by Julie Plec
Still, Sampson couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on New Orleans. As he stared into the flames he knew he was witnessing more than the death of a city—it was a resurrection. New Orleans would rise again from the ashes, just as she always did.
CHAPTER ONE
A few weeks earlier...
“DRINK!”
Dozens of voices picked up the command, turning it into a chant. “Drink,” they all shouted at the thief. Everyone else had already taken their turn, pledging their allegiance to Klaus’s army by drinking his blood. Klaus let them think the gesture was symbolic, little did they know they’d all be vampires by the end of the night.
The energy in the room was at a steady thrum, and it felt as if the very blood in his veins vibrated with the cries of men. Klaus had outgrown the family mansion, shedding it in favor of a roomy four-story garrison in the center of town. It was a more fitting place for his new calling—a place of war.
There had to be a hundred of his new recruits carousing in the large dining hall, banging their tankards on the long wooden tables and shouting encouragement. Klaus sat alone on a dais, where he had received each of them in turn. One was a whore from the Southern Spot, the oldest brothel in New Orleans, and by Klaus’s estimation, still the best. She’d run afoul of the madam and been thrown out, showing some real fire and a surprisingly creative vocabulary. Another group of bandits had been rounded up by Spanish patrol in the countryside, and Klaus had found a fresh crop of young runaways near the harbor.
The last recruit to drink was a thief named José. He’d been caught with one hand in the safe of the Southern Spot. The manager—a hothead Klaus suspected might be doing some skimming of his own—had wanted to just kill the man and dump his body in the river. But Klaus had an eye for potential; he could spot those who were loyal. All Klaus needed to give him was a new life, a new family, and a new mission. That might have seemed an impossibly high price to most people, but not for an Original vampire.
Drinking blood—human blood, they believed—was a gruesome way to pledge, but the high entry price was a sure way to have volunteers clamoring to join up. Everyone in the hall understood that being a part of Klaus’s army would require dangerous things of them, and that was part of the appeal. Once this last lowlife thief drank his share, all they would ask of Klaus was to lead.
That was what Klaus was good at, what he was destined for. Everything else was just a distraction, and Klaus was done with those. His past self would have traded the entire city for a life with Vivianne Lescheres Mikaelson, but he understood now that it was never meant to be. If he couldn’t have her, he would rule New Orleans, and the werewolves could consider themselves lucky if he stopped there.
As if their role in Vivianne’s two deaths wasn’t enough of an insult, New Orleans’s wolves had grown bold in recent weeks. There had been daytime raids on Klaus’s businesses, an ever-mounting pattern of attacks on his warehouses and ships. Now Guillaume, one of the humans whose eyes and ears Klaus relied on, informed him that the werewolves were poised to strike at the vampires themselves.
Elijah had generously given the Collado Pack a foothold in the city even after they had failed to save Vivianne. And yet, instead of showing gratitude, the werewolves had spent the last twenty-two years grasping for more. There was no reasoning with them, no dealing with them. The only solution was to wipe them out, as Klaus had wanted to do from the night he first arrived on these shores.
He stared down at the thief who knelt before him, ready to use compulsion if he tried to bolt. José had sharp, ratlike features, with a long, pointed nose and rheumy blue eyes. He didn’t look like much, but he didn’t need to be. Klaus had more than enough power to go around.
“Drink!” his soldiers shouted, and Klaus could see the thief’s pulse beat in his throat.
He lifted his glass and drained it in one swallow, the blood leaving an unsightly stain on his narrow lips. He gagged a little as he tried to control his disgust at the taste of the thick, warm blood. Klaus could dimly remember once feeling the same way, but centuries upon centuries as a vampire had cured him of that distaste.
Becoming a vampire was a cure for any number of life’s ills.
The thief looked around uncertainly, cowed by the thundering roar of approval that seemed to shake the house from its foundations. The army was in a merry mood that night, and it was only going to get better. Klaus studied the trembling man before him for a long moment. With a welcoming smile, he stepped forward and snapped the man’s neck, feeling the vertebrae pop under his fingers.
