by Julie Plec
“Spoken like a woman who spent the whole night prowling around the edges of the fighting,” an ex-pickpocket sniped. She was a scrappy little slip of a thing, so fast and light on her feet that Klaus had barely caught her making off with his purse. Anna, he thought her name was, and her animosity toward Lisette raised her a notch or two in his estimation.
“Cleaning up after you children,” Lisette corrected, flipping a loose lock of hair away from her freckled face. “Literally putting out your fires. But that’s not even what I mean, which you’d have realized if you weren’t in such a hurry to interrupt.”
Klaus chuckled and held out his glass. A man leaped up to refill it, but knocked over the table in his drunkenness, spilling a dozen glasses all over the crowd. They were sloshed enough that they shouted good-natured protests before wandering off in search of fresh liquor.
“So what was your point, Lisette?” Klaus sighed, knowing that she would insist on telling him either way.
She played with a lock of her hair, and Klaus suppressed the impulse to rip it off her scalp. “They’ve been harassing you for weeks now,” Lisette explained. “Stepping up their aggression and building toward an open confrontation, right? So why were they so unready for a fight when it actually came?”
A pleasantly plump young whore settled herself into Lisette’s lap, and Lisette pushed her away in irritation. “This way, love,” Klaus suggested, pulling the girl across his own knees. She began to unbutton his shirt, teasing at his chest with one dimpled finger. “The werewolves thought we were weak,” he explained to Lisette, more patiently now that some of his needs were being attended to. “There was no way for them to know what I had prepared.”
“No way?” Lisette scoffed. “Unless they’d ever met you, you mean? Klaus, no one in their right mind comes after you without expecting retaliation.”
It was a valid point, if he were to assume that the werewolves were rational, thinking beings. They hadn’t exactly demonstrated any of that by attacking Klaus’s business interests, and yet Lisette’s argument nagged at him all the same. When had the Collado pack grown so exceptionally idiotic?
“That’s not all,” Lisette went on, seizing on Klaus’s hesitation. “Klaus, where was your brother tonight?” She lowered her voice, as if she could keep a room full of vampires from eavesdropping. “We both know he would never have approved of this little foray—”
“We know?” Klaus interrupted. “When was the last deep, meaningful talk you’ve had with my dear brother, Lisette?” The whore giggled, her flesh jiggling in all sorts of interesting ways.
Lisette flushed and then grew even paler than usual, her freckles standing out vividly against her porcelain skin. “I know him,” she insisted. “You do, too, Klaus, and you know it’s strange that he wasn’t here tonight. He should have come bursting in to stop you—to stop us, I mean.”
He raised an eyebrow at the revealing mistake, but didn’t bother to comment on it. “Are you asking me where Elijah was tonight?” he asked. “Is that your real question, love?”
“No, I—” Lisette stuttered for a moment, then drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Somewhere across the room came the splintering sound of cracking furniture, and another good-natured shout went up from Klaus’s soldiers. “I’m talking about where he wasn’t, not where he was.”
“I’m not my brother’s keeper.” Klaus shrugged. His whore had moved her attentions somewhat lower, and it was becoming more difficult to care about tormenting his brother’s ex-lover. “It’s none of my business how Elijah spent his night, or whom with. But if you’re concerned about his priorities—that maybe he’s gotten distracted from you and even from me—you’re free to ask him about that yourself.”
Lisette turned away from Klaus, but he’d already caught the glint of tears in her eyes. “You know I can’t do that,” she whispered, and then the windows exploded into a thousand shards of flying glass.
The vampires scattered, shouting drunken and conflicting orders to each other. More than a few of them seemed to believe that the sun had already risen, and fled from the burning light that was still hours away. Only Klaus remained exactly where he was, waiting impatiently for whomever dared to disturb his party.
