by Julie Plec
It was almost impossible to pull himself up to sitting, but when he swung his legs over the edge of his bed, standing up wasn’t quite as difficult as he had expected. He placed one foot in front of the other, reminding his legs how to work. By the time he reached his door, he felt almost like his old self again, except for the terrible, overwhelming, unavoidable compulsion that was driving him out of the mansion.
Elijah silently opened the door and slipped out into the hallway, every sense alert. He could hear Rebekah a few doors away, thoroughly engaged. Elijah blocked out the sound, because somewhere in the distance Alejandra was calling to him, assuring him that Klaus and Rebekah had lied about her fate. She wasn’t dead, left to rot in the middle of the bayou; she was just outside of the house, waiting for him in the gardens.
Or perhaps she was just a bit farther than that. She couldn’t have stepped past the barrier of the protection spell that still surrounded the house without attracting notice. Elijah only needed to get outside its circle and then he would be able to see his love again.
He needed to see her; he could barely breathe without her. He went down the hall, toward the great curving front staircase, feeling stronger by the second. His footsteps were silent and sure as he descended the marble steps. He couldn’t have resisted Alejandra’s call even if he had wanted to, but surely it had to mean something that his vitality had returned when he was on his way to meet her.
A door creaked on its hinges somewhere in the south wing, and Elijah froze, trying to make the outline of his body melt into the shadows at the base of the staircase. He listened, but whoever was moving around the ground floor was as stealthy as he was. Even this brief pause made him feel dizzy, and he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He needed to get beyond the protection spell.
If they found him, they would try to stop him. How could he have ever thought his siblings were on his side? Rebekah and Klaus were traitors who held him back, used him, and made him a prisoner in his own home. They didn’t want him to be happy, didn’t want him to be with Alejandra. No one understood what Elijah had to do, and their misguided good intentions would only bring more violence and pain.
Long after he had lost count of his heartbeats, Elijah finally risked a step forward. He could almost smell the painted wood of the front door, not to mention the glorious freedom that lay beyond it.
The grand front hall was empty and silent. Moonlight slanted in at a curious angle that made half the marble glow brilliantly white, while the rest was so black there might have been nothing in its place but emptiness. The moon was nearly full, Elijah realized in surprise, wondering at the way the weeks had slipped away from him.
He would be back in control of his mind and his life soon enough. All he needed to do was rejoin Alejandra, and the door was directly before him. He reached for it, so eager to be out in the open air—
“Where do you think you’re going?” Lisette demanded, and before Elijah could even turn toward her she had thrown herself between him and the handle of the front door. His skin began to prickle and then burn. He had to obey. He had to leave.
“Get out of my way,” he warned, hoping that she would listen. Once upon a time, he would have been able to force her, to use his own magic to control her mind and move her aside. But there was no chance of that now, not in his weakened state. If he couldn’t convince Lisette to let him go, then Elijah would need to fight his way past her, and there was no part of him that looked forward to that.
“I went upstairs to sit with you and you were gone,” she said, showing no sign of planning to step aside. “Elijah, you need to rest.”
“I need some air,” he disagreed, his limbs itching as if every inch of them were being viciously stung by insects. Elijah rubbed at his arms, wishing that Lisette would just go away and stop tormenting him. She had been haunting him for months, and it was no surprise that she had chosen to confront him now. He was finally happy with another woman, and Lisette couldn’t bear that. She was interfering intentionally to keep him from Alejandra, with no regard for the physical agony it was causing him to be apart from her.
Even worse, Lisette was peering even more closely at him, inspecting each of his eyes for signs of distress. “Something is wrong with you,” she murmured, lifting her hand to tilt his chin for a better look.
Elijah felt a sudden blaze of rage explode within his chest, and he threw Lisette so hard that her back splintered the door. She landed heavily, and Elijah leaped over her, his eyes on the trees at the far edge of the manicured lawns. The protection spell stopped there, and he could almost taste the freedom that lay on its other side.
