Текст книги "Первородные: Восхождение"

Автор книги: Julie Plec

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

AFTER TWO FULL days of pouring cloying amber liquid down his throat, Klaus was starting to feel nearly drunk enough. If he could just maintain this inhuman level of intoxication for a few years, he might—might—start to forget the sight of Vivianne turning her back on him. As always, the kind ladies at the Southern Spot had done their best to take his mind off his troubles, and one healthy-looking, bouncy brunette in particular had made it her mission to ease his pain. She had kept him supplied with good whiskey, charming banter, and every ounce of the expertise with which she plied her trade.

Best of all, she didn’t remind him of Viv in the slightest. Except when he noticed how dissimilar the two were, and then he called for more whiskey, and the dance began again.

Sooner or later, he suspected, he would have to step out of this happy haze and return to real life, but there was no rush. He liked it here, and this was a place that could never let him down. His siblings probably needed rescuing by now—they were talentless when it came to staying out of trouble—but surely they would rather have him at his best. He needed a few more days of restoration before he was ready to dust off his trademark swagger.

The brunette refilled his glass, and Klaus caught her around her waist and pulled her, giggling, onto his lap. “I’ve missed you,” he told her lustily, and she snuggled her ample bosom conveniently closer to his mouth. He sampled the whiskey, and then he sampled her. A week would be best, he decided. The world could do without him for a week.

Vivianne Lescheres obviously could.

It had never once occurred to him during their night together that she was saying good-bye. It should have, perhaps, but every clue had had an alternate explanation. A better explanation—one that fit Klaus’s way of looking at the world so that he had ignored the obvious. He hadn’t wanted to see that her relentlessly stubborn streak could work against him as easily as for him.

The brunette had an adorable sprinkling of freckles across her snub nose, and Klaus devoted all of his mental energy to counting them. He had everything he needed right here, and Viv could go to hell for all he cared. She didn’t appreciate him, anyway. He had been willing to reorder his entire life for her, to become a new and better man. If that wasn’t enough for her, then she hadn’t been worth it after all.

The belled curtain across the door chimed merrily, and a few of the whores squealed. Klaus’s girl didn’t so much as flicker her eyes toward the sound, and he made a mental note not to get so drunk that he forgot to pay her handsomely.

“Of course I found you here,” a voice snarled arrogantly, and Klaus furrowed his brow in concentration. It was a familiar voice, and it was attached to a pair of legs in dark leather boots. He followed the boots upward, then continued along a line of gold buttons that edged the waistcoat. There was a long neck above that, with a juicy pulse beating beside a large Adam’s apple. Klaus acknowledged he might be a bit drunker than he’d thought as his eyes finished their lazy trek to rest on Armand Navarro’s smug face.

“A likely story,” Klaus slurred carefully, “claiming you walked into a brothel because you were looking for my company.”

Armand’s answering smile really required a punch in the mouth, but Klaus’s hands were otherwise occupied and his head felt a bit fuzzy. He suspected that his best chance of winning a fight right now was to stay out of one. Perhaps if he sat very still, Armand would get bored and leave him alone with his cheerful brunette friend. Everyone would win in that scenario.

“Stand up and face me like a man,” Armand demanded. “We knew it was only a matter of time before one of you vermin went too far, and I wanted to be the one to ensure that you pay for it personally.” Perhaps a fight was unavoidable, then. Klaus had been ready to empty the city of werewolves once they learned about his affair with Vivianne, but having to do it without her seemed joyless and dull.

The smile had drained from the whore’s face, and Klaus patted her pleasingly rounded thigh reassuringly. “You should go check on our room,” he suggested, feeling considerably more sober already. “I’m sure you remember how I like it.”

She nodded and rose, shrinking away from Armand as she passed by. Klaus watched her shapely rear fondly as she walked away, then returned his attention to the annoying werewolf in front of him. Armand’s breathing was rapid, his pupils dilated. He was keyed up and ready for a fight, and Klaus could only imagine one reason why.

