Текст книги "Первородные: Восхождение"

Автор книги: Julie Plec

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

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PROLOGUE

1766

LILY LEROUX HAD promised herself that she wouldn’t cry. Her mother would never have forgiven her for crying. Lily’s job was to look strong and poised in her fitted black dress, to accept the community’s condolences without seeming to need them. She was in charge of New Orleans’s witches now, or whatever was left of them. She had to lead them, not lean on them.

They could certainly use some leading. Lily’s mother had done her best to hold them together after the hurricane they’d created had razed the city to its foundations more than forty years ago, but their losses had been catastrophic. And the guilt of having caused so much destruction...the guilt was even more devastating.

In the meantime, other players had stepped into the void of power left behind by the witches. The French had recently handed New Orleans over to the Spanish, who had chosen to wholly ignore their new territory. Instead, it was the vampires who had taken the reins.

The Mikaelsons—the Originals, three of the very first vampires in existence—had made their move at an ideal time. Elijah, Rebekah, and, worst of all, Klaus now ruled the city. The witches hated them with a passion, although Lily suspected that her mother had always nursed some kind of soft spot for them. She had categorically shut down any talk of retaliation or reprisal by reminding them that their own hands were responsible for their current sorry state. If they hadn’t tried to seek reckless revenge against the werewolves for betraying their truce, they wouldn’t be sequestered in the backwaters of the bayou.

And the result of that policy was that Ysabelle Dalliencourt’s funeral was a sorry shadow of what it should have been. She had led her people out of the ruined city and kept their community together, she had counseled them against a destructive path of war, and taught them to focus on themselves and their craft rather than on the walking abominations that sat on their former throne.

She should have lain in state in the heart of New Orleans, not in the sorry little clapboard meetinghouse the witches had built in the midst of a swamp.

The Original vampires were responsible for this slight, Lily knew. They could have forgiven the witches’ weakness, as the witches had once looked past the brutality of the vampires. Instead, the Mikaelsons had tasted freedom and run with it, creating an army of new vampires from the humans of New Orleans and driving the witches out.

Everyone stood, and Lily rose with them, numbly. Six witches lifted her mother’s wooden casket on their shoulders and she heard Marguerite sob as they carried it past. Lily rested a comforting hand on her daughter’s thin shoulder, and fought the burning behind her eyes.

But she would not cry. Ysabelle had done well by her people, but her death was a sign to Lily that it was time for a new era, a changing of the guard. Lily was sick to death of subsisting under the vampires’ tyranny. The Mikaelsons needed to answer for their sins, and Lily Leroux intended to make sure they paid in full.

CHAPTER ONE

1766

IT WAS KLAUS’S kind of night. Wine and blood flowed freely, and the relaxed company and summer heat had led to an easy loosening of everyone’s clothing. He could only guess what was going on upstairs, but he didn’t intend to leave it to his imagination for long.

There would be time enough to take it all in. That was one of the nice things about being both a king and an immortal: He could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Elijah took care of the running of the city, Rebekah took care of the running of the Mikaelsons, and Klaus was free to take care of Klaus.

Carousing vampires filled every room on the ground floor, and Klaus could hear the party continuing through the ceiling above. In the forty-odd years since they had taken possession of a dying smuggler’s modest home, the Original vampires had done a great deal of adding on and improving, but even so it was filled to capacity. To effectively rule over a city full of eager young vampires the Mikaelsons might need to move to a larger home, but finding more land wouldn’t be the problem it once had been for them. New property was easy to come by in a metropolis empty of werewolves and witches.

Most of the werewolves who managed to survive the hurricane and explosion of 1722 had straggled away, and the ones who remained kept their noses down. The witches had fared a bit better, but not much: They squatted out in the bayou, their taste for power broken. New Orleans was essentially free of vermin.

It still made his gut twist in pain to think of what they’d done to Vivianne, even decades after her death. The way the witches had offered her hand in marriage to the werewolves, as if her only value lay in her heritage as the child of both clans. After signing her life away in a treaty to bring peace, the werewolves had demanded more of her mind and heart at every turn. She had died terribly young, still trying to make everything right between the factions.

