Текст книги "Первородные: Восхождение"

Автор книги: Julie Plec

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

CHAPTER NINE

THE ATTACK CAME at sundown. Cries went up from the sentries near the river first, and then Rebekah heard a second set of shouts rise from the woods to the west. The setting sun had turned the Saint Louis River into a long line of glittering fire, blinding the soldiers and confusing their line of defense. The attackers had chosen their approach well.

They looked human, but Rebekah knew better: A dead werewolf had been carried out of the camp the night before, and now his pack had come for vengeance. Soldiers called to her to stay in her tent as they ran past, and Eric shouted to Felix and pointed her way. His hook-nosed lieutenant immediately separated four men out from the ones running toward the battle to form a ring around Rebekah’s tent, keeping her safe within.

She wanted to tell them it wasn’t necessary, that she was better equipped to protect them than they her, but there was no point. Men would die who didn’t have to, but that was the nature of the world. She could hardly look out for their interests and her own at the same time, and so she waited patiently in her tent, listening to the brutal sounds of death all around it.

By the time it was fully dark outside, it was clear that the worst of the battle was pitched along the western edge of camp, and all of her guardians but Felix himself had left to join it. He had refused, sending the others to glory or death while he stayed behind, under orders.

Rebekah was restless. There were other things she could do than stay put, if only Felix would leave her alone. While the attention of the soldiers was elsewhere, this would be the perfect time to explore the forbidden reaches of the camp. The gruesome fate of the werewolf she had condemned weighed on her mind, and she needed to find out how much Eric knew. And, even more important, what his intentions were.

Rebekah had been inside the public chamber of Eric’s tent many times, but she doubted that he’d conduct an interrogation and an execution across his polished rosewood desk. Did he have a secret room that he was hiding from her? She’d previously assumed that his private chamber was a sleeping space, but now she wasn’t so sure. It was time to find out, and to see what else Eric kept secreted away.

The werewolf would not have revealed anything intentionally, but Eric was too clever by half. He was an impressive man all around, really: intelligent and generous and obviously well respected by his men, even after such a short time in command. It frustrated Rebekah that the same qualities that made him so agreeable to spend time with also made him more of a danger to her kind. If things had been different, Rebekah could see herself falling in love with a man like him.

Eric knew what he wanted from life and how to take it without resorting to cruelty, setting him apart from the men she’d been surrounded by for most of her interminable life. If she was honest with herself, Rebekah knew she was having trouble combating her attraction to Eric, even in spite of her very reasonable suspicions about his activities. In her heart she hoped that his tent would reveal nothing nefarious, and she’d be able to let her feelings of affection grow without fear...as if she had ever been so lucky.

She peeked through her tent flap’s opening, ready to make her move across the barracks to Eric’s headquarters. Felix was prowling the perimeter and saw her immediately. He was obnoxiously devoted to his job, but as long as she was stuck with him as her “protector” she decided she might as well use him.

She beckoned Felix close with one finger, and then let the power of compulsion fill her. “Escort me to the captain’s tent,” she ordered, her voice quiet but throbbing with magic. “I have business there, but no one else must know.”

His face clouded, and then, inexplicably, cleared. “You must stay here, Madame,” he disagreed. “I have been given my orders.”

Rebekah rocked back on her heels, stunned that he would—that he could—defy her. She could not think of another human who had resisted an Original vampire’s compulsion. That shouldn’t be possible. Maybe it was her own nerves, she decided, and tried again, leveling her powerful gaze into his eyes and repeating her demand.

“We will go at once,” he agreed thickly. It was as if he had never argued in the first place. Felix looked around to make sure no one was watching, then took her arm and led the way.

Together they crossed the camp, crouching low and staying near the walls of other tents. There wasn’t anyone around, but Felix took her command of secrecy very seriously, sometimes shielding her body with his own when he seemed to notice a movement nearby.

Felix stopped at the entrance of Eric’s tent, looking sadly purposeless. “Stand guard,” she ordered, compelling him anew. He shifted as if he wanted to object, but she took no chances, layering her power over and over itself until whatever restless will he had of his own was buried beneath the weight of hers. “Let no one enter until I have returned.” It was unlikely that anyone would attempt to come in while she was there, but in the very worst case she would hear the scuffle if they did. Felix, unable to reveal what he was really doing there, would seem to have gone mad, but such things were common enough even among seasoned officers. His fellow soldiers would be surprised, but hardly suspicious.