“We don’t have to do this,” Klaus offered magnanimously. He certainly wouldn’t mind pummeling Armand into a pulpy corpse, but just this once he should give the werewolf a pass. He had, after all, spent a glorious and extremely thorough night with Armand’s fiancée, and that was probably injury enough. If Armand was willing to walk away, Klaus would let him.

“Stand up,” Armand growled menacingly. “You’ll answer for your brother’s crime whether you want to or not, so meet your fate like a man.”

The intoxicated wheels in Klaus’s head turned slowly around that new piece of information. It seemed possible this wasn’t about Vivianne after all—maybe Armand still didn’t even know about what had happened between them. Maybe Viv had kept their secret. Maybe she cared for him even now....

“What has my dear brother done to you?” Klaus asked, rising to his feet. He was pleased to discover that he did not sway.

Armand’s smirk was tainted by the ugly yellow gleam in his eyes. “He attacked us in the woods,” he explained, sounding both murderous and a little bit triumphant. “On his own, during the full moon. The fool died in the Saint Louis River, and now you’re going to join him.”

Well, good for him, Klaus thought. Elijah had taken on the entire werewolf population of New Orleans. Klaus realized that he must have interrupted the changing celebration, and for whatever reason he’d decided to fight off the wolves. In spite of Armand’s cocky assurance that Elijah had not survived, Klaus knew differently—mere werewolf venom wouldn’t kill an Original. Klaus felt a slow burn of pride for his idiot brother.

Klaus didn’t hesitate. He cocked his fist back and punched Armand squarely in the nose, and the werewolf’s hot blood spurted out in a sudden torrent of red. Armand looked surprised for a moment, and then his eyes went fully yellow and he struck. Klaus heard the sound of wood splintering as Armand knocked him first into a grandfather clock, and then downward through a low table. Klaus would pay for a lot more than the whiskey and his brunette’s time before he would be welcome back in the Southern Spot again, and the thought enraged him even further.

He drove his knee up into Armand’s stomach, pressing his advantage when the wolf gasped. He used the distraction to grab one of the shattered legs of the coffee table, and bashed it into the side of Armand’s head. The blow dazed him for a moment, and Klaus seized the opportunity. Driving his arms and legs upward, he threw Armand off of him and against the wall behind their heads, which made a dry cracking sound when the wolf hit it.

Armand fell heavily to the floor, but somehow managed to pull all of his long, awkward limbs into order and rolled to his feet with improbable grace. Klaus was still half crouched when he was knocked to the floor again, and the two of them struggled for a moment with neither getting the upper hand.

Elijah had struck at the werewolves when they were strongest. Drunk or no, Klaus could certainly do his part. And while Armand might not have realized it yet, he had Vivianne to pay for as well.

Klaus trapped one of Armand’s legs with his own and twisted, putting the tall werewolf flat on his back and rising up to sit on his chest. He lashed out with his fists, hitting Armand again and again. In his mind, Klaus saw Elijah wounded, Vivianne changing. Blood flowed freely until Armand’s face was barely visible through it, and then his eyes returned to their normal, dull blue and rolled back in his head.

Klaus watched him for a moment to make sure he would really stay down, and then staggered inelegantly to his feet. “Ladies,” he offered politely to the few whores who had remained cowering against the walls. “I apologize for any inconvenience this brute has caused you. Rest assured that I will always be available to defend your honor, just as I have today.” He tried to smooth his shirt, and realized that it was soaked with Armand’s blood.

He reached into his pocket and grabbed the hand of the nearest girl to drop in a handful of gold coins, folding her fingers closed around them in case she was too stunned to do so herself. He kissed her on the cheek for good measure, feeling more like his old self than ever. Whiskey, the company of half a dozen good women, and beating a werewolf unconscious: That was the recipe for Niklaus Mikaelson.

With a spring in his step, he left the brothel and turned his feet toward the house Elijah had acquired. He couldn’t wait to hear his brother’s side of this bizarre tale. If it was half as entertaining as Armand had made it sound, it was past time for the Original vampires to catch up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ELIJAH HAD GIVEN up on trying to figure out what was real. Rebekah had been gone so long that he wasn’t sure whether she had been there to begin with. Esther had walked in and out of the cellar more than a few times, which probably hadn’t really happened, but the man in the blue soldier’s coat with the wooden stake in his hand seemed almost as improbable.

