushes, the trees. I begin to run but I know, I have no way of knowing but I know he is under the water. I call for him, scream, but I know he is sinking. The water is dark, it’s impossible to see deeper than a few inches and he is just gone. I dive in, thrash around, I am so young but he is younger, too little, I reach senselessly in every direction, scream Stefan’s name under the water. He is