20. You Raise Me Up.

Damon carried his unconscious wife, his vampire wife, into the car. Getting in had been easy once he had read Adam's mind. Hauptmann would sleep for a few days. Damon had stunned him, put in an IV, and grabbed Mimi.

He'd missed her so much all these months, and from now on, he knew that the vampire potion wouldn't go down quite as hard on him as it used to. Brianna was unconscious.

He'd managed to knock her out, too, after Damon had done some serious mind probing on her, gotten quite a fucking lot of good information he could put to good use. Also, the way Brianna and Sark had worked together, oh, that bitch deserved a good torture, but he couldn't act when Brianna had too many friends.

He put Mimi in the car, brushed the hair from her face, looked at his future wife for a moment, sighed, and smiled. His expression darkened as the dress revealed the mating mark between Adam and Mimi, but there would come a time when he would put his own on Mimi. He went to the driver's seat and started driving. 

I was on the ground. I opened my eyes, seeing moss-covered rotten logs near me. I was feeling pretty damn smug, and I did not know why. It was like I was in this vision, this dream, but then like I was watching this from afar. I realized it. I raise my eyes, seeing someone sitting on the rock in the shade of an enormous tree. It was nighttime.

And heard Salvatore's stern voice asking, " Well, my beloved wife, what the hell was that all about? Why did you, who is pregnant with my babies, just let Nick suck you dry, kill you, and what the hell did he think you were human for?"

I looked up, took Damon in my hand, looked into his eyes, and saw his white locks of hair on the right side of his forehead glowing in the almost dark forest. I felt the babies stirring inside me. I could feel several of them inside me.

I was thrilled about them, but at the same time, I knew I had done this before. I sat up and touched my belly, which was still rather flat, to calm my babies down. Again, I was confused as I almost looked at myself, but could still feel stirring inside my belly.

I said "it's my ability, I can manipulate my blood. I have learned to draw my life force and essence out of it and fill it with illusion and mental suggestion."

I saw Damon's dark blue silk shirt open, the one I had bought him, and for some reason, it made my love spill out when I saw him wearing it. The shirt was open with a few buttons, and I saw some kind of tattoo on his chest.

Then the vision ended, and I began to actually perceive where I was and remembered running to the fridge and the smell of passionfruit. But had that been another dream, or another vision escaped from Mimosa?

If it was a vision, then wow, I could almost still feel the babies' movements in my stomach. I started to get a better sense of where I was and gathered observations of my surroundings. I sighed in my mind as I began to really realize where the fuck I was.

 I was tied down to something hard. I opened my eyes and saw a lamp hanging from the ceiling. This was another fucking shed. I looked at how I was attached. Metal shackles, fine. I just needed some time and peace.

I smelled passionfruit and heard calm footsteps. I wasn't cannulated, so no evil spirit, but I also didn't feel a rib clamp and didn't see a stabber in here. So, was there something new again? I could still feel my pendant around my neck, but how had Damon then grabbed me from under Adam's nose?

Apparently, Adam had also been stunned or rendered harmless. Once I understood what the fuck the whole fucking thing was supposed to be.

 Damon walked over to the table. He was dressed all in black again: a black tee shirt and black jeans. He had a long silver dagger with which he lazily sliced my dress open from the neckline to the hem. Then the sleeves were broken so that the dress fell off me onto the table, and I was left with only my panties.

He sliced a thin scratch across my stomach, right at one scar, almost cutting through the scar. And I hissed in pain as the silver burned. I knew it wouldn't scar, but would that scar stay on the rest of me?

Damon's voice was low, pleasurable, reproachful, even a little. "Baby, Baby. You were good in the fight today, but you should have been a little better behaved. No one appreciates such a naughty wife... That performance with Adam. I know you two have a bond, but you don't have to go public with it. Especially when you know you're my vampire wife. You know, you were great when you were fighting. You were alive. You were like a force of nature. Incredible. Dangerous, beautiful, untamed, bestial. Every man there would have wanted to conquer you, but Adam had already got you." 

I took a breath. I was in a pretty fierce mood, and the fucking bad irritation was threatening to surface. Adam and I had had a pretty intense time, and I didn't want to spend my time in a fucking shed when I could have been fucking Adam wildly.

So I said, "ex-wife."

Damon looked at me coldly, passionfruit flaring in the air. " Darling, you don't know when to back off. I am not in the mood to listen to objections. Don't you darling have any doubts. We will have our new wedding and our wedding night. Then you'll remember who you belong to. And by the way, those scars will go away. My wife doesn't have a single scar. I'll get those demon blades out of you, too, when I have time. But first, I'm going to give you an excellent lesson." 

Damon now walked to the other side of the table. I tried to concentrate on removing the shackles. I could get my thumbs out of the joint if I concentrated a little.

Damon looked at my attempt, came over, and grabbed my wrist. " Darling, come on, that's not polite behavior, but fine, I'll control you... you want this..."

Damon had never called me darling before. Now, he was almost stretching it. Maybe a few times, but rarely and always when he was in an exceptionally dangerous mood.

This was no black mamba. And this was not the one who enjoyed hurting me. This side was someone else entirely. Someone who could do whatever he wanted to me, be it good or bad. This individual/side still wants and still thinks they own me. And somehow, I had the feeling that this side had been present in the vision.

But something inside me rebelled against this side's control, and I found myself making up quite a few sentences, the kind that would make Damon snap fast. But maybe now was not the time to recite.

Damon took a piece of silk rope, thin, and wrapped it around my palm and partly around my thumb so that I couldn't dislocate my thumb. He did the same for both hands. 

Then he turned around and walked over to the counter. I could hear glass bottles clinking, so drugs were on the way. This was definitely not a black mamba because there was not a single cannula anywhere in me. He came with a syringe.