The hall went silent, a hundred faces staring, mouths gaping open in shock. The dead man collapsed to the floor in an awkward heap, but Klaus didn’t bother to watch him fall. Instead, he leaped forward, moving faster than human eyes could follow, reaching for the neck of the nearest human, and then the next.
There was barely time for the last man to scream, a thin, strangled sound that choked off when Klaus’s hand closed around his windpipe. He killed the last man slowly, watching him struggle for air as surrounding bodies thumped to the ground.
The whole ordeal was over in seconds. He walked among his men and women, down along the narrow aisle that ran between the tables. They had all been criminals and deserters, lost until he had come along. Now they were an army of the dead.
Klaus was the only one who seemed to realize that true safety lay in power. A better network, a bigger army, more resources, more weapons—there was no position too strong, in Klaus’s opinion. The fact that Mikael hadn’t come for them yet didn’t mean he had ended his hunt. His children—and Klaus, his hated stepson—needed to be in the strongest position possible when he did.
Elijah had had his turn at trying to run the city. The vampires had only subsisted for the last twenty-two years, and as long as they were forced to share and negotiate, true power would never be theirs. Without love, power was the only prize left worth fighting for...and, as it happened, Elijah himself was distracted by love at that very moment. If he couldn’t fully dedicate himself to controlling their city, then Klaus would do it. And he would do it in his own way, as he should have from the start. The werewolves were coming, and Klaus was determined to strike first and in force.
The last of the brisk winter air swept through the open courtyard and struck him in the face. The night was already promising; he could feel it. Klaus’s blood was working, breaking and changing and reforming the men and women, dragging them back toward an entirely new kind of life. By the following night, he would have a hundred new vampires in his army, all of them fanatically loyal to him and him alone.
CHAPTER TWO
REBEKAH INHALED THE smell of damp earth as her horse cantered through the countryside. It felt good to be out of the city, free of the confining walls of the mansion and away from the oppressive eyes of her brothers. She had once promised them that they would remain together for eternity, but back then she had had no idea just how long eternity could really be.
“What a shame to let the horses have all the fun,” Luc called to her. “We could just run ourselves.”
Rebekah couldn’t match his lightness of spirit, not with the sight that had driven her from New Orleans still so fresh in her mind. She longed to, though. It was the ease of Luc’s joy that had inspired her to invite him along, in the hope that some of it might pierce the gloom that had shrouded her ever since she had found Marguerite Leroux’s dead body in her bed.
“We’re in no hurry,” she countered, and Luc’s blue eyes twinkled wickedly. In spite of everything that weighed on her, Rebekah couldn’t even seem to look at him without either laughing or lusting...often both at once. She had definitely made the right choice of a traveling companion. “The horses may be a bit slower than we are, but they serve their purpose.” There was no need to risk unnecessary attention, after all, not even in the dark of night. Elijah had intended to keep Klaus out
of trouble by placing him in charge of New Orleans’s booming shipping business, but all that had done was give Klaus eyes and ears everywhere.
Luc urged his horse on as they crested a low hill, and she kicked her own forward to keep pace. An emerald valley spread out below them, carpeted with lush grasses. A little village huddled near its far end, near a stream.
“We should stop here for daybreak,” Rebekah suggested, feeling the stress of New Orleans, her family, and even poor Marguerite begin to fade just a little bit. “I’m sure there’s an inn.”
“I think I see one,” Luc agreed, swinging down from his saddle. She did the same, falling in beside him as if they had walked together for decades. “Should I be expecting your brothers to drop in on us at any point, or will we be alone?”
Luc Benoit had been born in the New World, and, to Rebekah’s eyes, it showed. He had all the restless curiosity of an explorer, and the casual confidence of a boy who had been raised to believe he could tackle any challenge that came his way. Wolves, bears, and whip-fast alligators had prowled the bayou around him, so he had never bothered with learning to fear the unknown.
