The Originals: The Loss

  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.

  After a hurricane destroyed their city, Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah Mikaelson have rebuilt New Orleans to even greater glory. The year is 1766. The witches live on the fringes in the bayou. The werewolves have fled. But still, Klaus isn’t satisfied. He wants more. He wants power. But when Klaus finally finds a witch who will perform a spell to give him what he desires most, she secretly uses Klaus to unleash a curse—one that brings back hundreds of her ancestors—and begins a war to reclaim New Orleans. As the siblings fight off the attack, only one thing’s for certain—the result will be a bloodbath.

  Dear Reader:

  So glad you’ve returned for the next installment of Mikaelson drama. While you can tune into the CW to see the present-day Klaus, Elijah, and Rebekah, our beloved Original Vampire family, their past has about 1,000 years worth of stories to share. You can unearth these tales, courtesy of HQN Books, in association with Alloy Entertainment, in their new trilogy of books that features part of the vast history of The Originals.

  In the first book, you watched as each of the Mikaelson trio struggled with their vampire natures and their complicated heightened emotions in order to seek out love. In this book, you’ll find the Mikaelsons forty years after they landed in New Orleans. They’ve banished the witches and werewolves, and made the city their perfect home—yet of course, Klaus still isn’t satisfied. He’s lost the love of his life and he wants her back at any cost. But when a resurrection spell brings more chaos and horror than the siblings ever imagined, Rebekah and Elijah are forced to fight a never-before-seen evil.

  In The Originals: The Rise, The Loss, and The Resurrection, you’ll get to see sides of the Mikaelson vampires you never knew existed. Turn the page for a book that has all the romance, murder, and mayhem of the TV show, and a story that will keep you thirsting for more.

  With best wishes,

  Julie Plec

  Creator and Executive Producer of The Originals

  CREATED BY JULIE PLEC

  based on

  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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  EXCERPT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  1766

  LILY LEROUX HAD promised herself that she wouldn’t cry. Her mother would never have forgiven her for crying. Lily’s job was to look strong and poised in her fitted black dress, to accept the community’s condolences without seeming to need them. She was in charge of New Orleans’s witches now, or whatever was left of them. She had to lead them, not lean on them.

  They could certainly use some guidance. Lily’s mother had done her best to hold the witches together after their hurricane had razed the city to its foundations more than forty years ago, but the loss had been catastrophic. And the guilt of having caused so much destruction...the guilt was even more devastating.

  In the meantime, other players had stepped into the void of power left behind by the witches. The French had recently handed New Orleans over to the Spanish, who had chosen to wholly ignore their new territory. Instead, it was the vampires who had taken the reins.

  The Mikaelsons—the Originals, three of the very first vampires in existence—had made their move at an ideal time. Elijah, Rebekah, and, worst of all, Klaus now ruled the city. The witches hated them with a passion, although Lily suspected that her mother nursed an odd soft spot for them. She always shut down any talk of retaliation by reminding them that the witches’ own hands were responsible for their current misery. If they hadn’t tried to seek reckless revenge against the werewolves for betraying their truce, they wouldn’t be sequestered in the backwaters of the bayou.

  But Ysabelle Dalliencourt’s blind love for the vampires meant that her funeral was a sorry shadow of what Lily thought her mother deserved. Ysabelle had led her people out of the ruined city and kept their community together; she had counseled them against a destructive path of war and taught them to focus on themselves and their craft rather than on the walking abominations that sat on their former throne.

  Everyone stood, and Lily rose numbly with them. Six witches lifted her mother’s wooden casket on their shoulders, and she heard Marguerite sob as they carried it past. Lily rested a comforting hand on her daughter’s thin shoulder, and fought the burning behind her eyes.

  Her mother should have been enshrined in the heart of New Orleans, not in the little shack the witches had built in the midst of a swamp. The Original vampires were responsible for this slight, Lily knew. They could have forgiven the witches’ weakness, as the witches had once looked past the brutality of the vampires. Instead, the Mikaelsons had tasted freedom and ran with it, creating an army of new vampires from the humans of New Orleans and driving the witches out.

  But Lily would not let a single tear escape. If she cried, it meant that the vampires had won—broken her strong spirit. Instead, Lily forced herself to see Ysabelle’s passing as a sign. It was time for a new era, a changing of the guard. Lily was sick to death of subsisting under the vampires’ tyranny. The Mikaelsons needed to answer for their sins, and Lily Leroux intended to make sure they paid in full.

  CHAPTER ONE

  IT WAS KLAUS’S kind of night. Wine and blood flowed freely, and the relaxed company and summer heat had led to an easy loosening of everyone’s clothing. He could only guess what was going on upstairs, but he would leave it to his imagination for now.

