by Julie Plec
Gingerly, she put the ring back exactly as she found it and moved on, continuing her investigation.
On the far side of the chest she nearly tripped over something thicker than the piled carpets, and she looked down in surprise at what must be Eric’s bedroll. She had almost forgotten that this was also the place he slept. She would never have thought him to be the type of man who would find rest among such chaos and darkness. He was serious, yes, but she had never imagined him as morbid.
For a moment she could see his dark hair with its sprinkling of gray at the temples on the crisp white pillow below her, his thoughtful hazel eyes gazing into hers. Maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding; maybe Eric’s fascination with vampires wasn’t what it seemed. Maybe there was another explanation entirely, and they could make a fresh start with none of her lies and none of his....
She lowered herself down onto his blankets, wanting to see how it was that he woke up every morning. The mirrors and some of the crosses that ringed the walls glittered in the light that flickered through the tent, and the nearest chest was so close she could have reached up and touched some of the strange instruments within. Vampires were his first waking thought and the last thing on his mind as he fell asleep. Despite lying amongst sheets that smelled of him, and feeling the spot where his body lay every night, Rebekah had to admit that there was no question that Eric’s job was to hunt vampires, and everything else—the army, the city, the king’s law—was nothing but a smokescreen.
Rebekah rose onto her knees, preparing to leave and steal back to her own tent, when something incongruous caught her eye. There was something resting on the ground beside Eric’s bed. Picking it up, she saw that it was an intricate gold locket, left open to reveal a miniature portrait within.
The flaxen-haired woman it depicted was lovely, and Rebekah was surprised to feel hot jealousy rising in her throat. It might be Eric’s mother or his sister, she reminded herself. And it didn’t matter anyway, because Eric had been sent across an ocean to find and destroy her. If the woman in the portrait was his wife, then as far as Rebekah was concerned, she could keep him.
She realized she had stayed too long. There was no sound from Felix or the battle. Her expedition had given her a great deal to think about, and probably enough evidence to leave this place and report back to her brothers. She was, after all, surrounded by the army of a vampire hunter and shouldn’t risk any more spying when she was almost certainly being watched.
But she needed to know more. The evidence of Eric’s obsession was troubling, but there could be ugly consequences to assuming she knew what it meant. If she let her brothers get hurt because she did not want to believe...if she let Eric get hurt because she believed too easily...She could not accept either risk. She wouldn’t tell Elijah or Klaus what she’d found yet, but she owed it to them to investigate fully.
Rebekah smoothed the blankets and plumped the pillow, trying to angle the locket exactly as it had been—although perhaps a little farther away from the bedroll than she had found it. She slipped through the outer chamber and poked her head out of the tent to find Felix still waiting. At least that one thing had gone as expected.
“Felix,” she whispered, and he turned attentively. “We must return to my tent now,” she told him, ensnaring him again with the power of her voice. “Once I have gone inside, you will forget that we ever left. You will know only that you followed your captain’s orders and guarded me throughout the battle.”
“I always follow my orders,” Felix told her amiably, and she had no doubt that he meant it.
CHAPTER TEN
KLAUS KEPT TO the walls, watching the garden for the first sign of movement. Any stirring might be Vivianne...or it might be a pack of werewolves emerging from the mansion to tear him limb from limb. There was no shortage of lights and voices within the house, but outside nearly an hour had passed with nothing shifting except for the wind.
Klaus reread the note clutched in his left hand for the thousandth time. He was in the right place, and while he had arrived early, she was now late. Vivianne had asked to meet him here, in the garden behind the ballroom where they had first danced together, tonight. Now. Where was she?
Without his meaning to, his gaze drifted to the vine-covered walls where he had tried to conceal the body of the unfortunate serving girl he’d fed on that same night. Solomon Navarro had learned of that little incident all too quickly, and Vivianne had seen evidence of it herself. If she was setting him up for revenge, she could hardly have chosen a better spot...but he didn’t believe that. He was sure he’d reached her the other night—he had felt the softening of her cool, skeptical exterior. She had wanted to believe him.
Surely she would come.
He heard the sound of soft footfalls on the grass, and he knew it was not an ambush. Vivianne hurried across the lawn, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining with some emotion he could not name. For a moment, it was enough. “I’m glad you came,” she whispered when she reached him, and in spite of his own promise to wait out her hesitations, Klaus could not repress a smile.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way about a woman—a century? More? She’d asked to see him, and now she was here...If Mikael had been standing behind him with a white oak stake at that exact moment, Klaus might have died a happy man. Better than that, though, was to live—to live in the astonishing glow of this remarkable young woman, and to know that it was within his reach to win her over.
“I could not have stayed away,” he murmured, speaking the absolute truth. He had never seen her handwriting before that evening, but he had recognized it on sight. Nothing could have kept him from this meeting, not even the very real possibility that it might have been a trap.
