by Julie Plec
Lily wouldn’t even look at him. She spent the last moments of her life staring at her daughter, searching the girl’s pale face for any signs that life was returning to it. Marguerite’s recovery would take much longer than Lily had left, though, and it was just as well. It was better for the girl to sleep through this ugliness, and she certainly didn’t need to know just yet that her own actions had set her mother’s death into motion.
Klaus made it quick, and far more merciful than the renegade witch deserved. He bent down and snapped her neck, and she slumped sideways, her war ended between one moment and the next. Rebekah caught Marguerite up in her arms, supporting her body while her mother’s fell to the ground.
“She’ll be all right in time,” he said to Rebekah, who still looked as though she was about to cry.
“She won’t,” Rebekah muttered, but she spared him the indelicacy of his next request. She slipped the opal off over Marguerite’s head and tossed it to Klaus, as if the trinket wasn’t worth the blood that had been shed.
But he knew better. No matter what Lily had said, no matter what wild claims she had made in order to prevent Klaus from destroying her army, he knew the truth. Vivianne had been destined for him from the beginning, and nothing could keep them apart. Her magic could turn the opal into the cure they needed. He closed his fist around the chain so hard that it bit into his skin like a set of teeth.
All he had to do was get it to Vivianne, and they could finally set her free.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MARGUERITE’S WOUNDS WERE healing. Before long the skin would seal over it, and it would be as if Klaus’s knife had never torn through her.
Rebekah watched her, waiting for any sign of life returning to her pale face, but she knew it would be hours before Marguerite began to revive. And even after she did, she would never be the same. Her life had ended forever on this night, even if she went on living for a thousand more years. Rebekah could have killed Klaus where he stood, gloating over his useless pendant.
“Look what you did to her,” she hissed, stroking Marguerite’s hair back from her forehead. “She’s barely more than a child, Niklaus!”
“She’ll live,” he replied, tucking the opal into an inner pocket of his coat. “She looks better already.”
“You know the opal is worthless, right?” Rebekah said. “There’s no way to—”
“It will save Vivianne,” Klaus interrupted, his voice rising over hers. “It was worth any price.”
Even after centuries of betrayals and heartbreaks, he still believed there was such a thing as happily ever after. Rebekah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at his naïveté.
“Marguerite found Lily’s research and notes on the mort-vivant spell,” she tried. “It’s working through Vivianne. We can’t save her from it, even with the pendant. Vivianne is becoming one of the morts-vivants, and the only way to stop it is to kill her like one of them.”
Klaus glanced contemptuously at the girl lying across Rebekah’s lap. “As you said, dear sister, she’s basically a child. A child who nearly got herself killed trying to protect an invincible madwoman, so you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t consider her an authority on everything that is and is not possible in this world.”
Rebekah set Marguerite gently down on the cool grass, reluctant to let her go for even a moment. She could have been the little sister Rebekah never had, or even a younger version of herself. The self that Rebekah had been, anyway, before plagues and werewolves had chipped away at her family, and before her mother had cursed her and her father had hunted her. Before the prospect of an eternity full of more of the same had fully settled itself onto her shoulders.
Rebekah stood, trying not to look at the girl at her feet. “Niklaus, enough is enough. I’m sorry for your pain, but open your eyes. Look at what your quest to drag Vivianne back into the world has cost us already, and think how much we still have left to lose. Our people are dying around us, and this stupidity of yours has torn our family apart.”
“Don’t blame Vivianne for your own foolish choices,” Klaus scoffed. “She didn’t force you to poison our wedding feast or hunt us down on our honeymoon. You’ve done more than enough to tear our family apart, and all over your petty jealousy of a woman struggling under a horrible curse. If you had ever been on her side and, more important, on my side, we could have resolved this ages ago.”
“She shouldn’t even be alive!” Rebekah shouted, losing her patience entirely. “You did all of this for a dead woman! She had her chance at life, brother, and she threw it away. It was tragic and pointless and miserable, and I would have done whatever you needed if you had only had the decency to mourn her. Just grieve, like everyone else in the world has to do from time to time, and eventually learn to move on.”
