Первородные: Восхождение

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

HUGO REY HAD been brilliant, and Klaus wished that he had managed to meet the man before he died. The network of tunnels and chambers that radiated out from the main cellar allowed them to move unnoticed beneath the werewolves’ very feet. Unfortunately, none of the tunnels seemed to extend beyond the borders of the property, so they could not escape, or even properly flank their besiegers. But there was an opportunity there, Klaus was sure of it. They needed only to decide how best to take advantage of it.

Klaus was partial to the idea of springing from one trapdoor while Elijah leaped out of an opposite one, surprising the wolves on two fronts and hopefully creating enough casualties to convince them to leave. But Elijah pointed out, quite reasonably, that once the trapdoors were open, the werewolves might manage to get into the cellar. Its far-flung chambers could not possibly be covered by the protection spell, and once the wolves had found them their only advantage would be lost.

Vivianne was no help, as all of her suggestions involved as few deaths as possible. She seemed convinced, in spite of the taunts and threats shouted through the missing windows, that a peaceful solution was possible and even desirable. Klaus fumed at the pointlessness of his earlier threat—he couldn’t very well lock her in the cellar when they needed access to the arms stored there.

Klaus preferred if Vivianne didn’t watch the slaughter, and put her in the upstairs bedroom, where she agreed to wait out the battle and storm.

“Stay safe, my love, and I will be back soon,” he said with a kiss that was more of a bite of her full red lips. She gave him a smile that melted him from the inside, whispering a yes into his chest. Damn, he’d never get enough of this woman.

Back in the cellar, they scanned the ammunition. “This isn’t everything,” Elijah declared, his sharp brown eyes scanning the boxes. “The day Hugo died, I brought some barrels down for him, but they must still be in one of the outer cellars.” He turned slowly, muttering something about “the southeast corner” and seeming to mentally check off each door in turn.

“That one,” Klaus told him decisively, pointing to the one on their left and then crossing the dank dirt floor to throw it open. He let Elijah go first, then followed.

The barrels waited at the end of the tunnel, five of them, each nearly as tall as they were. Elijah was already prying the lid off one of them by the time Klaus caught up to him. He looked up with a strange gleam in his eyes. “Gunpowder,” he said.

“In all of them?” Klaus demanded, but he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he yanked up the lid of the nearest barrel while Elijah moved on to another. He could smell it even before he could see it. All five barrels were packed with gunpowder. There was enough to last them a year if they fired at the werewolves night and day the entire time, but Klaus felt that would be a terrible waste of such an extraordinary supply of the stuff.

“Each of these would make a powerful blast if we left it as it is,” Elijah mused, and Klaus knew that they were thinking along the same lines.

“Four of these chambers and four barrels,” Klaus agreed, “and a fifth from which we could pour out fuses. No blast will damage the house, but we could blow up the ground beneath their feet.”

“I always did envy the number of werewolves you managed to pick off when we first arrived,” Elijah grinned, positioning one barrel on the rough earthen steps and stepping back to examine the effect.

Klaus tipped his barrel over at the base of Elijah’s and began to pour heavy black powder in a steady stream. When the thickness looked right for a makeshift fuse, he began to back away down the tunnel from which they had come. Elijah picked up a second barrel and took the easternmost door toward another of the outer cellars. With a full barrel in each corner of the property and the loose powder from the fifth barrel connecting them all to the center, they could turn the tables on their attackers with one simple spark.

Klaus ran his fuse into the very center of the main cellar, just below the open trapdoor. He counted his paces as he continued in a straight line to the door. By Klaus’s estimate it would take less than a minute for the lines to burn in every direction, reach the full kegs, and blow them up through the earth.

Elijah met him below the central trapdoor, grinning. Klaus hadn’t realized the extent to which they’d been at odds during the last nine years until they were on the same side again, fighting shoulder to shoulder—just as they always should have been.

“No point in waiting,” Klaus pointed out, striking a spark and waving Elijah toward the ladder. “We can clear out the werewolf infestation before the worst of the storm hits, then come back down here to ride it out if we have to.”