“You’re so quiet tonight, Niklaus. Should I get you another drink?” A buxom young vampire fell into Klaus’s lap with a giggle and interrupted the dark turn of his thoughts. Her long, strawberry-blonde hair smelled like orange blossoms. Lisette, he reminded himself. She was one of the newest crop of recruits in their little army, but she carried herself with the ease of a vampire who had lived for centuries. She did not seem intimidated by the Originals, nor did she strain herself to impress them, and that indifference had won Klaus’s approval.

He smiled, blowing strands of her long hair away from his face. “Would you like me to still recognize you by the end of the night?” he asked her airily.

“I’d lay odds that your memory can stand up to more liquor than you have in this entire house.” Lisette returned his fond smile with a saucy wink. “But you could just join me for some air, if you like. It’s a beautiful night, and I’m restless. Helping you keep your wits about you could be my good deed for the day.”

“You want to leave my party?” Klaus asked, curious in spite of his bleak thoughts. “I never thought of you as the solitary type.” He could not, in fact, remember ever seeing Lisette alone. Perhaps he had confused her with another new vampire after all. He had been drinking liberally, trying his best to truly join in the revelry around him. Forty-four years, and he still felt as though Vivianne might walk through the door and make him whole again.

“I am deep and mysterious,” Lisette told him, with a mock seriousness in her wide-set gray eyes. “Come upstairs with me and I’ll prove it to you.”

Klaus brushed her reddish hair aside and kissed her neck lingeringly. She sighed and wriggled a little, giving his mouth better access. “Not tonight, love,” he murmured softly, traveling down to her collarbone. Across the room, another pair of vampires moved together in a similar way. Watching them, Klaus continued to brush Lisette’s lightly freckled skin with his lips, but it only made him feel even hollower. He could go through the motions, but he couldn’t be consumed by them. No matter how far he wandered down the path of debauchery, he couldn’t quite get lost.

He wanted Vivianne back. That was the simple, scalding truth of the matter. He had tried to bury her and tried to mourn and tried to move on, because he knew that was how death was supposed to work. He had seen it countless times, even though no one would ever be forced to mourn the loss of him. His mother had been a witch, his true father had been a werewolf, and to save him from a certain death, his mother had made him a vampire. Klaus would never die.

It was useless to compare himself to other people. Niklaus Mikaelson was not in a position to simply lie down and accept the workings of normal, faceless, mortal death. It was stupid and beneath him. If he wanted Vivianne Lescheres at his side, ruling New Orleans as his queen for eternity, it should not be an impossible demand. Not for the likes of him.

Lisette shifted again, rather enjoyably, trying to bring his full attention back to her. It was no use, though. “Ma petite Lisette, my heart is not in this celebration tonight, so I will make my farewell,” he apologized, sliding her gently back onto her feet.

“As you wish,” she said before sauntering off, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Klaus was watching her go. He was, of course—it was a simple courtesy after rejecting her advances. And the back of her was just as easy on the eyes as the front, so he didn’t mind.

When she was gone he eased himself up out of his chair and slipped out through a different door. A few voices called after him as he moved through the dimly lit rooms, which were full of sharp teeth, ringing laughter, and sensuous limbs. He ignored them, having finally realized where he wanted to spend this night.

He climbed the ornate spiral staircase, lined with a red silk carpet that Rebekah had ordered from the Far East. As he passed by several bedrooms he heard his name called again, but this time in softer, throatier voices. He resisted the impulse to look through the doors that had been carelessly—or deliberately—left open, making instead for a small staircase at the back of the house.

Klaus had asked his siblings to keep it private, and so Rebekah picked a medieval tapestry to conceal the doorframe: a unicorn, with a gold-threaded mane laid gently in the lap of a lovely virgin. Rebekah had the strangest notions sometimes. He glanced behind him and then swept the curtain aside, retreating from his guests and their revelry to the safety of his attic sanctuary.

This was the one place his sister’s restless hands had not touched. The attic was much larger than it had been when they had first inherited the house, but it’d retained its original rustic look. Unpolished beams crisscrossed the high, gabled roof, and the rough floorboards creaked charmingly beneath his feet. There were a few windows set into the peaks of the gables, and during the day sunlight streamed in from all directions.

