The Originals: The Loss Read online

  Eventually, his schemes had grown less frequent and more desperate, brief flares of defiance against impossible odds. Vivianne was waiting for him on the Other Side, and he was failing her. In spite of all of his power, he couldn’t secure the cooperation of a single witch...until now. And so whatever Lily wanted, however outrageous her demands, to Klaus they were more than fair.

  He knew that his siblings would not feel the same way. Elijah, in particular, would never have agreed to this sort of bargain. Rebekah had a soft spot for true love and might yield eventually, but she wouldn’t have kept Klaus’s secret from Elijah. They would have smashed the stone before they would let him give it to a witch.

  The moment he had found the opal in the back of Elijah’s wardrobe, he had resolved to say nothing to his siblings. He refused to be stopped when he was so close to getting her back.

  He needed her.

  Death didn’t have to mean forever. Not to a vampire, and especially not to an Original. If he’d had time to give her a single drop of his blood before she’d died that night, it would have been enough. She’d have awoken the next night as a vampire with an endless second chance at life. Unfortunately, Vivianne had been killed instantly by a blast of gunpowder exploding beneath her feet, as had most of the werewolves in New Orleans.

  Warm rain began to splatter against his face, and the thickness in the summer air broke as he reached the witches’ cemetery. He remembered another storm all too vividly. The thunder rolling in, the werewolves surrounding the house, and Vivianne, hopeful to the last that she could somehow make everything right. She had been beautiful that night. He needed to tell her that.

  The cemetery was dark. Clouds covered the moon, and the steady rain had extinguished any candles meant to light the way for the dead. Once upon a time, every space between the tombs and the trailing vines had been filled with candles, incense, flowers, and charms, but after the witches moved to the bayou, it had fallen into neglect. Ivy and moss overwhelmed the graves.

  Only Vivianne’s tomb was as spotless as the night she had been laid to rest. The witches may have stopped honoring their dead, but Klaus had no such trouble. The white marble of the little mausoleum glowed from within, so polished were its walls. He cast a glance at the shrine as Lily emerged from behind a curtain of rain. Curiously, no water seemed to land on her.

  “Do you have the pendant?” Lily asked, holding her lantern so that it cast a shadow over Vivianne Lescheres’s engraved name. Her hood was thrown back, and her brown hair was pulled severely against her skull.

  “No pleasantries?” Klaus remarked, dangling the opal. “And here I thought we might become dear friends.”

  “I wouldn’t expect so.” The witch’s tone was frosty, but she followed the gentle swing of the gem. She reached into the pocket of her wool cloak and pulled out a small glass vial. “But along with the pendant, there is one other thing I’ll need before I return Vivianne from her eternal sleep.”

  Klaus eyed the vial, feeling his jaw set with anger—he should have expected that she’d want to raise the price when Vivianne was nearly within reach.

  “And what would that be?” He hoped the words sounded undecided, but they both knew he wouldn’t refuse whatever she asked.

  “It’s just a small matter,” she assured him, “more of a gesture of goodwill, really. The land we live on now is stagnant and unhealthy, and my daughter has grown ill. Our arts have not been able to help her, but I believe that your blood can.”

  “My blood,” Klaus repeated, his mind racing. The mix than ran in his veins was much more precious than the pendant, and dangerous in the wrong hands. It seemed possible that his blood could be used to cure a sick child, and it was just one time, one spell. A necklace and a little bit of blood; it was nothing. Not even worth mentioning to anyone else.

  Klaus bit into the skin of his wrist, then stepped forward to hold the arm where her vial would catch his blood. The vial filled to the top, and Lily pressed a soft wax stopper into it. “That’s everything,” he told her firmly. “Begin.”

  Lily snatched the opal from his hand, and lost no time in marking out a curious design in the wet earth in front of Vivianne’s grave.

  “Stand at this corner here,” she ordered, pointing with one long finger. “You’re the anchor for the spell.” When Klaus hesitated, she shoved a lock of hair from her face and sighed impatiently. “She’s coming back to you,” the witch explained, as if to a child.