It had a pink liquid of 5-6 ml in it. He walked around the table as he wondered where to inject it.

"Hmm, I think I'll try giving this to your liver. Let's see, darling, how fast it works. I can tell you this is a novelty. I've never given this to you before, darling. A dental thing, of course, but there's no evil spirit in me now. You just need to learn this lesson."

He came and pressed the needle pleasurably into my liver and injected the entire contents of the syringe into it. He waited a moment, pulled the needle out, and began to massage my liver as if it would help the dull pain of the injection.

The rubbing mostly made the pain worse, and I whimpered a couple of times as he really dug his fingers into my side. Slowly, my head began to get cloudy. Oh, sedative. Well, I must have been too excited then.

Then Damon stopped rubbing my liver and went for the next medicine. He took a portable ultrasound and a marker, took his time ultra-sounding, and drew some markings on my stomach. I don't know what.

Damon said, "Look at Darlin. Here's your pancreas. I marked it so it's easier to give you the medicine there too, and I've already looked at a couple of other places."

So the pancreas was the target. It wasn't rubbed. Slowly, my sedated numbness got worse, reality blurred, and I couldn't stay awake. My eyes were so heavy that I just wanted to sleep.

The next medicine came in the spleen. Damon laughed when he noticed my difficulty in staying awake.

He said, "You'll wake up soon enough when we get down to business."

He was now rubbing my stomach at one point, and a sharp pain told me he had located one of the demon blades and was moving it around in my abdominal cavity, causing a sharp tearing pain that kept me awake even if every aching internal organ didn't.

Then, an IV bag was retrieved, and a cannula was inserted into the abdominal cavity, where the medicine was drained: a sedative or something to mess with my head.

Damon said, "Darling, don't you worry. The demon blades will come out of you, and I'll remove those scars. My wife doesn't really have any scars on her body."

I was just wondering at what point he was going to do it and where it was going to end up.

 Damon spoke again, almost half to himself. " You're still so incredibly young and inexperienced in vampire matters, I don't always even remember, but darling, once this whole little Brianna episode is out of the way, I'm taking you to a vampire club, like the one we had at our wedding with the divans, don't worry I won't be fucking a hundred virgins there. Not when it's just the two of us, and you get to be the pretender. You get to observe how vampires actually work. You're a vampire, too, so it's time you got to know your side of it too. The way vampires interact with each other, it's a dance. It has its own rules, darling, and I haven't taught them to you yet. And I wasn't watching myself when Brianna caught me, but now I've learned and learned well." 

He watched my state of being for a long moment. He looked into my eyes as if to assess my level of consciousness. " Well, now, darling, let's start the lesson." 

His voice was enjoyable, dark, alluring, even in some sort of strange way. Then I realized somehow that his vampire side was quite bit out again, and he looked at me almost curiously as to see if my vampire side was coming out too; I was just too damn drugged to do anything. He took my wrist, freed it, bit into it, and then stroked my long blood-read curly hair very contently.

Then he took the silver dagger and slowly plunged it straight into my stomach. Again and again. Now and then, he would put his finger on the wound and hook the demon blade out of there. It hurt like you wouldn't believe it. He paralyzed my vocal cords so I wouldn't scream.

He was enjoying himself, but this was a different kind of enjoyment again. Slowly, he ran the dagger across my ribs and plunged it between my ribs, straight into my heart.

" Now darling, now I have just broken your heart. Now you know what a truly broken heart feels like.."

The silver blade sliced, thrust, and stabbed my liver, my aorta, into my lungs. My other organs too. There was no place in my body where that damn blade wouldn't have sunk. I was healing for now, but damn, it hurt and hurt badly. I was pretty damn confused, in pain. 

Then again, every organ was on drugs, different drugs. He made sure I was drugged. After that, he unlocked my shackles and helped me to stand. Then he sent fear and terror so that I just stood and shook.

He came and wrapped himself around me, miraculously his passionfruit soothing. He stroked my hair. I leaned against him, feeling safe, and suddenly, at the same time, he plunged the dagger back into my belly as he continued to calm me.

"Shh, just listen to my heartbeat, darling. It's all right. Good, take it easy."

His voice was soft and soothing, but the knife was burning, and the blows were hitting harder and harder. Agony, pain, confusion, fear, and terror all were tearing my mind in different directions, and I no longer knew what was true and what wasn't.

He held me tightly against him, supported me even though my legs began to give out, and then he wrapped my back against his chest and continued stabbing me. He slit my jugular open with his claw; I felt my fiery blood running down my body, and my consciousness began to shut down as he each time took a nail out of my vein.

Then another stabbing, whispering in a low voice to whom I belong, whose vampire wife I am. He kept calling me Darling. Eventually, I didn't get any better, not anymore. But he wouldn't stop. I lost consciousness as he kept stabbing and soothing me. I felt my strength was completely gone.

Damon put Mimi down on the floor. He took a couple of deep breaths, feeling incredibly amazing, strong, and whole. He knew this would not traumatize Mimi. Her memories were going to be very blurry, but she would feel it in her skin and maybe learn a lesson.

He had seen a vision that Mimi had seen when she had woken up and knew it was from Mimosa. He was curious. Mimi had been pregnant in the vision, but somehow Damon knew that the possibility of that was a long way off and there would be obstacles, but that they had a chance at a future together made Damon's soul almost sing.

He should probably try to apologize to Mimi for his own weakness and how he'd only let the addiction hold him, even though he was strong enough to get rid of it pretty fucking easily once he understood how to use his mental abilities. Damon picked up Mimi off the floor and put her on the table, sighed, and then acted.