Первородные: Восхождение

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?