The Originals: The Resurrection Page 2

  “I think I see one,” Luc agreed, swinging down from his saddle. She did the same, falling in beside him. He wrapped a casual arm around her waist, running a finger along the boning of her corset. She relaxed into his hand with a sigh.

  “Should I be expecting your brothers to drop in on us at any point, or will we be alone?” he asked, teasingly pulling at a silk bow on her hip.

  Luc Benoit had been born east of the river in the newly minted United States, and it showed in everything he did. He had all the restless curiosity of an explorer, and the spontaneous 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 world 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 who Klaus was rounding up to form his ludicrous “army.” In fact, Klaus had already recruited Luc 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 attempts at self-destruction. Her troubled brother always managed to destroy everyone around him, emerging unscathed again and again, and Luc was far too handsome to end up dead. At the time, Rebekah had thought she deserved a dashingly sexy 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 just for the two of us. I haven’t been to this area in ages, and I need your help finding one particular thing.” 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 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 Lescheres. 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 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 connection in a single, violent moment. Even after Klaus had slaughtered two of the footmen for some imagined insult, Rebekah never believed he would take away someone she truly loved—not until she had seen the proof with her own eyes.

  It was too cruel, too unfeeling, even for Klaus. But after Vivianne died, Klaus abandoned any of the decency left inside of him. His heart was shut off from anyone but himself. And so as Rebekah held Marguerite’s cold body against her own, she had vowed that she would put an end to Klaus’s misery once and for all.

  “Your brothers don’t know you’ve left,” Luc guessed, watching her intently. His full lips pressed together thoughtfully. “Don’t worry, Rebekah, I’m a man of my word. I can keep your 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, and Luc’s purpose on this journey wasn’t to be her interrogator. He glared at her with mock ferocity before kissing her back.

  “My family was whole once, before they came to Virginia,” Rebekah mused, 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 us to a place where we’d be safe. I was born in the New World, not far from here. My parents thought they had saved us.”

  Luc glanced at her. “There are plenty of other dangers here,” he pointed out.

  “Exactly.” One of the horses whickered softly behind them, and Rebekah scanned the dark trees that surrounded them. “Our small village neighbored a werewolf clan, and I lost another brother to their violence. 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 logic that had motivated her mother to change her children into vampires. 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 why you use that word for a never-ending life.”

  “It’s a curse.” Her voice was forceful, but she knew Luc was too newly made to understand. 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. The cruelty he had once reserved for his enemies had been directed squarely at her, the sister who had promised to stand by him forever.

  “I was there when the spell was cast. My mother made us as strong as she knew how to, 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 that it was within their power to bar us from their homes. We couldn’t enter without their invitation, and no one was willing to offer it.”

  “People fear what they don’t know.” Luc shrugged, as if the total isolation faced by the Mikaelsons 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 any price, until she saw the life she had condemned us to. 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 spreading rumors about their mortal flaw, but all strengths 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. The siblings had burned the tree to the ground, but Rebekah had heard whispers that it stood again in Mystic Falls, every bit as immortal as the Mikaelsons were. She had chosen Luc to escort her there, to learn if those rumors were true, but even now she was reluctant to explain the Mikaelsons’ greatest weakness to him.

  “Every curse is complicated, as is my family,” 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 have seemed impossibly foreign to him.

  Between thoughts of her past and thoughts of Luc, Rebekah was so distracted that she was startled to realize they had reached the outskirts of the village.
A small inn lay at the end of a dirt road. When they knocked on the thick wooden door, a bleary-eyed woman peered out of a small window, suspicious of the couple arriving on her doorstep before the sky was even light.

  “Our horses need tending,” Rebekah announced. The door didn’t budge. “I can pay in silver,” Rebekah went on. She jingled a pouch of coins in her palm, letting the weight of the silver be heard.

  The door creaked open, “Why didn’t you say so?” the woman replied. “Come in, please, madame. And monsieur.”

  Luc followed a groom to the stables, and Rebekah noticed that he trailed the man at a bit of a distance, keeping out of his line of sight. “We’ll need a room just for the day,” she said to the woman, curious what Luc was up to. With a last glance back at him, Rebekah stepped inside the inn.

  The innkeeper fished around for a room key, still eyeing Rebekah doubtfully. “These parts aren’t always safe at night,” she ventured. “It’s lucky you and your husband made it here unharmed. 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 looked up at him, trying to read his bland, polite smile. His thick 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 fluttering heart. 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.

  “I thought you could use a bit of a diversion,” Luc suggested when the woman fell to the floor. “Perhaps an inn full of distractions will take your mind from the troubles that have driven you from New Orleans.”

  There was a noise on the staircase: a patron with the bad judgment to be an early riser. Rebekah smiled and positioned herself out of sight, lying in wait as the man descended the stairs. She could have rushed at him, but Luc was right: After the night she’d had, a little fun was in order. Playing with her food was always enjoyable, and Rebekah found herself growing excited at the thought of picking off the guests one by one.

  By noon the body count included all the visitors of the inn, as well as the keeper’s husband, a milkman, and an exceptionally pretty young chambermaid. Rebekah felt nearly drunk on all the blood she had consumed, and its heat radiated out from her skin.

  She slipped out of her dusty traveling gown and then the shift she wore beneath it, letting her golden hair down for good measure. She could feel every tiny movement in the currents of the air, she could hear earthworms pushing through the dirt two floors beneath her bare feet. She felt almost human again...only better.

