by Julie Plec
“I’ll start with our books,” Elijah added, “then work my way along the western rooms.” He lifted Lisette gently, cradling her body as he followed Klaus to the staircase.
Rebekah pulled the stake from Luc’s corpse, carefully closed his eyes with her hand. She took the pouch of vinaya powder from him as well, unwilling to leave him with any of the treasures he’d thought worthy of his betrayal.
The paintings behind him were already beginning to smolder, and the air inside the attic was nearly as smoky as the air outside.
There were a lot of things Rebekah wanted to take with her from the mansion, and she’d have to hurry if she wanted to save all of her possessions. But even if she only had a few minutes before the fire consumed everything, Rebekah knew every inch of her home. She moved more quickly than any fire.
So when she turned her back on Luc’s corpse, it was because she had chosen to let him burn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ELIJAH FELT LIKE he was submerged in dark water, his body slowly floating to the top of a great, salty lake. He could see two pale moons in the sky above him, and as he drifted upward the moons rippled and changed, dimming and twisting to become two faces.
Elijah opened his eyes as his face broke the surface, and saw Rebekah and Klaus leaning over him, anxiously waiting for him to stir. The eastern edge of the sky was light with the promise of dawn, and he wondered how long they had sat over him that way, worrying. After his long ordeal, Elijah had welcomed some real sleep, but it was clear that his siblings were relieved to see him conscious again.
Klaus and Rebekah had never looked more like siblings to Elijah than they did in that moment, with twin expressions of concern and terrible, painful love on their faces. Rebekah’s hair was paler and Klaus’s eyes had more green, but the shadows of the forest and the flames of the fire had washed their differences away. They might as well have been the two faces of Janus, except that both of them were turned toward the present moment.
“It’s all right,” Elijah told them, sitting up and brushing debris from his cloak. “I’m still cured.”
“I should think so,” Klaus said, leaning back and pretending he hadn’t been worried. “Our dear sister here even killed an extra vampire for you, just to make sure. Our final count was one hundred and one, plus all the witches and werewolves. Not a bad pull for one night’s work.”
Privately, Elijah wondered if Klaus’s count was really as accurate as he believed. The instant Luc died, Elijah’s mind completely cleared of all his pain. The changes he’d felt were so momentous and so sudden that Elijah imagined some lucky vampire had managed to duck out of the warehouse just before it burst into a deadly inferno. Or perhaps it was more likely that the witches had gotten it wrong: that the number of deaths required was one hundred and one. With Amalia dead along with the rest of the fighters in the warehouse, they’d never know the real answer.
All Elijah knew for certain was that he was free from Alejandra at last.
“I’m sorry,” he said, watching the smoke that still rose from the wreckage of their city and their home.
“For what?” asked Rebekah. “We’re all to blame for what happened last night.”
Most of New Orleans was in ruins, and Elijah guessed that they’d spent the rest of the night under the stars. It reminded him of their human lives, of those nights when they had snuck outside, whispering and giggling and feeling the promise of the world open up on every side.
“I should have understood that she was manipulating me. I lost my way, and I lost my faith in our family,” he finally said.
“We’d all gone a bit astray,” Rebekah reminded him, looking at Klaus. “The humans understood our weaknesses, and they told us the lies we were most ready to believe.”
It wasn’t lost on any of them that two of the worst of those lies had revolved around Klaus. Elijah had thought him a traitor, and Rebekah had been ready to seek revenge on him for a murder. The bonds between the three siblings were strong, but they were also twisted by a thousand doubts and complications that Elijah suspected they would ever truly untangle.
“The grudge I carried against the witches and werewolves blinded me,” Klaus admitted, surprising Elijah. Perhaps New Orleans truly had been cleansed by a fire—and Klaus was ready to begin again. “In my hunger for revenge I lost sight of my family, and even of my own self. The humans may have exploited our weaknesses, but they didn’t create them.”
“We all could have been wiser,” Elijah said, then closed his eyes against the fresh pain of losing Lisette.
“So the next time we will.” Klaus shrugged. “There’s plenty of space to rebuild, and I think an argument could be made that the surviving quarter of the city is the one that still belonged to us.”
He flashed his charming, sardonic smile, and Elijah saw the beginning of a matching grin on Rebekah’s lips. Together they had put down the human rebellion in New Orleans, and had dealt a huge blow to the strongholds of the werewolves and witches. It’d be a long time before those factions held power in their hands again, and in spite of the cost, that was a good night’s work.
“One step at a time,” Elijah said, rising to his feet and savoring how normal it felt to stand. He had almost forgotten the powerful, easy feel of his own body. He hadn’t felt this well since before he had taken up with Alejandra, and the memory of her death brought him nothing but relief.
It was loyalty that held Elijah’s world together, and he’d devoted himself to someone who wasn’t worthy of his fidelity—who had never offered him the same thing in return. That realization was almost more painful than the physical torture she had inflicted on him.
“The sun will be up in a moment, and right now there is one more good-bye I must make,” he said.
