by Julie Plec
“You must be tired.” She realized it abruptly, jumping to her feet and smoothing the sheet that covered Eric’s strong, lean torso. “I came to see that you were well, but I should not have strained you by talking so long.”
“It is no strain to speak with you,” he disagreed, and his hands clutched at the sheet, as if they were searching for hers. “You must visit me again. Your company will improve my health faster than any doctor.”
Rebekah’s answering smile was immediate and genuine, in spite of her endless questions and misgivings. The one thing that she knew to be true was that she felt at home with Eric, and that he felt the same. The happy, loving, normal life she had always longed for lay before her on a folding cot in a stinking infirmary, surrounded by men who might die. And yet, he might have been sent by her father to murder her. Rebekah expected nothing less from cruel fate.
She always chose the wrong man at the wrong time. She would fall in love, making it too late to undo her mistake. “I will return,” she agreed, not knowing if she spoke the truth. She stood and shook out her skirt, trying not to notice the way he watched the motion of her hands. “Rest now.”
Then she strode from the tent, ignoring the groans of the wounded men as she went. She was no visiting angel who would sit by their bedsides as they lay dying. She was death herself, and she had business of her own to attend to.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
KLAUS STUMBLED AGAINST the doorframe, cursing the long flight of stairs that led to his hotel room. Loudly. He had not been drinking, and yet he felt drunk. Over the last couple of days, he’d managed to steal a few hours with Vivianne, and the time they spent together was more potent than any liquor.
She’d not yet agreed to call off her farce of an engagement, nor would she promise to forgo the ceremony that would make her a full werewolf. But since their first clandestine meeting in the Navarros’ garden, it’d become clear that she was not willing to give up Klaus, either. Every time he came to her, she lit up as if from within. Even blood could not bring him the same satisfaction, the same fullness, as the planes of her perfect face when she angled it up toward his.
But it was a different face that waited in the dim shadows of his hotel room—soft sweeps of peaches and cream rather than Vivianne’s sharp, contrasting angles. Klaus felt his lip curl into a snarl. “Sister,” he greeted her as politely as he could, under the circumstances. “I would have sworn this was my room.”
“I would have sworn you were too drunk to know the difference,” Rebekah retorted casually. She lounged comfortably on his tasseled bedding, her eyes on some scrap of paper in her hand.
“I am surprised you even remembered which hotel we live in,” he sniped back, stepping forward to get a better look at the paper. It seemed familiar, although it was hard to be sure. Pointedly, he didn’t close the door behind him. He wanted her to understand that she was free to leave just as soon as she liked. Sooner, even. “Haven’t you enlisted in the French army by now?”
Rebekah looked up at him, the rage in her eyes visible even in the gloom. “And whom have you joined forces with?” she snarled contemptuously, shaking the page in her hand as if it should have made the answer obvious. “You certainly aren’t working with our family anymore.”
Klaus lit a candle, holding his hand around the tiny flame to shield it until it could catch. The room warmed into shades of gold and green, with heavy walnut furniture scattered across an intricately patterned rug. The extra light also showed Rebekah’s temper, but he still couldn’t see what was written on the other side of the paper. Klaus felt a twinge of frustration, but was not about to admit any weakness.
“I hardly think you’re in a position to say what I’m doing or whom with,” he told her coldly after he had set the candle down on a table, “considering how long it’s been since you’ve bothered to check in. Where is this human army you were supposed to be securing for us, Rebekah? Have you won their allegiance to our cause or just wasted your time whoring around with a few of the prettier officers?”
Rebekah leaped from the bed and slapped him hard across the cheek. “Have you lost your mind?” she shouted, and Klaus could hear agitated voices complaining from nearby rooms. Rebekah didn’t seem to care as she shoved the bit of paper closer to his face. “Explain this,” she demanded, at an absolutely unreasonable volume, considering the hour. The sun was not yet up, and neither were most of the hotel’s guests. At least when Elijah secured them a home they could fight in peace.
Klaus’s eyes focused on the paper, and he felt a rage rising within him that would drown out his sister’s like the ocean swallowing a single drop of rain. The long, sloping handwriting on the page was immediately, intimately familiar to him, and his mind raced with all of the private, practically sacred things Rebekah might have read. She had no right. “That belongs to me,” he reminded her, his voice a low, warning growl. “Show some sense for once in your interminable life. Set it down, and go.”
“Sense!” she snorted, tossing the letter on the bed as if Vivianne’s thoughts and words were trash. The note in which she’d invited Klaus to their first meeting was the most important treasure he had in his possession, and Rebekah simply threw it aside. “Tell me all about sense, brother. Tell me all about how your torrid affair with that child is really just a plot, and not a total betrayal of our kind. Tell me what sweet nothings you whispered in her ear to seduce her into marrying that goddamned wolf like she was supposed to do all along!”
“My affairs are none of your business,” Klaus argued. “That cursed alliance between the witches and the werewolves was never what you and Elijah thought. You should thank me for interfering, and you would if you weren’t so blinded by your own stupid optimism.”