Apprehensively, Rebekah lifted the fleur-de-lis–covered flap of Eric’s tent. It was empty, and yet she felt like something was waiting for her.

The outer office looked just as she remembered it. The room was dark, but she could see perfectly well with her heightened vision. Nothing looked amiss, and she wished she could leave it at that. She liked Eric, she had to admit to herself, and she was reluctant to find out his secrets. Exposed secrets usually led to someone dying. And that wasn’t going to be Rebekah.

With a deep breath and a muttered curse, she shoved aside the curtains to the inner chamber with defiant force.

And then she froze.

It wasn’t a bedroom at all. It wasn’t a sanctuary or a place of repose...it was a shrine to death. The fabric walls were covered with crosses and mirrors, and around three sides of the room sat carved wooden chests. They were piled high with stakes, objects wrought in silver, crossbows with wooden bolts, and even strings of garlic cloves. One chest held piles of dusty books stacked among instruments she didn’t recognize with purposes she could not guess. Rebekah approached them carefully, studying each one. This was a room designed for catching and killing vampires.

It was all wrong, she realized with a sigh of relief. Some of the books looked ominously authoritative at first, but most were nothing but fairy tales. She nearly laughed aloud at one pretentiously titled The Mythes and Truthes of the Monstyrrs Known Throughout the Known Worlde as “Vampyrre.” She didn’t see anything in the tent that would especially hurt her. The thing that stung, actually, was that a man she’d begun to like had built a room dedicated to discovering the weaknesses of her kind.

She felt as though a heavy weight sat in her chest when she forced herself to admit just how wrong she’d been to trust Captain Moquet. She could no longer entertain her attraction to his relentless curiosity, not when it was such a clear threat to her. What if she’d been completely blinded by their chemistry, and he was using her much as she had intended to manipulate him?

She had to admit it was possible that Eric had never been interested in the human widow at all, and might have suspected Rebekah’s true nature all along. What if he was keeping her close in order to learn her weaknesses? Her hands shook as she picked up one cruel-looking artifact after the other, inspecting them for anything that might cause irreparable harm.

So far, the Mikaelsons had been both lucky and careful—rumors of vampires hadn’t spread from the Old World to the New. But Eric had recently arrived from France, and the truth was that he had never said much about why. What had really brought him to this distant swampland? Had he come to bring order to a lawless land for the greater glory of King Louis, or had he been sent to follow the trail of vampires?

Her eye fell on something she recognized, and she bent forward to pick it up. A small gold ring set with lapis lazuli hung on a chain that dangled from the corner of a silver mirror. The jewelry was twin to the one on her own finger. There were only six daylight rings in the world, to the best of her knowledge, and they were treasured family heirlooms. Her family’s heirlooms. What was one doing here? Had it been enchanted, like the ones Esther had made, or was it just a copy?

One thing was certain: Eric’s interest in the occult was much less haphazard than he had let her believe. He wasn’t just after “unnatural fiends”; he knew exactly what he was searching for. And in spite of all the things he seemed to have gotten wrong so far, he was also getting some things dangerously right. The lapis ring might look like nothing but a pretty trinket, but it would not have been created—and it certainly would not have been here—unless it had been meant for the finger of a vampire.

She could imagine him turning it over in his calloused hands, studying it. She could picture him prowling around this room, trying to connect all of its pieces into a coherent picture. The way his eyebrows furrowed when he concentrated, the strong line of his shoulders beneath a thin white shirt...Rebekah clenched the ring in her fist, furious with herself.

It was obvious now that she didn’t really know him at all. That brooding strength, that concentrated power...she could not afford to be attracted to the very qualities that would make him an effective killer of her kind.

Of course this was Eric’s secret. Naturally Rebekah had gotten involved with the one man who was the most dangerous to her. It was the same mistake she had made over and over, and every time that she thought she’d learned to choose more wisely, she was proven wrong. It was as if her heart had some instinctual longing for misery and pain.

Gingerly, she put the ring back exactly as she found it and moved on, continuing her investigation.