Elijah cast a wary glance at the tinder in Klaus’s hand before climbing up into the house. Klaus crouched down and touched the flame to where the four trails of gunpowder joined. It popped and caught, and he watched for a moment to make sure that it spread in each direction before following Elijah up the ladder.

“I’m impressed, brother,” Elijah told him as he closed the trapdoor and stamped it firmly shut.

“It’s a good plan,” Klaus agreed smugly. “But it’s fortunate we were so well supplied.” It was easy enough to spread some of the credit around when there was so much of it and they were about to take out the entire Navarro pack from the comfort of their own home.

“That as well,” Elijah said. “But I meant that Vivianne stayed put when you told her to.”

Klaus chuckled and nodded, but then he felt a sudden stab of doubt. Why had Viv obeyed so placidly? Elijah was right—it wasn’t like her at all. He raced up the stairs, calling her name and throwing open the bedroom door.

She was gone. She was gone, but she had not come down to the cellar to debate with them. He had not heard, seen, or even smelled her anywhere on the ground floor, and now there was no trace of her on the upper floor, either. She was simply gone.

It took him seconds—he could not have said exactly how many—to understand. She was not in the house, and so she must have left the house. She had defied him and departed the one safe place left to her, to go out into a crowd of angry werewolves under a bewitched hurricane. If she survived the night, he would kill her himself.

He crossed to the window and a flash of lightning showed him everything. Armand held her white arm in a vise grip, his face inches from hers. Sol stood directly behind her, his forehead beaded with sweat as he shouted something unintelligible.

“Viv!” Klaus shouted, and a few of the closest werewolves turned his way. The main ring of them was a good distance from the house, settling in for what they thought would be a long wait.

It would not, though. Klaus could picture the burning fuses and in the next brilliant bolt of lightning he even thought he could make out the trapdoor beside Vivianne’s beaded shoes.

He dove from the window, but the first of the barrels went up even as he fell. There was another deafening crash just as he hit the ground. He rolled immediately to his feet, but before he could take a single step, the last two explosions went off together. Vivianne stared at him, her mouth open as if she wanted to speak, and then she disappeared as the ground beneath her erupted in shrapnel and flames.

The concussive blast of the explosions slammed Klaus hard against the wall of the house behind him, and fire bit into every inch of his skin. For a long time he could not see anything but light and smoke, and then he wished he could not.

Through the deafening ringing sound in his ears, Klaus thought he heard moans here and there around the house, but the destruction had been nearly total. The house stood untouched, in the center of a ravaged plot of dirt, crisscrossed by tunnels that lay open like waiting graves. Corpses lay everywhere around them, a triumph that left Klaus completely, utterly empty.

One of the bodies was hers. He knew before he looked, and so he could not bear to look too carefully. A shred of blackened lace, a stretch of blistered skin. She had been standing directly above the keg of gunpowder. He found that his arms were around her, that he held her as close as he ever could have. She had met a quick, brutal end to her short, charmed life, and Klaus knew it was far more his loss than hers.

Vivianne Lescheres had lived every moment fully and passionately, and now Klaus would have to live the rest of his without her. It was unbearable, unthinkable. It was cruel, and it was at least a little bit his fault. He had seen how far she was willing to go to defend her faith in her people, and he had understood the profound depths of her naïveté.

And yet he had left her unprotected, because no matter how well he knew her, he had never once managed to put himself in her place. He had never predicted the intensity of her need to do the right thing, and so he had lost her again and again until there was nothing left to lose.

“Run, if you can,” he shouted hollowly to any wolf left to hear him. “Run now. There will be no amnesty, no peace. Run.”

A hurricane was coming to level the city, and nearly all of its werewolves were dead. The ones who remained would do well to heed his warning, because Vivianne was gone and Klaus had nothing else to protect. He heard a few miserable survivors scrambling into the brush. Klaus found himself alone, the world around him as barren as his own heart. A sudden sheet of rain drowned out the fires from the explosion, and Klaus held Vivianne’s body closer, guarding her as the storm came upon their exposed scar of land.