The Originals: The Loss Page 4

  “Niklaus?” she called, not wanting to delay their confrontation. “Niklaus, I know you’re home.”

  She expected him to descend the spiral staircase—lately he seemed to spend all of his spare time in that dusty, drafty attic he refused to let her renovate. But instead, he emerged from the shadows of the billiard room, holding a crystal goblet loosely in one hand. There was a layer of dried blood on his sleeve.

  “Dear sister,” he greeted her gamely, but the smile that twisted his lips didn’t reach his eyes. “Welcome home.”

  “That’s all?” she demanded, taking a step closer to his infuriatingly smug face. “You have nothing else to say about your behavior tonight?”

  Klaus frowned. “I think not,” he decided after a moment. “And you?”

  It was almost unbearable. The idea that she had something to answer for, that she had somehow wronged him...It was all she could do not to just fly at his throat right then and there. In spite of Lisette’s help and Rebekah’s own diligent efforts, the mansion was still in shambles. And there stood Klaus, using their one unbroken crystal glass and acting as if he had done nothing wrong.

  “You attacked me,” she snarled, unable to keep her anger in check. “You turned the house inside out, and then you attacked me, and then you just left.”

  Klaus’s brow furrowed, and his turquoise eyes shadowed for a moment. “That’s not how I remember it.” He shrugged. “Rebekah, I’m not responsible for every scuffed floor and bad mood of yours.”

  “I don’t care about the floors!” she insisted, although the floors were one more mark against him. But that minor concern was far outweighed by her distress at being flat-out lied to by her own brother. At being shut out, yet again, because he never really felt that they were on the same side. “I care that you won’t just talk to me!”

  Klaus had begun to walk away, but at that he rounded on her. For a moment, she thought he might tell her everything, not because he trusted her, but because she had finally made him angry enough. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say,” he spat. “You couldn’t possibly know how I feel, what I am going through. You can’t understand what my life has become now.”

  “Not if you don’t explain!” Rebekah was so frustrated she was practically shouting, but she didn’t care. The sight of Eric’s broken silver chain flashed before her eyes, blocking out Klaus’s furious face. Elijah could break up yet another fight between them if it came to that. Klaus always listened to him, if reluctantly. He would sneak around behind their backs, but when it came down to a confrontation, he respected Elijah’s opinion in a way he had never respected hers.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you, sister,” Klaus retorted, driving home the unfairness of it all. She could understand. Better than anyone, probably, since she had known him and looked up to him her entire life. And she might even be able to help, if Klaus didn’t always dismiss her and keep her at arm’s length. But he didn’t even see a point in letting her in. He was so self-absorbed that the only pain he could see was his own.

  Suddenly, she felt the fight drain out of her. He wasn’t going to listen, no matter what she said. He would just carry on with his own secretive plans, acting like his own family was nothing but an obstacle in his way. “No, you never do,” she agreed. “You just keep barging around, ruining everything without bothering to talk to anyone.”

  Rebekah could have reached the foot of the staircase without touching him, but she chose to push past him instead, shoving one shoulder hard against his. She thought she saw him smirk out of the corner of her eye, and she fumed all the more at the possibility that he was laughing at her.

  He thought he could just do whatever he wanted, pursue his own goals, never consult with her or respect her opinion. Maybe she had been going about their fractious relationship all wrong, she considered, as she slammed the ruined door of her room behind her. Her jewelry boxes lay in chaos, their contents spilled across her vanity and onto the floor. Maybe her sympathy and concern had been the problem all along.

  Klaus didn’t want to be understood, and perhaps he didn’t need it, either. Perhaps the best thing she could do was treat him with the same coldness and lack of consideration that he treated her. She was now more determined than ever to ruin his fun, and see how he liked it. It might bring him down a notch, make him humbler and more willing to turn toward his family in times of need. At the very least, it might make it more tolerable to be stuck in a house with him.

  Rebekah pulled a ruby earring out of the soft pile of the carpet, setting it carefully beside its mate in one of her lacquered boxes. She removed the gems she was wearing one at a time and added them to the collection, admiring the soft glint of each one before she closed the box’s lid. Elijah had power, Rebekah had beauty, and Klaus had trouble. They had each created lives that suited them, but Klaus’s was a constant threat to the other two. That was his nature.

  She traded her gown for a loose silk robe, and sat on a tapestried stool to brush out her long, golden hair. Watching her dim reflection in the glass above the vanity, she looked for some sign that she could be as ruthless and self-serving as her half brother. She could, she decided. She had watched Klaus be a brute for centuries; she certainly knew how it was done.

  When Klaus least suspected it, he would learn how wrong he had been to constantly discount his siblings. She would show him what it truly meant to have no one looking out for him, no one watching his back. He always claimed he had no one to rely on but himself, and she had tolerated those insults for far too long. She would find a way to wound him, just a little. Just enough. He would learn to appreciate what he had in his siblings, or she would continue to make him pay.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SHOUTING WAS getting louder, and Elijah wanted nothing to do with it.