A hand wrapped around his ankle as he jumped over the veranda steps, and dirt and gravel filled his mouth as he crashed to the ground. Lisette scrabbled for a better hold, clutching at his burning arms and the back of his head in a desperate bid to bring him back under her control.
Elijah rolled and caught her by the neck, intending to choke her until she was unconscious, but the pain that wracked his body was only getting worse. The burst of strength that had carried him out of the mansion disappeared, and Lisette broke free, pinning him to the ground with a viselike grip.
“Stay down,” she ordered, her voice hoarse from the damage he had managed to inflict on her throat. He stared at the handprint he had left imprinted on her skin. “Elijah, I think that the powder is still working in you.”
That conclusion was so obvious that Elijah could have murdered her on the spot for being so slow. The cursed powder filled every part of him, torturing him with no hope of respite. The only way to end its hold on him would be to reach Alejandra, and Lisette refused to let him go. He struggled wildly, trying to shake her off, but the pain had crept back into his brain, and his limbs refused to do what he wanted.
“It must be Tomás,” Lisette said, holding Elijah’s hands over his head and looking into the forest. She scanned the trees for a sign of the human, but was searching for the wrong twin. “Elijah, this is important. You have to fight this and stay here with me.”
Everything in Elijah told him to do the exact opposite: that getting free of Lisette and away the mansion was the most important thing he could do. But her voice stirred something buried and half forgotten—the long-lost memories of a woman he had once loved. He’d shoved those memories deep down into the well of his heart and tried to banish them from his mind, but his feelings for Lisette had never fully disappeared.
And so when the vinaya provoked him again, commanding him to kill Lisette and move on, Elijah found himself resisting its pull. In spite of the desire that literally burned him from the inside out, he knew that Lisette must not become a casualty of Alejandra’s magic. It was bad enough that Elijah had turned his back on her, that he had tried to forget her in the arms of a human who had turned out to be his enemy. He had already hurt Lisette far too badly, and no matter what Alejandra’s ghost whispered in his ear, he absolutely refused to do any worse. Lisette deserved better from him, and that truth drove Elijah to resist the vinaya’s control.
As he lay on his back, with Lisette above him, he relaxed. He felt the dampness of the crushed grass beneath him seep into his clothes. He reminded himself of what he knew to be real: Alejandra was dead, and before she died she had taken control of him. She lured him with empty promises, and now, looking up at the real, true promise of Lisette, he knew it.
He closed his eyes and let Alejandra drift away from him again. Sensing the change in him, Lisette loosened her grip. “I should have said something sooner,” she said. “I could tell that you were different, and when Klaus told me about that woman, I knew she must be bad for you. But I was still angry, and perhaps a bit jealous, and I didn’t press the matter the way I should have. I was afraid you would dismiss my fears as nothing but the resentment of a former lover.”
“I would have,” Elijah admitted, finding his voice again at last. “But I’m
glad you didn’t simply leave me to my fate. I didn’t deserve this kindness after the way I treated you.”
“You did what you thought you had to do,” Lisette said. “I don’t know that it was the right thing, but that doesn’t really matter anymore. When you need me, I will be here, and nothing is going to change that.”
Hearing her words made some of his pain disappear. It wouldn’t dissipate completely—this agony was brutal and unrelenting and seemed determined to be his own personal hell for the rest of eternity—but Lisette’s wry smile made it recede ever so slightly. Lisette was strong, and she had just proved herself strong enough for both of them. He had always regretted hurting her, but for the first time he sincerely regretted leaving her. He wondered if there might have been another way, if he could have protected her from Klaus without forsaking her entirely.
“What is this?” Klaus demanded, as if by thinking about his brother, Elijah had caused him to appear. “Lisette, what the hell were you thinking bringing him out here?”