Rebekah bit her lip and Klaus looked down, but both of them fell in behind him, like an honor guard. They followed him to the ash-filled front lawn, where the great fountain still stood. Behind it, the bones of the mansion rose in strange, uneven shapes, pointing toward the sky like fingers on a corpse. And in the same spot where Klaus had wed Vivianne Lescheres, the Mikaelsons worked together to build a funeral pyre for Lisette.
They’d left her body fully covered, draped from head to toe in a shroud of thick black silk that shimmered like obsidian in the first rays of sunlight. From her bodice, Rebekah pulled out the pouch of vinaya powder and the White Oak stake. She laid one deadly object on either side of Lisette’s lifeless form, like reminders of what the young vampire had died for.
“She died for me,” Elijah said, and he felt his siblings look at him curiously.
“She saved you twice at the same time,” Klaus remarked. “She would have been unbearably pleased to know that.”
“Niklaus and I discussed it a little while you slept,” Rebekah added. The rising sun shone in her golden hair, and made the ruins of the house behind her look older somehow, as if they were the remains of a civilization that had already been gone for centuries. “The powder has to burn, of course. Vinaya can’t be allowed to exist, not in New Orleans or anywhere else we come across it. But we thought that you—and Lisette—would like to see the White Oak stake go up as well. As a symbol of our strength together, and our commitment to...”
She trailed off, looking at Klaus, who shrugged. “To not killing each other,” he suggested, and even though Elijah could feel the sting of unshed tears in his eyes, he laughed.
“Good enough,” he agreed. He steeled himself for the next part, when he would truly lose Lisette to the Other Side. He knew in his mind that she was already there, but his heart kept telling him that as long as he could see her body, he might be able to keep a piece of her with him always.
Elijah knew what Lisette would have said about that. He owed it to her to let her rest in peace—she’d already put up with enough of his selfish ways.
He reache
d forward and grasped the edge of the shroud. He gave it one firm, fast pull, tugging it free of Lisette’s body without disturbing the two sinister objects by her sides.
Sunlight struck Lisette’s skin and began to burn her. She was lost in the flames within seconds, and the wood piled beneath her began to smoke as the fire caught. Soon, the stake and the vinaya were nothing but ashes, and the pyre burned high under the mercilessly blue sky.
“This is a new beginning for us,” Elijah said at last. “We have suffered alone, but that suffering has brought us back together again.” He reached to either side of him, taking Klaus’s and Rebekah’s hands in his. “This is how our family was meant to be,” Elijah reminded his siblings. “Always and forever.”
EPILOGUE
ALMOST A MONTH after the fire had burned out, Klaus could still smell soot on the evening air. Spring had come in earnest, with patches of bright green forcing their way up through the charred soil. New houses were rising everywhere, constructed from Spanish brick and iron—no longer wooden tinderboxes. Klaus doubted they would fare much better than the old wooden ones had, but he was amused by the humans’ optimism. Who was he to say that something built in the middle of a vampire-owned swamp wouldn’t last?
The Mikaelsons, by contrast, had been slow to rebuild. Klaus had lost his army and won his war in a single night, but the experience had left him more restless than triumphant. In one stroke he had defeated three enemies and put an end to his brother’s curse, a victory so complete that it left nothing but silence in its wake. Yet silence and peace were more boring than so-called triumph had any right to be.
The faint, sweet smell of honeysuckle drifted toward him on the mild evening breeze, piercing the stale odor of old smoke and driving it away. Klaus slowed his steps a little, watching the sun grow and redden as it plunged toward the horizon.
The sound of hammers rang out around him, and he could hear mortar being scraped between stones. The work in the city would go on well into the night, now that New Orleans’s residents were no longer afraid of the dark. The worst of the fearmonger had died in the fire, along with the creatures the humans had once barred their doors against.
It was as if the slate had been wiped clean, even for those who had no idea what had happened. The few surviving werewolves and witches had their suspicions, but no one seemed to have the heart for more war, not after the toll the great fire had taken. It was as if the entire city had silently agreed that enough was enough.
A small, dark-haired child hurtled around a corner and nearly bumped into Klaus, wheeling his arms backward with all his might to avoid contact. “Watch where you’re going!” he piped shrilly, crossing his arms over his thin chest and puffing it out as best he could.
“That’s good advice,” Klaus agreed. “I suggest you take it yourself.”
“This is my quarter,” the boy explained. His bony wrists stuck out of his faded sleeves, and he couldn’t have seen more than eight summers. But he had the imperious manner of a prince in disguise, and Klaus found himself more entertained than annoyed.
“What makes you think that, little gentleman?” he asked, glancing along the cobblestoned street before him. Werewolves had lived here once, Klaus realized. Now all that was left were the remnants of old French architecture and burnt-out shells that had yet to be demolished.
“My father built our house with his own two hands,” the boy—the little werewolf—announced proudly. “And he was a hero in the fire; he died saving lots and lots of other people.”
Klaus smiled unpleasantly, imagining how many similar stories were drifting through the city. It was a fairy tale so laughable that only a child would believe it. “And who told you that?” he asked.
“My mother,” the puppy said. “She told me all about it.”
“We have something in common, then,” Klaus replied, bending down to meet the child’s eyes. “My mother told me lies about my father, too.”