  He tore the scorched remnants of the curtains away from the windows and heaped them in a charred pile in the middle of his study. Dozens of his books were unsalvageable, and traces of smoke lingered in every corner of the room. The damage was too extensive to fix on his own, but if nothing else, it would keep him away from his siblings. He didn’t particularly want to see them at the moment. As long as no one got staked, Elijah had better things to do.

  Hours passed and night fell. Something nagged at Elijah as he leafed through each spell book, checking to make sure the writings could still be deciphered. What was wrong? Was it that he hadn’t heard a sound from Rebekah or Klaus in hours? No, something else was tugging at his conscience.

  Flashes of a vision came to him, bits of Spanish moss and cattails. He could feel danger all around him, except it wasn’t around him at all. It was around her. If he concentrated, he could almost see her, although he couldn’t sense whatever it was she fled from.

  All he knew for sure was that Ava, the vampire he had made, the woman who had shared his bed just hours ago, needed him. Elijah shoved away from his desk and charged through the house, slamming the door behind him as he raced toward the bayou.

  He found her trail quickly, as he knew her habits. She hunted in these marshes, catching lost travelers and stray bandits, and now and then he had hunted there with her. The marks of her passage were almost invisible, nothing but a broken reed here and a footprint-size puddle there. Fortunately, Elijah knew what he was looking for, and his eyes were sharp. He followed one clue to the next, working his way through the sucking mud and waist-high grasses. He did not want to think about what it meant that he had to track Ava like a deer, that he couldn’t sense her through the bond they had once shared.

  He almost stumbled over her prone body before he saw it. Ava Duquesne lay on her back in the swamp, with her long legs at a strange angle and her hands clutched like claws at something just out of her reach. But all he could look at was the ragged hole where her heart had been torn of her chest.

  He brushed the tangle of chestnut hair away from her f
ace to see her green eyes open and staring, fixed on whatever monster had hunted her down and murdered her. For a moment, he remembered her again as she had been, as she should have been, stretched languidly across his bedsheets with a knowing smile on her pink lips.

  And then he was jolted back to the brutal sight of her now: limp and broken, with a bloody hole in her chest the size of a fist. Her skin was covered with scrapes and fine scratches, as if she had run instead of standing her ground. Elijah couldn’t imagine what type of creature a vampire would be afraid of. He hadn’t known her well—their connection had always been more physical than conversational—but she had never struck him as fearful.

  He looked for her heart, hoping it would be a clue, but it was nowhere to be found.

  Elijah’s mind grasped at possibilities. This wasn’t the work of witches or werewolves, the most obvious natural enemies they had. Something had chased Ava down and mutilated her, and Elijah couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might be.

  He couldn’t even rule out the possibility that it might be personal. He hadn’t made a big show of his liaison with Ava, but he hadn’t thought to hide it, either. Could someone have been trying to send a message to him through her, or get revenge on him for some forgotten slight? If this gruesome work was meant to hurt him, he wouldn’t stop until he had torn that person to shreds. It was the least he could do for Ava, and perhaps all he could do for her anymore.

  Elijah half-lifted Ava’s body, cradling her against him even though the smell of her drying blood was almost overwhelming. Every tiny sound that came from the bayou sounded close and suspicious. He felt watched, seen from every direction by some menacing, unknown monster. He had no idea where the danger was, only that the very air around them was suffused with it.

  Without warning, the creature hurtled into him from the side, throwing him back with such force that he lost hold of Ava. A woman hovered over him, but she was no ordinary woman. She held him down with nothing but her own incredible strength. He could feel the intense coiling of her muscles as he struggled against her, and he knew that she wasn’t using magic. She had pinned him to the muddy earth because she was stronger than he was, and no one was stronger than he was.

  His disbelief was so total that it was a full second before he felt a warm wetness spreading from where her left hand pressed against his shoulder. He risked a glance away from his attacker’s eerily calm face to see Ava’s heart in her hand. Looking back into the creature’s dead eyes, Elijah understood that murdering his lover hadn’t been a message after all. To her, Ava was just prey.

  “Who are you?” Elijah demanded, and the strange woman smiled horribly.

  She lifted the heart to her lips and took a delicate bite. Blood dripped down her chin and splashed onto his shirt, but from the expression on her face the woman might have been eating a ripe plum.

  “Who are you?” he asked again, as curious as he was repulsed.

  “Wait your turn,” she rasped between bites of the heart, her voice sounding rusty and unused. “You will have your turn.”

  For a bizarre moment, he thought she was offering to share her gruesome feast, but then her more likely meaning dawned on him. She looked like any other human woman: lank, light brown hair framing an ordinary enough face. But her strength; her odd, creaking voice, and most of all the heart in her hand...There was nothing ordinary or human about her. Whatever she was, she had chosen him as her next victim.

  Elijah had lived for centuries, and had survived wounds that would have killed another vampire hundreds of times over. Even the loss of his heart would not end him, but he didn’t want it ripped from his chest if he could help it. As he watched the madwoman lick her lips clean of Ava’s blood and lower her face to take another bite, he did not intend to lie there and find out what she was capable of.