The brick that had flown through the window landed harmlessly at his feet, and Klaus nudged it away with a toe. The lantern-jawed face of Sampson Collado peered through the broken window. William Collado’s son had taken his father’s place as pack leader at the tender age of twenty, and while he seemed competent enough to rule during peacetime, Klaus had no doubt he could crush the young pup when it came to war.
“Come out and explain yourself, Klaus Mikaelson,” the brawny werewolf ordered. “If we have to come in after you, we won’t spare your people.”
“If I get up from this chair, none of you will walk away from this place,” Klaus countered, checking his glass hopefully. The whiskey was gone, and both the bottle and his whore had vanished somewhere in the commotion—yet another insult the wolf had to answer for.
“You owe us an explanation,” Sampson growled, although Klaus noticed that he made no move to enter the brothel. “We’ve upheld the peace in this city for twenty-two years, only to be attacked in the night by your band of cowards. I want to know why you chose this night to break our treaty.”
“To save you the trouble of breaking it in the morning,” Klaus said. “You’ve been harassing my businesses for weeks now, and I know all about your planned attack for tomorrow. I have eyes and ears everywhere, you young fool.”
Sampson took a step back from the window frame, but with a smirk on his face that indicated he was in no way retreating. “Bring the human,” he called back to his comrades, and two of the werewolves dragged forward a man who had been beaten to within an inch of his life.
Both of his eyes were swollen shut, and his nose and one cheekbone had been badly broken. But all the same, Klaus recognized Guillaume, the spy who had been keeping tabs on the werewolves’ insurrection for him. “How dare you?” he shouted, jumping to his feet at last. Some of the bruises on Guillaume’s face were hours old—they must have been working him over since the raid.
“Tell him what you told us,” Sampson ordered, shoving Guillaume roughly. “Skip the part where we had to torture it out of you, because no one wants this little parlay to last that long.”
Guillaume coughed, and Klaus could hear the telltale sound of internal injuries. If the man lived to see the next day, it would be his last. Becoming a vampire could save his life, but Klaus had no further need of a spy who was stupid enough to get caught by werewolves.
“I’m sorry,” Guillaume wheezed. “I’m so—”
One of the werewolves shook him violently, and Guillaume’s tobacco-stained teeth rattled in his skull. “I’m sure you’re deeply sorry,” Klaus assured his informant, stepping closer to the broken window, “at least to have gotten caught, you idiot.” Guillaume’s bloodshot eyes followed Klaus’s movements a second too late, and one of his pupils was noticeably larger than the other. “But you can make it right by telling me what else you’re sorry for.”
“It wasn’t the wolves,” Guillaume gasped, just before his body was racked by another round of guttural coughing. “I met a man in a tavern. He had gold, and he said you’d be attacked. He said it would be best if you thought the werewolves did it, and he had gold.”
His head lolled toward his chest, and Klaus slapped him smartly across the face. “Tell me about this man,” he snapped. “Was he a vampire, or a witch? What name did he use?”
“Human,” Guillaume rasped. “Just human. He said the city used to be ours, and it should be again. He said you could all kill each other and the humans could take back their home.”
“A name,” Klaus growled. There were tens of thousands of humans in New Orleans. Klaus wasn’t opposed to killing them all just to be on the safe side, but tha
t wouldn’t leave him much of a city to rule.
“I don’t have one, but he had black hair and tanned skin. A gentleman,” the miserable spy groaned, and in spite of his own fury Klaus believed him. Sampson gave a nod, confirming that the same answer had been given under torture. “He isn’t working alone,” Guillaume wheezed, and the werewolf and Klaus both straightened attentively.
“Tell us what he told you,” Sampson urged, his deep voice almost gentle. He must have been able to hear Guillaume’s imminent death as clearly as Klaus could, and was changing his tactics to suit the occasion.