Certainly, Kol and Finn had not stepped out of their coffins to visit with him, and his two mortal—and long-dead—brothers had not stood vigil at his bedside. But that meant it was possible Niklaus was not there, either. The werewolves’ poison had spun wild dreams and visions that he was sure were more meaningful than true, and yet Elijah could not quite grasp their message. Perhaps that was all a part of the hallucinations—the conviction that the nightmares must be trying to tell him something.

It had been hours or days or weeks since Rebekah had pulled the unconscious blue-clad man through the ceiling, and yet she had never returned. So that may not have been real, either. Except how could Elijah have gotten here, in this dank cellar on a bed of soft blankets, if Rebekah had not first brought him, and then inexplicably abandoned him?

There was something about a sunrise across the river and a bleeding man in the bayou, but it was confused with the conviction that he had flown away from the wolves and then nested here like some strange, unlikely bird. He had no sense of what had happened since he’d been attacked, but each hour was a little less confusing than the last, and so Elijah suspected he was drifting toward lucidity.

He ached all over. His wounds itched as they faded into smoothness, and with every tiny movement he discovered a new source of tenderness. But there was no doubt that he was healing, and Esther’s magic had served its purpose once again.

He opened his eyes and blinked, trying to distinguish the faint difference between the darkness in the cellar and the kind behind his closed eyelids. There was the slightest outline of light around the edges of a trapdoor, and he stared at it intently until it was all he could see.

When the trapdoor was suddenly thrown open, the flood of light behind it nearly blinded him.

“Brother,” an amused voice called down, and Elijah wondered if he was hallucinating again. Klaus was haloed by sunlight and covered in blood, hardly the most encouraging sign of his mental recovery.

“Brother,” he replied cautiously, lifting himself gingerly onto one elbow and discovering with relief that it did not hurt as much as he had expected. “Did you bring me here?”

Klaus jumped down into the cellar and stared at Elijah, his eyes appraising. “You look well,” he remarked, sounding grudgingly impressed. “I heard you took on the entire Navarro pack under a full moon, but if that’s true I would hate to see how they fared.”

Elijah pulled himself up to a sitting position and sighed. “It’s true,” he assured his brother. “A few of them will certainly remember me.”

Klaus crouched companionably beside the blankets, looking totally unaware that his clothes were soaked with blood. It must not have been his, but that stirred something troubling in the back of Elijah’s foggy brain. Someone else’s blood had been the point of this fiasco, and he felt around frantically to find...something. Something that was missing.

“All your parts still there?” Klaus grinned, and Elijah glowered at him.

Blood! That was what he had needed—werewolf blood. And despite all his cuts and bruises, he had succeeded. So where the hell was his handkerchief? He patted his clothes again, rifling through the tatters, but the bloody cloth was gone. It’d been the one thing he’d needed to work the protection spell, and he’d failed.

Elijah closed his eyes and breathed. He would have to regroup and come up with a new plan—that was how it always went. There were setbacks and then there were solutions, and then there were more setbacks. His next plan would have to wait until he absorbed the magnitude of this failure.

“Where have you been?” he asked Klaus, rather than answering him. “Is all that your blood?”

Klaus grinned happily. “None of it, as far as I recall. That idiot Armand decided to bother me during an otherwise lovely morning. He was under the impression you had been killed, and that he was capable of doing the same to me. It ended bloodily for him.”

Elijah opened his mouth, then closed it again, momentarily stunned. If he hadn’t felt his healing wounds so acutely, he would have sworn he was still dreaming. But when he reached out and grabbed Klaus’s soaking-wet shirt, he knew this was really happening. Suddenly, his grin matched his brother’s. “You did well,” he told Klaus, whose blue-green eyes widened in surprise. “Now give me your shirt.”

