Первородные: Восхождение

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“TAKE ALL THE time you need,” Eric urged her, pulling out her chair chivalrously. “We will speak about whatever you choose, and also...not.”

He had said variations of the same thing so many times since his unexpected proposal that Rebekah knew it must be driving him absolutely mad that she had not yet answered him. But she wasn’t looking forward to his expression when she said no.

She could still feel the heat of his lips on hers; she could still hear the passion in his voice when he had asked her to marry him. She had given him every reason to believe that she returned his feelings, and the truth was that she did. Which only made what she had to tell him more painful.

“Thank you,” she said instead, sitting at the beautifully laid table. “You must know how flattered I am, but I appreciate having this time to think.” It was difficult to believe that it’d only been a day since their ride into the countryside. Every moment she waited to give him her answer felt like another day in itself.

His love pressed right in the center of her pain. She wanted to marry him. If only they could ride off together into another life and dedicate themselves to nothing but making each other happy, and she could leave her tortured past behind.

Sooner or later, though, he would likely notice that she didn’t age. And Mikael would not stop hunting her just because she chose to stop caring, and Klaus would probably stake her even if Eric didn’t figure out her secret and do it himself. There were too many dangers and unknowns to ever accept his proposal.

But as long as he didn’t know that, then she could almost convince herself, at least for this little while, that it might be possible. And so she could not answer him.

A boy who could not have been more than fifteen brought them a crusty loaf of bread and a pitcher of acceptable red wine, and assured Eric in a hoarse whisper that their dinner would be ready at any moment.

“The camp looks almost as good as new,” Rebekah offered, to change the subject. “I heard that the armory sustained some damage, though, that will require new weaponry.”

“Yes,” Eric agreed, looking preoccupied. “We had a source of munitions in the area who has proved very useful for resolving that sort of shortage quickly, but he cannot be found. I have sent some messages up the river, and hopefully some of the other outposts are well supplied. If we have to wait for powder and cannonry from France, we may have trouble holding our position here.”

“Has it been so dangerous?” she asked curiously. Aside from the werewolf raid she had caused, the only real source of entertainment for the soldiers seemed to be the bandits they encountered during their patrols. Cannons were hardly necessary.

“We have been well-armed enough to keep the peace until now,” Eric explained. “If the word gets out that has changed, I expect the rebellious factions and criminal element in this region will grow bolder.”

He wanted overwhelming force, and Rebekah approved of the tactic. It was, after all, the same policy to which she and her brothers subscribed. They had built their legend through a surplus of brutality, and made sure they were always prepared to reinforce the lesson. It was why neither she nor Elijah had tried too hard to slow Klaus’s killing spree when they had first landed here. She believed in holding power at any cost. If Eric wanted artillery just to keep the peace, then he was the sort of man she would consider marrying.

If she could consider marrying.

She opened her mouth to tell him she would do it—damn the consequences. She wanted to be his wife. Years from now, when she hadn’t aged and he wondered why there were signs of vampire kills everywhere they went and Elijah showed up every few months to try to drag her back into the fold...well, she would just figure those problems out as they came.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Felix’s hooked nose poking through the flap of the tent, followed in a moment by his boringly handsome face. “Sir,” he whispered, as if he were close enough to speak only to Eric without Rebekah overhearing the words. “Sir, you are needed. A message has come down from Baton Rouge, an answer to our—my lady”—he seemed to notice her at last—“I am terribly sorry to interrupt, but the captain is needed at the communications post down by the river. At once, sir,” he added with a guilty glance back at Eric.

Eric sighed and rose. “I will return, Madame,” he told her formally, refraining from anything more intimate in front of his lieutenant. Felix must know by now that there was something more than politeness between them, but he just nodded impatiently, eager for Eric to go to his work. As he approached the tent’s exit, though, Eric hesitated. “Stay, please, Felix, and keep Rebekah company while I am gone.” He glanced back at her one last time.

“Yes, sir,” Felix answered smartly, saluting. “My lady.”