Klaus moved his easel with the sun, watching his paintings change over the course of each day. He’d sometimes climb up here at night and light a few candles, stepping back from the easel to take in the effect of all of his canvases at once. He had been working feverishly and couldn’t remember ever being so productive.

It was a waste, though, because every last painting was of her. Vivianne’s left eye, black in a pale sea of skin. The outline of Vivianne running through a cobblestoned street in the middle of the night. The sound of Vivianne’s laughter, captured so perfectly that someone who had never met her would still know what it was. Vivianne in his bed the first night, the last night, every night.

It wasn’t work; it was torture. He could never paint anything else. Whatever he tried his hand at simply became another aspect of Vivianne.

His current painting was of her hair: black and sleek as a raven’s wings, but with a life and movement that Klaus struggled to capture exactly. In the light of his candle it looked flat and wrong, an entire story he was somehow failing to tell. He picked up a brush and began to work, adding texture and light in some places, while leaving others as dark as gravity.

The wailing sound of the house’s protection spell went off again, as it had been all night long. Everyone else was too busy partying to pay attention to it, but Klaus stopped, brush halfway to canvas, at the sight of a witch at the east window. She sat on the outer lintel, poised as if she were resting on a park bench.

Klaus knew her at once. No matter what Ysabelle Dalliencourt’s old spell assumed, this was not exactly an unexpected intruder on their land. He could see traces of her mother’s face in hers, in the strong, straight nose and the long planes of her cheeks. Her hair was darker, more of a ruddy brown than an auburn, but her eyes were the same fathomless brown.

He crossed the room quickly, wishing that he could cover all of his canvases as he went. Vivianne and Lily might have been cousins, but Lily had no right to see her image the way Klaus portrayed it. No matter her relation, Lily was one of them, a descendant of the cowards and weaklings who had let Viv slip away.

He opened the window and invited her inside nonetheless. Lily was also the first witch in over forty years to respond to Klaus’s overtures, and he couldn’t afford to slight her.

To raise the dead was difficult, but it was more than just that. It required dark and frightening magic that few would dare to even attempt. For decades Klaus had let it be known—quietly, without involving his siblings in something that was really none of their concern—that the price of readmission to New Orleans was Vivianne. The witches wanted their home back badly, but none had broken ranks to try their hand. Ysabelle had much to do with that, he knew, but now she was dead, and her daughter had come to bargain.

“I can grant you what you desire,” Lily Leroux told him with no preamble. “But it will cost you. One item for the spell, and another for my daughter.”

“As I have said—” Klaus began, but she waved the words off impatiently.

“I know what you are willing to offer,” she reminded him. “Now listen to what I want.”

Klaus was never eager to be on the wrong side of a bargain, but if it meant that Vivianne would be returned to him, he would listen to anything the witch had to say.

CHAPTER TWO

REBEKAH HAD TO admit that Klaus knew how to throw a party. She and her two siblings had lived in relative solitude for so long that now it was as if she could never get enough of their own kind, and Klaus always seemed ready to provide her with plenty of company. Lithe young vampires filled the mansion, dancing, singing, drinking, and casting alluring glances at one another...and at her. Always at her. She was more than a celebrity among them; she was practically a goddess.

After a few glasses of champagne, Rebekah found that being worshipped suited her just fine. There were a few—well, more than a few—young male vampires who made a sport of competing for her attention, and she encouraged them shamelessly. There was a Robert and a Roger she constantly mixed up, and Efrain, who had extraordinary blue eyes but got tongue-tied at the mere sight of her. Tonight was about celebrating, and tomorrow night probably would be, too.

Robert (she was almost sure) refilled her glass before it was empty, and she smiled languidly at him. They were like sweet, admiring puppies, sitting at her feet and lapping up every scrap of her attention. It was impossible to take any of them seriously, but perhaps something not-so-serious was exactly what she needed.

She had been in love, and she knew how that ended. But she would live for a very long time, and it was not realistic to spend the rest of eternity running away from every sort of connection. A good fling might be exactly what she needed...and then perhaps another one after that.