Klaus’s hands balled into fists, and Rebekah instinctively edged her body in front of Marguerite’s, shielding her from whatever wrath her brother still had left in him. “You have a lot of nerve, talking about who is supposed to live and die. Our whole existence is unnatural, Rebekah. The rules that people must live and die by don’t apply to us, and my wife is waiting at home to prove it yet again. With this opal and her magic, she can have the same chance that you and I do, and you’re crazy if you think that I don’t intend to give it to her.”
It was hopeless. Klaus refused to accept that there were things in the world outside of his control, even while he was surrounded by the obvious. “Of course you’ll give it to her,” Rebekah agreed, changing tack and softening her tone. “Niklaus, I’m not saying that you must keep the opal away from Vivianne, or that you shouldn’t do everything in your power to help her. What I’m telling you is that it’s not in your power. The opal won’t help her, and neither will whatever spell she’s cooking up in our attic right now. I’m not trying to talk you out of this. I’m trying to prepare you for the fact that it won’t work.”
Something shifted in her peripheral vision, and Klaus saw it, too. For a brief, hopeful moment, she thought it might be Marguerite, healed from her horrible wound, but the girl still lay pale and motionless on the grass.
Instead, it was her mother who rose. Lily Leroux climbed to her feet, her neck snapping straight even as Rebekah watched in shock. There was a strange gleam in her brown eyes, a light that was also somehow a blankness.
Klaus stepped forward and snapped her neck again. The gesture was almost impatient, as if he were annoyed that killing her hadn’t quite worked the first time. Rebekah realized that he didn’t understand what had happened. He didn’t know about the beacon—Vivianne would keep calling to the dead witches until they had all returned. Lily was now a mort-vivant.
Lily popped her neck back into place, lunging for Klaus almost faster than Rebekah’s eyes could follow. Her hands were outstretched, her fingernails curving into talons. “She’s one of them,” Rebekah shouted, leaping on her back and gouging at her eyes.
It was just like Marguerite had warned them: Dead witches would rise. It must be happening out in the main battlefield, too. The living witches were being reborn as the living dead. Rebekah wondered how Elijah and his armies were faring if the witch army kept growing in size.
Lily fought like a demon, whipping Rebekah around so hard that her skull cracked against Klaus’s with a sickening sound. Rebekah caught Lily by her brown hair and twisted hard, pulling the witch off her brother and catapulting her through the air toward the open grass of the rolling hills.
“She’s mine,” Klaus snarled, holding up one arm to block Rebekah from following after her, and Rebekah rolled her eyes.
“Abominations belong to everyone,” she snapped, shoving Klaus’s arm down and chasing after Lily Leroux. Lily was just as responsible for Marguerite’s condition as Klaus was—maybe even more. He may have struck the blow, but Lily had created this nightmare and forced them all to try to navigate it. Even dead she was mo
re trouble than she was worth, and Rebekah’s hands itched for the warm, slimy feel of her beating heart.
She caught the undead witch before Klaus could get there, but Lily swung wildly at her head and Rebekah ducked, giving him time to reach them. He twisted Lily’s head all the way around, shattering her spinal column for the third time in five minutes, although by now Rebekah knew it was unlikely to do much good.
There was only one way to kill Lily, at least as long as Vivianne was still alive. Rebekah would have liked to do it herself, but just taking part in the death of Lily Leroux would still be a memory to cherish. Rebekah grabbed at the dead woman’s arms, locking them behind her struggling body and generously offering her to Klaus.
He plunged his fist into her chest, and for a nauseating moment Rebekah thought she could feel his searching fingers through the skin of Lily’s back. Then he found what he was searching for and pulled, ripping the bloody organ out through the gaping hole in her rib cage. Rebekah could feel Lily’s body go slack, slumping against her own before Rebekah dropped her unceremoniously to the ground.