“I’m the one who stopped him,” she countered, and Elijah thought she seemed a little reluctant to separate from him as she rose to her feet to face Klaus. “I was watching your back once again, you spoiled ingrate.”
To Elijah’s surprise, Klaus didn’t lash out in return; perhaps the two of them had come to some kind of understanding. An uneasy one, from the look of things, but even a shaky rapport was better than murderous hatred. “I’ve never known you to watch anything of mine when Elijah was in the room, love,” Klaus replied sardonically, and Elijah noticed that Klaus held a small stack of dusty books loosely under one arm. “Bring him back inside, will you? While you were frolicking about on the lawns, I seem to have found a cure for my brother’s affliction.”
Elijah closed his eyes in relief as the two of them lifted him, each wrapping one of his arms around their shoulders. He had made it; he had outlasted Alejandra’s curse. Klaus’s visit to the witches had been a success, and soon Elijah would be his own man once again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SUN WAS rising over the eastern hills, and human servants hurried around the mansion closing shutters and drawing curtains against its painful rays. Klaus watched a particularly fetching young maid as she barred the last set of wooden shutters in the salon, studying her lithe movements as he tried to shut out all his other thoughts. The maid glanced coyly over her shoulder before leaving the room, but no flirtation could lighten Klaus’s mood that morning.
Rebekah appeared in the doorway just after the maid passed through, her hair a bit tangled and her cheeks unnaturally flushed. Klaus raised an eyebrow at the sight of her, easily guessing how she had passed the night. “I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself, dear sister,” he greeted her, his voice dangerously light. “While you were otherwise engaged, I found Elijah wandering the gardens.”
Rebekah’s mouth dropped open in shock, leaving her uncharacteristically speechless. It wouldn’t last long, Klaus knew, but he relished her guilty silence as long as he could.
“I’m all right,” Elijah murmured, his trembling voice betraying the lie. He lay awkwardly across a scrolled wooden bench, his head resting in Lisette’s lap. In her usual way, Lisette seemed to have no awareness whatsoever that she didn’t belong in this council, or that her presence among the three siblings might be out of place. She had eyes only for Elijah, as if her lucky interception during his misadventure had somehow made her responsible for his well-being in perpetuity.
“You were supposed to be with him!” Rebekah finally said, and Lisette slowly raised her head to look at her.
“You left before I arrived,” Lisette snapped, and Rebekah’s cheeks flushed to an even darker scarlet. “He was gone by the time I reached his room. He’s not merely sick, Rebekah; Elijah is possessed. He can’t be left alone for a moment.”
“How convenient for you,” Klaus pointed out, enjoying their bickering. It was as good a distraction as any from what Amalia Giroux had told him. She had bluntly explained Elijah’s cure, leaving no room for denial or negotiation. And no matter how many times Klaus turned her words over, looking for another solution, he couldn’t find one. No one but Klaus could pay the price of the spell, so Klaus would be forced to sacrifice one of his greatest possessions on his brother’s behalf.
Lisette sneered at him, but had no retort to offer. Her fingers wound through Elijah’s brown hair, absentmindedly tangling it and then smoothing it again.
Rebekah dropped onto a velvet daybed and ran her hands through her own hair, pulling and arranging it into some semblance of order on top of her head. “So?” she asked, apparently determined to pretend that Lisette had disappeared. “Niklaus, what did the witches have to say for themselves?”
Klaus could almost taste the bitterness the meeting had left in him, and he grimaced in spite of his determination to remain cool-headed. “They laid some fairly steep terms,” he began, knowing his siblings would find Amalia’s demands just as outrageous as he had. He realized he had taken Amalia’s candle from his coat pocket and had been rolling it back and forth between his fingers. He set it down firmly on the table beside him, sat down in a leather chair, and rested his hands on his knees. The group looked at him expectantly. “Before they would tell me how to cure Elijah, they wanted to secure the same portion of the city for themselves as we gave to the werewolves.”
