by Julie Plec
He didn’t have the hatred in him to kill Klaus, he realized. Elijah had known for centuries which of them was the better man, and there was no need to prove it. All he had ever wanted was Klaus’s loyalty, and he was beginning to understand that he was never going to get it.
He threw Klaus across the room and stood, dusting off his wrinkled coat in disgust. “Stay down,” he snapped when Klaus began to pull himself to his feet, and although Klaus didn’t obey, he made no move to resume their fight.
Fighting had been pointless, anyway: It was always pointless. Elijah and his brother could spend the next year beating each other’s heads in, and still neither of them would ever win. Maybe it really was time to go their separate ways. Elijah could certainly think of a few things he would rather do than worry about Klaus all the time.
“We’re done here,” a voice said, and Elijah was startled to realize it was his own. “Do whatever you want with the city, Niklaus. It’s yours. We’re done.”
Elijah turned and walked out of the brothel, letting the door slam behind him. He could see the first orange streaks of sunrise in the eastern sky, and daybreak had never seemed so appropriate. The future itself was opening before Elijah, full of more possibilities and fewer obligations than Elijah could remember facing in his entire life.
Alejandra had been right, and the first thing he intended to do was find her and tell her so. She had seen what he could not: that Klaus and Rebekah didn’t think they needed him. Both of them believed that they would be happier if they forged their own way.
And at long last, Elijah was free to do the same.
CHAPTER TEN
KLAUS AND HIS army raced against the rising sun. There was only half an hour left before they’d be forced to take cover, but thanks to Lisette’s clever idea, the long daylight hours didn’t have to be wasted. Not as long as they got to their destination. Klaus stormed through the cobblestoned streets, his soldiers following at his heels.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell him—” Lisette began again, hurrying alongside Klaus as his second-in-command. Her promotion would either be short lived, or Klaus would have to start tolerating her presence—depending on whether her plan worked.
“He wasn’t willing to listen,” Klaus snapped. “Elijah always has to be in charge, and he couldn’t handle hearing that he had fallen out of touch with his city. The bastard can be surprisingly sensitive, as you know.”
“He takes on a lot,” Lisette argued, jogging to keep pace with Klaus’s long strides. “If he had our support, instead of—”
“We’re saving New Orleans for him,” Klaus reminded her sharply. “If he ever humbles enough to notice, he has all the support he could ask for. But instead of asking, he barged in and acted like a lunatic, so I don’t really care what he thinks of us right now. I can’t worry about his precious feelings when I have to get on with doing his job for him.”
“That’s not really—”
“Shut up,” Klaus ordered. Learning to put up with Lisette might be even more difficult than he thought. “I told you, he didn’t want to listen. I would think that you, of all people, would know what that’s like.”
His vampires coursed through the streets, moving on ahead of them, and Klaus fed off their impatience. The city jail was just a few blocks away, on the western outskirts of New Orleans. Sampson Collado had brought Klaus a problem, and Klaus’s solution was an unstoppable army. And what better place to recruit soldiers than a prison? It was full of citizens who could use a second chance at making a meaningful contribution to their city. He had Lisette to thank for that genius idea.
If the Cult of Janus was as well connected and supplied as Guillaume had claimed, then all Klaus needed was more vampires. With enough men he could cut off their supply chain, infiltrate their command, and stamp out their little insurgence.
Since the jail was nearly windowless, Klaus’s army could spend the day there, turning all the prisoners into new vampires, and by the time the next moon rose their ranks would have doubled or more. New Orleans’s worst criminals would be put to work saving the city from itself, and Klaus could show Elijah just how ludicrous his behavior in the brothel had been.
No matter what his brother believed, Elijah wasn’t the only vampire in the world who was capable of seeing a problem and crafting a solution. He had never given any of his siblings the credit they deserved, and especially not Klaus. He was so busy painting himself as their rescuer that he had absolutely blinded himself to the possibility that the roles might occasionally reverse.
“We’ll make it with time to spare.” José smirked. The slight thief seemed impressed by his own speed and endurance in the way that only a new vampire could be. Klaus remembered that feeling, of everything being new and astonishing, before his incredible power had truly become a part of him, as natural as his heartbeat.
“Of course we will,” said Lisette. “Look, the Alonso brothers have reached the gate.”
The brothers, a cheerful pair of former fishermen, tore off the guards’ heads and pried open the heavy door. Others rushed to help, making short work of iron bars and thick, oaken boards. Klaus gave one last look over his shoulder before he slipped inside the jail. A burning sliver of the sun was just visible over the bayou, and Klaus grinned in satisfaction before turning to survey his newest recruits.
The Spanish were not popular rulers in New Orleans, and the jail cells were overcrowded with murderers, rebels, and fighters. Klaus wanted them all.
“They drink before they die!” Klaus shouted. His army couldn’t forget their mission. The prisoners had to drink blood before they were killed, or else they wouldn’t turn.
Guards were to be compelled to stand down or else killed—he had no use for them. They were tools of the Spanish government, and possible extensions of Janus’s shadowy arm. Klaus saw José drinking deeply from one guard, his bright red uniform stained with the darker shade of blood. “Don’t fill up just yet,” Klaus reminded him, and José promptly snapped the guard’s neck.
