Первородные: Восхождение

CHAPTER SIX

“IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST.”

Rebekah had been repeating this mantra for days, and yet Captain Eric Moquet never seemed fully satisfied. That kind of restless curiosity might be appealing in a lover, but it was downright annoying in an investigator. She enjoyed the attention lavished on her by the captain, but he was becoming difficult, and Rebekah wasn’t sure how much more patience she had for these soldiers she had so confidently offered to win over to the Mikaelsons’ cause.

“But we must know, and only you can provide the truth.” Eric held Rebekah’s arm as he led her across the treacherous campgrounds. The soldiers had done their best to tame the terrain by the river, filling in marshy holes and cutting back undergrowth, but the wild bayou was barely contained by the orderly sprawl.

She sighed in frustration. Eric had decided that it was terribly important to help her, find the bad men, and punish them. He still wanted to root out her imaginary attacker and bring him to justice, and he was increasingly baffled by Rebekah’s reluctance to cooperate. Eric believed that the rule of law would win out over chaos, and she could not convince him otherwise. It was actually an endearing, if idiotic, belief.

Still, the more Eric questioned her about the supposed attack in the forest, the more Rebekah worried that she might have made a terrible mistake in staging the murder. He did not want to let the crime go unpunished, which she supposed was natural enough. But the problem went far deeper than that.

Until she had met Eric Moquet, Rebekah had allowed herself to forget that humans could be intelligent, insightful, or intuitive. She had expected a single-minded and military pursuit of the wrongdoers, which would run into the dead end she had created. Instead, Eric’s mind had shown flexibility that was, frankly, alarming. He attacked the problem with creativity and inventiveness, so that sooner or later he was bound to notice that she was lying.

As if to make her predicament worse, Eric had also proved himself to be extremely chivalrous over the last few days, not to mention even more handsome than she had realized at first. His hazel eyes were warm and sincere, while his dark hair with its scattering of silver strands made him look dignified and thoughtful. Combined with his deep rumble of a voice that was worth listening to at least as much as his carefully measured words, she found herself fascinated every time they spoke. He walked a gentleman’s fine line flawlessly, managing to provide attentive, charming company without intruding on her privacy. In spite of the worries that never left the back of her mind, they had spent many hours together in perfect companionship. The captain had even shared a wonderful amount of news and gossip with her from his home city of Paris, reminding her fondly of the time she had spent there and the people she had come to know.

But he had rarely spoken about himself, not even to hint at whether a wife and family were waiting for him back in France. Nor would he confide in her much about his obvious interest in the occult, which frustrated her greatly. That ridiculous fixation was almost certainly harmless—she had once caught him reading what looked to be a book of fairy tales with rapt interest—and she saw no sign that he knew anything specific or dangerous to her. But it would have been better if he knew nothing at all, and Rebekah was determined to steer his attention in a more productive direction.

Unfortunately, at the moment, his preferred direction seemed to be tracking down her imaginary bandits. He wanted her to look at the assorted criminals he’d caught in the last few days to see if any of them were her attackers, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

In a burst of inspiration, it occurred to Rebekah that one of her problems might be the solution to the other. If she connected the mystery of her attacker with Eric’s interest in the supernatural, then he would solve one investigation while explaining the other. After all, what was one human’s life—a troublemaker anyway—compared to the safety of her and her brothers? If Eric didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, then Rebekah could convince him that any one of the suspects was the “supernatural” terror.

“Captain, I know you believe that we were set upon by...by some unnatural fiend,” she reminded him. “Could you not eliminate any suspect that’s a mortal man?”

“You saw these creatures in action and still believed them to be mortal men,” he pointed out, his eyes searching hers. “Perhaps we have caught one such fiend without even knowing it.”

“Well, then,” she agreed thoughtfully, “let me get a look at them.”

It took them only a minute more to reach the newly constructed prison. The building was more solid than the surrounding tents, but still rough and unfinished, cobbled together from whatever the soldiers had scrounged from the forest. It looked no better on the inside. The dozen or so men who had been unlucky enough to get caught were crammed into one small cell. Rebekah could only imagine how uncomfortable it must be to sleep. The straw beneath them was dank, and barely any air came from the one high, barred window.