Guillaume swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple sliding around in his throat. “He said he has weapons. The type that work against your kind—he works as a merchant, and he has spent a lot of time and money collecting those things. I never asked for a name, and he didn’t give it. But I could pick out some of his friends in the tavern, pretending to be strangers—I was surrounded. He wore a cloak pin, and there were men and women there wearing the same design. On pins, embroidered into the design of a dress, one had it drawn into her skin. Two faces, looking out in opposite ways from the same head.”
“Janus,” Klaus frowned. “A Roman god with twin faces, looking at the past and the future at once. Could that have been his name, perhaps, or is it some other conceit?”
“I don’t—” Guillaume coughed again, and Klaus waved dismissively.
“Never mind, he’s spent. Sampson, I think we have much to discuss.” Klaus stepped back from the window, and Sampson gestured to his werewolves to drag Guillaume away. Klaus had no idea how they would dispose of the traitor, and he didn’t care. It would seem that he had other humans to deal with.
Sampson rested one hand on the windowsill and then jumped over it, landing lightly on the other side. He was an inch or two shorter than Klaus, with a square, solid build that matched his broadly handsome face. Klaus found a bottle of whiskey that was, miraculously, neither broken nor empty, and he set it on the table. The two men sat, appraising each other. One of the terrified Southern Spot girls poured the amber liquid with a trembling hand.
“So,” Klaus began, ignoring the shamefaced vampires who had begun to quietly file back to their seats. “Some humans have gone to a great deal of trouble to set us at each other’s throats. I don’t see us ever becoming friends, but there’s no denying we have a common enemy.”
Sampson sipped his whiskey and then smiled, and for a moment Klaus thought he detected a hint of yellow in the depths of his brown eyes. “Too bad for that enemy, then.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
REBEKAH LAID LUC’S convulsing body among the roots of the White Oak tree, her own hands shaking. She wasn’t going to let Tomás get away, and there was no more time to lose. His back was already disappearing into the darkness.
She overtook him by a stand of pine trees, just where the woods grew thick and dark. Bad enough that he had threatened her, and even worse that he’d hurt Luc, but walking away from an Original was unforgivable.
Tomás didn’t turn to confront her, but he didn’t flee, either. Rebekah caught the edge of his black cloak and spun him around to face her. “So nice to see you again so soon. How’s your lover doing?” he asked, leering a little. “I’m surprised you left him all by himself in these woods. Don’t you know there are predators out here?”
“What did you do to him?” Rebekah demanded. “What was that powder, and who gave it to you?”
Tomás’s laughter was sudden and sharp. “You think I’ll help you, Rebekah? I stood before your greatest weakness and told you I would destroy you. Do you always cling so to your enemies? No wonder you’re a thousand-year-old spinster still living with your brothers.”
Rebekah took a menacing step forward, so she was close enough to see every plane and shadow of his face. He had a high-bridged nose and sharply angled cheekbones. His face looked haughty and superior without even trying, and so when he smirked at her, the effect was especially condescending. “You seem to think you know a lot about me,” she purred, eyeing him up and down cautiously. He made no move for his weapon, but he had already surprised her once. “Then you know I’m not afraid of parlor tricks or empty threats.”
Tomás’s voice was a low hiss. “I know what you are afraid of, Rebekah.”
Unable to stop herself, she lashed out, striking at his smug mouth as if she could force those ugly words back inside. But her fist connected with nothing but air, and Rebekah almost lost her balance from the force of the blow. Tomás had moved faster than a human should have been able to—almost as fast as a vampire.
She spun to face him and shot out one leg, knocking his feet out from under him. He rolled and pulled himself up to a wary crouch before she could press her advantage.
“Tell me who you are,” she said.
“Merely a concerned citizen,” he answered, his pale green eyes sparkling with some private joke. Then he spread his hands wide, indicating the forest and the little town on the other side of the trees. “Does this feel like your home, Rebekah? You’ve lived nearly eighty years in my city, but you were human here. Does that make a difference to a monster like you?”
