The Originals: The Loss Page 6

  The horse violently shied away from the sound of her voice, nearly kicking Vivianne as she got inside. Rodger got it back under control quickly, but it still stamped and snorted, its eyes rolling wildly white in their sockets. Horses had never cared for Rebekah, but the reaction seemed excessive even to her. It settled a bit as Vivianne arranged herself inside the carriage and Rodger climbed up to take the reins.

  The coach flew over the cobblestoned streets. It was too noisy to talk, especially when pedestrians and wagoners shouted at Rodger’s aggressive driving. Rebekah felt a secret relief at that—it was always hard to know exactly what to say to Vivianne. She seemed happy, healthy, and downright normal. Which wasn’t normal, as far as Rebekah was concerned. No one who had endured the other side could emerge unscathed. But that was Klaus’s problem, Rebekah reminded herself, not hers.

  Once they reached the shop, Rodger helped them out of the coach, keeping his eyes on the cobblestones at their feet. As Vivianne stepped into Madame Pavin’s, Rebekah hung back and took Rodger by the arm. “We’ll be here at least an hour,” she whispered, glancing at the open shop door to make sure no one was close enough to hear. “There’s a package waiting for me at the Southern Spot, but I can’t be seen there myself. Go, and ask for Thomas. Discreetly.” Rebekah’s voice hovered just on the edge of compulsion. “Buy some time with one of the girls so that no one notices you, and do not speak of this to anyone.”

  “My lady,” he murmured, taking her hand and pressing it to his lips. “It will be done just as you require.”

  The dressmaker was thrilled to see them, and even sent her apprentice out for a bottle of champagne. They sipped their drinks while she brought out one bolt of silk after another. Madame Pavin was known for receiving goods from Paris before any other tailor, and the quality of her merchandise was famous. Vivianne’s pale cheeks flushed, as much from excitement as from the champagne. She stroked each bolt of silk, as if not quite believing that she would be dressed in such finery.

  “You’ve always looked good in white,” Rebekah suggested, leaning back in her chair and swirling the bubbly liquid in her glass. Planning this spectacle took a great deal of work, but it was also more enjoyable than she had assumed it would be. Vivianne was agreeable, and Klaus’s only input was to repeat, “The best of everything,” in response to every dilemma, and now there was champagne. She refilled her glass.

  “I think that Klaus would suggest the gold,” Vivianne murmured, running one hand over each of the silks in question. “But it’s never flattered me nearly as well.”

  “He’ll marry you if you wear a flour sack.” Rebekah said dismissively. “You have to think of yourself and your audience.”

  “My guests, you mean,” Vivianne corrected, giggling a bit. “Will I even have met half of them?”

  Madame Pavin emerged from her storeroom with an armful of peach-colored silks, then retreated.

  “The world is full of people now I’ve never met,” Vivianne went on, holding the pink fabric up near her face in the mirror. “This washes me out. I look dead.”

  It was as if the champagne had increased Rebekah’s intuition by gently blurring her other senses. For the first time, she realized that this wasn’t exactly the Vivianne she had once known. She had been so busy marveling at what was there—at the girl’s cool poise—that she hadn’t really noticed before what was missing. Vivianne’s spark had been muted somehow. She was still clever and witty, but now her jokes were drier and more self-deprecating.

  “Do you remember it?” Rebekah blurted out. Vivianne met Rebekah’s eyes in the mirror, but she didn’t speak. “What did you see on the Other Side?”

  “It was...dark,” Vivianne answered at last, setting aside the silk and returning to a bolt of heavy Indian cotton printed with flowers. “I don’t remember much at all. Except that I was there for what felt like forever, and I longed for your brother the entire time. Every moment, every second, I wished to see him again.”

  Rebekah was silent. She wondered what afterlife Eric Moquet had found. Unlike Vivianne, he had no supernatural heritage, and so he could not have gone to the Other Side. She hoped that he had reunited with his deceased wife and didn’t miss Rebekah at all.

