by Julie Plec
The cabin’s small room spun gently whenever Alejandra moved, and Elijah wondered if this was what seasickness felt like. He had only been on a ship once as a human, when his family had fled Europe to escape the plague. That voyage hadn’t affected him, but he could still remember some of the other passengers looking just as nauseous and unsteady as he currently felt.
Alejandra bent to touch Elijah’s forehead, and he shivered. “Is it even worse?” she asked, her voice filled with concern and sympathy. “I wish I could do more to help you.”
“You’re doing all that anyone could,” Elijah said. He felt as if his very soul was being leached away, as if his mental strength was draining out of him along with the physical. He’d already lost track of the days and nights that had passed since their arrival—three at least, but it could just as easily have been a week.
It troubled him that no one would worry about his unexplained absence. It seemed like a particularly unfortunate coincidence that he had fallen ill at the same time he had cut himself off from his family. As he lay there, shivering and sweating in some shack in the middle of nowhere, it was impossible for Elijah to shake the feeling that the loss of his siblings was somehow linked to his illness.
“I need to warn them,” Elijah reasoned, forgetting that he hadn’t spoken aloud. Alejandra cocked her head curiously, and he wondered if she had grown used to his feverish madness.
“Warn whom?” she asked, and then draped another cool, damp cloth across Elijah’s forehead. It smelled faintly medicinal, as if it had been steeped with herbs. She was trying, he knew, but no matter how much occult knowledge she may have stumbled across, Alejandra was clearly out of her depth.
“Rebekah,” Elijah sighed, unwilling to name Klaus. It would make him seem weak—weaker—to admit that he was worried about the health of the brother who had so recently betrayed him. But old habits died hard, and Elijah had been looking out for Klaus his entire life.
“You don’t know where Rebekah is,” Alejandra told him gently, patiently, as if speaking to a child. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran an idle finger along his chest, pausing over the spot where she could feel his heartbeat. Her touch was clinical, offering none of its usual invitation. “Rebekah left New Orleans before you did, don’t you remember that? She has always wanted to go off on her own and live the life that was taken from her, and she finally did it.”
“She did?” Elijah asked. Alejandra’s words conjured up images he wasn’t sure he’d actually seen. Had he watched Rebekah ride out? Had they spoken; had she asked him to let her go? He could remember all of that now, even though he was positive it had never happened.
“Yes...we’ve been over this, Elijah.” Alejandra sighed, examining his eyes closely. “Can you stand? If you wanted to, I mean, could you?”
“Of course,” Elijah replied, stung by the question. “I could fight dragons for you, my love.”
“That’s not true, either.” Alejandra laid two cool fingers along the side of Elijah’s neck, remaining still for a few moments while his pulse beat erratically. “Did you know I grew up in this swamp? There was nowhere else for us to live after our father was killed, and our mother could barely take care of us.”
Her voice was far away, almost dreamy. Elijah felt as though he were drifting downward, farther and farther from her lovely face. “‘Us?’” he repeated, hearing a curious slackness in his voice. “You told me once that you didn’t have siblings.”
“We were terribly poor—my mother had come to the New World as an indentured servant, and spent every moment working,” Alejandra continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “We had to fend for ourselves out here, to use whatever we could find in the bayou to survive.”
“Did I know all this before?” Elijah asked, trying to remember exactly what she had said about her life, and when. Perhaps Elijah had known about her upbringing all along, and had forgotten it in the haze of his illness. Now it was easy to imagine Alejandra as a child here. He could see her face round with youth and her black hair twisted into two thick plaits as she picked her way across the bayou with her brother, Klaus.
That was wrong, though. Klaus was his brother, and Alejandra had told Elijah that she had no siblings. He was sure of that, although he couldn’t remember the precise words, or when he had heard them.
“You said...” Elijah paused, trying to remember exactly what she had said, and found himself unable to go on.