* * *

YSABELLE STEPPED BACK from the fresh line of peat and muttered as the flames sped around the perimeter of the Mikaelsons’ land.

“Nice trick,” Klaus remarked good-naturedly.

Elijah elbowed him in the ribs. “Concentrate,” he reminded Ysabelle, with a warning glare at his brother.

“I remember how this goes,” the witch assured him. She mixed her potion deftly, this time swirling in the blood she had coaxed from Klaus’s shirt. She rehearsed the incantation one final time before she began to circle the land and pour out the liquid.

“That will take forever,” Klaus grumbled, kicking at a tuft of grass. “Was she this slow the first time?”

“I don’t really care as long as it works,” Elijah countered. He watched Ysabelle reappear on the far side of the house and waited, barely daring to breathe. She did not look at them, instead keeping her eyes fixed on the potion spilling onto the long line of fire. She allowed herself a ghost of a smile when her iron bowl emptied just when she had reached the end. This time, there was no boom, but the world seemed to ripple and the pressure mounted. Then, it seemed to Elijah that the house absorbed the brutal, urgent silence into itself, and the walls swallowed it whole.

She’d done it—and now his family was finally safe.

He would have to arrange for their belongings to be brought from the hotel. He had dreamed of seeing Kol’s and Finn’s coffins in the basement with him, but that was an illusion. It was odd, actually, that Rebekah hadn’t moved them, unless he’d only imagined her as well. That part of his memory still felt hazy. Trying to put events into their proper order only made him feel like he was sliding back into the venomous fever.

He blinked in the sunlight, trying to put his finger on what had changed. The house looked exactly the same, although that was already an improvement over their last attempt.

Klaus wandered closer to it, climbing up onto the low porch with his head cocked, looking for a sign that the spell had really worked. Ysabelle moved the other way, stepping across the extinguished line of peat. She fumbled in her bodice for a moment, then withdrew something that flashed silver in the lazy afternoon sunlight. With an agile ripple of her shoulder, she threw it squarely at Klaus’s back.

Elijah didn’t bother to move. If she had failed a second time, she might as well kill them. But the knife bounced back, landing on the grass as if it had been dropped rather than ever thrown. Ysabelle’s face was lit with her triumph, and Elijah clasped her shoulder appreciatively.

“Thank you,” he told her, but his mind was already elsewhere. The deadly point of a weapon...He had seen that before, and recently. Wading through the hallucinations, he could distinguish the memory of a blue-coated man with a stake.

He’d crept in from one of the passageways, his weapon held at the ready. He’d said something, hadn’t he? Something about Rebekah. About taking Rebekah. And then she appeared, attacked the man, and pulled him out of the cellar.

So why had she not returned? He was now sure that she’d rescued him from the river but that had been at least a day or two ago. Who was that man, and why had Rebekah not simply disposed of his body and returned?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

REBEKAH STARED OUT at the ocean, watching the waves chase and break across one another. She could have stayed there forever. She felt finally, totally at peace.

Eric joined her on the little terrace, resting a warm, possessive hand on her shoulder. She smiled up at him, remembering the feeling of safety she had experienced the first time they met. He was waiting, and he must feel like his entire life depended on the choice she had to make. But he looked relaxed, simply happy to be with her in this little abandoned cottage facing the sea.

Rebekah had fully intended to make good on her plan to drown him, but she had been overcome by fear and curiosity in the end. She’d wanted to know the details of his messages to her father, and she’d needed to understand why he’d gone to such lengths to deceive her. He could have pretended to shelter her without pretending to love her. He certainly didn’t need to propose to her, and so why had he? What had been the point of his twisted game?

Once she had reached the seashore, she had waited impatiently for him to wake up so she could kill him. And then, with his first breath, he’d said that he was so relieved she was safe.

It was too much, that he would try to keep up the charade even now. But something in the softness of his lips, the trusting look in his eyes, gave her pause.

“How did you get away from that monster?” Eric gasped, and then he looked around them in confusion. “What is this place, and how are we here?”

“‘That monster’?” she repeated. “You were the one who was trying to kill him.”

