by Julie Plec
“The living ones are being resurrected as the undead ones,” Rebekah snapped, finally dispatching the last of her knot of morts-vivants. “It happened to Lily, too.”
No wonder they were more and more outnumbered by the minute: Each easy kill became a new, much more formidable, enemy. The witches were rebuilding their army even faster than the vampires were destroying it.
“That explains it,” Lisette agreed, slipping out of Elijah’s grasp to engage the newest mort-vivant. He rushed to help her, and he thought the two of them made an effective team. But there seemed to be undead witches everywhere, attacking and interfering from all sides and making it impossible to pick them off one by one.
There was no telling how far the evil could spread, or what destruction it would wreak on cities that didn’t have the protection of vampires. In her bid to take over New Orleans, Lily Leroux might yet take down the entire New World.
A vampire screamed, and no one was free to get to her in time. More and more of them were dying, everywhere Elijah looked. He could still see plenty of bared fangs and yellow eyes, but they were like islands in an engulfing sea of morts-vivants. Vampires he had sired were being torn to pieces, and it seemed the next one was always in danger before he could even reach the last.
There was nothing to be done, though, but keep fighting. He had raised this army, and he had led them onto the field. Lily might have started this war, but it was Elijah’s now, too, and he would keep defending his army until his army was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
VIVIANNE TURNED THE opal over in her hands, staring at it as if its flashes of fire could reveal its mysteries. Klaus held every muscle in his body at the ready, waiting only for her word of what to do next.
“I’m going to need your blood,” Vivianne muttered, and Klaus had opened a vein before her words had fully died on the still, dusty air of the attic.
She held the stone out to catch the thick, dark liquid, and its smooth surface seemed to drink it in. He had seen the same thing, he remembered, when Lily had first done the linking spell, and he wondered how much of his blood the cursed stone could swallow.
Vivianne watched the opal for a moment longer, then held her own fragile wrist up to Klaus. “Now mine,” she said.
He hesitated for just a moment before biting her skin, as gently as he possibly could while still breaking it. He knew she had been through much worse, but he couldn’t escape the feeling that he had already hurt her enough—too much.
But Vivianne didn’t even register the discomfort, intent as she was on the open grimoire by her feet. She set the pendant on the floorboards beside it and dipped one finger into the blood that welled up through her skin.
“The opal connects energies together,” she explained, tracing a design in chalk on the floor around the pendant. “Yours to Lily’s, mine to yours, hers to the morts-vivants so that they do her bidding. The connections serve different purposes, but they all run through this stone.”
“We don’t need some necklace to bind us together, love.” Lily might have used magic to bring Vivianne back specifically to him, but if she had awoken on the other side of the world Klaus knew they still would have found each other.
“Exactly.” Vivianne stepped back to examine her design, then rubbed out one slightly crooked line and drew it again. “None of the stone’s connections are natural or necessary; they just suited Lily’s purposes. This ritual will break them all, and then I’ll be free of her and her monsters forever.”
The moonlight slid in sideways through the northern windows. It was hard to shake the impression of wrongness, even though Klaus knew that it was Vivianne working this magic and not the dark thing trying to take hold within her. The creature had only minutes left, and then she would banish it for good.
As soon as it was done he would take her away from all of this, somewhere with plenty of sun and no monsters. They would stay however long it took for her to heal, and to finally feel safe again.
“Does this look right to you?” she asked. “Never mind, just stand right there where the lines cross, and let me concentrate.”
Her voice was brisker than usual. He could almost see the sense of urgency crackling around her, mixing with the invisible aura of her magic. Dark or light, Vivianne was powerful, someone to be reckoned with, and he suppressed a smile as he did what he was told.
Vivianne began to chant, and candles she had arranged around the outside of her symbol flared to sudden, brilliant life. The shadows they cast seemed to move in the corners of Klaus’s vision, writhing and twisting until he turned to look at them directly. He could feel a strange tension building in the attic. Shadows danced and spun, coming completely unmoored from the objects that had cast them, not even pretending to belong to the mortal world anymore. They swirled and flew around Klaus’s head like bats, but he only had eyes for Vivianne.
