The Originals: The Loss Read online

  He nodded, and with one last glance at the soup, Rebekah had no choice but to leave. The banquet hall seemed almost like a dream after the bustling of the kitchens. She had draped the walls with honeysuckle vines, and the warmth of the candelabras carried the subtle, sweet smell throughout the room. Waiters were beginning to pour the wine, moving silently as shadows among the cheerful, lively vampires they served.

  Rebekah took her seat beside Elijah and tried to appear nonchalant. He looked preoccupied, his brown eyes focused on something far beyond the walls of the mansion. “I’m sure the good people of New Orleans can manage without you for a night,” she said a bit more tartly than she intended to thanks to her own anxious nerves.

  “Not all of them,” he replied grimly. “The morts-vivants take new hearts every night, and no one has yet found a way to stop them.”

  “Can you think of a single night since we arrived where no one has died in New Orleans?” she asked, tipping some wine into her mouth. Another servant set a goblet of blood beside her right hand, and she could already imagine the refined flavors mingling on her palate. “The darkness has always been full of monsters.”

  “This is different,” her brother insisted, glowering at his own goblet as it arrived. “These are monsters with a purpose. They’re connected to us somehow.”

  “To her, you mean.” Rebekah said. Vivianne’s flashes of darkness still troubled her—those sudden moments that Rebekah couldn’t quite put her finger on. Sometimes, when she looked at her new sister-in-law, she would have sworn she was looking at someone else entirely.

  Or perhaps Elijah wasn’t the only one who needed a crisis in order to be content. Maybe Rebekah was looking for trouble. She had gotten so used to Klaus’s endless drama over the years that it might just feel unnatural not to assume the worst about his actions. She found herself hoping that, once the dust from her little joke had settled, she would be in a better frame of mind to receive Vivianne into their family without jumping to fantastical conclusions.

  The soup course arrived, and Rebekah tasted hers delicately, letting just a tiny bit of it spread across her tongue, alert for any hint of something amiss. The venom was tasteless, and she couldn’t detect the faintest trace.

  She forced herself to swallow another, larger spoonful, knowing that she needed to fall ill along with the rest of the crowd in order to avoid suspicion. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad for her as for the rest—she would heal on her own, without having to rely on Klaus to cure her—but it still felt wrong to knowingly poison herself.

  Elijah ate his portion with none of her reserve, seeming to barely taste it. “Lily Leroux did the spell for Klaus,” he told her between mouthfuls, “and they both lied to me about whatever arrangement they made. She used an opal pendant of our mother’s to link herself to him for protection, which he didn’t even bother to tell us.”

  “Then she has something worth hiding,” Rebekah considered. She thought she heard a moan from one of the tables at the far end of the room, but she couldn’t see what—if anything—was happening. “And you think it’s something to do with those things you’re chasing around the bayou every night.”

  “I do,” Elijah confirmed. Then he frowned and turned his head, following the sound of another groan that was more distinct this time.

  Rebekah was sure that the venom was beginning to do its work on the guests, because she could feel it herself. The entire room was growing hazy. The smell of the thousands of flowers became an overripe perfume, just on the verge of rot. Things moved at the corners of her vision, shadows that may or may not have been real. Around her, conversation flagged and faltered, and beneath the cheerful strains of music she could hear more and more pained cries.

  “Why would a witch want to kill random humans?” she asked, trying to hold on to the thread of the conversation with all her might.

  Elijah’s eyes squinted and unfocused, as if he were listening to music she couldn’t hear. “She wouldn’t,” he said.

  A vampire fled from the hall, and another rose to her feet only to collapse. The first scream rose up from the diners, a high-pitched, strangled sound. “Sabotage,” Rebekah heard, and then, “Werewolves.”

  It was working perfectly. She saw Klaus push his chair back so hard it fell over, his face a mask of rage. He first checked to make sure Vivianne was unharmed—the poison wouldn’t affect her—and then he caught the nearest server by the collar. Although Rebekah couldn’t hear what question he asked she could see the raw power of compulsion in his eyes. The girl answered without hesitation, but Rebekah knew she couldn’t possibly tell him anything of use. Klaus snarled in frustration and snapped the server’s neck. Poor thing.

