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The floating thing didn’t look like driftwood, and animals didn’t wear starched shirts—not even the stained and shredded kind. With a soft cry, Rebekah dove into the water, striking across the lazy current to reach the limp body of her brother.
Elijah had been mauled. It wasn’t just his shirt that was in tatters: His skin was a bloody map of slices and tears. One of his eyes was so bruised that she could not see how it could possibly open, and a bloody welt on his lip was swollen and raw. But worse than anything she could imagine was the sight of his one open, staring eye. It looked straight up into the rose-and-amber sky, seeing nothing, not even noticing that she was beside him.
The werewolves had done this to him, and she bit back a scream of rage. Under the full moon, the beasts had torn at his flesh and filled him with their poison. But why? Werewolf venom would kill a normal vampire, but not an Original. An Original could live through anything, at least anything that didn’t involve a white-oak stake. Still, the pain and hallucinations were almost as bad as dying a second time, and Elijah must have headed to the river with the hope that some of the poison would seep out into the water.
So much for the supposed truce. She hoped that Klaus was eloping with the little trophy bride right now.
She pulled him close and dragged him to shore, feeling relief at the faint sound of his heartbeat. It was easier to carry him once she reached the shore, although the sucking mud and tangling grasses did their best to hold her back. She was concentrating so hard that a shout rising up from the bayou caught her completely by surprise.
A man in a wide-brimmed hat and drab hunting clothes gaped at the pair of them, then lifted his hand and called out to her again. He must want to help, and Rebekah was happy to take him up on the generous offer. Setting Elijah gently down among the reeds, she sprang on the hunter before he could even lift his rifle. She struck him hard in the head, struggling against the wild, anxious energy in her body that urged her to knock it clear off his neck.
But she needed his heart still pumping, and so with an indrawn breath she stopped herself after the first blow. She dragged his limp body back to Elijah and split open the hunter’s neck with her teeth. The thick red blood flowed freely, and she turned and adjusted the gash until it was spurting more or less into Elijah’s mouth. She waited, hoping that he would revive enough to feed, but whatever blood he swallowed was still better than none.
Eventually, the hunter’s heart gave out. Elijah was still as vacant, but she thought there was a little more color in his pale cheeks. He must be deep within the hallucinations of the venom, and she didn’t envy whatever demons he fought—he’d come back to her in time. She lifted him again and ran for all she was worth.
Back in the house, she felt u
Anger would not help her brother, though, and so she dug her fingernails into her soaked, muddy wool gown and started again, this time working from the top of the house downward. When she reached the ground floor again, Elijah moaned softly, and she leaped to his side to check his pulse. It still sounded terribly faint, but to her keen ears it was a bit steadier. He would recover, she knew, but she had no idea what so much venom would do to him. He needed to rest in peace.
She searched the first floor again, trying to find any protected area, no matter how humble. She threw open closets and even cupboards, looking for any enclosed space big enough for Elijah to lie down comfortably. She had crossed the living room floor three times during her hunt before she realized that her footsteps sounded different in the center of the cheerfully red woven rug. She tore it aside and beneath it she found a trapdoor.
The cellar below was damp and more than a little musty, but she didn’t smell anything rank or unclean. Crates and barrels lined the walls. She pried open one and then another, finding musket balls and artillery shells and wicked-looking swords. There was an entire armory below their new house—it was a bit more defensible than she had initially believed.
The cellar was spacious and not much light filtered down through the hole in its ceiling, but Rebekah found short wooden doors in each of the four dirt walls. She moved aside a large whetstone that half blocked one of them and pulled it open, to the loud protest of its tired hinges.
Beyond lay a narrow tu
The sunlight also revealed two other closed doors leading out of this smaller chamber, and she realized that there must be an entire network of tu
A small sound came from the nearby trees, and Rebekah froze, her eyes sca
She carried some bedding down first, and then Elijah, who moaned again but still stared in that blank, horrible way out of his one good eye. She decided that he was as comfortable as she could make him, so she left him to heal.
The best thing to do, of course, would be to go out and find him some more blood, but the unseen, unknown something outside made her afraid to leave Elijah alone. She knew it was most likely just her overexcited nerves that kept screaming that they were being watched, but she wouldn’t be able to forgive herself if she walked into some trap.
She busied herself with straightening up the house, sweeping up the dust and leaves that had blown in through the missing windows and nailing the billowing curtains over their empty sockets so there was at least some kind of barrier. It made her feel a little better once she couldn’t see outside, but at every noise and shadow that shifted across the fabric she jumped.
No sane person would attack a vampire blind. No one, no matter how foolish or how angry, would approach this house and burst into it knowing that she was somewhere inside. No one, but what if there were many? Elijah had marks on him from dozens of werewolves. The entire pack could be out there, human now but desperate to finish what they had started. Or perhaps Eric Moquet had somehow tracked her here, with his army at his back.
The Mikaelsons had come to New Orleans in search of a haven. It was supposed to be their home, their shelter. But the city had turned into a trap. They were exposed, surrounded by enemies, constantly on their guard. There was no safe harbor.