Eric’s second-in-command, the black-stubbled, unimaginative Felix, stood guard by the door. He watched her intently as she passed, and Rebekah felt an inexplicable chill as his eyes raked across her face.

“You are perfectly safe,” Eric murmured in her ear, mistaking her disgust for fear. “Do you know any of them?”

“Perhaps.” She had to force the words out past her teeth, and she wished she could take them back as soon as she did. “These are your suspects?”

“They are, Madame,” Eric confirmed, his sun-weathered face looking satisfied.

Rebekah frowned as she scanned the group. There were more men than she had thought there would be...surely they were not all new arrivals. “Which of these were caught after I came here?”

To her surprise and mild alarm, Eric hesitated. In what light filtered in through the small window, his expression was unreadable. “I am a fair man.” Pride rang in his low voice, but there was an apology in the words as well. “Madame, if you know one of these criminals, then I am sure you will be able to distinguish him without us separating the new from the old.”

In other words, he would not narrow down her choices, testing her as much as the men in the jail cell. That made things considerably more difficult. If she pointed to the wrong thug, Eric would know it, and worse, he might even direct his inquiry toward her.

If she wanted to keep suspicion off herself, she’d have to pick the right wrong man. She could compel Eric to believe her, but she knew from experience that lies acquired lives of their own, and one lie always led to more.

She glanced at the caged men. Perhaps she could make some kind of guess based on which were the least filthy? It was not an easy distinction to make. Then, to her delight, she realized that she actually did know one of the faces...and had seen it the night before she’d killed the wagoner and his wife. Green eyes glittered brilliantly out of his swarthy face, and his left arm was bound in a grimy sling. Elijah had broken it, she remembered, when Solomon and his pack had surrounded her brother and ambushed him, six to one.

“That one,” she said confidently, raising her hand and pointing. “That’s the man who attacked me. I would know his face anywhere.”

Eric looked pleased, but the caged werewolf looked murderous. “The bitch lies,” he snarled, throwing himself forward to grab the bars between them, and she thought she detected some yellow starting to blossom in the green of his eyes.

She clutched Eric’s arm and pressed the side of her body against his, for good measure. “It’s him,” she whispered, and her apparent fear snapped him into action.

He spun her outside before slamming the door decisively behind them, then gestured for Felix to approach. The wind caught at Rebekah’s gray gown, twisting its skirt around her legs. “Bring the one with the broken arm to my tent,” Eric ordered. “I need to question him, and then I will carry out the execution myself.”

Felix saluted sharply, then cast one more lingering glance at Rebekah before he moved to obey. She wondered if he was jealous of the time she had spent with his captain, if he worried that he might be replaced as Eric’s confidant. If so, though, surely the wisest course of action would be for him to perform his duties more smartly and expediently than ever before. As if he had reached the same conclusion, Felix pulled a ring of keys from his red coat and marched stiffly back into the jail.

So that the captain can question and then kill the prisoner. Rebekah could only imagine how confused the werewolf would be by Eric’s questions. But he wouldn’t say anything that might incriminate her—of that she was sure. No lowly pack member would take it upon himself to reveal the existence of his kind to humans, and in protecting his secret he would have to protect hers as well. How fortunate that any werewolf would rather die than betray his kin, because die he would. And it would serve him right.

As they escorted the struggling werewolf out of the jail, Eric bent to pick something up off the ground. It was a fallen tree branch, and as she gasped he snapped it across his knee. Eric held one splintered half up to the light, and she knew exactly what it was: a stake.

Rebekah felt a sudden tightness in her throat. What would Eric want with a stake? The only reason he’d need one would be to kill her kind. All of a sudden the good Captain Moquet was looking less like an eccentric scholar of the occult and more like a fledgling vampire hunter. She raced back to the warmth of her tent to remove herself from any further involvement.

It was hours before she heard enough of a disturbance to peer outside. Four soldiers were carrying the werewolf’s lifeless body toward the edge of the camp. Even from a distance, with night having fallen across the bayou, she was sure she could see the broken tree branch still protruding from the left side of the man’s chest.