The Originals: The Loss Page 2

  “I’m sorry for my brother’s rudeness,” she told the female vampire impulsively.

  The girl’s gray eyes widened in momentary surprise, as if it’d never occurred to her to be offended by Klaus’s abrupt moods. Rebekah felt foolish for having even mentioned it, but then the vampire smiled easily. Her teeth were white and even, like a good string of pearls. “No need,” she assured Rebekah, as casually as if they were equals. “He is who he is.”

  “Wise words,” Rebekah agreed, draining her champagne and then staring pointedly at Rodger. He hurried away to find a new bottle. “Klaus doesn’t have it in him to think of others.”

  The only thing to which Klaus had really applied himself over the past forty-odd years was driving Rebekah and Elijah crazy. He had won ownership of that tawdry brothel he so enjoyed in a card game and promptly lost it again. The Southern Spot had spent all of a week under the new sign reading the slap and the tickle before its old one had been restored. Still, Klaus spent inordinate amounts of time there, drinking and whoring as if he still were needed on hand to run the place. He had only stumbled out in the mornings to interrupt the French army’s battles and feed at his pleasure, forcing Rebekah to use her powers of compulsion again and again. He delighted in tormenting the French governors until they were driven out of town, almost ruining The Originals’ claim to their land when the French had signed the colony over to the Spanish after the war.

  The redheaded girl sat down without waiting for an invitation. Rebekah raised an eyebrow, but she was amused, and the bold young thing didn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated by her expression. “I wouldn’t expect him to think of anyone but himself,” the girl agreed easily. “I was just trying to help him out of his mood.”

  “And why would he be any less moody for you than for the rest of us? I don’t even know you,” Rebekah reminded her. She was sure she had seen the girl around before, but had probably been paying too much attention to Robert/Rodger to notice. In any case, attending a few parties hardly made her a part of the Mikaelsons’ inner circle.

  “Oh! I’m Lisette,” the vampire chirped, extending her hand as an afterthought. She offered no other explanation or defense for her presumption, and it seemed like she was totally unaware of it. The Original mystique seemed to slide right off of Lisette. After the fawning attention of Rebekah’s admirers, it was like the shock of diving into a cool pool of water.

  Rebekah hesitated for the briefest moment before shaking Lisette’s outstretched hand. Part of her wanted to shake some appropriate reverence into the girl...but the rest of her actually enjoyed the novelty. A fling would be great, but a friend...How long had it been since Rebekah had had a real friend? Her nature, her position, and her family made it virtually impossible to make girlfriends, much less keep them. Rebekah Mikaelson was dangerous, intimidating, immortal, and guarded. But Lisette didn’t seem to care.

  “So tell me about yourself, Lisette,” she commanded, then bit her tongue and softened her tone. “Please?”

  “Oh, me? There’s really nothing to tell.” Lisette giggled, but that didn’t prevent her from immediately producing a few chatty details about the other partygoers.

  She went on, and Rebekah basked in the normalcy of it. They might have been of an age: young women navigating society together. She listened raptly, asking questions whenever Lisette needed prompting, and Lisette obliged with an astonishing wealth of information about nearly all of the Mikaelsons’ guests. Most of Rebekah’s pets gave up and drifted away after a while, and even shy, smitten Efrain looked around as if he might prefer to be elsewhere.

  But Rebekah didn’t care. Admiration was easy enough to come by these days, but Lisette was a rarer kind of pleasure. They were still talking when a commotion broke out near the sweeping main staircase, and Rebekah reluctantly decided she needed to investigate. She had put far too much work into making this house comfortable to let it go to ruin, no matter how much fun everyone was having.

  When she reached the front hall, though, she realized that the newest vampires weren’t the problem. Klaus had returned from his sulk, and seemed determined to spread his misery around. A few nervous-looking vampires, in various states of undress, huddled together on the staircase, cowering as Klaus pushed past them. “If I find you’ve touched anything in those rooms I will slice you open from throat to ankles looking for it,” he threatened the nearest one, who could only tremble in reply.