“Shh, shh, don’t talk, my love.” She smoothed the hair on his forehead and he relaxed into her touch. “It’ll only confuse you more,” she went on. “But I have thought of something that might cure you. There’s a root that grows nearby. We used to make it into a tea for all sorts of unknown ailments. It’s worth a try, my dearest.”
Alejandra threw her cloak around her shoulders, then leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. She smelled like smoke and incense. “I’ll be back before you know it,” she promised.
He didn’t want her to go, but he couldn’t force his mouth open. She smiled and put a finger to his lips.
The door banged shut behind her, and Elijah stared at the low ceiling. It swayed, and he tried to count its movements like seconds. He wondered if Alejandra had been right—was he already too weak to stand?
Elijah swung his legs over the edge of the thin mattress and dragged his torso upright. He had definitely been overly optimistic when he had said he could fight, but he’d be damned if some mystery illness would keep him off his feet entirely.
It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but Elijah slowly forced his body upright. The room spun dangerously, but he refused to succumb to his mind’s tricks. He stood, and after a few minutes he convinced himself to take a few halting, unsteady steps.
He felt as though he had been in a fog ever since he’d met Alejandra. It had been a beautiful, delirious haze, and he thought it was love. But now that same fog had taken over his mind and body, and Elijah couldn’t see his way out. It scared him.
The strangest part was that Elijah still loved her, even as doubts swirled in his mind. The thought of being at odds with her was almost physically painful. All he wanted was to be persuaded that he was wrong, that his suspicions were nothing but mere hallucinations. That, more than anything else, convinced Elijah that something was terribly wrong with him.
The pack Alejandra had brought with her was just a few short steps away, but his vision stretched so that it looked like miles. Alejandra would be back soon—he had to hurry.
Elijah dragged his left foot forward, then shifted his weight and worked to move his right. Every few seconds, he thought he could hear footsteps approaching outside, and he had to force himself to concentrate on his goal. He couldn’t spare the energy to take a few extra steps and look out the tiny window.
Elijah collapsed with a sigh of relief when he finally reached the bag. Fumbling with the clasps took nearly all the strength and dexterity he had left, but he had come too far to give up now. The pack contained a few simple dresses, a comb made of horn, a tiny jar of some kind of sweet-smelling cream. Elijah pawed awkwardly through all the usual things a woman might bring on a journey until his numbed fingers bumped up against a small paper envelope that didn’t belong.
He tore it a bit as he opened it, cursing his weak-limbed clumsiness, but when he saw the powder inside he forgot everything else. He had never seen it before, but he knew it at once: Its curious, shining flecks were exactly what the legends had always described.
“So it seems you were able to stand,” Alejandra remarked from the doorway. Elijah felt his blood turn to ice at the sound of her voice, afraid of the desire it aroused in him even now. She had laid her trap well, and he was thoroughly tangled in it. “Tell me, what have you found in there?”
Elijah felt compelled to turn, although his body protested at every movement. The powder she’d secretly been giving him had rendered him all b
ut helpless. “Where did you get vinaya powder?” he asked, his tongue feeling thick and heavy in his mouth.
“We collect curiosities,” explained the man who walked in after Alejandra, and behind him Elijah could see a dozen lanterns or more. He was trapped, hemmed in by humans and too weak to even think of overpowering them.
“Your kind has an unnatural advantage over us,” Alejandra added, her voice cold and detached. “We had to even out the odds if we wanted to take back our city.”
“Witches all over the coast practically begged to trade with us,” the man went on. He was tall, with black hair that curled just to his shoulders. His body was shrouded in a thick black cloak with a glittering silver pin at its throat. “They relayed potions and weapons from all over the world, including some cuttings of the vine that makes that cunning little powder in your hand.”