  “Werewolf poison,” she heard someone say again, and that finally spurred Klaus into action. His blood, that unique hybrid mix of vampire and latent werewolf, was the only known antidote. That always surprised Rebekah, coming as it did in the body of someone who was normally so destructive by nature.

  Klaus worked his way around the room, systematically offering his blood-smeared arms to one vampire after another. Vivianne trailed after him to make sure each guest was on the mend. Vivianne was Rebekah’s one source of minor regret. No bride would want the memory her wedding feast marred by this kind of unpleasantness, and it was a shame that she had to suffer for Klaus’s sins.

  Klaus didn’t bother healing Rebekah or Elijah, passing them without so much as a glance. Rebekah was free to simply watch, savoring the bedlam she had created during this elegant, happy occasion.

  Rebekah found that her gaze kept traveling back to Vivianne, her gown standing out like blood on snow. To Rebekah’s surprise, Vivianne didn’t look angry or even afraid. She looked pale, almost sick. She paused to lean on a chair, clutching its carved back as if it were the only thing keeping her on her feet.

  The werewolf venom shouldn’t have affected her, couldn’t have affected her. She was part werewolf, just like Klaus. And yet the longer Rebekah watched her, the worse she looked. Had Rebekah miscalculated some part of the poison? Klaus would never forgive her if that was the case.

  Suddenly, Vivianne’s hand shot out, snatching a goblet off the table and drowning its contents in one long swallow. She spilled some of the thick, viscous liquid down her chin in her haste, and it ran out of the corner of her mouth. A few drops of Romanian virgins’ blood splattered on the bodice of Vivianne’s dress, blending in so neatly that if Rebekah hadn’t seen it happen she might have thought it was part of the silk’s pattern.

  Vivianne straightened and wiped her lips self-consciously, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. Her hands shook at her sides, and she gripped her dress to keep them from trembling.

  “Elijah! Elijah, did you see that?” Rebekah tried to whisper, but her mouth wasn’t quite working.

  “Hmm?” Her brother couldn’t even turn his head toward her, and had missed the moment. He closed his eyes in pain and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  Rebekah was the only one who had seen Vivianne drink blood, and now she couldn’t stop seeing the scene over and over again.

  Rebekah had known that Vivianne might be changed by the Other Side, but this went further than that. This wasn’t trauma. What Rebekah had witnessed was the price of some terrible curse: the need for blood.

  Just like Elijah’s undead witches in the woods, she realized. They were eating hearts in order to stay alive, the same way vampires drank blood. And now Vivianne had joined them, another dead thing borrowing life from elsewhere.

  She hadn’t simply been given a second chance, the way Klaus insisted and his siblings had hoped. She had been altered somehow, and there had to be consequences—there always were. Rebekah had felt it since she’d first set eyes on Vivianne. Of course her brothers had missed it. They were always looking for truth in the wrong places.

  Vivianne must somehow be connected to the ghastly mo
rts-vivants. She wasn’t ripping hearts from chests—at least not yet—but there was darkness in Vivianne that was burning like a fuse toward gunpowder, and when it exploded there was no telling what might happen.

  Rebekah’s prank might have been juvenile and maybe even a little mean. But it had revealed a truth: Vivianne was dangerous. Even Klaus would have to admit that once Rebekah told him what she had seen. He had gambled to get Vivianne back, but he had gotten something evil in her place.

  As if to drive that reality home, Rebekah heard the unearthly wailing sound of the house’s protection spell. Someone had trespassed. The sound grew, and Rebekah cursed the awful timing of her “harmless prank.” It had rendered the vampires weak and disoriented just when it looked like they would be needed most.