  Klaus’s mind filled with questions he knew he should ask. Did that mean Vivianne’s new life would be tied to his? Would she be mortal, this second time around? Would she truly be her former self? But he’d proceed no matter the answers, so he would rather not know. Klaus had always subscribed to the notion that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission...if he had to choose between the two at all.

  He stepped onto the spot Lily indicated and focused on the only thing that mattered: Vivianne coming back to him. That very night, he would hold her again. He could see her already, just as she had been in that last moment. Before the earth had exploded beneath her feet, she’d looked up at him through the window. Her black eyes had flashed in her pale, perfect face, her dark hair shone in the moonlight. Her defiant, strong-willed spirit made itself known in the angle of her pointed chin, and her bloodred lips seemed to be calling to him.

  Lily began to chant, and in his head, Klaus heard Viv’s laughter rippling below the incomprehensible words. He concentrated on it, holding fast to the idea of her, trying to pull her back from beyond the grave. He let himself become consumed with thoughts of Vivianne until they drowned out everything else, even the words of the spell that would bring her home again.

  Klaus felt the tingling of magic, not around him but rather all through him. It pushed and tugged, nagging at him until he had no choice but to notice what the witch was doing. The spell was wrong somehow.

  Lily unstoppered the vial of his blood and carefully tipped out a few precious drops onto the gleaming white opal. They faded into the stone as if it had swallowed them. Then she hung the chain around her neck, chanting something that was not the spell to raise his beloved from the dead.

  But he was afraid to stop her....A mistake in this would cost him everything. No matter how sure he was that something was wrong, Vivianne might still step out from the tomb before him and erase all of his doubts.

  Instead, Lily stopped, breathing heavily, as if she had been running. The tingle of magic flared through Klaus, and then it ended.

  “What was that spell?” Klaus demanded. He tried to shake off the spell, but he could feel it holding fast, weaving itself into his blood. What had she done to him? “Speak now, before I tear out your throat.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Lily warned him with a smile. She produced a small blade from her cloak and sliced it across her arm. Klaus felt a stinging on his own skin, and looked down in surprise to see a thin line of blood rising up through his sleeve. It perfectly matched Lily’s wound. “I have linked us together, Niklaus. Whatever happens to me now will happen to you as well.”

  The words enraged him. He’d assumed that he would at least be able to kill her if she betrayed him, but now he was trapped. He couldn’t hurt her without hurting himself...at least, not directly.

  “You have people,” he reminded her, his voice icy with fury. “I don’t have to touch you to hurt you. I’ll suck the life from everyone you love until you sever the link between us. I’ll let you cure your daughter, and then I’ll take her away from you again.” He stepped across her line in the dirt, bringing his face so close to hers that she couldn’t mistake the truth in his eyes. “I will make you want me to kill you.”

  Lily blanched a little, but she did not step away. “You won’t,” she disagreed, her voice trembling in spite of the certainty in her words. “I have not yet brought back Vivianne Lescheres for you, but I stil
l intend to do so. It’s in your interest to keep peace with me, vampire, until I’ve done what I’ve promised.”

  Klaus fought the urge to strike her. The satisfaction of the smack almost seemed worth the answering pain it would cause him. “If you really could bring her back,” he sneered, shoving the tiny glimmer of hope down into the depths of his disappointed heart, “then why not just do it? If you had that kind of knowledge, you wouldn’t waste your time with these games.”

  “I had to protect myself,” Lily argued. “I serve a purpose to you until Vivianne is alive again. As soon as that’s done I’ll be expendable to you, and then this link is what will keep me safe. You can’t hurt me, and your kind will leave me in peace, even after they learn what I have done for you. What I will do for you,” she reminded him, resting a courageous hand on his sleeve, “as soon as I can arrange the spell.”

  “Arrange what?” Klaus asked, in spite of himself. His tone remained rough, but he wanted to be convinced, and what choice did he have but to keep hope alive? He had given up his blood and the pendant, and now he was linked to this treacherous witch. Having already gambled, he might as well let the wager ride.