  No matter how much she had loved him, she could never do what Klaus had done. She was even surer of that now that she could see the mark it had left on Vivianne.

  “I’m so excited for the wedding,” Vivianne went on after a long pause, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Rebekah could see the scars now, the pain that had been branded onto her very soul. The wound had healed over, but Vivianne would never be exactly the same.

  Well, forty-four years on the Other Side would do that to a girl, Rebekah supposed. Perhaps time would heal even this, especially if Niklaus got his head out of the clouds and managed to notice that his bride wasn’t quite as perfectly herself as he wanted to believe.

  She refilled her glass from the dwindling bottle of champagne, and as if on cue Madame Pavin appeared with a new one. Through the window she saw Rodger return to the coach and pat the skittish horse on its muzzle. He glanced inside and nodded at Rebekah, confirming that he had the vial. Vivianne would get her husband, and at the same time Rebekah would get her payback. She couldn’t say that everything was “perfect,” exactly, but things were heading in that direction.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ELIJAH SLAMMED ANOTHER book closed. Somewhere down the hall, the pounding of a hammer shifted the noise level from annoying to intolerable. Rebekah’s incessant wedding preparations were worse than a nuisance—they were a constant reminder of the black magic Klaus had harnessed in order to get his way.

  Klaus knew that all magic comes at a price, and a resurrection spell requires a heavy fee. Elijah wasn’t quite sure what it was yet, but he suspected that the grisly murders over the last few days were only its beginning. The city was starting to devolve into a panicked state after a handful of humans had been found dead and with their hearts ripped out. The morts-vivants, as the locals were beginning to call them in terrified whispers, had not faded back into the bayou. Elijah had imposed a curfew on the entire city, and not even the rashest of citizens had been foolish enough to break it.

  He pushed his chair back and stalked through the house, determined to get answers one way or another. None of his books—not even his mother’s grimoire—had anything the say about witches who devoured hearts, which made Klaus’s close-lipped stubbornness even more unacceptable than usual. Elijah needed to know what was happening in his city, and he was absolutely sure that his brother knew more than he was telling.

  Klaus was prowling the front room like a lion in a cage, obviously distracted and irritated by Vivianne’s absence. He could hardly stand to be away from her for ten minutes at a time, and Elijah had no idea how Rebekah had convinced him to let her take his fiancée out for the entire morning. Klaus had positioned himself so that he would be the first to see them return.

  “It’s time you tell me about that spell,” Elijah said, and for good measure he moved between his brother and the big bay window, blocking his view of the courtyard.

  “It’s done, and it worked,” Klaus snapped. “That’s all I have to tell.” Elijah wasn’t sure what had made him so touchy about the subject, but he was beginning to guess that it was something he very much needed to know.

  “It did what you wanted it to,” Elijah agreed, crossing his arms over his chest. “I need to know what else it might have done.”

  Klaus stopped trying to see past him through the window and grew dangerously still. “What else might it have done, dear brother?” he asked in a tone Elijah knew all too well. This line of questioning made Klaus see him as an enemy, but it was too important to just let drop.

  Elijah had become convinced that the so-called morts-vivants must be returned from the dead. There was no other explanation, really. Elijah understood
the ache of hunger he had seen that night in the bayou, as if the sight and smell of the heart had consumed them. They needed that heart in order to live, and to Elijah that meant they had to have been resurrected somehow.

  And everywhere he turned, there was Vivianne, a witch who had been revived on the very same night. That could hardly be a coincidence, and yet she was completely different from the mob that had attacked him in the swamp. She seemed a bit subdued compared to her former vivacious self, but Vivianne was still thoughtful and articulate, and above all she had no interest in eating living flesh. She was nothing like the ravenous monsters he had encountered.

  Elijah understood why Klaus resented the implication that there might be some kind of connection between them. For all of his faults, Elijah knew that Klaus’s love for Vivianne was absolute. That was what made it so dangerous.