  It had been foolish to think the wedding might ever go so smoothly that she would need to sabotage it, anyway. She turned to Elijah, who still looked a little glassy-eyed from the poison, although he had straightened in his chair at the sound of the alarm. He was shaking off the venom’s effects far faster than the others, but still wasn’t back to normal. “Look alive, brother,” Rebekah urged him. “I think tonight’s surprises are just beginning.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ELIJAH FELT LIKE he was emerging from a bank of clouds, stepping out of a haze into some kind of hell. Bodies writhed in pain all around him. Klaus was bleeding from both arms and his neck, and Rebekah was grimly separating the healthiest vampires from those who were still incapacitated by the werewolf venom. The chaos seemed nearly total until the chilling sound of the protection spell keened yet again, reminding Elijah that things could always get worse.

  He stumbled to the nearest window. There was no way to miss what had set off the spell: They were everywhere. He even recognized one or two faces from the mob that had attacked him in the bayou. The morts-vivants had come in force.

  “Close the doors!” Elijah bellowed, and even over the commotion in the hall he could see some vampires staggering to obey. Many of them didn’t even seem to have heard his shout, or perhaps they thought he was just another hallucination brought on by the poison. “We’re under attack; lock everything!”

  Elijah motioned to Klaus to keep feeding his blood to the last of the poisoned vampires. None of their army was at full strength yet, and their foes couldn’t be killed. It was going to be a bloodbath.

  He could hear the sound of doors and windows slamming shut all around the house, but it couldn’t block out the sound of the dead things’ grating voices. The noise was like a screw being turned in his ear, drilling slowly but inexorably toward his brain.

  “We’re sitting ducks in here,” a redheaded girl warned him, slamming wooden shutters across a pair of French doors. “We need to take the fight to them.” She must have been poisoned along with the rest of them, but she had probably been among the first to drink Klaus’s blood. Her freckled cheeks were flushed with excitement, but her gray eyes were sharp and focused.

  She was half right, and her instincts for battle were sharp. The morts-vivants couldn’t get inside, thanks to the protection spell that Ysabelle had worked on the house. More than forty years later, it still held, and if the monsters outside really were witches, they wouldn’t be able to enter without an invitation. But Elijah couldn’t just stand by while the vile things stalked his city, and he wasn’t about to hide behind magicked walls when an enemy showed up on his doorstep.

  “And who might you be, with such wise advice?” Elijah asked the redhead.

  “Oh, I’m Lisette. Pleased to be at your service.” She extended her hand to be kissed, as if they weren’t in the middle of preparing for a battle.

  “Lisette,” Elijah replied, bending to lightly kiss the top of her hand. Her named rolled in his mouth. “How long did it take you to heal, Lisette?” Elijah asked her. “How soon do you think the rest will be ready?”

  The girl evaluated the hall with shrewd eyes. More vampires were beginning to stagger back to their feet, but most of them still looked sick. “We’re not that easy to kill, you know,” she reminded him, deliberately sidestepping his questions with a sardonic smile. “Not even if the werewolves warm us up for our enemies first.”

  The connection was so obvious Elijah was surprised he hadn’t seen it first. The arrival of the morts-vivants so close on the heels of the poisoning was no coincidence. The witches and the werewolves must be working together somehow, and for the werewolves to take such a risk they must have been sure the witches could finish off every last vampire.

  Hugo Rey’s tunnels had collapsed in the explosion forty-four years before, but Rebekah hadn’t forgotten their value when she had improved the house. The original dirt passageways had been replaced with a network of wood-braced tunnels that ran to the very edges of the property. Those doors were points of weakness that the Mikaelsons had taken great pains to conceal and reinforce. The benefit of having such tunnels, of being able to outflank anyone who dared to approach the house uninvited, far outweighed the risk of leaving a tiny opening in the protection spell.

  “There’s a way we can attack them from behind,” Elijah suggested, blocking out the image of Ava’s lifeless body over and over. He had lived far too long to be afraid of a fight, but that didn’t mean he was enthusiastic about a battle against a horde of brutal, unkillable heart-eaters. Vampires would be killed, but it had to be done.