  There would be time enough to take it all in. That was one of the nice things about being both a king and an immortal: He could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Elijah took care of the running of the city, Rebekah took care of the running of the Mikaelsons, and Klaus was free to take care of Klaus.

  Carousing vampires filled every room on the ground floor, and Klaus could hear the party continuing through the ceiling above. In the forty-odd years since they had taken possession of a dying gunrunner’s modest home, the Original vampires had done a great deal of adding on and improving, but even so it was filled to capacity. To effectively rule over a city full of eager young vampires, the Mikaelsons might need to move to a larger home, but finding more land wouldn’t be the problem it once had been for them. New property was easy to come by in a metropolis empty of werewolves and witches.

  Most of the werewolves who managed to survive the hurricane and explosion of 17
22 had drifted away, and the ones who remained kept their noses down. The witches had fared a bit better, but not much: They squatted out in the bayou, their taste for power broken. New Orleans was essentially free of vermin.

  Decades after Vivianne’s death, it still made Klaus’s gut twist to think of what the witches and werewolves had done to her. The way the witches had offered her hand in marriage to the werewolves, as if her only value lay in her heritage as the child of both clans. After signing her life away in a peace treaty, the werewolves had demanded more of her mind and heart at every turn. She had died too young, still trying to make everything right between the factions.

  He pushed those thoughts away and finished his whiskey. He had been drinking liberally, trying his best to truly join in the revelry around him. Yet forty-four years later and he still expected Vivianne to walk through the door and make him whole again.

  “You’re so quiet tonight, Niklaus. Should I get you another drink?” A buxom young vampire fell into Klaus’s lap with a giggle and interrupted the dark turn of his thoughts. Her long, strawberry-blonde hair smelled like orange blossoms. Lisette, he reminded himself. She was part of the newest crop of recruits to their little army, but she carried herself with the ease of a vampire who had lived for centuries. She did not seem intimidated by the Originals, nor did she strain herself to impress them, and Klaus found that indifference mildly offensive.

  He blew strands of her long hair away from his face. “Would you like to still recognize yourself by the end of the night?” he asked her, an edge of danger in his voice.

  “You underestimate me. I am deep and mysterious,” Lisette told him, with a mock seriousness in her wide-set gray eyes. “Come upstairs with me, and I’ll prove it to you.”

  Klaus brushed her reddish hair aside and kissed her neck lingeringly. She sighed and turned a little, giving his mouth better access. “Not tonight, love,” he murmured, traveling down to her collarbone. However grating Lisette’s disingenuousness might be, he had to admit that she had a beautiful neck.

  Across the room, another pair of vampires moved together in a similar way. Watching them, Klaus continued to brush Lisette’s lightly freckled skin with his lips, but it only made him feel hollow. He could go through the motions, but he couldn’t be consumed by them. No matter how far he wandered down the path of debauchery, he couldn’t quite get lost.

  He wanted Vivianne back. That was the simple, scalding truth of the matter. He had tried to bury her and tried to mourn and tried to move on, because he knew that was how death was supposed to work. He had seen it countless times, even though no one would ever be forced to mourn the loss of him. His mother had been a witch, his true father had been a werewolf, and to save him from death, his mother had made him a vampire. Klaus would never die.

  It was useless to compare himself to other people. Niklaus Mikaelson was never going to accept the workings of normal, mortal death. It was stupid and beneath him. If he wanted Vivianne Lescheres at his side, ruling New Orleans as his queen for eternity, why should that be an impossible demand?

  Lisette shifted again, rather enjoyably, trying to bring his full attention back to her. It was no use, though. “Ma petite Lisette, you do not want to tangle with me tonight,” he said, sliding her back onto her feet.

  “As you wish,” she said before sauntering off, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Klaus was watching her go. He was, of course—it was a simple courtesy after rejecting her advances. And the back of her was just as easy on the eyes as the front.

  He eased himself up out of his chair and slipped off in the opposite direction. A few voices called after him as he moved through the dimly lit rooms, which were full of sharp teeth, ringing laughter, and sensuous limbs. He ignored them, having finally realized where he wanted to spend this night.

  He climbed the ornate spiral staircase, lined with a red silk carpet that Rebekah had ordered from the Far East. As he passed by several bedrooms, he heard his name called again, but this time in softer, throatier voices. He resisted the impulse to look through the doors that had been carelessly—or deliberately—left open, making instead for a small staircase at the back of the house.

  Klaus had asked his siblings to keep it private, and so Rebekah had picked a medieval tapestry to conceal the doorframe: a unicorn, with its gold-threaded mane laid gently in the lap of a lovely maiden. Rebekah had the strangest notions sometimes. He glanced behind him and then swept the curtain aside, retreating from his guests and their revelry to the safety of his attic sanctuary.