“Well,” Klaus said in a conversational tone, squeezing the heart until it was misshapen and almost unrecognizable. “We may have had our differences, dear sister. But if I have to spend the night tearing hearts from chests, I can’t think of any better company than yours.”
The thought of having avenged Vivianne somehow had brought a sly smile to his face, an expression with which Rebekah was thoroughly familiar. Klaus thought he had won already, that nothing could stop him now from saving the love of his life from her grisly fate. Rebekah knew he was wrong with every fiber in her being, but the sight of him standing there, so jovial in the moonlight, softened her own heart until it was nearly unrecognizable as well.
There was no harm in letting him try, not really. A few more vampires might die, and probably an extra handful of werewolves. But the upside was that Klaus would finally realize what she had been trying to tell him all along: There was no magic spell that could repair all of the damage that Lily had done. Trying to rescue Vivianne from her fate—and failing one more time—might be just the bitter potion her brother needed to swallow in order to finally realize it was time to give up.
“Go home and try the opal,” she suggested. “I’ll take care of things here.”
Klaus discarded the heart, touched his coat pocket that held the pendant, then turned and ran for the mansion. Watching him go, Rebekah hoped against hope that somehow she and Marguerite had been wrong. There was also something to be said for true love.
CHAPTER THIRTY
ELIJAH WAS DOING his best to be everywhere at once, but he could feel the tide of the battle turning against them. The werewolves had seemed to bring them a substantial advantage at first, but over time it became clear that the full moon was as much a drawback as it was an asset. The wolves were strong, fast, and ruthless, but in their current form they couldn’t actually kill any of the morts-vivants. And there seemed to be more of those than ever, no matter how many of them Elijah and his vampires destroyed.
Even worse, the morts-vivants seemed to prefer the taste of vampire hearts to those they ripped from the werewolves. The losses were heavy all around, but even in the midst of battle Elijah could tell that his own kind were taking the worst of the hits.
For the first time since he had set out to recruit the werewolves the night before, Elijah was forced to consider the possibility that he had been too eager to secure the werewolves’ help. He had given away a substantial chunk of the city—his city, which he had fought for, rebuilt, and held together with his own two hands—and for what? So that William’s wolves could harass the witches a bit, while his own vampires were crushed under the burden of winning the war?
If William had approached him with this bargain, Elijah would have been certain it had been a trick. But as things were, there was no one to blame except himself...and, of course, Lily Leroux.
Klaus’s grief had been a dam waiting to burst. For forty-four years their enemies had refused to “help” him, believing that the worst thing they could do to him was deny him what he wanted most. Only Lily had seen the real potential in Klaus’s blind longing. She had given him the thing he most wished for in the form of a weapon—it truly was a brilliant kind of evil. Elijah sincerely hoped Klaus had found a way around their linking spell to repay her in the way she deserved.
He suspected his brother might have already killed the witch. There was no longer a sign of any central command. Spells were launched haphazardly, sometimes colliding in midair, and the morts-vivants clustered around every freshly captured heart, vying with one another for the first taste. It had been nearly an hour since Elijah had managed to catch a glimpse of their general, so maybe Klaus had managed to end her short, vicious reign.
Unfortunately, the witches’ disorganization only seemed to make them more brutal, and Elijah’s forces were struggling to hold their ground. Even with Lily out of the way, it was beginning to seem unlikely that the vampires could overpower so many mindless, bloodthirsty attackers.
Elijah watched a werewolf spring through the air, perfect in its powerful forward motion. It landed squarely on the chest of a living witch, who saw it too late to turn his magic against the massive beast. The wolf tore out the witch’s throat with murderous proficiency and then moved on, dragging at the leg of a mort-vivant who was close to overpowering two of Elijah’s vampires.