“My ‘optimism’ doesn’t apply to anything done or said by you,” Rebekah spat viciously. “You’ve been a walking disaster for one century after another. I’ve given up on expecting you to ever stop and think before you bring the walls down around our ears, but surely even you can see how incredibly predictable your behavior is by now. Life gets too easy, and you get bored. Things go smoothly, and you do everything in your power to ruin them.”
“Enough!” Klaus shouted, losing his self-control. “Of all people, Rebekah—of everyone in the world—I would expect you to remember that passion does not ask our permission before it strikes.”
Rebekah hesitated briefly, but then her jaw set in anger. She thought he was manipulating her, he realized, and it was best to let her believe that. He’d rather she think him a bastard than a fool. He was suddenly shattered by his feelings; he felt possessed by them.
“All you desire is trouble,” Rebekah scoffed. “Seeing the rest of us struggle to clean up after you when we could have just followed our perfectly good plan from the start.”
“Speaking of that good plan,” he said, his voice a low rumble, “I still haven’t heard your report on our army. But I did hear about something else interesting: a werewolf attack, right on the spot where my own dear sister was supposed to be pressing our agenda. So I asked around a bit. Imagine my surprise to hear that my same sister had been dining with the handsome captain every night, and then she visited him in the infirmary like a good little camp follower. So tell me, Rebekah, where has your plan failed? You are in position. You have his trust. Why have you not moved to take command of his men?”
Rebekah’s pretty mouth gaped open so comically that he nearly laughed. “You spied on me?” she demanded. “You took time away from your juvenile romance to spy on me? You could have destroyed my cover!”
“You have no cover,” he reminded her cruelly. “You have become exactly what you were pretending to be—a pathetic damsel in distress, living on crumbs of affection from Captain Moquet.”
Rebekah bit her lip, and Klaus saw that his words had hit home. She really did love her dashing soldier-boy, at least as much as she could call any of t
hose doomed infatuations of hers “love.” Now that Klaus knew the truth, he had even less patience for his sister’s tiresome affairs. As always, it would be his job to drag her, kicking and screaming, back into the fold. Did she never tire of resisting her fate and failing miserably at it?
“It’s more complicated than you know,” she murmured, then tossed her honey-colored hair back and raised her voice. “The army knows that supernatural beings exist, and they may even suspect that we are here in this city. I have had to move more slowly, to investigate and make sure that our secret is not exposed. I wouldn’t expect you to understand caution, but this is what it looks like.”
The strangest, most inexplicable part of it all was that she seemed to really believe what she was saying. The twit had just admitted that she was living among a bunch of armed men who knew of vampires. And she was so oblivious, so thoroughly lost, that she actually called that caution!
If anyone in the army knew of vampires, all the more reason to compel or kill them. What didn’t make sense was to wait, investigate, and fall in love...and yet that was exactly the path Rebekah had chosen. How like her, and how entirely unlike caution.
“Rebekah,” he reminded her, keeping the tightest possible control over his tone. He wanted her to understand that he meant every word, that this was no angry bluster. “Elijah believes it is crucial for our family to stay together, and I see merit in that belief. But if you insist on continuing to endanger our very existence, I have a silver stake with your name on it,” he warned, stepping closer. She flinched away, the backs of her knees bumping into the tasseled coverlet. “Secure the army or destroy this threat or do both, for all I care. But do not fail. If you cannot be relied on, you will join Kol and Finn in a coffin.”
“You monster,” Rebekah hissed. Even in the warm candlelight, her face was ashen. “That you would dare to threaten me while prancing around the city with that—that—”
“Witch,” Klaus finished evenly. “A witch who is also half werewolf. What advantages does your captain possess? That is, aside from the ability to reveal our location to your father?”
Rebekah laughed mirthlessly. “Our father,” she corrected dryly. “He certainly hates us all the same by now.”
“He hated me the same from the start,” Klaus muttered, furious with her for turning the tables back on him so quickly. This sort of quick thinking was why she had always been a valuable ally, but he did not enjoy being the target of her wit.
Perhaps, though, it was a sign that she was not lost, that she could still rescue this disaster. Maybe her fear of his dagger would help her remember her responsibilities.
“I have no wish to fight with you,” she told him more softly, as if she could read his own softening in his face. “Both of us want the same thing in the end, do we not? Love?”
It was just the slightest bit too far. He would not allow her to compare her schoolgirl romance with the extraordinary revelation of his feelings for Vivianne Lescheres.
“We do not,” he reminded her icily. “I want you to put our safety above your feelings, and you want me to let some upstart werewolf marry a woman that he has no right to. I will not hesitate to put her well-being above yours, and you already know I will do the same when it comes to my own. So collect yourself and behave like a Mikaelson, or you will live to regret it. Eternally.”
Rebekah’s gentle expression turned murderous in the blink of an eye, and Klaus was glad he had held his ground with her. She was both the charmer and the snake, and he could not be too careful. “I will do what I must,” she snapped, and he noted that she didn’t explain what, exactly, that would be. “You will have no cause to fear from my behavior, but I warn you that I will not be bullied or threatened this way. Get your own affairs in order, Niklaus, before you presume to judge me for mine.”