He could almost see the battle of forces within her, the war she was waging for control of her own body and soul. She struggled to command her own magic while Lily’s threatened to overwhelm her, and although she stood perfectly still, her slight form contained a raging ocean of power.
With a movement so swift that even Klaus’s sharp eyes didn’t see it coming, she brought the hilt of his dagger down on the opal, shattering it into a million splintered pieces. The shadows around them broke apart in the same instant, scattering and then slithering back into their corners. A sudden gale howled through the attic, gusting out of the broken stone or perhaps coming from Vivianne herself, but although Klaus could feel it tearing at his clothes, the flames of the many candles around him didn’t so much as flicker.
They burned steadily until the wind died, then extinguished so suddenly it was as if the flames had somehow swallowed the tempest. There was no sign of any magic left, nothing but the faint smell of smoke that was already beginning to fade. It was over, and they were alone in the attic. Vivianne swayed a little on her feet, but Klaus could see some color creeping back into her face, and the ghost of a smile played on her lips. “It worked,” she told him. “I felt the spell work.”
He had certainly felt something, but he approached her slowly, trying to take in each subtle change in her at once. “Do you feel...hungry?” he asked, searching the deep pools of her black eyes for anything sinister that might be lurking at the bottom.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, pressing her hand to the bite on her wrist. The bleeding had already slowed to almost nothing, but Klaus lifted it to his lips and kissed it gently all the same. “I feel dizzy.”
He was so concentrated on Vivianne that it took him a moment to register the strange hush that had fallen outside of the house. There was no more screaming, no tearing or slashing of flesh to be heard.
He embraced her, holding her so close against his body that he could feel the beat of her pulse just as forcefully as his own. He could smell the soft lilac fragrance of her hair and feel the gentle curves of her hips against his. She was going to be all right; he would devote the rest of eternity to making sure of that.
He held her, inhaled her, tried not to hear the new shouts that rose up from the armies outside. Vivianne stirred, and Klaus knew that she must hear it, too. But he just pulled her close, wanting to share one last moment of hope with her, one last peaceful interlude.
“You need to back away from me now,” she whispered at last, and he could hear the hunger in her voice. “Klaus, you can’t imagine how hard I’m trying not to kill you where you stand.”
Klaus could feel it, though, in the way Vivianne’s body trembled and by the tension in her muscles. The spell may have done what it was written to do, but nothing that mattered had changed. Rebekah had been right all along that magic didn’t just come with any old price. What made magic so dangerous was that it came with a price worthy of the prize. There was nothing in the world worth as much to Klaus as Vivianne, a
nd so the cost of getting her back could only be losing her all over again.
Klaus stepped back reluctantly, his eyes scanning up and down Vivianne’s shaking body. “Go and look,” she urged him through her clenched jaw, jerking her chin to indicate the nearest window. “See for yourself how we failed.” Klaus hesitated for a moment, but she didn’t move and so he crossed the creaking attic floor.
The scene outside was even more gruesome than he had imagined. Morts-vivants were everywhere, and they seemed to be killing everyone around them indiscriminately. One tore a live witch’s head off while Klaus watched, and another seemed to be trying to tear the skin from a werewolf in one long skein.
Klaus turned back to Vivianne, searching for the words to describe what was happening. As he did, he saw the sudden shift, the almost imperceptible moment when Vivianne lost her battle for control. He jumped back just as she charged, but she was far too fast. Her fingernails raked across his throat, laying it open, and he felt his own blood pouring down the front of his shirt.
Klaus shoved her away hard, feeling sick as he watched her lick the blood from his jugular vein off her hands.