A cheerful-looking vampire with reddish-gold hair strolled into the parlor where Rebekah held court, and she noticed Klaus leaving the drawing room in the opposite direction. Sulking again, she guessed. He was as magnetic as ever, drawing in humans and vampires alike. They flocked to the house at his suggestion, and then he hid from them like a hermit. He was going up to that drafty attic again; she just knew it.

“I’m sorry for my brother’s rudeness,” she told the female vampire impulsively.

The girl’s gray eyes widened in momentary surprise, as if it’d never occurred to her to be offended by Klaus’s abrupt moods. Rebekah felt foolish for having even mentioned it, but then the vampire smiled easily. Her teeth were white and even, like a good string of pearls. “No need,” she assured Rebekah, as casually as if they were equals. “He is who he is.”

“Wise words,” Rebekah agreed, draining her champagne and then staring pointedly at Roger. He hurried away to find a new bottle. “Klaus doesn’t have it in him to think of others.”

The only thing to which Klaus had really applied himself over the past forty-odd years was driving Rebekah and Elijah crazy. He had won ownership of that tawdry brothel he so enjoyed in a card game and promptly lost it again. The Southern Spot had spent all of a week under the new sign reading the slap and the tickle before its old one had been restored. Still, Klaus spent inordinate amounts of time there, drinking and whoring as if he still were needed on hand to run the place. He had only stumbled out in the mornings to interrupt the French army’s battles and feed at his pleasure, forcing Rebekah to use her powers of compulsion indiscriminately again and again. He delighted in tormenting the new French governors until they were driven out of town, almost ruining The Originals’ claim to their land when the Spanish had used that opening to their own advantage.

The redheaded girl sat down companionably without waiting for an invitation. Rebekah raised an eyebrow, but she was amused, and the bold young thing didn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated by her expression. “I wouldn’t expect him to think of anyone but himself,” she agreed easily. “I was just trying to help him out of his mood.”

“And why would he be any less moody for you than for the rest of us? I don’t even know you,” Rebekah reminded her. She was sure she had seen the girl around before, but had probably been paying too much attention to Robert/Roger to notice. In any case, attending a few parties hardly made her a part of the Mikaelsons’ inner circle.

“Oh! I’m Lisette,” the vampire chirped, extending her hand as an afterthought. She offered no other explanation or defense for her presumption, and it seemed like she was totally unaware of it. The Original mystique seemed to slide right off of Lisette. After the fawning attention of Rebekah’s admirers, it was like the shock of diving into a cool pool of water.

Rebekah hesitated for the briefest of disapproving moments before shaking Lisette’s outstretched hand. Part of her wanted to shake some appropriate reverence into the girl...but the rest of her actually enjoyed the novelty. A fling would be great, but a friend...How long had it been since Rebekah had had a real friend? Her nature, her position, and her family made it virtually impossible to make girlfriends, much less keep them. Rebekah Mikaelson was dangerous, intimidating, immortal, and guarded. But Lisette didn’t seem to care.

“So tell me about yourself, Lisette,” she commanded, then bit her tongue and softened her tone. “Please?”

“Oh, me? There’s really nothing to tell,” Lisette giggled, but that didn’t prevent her from immediately producing a few chatty tidbits about the other partygoers.

She went on, and Rebekah basked in the normalcy of it. They might have been of an age: young women navigating society together. She listened raptly, asking questions whenever Lisette needed prompting, and Lisette obliged with an astonishing wealth of information about nearly all of the Mikaelsons’ guests. Most of Rebekah’s pets gave up and drifted away after a while, and even shy, smitten Efrain looked around as if he might prefer to be elsewhere.

But Rebekah didn’t care. Admiration was easy enough to come by these days, but Lisette was a rarer kind of fun. They were still talking when a commotion broke out near the sweeping main staircase, and Rebekah reluctantly decided she needed to investigate. She had put far too much work into making this house comfortable to let it go to ruin, no matter how much fun everyone was having.