  “I’ll need some help from my clan,” she informed him, confident that she had brought him back into the fold. “The full moon is the best time for this spell, and that’s not until tomorrow night. And, of course, we will need Vivianne’s remains.”

  Klaus pointed to the small white tomb. “She lies there,” he reminded Lily. After the great hurricane, he had buried Vivianne himself on a knoll where she could see a little curve of the river. He realized suddenly that the rain had stopped, and a few stars struggled to pierce through the hovering clouds. It was a lovely spot, perfect for Viv.

  “She did,” Lily corrected. “Did you really think we would let her lie in a vampire’s tomb, where you knew exactly how to find her? You’ve been sniffing around my kind for decades looking for a way to resurrect her. We would have been fools to leave the body where it was. The day my aunt Sofia died, we removed her daughter’s bones and brought them somewhere...safer. Our bargain is still intact, Klaus,” she added, watching his face carefully. “Continue to keep your end, and I assure you that I will keep mine.” With that, Lily disappeared back the way she had come, and Klaus was left to grapple with what had just happened.

  She was coming back.

  The knowledge paralyzed him, burning into his brain like a toxin that shut down every other response. Suddenly, a fear crept in among his hope. What if it wasn’t the same as before? What if Vivianne didn’t love him anymore? What if she was at peace and didn’t want to come back? Klaus forced himself to push those thoughts away. What was done was done, and whatever Vivianne’s resurrection brought with it would just have to be outweighed by his love.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  REBEKAH SURVEYED THE aftermath of the party with her upper lip curled in distaste. It was possible that some of the damage was the result of their guests, but to her eye it was all Klaus’s fault. Every stain and splinter, every crack and crease, was somehow the result of his selfish ransacking. With each new ruin she accounted for, her desire to punish Klaus sunk deeper into her chest. He couldn’t just ruin everything because he felt like it.

  She still had no idea what he’d been looking for—what he had found. But Klaus never needed much of a reason to turn their lives upside down and their house inside out. He didn’t care about the effort his siblings had put into building a life for themselves in New Orleans. He only cared about himself.

  She straightened the gilded frame of an oil painting, turning her head so that the light moved across the brush marks of its surface. The painting itself looked unharmed, and so she moved on to a silk-covered divan, which had not been so lucky. The bloodstains in the champagne-colored fabric were dire, but the slit at its edge put the thing beyond repair. It looked like the work of a knife, and Rebekah had no trouble imagining Klaus slashing up the upholstery while searching for his precious object.

  She pushed the edges back together anyway, then let them go again in disgust. “I saw Ava Duquesne catch her ring on that,” a voice observed, and Rebekah spun around. Lisette stood in the doorway, looking totally unfazed by both the sorry state of the mansion and the fact that all the other guests had left. The soft candlelight washed her hair into a deeper red than Rebekah remembered. “She thought no one would notice, which is obviously ridiculous.”

  “What are you still doing here?” Rebekah asked ungraciously. “I thought all of you scattered when Klaus went on his little rampage.”

  If Lisette recognized the hint that she should have left, she didn’t acknowledge it. “I had brothers growing up,” she said and picked up the feet of a dead human, jerking her chin toward Rebekah to indicate that she should lift his arms. To her own surprise, Rebekah complied, and the two of them carried the corpse toward the door while Lisette continued. “I was raised on a farm up near Saint Louis, where my brothers taught me to ride and to shoot,” she explained cheerfully, stepping through the doorway as if she carried bodies out of the house all the time. “They taught me to clean a deer and a rifle, to tell a joke that could make a blacksmith blush, and never, ever to be intimidated by anyone’s family but your own.”

  Rebekah laughed so unexpectedly that she nearly dropped the arms of the man they carried. She found herself liking Lisette all over again, in spite of her own foul mood and the girl’s unreasonable lack of deference. Still, it would set a bad precedent to encourage that kind of familiarity, so she rearranged her face in a stern expression before replying. “We are your family now,” she reminded Lisette. “We keep the bodies over there, a little way into the woods.”