“Blood is all you’ll get from us!” another guard shouted, running at them wildly. “There will be no more of your kind polluting our city.”
“Everyone’s a hero until the last second,” Klaus said to José, throwing the guard against a stone wall so that his skull shattered. “But when a man can look his own death right in the eye, he always drinks.”
Farther along the corridor, vampires had begun opening the cells, wrenching the doors clean off their hinges. The prisoners shouted impatiently for their release, but the ones who were free could sense the danger they were in. They stayed huddled against the walls, trying to get away from the vampires. They had been criminals and convicts: They knew what hunger looked like.
“You will all drink this,” one of the Alonso brothers ordered, rolling his sleeve back and opening a vein in his forearm. The prisoners cringed, and one of them gagged audibly. Klaus silently cursed Alonso’s clumsiness, and he had to resist the urge to kill the idiot and let the others try their luck. The fisherman had been human mere days ago, and yet apparently had already forgotten how repugnant humans would find the idea of drinking blood.
The prisoners stared at the blood for a moment, then looked at each other. At that silent cue, they rushed at the vampire together.
Chaos erupted as other prisoners followed their lead, charging the vampires who stood between them and a chance at freedom. Klaus’s soldiers were strong, but with all the humans attacking at once, they had their hands full containing the riot.
“Drink this if you want to live,” Klaus heard Lisette order, and he turned toward the sound of her voice. She held her bleeding arm against a man’s mouth, gripping his throat with her other hand. The man’s eyes bulged in fear and disgust, but Klaus saw his throat work, and offered Lisette a terse but respectful nod. She crushed the man’s windpipe like an overripe
piece of fruit and discarded his corpse on the cold stone floor. “Drink this if you want to live,” she repeated to the next nearest prisoner, who gaped at her in horror.
Across the corridor Klaus heard an enraged howl, and turned just in time to see one of his vampires sink his fangs into a surprised prisoner’s throat. Klaus was beside the pair in a flash and dragged them apart, keeping a firm grip on both of their collars.
“The son of a bitch punched me,” the vampire snarled, and Klaus could see a telltale bump where his nose had been broken.
“He bit me,” the prisoner complained, his voice shrill with shock.
“He drinks first,” Klaus reminded the sulking vampire. “They all do, or don’t bother coming back to the garrison.”
He knocked their heads together—not too hard, since it wouldn’t do to kill the prisoner yet—and moved on through the melee. All the cells had been opened at last, and the screams rang merrily through the building. Klaus took careful note of which of his soldiers required his intervention, and which seemed to be learning quickly enough on the job.
Over the next hour, the long vaulted corridor grew quieter. The layer of bodies on the floor was so thick that it was almost impossible to walk from one end to the other without stepping on a hand or a limp leg. Sunlight scattered across the carnage, but the jail wasn’t intended to feel light or airy, and it was easy to avoid the rays. They’d accomplished a good morning’s work.
“José,” he called, catching sight of the man. The thief looked the part of a dangerous warrior at last, smeared with the blood of a dozen dead men. “The guards must have kept a stash of liquor around here somewhere. See if you can find it, would you?”
José hurried along the passageway and disappeared through the far door. Klaus leaned against a stone wall and watched the last few humans die.
They remained there for the day, drunk on blood and growing even more inebriated with the help of a few casks of wine José had discovered in the cellar. The tiny patches of sunlight moved across the floor, and vampires played and sparred around them, daring and taunting one another to stand as close as they could bear before their skin started to sizzle. They brawled and sang while the sun passed overhead, then sank on the jail’s western side.
“Move the bodies out,” Klaus ordered when the sun was finally low enough, and dozens of lazy, intoxicated faces turned his way in surprise. “Move!” he shouted, and vampires began scrambling to their feet. “To the mansion, I think.” It was closer than his garrison, and they were less likely to be disturbed by any overeager rebel.
His army, shouldering their newest recruits, filed out into the twilight and slipped into the woods that bordered the jail, taking the long way home. The mansion lay to the northwest of them. Even with each of them carrying two bodies at a time, they would all have to make multiple trips, and they would have to hurry to finish by moonrise.
Klaus left them to it, strolling alone toward his mansion in the growing darkness. The cobblestoned streets were just as deserted as they had been at dawn. He hadn’t noticed until now just how mindful the citizenry had become of his kind and their feeding habits. The humans of New Orleans knew all about vampires, and they kept to their homes at night.
He rounded a corner and stopped, blinking in surprise at a white mark that had been painted onto the side of a butcher shop. It was one head with two faces, each looking in opposite directions: the symbol of Janus. The symbol was like cold fingers creeping up Klaus’s back. The cult had grown bold, riling up the population and putting their stamp on the city.
Klaus shook himself, shoving those gloomy thoughts aside. He had an army now, and no one was going to stop him from ruling New Orleans.