On the far side of the chest she nearly tripped over something thicker than the piled carpets, and she looked down in surprise at what must be Eric’s bedroll. She had almost forgotten that this was also the place he slept. She would never have thought him to be the type of man who would find rest among such chaos and darkness. He was serious, yes, but she had never imagined him as morbid.

For a moment she could see his dark hair with its sprinkling of gray at the temples on the crisp white pillow below her, his thoughtful hazel eyes gazing into hers. Maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding; maybe Eric’s fascination with vampires wasn’t what it seemed. Maybe there was another explanation entirely, and they could make a fresh start with none of her lies and none of his....

She lowered herself down onto his blankets, wanting to see how it was that he woke up every morning. The mirrors and some of the crosses that ringed the walls glittered in the light that flickered through the tent, and the nearest chest was so close she could have reached up and touched some of the strange instruments within. Vampires were his first waking thought and the last thing on his mind as he fell asleep. Despite lying amongst sheets that smelled of him, and feeling the spot where his body lay every night, Rebekah had to admit that there was no question that Eric’s job was to hunt vampires, and everything else—the army, the city, the king’s law—was nothing but a smokescreen.

Rebekah rose onto her knees, preparing to leave and steal back to her own tent, when something incongruous caught her eye. There was something resting on the ground beside Eric’s bed. Picking it up, she saw that it was an intricate gold locket, left open to reveal a miniature portrait within.

The flaxen-haired woman it depicted was lovely, and Rebekah was surprised to feel hot jealousy rising in her throat. It might be Eric’s mother or his sister, she reminded herself. And it didn’t matter anyway, because Eric had been sent across an ocean to find and destroy her. If the woman in the portrait was his wife, then as far as Rebekah was concerned, she could keep him.

She realized she had stayed too long. There was no sound from Felix or the battle. Her expedition had given her a great deal to think about, and probably enough evidence to leave this place and report back to her brothers. She was, after all, surrounded by the army of a vampire hunter and shouldn’t risk any more spying when she was almost certainly being watched.

But she needed to know more. The evidence of Eric’s obsession was troubling, but there could be ugly consequences to assuming she knew what it meant. If she let her brothers get hurt because she did not want to believe...if she let Eric get hurt because she believed too easily...She could not accept either risk. She wouldn’t tell Elijah or Klaus what she’d found yet, but she owed it to them to investigate fully.

Rebekah smoothed the blankets and plumped the pillow, trying to angle the locket exactly as it had been—although perhaps a little farther away from the bedroll than she had found it. She slipped through the outer chamber and poked her head out of the tent to find Felix still waiting. At least that one thing had gone as expected.

“Felix,” she whispered, and he turned attentively. “We must return to my tent now,” she told him, ensnaring him again with the power of her voice. “Once I have gone inside, you will forget that we ever left. You will know only that you followed your captain’s orders and guarded me throughout the battle.”

“I always follow my orders,” Felix told her amiably, and she had no doubt that he meant it.

CHAPTER TEN

KLAUS KEPT TO the walls, watching the garden for the first sign of movement. Any stirring might be Vivianne...or it might be a pack of werewolves emerging from the mansion to tear him limb from limb. There was no shortage of lights and voices within the house, but outside nearly an hour had passed with nothing shifting except for the wind.

Klaus reread the note clutched in his left hand for the thousandth time. He was in the right place, and while he had arrived early, she was now late. Vivianne had asked to meet him here, in the garden behind the ballroom where they had first danced together, tonight. Now. Where was she?

Without his meaning to, his gaze drifted to the vine-covered walls where he had tried to conceal the body of the unfortunate serving girl he’d fed on that same night. Solomon Navarro had learned of that little incident all too quickly, and Vivianne had seen evidence of it herself. If she was setting him up for revenge, she could hardly have chosen a better spot...but he didn’t believe that. He was sure he’d reached her the other night—he had felt the softening of her cool, skeptical exterior. She had wanted to believe him.

Surely she would come.

He heard the sound of soft footfalls on the grass, and he knew it was not an ambush. Vivianne hurried across the lawn, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining with some emotion he could not name. For a moment, it was enough. “I’m glad you came,” she whispered when she reached him, and in spite of his own promise to wait out her hesitations, Klaus could not repress a smile.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way about a woman—a century? More? She’d asked to see him, and now she was here...If Mikael had been standing behind him with a white oak stake at that exact moment, Klaus might have died a happy man. Better than that, though, was to live—to live in the astonishing glow of this remarkable young woman, and to know that it was within his reach to win her over.