Eric nodded then winced and rubbed at his throat. “He killed Felix,” he explained, grimacing. “I returned to find Felix murdered, and you gone. I knew the creature was punishing us for our curiosity. We had heard that there was a nest of his kind near here, and so when I realized you had been taken I searched the area. I found the tracks where he carried you from the river. A piece of your dress had snagged on the reeds and so I knew you had been there. I followed your trail to this house. I watched from the trees, and finally I saw you.”

Rebekah tried to make sense of his halting speech. He had found their house, and must have seen her come up through the trapdoor while she had been exploring the tunnels beneath it. And then, believing her to be Elijah’s prisoner, he had used that same door to try to set her free.

It was a ludicrous explanation, but she found that she still wanted to trust him. The way he stared up at her, as if he were drinking in her presence, she could actually believe that he had thought her a helpless victim all along.

Except that Felix had said otherwise before he died.

She could not stand the layers of lies between them anymore. It was not serving her purpose to keep pretending. And the only way to figure out the truth was to reveal what she was. There, in the light of day, where Eric could see.

“The man in the cellar is a vampire,” she told him bluntly, and then she concentrated for a moment so that her own fangs extended into view. “He is my brother. I am a vampire, too, and so you understand why I couldn’t let you hurt him.”

Eric remained sprawled out on the sand, carefully thinking over her words. Even if he had known all along, she hadn’t expected such composure from him. “You were not kidnapped,” he said finally. “You...you killed Felix.” He did not sound angry or afraid—but amused.

“Felix tried to kill me,” she said. “He tried to ambush me with the same stake I found you holding over Elijah. You attacked us. Felix said you had been hired to find us, and that you’d sent reports back to my...to your employer.”

Eric sighed and closed his eyes. “The man who hired us wanted only information, not murder. He chose me because I had education and resources, which Felix did not—he only had a fervent desire to hunt down monsters. Our employer hoped that would lead me to you. But I deceived him, and I lied to Felix as well. I didn’t want anyone else to find vampires—I wanted them to be all mine.”

“You sent no reports,” Rebekah interpreted. “Or you sent false ones. And if he had no education, then Felix could not write any himself, nor read what you wrote. Then no one but you now knows where we are. But why?” It made no sense, but he stood to gain nothing from inventing that tale—and if he was the only person who knew her secret, then killing him would keep her safe.

Felix had promised Rebekah that she would be hunted down, and Eric could have told her the same story, trying to bluff his way into some kind of negotiation. The chance he would survive would be slim, but it would have been smarter than saying that her exposed secret could die with him, right there on the beach. As bizarre as it seemed, she found herself inclined to believe what Eric was telling her. She sensed that, like her, he was ready to simply tell the truth.

His hazel eyes had opened again, and lingered on the smallest details of her face. “Your brother,” he repeated. “I did not know.”

“He was lying half dead,” Rebekah snapped, irritated by her own confusion on top of everything else. “How did you think he could have carried me away in that state? He hardly looked a threat.”

“His injuries confirmed that he had fought with Felix.” Eric coughed and rubbed at his throat again, then tried to prop himself up on his elbows. With a firm hand, Rebekah indicated that he should stay where he was. “And I thought that even a wounded vampire could manage to kidnap a frightened widow.”

In spite of herself, Rebekah laughed aloud. “You were wrong on every count.” Really, the idea of Elijah’s gruesome wounds coming from a tangle with some human was ridiculous. Rebekah hadn’t gotten a scratch in their brief struggle.

To her surprise, Eric smiled at her. “I knew you were extraordinary,” he murmured. “And yet I find myself embarrassed by how thoroughly I underestimated you. And equally as ashamed that my lieutenant picked up on the truth before I did, when I could not be there to protect you.”

Of course she was extraordinary, but it seemed like a rather odd reaction to everything she had just disclosed. For a human. “You don’t sound as alarmed as I would have expected,” she pointed out, showing her fangs again for emphasis.