  “I don’t see why it matters, Elijah,” Klaus sneered as he turned to leave the room. In a leap, Elijah pinned Klaus to the far wall with his forearm pressed against his brother’s throat—his patience evaporated.

  “The morts-vivants could be a threat to her, you idiot!” he snapped, and although he had expected Klaus to fight back, those words finally seemed to penetrate his impossibly thick skull. “If you really cared so much about protecting Vivianne, you’d tell me everything you know about who raised her and what they wanted in return. Unless you’re more worried about protecting yourself?”

  Klaus’s lips pulled back in a feral snarl, but he raised his hands in a lackluster approximation of surrender. “I asked a witch,” he admitted, and Elijah relaxed the pressure of his forearm just a little bit. “Her daughter was sick, and she wanted my help. I told her I wanted Vivianne in exchange, and she was willing.”

  “Give me a name,” Elijah growled. He knew that Klaus wasn’t telling the whole truth.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Klaus argued. “All she wanted was a little of my blood for her brat. She did the spell and we were done. If witches did something to create your monsters out there in the bayou, it has nothing to do with me. Or Viv.”

  “We don’t know that!” Elijah snapped, shaking his brother for good measure. Klaus shoved Elijah hard enough to push them apart, and made a show of straightening his coat. Elijah backed off a step, but he didn’t take his eyes off Klaus.

  “There’s something you don’t know, brother?” Klaus mocked. “I thought nothing in this city escaped your notice.”

  That may have once been true, but hearing it out loud only made Elijah miss Ysabelle Dalliencourt even more. For forty-four years she had been not only his friend, but also his discreet window into the witches’ councils. There could never have been a surprise like the morts-vivants while she had been alive, but witches didn’t live forever. Although, if recent events were any indication, perhaps they didn’t die forever, either.

  “Who has your blood?” Elijah asked again, refusing to be drawn out by his brother’s feint. “Did you see her use it to heal her child?”

  Klaus looked uncertain. It was unbearably stupid to hand out blood like it was nothing, and Klaus knew it.

  “If you’re so worried, ask to see her daughter yourself,” Klaus suggested, using bravado to hide the fact that he was conceding to Elijah’s argument. “It was your friend’s daughter who took the blood. Lily something...”

  Lily Leroux.

  Elijah left the mansion and headed out for the swamplands.

  Since the hurricane, the witches of New Orleans had been quite secretive about their location. It was common knowledge that they had made a home for themselves somewhere in the bayou, but no one seemed ever to have seen it for themselves. Not even Ysabelle would say where it was, but she had continued to visit with Elijah until the year she died. Through those meetings he had formed a pretty strong guess as to where the rest of her kind were hiding.

  He crossed into the large clearing where she used to materialize. But even with his unnaturally sharp senses, all that lay before him was empty swampland. A bird trilled somewhere, and dragonflies chased each other through the lush undergrowth. Elijah knew better than to trust appearances over logic. He took a single step forward, and suddenly he could see everything.

  There was an entire town where there had been nothing before—wooden houses, gravel streets, and all of the witches who had deserted New Orleans—surrounded by a high wall.

  Several people stared as he emerged through their magical barrier, but they didn’t look particularly threatening. Some carried pails of water, and one had a basket of bread from which he was selling loaves to passersby. He could hear the ring of a hammer on a blacksmith’s anvil, and a flock of chickens ran loose across the muddy gravel. It looked ordinary, like any town he might have stumbled across.

  “I need to see Lily Leroux,” Elijah announced to none of them in particular. He remembered Ysabelle’s daughter as a chubby-legged little girl, but she now had a child of her own, and Elijah realized that he should have kept a better eye on this coven.

  An older woman finished paying for a loaf of bread, then gestured for Elijah to follow her. She led him to the center of the compound, where the thatched roof of a large meetinghouse rose above all the other buildings. Indicating that he was to go inside, the white-haired woman left without speaking a word.

