by Julie Plec
Klaus stood and rounded on Sampson, who was prying a broken vial out of another man’s hand. “What treachery is this?” Klaus demanded, grabbing the burly wolf by the collar. “What game do you think you’re playing?”
Sampson shoved Klaus away and straightened his coat. “You think I let you kill hundreds of men just for the pleasure of watching them die a second time?” he asked. “I’m not as much of a monster as you are, Klaus.”
A little trickle of froth ran from the prisoner’s mouth, and his eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. They would all die, Klaus realized. All their work would be for nothing.
“We didn’t plan any of this,” the red-haired werewolf insisted, kicking a newly dead prisoner in her frustration. “Don’t be absurd.”
“It’s just a coincidence, then, that it’s your toxin they all carry?” Klaus pulled a vial from a third man and held it up to emphasize his point. “How many of the citizens of New Orleans have one of these hidden on them tonight?”
“How the hell should I know?” Sampson’s face reddened a bit in his outrage.
“You should know,” Lisette pointed out, closing the eyes of one of the prisoners. “You knew that humans were arming themselves with supernatural weapons, yet you continued to turn a profit off the weapon your own bodies make. Did it ever occur to you that this armed, organized cult would take advantage of that?”
“We don’t sell our venom here,” Sampson said stiffly, then he tasted the glass vial in his hand. “Wherever they got this, it wasn’t from us.”
“Wherever they got it,” Klaus repeated, tossing his vial aside and beginning to pace again. The men were dying in earnest now, but there were no screams or even groans of pain. It was a suicide pact, and they were all in it to the last. “You send your poison up the river to sell it there, and your friends upriver send theirs down here. Your hands are always clean, yet somehow your filth spreads everywhere.”
“I’d heard you were paranoid, but this is absurd,” Sampson snapped. “You make it sound like we came to you, revealed the spy in your midst, and allied with you just to play some schoolboy prank. What could we possibly stand to gain by all of this?”
“What did I gain?” Klaus shouted. Rebekah had run off and Elijah had made his dramatic exit, and there was no one to hold Klaus back. And yet his plan had still been foiled, as if he were always predestined to fail.
The guard had warned him, he realized, back when they had first stormed the prison. He had said that Klaus would get nothing from the humans there except for blood. He had known...they had all known. The entire city was rising up against the vampires, and now Klaus couldn’t even make new ones. Any he managed to turn would just find another way to die.
“They won’t fight for us,” Lisette murmured, and Klaus knew that she had arrived at the same conclusion. “Even without the venom, they were never going to join our cause. This was pointless from the start.”
Sampson glared at her, then back at Klaus. Surrounded by the magnificent setting of the mansion, the wolf looked especially crude and out of place. To Klaus it seemed like a stray dog had snuck in off the street and was shedding its filthy fur all over the Turkish silk carpet, and he suddenly wished Rebekah were there to throw the mongrel out.
Where the hell was she, anyway? It wasn’t like Klaus’s siblings to leave him to his own devices for this long.
“Get out,” Klaus snapped. “This isn’t a matter that requires your cooperation, so I invite you and your pack to get the hell out of my house right now.”
Sampson looked as though he intended to argue, then seemed to think the better of it. He was too timid a leader to truly ally with, Klaus decided. He was more in Elijah’s mold, always considering politics and angles rather than trusting his instincts.
“Have it your way.” Sampson shrugged. “We won’t be much help with this sort of situation, anyway. We’ve never experienced such a colossal failure—not until we teamed up with you.” The werewolf turned and left, abandoning him just like Elijah and Rebekah had. No wonder he had so little faith in anyone but himself: He was the only person he could rely on.
“What the hell are we going to do with all these bodies?” Klaus complained when the last werewolf had left. He knelt and tugged one of the dead men’s eyelids open.
