by Julie Plec
And yet he had left her unprotected, because no matter how well he knew her, he had never once managed to put himself in her place. He had never predicted the intensity of her need to do the right thing, and so he had lost her again and again until there was nothing left to lose.
“Run, if you can,” he shouted hollowly to any wolf left to hear him. “Run now. There will be no amnesty, no peace. Run.”
A hurricane was coming to level the city, and nearly all of its werewolves were dead. The ones who remained would do well to heed his warning, because Vivianne was gone and Klaus had nothing else to protect. He heard a few miserable survivors scrambling into the brush. Klaus found himself alone, the world around him as barren as his own heart. A sudden sheet of rain drowned out the fires from the explosion, and Klaus held Vivianne’s body closer, guarding her as the storm came upon their exposed scar of land.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE STORM FORCED the door closed again as soon as Elijah managed to yank it open. The wind had a life of its own, thrashing and dancing around the house, and carrying along bits of debris. The storm had blown in across the water and reached them at last, and Elijah was not at all sure the house would stand against it.
He dragged Klaus inside, fighting the wind the whole way. Klaus stubbornly held a body in his arms, a corpse Elijah recognized as Vivianne. He cradled her tenderly against his chest, and Elijah was awed by the endurance of his love.
“You should have told me, brother,” Elijah said, but Klaus did not seem to hear him. He slammed the door behind them. Perversely, now it did not want to remain shut, and Elijah found a wooden bar to hold it closed. “I would not have liked it, but I would have understood.”
“You were dead set against it,” Klaus said, but there was no bitterness in his tone, there was just nothing. “Everyone was against us, and yet she never stopped wanting to explain. She died trying to make the rest of the world understand.”
“I would have,” Elijah repeated, resting one hand on his brother’s shoulder. Klaus flinched a little, but he did not pull away. “If I had known you felt this way, I would have stood behind you.”
“We will never know,” Klaus answered, setting Vivianne’s body down on the floor and stroking her dark hair. “With her gone, I do not think my happiness will ever depend so entirely on one woman again.”
Elijah rocked back on his heels, stunned at the raw, vulnerable loss in Klaus’s voice. Vivianne hadn’t simply been a conquest or a delectable piece of forbidden fruit; Klaus had been in love. He could not remember the last time he had seen his brother look so empty, his usual fire not just dampened but nowhere to be found. It was almost unbearable to see Klaus—irrepressible, impossible Klaus—defeated.
Rebekah was gone and Klaus was broken, and the storm had come in earnest. Elijah could tell that the witches fully intended to make good on their threat, and as the night went on it was clear that Ysabelle’s protection spell was the only thing that kept the house standing. Perhaps it actually did defend against the weather, or it could somehow tell that this was no natural storm.
The hurricane howled through the window frames, shredding the curtains and throwing books, plates, and even furniture around the room. Lightning crashed down around them, splitting whole trees down to the ground. The pounding rain turned the earth into rivers and waterfalls, flooding the tunnels and certainly the cellar beneath them. But the house itself did not yield. When morning arrived, the new day brought the faintest hint of sunlight along with it.
Elijah convinced Klaus to take a ride with him, promising that they would pass by the witches’ cemetery along their way. A place would need to be made for Vivianne, and making that kind of practical arrangement might lift Klaus’s spirits a bit. He would want to feel he could do something for her.
They caught a couple of horses that were running loose in the forest. From the look of them, Elijah guessed that they had come from the French army’s encampment. He doubted they fared well in their tents and makeshift buildings, especially with their commander and his lieutenant gone.
Where the houses were closer, the damage was even more pronounced than in the ravaged outskirts. Elijah barely understood where he was at first, now that all the landmarks were missing. It seemed he no longer knew his way around New Orleans, with this house gone and that villa collapsed, with that magnificent tree now lying sideways across that stately manor. It was as if he had entered an alien place, and he hurried his horse along.
Klaus followed behind, not seeming to notice what had become of the city. He held Vivianne’s body before him on his horse, and only looked at her.
The werewolves’ quarter had been beaten just as badly. Even though most of the pack had been at the Mikaelsons’, it was obvious that the witches would have been willing to do the job for them. Any werewolf who had not taken part in the siege had been drowned or crushed.
Hardly anyone but the two Originals moved among the devastated houses, and of the few survivors he saw, at least half were packing up their possessions into carts. New Orleans was no place for the werewolves now—they were surrounded by enemies and without a pack. They’d all be gone soon enough, and Elijah felt a twinge at the bitterness of his success.
Yet in spite of the solemnity of the destruction around him, Elijah could feel the wheels in his head turning. It certainly had not been their intention, but the witches had created a great deal of space...and left vampires to fill it.
They turned west, toward the cemetery. Elijah had an ulterior motive, of course—he was curious to see if Ysabelle had survived the night. She and her sister had taken no part in the raising of the hurricane, and he would be sorry if it had killed them.
Klaus dismounted in the graveyard and waved him onward. Elijah left his horse beside Klaus’s and continued alone. He found Ysabelle and Sofia on the porch of Ysabelle’s house, blinking in the daylight as if they had just come outside.