  He recognized Lily at once, although her coloring was darker than her mother’s, her aristocratic nose and her brown eyes were immediately familiar. Elijah could see a little of her father, Abelard’s, softness blurring the edges of her features, but otherwise Ysabelle’s face had bred true in her only daughter.

  She held court at one end of the meeting hall, surrounded by young witches and the remnants of what looked like a powerful spell. The entire floor was taken up with a massive pentagram, and the earthen ground looked as if it had melted. Not for the first time, Elijah wondered what kind of magic it had taken to pull Vivianne from her grave.

  Lily did not rise to greet him. She watched his approach with an amused smile playing on her lips.

  “I require an explanation,” Elijah told her when he reached the end of the hall. “Monsters from beyond the grave are terrorizing the city, and my brother tells me you were raising the dead on the night they first appeared.”

  Lily looked around at her companions, as if sharing a private joke. “Someone is being terrorized?” she asked curiously. “You may have noticed that we are no longer part of the city’s inner circle. Gossip takes some time to filter out our way.”

  “It’s hardly gossip,” Elijah countered. “I’ve seen them with my own eyes, and I have no doubt you know the creatures I mean. They tear the hearts out of men’s chests to eat, and they call themselves witches.”

  Lily rocked back in her chair as if he had struck her, mocking surprise. “You know our kind better than most, Elijah,” she scolded. “You know we don’t eat from humans.” Not like you do lingered unspoken between them.

  “I know what I witnessed,” Elijah said. “Aren’t you at all curious about these things that stalk the bayou, committing brutal murders in your name?”

  “My name is my own business,” Lily said. “What others do with it is theirs. I know nothing about this, and I cannot help you.” She leaned forward to rise to her feet, and as she did the shawl wrapped across her shoulders shifted just a bit. Just enough. “I think it’s best that you go. I’m sure you’re extremely busy.”

  “I am,” Elijah agreed, but instead of turning to go he bounded forward, pulling the corner of her shawl aside to reveal a silver chain that ended in his mother’s opal. Klaus hadn’t mentioned that. Elijah could think of a hundred reasons why he would have lied about it, and none of them were good. “But I think we have a bit more business here, first.”

  To his surprise, Lily didn’t flinch. “I now understand why it took so long for your brother to find someone to cast his spell,” she sighed, brushing his hands away from
her collar. “This kind of trouble always seems to follow you vampires.”

  Elijah stepped back, surprised by her brazenness. She was by all accounts a powerful witch, but to show such contempt to his face was truly impressive.

  “What was the true bargain you struck with Niklaus? He gave you his blood and my mother’s opal?” Elijah demanded an answer. “I suspect that curing some ailment of your daughter’s was just a cover. Tell me the truth, before I show you what it feels like to have your heart torn out.”

  Lily laughed, chuckling in the face of death, and Elijah realized that she must be quite mad. “You can’t hurt me, vampire,” she warned him, a teasing note in her voice. “Don’t you know what my pretty new necklace does?”

  Esther had owned countless baubles and charms, but most of their secrets had died with her. Elijah honestly had no idea what the large opal could do. Reading his silence, Lily relaxed back into her chair, resting her hands on its carved armrests. “This pendant links me to your brother,” she told him. “He can’t be killed, so nor can I. In the meantime, though, everything you do to me will happen to Niklaus. I can’t be touched, Elijah. Not by someone who values family as much as you do.”

  Elijah considered the merits of torturing his brother, but Lily was right. She was safe for now.

  Trust Klaus to strike a bargain with such a devious, untrustworthy witch. Elijah felt positive that Lily’s spell had something to do with the undead witches, but thanks to Klaus, his questioning had reached a stalemate.

  “I understand that you have a wedding to prepare,” Lily said to him. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend, but I hope you’ll give the happy couple my compliments.”

  “I’ll do that,” he assured her, venom dripping from his voice.

  The morts-vivants would come out when darkness fell, and Elijah still didn’t know what they were or how to stop them. Lily had been another dead end in a series of failures.