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CHAPTER NINETEEN
KLAUS WOKE IN the late afternoon, fully rested for the first time he could remember. He reached for Vivia
She was gone. Her dress, her shoes, even her scent was fading. She had been gone for hours and hours, and soon it would be as if she had never been there at all. What had happened to her?
He dressed quickly, thinking over what had happened. Whatever they had experienced together, something had obviously gone wrong. He had missed something...something she hadn’t wanted him to see. When she had given herself to him, she’d also been preparing to take herself away, and he had misunderstood everything.
He circled her family’s home, prowling like an animal with every sense attuned to the slightest change. He could feel her moving between its rooms, even when he could not see her. And so he knew when she stole out of the house, although her own mother had no idea she was gone. She was escaping his love and now her family’s, believing they could never understand what she was about to do.
She was wrong. She was young and impulsive and sincere, and that combination made her incredibly vulnerable to the manipulation of the werewolves.
And people called Klaus a monster.
She wore a long, black cloak with a deep hood that hid her face, but he did not doubt for a moment that it was she. He followed soundlessly, pursuing her through the shadowed cobblestoned streets until they gave way to dirt tracks. She did not hesitate, and he did not take his eyes from her concealed form. He would have killed anyone or anything that troubled her, but he couldn’t protect her from herself.
He knew Vivia
He had not. He smelled the werewolves before he saw them. Dozens and dozens, all waiting for Vivia
They had gathered in a semicircle near the edge of the forest, waiting for her with torches and the requisite human sacrifice. Klaus was repulsed by the makeshift altar, which tried to lend an air of legitimacy to the proceedings. An unconscious man lay across it, naked to the waist with his hands bound behind him. How could Vivia
Vivia
“Welcome, all,” Solomon Navarro bellowed, tugging his son back into the semicircle. “And welcome, Vivia
“Thank you,” Vivia
Klaus longed to shake sense into her, but a rumbling of approval rose from the werewolves. Their energy was high, yet so was their tension. So far, Viv had said the right things, but she hadn’t actually killed anyone yet. The real party wouldn’t start until she had backed up her pretty words with murder.
“Who is he?” she asked, gesturing to the man on the rough wooden altar.
“A criminal,” Armand Navarro assured her. “This death is better than the one he deserves.”
Vivia
A female werewolf stepped forward from the pack. She was young, with long blonde hair that was pulled back severely. “He attacked me,” she answered, her voice full of steel. “He said I wasn’t the first, there’d been other women before me.”
Solomon crossed the line of werewolves to rest a heavy hand on Vivia
Vivia
Sol nodded his consent, and Vivia
Instead, she lifted the knife.
A howl rose from the werewolves, and they closed in around her and the man. There was no chance left to hesitate, and so the knife flashed down, slicing the man’s throat in two just as neatly as if Klaus had done it himself.
There was a moment when the man’s blood spurted out and the air meant for his lungs bubbled through the gap and nothing else happened at all. Klaus watched, stu
The response from the werewolves was deafening, like they had all gone mad. The howling drowned out any individual voices, overwhelming anything Vivia
And then the pack was changing, shifting, crying out in an agony that matched their ecstasy. The sun had fully set, Klaus realized, and the full moon was rising over New Orleans. Vivia
All around her, men and women turned into wolves one by one, but she writhed on the ground in her shuddering, breaking human form. No matter what pain this transition caused her, though, her feelings about what came after would be worse. She didn’t have the luxury of shutting off her emotions the way a young vampire might have. She would have to live with her condition long after the werewolf change had grown easy for her.
It was the least she deserved.