“Well, it’s not as if they’re coming back,” Lisette said, pushing a corpse out of the way so she could lounge on a velvet settee. “But the werewolves will, once they’ve calmed down and thought things through. We can’t just leave these men lying around.”
“True,” Klaus agreed, watching a man spasm beside the marble fireplace. “If any of them do manage to rise, they will be enemies.”
Lisette stared at the corpse she had just moved aside. “You want us to...to make sure they stay dead,” she sighed.
“It’s what they wanted. And we can’t refuse a dead man’s last wishes,” Klaus replied sarcastically. As irritating as he sometimes found Lisette, she had stayed. There weren’t many people in Klaus’s life who could say the same, especially not at the moment. Cold moonlight streamed through the windows, washing the corpses in sickly white.
“Stake them all,” Klaus ordered, raising his voice to carry throughout the mansion, so that everyone could hear him. “Make sure every convict stays dead.”
It was gruesome, boring, thankless work. Most of the prisoners had died already, but others thrashed and struggled when the vampires approached with their stakes in hand. Even with their last breaths the convicts seemed determined to make things as difficult as possible.
Even worse, Klaus’s army had begun their task in a disorganized, haphazard way, leaving some un-staked corpses littered between the ones who had already been put out of their misery. Hands twitched up to catch at Klaus’s ankles when he least expected it, and he caught himself re-staking at least a few of the men.
“We’re going at this all wrong,” Lisette complained, echoing Klaus’s own irritated thoughts. “They should have been ordered to move the staked ones outside from the start.”
“How nice to hear about one more thing I’ve done wrong,” Klaus snapped, regretting his earlier moments of sympathy toward her. “If you don’t like your orders, love, you can always go running after my brother. Maybe this time he’ll tolerate your company. Better him than me.”
Lisette straightened from the convict she had been crouched over, shoving her hair away from her face with a rough, angry thrust of her hand. “You keep worrying at that old bone, Klaus. It makes me wonder what your obsession is with Elijah’s romantic life. Do you really live so much in his shadow that when you see me all you can think of is him?”
“What else should I think of?” Klaus hissed, stung in spite of himself. “Your lack of discipline or dedication to my cause? Your incompetence? Let’s not forget whose brilliant idea this massacre was in the first place.”
“It was a brilliant plan!” Lisette shouted, forgetting any pretense at composure. “You thought so, too, before you went and ran your mouth about it to anyone who would listen. Did you forget that these humans have been spying on you, manipulating you, and generally leading you around by the nose for weeks already? Did you think they would just sit on their hands and let you turn their soldiers into yours?”
Klaus was blinded by his own rage, and when his vision cleared he found that he had shoved the impertinent brat against the wall, his forearm pressed against her throat. “I don’t see you living to eternity with a mouth like that,” he seethed, his voice low and menacing. He realized that he still held a wooden stake in his free hand, and he touched the deadly point to Lisette’s lightly freckled chest.
“Maybe you’re right, if I have to deal with you forever,” she spat, more angry than afraid, even with a stake poised right above her heart.
He drew the stake back, ready to drive it straight through her ribs, when a commotion by t
he front door forced him to hesitate.
“What the hell have you done?” a familiar voice shrieked, climbing into registers that were actually painful to Klaus’s ears. “Pack up this butchery immediately and get it out of my house.”
Klaus released Lisette, his moment of rage over. “It’s my house, too,” he shouted, stepping across a drawing room’s worth of corpses to confront Rebekah in the hall. “You ran away again, so I’ve been managing things in your absence, dearest sister.”
He expected her to have some kind of snappish retort, but Rebekah’s blue eyes blazed with unexpected rage the moment they met his, and Klaus was entirely unprepared for the immediate fury of her attack.
“You’ve terrorized this family for long enough, you son of a bitch,” Rebekah snarled, her pretty face twisted into a mask of absolute loathing. She had a stake of her own, Klaus realized, and then he gave it a better look. He hadn’t seen the wood of the White Oak tree in centuries, but he would know it anywhere.