  The bedroom where they had ended their merry hunt was by far the best of the lot, although the windows were carefully shuttered against the view. But even in the semidarkness, Rebekah could feel the heat of the sun overhead as if its light were streaming out through her own skin. She raised her arms and Luc stepped into them, his lips crushing down on hers with even more passion than usual.

  Rebekah helped him out of his clothes, not caring that his tunic landed on an ice-cold, bloodless corpse. They barely made it to the four-poster bed before their bodies came together, moving as one to the beat of their racing pulses. Luc invented a hundred new ways to worship her, reminding her over and over again of the urgency of his desire for her. Rebekah spent hours learning the sensual curve of his lips, the touch of his calloused hands, the feel of the sharp ridges of his hip bones against her own.

  She had chosen well indeed. He was exactly the man to fill the idle hours between here and Mystic Falls.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ELIJAH WAS NOT a man who hid in darkness. By his very nature he struck fear into others. He didn’t need to think about commonplace dangers, especially not in the city he had called his own for so long. New Orleans had been his home for the better part of a century, and yet tonight he found himself hiding in the shadows of a narrow alleyway like a criminal.

  Elijah had suspected for some time that Klaus was up to no good. It had started with his brother moving out of the family mansion—proof enough that he was hatching some troublesome plot. And then the new vampires had appeared in the streets. Overnight, there were more of them than they’d made in the last twenty years, and there was only one plausible explanation: Klaus was raising an army, and havoc was sure to follow.

  On the street corner, a vampire accosted a prostitute, and Elijah forced himself to do nothing. It would likely be her last night alive, but Elijah couldn’t afford to be caught—or have his whereabouts reported to Klaus. By the next night the girl would either be dead or a vampire herself. Elijah waited until the pair was engaged to the point of distraction, then moved on.

  It was the second time tonight that Elijah had been forced to sneak through the shadows. Earlier, he’d been forced to slip out of the mansion without getting caught by Lisette. His former lover seemed to be everywhere, waiting around every corner and behind every door like a lovely, flame-haired punishment. She had every right to her anger, but Elijah wasn’t prepared to bear the brunt of it every time he stepped out of his bedroom or study, and so he avoided her.

  Elijah had adored Lisette, and his time with her had restored more of his faith in the world than he’d realized he’d lost. But the Mikaelsons had enemies everywhere, including some exceptionally dangerous ones within their own family. Ultimately, their romance had simply been too public.

  No matter how brash or capable she was, Lisette could never be more than a second-generation vampire. She was a hair slower and a shade weaker than Klaus and Rebekah, and worst of all she could be killed by a simple wooden stake through the heart.

  His love for her made Elijah vulnerable. Any danger to Lisette was a threat to him, and her own bravery, which bordered on recklessness, didn’t help matters. She refused to be careful, and she accused him of wanting to keep her locked up and away from the world.

  She wasn’t wrong, but Elijah felt like his hands were tied. And when Klaus had threatened to decapitate her—for the hundredth time—over some minor dispute about using a werewolf-owned vendor at his precious whorehouse, Elijah had finally understood that he had no choice. Klaus had grown increasingly volatile, and more than one head had already rolled before his wrath. The next could be hers.

  And yet Elijah knew Lisette would never forgive him for his weakness in ending their relationship, no matter how pure his intentions had been. It was easier to avoid her than to face the constant, silent accusation on her face, the reminder that he had given her up in order not to lose her.

  Elijah had spotted her just outside the front door of the mansion that very night. At least she only put herself in his way—she had far too much pride to follow him. Elijah wondered what she would do if she happened to stumble across one of his meetings with Alejandra. Would knowledge of his new lover free Lisette from her
need to haunt him? Or would it make her want to burn down his house—perhaps with him still inside it?

  A pair of vampires burst out of a tavern in front of him. Elijah darted sideways into the slim cover of a doorway. That wouldn’t have been enough to keep a more experienced hunter’s eyes off him, but these two were newly made, and drunk on both blood and ale. Elijah held every muscle in his body perfectly still until they had passed, their raucous singing echoing off the cobblestoned street.

  When the way was clear, Elijah moved on, all his senses alert, anticipating his first glimpse of the woman he would soon hold in his arms.

  He had first met Alejandra Vargas at the Southern Spot, of all places, when he had gone to warn his brother that his raids on werewolf holdings weren’t as discreet as Klaus believed them to be. The wolves were starting to retaliate, disrupting the imports and exports that Elijah had delegated to Klaus, and at this rate it wouldn’t be long before war broke out once again. Elijah had been prepared to bully Klaus back into line, but the sight of the brothel’s new fortune-teller had knocked the fight right out of his body.

  He could tell at a glance that Alejandra wasn’t one of the establishment’s usual women. She was tall—nearly as tall as he was—with curling black hair and startling green eyes that seemed to pin him to the door the moment he walked through it. The purring accent Elijah heard when she spoke was full of intelligence, mystery, and humor, and he was enchanted at once.

  “Please sit,” she had told him, an order masquerading as a request.

  Elijah had suspected that Klaus was in one of the back rooms with two or three of his more buxom employees. Ever since he’d won the brothel back for the fourth time, Klaus had seemed dedicated to enjoying his ownership to the fullest, and Elijah had decided that his business with his brother could wait. He had sat in the chair Alejandra indicated, and she settled herself across from him. Women moved in and out of the main room, mingling with customers and occasionally peeling off to more private areas, but Elijah only had eyes for the fortune-teller.