“The pendant was supposed to free you,” Klaus whispered. He hadn’t let himself consider the possibility that it might not. He had never imagined failure, never prepared himself for the brutal, stabbing pain of this moment.
Vivianne screamed incoherently in response and tore out a few glossy handfuls of her raven hair. Klaus took advantage of her momentary distress to catch hold of her arms, pinning them to her sides. She struggled, and she was nearly as strong as he was, but he held on. She deserved to understand what was happening, even if he never truly would.
Finally, her muscles slackened, and her grating screams grew hoarse, eventually becoming hopeless sobs. She rested her dark head against his shoulder, and while he could not bring himself to relax his grip on her, she made no further move to attack him.
“There is no freedom for me,” she rasped, her voice a harsh ruin. “I can feel that now. Klaus, my bond with the morts-vivants was never some frail linking spell, or any curse Lily worked after she raised me. It’s born from the magic that keeps us all alive: them and me alike.”
“We’ll keep looking,” Klaus promised, hearing that his own voice was nearly as rough as hers. “There are other spells—”
“No,” she whispered. “There’s only one way to end this nightmare, and I think you know what it is. I think you’ve known for some time now.”
“Lily chose you because of me,” Klaus admitted, tasting bitterness in his words. “She made you the keystone of her spell, because she knew that I could never—that I wouldn’t—”
“Oh,” Vivianne breathed, and although there was sadness in her eyes, Klaus thought he could see relief there, as well. “The spell survives as long as I do, then. And Lily believed you would never agree to let me die again.” She smiled and lifted a soft hand to touch his cheek. “She didn’t know you the way that I do, love.”
Klaus turned his face so that his lips brushed her fingers. “You know that I’m yours, Viv.”
Vivianne looked up then and kissed him on the mouth, her full lips salty with her own tears. “I love you, Niklaus. I would give anything to share a life with you, but mine is already over. This thing I have now is no life, always waiting for the next time I start to sink. Sooner or later, I won’t be able to come up for air at all, and I’ll drown in this darkness forever.”
“I don’t want to lose you again,” he murmured, kissing her lips, her tear-stained cheeks, her hair.
“It’s still the first time,” she told him softly, closing her eyes. Her long lashes glittered wetly against her pale cheeks. “We were fools to think there would be a second chance for us. There never was one....Pretend it never happened.”
He could never do that, and she must know it. There was nothing that could soothe this pain, no logic that could argue it away. The brutal finality of this second loss made it a thousand times worse than the first, and the first had already been unbearable. There was no way that Klaus could walk away from this night without being scarred by it forever, but there was also no other choice.
He had loved her enough to move mountains to bring her back, but he loved her too much to ask her to stay. Not like this, not caught halfway between her true self and some unspeakable monster. “I would give anything not to do this,” he said, memorizing every inch of her face over and over and over again.
“You wouldn’t want anyone else to do it.” She smiled through her tears. “Neither would I. Say good-bye, Niklaus, and send me back to the Other Side so that I can dream about you again.”
She closed her eyes, and he kissed each lid tenderly. “Good-bye, Vivianne,” he murmured. “I’ll never love another the way I love you.” Then he punched through her chest, feeling the scrape of her broken rib cage against his knuckles, and pulled her heart back out through the hole he had made. Vivianne Lescheres Mikaelson died with tears in her eyes and a smile on her ruby lips, falling into Klaus’s waiting arms with a final sigh.
He held her and stared at the heart in his hand, feeling as if it were his own. Something was shifting within him, rearranging itself around the new, empty space in his chest before Vivianne’s body even had the chance to grow cold.