Sofia Lescheres saw him first, and she touched her sister’s elbow and went into the house without a word. Ysabelle watched her go, then stepped down off the porch to meet Elijah halfway. “She is grieving,” the tall witch explained, wrapping a mauve shawl tightly around her body. “There was a great deal of death last night, and in their anger the fools did not think to protect our people. Witches are dead, and she believes that her daughter is one of them.”
“She is,” Elijah confirmed simply. He considered trying to explain how she had died, but there was very little he could say that would not make it worse. He and Klaus had survived, and Vivianne was dead. Even surrounded by werewolves, the ground exploding, and a magical storm bearing down, the brothers had lived, and the witches would hold them responsible for failing to protect Vivianne.
And perhaps they would be right. If Klaus had not been so deeply, blindly in love, he would have tied her to a chair and been done with it. “It was quick,” Elijah offered. “Vivianne did not suffer.”
Ysabelle shuddered, and he could tell that she was holding back a sob. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I will tell my sister.” She clenched her hands, blue veins standing out angrily. “Those fools,” she repeated, and in those two short words Elijah could hear all of the raging she refused to do in front of him.
“My brother is in the cemetery now,” he told her. “We would like to help with the arrangements, if we may.” Even better if they could get Vivianne’s remains safely into a casket before anyone thought to ask why she was burned. “I understand that Vivianne’s father rests elsewhere, but we thought this place would be most appropriate, if her family agrees.”
Ysabelle hesitated, glancing back at her house again. It looked untouched by the storm, Elijah noticed. He guessed that his was not the only house she had used Esther’s grimoire to protect. “Sofia will be staying with me for a while,” she replied. “Her roof was lost, and she doesn’t want to see anyone. But it is a kind offer
, and I think that if it were simply done...”
Elijah nodded. “We will take care of it,” he assured her. “We can begin work on a suitable tomb this morning. If Sofia will come to the cemetery two nights from now, I will make sure that she has a chance to say a proper good-bye. Alone, if she wishes it.”
“I think she will,” Ysabelle agreed. “Thank you.”
He left her there, unable to do more. Ysabelle and her sister would just have to live with their anger and their grief. Elijah guessed that it would be some time before they thought about the rebuilding and running of the city, and that suited him quite well.
He found Klaus still in the witches’ graveyard, looking sober and intent on his task. “I was thinking here,” he said at Elijah’s arrival. “You can see a bit of the river from right here.”
Elijah clasped his arm, then walked with him back to where their horses waited. He explained his conversation with Ysabelle, and they discussed whether they were likely to find a tradesman left in the city to build a casket and a little mausoleum.
Klaus seemed somewhat cheered by the news that a number of witches had perished in the storm, and Elijah was glad that he was beginning to look beyond his gloom. It would take Klaus time to heal, but forever was a long time to carry such a raw wound—and eventually his brother would start to let go of the pain.
As they returned to their home, Klaus’s horse snorted and shied in surprise. Elijah tightened his reins instinctively, looking around for any potential source of danger.
She was right in front of them. Rebekah sat on their porch, with her bare feet dangling carelessly in the muddy water. Her golden hair was plastered down against her skull, and her clothing was so soaked and filthy that he could not have guessed at its original color. Her beautiful face was dirty as well, but he could see where fresh tears had carved out tracks of bare skin.
She didn’t need to speak—it was obvious that she had also lost her true love last night. She would not be there, alone and weeping, if Eric had survived. He would never have wished that kind of a loss on her—or on Klaus, for that matter. To see both of them bereaved in one single blow was the worst kind of sorrow.
“It will be all right,” Elijah told her, then nodded to Klaus so that he would know Elijah spoke to them both. “There can be no replacement for what you have lost, but you have not lost everything. No matter who else is gone or missed or remembered, we will always have one another. We will always have family.”
* * * * *
The untold story of THE ORIGINALS has only just begun.
Read on for a sneak peek of
THE ORIGINALS: THE LOSS
Coming soon from creator Julie Plec,
Alloy Entertainment and HQN Books...
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PROLOGUE
1766
LILY LEROUX HAD promised herself that she wouldn’t cry. Her mother would never have forgiven her for crying. Lily’s job was to look strong and poised in her fitted black dress, to accept the community’s condolences without seeming to need them. She was in charge of New Orleans’s witches now, or whatever was left of them. She had to lead them, not lean on them.
They could certainly use some leading. Lily’s mother had done her best to hold them together after the hurricane they’d created had razed the city to its foundations more than forty years ago, but their losses had been catastrophic. And the guilt of having caused so much destruction...the guilt was even more devastating.
In the meantime, other players had stepped into the void of power left behind by the witches. The French had recently handed New Orleans over to the Spanish, who had chosen to wholly ignore their new territory. Instead, it was the vampires who had taken the reins.