  While the Mikaelsons mostly preferred to do their hunting in the twisting streets and alleyways of New Orleans, it was only polite to provide in-house refreshment for their guests. After a dozen or so of their parties, the corpses had really started to pile up. A little hollow in the forest downwind of the house had been repurposed as a mass grave, with leaves and underbrush piled on top of it in a halfhearted attempt at concealment.

  “I noticed a few more in the drawing room, and one under that odd sculpture near the stairs,” Lisette suggested, unconcerned with Rebekah’s reproof. “It might be better to take two at a time.”

  “Indeed,” Rebekah agreed. They could each easily carry a human by themselves, but it was pleasant to have company. Even odd, chatty company was an improvement over dwelling on the infuriating mystery of Klaus’s outburst. “My brother is trying to drive me mad,” she blurted out, and then looked away from the expression of pity that she knew must be on her newfound friend’s face.

  “They do that,” Lisette agreed amiably, falling into step beside Rebekah as they turned toward the mansion and the brightening sky. “I’d heard that he’s been a bit wild since the hurricane when his fiancée died,” she added, as if it were meant to be reassuring. As if Klaus acting out for over forty years were just a phase.

  “She was never his fiancée,” Rebekah snapped, “and he was ‘wild’ well before then.” And they had both lost someone that night, although to hear Klaus tell it no one in the world had ever experienced the kind of pain he did when the perfect, extraordinary, peerless Vivianne Lescheres had run out and gotten herself killed.

  At least, he had told it that way at first. Before too long, he had stopped speaking of it entirely. Now that Lisette brought it up, he was a bit worse than usual. Perhaps he was still clinging to his doomed love affair with the half witch, half werewolf that had nearly drowned the entire city.

  If so, it was well past time for him to get over it. New Orleans was full of far more appropriate candidates for Klaus’s affection now that the witches were no longer able to enforce the old treaty that had barred the Mikaelsons from making new vampires. In this new, livelier city Rebekah had managed to move on from her loss, filling her life with enjoyable distractions. It
was absurd to imagine that Klaus might still be stuck on the same girl. The one thing that Rebekah had learned as a vampire was that people die and you had to move on.

  On their fourth trip back from the makeshift burial ground in the woods, Rebekah noticed that the front door had been closed. She felt sure they had left it open. Elijah was still brooding in his scorched study, and that left only one possibility.

  “Are you nervous?” Lisette asked, nodding her strawberry-blonde head toward the closed door. “I know plenty of vampires who would hide from Klaus, but just as many would hide from you as well.”

  Rebekah remembered the icy-cold feel of a silver stake piercing her heart, followed by a moment of blankness that had spanned years. Klaus wasn’t better, stronger, or smarter than she was, but he still somehow managed to be more dangerous. His selfishness made him unpredictable, and his distrust of his own siblings only made things worse. “I am not intimidated by him,” she retorted, although she wasn’t entirely sure it was true. “Our family is simply more complicated than the rest of you can understand.”

  Lisette shrugged. “Elijah’s the one I wouldn’t want to cross,” she observed. “But I would also trust him to give a fair hearing. For every weakness, a strength.”

  It struck Rebekah that she would have reversed those two, but at the same time she realized that the sky over the bayou had grown decidedly pink. The daylight ring on her index finger protected her against the sun’s blistering rays, but Lisette had no such magic. She had already stayed too long.

  “Go home for the day,” Rebekah told the girl brusquely. “I’m not afraid of Klaus, and I’ll deal with him. Thank you,” she added, feeling warmth toward the young vampire. “I appreciate your help tonight, but you’ve done enough.”

  “I’d imagine you could use all the help you can get,” Lisette suggested, although her impish grin took a little of the sting out of the words, “with a brother like yours.” She hugged Rebekah, who was too surprised to object, then spun on one heel and ran toward the heart of the city. With a final reddish-gold twinkle she was gone, and Rebekah inhaled a deep breath before stepping up onto the veranda and shoving the front door open.