The boy’s head jerked back in surprise, as if Klaus had struck him. “My mother doesn’t lie,” he insisted. “Ignacio Guerrera was a great man, and if he hadn’t run into the fire to help people, this whole city would have belonged to him someday. And I’m going to prove it. I’m going to be just like him when I grow up. You’ll see.”
That, Klaus decided, was a threat that could wait for another day. “If you grow up,” Klaus corrected, feeling the little sting as his fangs extended. He bared them at the boy, adding a theatrical snarl for good measure.
The werewolf child screamed and ran, his thin shoes slapping against the cobblestones as he vanished down a side street. Klaus watched him go, amused. He did have a soft spot for children, even if he never expected to have any of his own.
His wandering took him back toward the river. No one had been saved from the warehouse; he was sure of that. The fire had leveled the entire district, and all that was left of Tomás’s warehouse was scorched ground, a mountain of ash, and the larger bones of the human skeleton that were too big to burn. The spilled rum had burned hot and fast, and the vampires must have gone up like so many dry torches. There would have been no chance to think or to plan; no escape from the inferno that raged everywhere.
The fact that Klaus hadn’t heard the slightest whisper of revenge only confirmed that no one had survived. Everyone supposedly knew someone who had miraculously escaped the blaze, yet no one had come forward to breathe a word about how it had started.
The Guerrera boy would realize the truth someday, Klaus imagined, and then there would be one more disillusioned werewolf roaming the streets of New Orleans. But there would always be another dispute to settle, another cause to fight for. That was just the way the world was for Klaus.
There was only one place in the entire city that Klaus missed. The Southern Spot had burned along with everything else. Klaus hadn’t decided yet what he would build on that lot—whether he would improve the structure that had been there before, create something completely different, or simply leave it for some eager developer to swallow up. There should have been plenty of land to go around, but in the free-for-all that had followed the destruction, there was always someone with an eye out for more.
The scent of honeysuckle came to him again, nearer this time. Klaus’s steps turned toward it as if of their own accord. He followed it past villas and hovels and piles of charred rubble. The darkening sky was quickly filling with stars.
Klaus turned a corner that felt vaguely familiar, and at the far end of the street he saw a young woman walking alone. Even for the new, safer New Orleans, that seemed unusually bold, and boldness had always caught his eye.
She might have been about twenty, in a gauzy white dress that left her white arms bare to the warm night. Her long black hair tumbled loose around her shoulders, and to Klaus it seemed she must have stolen out of her bed, unnoticed by the family who surely thought she was asleep.
He almost called to her. She looked so familiar standing there that he believed for a moment they were old friends. But Klaus’s friends had short life spans, and as of late, they left more quickly than they came.
The girl turned as if she had heard him approach, and the spray of lilacs that climbed the brick wall behind her framed her face like a soft purple halo. “Is someone there?” she called, perhaps out of habit, since he knew that she could see him. The moon was nearly full again and the night was bright.
“You shouldn’t be out alone after dark,” Klaus warned her, locking his eyes on to hers as he drew closer. Her eyes were blacker than the evening sky, like pieces of onyx set into her lovely face. Her mouth was a curious red slash, and twisted into a knowing smile. She almost looked like someone he had once known.
“I’m hardly the only one out here,” she said, raising one black eyebrow. Her voice was low and soft, and he could hear refinement and education in it. She had been bred for an ambitious marriage, no doubt, and shel
tered from even a hint of scandal for her entire life. She couldn’t possibly have any idea how vulnerable she truly was just then. “I wanted to watch the stones being laid for our new house, but Mama believes that seeing our old home will bring me too much pain. I think that’s just silly.”
“The workers will be using torchlight by now,” Klaus guessed. There was something so familiar about her, but Klaus wasn’t feeling especially nostalgic at the moment. He only felt hungry. Just looking at her made his fangs extend. “I’d be happy to escort you there, if you tell me the way.”
Her eyes widened in delight, and she took a few eager steps toward him. “Would you?” she asked. “You’re too kind, sir.”
“So I’m often told,” Klaus agreed, holding out his arm politely.
The young woman lightly placed her hand on his forearm, falling in beside him as if they were old friends. After they had walked down the street, Klaus turned them down a darker alleyway.
“I’m sorry, sir, but my home is the other way.”
“Ah, señorita, my apologies,” he murmured, then pulled her in by her waist and slipped his other hand over her mouth so that she couldn’t scream. For just a moment, he showed her his true face before sinking his fangs into her throat. He wanted her to know who it was who killed her, to be afraid before she died.
Her blood tasted of lilacs and honey, so young and sweet that Klaus’s mouth worked to extract every last drop. He could feel her heart flutter and slow, and he knew that she could no longer scream, even if she wanted to.
The girl died where she stood, still resting one hand on his arm, but the trusting look in her eyes had been replaced by one of horror. Klaus hid her corpse in a burnt-out shop—it had been a butcher’s counter once, he realized with some amusement.
Feeling even better than before, he stuck his hands into his pockets and continued on his way, enjoying the caress of the warm evening air on his face. New Orleans had never seemed so full of possibilities.