When she reached the front hall, though, she realized that the newest vampires weren’t the problem at all. Klaus had returned from his sulk, and seemed determined to spread his misery around. A few nervous-looking vampires, in various states of undress, huddled together on the staircase, cowering as Klaus pushed past them. “If I find you’ve touched anything in those rooms I will slice you open from throat to ankles looking for it,” he threatened the nearest one, who could only tremble by way of reply.

Had something gone missing? Something of Klaus’s? Whatever it was, it must be important enough that he would search for it in the middle of a party. She could not imagine what would provoke him to act so bizarrely, except that maybe he’d simply gone too long without making a scene, and couldn’t help himself.

“My dear sister!” he greeted her, his voice a mockery of brotherly warmth. Then a thought seemed to occur to him. “You probably have it,” he told her cryptically, and climbed back up the staircase.

“I—do you think you’re going to my room?” Rebekah shrieked, running after him. “Niklaus, what the hell has gotten into you tonight?” Skipping the party to brood in his attic sounded like a brilliant plan in comparison to this.

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he threw open the door to her room and began tearing through her things. Her things; he couldn’t even leave this one, tiny corner of the house alone.

She grabbed his arm, but he shook her hand off and upended a jewelry box onto her vanity. Pearls and topazes spilled everywhere, and soft gold gleamed against the painted wood. “It’s nothing,” he muttered, not even bothering to lie convincingly. “There’s just a trinket I’ve lost, and it might have wound up here.”

He opened another box, rifling through it carelessly, dropping a ruby earring onto the carpet without even noticing. “Get out!” she cried, shoving him with all of her strength. His body flew backward, crashing into the door with a satisfying splintering. “Whatever it is you won’t find it here.”

Klaus moved on to the next room, and Rebekah heard another crash from down the hall. If she didn’t go after her brother, she realized, the damage would mount quickly. He hadn’t even bothered to throw out the occupants of the room this time. Rebekah found him throwing clothing out of a closet while two vampires watched him from the bed, an embroidered coverlet pulled up to their chins as if the thin silk would protect them from a lunatic vampire. “Stop this madness,” she ordered.

He waved her away dismissively and walked out to the top of the stairs, shouting that it was time for all of their guests to leave. Why was it up to Klaus to decide that the party was over? He had a special talent for ruining beautiful things.

Rebekah reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to see him disappearing into Elijah’s study. She felt sure Elijah would thank her for keeping him out, and so she gritted her teeth and pushed through the crowd.

Klaus had already forced open a drawer of Elijah’s desk, and Rebekah gasped. She had no idea where Elijah had gotten to, but the moment her brother saw what Klaus was doing, the house would not be big enough to hold the three of them.

“Don’t touch that,” she shouted, throwing her weight against the drawer to slam it closed. Klaus shoved her aside and broke open the lock on another drawer. Rebekah shoved him back, hard, and he tripped over one of the large candelabras that Elijah had along the walls. It swayed dangerously toward the window beside it, and Rebekah had just enough time to see a curl of smoke rise up from the fabric before Klaus sprang toward her.

The force of his attack knocked them both back out into the front hall, snarling and biting and scrabbling for purchase. Vampires scattered, and somewhere nearby Rebekah heard the sound of breaking glass. Tangy smoke drifted out of the open door of the study, and she guessed that the curtains had caught fire. Klaus destroyed everything.

She couldn’t live like this anymore, not with Klaus the terror. He didn’t appreciate anything she or Elijah did for him. He was so self-centered that he couldn’t imagine they might prefer to not spend their lives either cleaning up his current disaster or trying to predict his next one.

As she gasped for breath from Klaus’s armlock, Rebekah made up her mind: She’d find a way to destroy whatever was left of Klaus’s happiness just the way he always managed to ruin hers.

CHAPTER THREE

ELIJAH RAN AN idle finger up and down Ava’s bare arm, feeling perfectly at peace. It had not been easy, and the cost had been high, but he had persevered. He had held his siblings together and overcome every obstacle this city had thrown their way, and now it was time to reap the rewards.

The French had lost their grip on the region, and now Spain had seized power and established its own rule over New Orleans. But it quickly became clear that actually running the city was of no interest to King Carlos III, and the Spanish governor he’d sent over didn’t find the task especially appealing, either. The French colonists were disgusted by the regime change, and Elijah had always viewed human unrest as an opportunity.