That swaggering recklessness had eventually been his undoing, although Rebekah could tell it had taught him nothing whatsoever. Luc had fallen in with a gang of privateers, bullying the British along the northern coasts, and when that work was done he had simply kept on tormenting others for profit. He had become exactly the kind of shiftless troublemaker that Klaus was rounding up now to form his ludicrous “army,” and in fact Klaus had already recruited him when Rebekah had first met him.
She’d had no choice but to make Luc a vampire herself, saving him from a fate tied to Klaus’s endless, futile attempts at self-destruction. Her troubled brother had only ever managed to destroy everyone around him, emerging unscathed again and again, and Luc was far too handsome to end up dead. She deserved a good distraction. Then Klaus had killed Marguerite, and everything had changed.
“I have lived and traveled with my brothers for centuries,” she told Luc. “But this is a trip I intend for us to make alone.” She couldn’t promise that Klaus or Elijah wouldn’t pursue them, as neither would be pleased with Rebekah’s decision. But she and her loyal new lover had a good head start, and Rebekah knew how to disappear when she needed to.
She was done answering to her family. That had all been over the moment she had laid eyes on the bloody stake broken off in the center of Marguerite Leroux’s thin chest. The awkward, lanky girl should have finished growing into a woman years ago, and she would have if Klaus hadn’t accidentally killed her during the madness that had followed his foolhardy resurrection of Vivianne. Rebekah had saved her, freezing her as a teenager forever...or at least until Klaus got it into his head to make good on some of his wild threats.
Klaus had always enjoyed using the vampires closest to his siblings as a means to try to control them. It hadn’t taken him long to see that Rebekah felt a genuine bond with Marguerite, and he seemed to take particular pleasure in reminding Rebekah that he could destroy that bond permanently in a single, violent moment. She hadn’t ever really believed he would do it, though—not until she had seen the proof with her own eyes.
It was too cruel, too unfeeling even for Klaus. But apparently Klaus had no shred of decency or family feeling left in him, and so as Rebekah held Marguerite’s cold body against her own, she vowed that she would put an end to Klaus’s misery once and for all.
“Your brothers would not approve of this journey,” Luc guessed, watching her intently. His full lips pressed together thoughtfully in a way that made her want to bite one. “You can’t trust me to keep our destination a secret.”
He started to speak again, but Rebekah caught him by the shoulders to kiss him—and quiet him. Too many questions were never a good thing. He glared at her with mock ferocity before kissing her back.
“My family was whole once,” she began, linking her arm through his and resuming their stroll toward the first houses of the little village. The sun wouldn’t rise for at least another hour. “But a plague took my oldest sister, and after she died my father wanted to take my mother and my older siblings to a place where they would be safe. I was born in the New World, not far from here.”
Luc glanced sidelong at her. “There are plenty of other dangers here,” he pointed out.
“Exactly.” One of the horses whickered softly behind them, and Rebekah felt the sudden burst of its warm, wet breath against the small of her back. “We discovered werewolves in what is now Virginia, and I lost another brother. My parents realized then that nowhere was truly safe. They could run forever, but they would keep losing children everywhere they went.”
“And yet here you are today,” Luc reminded her. “Whole and living and, if I may say so, in extremely good health.”
Rebekah smiled ruefully, unable to deny it. In his usual, direct way, Luc had struck on the same bottom line that once motivated her mother to change her children into vampires in the first place. Esther had believed—at the time, at least—that strength and life were all that mattered, even if they cost her family everything else.
“My mother was a witch,” Rebekah explained. “She was an exceptionally powerful one, and she cast an immortality curse on us.”
“I’ve heard you call it a curse before,” Luc interrupted. “But I don’t understand.”