  This was the one place his sister’s restless hands had not touched. The attic was much larger than when they’d inherited the house, but it’d retained its original rustic look. Unpolished beams crisscrossed the high, gabled roof, and the rough floorboards creaked charmingly beneath his feet. There were a few windows set into the peaks of the gables, and during the day sunlight streamed in from all directions.

  Klaus moved his easel with the sun, watching his paintings change over the course of each day. He’d sometimes climb up here at night and light a few candles, stepping back from the easel to take in the effect of all of his canvases at once. He had been working feverishly and couldn’t remember ever being so productive.

  It was a waste, though, because every last painting was of her. Vivianne’s left eye, black in a pale sea of skin. The outline of Vivianne running through a cobblestoned street in the middle of the night. Vivianne in his bed the first night, the last night, every night.

  It wasn’t work; it was torture. He could never paint anything else. Even when he started a different subject, it never failed to transform into another aspect of Vivianne.

  His current painting was of her hair: black and sleek as a raven’s wings, but with a life and movement that Klaus struggled to capture. In the light of his candle, it looked flat and wrong, an entire story he was somehow failing to tell. He picked up a brush and began to work, adding texture and light in some places, while leaving others as dark as gravity.

  The wailing sound of the house’s protection spell went off again, as it had been all night long. Everyone else was too busy with their party to pay attention to it, but Klaus stopped, brush halfway to canvas, at the sight of a witch at the east window. She sat on the outer lintel, poised as if she were resting on a park bench.

  Klaus knew her at once. No matter what Ysabelle Dalliencourt’s old spell assumed, this was not exactly an unexpected intruder on their land. He could see traces of her mother’s face in Lily’s, in the strong, straight nose and the long planes of her cheeks. Her hair was darker, more of a russet than auburn, but her eyes were the same fathomless brown.

  He crossed the room quickly, wishing that he could cover all of his canvases as he went. Vivianne and Lily might have been cousins, but Lily had no right to see her image the way Klaus portrayed it. No matter her relation, Lily was one of them, a descendant of the cowards and weaklings who had let Viv slip away.

  He opened the window and invited her inside nonetheless. Lily was also the first witch in over forty years to respond to Klaus’s overtures, and he couldn’t afford to slight her.

  To raise the dead was difficult, but it was more than just that. It required dark and frightening magic that few would dare to even attempt. For decades Klaus had let it be known—quietly, without involving his siblings in something that was really none of their concern—that the price of readmission to New Orleans was Vivianne. The witches badly wanted their home back, but none had broken rank to try their hand. Ysabelle had much to do with that, he knew, but now she was dead, and her daughter had come to bargain.

  “I can grant you what you desire,” Lily Leroux told him with no preamble. “But it will cost you. One item for the spell, and another for my daughter.”

  “As I have said—” Klaus began, but she waved the words off impatiently.

  “I know what you are willing to offer,” she re
minded him. “Now listen to what I want.”

  Klaus was never eager to be on the wrong side of a bargain, but if it meant that Vivianne would be returned to him, he would listen to anything the witch had to say.

  CHAPTER TWO

  REBEKAH HAD TO admit that Klaus knew how to throw a party. She and her two siblings had lived in relative solitude for so long that now it was as if she could never get enough of new company, and Klaus always seemed ready to provide her with plenty of friends. Lithe young vampires filled the mansion, dancing, singing, drinking, and casting alluring glances at one another...and at her. Always at her. She was more than a celebrity among them; she was practically a goddess.

  After a few glasses of champagne, Rebekah found that being worshipped suited her just fine. There were a few—well, more than a few—young male vampires who made a sport of competing for her attention, and she encouraged them shamelessly. There was a Robert and a Rodger she constantly mixed up, and Efrain, who had extraordinary blue eyes but got tongue-tied at the mere sight of her. Tonight was about celebrating, and tomorrow night would probably be the same.

  Robert (she was almost sure) refilled her glass before it was empty, and she smiled languidly at him. They were like sweet, admiring puppies, sitting at her feet and lapping up every scrap of her attention. It was impossible to take any of them seriously, but perhaps something not-so-serious was exactly what she needed.

  She had been in love, and she knew how that ended. But she would live for a very long time, and it was not realistic to spend the rest of eternity running away from every sort of connection. A good fling was a fun distraction...and then perhaps another one after that.

  A cheerful-looking vampire with reddish-gold hair strolled into the parlor where Rebekah held court, and she noticed Klaus leaving the drawing room in the opposite direction. Sulking again, she guessed. He was as magnetic as ever, drawing in humans and vampires alike. They flocked to the house at his suggestion, and then he hid from them like a hermit. He was going up to that drafty attic again, she just knew it.