The Originals: The Resurrection

  Family is power. The Original Vampire family swore it to each other a thousand years ago. They pledged to remain together always and forever. But even when you’re immortal, promises are hard to keep.

  Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah Mikaelson had won it all, only to lose it again by 1788. Control of New Orleans is split between the vampires and the werewolves, much to Klaus’s displeasure. In a dangerous attempt to reclaim his home, Klaus decides to build a vampire army to take out the werewolves once and for all. If he can’t have love, then he’ll settle for power. Elijah lets his brother take the reins as he turns his attentions to a beautiful and mysterious woman. But Rebekah has had enough of her brothers’ love of bloodshed and begins a journey to find her first home and the key to her family’s immortality. As the battle rages on, the siblings must come together and fight for what they believe in most: family.

  CREATED BY JULIE PLEC

  based on

  Dear Reader:

  Welcome back for the final book in the Originals series. If reveling in the dramatic lives of current-day Klaus, Elijah, and Rebekah Mikaelson on the CW isn’t enough for you, don’t worry—just turn the page to see where their stories began. Courtesy of HQN Books, in association with Alloy Entertainment, this trilogy explores the dark past of the Originals with brand-new tales.

  In the last two books, you saw how far Klaus would go for love. In book three, The Resurrection, you’ll understand how far he’ll go for power. After establishing a joint rule with the werewolves, the Mikaelsons have governed in peace for the past twenty years. Except Klaus never wanted eternal harmony; he wanted the entire city to kneel before him, covered in the blood of his rivals. And now he might finally get his chance. With Elijah and Rebekah distracted by their own desires, Klaus seizes the opportunity to take the city for himself. But when a new enemy rises up from the shadows of New Orleans, the three siblings will have to join forces and fight with everything they have if they want to save their home.

  In The Originals: The Rise, The Loss, and The Resurrection, the Mikaelson vampires are examined in a whole new way. Turn the page for a book that has all the violence, forbidden love, and lust for power of the TV show, and a story that will satisfy your hunger for more.

  With best wishes,

  Julie Plec

  Creator and Executive Producer of The Originals

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT

  PROLOGUE

  March 21, 1788

  THE CITY WAS BURNING. From the east end to the church, New Orleans was lit up with flames, and Klaus Mikaelson was to blame. José Pilón sat on a low hill, watching the only home he’d ever known vanish before his eyes. Smoke rose from the city and seeped into the bayou, billowing into dark, sooty clouds. The full moon was bright and glowed an ominous red as it hovered above the flames.

  José was born into an unprecedented era of peace, but his death had heralded a new age of violence. The Mikaelsons just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Any truce that involved the three Original vampires wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, not in the long run. Sooner or later, one of them would get angry, jealous, or just bored.

  Nine times out of ten that “one” would be Niklaus, the most volatile of the three siblings. José had once believed he would be loyal to Klaus Mikaelson forever—that sharing a vampire’s blood created an eternal link of brotherhood. But Klaus had lied. To suit his own purposes, the middle Mikaelson sibling had turned on his enemies and his friends alike, and now José’s city was burning to the ground.

  He was supposed to have burned with it.

  José had been born with the skills of a thief, and this time he had stolen his life back. He’d spent his childhood moving unseen through the back alleys and crooked lanes of New Orleans, noticing what others ignored and taking what wasn’t his. It had served him well—as a human and as a vampire.

  After the fire had started to spread, panic followed. José had kept his head down, ignoring the chaos and thinking only of escape. The main door had been barred, but any good thief knew there was always more than one way out.

  He bet his life that he could reach the river before the fire overtook its banks, wooden warehouses catching in a torrent of flames. José waited until the freight doors that opened onto the docks weakened and caved in. He covered his mouth and nose so he wouldn’t breathe in the smoke, and stayed low to the ground. Soon he was cut off from everyone, the others enveloped in the blaze. Their screams pierced through the deafening roar of the fire.

  Once the warehouse collapsed under its own weight, José managed to slither out from under the fallen beams and throw himself into the river before his body fully caught flame. Burns would heal easy enough, but only if he could make it out alive.

  He wasn’t alone as he waded through the Mississippi River. Dozens of other citizens fled the city with only the clothes on their back, desperate to get to the other side of the bayou.

  The smell of smoke burned in José’s throat and he coughed up water as he dragged himself through the swamp and up the riverbank. Even from his spot on the bluffs, watching the fire reflect on the water below, José could feel the heat of the fire biting at his skin. The wind whipped sparks along the water, launching a thousand embers from one wooden roof to the next. The fire was traveling faster than any human could possibly stop it, and it was clear that by morning there would be nothing left of the city. It was the greatest fire New Orleans had ever seen—and would hopefully ever see again. They were safe until the next time Klaus got angry, at least.

  Klaus might have given him eternal life, but he had also tried to take it away again, and to José’s way of thinking—taking an eye for an eye—that made them even. José was immortal and powerful, yet also homeless and penniless, an outcast with no place or purpose in the world. José wished he could help stop the destruction and eventually assist in the rebuild, but he knew he could never return. New Orleans was too dangerous for him now—Klaus would always be on the lookout for a deserter.

  Still, he couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on New Orleans just yet. He knew that he was witnessing more than the death of a city—it was the beginning of a resurrection, and it was a sight to behold. Whatever Klaus had meant to accomplish, this deadly blaze wasn’t where the story ended. As soon as the embers cooled, 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 al
ready taken their turn, pledging their allegiance to Klaus’s army by drinking his blood. Klaus let them think the gesture was symbolic—what was the point in letting them all know they’d be vampires by the end of the night? That’d only result in an unnecessary struggle, and Klaus never did anything to make his life harder.