“I could not have stayed away,” he murmured, speaking the absolute truth. He had never seen her handwriting before that evening, but he had recognized it on sight. Nothing could have kept him from this meeting, not even the very real possibility that it might have been a trap.

He had never truly believed that, though, not really. This was not Klaus’s first midnight rendezvous with a woman, and they usually all had the same purpose. Crickets sang nearby, and the scent of honeysuckle wafted toward them from the vines that climbed the garden wall. It was perfect.

“I needed to see you again,” she breathed, so softly that at first he thought he had misheard her. Then she lifted her face to gaze at him earnestly, and he knew there had been no mistake. “I thought I knew who you were before I even met you, Niklaus Mikaelson,” she told him, “but every time we speak I seem to learn something new. There is depth to you, and passion of course, and a kind of honor I didn’t expect to find. I am more drawn you to every time I see you, but we could never be together. Now that I’ve come to know you a bit more fully, I feel it’s only right to tell you so myself, face-to-face. I have asked you here tonight to make you understand that you must let me go.”

Klaus found himself at a rare loss for words. So he kissed her instead, his lips pressing firmly against her warm ones and his hand gently holding the back of her head in place. She kissed him back, tentative but curious. When she pulled back she rested her dark head against his chest, and he could feel her heart racing. He could have stood there just that way for the rest of the night, if she would agree to it.

“Niklaus, I’m engaged,” she reminded him. Her voice was a bit muffled against the collar of his shirt, but to his keen ear she sounded confused and indecisive. Then she straightened, running her hands over her face as if to brush away any lingering traces of him. “I wish that the things you said the other night could become our reality, but my engagement is too far gone already. I have made promises, and I made them of my own free will. I have an opportunity to seal the peace for good, and if I back out now there will be a slaughter. Hundreds dead on both sides, and it will all be because of me. Because I was weak, and because I put my own selfish desires above the lives of everyone else I love.”

It was unsettling that she chose the past tense when speaking of him, but he did not feel that hope was lost. “Nothing needs to be decided tonight,” he urged gently. “You are not yet married—there is time to consider.”

“It’s not just that.” Vivianne would not meet his eyes, and Klaus felt a stab of fear. Why had she said that she could “seal the peace for good”? What did that mean exactly? It could not be the simple act of her marriage. There was something more, and it was something that he needed to know.

“Tell me,” he insisted, and he saw her shiver.

“They want me to change,” she whispered. “The Navarros. They say I was raised as a witch, and so I need to become equally werewolf.”

Of course they did. Klaus understood it all immediately. If Vivianne were to activate the wolf within her, then the alliance would be undeniably skewed in favor of the werewolves. She would be truly stuck between both worlds, and married to a man who belonged to only one of them. “And they do not want you to speak to anyone else about this,” he guessed.

Her answering nod was small, and she glanced over her shoulder at the villa behind her. She knew something was wrong with this request, no matter how much she wanted to believe that neither family would let her come to harm. She was young, and for all of her steely intelligence, she was also naive. She did not yet understand how vulnerable her sweetness made her, and so it would fall to Klaus to rip the throats out of anyone who attempted to use it against her.

“It was part of the pact,” she admitted haltingly, “that they wouldn’t ask me—that I wouldn’t have to—”

The witches had been wise, but it may have been all for nothing. The werewolves weren’t as interested in the pact itself as they were in using it to gain the upper hand. “That you wouldn’t need to kill a human and become a full werewolf,” he finished sternly, wanting to make her hear the full measure of what she was considering. In order to activate her werewolf side, she’d have to commit murder, and then she’d change on the full moon...and every moon after that. “I can’t imagine anyone who loves you wanting that for you.”

Not to mention that there were those who believed it was bad enough to be one type of supernatural being, and the thought of two active powers living in the same body sounded hellish. Klaus himself had killed thousands of times, and yet he could not become a werewolf, because his mother had prevented it. She had cast a spell to cut off that part of him, locked it away forever and called it “balance.” Her magic honored nature, except when her pride or infidelity perverted it. Because of Esther’s hypocrisy, this was a path down which he could not follow Vivianne, should she choose to go.