He had never truly believed that, though, not really. This was not Klaus’s first midnight rendezvous with a woman, and they usually all had the same purpose. Crickets sang nearby, and the scent of honeysuckle wafted toward them from the vines that climbed the garden wall. It was perfect.
“I needed to see you again,” she breathed, so softly that at first he thought he had misheard her. Then she lifted her face to gaze at him earnestly, and he knew there had been no mistake. “I thought I knew who you were before I even met you, Niklaus Mikaelson,” she told him, “but every time we speak I seem to learn something new. There is depth to you, and passion of course, and a kind of honor I didn’t expect to find. I am more drawn you to every time I see you, but we could never be together. Now that I’ve come to know you a bit more fully, I feel it’s only right to tell you so myself, face-to-face. I have asked you here tonight to make you understand that you must let me go.”
Klaus found himself at a rare loss for words. So he kissed her instead, his lips pressing firmly against her warm ones and his hand gently holding the back of her head in place. She kissed him back, tentative but curious. When she pulled back she rested her dark head against his chest, and he could feel her heart racing. He could have stood there just that way for the rest of the night, if she would agree to it.
“Niklaus, I’m engaged,” she reminded him. Her voice was a bit muffled against the collar of his shirt, but to his keen ear she sounded confused and indecisive. Then she straightened, running her hands over her face as if to brush away any lingering traces of him. “I wish that the things you said the other night could become our reality, but my engagement is too far gone already. I have made promises, and I made them of my own free will. I have an opportunity to seal the peace for good, and if I back out now there will be a slaughter. Hundreds dead on both sides, and it will all be because of me. Because I was weak, and because I put my own selfish desires above the lives of everyone else I love.”
It was unsettling that she chose the past tense when speaking of him, but he did not feel that hope was lost. “Nothing needs to be decided tonight,” he urged gently. “You are not yet married—there is time
to consider.”
“It’s not just that.” Vivianne would not meet his eyes, and Klaus felt a stab of fear. Why had she said that she could “seal the peace for good”? What did that mean exactly? It could not be the simple act of her marriage. There was something more, and it was something that he needed to know.
“Tell me,” he insisted, and he saw her shiver.
“They want me to change,” she whispered. “The Navarros. They say I was raised as a witch, and so I need to become equally werewolf.”
Of course they did. Klaus understood it all immediately. If Vivianne were to activate the wolf within her, then the alliance would be undeniably skewed in favor of the werewolves. She would be truly stuck between both worlds, and married to a man who belonged to only one of them. “And they do not want you to speak to anyone else about this,” he guessed.
Her answering nod was small, and she glanced over her shoulder at the villa behind her. She knew something was wrong with this request, no matter how much she wanted to believe that neither family would let her come to harm. She was young, and for all of her steely intelligence, she was also naive. She did not yet understand how vulnerable her sweetness made her, and so it would fall to Klaus to rip the throats out of anyone who attempted to use it against her.
“It was part of the pact,” she admitted haltingly, “that they wouldn’t ask me—that I wouldn’t have to—”
The witches had been wise, but it may have been all for nothing. The werewolves weren’t as interested in the pact itself as they were in using it to gain the upper hand. “That you wouldn’t need to kill a human and become a full werewolf,” he finished sternly, wanting to make her hear the full measure of what she was considering. In order to activate her werewolf side, she’d have to commit murder, and then she’d change on the full moon...and every moon after that. “I can’t imagine anyone who loves you wanting that for you.”
Not to mention that there were those who believed it was bad enough to be one type of supernatural being, and the thought of two active powers living in the same body sounded hellish. Klaus himself had killed thousands of times, and yet he could not become a werewolf, because his mother had prevented it. She had cast a spell to cut off that part of him, locked it away forever and called it “balance.” Her magic honored nature, except when her pride or infidelity perverted it. Because of Esther’s hypocrisy, this was a path down which he could not follow Vivianne, should she choose to go.
“I don’t want it for myself,” Viv retorted, her lovely face betraying her agony. “But I want it for them. For us. For New Orleans and my parents and the werewolves and the witches and the humans who won’t be caught in the crossfire anymore. Becoming a true werewolf is the only way I can ever really be a part of their pack, so that they will listen to me and accept my marriage.”
Why would they bargain for it if they didn’t intend to accept it, Klaus wanted to ask her, unless it was to spring this on you when the moment grew near? But she wasn’t ready to hear that truth, he knew, and it would only drive her away from him. “If they do not want you as you are, they do not deserve to have you,” he growled instead, and then wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her near to kiss her again, despite her halfhearted resistance. “Come with me tonight, and leave this trap before it can close around you.”
She rested her forehead against his collarbone, closing her eyes, struggling with herself. “This has to end, you and me,” she argued, and her voice was rough with tears. “I felt like I had to tell you in person, but I am sorry if that only caused you pain. It hurts me more than you know.”
“Then undo it,” Klaus said. “I will forget that you ever said these things, and you can do the same. Nothing is done yet. No one is married; no one is dead.”