The Mikaelsons—the Originals, three of the very first vampires in existence—had made their move at an ideal time. Elijah, Rebekah, and, worst of all, Klaus now ruled the city. The witches hated them with a passion, although Lily suspected that her mother had always nursed some kind of soft spot for them. She had categorically shut down any talk of retaliation or reprisal by reminding them that their own hands were responsible for their current sorry state. If they hadn’t tried to seek reckless revenge against the werewolves for betraying their truce, they wouldn’t be sequestered in the backwaters of the bayou.
And the result of that policy was that Ysabelle Dalliencourt’s funeral was a sorry shadow of what it should have been. She had led her people out of the ruined city and kept their community together, she had counseled them against a destructive path of war, and taught them to focus on themselves and their craft rather than on the walking abominations that sat on their former throne.
She should have lain in state in the heart of New Orleans, not in the sorry little clapboard meetinghouse the witches had built in the midst of a swamp.
The Original vampires were responsible for this slight, Lily knew. They could have forgiven the witches’ weakness, as the witches had once looked past the brutality of the vampires. Instead, the Mikaelsons had tasted freedom and run with it, creating an army of new vampires from the humans of New Orleans and driving the witches out.
Everyone stood, and Lily rose with them, numbly. Six witches lifted her mother’s wooden casket on their shoulders and she heard Marguerite sob as they carried it past. Lily rested a comforting hand on her daughter’s thin shoulder, and fought the burning behind her eyes.
But she would not cry. Ysabelle had done well by her people, but her death was a sign to Lily that it was time for a new era, a changing of the guard. Lily was sick to death of subsisting under the vampires’ tyranny. The Mikaelsons needed to answer for their sins, and Lily Leroux intended to make sure they paid in full.
CHAPTER ONE
1766
IT WAS KLAUS’S kind of night. Wine and blood flowed freely, and the relaxed company and summer heat had led to an easy loosening of everyone’s clothing. He could only guess what was going on upstairs, but he didn’t intend to leave it to his imagination for long.
There would be time enough to take it all in. That was one of the nice things about being both a king and an immortal: He could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Elijah took care of the running of the city, Rebekah took care of the running of the Mikaelsons, and Klaus was free to take care of Klaus.
Carousing vampires filled every room on the ground floor, and Klaus could hear the party continuing through the ceiling above. In the forty-odd years since they had taken possession of a dying smuggler’s modest home, the Original vampires had done a great deal of adding on and improving, but even so it was filled to capacity. To effectively rule over a city full of eager young vampires the Mikaelsons might need to move to a larger home, but finding more land wouldn’t be the problem it once had been for them. New property was easy to come by in a metropolis empty of werewolves and witches.
Most of the werewolves who managed to survive the hurricane and explosion of 1722 had straggled away, and the ones who remained kept their noses down. The witches had fared a bit better, but not much: They squatted out in the bayou, their taste for power broken. New Orleans was essentially free of vermin.
It still made his gut twist in pain to think of what they’d done to Vivianne, even decades after her death. The way the witches had offered her hand in marriage to the werewolves, as if her only value lay in her heritage as the child of both clans. After signing her life away in a treaty to bring peace, the werewolves had demanded more of her mind and heart at
every turn. She had died terribly young, still trying to make everything right between the factions.
“You’re so quiet tonight, Niklaus. Should I get you another drink?” A buxom young vampire fell into Klaus’s lap with a giggle and interrupted the dark turn of his thoughts. Her long, strawberry-blonde hair smelled like orange blossoms. Lisette, he reminded himself. She was one of the newest crop of recruits in their little army, but she carried herself with the ease of a vampire who had lived for centuries. She did not seem intimidated by the Originals, nor did she strain herself to impress them, and that indifference had won Klaus’s approval.
He smiled, blowing strands of her long hair away from his face. “Would you like me to still recognize you by the end of the night?” he asked her airily.
“I’d lay odds that your memory can stand up to more liquor than you have in this entire house.” Lisette returned his fond smile with a saucy wink. “But you could just join me for some air, if you like. It’s a beautiful night, and I’m restless. Helping you keep your wits about you could be my good deed for the day.”
“You want to leave my party?” Klaus asked, curious in spite of his bleak thoughts. “I never thought of you as the solitary type.” He could not, in fact, remember ever seeing Lisette alone. Perhaps he had confused her with another new vampire after all. He had been drinking liberally, trying his best to truly join in the revelry around him. Forty-four years, and he still felt as though Vivianne might walk through the door and make him whole again.
“I am deep and mysterious,” Lisette told him, with a mock seriousness in her wide-set gray eyes. “Come upstairs with me and I’ll prove it to you.”
Klaus brushed her reddish hair aside and kissed her neck lingeringly. She sighed and wriggled a little, giving his mouth better access. “Not tonight, love,” he murmured softly, traveling down to her collarbone. Across the room, another pair of vampires moved together in a similar way. Watching them, Klaus continued to brush Lisette’s lightly freckled skin with his lips, but it only made him feel even hollower. He could go through the motions, but he couldn’t be consumed by them. No matter how far he wandered down the path of debauchery, he couldn’t quite get lost.