“Vinaya,” Elijah repeated. He now recognized the vines that grew around the cabin—similar to poison ivy, glossy and red at the stem, but with a fourth leaf. A plant like that was supposed to be the main ingredient in vinaya powder. The story went that vinaya’s creators believed vampires could be made human again, and vinaya powder was the horrible result of their good intentions. The witches’ original enchantment had failed, but they’d unleashed a potent concoction that allowed a human to control any vampire who ingested it. Any trace of the spell had disappeared centuries ago and had never been heard of again...until now. “You put it in the wine you gave me the day we left?”
“And in everything since then as well,” Alejandra confirmed. “It takes time for the powder’s strength to build up to a level that gives me permanent control. My twin here likes to use it for immediate effect, but I find his methods less reliable. With a vampire of your experience and power, I couldn’t take any chance of the vinaya wearing off...and now I can promise you that it won’t.”
The tall man smiled fondly at Alejandra. “We each have our strengths, sister,” he agreed, sounding almost playful. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and Elijah was consumed by the desire to tear his throat out.
“Your twin?” Elijah asked, looking from her to the man and back again. There were similarities, now that he thought to look for them: The man had Alejandra’s patrician nose and high, sharp cheekbones. His green eyes were a few shades lighter in color than hers, but they had the same languid, feline shape to them.
“Did I never mention him before?” she asked, smiling up at the man in a way Elijah recognized well. The cabin might be where Alejandra had lived as a child, but the man beside her was her home.
“My name is Tomás,” the man said pleasantly, releasing Alejandra and taking a menacing step closer to Elijah. “You are Elijah Mikaelson, and you are going to help me and my sister destroy your brother, your sister, and then every last one of the vermin you three have created to infest our city.”
Before Elijah could answer, Tomás lifted his hand to his mouth and blew onto his palm, scattering a fine, iridescent powder into Elijah’s face. It burned, but he was too weak to cry out.
“You will have no choice,” one of them gloated, but through the red haze that consumed him, Elijah could not have even said which twin had spoken.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHERE THE HELL was Elijah?
Klaus prowled the floor as if a map to his brother’s location might appear if he kept pacing. He had begun his search for Elijah in Alejandra’s spare little room above the Southern Spot and now, days later, he had memorized the cracks in the floorboards.
There wasn’t much in the room aside from its floorboards. Klaus didn’t make it his business to pry into his employees’ lives, but he wished he had noticed sooner that his fortune-teller didn’t actually seem to live in the quarters she was assigned. The bed didn’t look as though it had ever been slept in, and if Alejandra had ever kept any personal effects there, she had taken them with her.
Klaus knew there was nothing useful in the empty room. But he didn’t know where else to go, and giving up the search was not an option. Elijah must be counting on his siblings to find him, and they’d already lost too much time dealing with the Cult of Janus. It was bad enough to have been tricked, but now he was also helpless.
There had to be something that would lead them to Alejandra—and to Elijah, if they were even together. Klaus couldn’t shake the fear that he might be running out of time.
“No one has been here in days, if ever,” Rebekah sighed from the doorway. “Sampson and his pack have been moving west along the river, and you should be out there with them, Niklaus. The trail here is cold.”
“Even a cold trail has to start somewhere,” Klaus argued stubbornly, although he was debating his own doubts as much as his sister’s. “We don’t have any other leads.”
“We do now,” Lisette’s freckled face appeared beside Rebekah’s in the doorway. “The wolves found a track, but they lost it again. They think Alejandra and your brother boarded a boat at the edge of the bayou, but they have no way of narrowing down where they went from there.”
The news gave Klaus a dim hope. He was a better tracker than any werewolf, or at least any werewolf stuck in its useless human form—his nose and eyesight were both far superior. Maybe the boat had left traces as it pushed through the swamp, signs that the wolves were too dense to pick up on. It was possible, but not quite enough to persuade him to give up on any other leads. “The vampires I sent to the warehouse district have turned up nothing?”