  “I’ll lead a group through the tunnel to the east,” Klaus announced, appearing at Elijah’s side with a savage grin on his face. The disastrous end of his wedding feast had enraged him, and then enemies had appeared practically wrapped in a bow. Klaus’s shirt was covered in blood, Elijah saw, and his self-inflicted wounds had barely started to heal.

  “You’ll sit this one out,” Elijah countered. Klaus opened his mouth to protest, but Elijah raised a hand to cut him off. “Stay with your bride,” he ordered. “She can’t be in this fight, and no one will protect her as well as you will, as much as I would like you to join us, brother.”

  He decided not to tell Klaus how important it really was that Vivianne survive this battle. It was about far more than sentiment: Lily Leroux was hiding something important, and Elijah felt sure it was related to the monsters at his door. Vivianne might well be the key to unraveling whatever Lily was plotting, and he wasn’t about to let her die a second time before he was able to figure it out.

  Klaus hesitated, torn between his vows to his new wife and his lifelong passion for battle, but with a muttered curse he ran to Vivianne’s side, gesturing toward the great curving staircase and explaining something Elijah couldn’t hear. They left the hall together, and that was one less thing for Elijah to worry about.

  “Rebekah, take a group through the tunnel to the south. I’ll take west, and”—Elijah’s eyes fell on the redheaded vampire who still lingered nearby—“Lisette, good. You’ll take north.” The girl nodded, standing at attention like a soldier awaiting orders. She’d do well enough, he could see. “Choose one more vampire you trust to replace Klaus in the east. The sickest will just have to follow us as they can. I’ve never seen one of these creatures die, and I don’t know if they can, so whatever you do to them don’t expect them to stay down for long.”

  “If we can’t slaughter them, we’ll at least drive them off,” Lisette agreed, and he could see that she would execute her part of the plan just as well as his own brother would have. Perhaps even better, without Klaus’s trademark unpredictability.

  “Go,” he ordered, and she flashed him a startlingly winning smile before spinning to make her way through the crowd. He could hear her calling orders as she went, and the disorganized clumps of vampires realigning into something resembling an army.

  Elijah worked his way around the room in the opposite direction, picking the most stable of the vampires and directing them toward the barricaded door in the cellar. Rebekah met him there with a sizable band of her
own.

  Together, they unbarred the door, working quickly to unblock the heavy slab of stone and move it aside. Lisette arrived, along with another vampire that Elijah recognized as one of Rebekah’s smitten admirers, each with several dozen others at their backs.

  “We’re under siege by monsters who don’t stay dead,” Elijah announced, opting for brevity over detail. “Break them up and get them away from the house however you can, and the first of you to figure out how to kill one gets the honor of killing a hundred more.”

  “Stirring speech.” Rebekah grinned, and he noticed a smile on Lisette’s face as well. The two women turned toward their opposite tunnels, Elijah and the other leader—Efrain, he remembered at last—hurried in their own directions, leading what Elijah hoped would be a coordinated attack .

  A mort-vivant jumped on him as soon as Elijah leapt up through the concealed door in the grass. The witch’s face was a rictus of hunger and fury, and the battle was joined before Elijah could so much as blink. They were just as strong as he had remembered, and perhaps even faster. It lunged again, arms outstretched toward Elijah’s chest, and as he ducked aside he found himself face-to-face with three more.

  He wondered for a moment if this was what it was like for a human to be hunted by a vampire, to know that the powerful creature bearing down on him saw him only as a meal. Luckily, Elijah was a great deal more than human. He grabbed one of the monsters by her arm and ducked his shoulder to roll her across his back, throwing her hard to the ground. He twisted the head of another all the way around, hearing her neck shatter as he did. The third got close enough to sink his teeth around Elijah’s collarbone, ripping into the flesh and viciously holding on until another vampire arrived to pull him off. The mort-vivant, an undistinguished-looking man in a wool coat who might have been about thirty, shoved his arm into the vampire’s chest and tore her heart free of her battered rib cage.