  Had something gone missing? Something of Klaus’s? Whatever it was, it must be important enough that he would search for it in the middle of a party. She could not imagine what would provoke him to act so bizarrely, except that maybe he’d simply gone too long without making a scene, and couldn’t help himself.

  “My dear sister!” he greeted her, his voice a mockery of brotherly warmth. Then a thought seemed to occur to him. “You probably have it,” he told her cryptically, and climbed back up the staircase.

  “I— Do you think you’re going to my room?” Rebekah shrieked, running after him. “Niklaus, what the hell has gotten into you tonight?” Skipping the party to brood in his attic sounded like a brilliant plan in comparison to this.

  He didn’t answer her. Instead, he threw open the door to her room and began tearing through her things. Her things; he couldn’t even leave this one, tiny corner of the house alone.

  She grabbed his arm, but he shook her hand off and upended a jewelry box onto her vanity. Pearls and topazes spilled everywhere, and soft gold gleamed against the painted wood. “It’s nothing,” he muttered, not even bothering to lie convincingly. “There’s just a trinket I’ve lost, and it might have wound up here.”

  He opened another box, rifling through it carelessly, dropping a ruby earring onto the carpet without even noticing. A silver chain snapped under his careless fingers, one that Eric Moquet had given Rebekah when they had both believed they could have a life together. “Get out!” Rebekah cried, shoving Klaus with all of her strength. His body flew backward, crashing into the door with a satisfying splintering. “Whatever it is, you won’t find it here.”

  Klaus jumped back to his feet and moved on to the next room. Within seconds, Rebekah heard another crash from down the hall. If she didn’t go after her brother, she realized, the damage would escalate quickly. He hadn’t even bothered to throw out the occupants of the room this time. Rebekah found him throwing clothing out of a closet while two vampires watched him from the bed, an embroidered coverlet pulled up to their chins as if the thin silk would protect them from a lunatic vampire. “Stop this madness,” she ordered.

  He waved her away dismissively and walked out to the top of the stairs, shouting that it was time for all of their guests to leave. Why was it up to Klaus to decide that the party was over? He had a special talent for ruining beautiful things.

  Rebekah reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to see him disappearing into Elijah’s study. She felt sure Elijah would thank her for keeping him out, and so she gritted her teeth and pushed through the crowd.

  Klaus had already forced open a drawer of Elijah’s desk, and Rebekah gasped. Elijah hadn’t appeared yet, but the moment her brother saw what Klaus was doing, the house would not be big enough to hold the three of them.

  “Don’t touch that,” she shouted, throwing her weight against the drawer to slam it closed. Klaus shoved her aside and broke open the lock on another drawer. Rebekah pushed him back, and he tripped over one of the large candelabras that Elijah had along the walls. It swayed dangerously toward the window beside it, and Rebekah had just enough time to see a curl of smoke rise up from the fabric before Klaus sprang toward her.

  The force of his attack knocked them both back out into the front hall, snarling and biting. Vampires scattered, and somewhere nearby Rebekah heard the sound of breaking glass. Tangy smoke drifted out of the open door of the study, and she guessed that the curtains had caught fire. Klaus destroyed ever
ything.

  She couldn’t live like this anymore, not with Klaus the terror. He didn’t appreciate anything she or Elijah did for him. He was so self-centered that he couldn’t imagine that his siblings might prefer to not spend their lives either cleaning up his current disaster or trying to predict his next one.

  As she gasped for breath in Klaus’s armlock, Rebekah made up her mind: She’d find a way to destroy whatever was left of Klaus’s happiness just the way he always managed to ruin hers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ELIJAH RAN AN idle finger up and down Ava’s bare arm, feeling perfectly at peace. Such tranquility had not been easy, and the cost had been high, but he had persevered. He’d kept his siblings together and overcome every obstacle this city had thrown their way, and now it was time to reap the rewards.