“I am hopeful that you’ll let me live, in a sense,” he admitted. She scowled, but her eyes roamed to the lean chest that his ripped shirt exposed. His strong hands, and how capable they looked...

“If you didn’t want to report our whereabouts back to you benefactor, then what did you want?”

“I’ve been hoping to meet a vampire for years now, but not because I wanted to kill one,” he replied.

“I don’t understand, Captain. If not to kill him, then what was the point?” She remembered the sight of the dead werewolf with the wooden stake protruding from his chest, and shuddered. “You cannot tell me you have not hunted us, and a hunt should end with a death.”

“My death, though,” Eric argued urgently, pushing himself up into a sitting position. This time, she let him. “Since Marion died so suddenly, so senselessly, my own death is all I have been able to think about. It haunts me to know that I will simply end, between one breath and the next. I stood before her grave and vowed that I would not follow her so easily. I would not let some sickness, some wound, some accident rip me out of the world. When I discovered writings about your kind, I knew that you held the keys to life and death. I need those keys, Rebekah. I have searched for years so that I could beg you to make me like you. Kill me, so that I cannot die.”

She recoiled, hope and fear warring together in her heart. She had assumed his obsession with death was morbid, that he hated having to live in a world from which every trace of his wife was gone. Death was indeed his enemy, she realized, but only because he loved being alive. She wanted to believe him so badly that it was almost physically painful. “Next you will say you never intended to kill my brother,” she hissed, her voice even harsher than she expected. “You were just trying to threaten a vampire into turning you?”

“I thought he had taken you,” Eric shouted and then winced and lowered his voice again. “I saw you emerge from that tunnel, too afraid to run away. I knew I had to act before the sun went down, and the vampire woke up.

“When I saw no further signs of you or your captor, I tried to follow you inside,” he rasped on. “It was foolish, but when I found him lying there, I thought the risk had paid off.” He frowned, his brow furrowing deeply. He raised one hand to run a rough finger down the side of her face, and the small touch sent shivers through her body. She found herself at a loss for words. “I will not deny I planned to kill him for his sins against you. I intended to kill him if it cost me my life or even a chance at eternal life. What would any of it matter if I lost you?” he said.

She lifted her hand to cover his, and he wove his fingers between hers. “Once I met you, I began to want more than just immortality. I wanted to share it with you,” he finished.

Rebekah felt a sudden heat flushing her skin. She bent down and kissed him passionately, and he wound his fingers in her long hair to keep her close. In that moment she knew she wanted to stay that way forever.

* * *

THEY HAD FOUND the abandoned cottage and lost track of the time. They had talked about everything—learning each other from the beginning, with no secrets between them this time.

He told her what he knew of Mikael’s plans and whereabouts, which naturally wasn’t much at all. They had met only once in an inn outside of Paris, and after that meeting Mikael had handled their business through associates. In turn, Rebekah told him about her father’s past, and he held her while she cried at the most bitter parts. She talked about her short life as a human, and he reminisced about the brief time with his beloved wife.

Most of all, though, they made love. Even when they had to pause, their bodies remained in constant contact. They could not stop touching: hair, shoulders, lips, back, ankles, everything. Her fingers traced the scars from his battles, and his calloused hands explored the flawless silk of her skin. They clung and collided, entwined and caressed. She drank her fill of his blood, and he begged her to take more.

She could not, though, not yet. She had made a promise to the witches of New Orleans nine years before, and her brothers’ bargains were tied to her own. As long as she remained in the vicinity of the city, she could make no new vampires, or else they would all be cast out.

Elijah and Klaus would not forgive her for that disobedience, but they would not absolve her for leaving them, either. She spent hours weighing those two choices, because the only other option she could think of was refusing Eric, and that she would not do. After all of her long life she had found a true mate, and she fully intended to keep him.

Eric’s hand slid down from her shoulder to drift along her collarbone, and he bent to kiss the side of her throat. He had extraordinary stamina for a human, and she could only imagine what he would be like as a vampire. She reached up and pulled him down closer, always closer, her mind made up. “We will leave together,” she told him softly. “I will make them understand that you are my family now, and we will go.”