“It is done,” she argued, pulling back and staring up at him earnestly. “It was done as soon as I was born. I can’t know what is required of me and walk away. How can I? You don’t understand what it’s like, to live between two warring worlds like this. I never asked for the responsibility, but there is no one else who can accomplish what I can. If I refuse now, it will ruin everything.”
She was as right as she was wrong: Klaus’s dual heritage had started a war, just as Vivianne hoped that hers would end one. “I am already ruined, Viv,” he told her. “Meeting you has ruined me. What do I care if the rest of the world burns as well? Having you with me would be worth any price.”
Light and laughter spilled out into the garden from an opened door, and Klaus shrank back against the wall, pulling her with him. “Vivianne!” a merry voice called. “Darling, where have you gone? You’re needed at cards—my mother has made a fortune off us in your absence.”
She gave a panicked start and pulled violently out of his arms. “Klaus, please, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” she pleaded, but if leaving him was difficult for her then he was certainly not going to make it any easier.
“Vivianne Lescheres,” he began, then paused long enough that she stilled to listen, her curiosity getting the better of her. “I have never had the pleasure of meeting a woman like you, and I’ve lived long enough that I would know if there were any. For you I’m even willing to beg: Please don’t break my heart quite yet.”
She gave him a hesitant little smile despite herself, and when she looked up at him again her eyes held a gleam that had nothing to do with tears. “Be careful what you wish for, Klaus,” she began, and then gave a small sigh. “Perhaps we could meet again, if only so I can tell you no once more.”
“My dear, I promise you that the only thing you’ll be saying with me is yes, and you’ll say it more than once. I’d be more than happy to prove it to you, if you’ll meet me again tomorrow night. Here?” Klaus felt reckless, ready to risk anything to keep from losing her.
“Vivianne, where are you?” the voice called again, and Klaus would have been happy to gut its owner with his fingernails.
Vivianne bit her lip, her entire body tense with worry, but she leaned up to give Klaus one more kiss. It lasted a second longer than a polite good-bye, and Klaus took that as the only answer he needed. He’d be here tomorrow night, and every evening after, until Vivianne made good on the promise of that kiss by meeting him again.
She struggled out of his arms and he watched her silhouette run across the grass, toward the light and the tall, thin figure waiting for her in the doorway.
Klaus didn’t have to see his face to know who it was. If he could kill every living being who was unworthy to speak her name, he would have started right then with Armand. It would end up as a massacre...which, now that Klaus thought of it, actually seemed rather appealing. He wondered how many werewolves were in the festively lit mansion before him—Armand and his mother, apparently, but from the voices and sounds of clinking glasses, probably quite a few more. It would not be worth facing Elijah’s wrath unless he succeeded in killing every one in the house—in the city, actually—this same night.
A worthy goal, but an unlikely one, and so he vented his rage on the high wall of the garden instead. His fist was unharmed, but the wall cracked and crumbled, leaving a satisfying hole in the mortared stones. It was a physical reminder that he would not give up Vivianne without a fight, even if it could not be the bloody battle he’d have preferred.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CEMETERY WAS darker than Elijah remembered. Clouds concealed the moon and stars, and it seemed there were fewer lit candles than during his previous visit. A cool wind blew in from the sea, picking up the murky scent of the bayou as it came.
Elijah weaved his way through the tombs on foot, careful not to disturb any of the stones. A mournful howl drifted toward him on the wind. The covered moon wouldn’t be full for a few more weeks, but the skin on his arms and neck still prickled at the sound. There was something happening in the cemetery, some kind of magic, and it was clear that outsiders would not be
welcomed.
He’d rather be anywhere else, but he’d made a vow to Ysabelle Dalliencourt to prove her wrong. With Hugo’s will and the deed to his house, Elijah intended to show the witch that she had underestimated him. Hopefully, she would be impressed enough by his resourcefulness to reconsider her position on granting favors to his family. The service he needed now was much smaller than a gift of land.
Ysabelle wasn’t home when he’d gone to look for her, so Elijah had guessed that the only other place she’d be was the witches’ graveyard. After searching through the enchanted maze for the better part of an hour, Elijah’s sharp eyes finally found Ysabelle in the center of a ring of candles. She was dressed in a lilac shift with her reddish hair loose around her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, but she did not look at peace. If anything, she looked angry.
Elijah hung back and watched as she muttered to herself then opened her eyes and began to furiously mix some substance in the copper bowl that lay at her feet. She straightened again, closing her eyes and looking as though every part of her body strained against some invisible force. He wasn’t sure what she was trying to do, but he could see the moment when she failed. Based on the slump of her shoulders, it looked like she’d been attempting the spell for a while without much success. Her frustration was just another asset to him.
“Good evening, Ysabelle,” he called, rather more cheerfully than was appropriate for a cemetery, especially in the middle of the night.
From the way she turned and glared at him, he was lucky that her magic wasn’t cooperating at the moment. Yet another point in his favor, he thought, approaching confidently. She knew he was not intimidated by her power, and she hated it.