  The French had lost their grip on the region, and now Spain had seized power and established its own rule over New Orleans. But it quickly became clear that actually running the city was of no interest to King Carlos III, and the Spanish governor he’d sent over didn’t find the task especially appealing, either. The French colonists were disgusted by the regime change, and Elijah had always viewed human unrest as an opportunity.

  As a result of his savvy and foresight, everything of consequence in New Orleans now had to go through him. Trade, construction, legal matters...Elijah Mikaelson was the city’s beating heart. And once he realized that the witches could no longer enforce their ban on siring new vampires, Elijah had taken particular delight in creating a new community. His family was the central core of his world, but there were benefits to building a society as well. He had everything he had wanted, and now he had Ava, who seemed determined to come up with all sorts of new things for him to desire.

  She stretched across the four-poster bed, and dappled light from the fireplace painted curious patterns on her skin. Just as he reached for her again, he heard a crash and a scream coming from downstairs. He waited for a moment, hoping that it would fade back into the predictable sounds of a party, but the commotion only seemed to grow louder.

  “It can’t be such a disaster that you have to leave? I can barely hear a thing,” Ava protested as he rose from the bed, and the glint in her catlike eyes was almost enough to make him ignore the trouble.

  “As much as I would like to keep taking in the sight of you, it seems as if my attention is required elsewhere,” Elijah said with one last quick kiss as he slid back into his discarded clothing. He had not risen to power by ignoring warning signs.

  In the hallway, he could pick out both of his siblings’ voices in the din. There was also a distinct crackling sound beneath everything else, and Elijah could smell smoke. Elijah resigned himself to dealing with whatever was happening below and abandoning Ava for the night.

  His willingness to get involved in this kind of mess was precisely why he was in charge and the Spanish weren’t, but sometimes it infuriated him to have to be the responsible one. He stormed down the curved staircase, the stench of smoke burning in his nostrils. It was coming from his study.

  Elijah froze for an instant in the doorway, taking in the disaster. He had often used his study as a refuge away from his siblings’ endless conflicts, but more than that he had made it into a tremendous resource in times of trouble. The Originals didn’t possess magic the way their mother had, but they were magic. Their entire existence was framed by it, and their lives were dependent on it. Elijah had curated an impressive library of books and manuscripts on the subject, in addition to all of the ordinary paperwork his prominence in New Orleans required. Watching it all burn was an unexpected blow to his stomach, and Elijah doubled over to take in a deep breath of smoky air, his nails digging into his fists.

  In addition to the curtains, two wooden bookcases on either side had gone up in flames, and many of the items looked unsalvageable. But the charred walls and books were not the only damage. His desk—a heavy piece of chestnut—stood askew, and some of the drawers that he knew had been locked were ajar. The fire had not simply been an unlucky accident; someone had been in this room, going through his things.

  And Elijah could guess who that someone was. Rebekah may have provoked him—she couldn’t always help herself—but the destruction in his study was Klaus’s work. There was no one else in the world with such a talent for inconvenient chaos.

  Even with Elijah’s unnatural speed and strength, it took him a few minutes to put out the fire. In the main room, Rebekah and Klaus were locked in a pointlessly vicious struggle. Neither of them had a silver dagger or, thankfully, a white oak stake, the only two weapons that could take down an Original vampire. All they could accomplish was annoying each other and making fools of themselves. Their wounds would heal, but the embarrassment would linger.

  Elijah grabbed Klaus by the collar and threw him backward, then stepped forward to rest his foot against Rebekah’s chest. He heard Klaus struggling to stand, and held out a warning hand. “Enough,” he said, his voice low. “The two of you were content to let the house burn around you. Over what?”

  They both began to argue at once, and he held his hand up again to silence them. Then, reluctantly, he pointed to Klaus. He would rather hear Rebekah’s version of events first, as it was almost certainly the more accurate one. But Klaus would never sit by and let her tell it. Giving him this small concession would help reestablish peace.