At long last, Rebekah had made up her mind to kill him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
REBEKAH’S ANGER HAD taken on a real, tangible life of its own. Her return journey from Mystic Falls had been consumed by vengeful thoughts of Tomás, but when she walked in her front door and saw Klaus with a stake pressed to Lisette’s heart, Rebekah’s old pain had all flooded back.
Rebekah had lost a great deal over the centuries, and sometimes she believed she was used to it. But then some new, fresh hurt, like the murder of Marguerite Leroux, would remind her that her heart wasn’t entirely scarred over. She couldn’t let Klaus take one more person from her, and she couldn’t possibly fight Tomás with a traitor hovering behind her back.
She pulled the stake from her cloak and flew at Klaus. Her brother blocked it, but clearly recognized that she meant to hurt him. All the other vampires fled from the room—they knew better than to get between a Mikaelson and a Mikaelson.
“You’ve gone too far,” she told him. “Enough is enough. You destroy everything you touch.”
“Is this about your precious carpets?” Klaus demanded. He made a grab for the stake, but she had no intention of handing it over. “It’s hardly the first time they’ve seen a bit of blood. It comes out one way or another.”
“You monster!” Rebekah shouted. “Have you forgotten what you did already? Do you ruin lives so easily that you can’t even keep track of them all anymore?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Klaus snapped, watching the stake warily. “Put that thing down, or I’ll kill you with it before you get the chance to threaten me again.”
“You killed my friend, and Lisette was next!” Rebekah cried, holding her ground. She raised the stake again, but her hand quavered.
“I’ve killed lots of people’s friends,” Klaus replied, unimpressed by her anger. “It never seemed to be a problem before. Rebekah, put the stake down.”
“You killed her because she was my friend.” Rebekah could see a spark of curiosity on Klaus’s face as her accusation penetrated his thick skull. Perhaps he had finally remembered the lengths he had gone to just to murder an innocent girl. “Marguerite never did anything to you, but you just had to get back at me, didn’t you? And to put her in my bed! You staked a child to hurt me, Niklaus.”
“Marguerite?” Klaus asked, as if he honestly didn’t know what she was talking about. “That stray witch you took in a couple of decades back? I don’t think I’ve seen her all week, dear sister.” He paused and then frowned. “She’s dead?”
“Don’t toy with me,” Rebekah warned, clenching her fist around the stake. She hated to think he was playing dumb to trick her; it was beneath them both.
“I didn’t kill her, Rebekah.” Klaus shrugged, as if the topic truly bored him. “Not after the first time, anyway. Not since you made her a vampire. I have no idea what happened to her, dead or alive. I’ve been a bit busy, as you can see.”
Rebekah glanced down at the floor in spite of herself, taking in the dozens of dead bodies that filled their mansion. “I see you’re up to your usual madness,” she replied. “You really think I’ll take this bloodbath as proof that you didn’t kill the one person I actually cared about?”
“I don’t have to prove anything to you.” Klaus held up his hands to signal a truce. “If I killed someone to send a message to you, it would make no sense to deny it now. And here I am, dear sister, denying it.”
You are going to lose everything you love, Rebekah, Tomás’s voice echoed in her mind. I know what you are afraid of. This is only the beginning.
Rebekah heard the White Oak stake clatter to the marble floor. Tomás had taunted her, giving her the pieces of the puzzle but knowing she missed the essential key. “We’re being used,” she whispered, trying to force the whole picture to take shape. “I met a human, Niklaus, and he said things that...I think he’s trying to drive us apart.”
“A human?” Klaus asked sharply, picking up the stake from the floor. He looked for a moment as if he might slide it into a pocket of his own, but Rebekah glared at him. Their truce was still fragile. As a compromise, Klaus opened a wrought-iron chest that stood against one wall, locked the stake inside, then held up his hands to show that they were empty. “The humans have been giving me some trouble as well. A group of rebels played me against the werewolves for weeks. Is that the sort of thing your human would do?”