He couldn’t make sense of how badly they were outnumbered. The morts-vivants were hard to kill, no question, but their living comrades had been falling like flies before the combined might of the vampires and the werewolves. And yet their army seemed barely smaller than it had been when they had first been seen in the hills, as if more of the undead were somehow reinforcing their ranks without their approach being seen.
One of the monsters bit viciously into Elijah’s shoulder, hanging on like a rabid dog when Elijah tried to shake her off. A werewolf appeared and tried to help, but the mort-vivant twisted like a snake, somehow maintaining the grip of her teeth while caving in the werewolf’s sternum with one kick.
The creature fell, whimpering, to the grass, and the uselessness of its intervention made Elijah irrationally angry. He grabbed the mort-vivant by the nape of her neck and yanked her away, ignoring the feeling of his own flesh being torn out by her teeth that refused to let go. He held the monster away from him for a moment, watching the undead witch swallow her piece of Elijah’s shoulder with revolting pleasure.
Still seething with anger, he reached out to seize her heart, but her attention shifted from her grisly feast just in time to see the movement. She caught his hand in both of hers, grinning to reveal blood-and-tissue-smeared teeth, and he felt like a human slamming his fist into a stone wall. Elijah had come to take his disproportionate strength for granted over the centuries—all of the Originals had—and the shock of impact was an unpleasant reminder of how heavily he relied on his own curse.
There shouldn’t be anything walking the world with so much strength. Not the morts-vivants, and not the Mikaelsons, either. Elijah knew that to the ordinary, mortal population of New Orleans there might not be much difference between the two—he did, after all, survive by draining human blood. Maybe the two unnatural species should just wipe each other out and leave the world to those who would die on their own.
A clenched fist appeared in the center of the mort-vivant’s chest, holding her heart triumphantly out toward Elijah. The witch’s body went slack, and he released his grip on her neck. Rebekah stood before him, still holding the gory organ, her porcelain skin streaked with the blood of a dozen more like it.
Elijah hadn’t realized until then that the tide of battle had carried him to the westernmost edge of the hills, where he had briefly glimpsed Lily earlier. Her corpse was still there, he realized, along with the thin, tall body of a girl he didn’t want to recognize. Rebekah stood
over the girl, and Elijah understood that his sister had also been protecting Marguerite when she helped him. She was fighting tooth and nail to keep a clear space around the girl’s limp form, although it didn’t seem to bother her that, just a few yards away, Lily was being trampled.
“The bitch is dead,” Rebekah announced, then parried three of another dead witch’s blows in rapid succession and drove her fist through his skull. He didn’t die, but now his attacks were blind and unfocused. He swung wildly, connecting at random with friends and enemies alike but failing to get anywhere near Rebekah.
Elijah saw Lisette just moments before she put the mort-vivant down for good. She was alight with the thrill of battle, shining from within under the moonlight.
“We’re outnumbered!” she said to him.
“We’ve been killing plenty of them,” Elijah assured Lisette, although he knew she was right. “Where are they all coming from?”
“It’s the spell,” Rebekah said, shoving a snarling werewolf out of the path of a nasty-looking witch before glancing back at the unmoving girl who lay behind her. “It’s what I’ve been trying to—”
Before she could finish, a cluster of morts-vivants broke through a ring of vampires who had been trying to contain them.
Elijah moved to help protect Marguerite, but before he had taken a step a stirring in the grass caught his attention. He whirled to face it, ready to put the mort-vivant back down, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Lisette preparing to do the same.
She started forward, eager to strike, but Elijah caught her arm and held her back. Something was nagging at him, a familiarity, a memory of having seen how that particular witch had come to lie in that particular spot.
Except it hadn’t been dead then.
Elijah had seen that same witch savaged by a werewolf just a few minutes before, and he was absolutely sure the man had been alive at the time. The wolf had torn his throat out and left him for dead—left him dead—but he had returned almost immediately as one of Lily’s heart-eaters. There wasn’t a scratch on him, no sign at all of the mauling he had just endured. He had fallen as one thing and risen up again as an entirely different one.