  The hand that held him was like a steel vise around his shoulder, but she was distracted by the heart in her other hand. He drove his body upward and sideways, knocking her off-balance and creating just enough space to leap to his feet.

  She rolled to a crouch, her blue eyes watching him with something that looked like amusement. Every movement she made gave Elijah chills, her bones creaking as she rose to her full height. She was wrong somehow. People liked to call his kind “unnatural” and even “abominations;” but what he was facing truly did not belong in the world.

  “We’re coming for you,” she croaked. Her voice sounded as if it came from a corpse. “Witches have retuned to this land, and there is no escape.” She smiled, and he could see blood on her teeth. Elijah grimaced at the sinew that came away from the heart as she took another bite. “You are afraid, and you should be. But fear won’t save you now.”

  Elijah had never heard of a witch who devoured hearts. And she had said “we.” Elijah could sense more of them now, perhaps a dozen creatures like her, lurking in the woods. They were closing in on him, and in spite of his better instincts, he flicked his eyes away from the witch’s for the briefest of seconds, and in that second she struck.

  The blow knocked him sideways, and his legs tangled in Ava’s. He fell across her body and then rolled before the witch could pin him again. But she was as fast as she was strong, and she nearly caught him again. Her fingernails raked at his face and arms, seeking the center of his chest while she still held Ava’s heart in her other hand.

  He lashed out with a vicious kick as they separated, catching her squarely in the stomach. She bent at the force of his attack, almost doubling over but not quite winded. She lunged for him again, and he heard the rattling of indrawn breath behind him. He ducked her hand and grabbed her by the wrist, spinning her into another witch who had crept up on them.

  The two creatures backed away from each other and snarled, but another pair of impossibly strong hands caught Elijah from behind. As he struggled, more creatures slunk out from the shadows. Where were they coming from? And why?

  He managed to shake off the witch who held him—a short man with a disturbingly cheerful smile on his face—and smashed his fist into the skull of another, wincing at the sickening crunch of the thin bone around her temple. But she didn’t even flinch, just continued to come at him with half of her skull caved in. Elijah was so shocked that her hand plunged through his flesh and brushed his ribs before he managed to get out of her range.

  Holding a hand over the wound in his chest, he feinted one way and then another, trying to divide the dozen of them enough to fight his way out, but to his surprise none of them seemed to be that interested in him anymore. The short witch was smiling again, although not at Elijah. He was turned toward Elijah’s first attacker, who still held Ava’s half-eaten heart. Elijah realized that all the witches were starting at the pulpy mess.

  Elijah stood perfectly still, sensing that this was not the moment to strike. He forced himself to watch, although he had a sick feeling about what he was about to witness. The creatures closed their circle around his first attacker, their attention rapt and hungry on the heart. Like a pack of wild beasts, they were turning on their own kind to get at her prize.

  She gave a low protective hiss and clutched the heart closer to her chest, prepared to fight for the last scrap of meat. Her flat eyes found Elijah’s again, and her thin lips pulled apart into a ghastly smile. “Soon enough,” she reminded him in her dead, rasping voice, and then the witches struck. They threw themselves at her all at once, like a bursting dam of bared teeth and sharp nails.

  Elijah heard the tearing of skin and the crunching of bones from somewhere within the writhing mass of hungry monsters, and he hoped that some of them wouldn’t live through the brawl. But he could still picture the woman who had lunged at him with her skull caved in, and he suspected he couldn’t rely on the resilient beasts to thin their own ranks.

  Although Elijah hated to leave a fight, he knew that the smartest move would be to take this opportunity and run. His feet flew
over the swamp, startling a flock of birds out of the weeds. He made for home, for the safety of the protection spell and the army that was his family. He needed to figure out what these creatures were before they became an unstoppable threat, and he hoped that the answer was in whatever was left of his study. Even with some of his books lost to last night’s stupid, wasteful fighting, the sources he had collected over the centuries were his best chance of understanding what evil now lurked in the bayou.

  At the edge of his land he finally glanced behind him, half-expecting to see the crowd at his heels. But there was only rustling grasses and tree branches that waved gently in the night breeze. Yet he knew that he would see the bloodthirsty creatures again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT HAD BEEN forty-four years since Niklaus Mikaelson had felt so alive. His impatience was like a drug that sharpened all of his senses while time seemed to stretch and blur. He stood at the edge of the bayou, watching the moon slide up over the horizon. It was as red as blood when it first rose, then turned gold as it climbed. Its reflection echoed in the river, growing smaller and smaller until it was just the moon, pale white and perfectly round.

  Another moon was vivid in his memory: the one that had risen the night Vivianne had embraced her dual heritage and triggered her werewolf side. At the time Klaus had felt betrayed, even disgusted by her choice. Now, though—now that Vivianne had been dead for decades and he had nearly lost hope of seeing her again—none of the petty issues that had once divided them felt like they mattered.

  He just needed her. The witch, the werewolf, his lover, his loss. Whatever she wanted to be, it was fine as long as she was his.