He had told her the absolute truth at the end. It would never be possible for Klaus to love this way again. The suffering he felt now left no room for it, and that was a lesson Klaus would never forget. Losing Vivianne forced him to face eternity alone, because an eternity full of this kind of loss would be unbearable. The love of Klaus Mikaelson’s life was gone, and there was nothing ahead of him now except for more life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IT WAS ALL Rebekah could do to keep the violence away from Marguerite. There was no room to breathe or think, no opportunity to move the girl to a safer place. Elijah’s armies had spent the night making new morts-vivants, and now they were everywhere. A werewolf’s yellow eyes were extinguished right in front of her, and the monster who killed it bared his bloody teeth at Rebekah in turn—a pasty-skinned, short-haired man who stared hungrily at Marguerite as if he knew that her un-beating heart was still, somehow, miraculously alive.
His dead eyes flickered between the two women. He feinted left and then right, but Rebekah had been in more than a few fights in her time, and she wasn’t willing to be drawn out. The mort-vivant lunged a little too far, shifting his weight just enough that he couldn’t recover in time, and Rebekah struck. She rained down bone-crushing blows on his arms and head until he was forced to drop his guard, leaving his rib cage unprotected. She killed him quickly, because she could feel eyes on her back and knew that she had no time to spare.
A mort-vivant, a woman in her forties with a knot of white-blonde hair piled high on her head, had snuck around Rebekah’s guard and was poised over Marguerite’s prone body. Rebekah caught her by her dingy white collar and threw her back as hard as she could, but the witch knocked her off her feet, and the two of them rolled, snarling and struggling for the upper hand.
Then the witch was lifted off her, and Rebekah caught a glimpse of red-gold hair and freckles as she sprang back onto her feet. The mort-vivant screamed incoherently and snapped Lisette’s right arm, then plunged her hand into the young vampire’s chest. Rebekah lurched forward to separate them just in time, then punched her own fist through the undead witch’s spine and pulled her heart out through her back.
“Thanks,” Lisette gasped, her face even paler than usual in the moonlight. She cradled her hurt arm against her wounded chest, but Rebekah could see that both gashes were already beginning to heal. Soon Marguerite would be that unbreakable, but first Rebekah had to keep her corpse from being mauled by the vile cannibals the girl’s own mother had raised.
“Have you seen Elijah?” Rebekah asked. “Does he have a plan, or are we just fighting to
the last one standing?”
“He was near the fountain last I saw,” Lisette said, rubbing at her healing arm with the opposite hand. “A bunch of us were regrouping near the house, but he seemed worried you weren’t there yet, so I came looking.”
“I’m fine out here,” Rebekah said, casting another look at Marguerite. Even with Lisette’s help, she wasn’t willing to risk carrying the body through a raging war. Rebekah would just have to hold her own until Klaus ended Lily’s curse...one way or another.
“Look out!” Lisette shouted. Rebekah ducked instinctively. A mort-vivant broke through a cluster of werewolves, holding one of their severed hind legs like a trophy.
Then a shudder ran through the creature, and Rebekah could feel an echo pass through the battlefield. The morts-vivants—all of them—twitched and then crumpled to the ground, like clockwork that had finally wound down.
A strange hush fell over the field, and then Rebekah heard a handful of whistles and cheers. Their army was battered and exhausted, eager to claim this sudden stop as a victory. One moment they had been fighting for their lives, and in the next the horde of attackers had simply given up.
“Niklaus,” Rebekah whispered, wondering how he had done it. Had she and Marguerite been wrong after all? Could Vivianne’s spell actually have worked? The alternative was almost impossible to imagine. If it hadn’t been the spell...if Klaus had...Rebekah stared toward the mansion, wondering what might be happening within its walls.
Then there was another ripple, another indefinable disturbance that passed through the undead as quickly and silently as the first. Somewhere nearby she heard a scream, and then another.
Bodies wiggled across the field, torsos finding new arms, different heads—like rag dolls that had been ripped apart and then sewn back together with whatever pieces were available. Random hearts rolled back into random bodies, a nightmare of musical chairs. A witch rose before her, but as he staggered to his feet all Rebekah could do was stare. He stood on one of his own legs; a werewolf’s haunch had replaced the other. The mort-vivant lurched unsteadily forward on one human foot and one ungainly paw.