“The werewolves?” Rebekah frowned. “Who would even need to turn you against the Collado pack? I didn’t know that you could hate them even more than you already do.”
“An outside observer might say the same about the two of us,” Klaus pointed out reasonably. “But these humans aren’t just trying to ruin friendships and spoil our happiness, dear sister. They mean business. They want us dead, so they’re driving wedges into cracks, hoping we’ll give in to our anger and mistrust. The problem is, it’s working.”
The news was a surprise, but it certainly tracked with what Rebekah had seen of Tomás. He’d forced Luc to attack Rebekah, but it had been much simpler to turn her against Klaus. It had only taken one well-executed murder, with the timing and the staging carefully planned. Tomás had killed Marguerite because Klaus had threatened her, and because Rebekah would believe that her brother had finally made good on those threats.
You are going to lose everything you love.
Rebekah was supposed to die in Mystic Falls, but if she escaped, Tomás had planned for her to return and kill Klaus—or for him to kill her in retaliation. A White Oak stake was a dangerous weapon, even for its wielder. Tomás didn’t care which of them died first, because he intended to kill them all. Even if Rebekah had failed to follow through, Tomás was lining up werewolves to take her brother out. He had so many plans intersecting at once that he didn’t even need to call on Klaus’s old hatred for New Orleans’s witches, although Rebekah was confident that they would not be forgotten.
“Is all this”—she gestured at the carnage on the floor—“the werewolves’ work, then?”
Klaus smiled bitterly at the bodies that lay everywhere around them. “In some ways, but no. This was the work of the rebels. Their cult has gained more ground than I would ever have believed. Sampson Collado revealed to me that my human spy had become a double agent, and we agreed to work together to eliminate the human threat. The sabotage you see here was supposed to undermine our alliance.”
“Your alliance?” Rebekah said, genuinely stunned. “You can’t be serious.” Either she had been away longer than she realized—lifetimes, perhaps—or Klaus was taking this human menace very, very seriously indeed. How had Elijah let this happen? And where was he, anyway? Surely he was aware of the human threat in their midst. He derived his deepest pleasures from such intricate plots.
“Where is Elijah?” she asked Klaus. Klaus looked guilty, or at least as guilty as he was capable
of. “Oh, no. What did you do?” Rebekah demanded as a wave of foreboding washed over her. If Tomás had already turned Klaus and Elijah against each other...
“Elijah has abandoned us,” Klaus announced, although his tone indicated that there was more to it than that. “I suspect it has something to do with the woman he’s taken up with, honestly, although he burst in on me and Sampson Collado and picked a nasty fight all on his own.”
Rebekah heard a sharp intake of breath from the drawing room, and she caught a glimpse of Lisette’s reddish hair at the edge of the doorway.
“What woman?” Rebekah asked, lowering her voice in an attempt to be discreet. “Another vampire, you mean?”
“No, some two-bit fortune-teller who was hired on at my brothel.” Klaus showed none of Rebekah’s restraint, and his voice seemed to echo off the very walls. “Not even a real witch, just a...”
He trailed off and stared at Rebekah, who returned his panicked look. “A human?” she asked, her heart beating hard. “Elijah’s been bedding some human woman, and then he fought with you, and now he’s gone?”
Klaus nodded slowly.
“We have to find him,” she said. “We have to find Elijah right now.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELIJAH COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time he had been ill. He didn’t think vampires could get sick. He had been poisoned, bewitched, and haunted, but as far as he could remember, he had never been sick.
He lay on top of the faded patchwork quilt, straining his eyes in order to see Alejandra make another concoction over the little hearth. She had spent days brewing strangely thin soups and foul-tasting teas, growing ever more creative as Elijah’s sickness stubbornly refused leave. If anything, it only seemed to get worse.