“What?” Rebekah all but shouted. “They’re to blame for all this! That powder originated with witches in the first place, and it isn’t the only thing Tomás has of theirs. He’s been building an arsenal of weapons to destroy supernatural beings, and he’s been doing it with witches’ help. Now they want to use their own treachery as leverage? I hope you slaughtered them.”
“It wasn’t these witches,” Elijah sighed. “They may not deserve a third of our city, but they aren’t responsible for every renegade out there who uses the same title, either.”
“Then who is?” Klaus asked, interested in a new enemy to take out his rage on—there seemed enough of it to go around these days. His fortunes in New Orleans had changed far too quickly for his taste: No matter what he worked to build, circumstances could sweep it all away in a moment. First he had been forced to share his city with the werewolves, and now...now he would lose even more. “It’s true, though, that they didn’t even know for sure that the powder really existed until I told them so,” Klaus added, at which Rebekah rolled her eyes skeptically. “The local clan is out of their depth with Tomás, and so an alliance is as much for their safety as their benefit.”
“An alliance,” Elijah sighed. “You mean another chunk of our city gone, in exchange for some information? Niklaus, I would never have asked you to agree to that. It may have taken us longer to find a solution on our own, but if the only alternative was giving away another piece of our home, I would have waited.”
“I doubt you could have,” Lisette muttered, barely seeming to notice anyone else in the room. “I was in your study for hours and hadn’t found a single thing of use, and you managed to escape in the meantime.”
“All the more reason I should look myself,” Elijah argued, although to Klaus, it was all his brother could do to keep his eyes open. “With a little time—”
“Oh, don’t be absurd,” Rebekah interrupted. “The powder nearly lured you out into the woods earlier, and I doubt that will be the last attempt Tomás makes. The humans have their sights on us and their hooks into you, and time is the one thing we don’t have. The longer we wait, the higher the risk one of their attacks will hit its mark.”
“They won’t,” Klaus assured her. Elijah could be as noble and long-suffering as he wanted, but it didn’t matter: The deal was struck. Whether Klaus liked it or not, the tide in New Orleans was turning against his desires yet again. “While the witches drive a hard bargain, they still did come through with their end of it.”
“And now we get to the re
al cost,” Rebekah said. “Magic never gives you anything for free, as we know better than most. So what’s it to be this time, Niklaus? What will we be asked to give besides our city?”
“You?” Klaus smirked, tasting bitterness as he did. Rebekah would try to play the martyr, when she was the one of the three of them who stood to lose the least. “Nothing of consequence, dear sister, unless you’re more attached to that new plaything of yours than I thought. According to Amalia Giroux, Elijah’s pain is so intense that it is equal to the pain of one hundred vampires at once. It would kill a hundred normal vampires, but Elijah is strong enough to suffer through that agony for eternity. To offset Elijah’s suffering, we have to sacrifice those hundred vampires—an eye for an eye, in a manner of speaking.”
Rebekah gasped, and Elijah’s brow furrowed deeply.
“A hundred?” Rebekah repeated.
“Amalia gave me that candle,” Klaus continued, “and once we light it we have until it burns out to complete the sacrifice. If we succeed in time, Elijah’s torment will be extinguished along with the last sputter of the flame.”
A silence fell over the room as each of them considered his words. Klaus felt the weight of the task settle more heavily onto his shoulders.
“Niklaus, do we even have so many?” Elijah said, his breath shallow.
“Just above, at my last count,” Klaus answered, deliberately avoiding Lisette’s steely gray gaze. Lisette had a good head for facts and figures, and she knew what Klaus wouldn’t say.
“A hundred and one,” she clarified, her voice crisp in the darkened room. “The humans all carry werewolf venom with them now, and they refuse to be turned. We have taken some recent losses, and have not been able to add to our numbers. So excluding the three of you, there were one hundred and one vampires in New Orleans as of last night.”