As a result of his savvy and foresight, everything of consequence in New Orleans now had to go through him. Trade, construction, legal matters...Elijah Mikaelson was the city’s beating heart. And once he realized that the witches could no longer enforce their ban on siring new vampires, Elijah had taken particular delight in doing so. His family was the central core of his world, but there were benefits to building a community as well. He had everything he had wanted, and now he had Ava, who seemed determined to come up with all sorts of new things for him to desire.

She stretched contentedly across the four-poster bed, and dappled light from the fireplace painted curious patterns on her skin. Just as he reached for her again, he heard a crash and a scream coming from downstairs. He waited for a moment, hoping that it would fade back into the predictable sounds of a party, but the commotion only seemed to be growing louder. Vaguely, he recalled hearing some other thumps and shouts a few minutes before. Perhaps they had been more significant than he realized, but he’d been thoroughly distracted.

Ava protested as he rose from the bed, and the glint in her catlike eyes was almost enough to make him ignore the trouble. But Elijah had not risen to power by ignoring warning signs, and with an apology, he slid back into his discarded clothing and went out into the hall.

He could pick out both of his siblings’ voices in the din. There was also a distinct crackling sound beneath everything else, and Elijah could smell smoke. Elijah resigned himself to dealing with whatever was happening below and abandoning Ava for the night.

His willingness to get involved in this kind of mess was precisely why he was in charge and the Spanish weren’t, but sometimes it infuriated him to have to be the responsible one. He stormed down the curved staircase, the stench of smoke burning in his nostrils. It was coming from his study, and was growing dangerously out of hand. In addition to the curtains, two bookcases on either side had gone up in flames, and many of the books looked unsalvageable. He also noticed that the charred walls and books were not the only damage. His desk—a heavy piece of chestnut that did not move easily—stood askew, and some of the drawers that he knew had been locked were ajar. The fire had not simply been an unlucky accident; someone had been in this room, going through his things, when it had started.

And Elijah could guess who it was. Rebekah may have provoked him—she couldn’t always help herself—but the destruction in his study was Klaus’s work. There was no one else with such a talent for inconvenient chaos.

Even with Elijah’s unnatural speed and strength, it took him a few minutes to put out the fire, then he thundered out of his study, to where Rebekah and Klaus were locked in a pointlessly vicious struggle. Neither of them had a silver dagger or, thankfully, a white oak stake, the only two weapons that could take down an Original vampire. All they could accomplish was annoying each other and making fools of themselves. Their wounds would heal, but the embarrassment would linger.

Elijah grabbed Klaus by the collar and threw him backward, then stepped forward to rest his foot against Rebekah’s chest. He heard Klaus struggling to stand, and held out a warning hand. “Enough,” he said, his voice full of authority. “The two of you were content to let the house burn around you. Over what?”

They both began to argue at once, and he held his hand up again to silence them. Then, reluctantly, he pointed to Klaus. He would rather hear Rebekah’s version of events first, as it was almost certainly the more accurate one. But Klaus would never sit by and let her tell it. Giving him this small concession would help reestablish peace.

“Our sister is out of control,” Klaus spat contemptuously. “I asked for her help in finding a simple trinket, and she followed me around the house, attacking me like some kind of madwoman.”

To Elijah’s shock, Klaus stormed from the room without waiting to hear another word, scattering the remaining guests as he went.

“He’s lost his mind,” Rebekah argued, shoving Elijah’s unresisting foot away and sitting up. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but this thing he wants is no mere trinket. He wants it too badly.”

There was no doubting that she was right. Elijah couldn’t imagine what Klaus was looking for, or why it had suddenly gripped him that he must have it right now, in the middle of the night. Klaus should have been enjoying the party, not tearing the house apart on some wild errand. Something had set him off, and Elijah reluctantly guessed that he would need to get to the bottom of this.

Together they followed the telltale sounds of Klaus’s renewed search to Elijah’s bedroom. A quick glance told Elijah that Ava had left. He felt a quick pang of frustration—Klaus’s selfishness never stopped intruding on everyone else’s lives.