She gathered her full skirt in her hands, preparing to sweep from the room, when Elijah’s abrupt appearance in the open door interrupted her. Klaus smirked—it served her right to have her dramatic exit so awkwardly canceled.
“What is this?” Elijah demanded, frowning.
He held a book close against his chest, and to Klaus’s keen eye it was one he had no business carrying around. “I might ask you the same question, dear brother,” he pointed out pleasantly, nodding toward the book.
Elijah glanced down at it and frowned. Klaus could tell that he wanted desperately to know what trouble his siblings had been stirring, but he was reluctant to explain his own actions. “I have a plan that will ensure our safety in this city in the long term,” he answered vaguely.
“As do we all,” Klaus assured him. The early warnings of daylight caught the edge of the book in Elijah’s hands, a volume of their mother’s grimoire. Klaus knew that Elijah was up to as much trouble as the rest of them, and he felt almost proud at the deceitful trio they made.
“We will have to see who accomplishes the most in the next few nights.” Rebekah blew dismissively through her lips and pushed past them, but Klaus aimed his next words at her back as well as Elijah’s waiting ears. “You may be closer than ever to finding us some quaint little hovel, brother, and Rebekah may still win us an army. But I’m building us an empire.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ELIJAH KNEW THAT he had to outrace his siblings before they started more trouble than he could stop. He didn’t fully understand the scene he’d witnessed this morning, but it was clear that both were up to no good. He wasn’t their keeper, watching them to make sure they avoided whatever type of catastrophe to which they were the most prone. Time and experience had proved that totally impossible. The only thing he could do was complete his mission before they had gone too far with theirs.
For that he needed Ysabelle, and there was no time to waste. The sun was just rising over the glittering bayou as he ruthlessly kicked his horse toward her house. The steady beat of its hooves marked out the next steps in Elijah’s mind, and he repeated the list to himself as they raced.
The spell to speak with Hugo’s ghost shouldn’t take long at all, not once Ysabelle had the grimoire in her hand. There was a protection spell in that book as well, and it was a powerful one. As soon as she saw that Hugo’s house truly belonged to Elijah, he would throw her on the back of his horse and race her to the property, so that she could make it into a fortress. Something told him that any moment now, one or both of his siblings was going to need a stronghold.
Ysabelle’s door opened before he could knock. She was ready for him. Her reddish-brown hair was pulled into a braid that coiled neatly around her hairline, and her cream-colored gown highlighted her elegant collarbones and chest.
“Are you in more of a hurry than before?” she remarked lightly, taking in his windblown appearance with a deliberately searching glance.
“I feel a new urgency this morning,” he agreed, wishing he could simply drag her from her house. But she was safe from even his lightest touch until she chose to step across her threshold, and so he would just have to remember to be courteous. “I took time to read the spell and gather what you would need,” he said.
Her lips pursed together, “I liked you better when you were a supplicant,” she snipped. “But very well. If you have all that is needed, we can begin.” She stepped out and meaningfully closed the door behind her. No matter how closely interwoven their interests became, he knew that he would never be welcome inside her home. At the very least he could prove to her that he wasn’t a liar, no matter what else he might be.
Elijah opened the grimoire to the correct page, setting it carefully in the forked stump of one of the scrubby trees in front of the house. As if they had worked together before, he and Ysabelle arranged the spell quickly and efficiently. Contrary to his assumptions, it was no simple thing, and Ysabelle’s inexperience with this type of power was evident. He never thought he’d miss the more powerful witches of Europe, but he did.
; By midmorning they were ready, and she took her place in the center of the circle they had drawn in her front garden. Elijah stepped back, not wanting his presence to interfere. Ysabelle sat quietly, with her wrists resting loosely on her knees and her brown eyes closed, for what felt like a year. He was sure that the sun moved to its zenith during the time she struggled to master the forces at play within her circle. Clouds covered the sun, and the meadow darkened—taking on the feeling of twilight. The birds stopped chirping, and everything was still.
Then, from one instant to the next, Hugo appeared between them.
Elijah jumped back in surprise, then stepped forward, eager to see the ghost’s face clearly. He could hardly believe it, but it had worked. His human friend stood in the shallow iron bowl at the circle’s center.
“Well met, spirit,” Ysabelle murmured, so low that Elijah barely heard her. “I am sorry to trouble your rest, but you guard truths I need to know. Will you help?”
Hugo’s clever blue eyes found Elijah before he answered. He looked much younger than Elijah remembered him, closer to thirty than seventy. It made sense, he supposed, that a person would not be forced to spend eternity exactly as they had died...unless that person became a vampire. “Witch,” Hugo said pleasantly enough for someone who had just been dragged out of eternal rest, “what is it that you want of me?”
Ysabelle’s eyes flicked sideways toward Elijah, then back to Hugo. “This—Elijah has come to me with the deed to your former house,” she explained, sidestepping whatever word she might have chosen to describe him. “He wishes me to place a protection spell around the land, but I have doubts about how he acquired it....I cannot allow a murderer to profit from his crime,” she clarified when Hugo did not immediately respond.