“I don’t want it for myself,” Viv retorted, her lovely face betraying her agony. “But I want it for them. For us. For New Orleans and my parents and the werewolves and the witches and the humans who won’t be caught in the crossfire anymore. Becoming a true werewolf is the only way I can ever really be a part of their pack, so that they will listen to me and accept my marriage.”

Why would they bargain for it if they didn’t intend to accept it, Klaus wanted to ask her, unless it was to spring this on you when the moment grew near? But she wasn’t ready to hear that truth, he knew, and it would only drive her away from him. “If they do not want you as you are, they do not deserve to have you,” he growled instead, and then wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her near to kiss her again, despite her halfhearted resistance. “Come with me tonight, and leave this trap before it can close around you.”

She rested her forehead against his collarbone, closing her eyes, struggling with herself. “This has to end, you and me,” she argued, and her voice was rough with tears. “I felt like I had to tell you in person, but I am sorry if that only caused you pain. It hurts me more than you know.”

“Then undo it,” Klaus said. “I will forget that you ever said these things, and you can do the same. Nothing is done yet. No one is married; no one is dead.”

“It is done,” she argued, pulling back and staring up at him earnestly. “It was done as soon as I was born. I can’t know what is required of me and walk away. How can I? You don’t understand what it’s like, to live between two warring worlds like this. I never asked for the responsibility, but there is no one else who can accomplish what I can. If I refuse now, it will ruin everything.”

She was as right as she was wrong: Klaus’s dual heritage had started a war, just as Vivianne hoped that hers would end one. “I am already ruined, Viv,” he told her. “Meeting you has ruined me. What do I care if the rest of the world burns as well? Having you with me would be worth any price.”

Light and laughter spilled out into the garden from an opened door, and Klaus shrank back against the wall, pulling her with him. “Vivianne!” a merry voice called. “Darling, where have you gone? You’re needed at cards—my mother has made a fortune off us in your absence.”

She gave a panicked start and pulled violently out of his arms. “Klaus, please, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” she pleaded, but if leaving him was difficult for her then he was certainly not going to make it any easier.

“Vivianne Lescheres,” he began, then paused long enough that she stilled to listen, her curiosity getting the better of her. “I have never had the pleasure of meeting a woman like you, and I’ve lived long enough that I would know if there were any. For you I’m even willing to beg: Please don’t break my heart quite yet.”

She gave him a hesitant little smile despite herself, and when she looked up at him again her eyes held a gleam that had nothing to do with tears. “Be careful what you wish for, Klaus,” she began, and then gave a small sigh. “Perhaps we could meet again, if only so I can tell you no once more.”

“My dear, I promise you that the only thing you’ll be saying with me is yes, and you’ll say it more than once. I’d be more than happy to prove it to you, if you’ll meet me again tomorrow night. Here?” Klaus felt reckless, ready to risk anything to keep from losing her.

“Vivianne, where are you?” the voice called again, and Klaus would have been happy to gut its owner with his fingernails.

Vivianne bit her lip, her entire body tense with worry, but she leaned up to give Klaus one more kiss. It lasted a second longer than a polite good-bye, and Klaus took that as the only answer he needed. He’d be here tomorrow night, and every evening after, until Vivianne made good on the promise of that kiss by meeting him again.

She struggled out of his arms and he watched her silhouette run across the grass, toward the light and the tall, thin figure waiting for her in the doorway.

Klaus didn’t have to see his face to know who it was. If he could kill every living being who was unworthy to speak her name, he would have started right then with Armand. It would end up as a massacre...which, now that Klaus thought of it, actually seemed rather appealing. He wondered how many werewolves were in the festively lit mansion before him—Armand and his mother, apparently, but from the voices and sounds of clinking glasses, probably quite a few more. It would not be worth facing Elijah’s wrath unless he succeeded in killing every one in the house—in the city, actually—this same night.

A worthy goal, but an unlikely one, and so he vented his rage on the high wall of the garden instead. His fist was unharmed, but the wall cracked and crumbled, leaving a satisfying hole in the mortared stones. It was a physical reminder that he would not give up Vivianne without a fight, even if it could not be the bloody battle he’d have preferred.