“It’s a curse.” Her voice was flat and forceful, like a slap to the face. She saw Marguerite’s glassy brown eyes, her auburn hair spread out like a fan across Rebekah’s pillows. Leaving her there had been an extra little twist of the dagger from Klaus, a reminder that nothing was safe from his reach. “I was there when the spell was cast. My mother made us as strong as she knew how to do, but the price of that strength was terrible. The hunger—you’ve felt that, and you know how it tears at us. She imagined us running through the hills, free again from fear, but every touch of the sun scorched our skin. We were confined to the night, and our neighbors grew distrustful of our new, strange habits. Soon they wanted nothing to do with us, and we quickly learned it was within their power to bar us from their homes. We couldn’t enter without their invitation, and none were willing to offer it anymore.”
“People fear what they don’t know.” Luc shrugged, as if the total isolation the Mikaelsons had been faced with were just some trivial faux pas. “But the benefits, surely, outweighed those minor concerns.”
“Our mother thought so at first,” Rebekah admitted. “She thought that our safety was worth anything, until she saw what life she had condemned us to with her own two eyes. She regretted her choice, and my father went even further than that. He vowed to use his own immortality to destroy ours, to kill the children he had once demanded that his wife save.”
“But you cannot be killed.” Luc frowned. The serious expression suited his handsome face: all squared angles and broad planes.
The Originals certainly didn’t go broadcasting their mortal flaw, but every strength came with a weakness. Their mother had called upon the power of the white oak tree to grant her children immortality, and the wood of that same tree could take it away again, and Rebekah had heard rumors that it still stood in Mystic Falls.
“My family is complicated,” she compromised.
“Then it’s just as well to have some time away from them,” he said mischievously. Luc was a straightforward man with simple tastes—the intrigue of the Originals must seem impossibly foreign to him. That was yet another thing that made him the perfect partner for a voyage like this one, and Rebekah felt the unhappy fog she had been carrying with her begin to dissipate and drift away.
Between thoughts of her past and thoughts of Luc, she was so distracted that she was startled to realize that they had reached the inn. A bleary-eyed woman peered out of the door, suspicious of the couple arriving on her doorstep before the sky was even light.
“Our horses
need tending,” Rebekah announced, continuing to advance so that the woman had no real choice but to move aside and let her pass. Luc waited outside until a groom arrived to lead the horses away, and to her surprise Rebekah noticed that he followed the man at a bit of a distance, trailing after him as he led the beasts toward the stable. “We’ll need a room just for the day,” she went on, curious what Luc was up to.
The innkeeper fished around for a key, still eyeing Rebekah doubtfully. “These parts aren’t always safe at night,” she ventured. “It’s lucky you and that handsome fellow made it here unharmed, but wouldn’t you rather stay over until the next morning to travel on by day? There’s a lovely room with a view over the valley, much nicer for a young couple like yourselves than those treacherous roads after dark.”
“Consider it, darling.” Luc appeared again at her elbow, looking unnaturally flushed. Rebekah thought she could spot a tiny fleck of blood in the corner of his mouth. “I would hate to risk our safety, no matter how much of a hurry you’re in.”
She glanced up at him, trying to read his bland, polite smile. His blond hair was tied back away from his face with a strip of leather, and she was struck by a sudden impulse to let it down and run her fingers through it. “Let us see the room,” she agreed. “It might be nice to rest awhile.”
Seemingly reassured, the innkeeper turned toward the wooden staircase. Luc fell on her as soon as her back was turned, wrapping a hand around her mouth and sinking his teeth into her neck. His skin still looked tanned against the woman’s sallow flesh, even though it had been weeks since he had seen the sun.
He punctured the innkeeper’s jugular vein and then passed her to Rebekah, his blue eyes glittering eagerly. She needed no more urging than that: She drank deeply, savoring the feel of the woman’s heart fluttering and then finally stopping. Her kind had been made to hunt humans, not for all of this backstabbing and infighting. This was what the Mikaelsons should have been doing all along, rather than scheming and maneuvering and betraying one another. Klaus had lost touch with his own nature, and for a while he had managed to drag Rebekah into the darkness with him.