“I am a monster,” she agreed, fed up with trying to make sense of the bizarre twists of his mind. Wind creaked in the branches overhead and stirred her hair around her shoulders. “I have no feelings, no attachments. Nothing here or anywhere means anything to me, so just undo whatever you did to Luc and be on your way. You picked the wrong monster to try to hurt.”
Tomás slowly stood up from his crouch, his tall body unfolding like a skeleton. “I would like to believe you’re telling the truth,” he mused. “It would be easier to understand how someone with no feelings could commit all of the evil acts you have to answer for. But you care about that good-looking lump of a vampire you left under the White Oak tree, and I believe you care about your home as well. But where is it you really belong? The place you lived as a child, or the mansion you occupied while you destroyed my home?”
“Your home?” Rebekah knew she needed to remain in control, but she was genuinely shocked. Tomás had accumulated strength and power, had learned about her history, and had attacked her lover, all over something so trivial she could hardly believe it. “You’re a human; the entire world is your home. You’re like grains of sand, drifting in and filling up every last crevice. I haven’t taken anything from you that can’t easily be replaced.”
“I might say the same of that Luc fellow.” Tomás shrugged. “Perhaps there are so many of us that you can’t tell humans apart anymore, but I came of age in a city your family ruled. The Mikaelsons have lived off the backs and blood of humanity for far too long now, and I intend to stop you.”
“With witches’ tricks?” Rebekah scoffed, feinting at his head and body a few times. Tomás blocked or avoided each blow, then landed an unexpectedly forceful kick in the center of her abdomen.
“I have tricks even they don’t know,” he warned, and Rebekah believed him.
If it was true that Tomás was just an ordinary human citizen of New Orleans, how had he come to be so powerful? Rebekah and her kind had spent decades happily feeding off the city’s residents, never dreaming that the humans might find a way to fight back. Now she was forced to wonder how many of them had already sided with Tomás.
The longer they fought, at least, the better she understood his method. She was confident that she could crush the life out of Tomás if she really wanted to, but first she need to know how to cure Luc, as well as how far this insurrection had spread. Tomás knew too much to be working alone.
“An uprising will cost you more than you can pay,” she warned. “And even if you succeeded in toppling us, whatever moved in in our place might be worse. Humans were meant to be ruled, and you’ll never go long without a new boot on your necks.”
“So it might as well be yours?” Tomás taunted. Rebekah caught
a glimpse of movement in the darkness behind him, and she realized that their sparring had led them back toward the White Oak tree. Luc was still immobile at its trunk, his blue eyes fixed on nothing. “I think we can do better.”
She lunged forward, but something happened as she closed in on Tomás—a flicker, a blur. She saw it coming, but there was nothing she could do: Her momentum carried her forward into the cloud of powder that he had blown into her face.
It burned. It burned so badly that she couldn’t move or even think, and everything around her disappeared except for the pain. She might as well have swallowed pure sunlight, and she could feel it boiling her from the inside out. Rebekah froze in place, her hands straining at her throat.
“Stay here by your tree awhile,” she heard Tomás say, somewhere close by in the blackness. He sounded near enough to touch, and Rebekah fought against the magic that surrounded her with every ounce of strength she possessed. “Think over what I’ve said. The next time you see me, I will have taken even more of what you love.”
Tomás’s lips pressed against hers and lingered... making her feel so dizzy in her blindness that she no longer knew if her feet were still on the ground. He deserved to die for that stolen kiss alone, but she couldn’t move so much as a finger.
As her vision began to return, Rebekah could see Tomás walking away from her again. Again. She should have slaughtered him when she had the chance. It had been beneath her to trade insults with him, to even bother trying to understand his intentions. He should never have lived so long, nor gotten so close. Rebekah needed to fix her mistake. No matter what tricks Tomás had up his sleeve, she was an Original.
She could map out every step it would take to reach him. She knew exactly where her feet would land, and she could imagine the earth springing back up beneath them. But no matter what she did or how hard she tried, Rebekah couldn’t force her body to actually move toward Tomás.