“Not yet,” Lisette admitted. “If this Tomás really is masquerading as a merchant, then it’s an excellent disguise. We haven’t found anything down there that doesn’t belong. I sent José on ahead to tell them about the boat, so they’ll start looking for any that might have been out in the bayou recently.”
“Go with José,” Klaus ordered as Lisette gave him a pleading look. “Don’t argue with me now. I need you to take charge of the hunt for the boat, so that my brother has our best people at every front of this search. He needs us all.”
Lisette’s lips went white as she pushed her mouth together in a grudging silence, then she turned and ran down the hallway without a word.
Klaus shoved the doors of the little wardrobe open again, trying to recall everything he had ever noticed of Alejandra’s habits. He had never paid much attention to her, not even after learning of her dalliance with Elijah. He thought he knew everything he needed to, and hadn’t bothered to seek out more gossip from the laundresses.
That thought gave him an idea so simple, so obvious, that Klaus was halfway out of the empty room before his mind had fully wrapped around his plan.
“Where are you going?” Rebekah shouted after him, but Klaus had already reached the back staircase, taking the steps three at a time in his hurry to reach the little courtyard behind the brothel where the washing was done.
“Hold where you are,” he ordered, bursting into the courtyard so abruptly that a sturdy, apple-cheeked woman shrieked in alarm. Her calloused hands were submerged in soapy water.
“Sir!” she squeaked.
“Do you have anything that belongs to the fortune-teller?” he demanded, rifling through the nearest pile of flimsy, silky gowns. Alejandra hadn’t worked in days, but the Southern Spot went through an impressive amount of clothing and bedding, and often nonessentials could pile up.
“I think that’s one of her dresses hanging on the line there,” a young maid suggested, pointing to a green linen gown. “It’s almost dry, if she’s able to wait until morning.”
“She can wait,” Klaus growled. “Is there anything of hers left to be cleaned?”
The women looked at each other nervously, and then the younger one pointed again. “With spring around the corner we’ve got a lot of outer-clothes no one seems to want right away,” she explained, and Klaus saw a pile of cloaks pushed off to one side of the courtyard. “We haven’t gotten to an
y of those ones there yet.”
“That fortune-teller always has fancy embroidery and beading and such,” the apple-cheeked woman added, seeming to have recovered her composure at last. “Hélène insists on doing that kind of thing herself, but she’s been down with the flux all week.” She stepped away from her work. “I’m sure there will be something there. I’ll help you look.”
Klaus knew Alejandra’s cloak as soon as the laundress uncovered it. It was midnight-blue velvet, embroidered with tiny silver stars that danced into all kinds of fanciful constellations as the fabric moved. The collar was set with glass cut to look like gemstones, and there was a faint, familiar smell on it: the suggestion of the Southern Spot permeating the rich folds. But after a moment Klaus was able to discern another layer: a smoky scent that could only belong to Alejandra herself.
“That’s it,” he announced shortly, ignoring the confused look the laundresses exchanged with each other. “You ladies have my undying gratitude,” he added over his shoulder, as he caught Rebekah just coming off the staircase and spun her around toward the front door. “This way, dear sister,” he told her. “I know what we’re tracking now.”
Boot prints crisscrossed the mud where the wolves had lost the trail. “Your wolves have made a mess of this,” Klaus observed as Sampson joined him and Rebekah.
“We got this far.” The muscular werewolf shrugged. “If you’re able to carry on the search from here without us, we’ll accept your heartfelt gratitude and fall back.”
Rebekah laughed at the pack leader’s brazenness, and Sampson flashed a grin at her before stepping away. The wolves were in high spirits as their leader called them off the hunt. They had cobbled together a crude but sturdy raft, and Klaus saw Rebekah usher the last of the werewolves away from it. She took one of the long oars for herself and pushed into the shallow water.
Klaus stepped into the slow river and cast about for any hint of Alejandra’s scent. When he caught a trace of her perfume a dozen yards downstream, he pushed off to pursue it, waving vaguely to catch his sister’s attention as he went.