  “Our sister is out of control,” Klaus spat contemptuously as he stood up and flicked the dust from his coat. “I asked for her help in finding a simple trinket, and she followed me around the house, attacking me like some kind of madwoman.”

  To Elijah’s shock, Klaus stormed from the room without waiting to hear another word, scattering the remaining guests as he went.

  “He’s lost his mind,” Rebekah argued, shoving Elijah’s unresisting foot away and sitting up. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but this thing he wants is no mere trinket. He wants it too badly.”

  There was no doubting that she was right. Elijah couldn’t imagine what Klaus was looking for, or why it had suddenly gripped his brother that he must have it right now, in the middle of the night. Klaus should have been enjoying the party, not tearing the house apart. Something had set him off, and Elijah reluctantly guessed that he would need to get to the bottom of this.

  Together, they followed the telltale sounds of Klaus’s renewed search to Elijah’s bedroom. A quick glance told Elijah that Ava had left. He felt a quick pang of frustration—Klaus’s selfishness never stopped intruding on everyone else’s lives.

  “You’re not welcome in this room, brother,” Elijah warned him, his voice cold and menacing. “Whatever this trinket is to you, you are still a member of this family, and this sort of behavior is unacceptable.”

  He thought he heard Klaus chuckle under his breath as he opened Elijah’s wardrobe and began hunting. Elijah understood why Rebekah had lost her patience and attacked him—there seemed to be no other way to get through to him in this state.

  “If we knew what he wanted...” Rebekah whispered, her blue eyes flicking sideways to meet his own. She was right. If they could find it first, they would have some leverage to make Klaus...what, though? Apologize? Explain? Think? None of that was likely.

  But where to even start? The house was full of powerful objects that they’d collected over the centuries, and Klaus could be after any of them. Their mother had been one of the most powerful witches in history, and they were the oldest and strongest vampires in existence. Useful, pretty, and priceless “trinkets” were so common in their house that they never would have missed one if they had not caught Klaus searching for it.

  “Tell us what you want, brother,” Elijah ordered.

  To his surprise, Klaus emerged from the wardrobe, looking almost reasonable. “I want to be left alone, brother,” he retorted sarcastically. His voice was light, but his blue-green eyes blazed with a pa
ssion that Elijah thought bordered on madness. Perhaps Rebekah was right: Maybe their brother really was losing his wits. He had not been the same since that terrible night Vivianne Lescheres had died, but it wasn’t as if they all hadn’t experienced a loss during their long lives.

  “You don’t have the right to be left alone,” Elijah said. “I have put everything into building this haven for you—for both of you.” He saw Rebekah flinch, but he didn’t care. “I have spent decades building a kingdom for us, and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy. Instead, you spend your time on this nonsense. You let our house burn while you think only of what you want. The same will happen with this entire city if you aren’t careful.”

  Klaus simply walked away. He didn’t respond or complain or argue, just sauntered past them as if he had not heard a single word.

  Something had shifted within his brother. They heard a door slam downstairs, then Elijah felt the hair stand up on his arms. He could hear the sound of Klaus whistling. Cheerfully.

  “Good riddance,” Rebekah muttered, once the sound had faded into silence. But Elijah knew that this wasn’t the last they’d hear of this. Klaus was up to no good, and whatever his plan, he was just getting started.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KLAUS TANGLED HIS fingers through the pendant’s chain. Set in silver, the large opal had belonged to his mother and held a powerful enchantment in its fire-streaked depths. He suspected that Lily knew some secret about the stone that she had kept from him, but Klaus was just thankful that someone had finally taken him up on his offer.

  Long accustomed to making his own luck, Klaus had spied on every witch in New Orleans. He had sought out the renegades and rule breakers, offering ever more elaborate bribes and threats in his desperation to get Vivianne back, as his mother’s curse forbade him from doing magic himself.