He imagined that his soldiers had finally reached the mansion. He could picture them rolling the corpses onto the fine carpets and smooth marble floors, their blood ruining—or enhancing?—Rebekah’s priceless collection. Hundreds of freshly dead bodies would soon begin to twitch and breathe, and Klaus would use them to make his own mark on the city.
He rested his hands behind his head, whistling cheerfully as he made his way toward home.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AS THE WHITE OAK stake found her heart, Rebekah screamed in pain, never having felt such misery before. It was as if her heart were breaking a million times over. She felt her eyes go wide and then shut tight, but she didn’t stop seeing. She could still picture the tree, its image seared into the darkness behind her eyes. There was daylight, and children who ran and played beneath its broad leaves. She could see little Klaus’s sardonic smile and Elijah’s warm brown eyes and even the flowers woven into her own hair. Their other brothers were there as well: Kol and Finn and tiny Henrik.
There was no danger, no threats waiting on the horizon. There was nothing but hope.
Rebekah ran to her family’s cottage and saw her mother, the most beautiful woman in the world, stirring something in a steaming pot on the hearth. Esther stood and smiled, in the comforting way she always did, and Rebekah wondered if she had flown into her mother’s arms that day, or if she had simply run to taste the stew. She could see both events, as if her past had been placed between two mirrors that stretched off forever in both directions, but showed two different lives. If she had hugged her mother that day, would she have become a vampire? What small decisions had led her to this endless path?
Mikael swung her up onto his shoulders, striding through a wide field while she giggled and twined her hands in his hair. There was no sign of the villain he would become. He was just her father: tall and strong and impossibly wise, showing her the world she had once believed she would live and die in.
They were all there, together and happy, as if the tree had been holding on to some part of the Mikaelsons for all those centuries. The tree belonged to them, and Rebekah realized she had been wrong to fear it for so long. It wasn’t destroying her like she always believed it would. Instead, the stake in her heart was restoring the life that should have been hers. A real human life—with a beginning, an end, and a family who loved her.
Rebekah could hear her mother calling to her. But Esther had died centuries before, and if she called to her daughter, then she had to be calling from the Other Side. She wanted Rebekah to go to her, to join her there at last.
“My child,” Esther whispered, and Rebekah strained to hear her voice over the buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds in the sunlight. “My darling child, you have lost your way in the night.”
Rebekah blinked, and in the second her eyes closed, she could see the full horror of what her mother meant. Darkness and blood and death filled all her senses, overwhelming them until her eyes flew open again. Her home was there, just where it belonged, surrounded by flowers and children and love.
“You have always belonged here,” Esther told her. The words in her mother’s soft, powerful voice rang true, like the truest thing Rebekah had ever been told. Rebekah could have lived and died in Mystic Falls, and her life would have been perfect.
“I want to be with my family,” Rebekah told her, her voice sounding close and far away at the same time. “Death scattered us, and I’ve tried to hold on to all the pieces.”
She blinked again and saw Marguerite, gruesomely pale, with her brown eyes staring forever at the ceiling. She felt the shock of that terrible betrayal, then the overwhelming grief of losing yet another person she thought would be by her side forever.
Marguerite would be on the Other Side now, along with Esther, Henrik, Eric, and countless other loved ones. Tomás had asked Rebekah where her home truly was; perhaps the Other Side was it.
“And I have wanted to be with you,” Esther promised. “I have watched you and longed for the day you would return to me, to be reunited again.”
There was a shimmering at the far end of the field, where the path led back down toward the village. Rebekah took one uncert
ain step toward it and then another, and Esther’s voice grew stronger as she approached.
“You don’t belong in that world anymore,” she said, and Rebekah could feel her mother’s voice pulling her. Rebekah had lived as a monster among monsters, and now she could leave that all behind. She could shed it like a worn cloak and be herself again.
There was another voice calling to her, she realized, and Rebekah paused, cocking her head to listen. It was someone wrong; someone who didn’t belong in this time or place. The voice was from another life, one in which Rebekah had been motherless for centuries. Where she had lost siblings and lovers and sacrificed too many parts of herself. But it was telling her that there had been bright spots, as well. Her long life had also been full of love.
She could never have lost so much if she hadn’t loved so deeply. That was worth the suffering, the voice cried, drifting to her ears from what felt like centuries away. Life was full of both pain and joy, and Rebekah had never been one to turn her back on any experience.
“Come back to me,” he told her, and she realized it was Luc. Luc Benoit, with origins at least as humble as her own and the same ability to rise above them. He didn’t belong here, but she could feel him leaning over her, tears streaming down the broad planes of his cheeks as he called to her.
“It’s an illusion,” Esther warned. She held out her hand, reaching out from one world into the next, but Rebekah couldn’t stop looking at Luc. He believed in her. He wanted her. After a thousand years of life she was still a woman who could be loved and admired and needed. All she had to do was keep living.
Rebekah hesitated for a moment that stretched out into eternity, torn between two desires so powerful that either one of them could consume her whole. She couldn’t bring herself to choose, and her indecision was enough to break the connection to the Other Side. Esther gave a gasping sigh, and the shimmering in the air hardened and then vanished.