  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 new recruits in the large main hall, banging their tankards on the long wooden tables and shouting encouragement to the next victim. Klaus sat alone on a dais, where he had received each of his subjects 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. But she’d refused to go quietly—showing some real fire and a surprisingly creative vocabulary. Another was a bandit who’d been rounded up by the Spanish soldiers who patrolled the countryside—and who had handed him over to Klaus for a small fee. The youngest were a fresh crop of runaways who’d been discovered scavenging in one of Klaus’s warehouses near the harbor. He’d convinced the teenagers that they’d have a much better life working for him than begging for scraps.

  The last recruit to drink was the thief. José had been caught with one hand in the safe of the Southern Spot. The manager, a hothead whom Klaus suspected might be doing some skimming of his own, had wanted to 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 like an impossible gift to give, but not for an Original vampire.

  Drinking blood was a gruesome way to pledge allegiance, but the extreme nature of the hazing was a sure way to have volunteers begging to join Klaus’s cause. Everyone in the hall understood that being a part of Klaus’s army would require dangerous things. That was the appeal. And Klaus had no use for an army that wasn’t ready to die for him.

  It hadn’t always been like this—his mad thirst for ultimate control and power. Klaus’s past self would have traded the entire city for a life with Vivianne Lescheres, 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—his “co-rulers” for the past twenty-two years—would consider themselves lucky if he stopped there. Without love, power was the only prize left that was worth fighting for...and, as it happened, Elijah himself was distracted by love at that very moment, finally giving Klaus the chance to take what was rightfully his.

  If the gossip among the Southern Spot’s laundresses was to be believed, Elijah was entertaining a little side romance. At the moment, Klaus didn’t care who his brother spent his time with, as long as it kept Elijah out of his way. He was sure the tantalizing news would come in handy just when he needed it to, but for now, it was Klaus’s little secret. Since his older brother couldn’t fully dedicate himself to controlling their city, 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.

  Peacetime was boring, anyway. Klaus had spent the last twenty years building his family’s fortune to levels that rivaled a king’s. He had become the foremost merchant in the city, and there was no trade route out of New Orleans that his ships didn’t sail. He had risen as high as anyone could in a city at peace, and it still wasn’t enough. Conquest was what Klaus was good at, what he was destined for. Everything else was just a distraction, and Klaus was done with those.

  Fortunately, a new enemy had presented itself just when Klaus was ready to go looking for one. As if the werewolves’ role in Vivianne’s two deaths wasn’t enough of an insult, they’d grown particularly bold in recent weeks. There had been daytime raids on the Mikaelsons’ businesses, and frequent sneak attacks on their 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 directly at the vampires themselves.

  As part of a pact, Elijah had generously given the Collado wolves a foothold in the city, even after they had failed to stop an army of dead witches. And yet, instead of showing gratitude, the werewolves had spent the last two decades grasping for more and more. There was no reasoning with them, and the disastrous failure of Elijah’s peaceful diplomacy was more than enough proof of that. As long as the vampires were forced to share and negotiate, true power would never be theirs. The only solution was to wipe out their rivals, as Klaus had wanted to do from the night he had first arrived on these shores.

  Klaus stared down at the thief who knelt before him, ready to use compulsion if he tried to bolt. José had sharp, angular features, with a pointed nose, watchful blue eyes, and starkly black hair. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and to Klaus’s critical eye he didn’t look like much. He didn’t need to, though. 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. José lifted his shot glass and drained it in one swallow, the blood leaving an unsightly stain on his lips. He gagged a little as he tried to control his disgust at the taste of the thick, warm blood. Klaus could dimly remember feeling the same disdain, 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, awed by the thundering roar of approval that shook the hall. Klaus’s 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 José’s neck, feeling the vertebrae pop under his fingers.

  The room 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 leapt forward, moving faster than human eyes could follow, reached for the neck of the nearest human, snapped it, and then seized 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 took pleasure in killing the last man slowly, watching him struggle for air as the surrounding bodies thumped to the ground.

  The whole ordeal was over in seconds. Klaus 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 of his siblings who seemed to realize that the only 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 Mikael appeared, and that meant the entire city should be under their control.

  The last of the brisk winter air swept through the open courtyard and struck Klaus in the face. The night was promising; he could feel it. Klaus’s vampire blood was already getting to work, changing and reforming the men and women, dragging them 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 Klaus and Klaus alone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  REBEKAH INHALED THE smell of damp earth as her horse cantered through the Louisiana 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 upon a time, promised her siblings that they would remain together for eternity, but bac
k then she’d had no idea just how long eternity could last.

  “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 until she’d dealt with a killer in the midst of her family—Klaus. She’d fled from New Orleans with an image of horror seared into her mind, and she wouldn’t be free of it until Klaus paid for what he’d done.

  Pulling her blonde hair back from her face, Rebekah longed to feel as free as Luc, who let the wind whip through his thick golden waves. It was his easy attitude toward life that had inspired her to invite him along, with the hope that some of his humor might pierce the gloom that had shrouded her ever since she’d 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 look at him without either laughing or lusting...often both at once. She had definitely made the right choice of traveling companion. “The horses may be a bit slower than we are, but I don’t want to risk any attention.”

  Even though it was the middle of the night, one never knew who might be watching. Elijah had intended to keep Klaus out of trouble by placing him in charge of New Orleans’s booming trade business, but all that had accomplished was to give Klaus eyes and ears everywhere. He had become an absolute terror, full of increasingly nasty surprises. Marguerite’s death was just the most recent example, but Klaus had threatened and terrorized the poor girl for years. He’d never fully forgiven Marguerite for what her mother, the witch Lily, had done to his beloved Vivianne.

  Luc urged his horse on as they crested a low hill, and Rebekah kicked her own mare forward to keep pace. An emerald valley spread out below them, carpeted with lush grass and moonlight. A little village huddled at 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.”