Felix was pleasant enough to look at, she supposed, but in no way was he an acceptable substitute for Eric. For my fiancé, she tried out in her mind, and although it sounded strange she did not dislike it.

Felix did not sit at the table with her, but instead crossed the office to rummage in one of the drawers of the large rosewood desk. “I am sorry to interrupt your dinner,” he repeated offhandedly, the main part of his attention on his search.

“It had not yet begun.” Rebekah stood. “What is it you are looking for?”

Felix frowned and closed the drawer. “It is nothing, Madame,” he assured her. “Just an item the captain will most likely want on hand when he returns. Please excuse me a moment.”

Before she could stop him, Felix stepped into the inner chamber. She waited for a surprised gasp, but none came. It made sense, she realized—as Eric’s right-hand man, Felix must have seen it all by now. That made Rebekah distinctly uncomfortable. Just how many humans in this area had heard of vampires? How long before there was nowhere in the world where they’d still be a secret?

She stepped closer to the curtain and listened intently, trying to track his progress from the sounds of shifting and scraping within. “Madame,” he called suddenly, and she startled. “Can I beg your assistance?” His voice had moved closer to her now as he approached the curtain from the other side. “I am sorry to ask, but I have need of some more delicate hands than my own.”

Rebekah narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Why had Eric left so suddenly, and what was Felix up to? He had resisted her compulsion at first, she remembered with foreboding. Perhaps he somehow remembered the last time they’d been in Eric’s tent together. Was he trying to catch her in some kind of lie? She felt her fangs come out.

“Coming,” she answered sweetly. She stepped confidently through the curtain, and caught Felix’s wrist as it swung down toward her. She twisted hard, and the wooden stake fell from his hand. The smile still on her face, she turned to him. “What was it you needed?”

He kicked at her and pulled his arm away, and she let it go. “Demon,” he grated, and she rolled her eyes. That wasn’t really the type of talk she was looking for, but it was a start.

“I think you have the wrong girl,” she suggested, although her chatty tone was expelled through gritted teeth. She had been so concerned about what Eric knew that she had never stopped to think that he might have an accomplice. “I’m the one you rescued from the dark, scary woods, remember?”

He hissed between his teeth and lunged at her. She sidestepped, bringing her raised foot down on his leg for good measure. The splintering sound it made was deeply satisfying. But there had to be a reason he was so bold in his attack....Had Eric set her up, proposed to her, and then left her to be ambushed? “I know who you are” Felix gasped, and she gave him some grudging credit for not screaming. He was a trained warrior, stronger than those in the French army, and he wasn’t about to give up his fight easily

However, he was human, and humans broke. “I don’t think you do,” she disagreed as he hurled an iron railway stake from one of Eric’s chests at her face. She caught it in the air and whipped it back into the foot of the leg she’d already broken, pinning him to the ground like a butterfly.

“I can see it,” he hissed, pulling at the stake. It was stuck deep in the earth, and he wasn’t going anywhere. “Your pretty face and your evil heart. In Europe, I was trained by the master of all vampire hunters, and I can see that you are filled with darkness to your core. The man who sent us wants your kind dead, and I want to do his bidding.”

Rebekah’s whole body went still as Felix’s words washed over her. So it was her father—the master of the hunters—who’d sent Felix and Eric her way. Only Mikael would have men cross oceans to kill his children. But it seemed like Felix didn’t fully understand who she was, or that her brothers were here as well. And that could be her saving grace.

“Your employer may want me dead,” she agreed, “but I think if he had wanted you to do it yourself, he would have told you how to kill me.”

Felix’s brown eyes were starting to lose focus, and Rebekah knew she didn’t have long to get coherent answers. “He taught me to resist your magic so that I could stand against you. He will reward me....”

His words struck another chord of truth. Mikael had taught Felix to resist her, which was an impressive feat on its own. Only by repeating the compulsion over and over had she bent Felix to her will. Yet, through it all, perhaps he had still retained some hazy suspicion about the night she’d snuck into Eric’s tent. It might have taken him some time to recall the pieces and figure out that she was a vampire—but what was Eric’s role in this? Had he deliberately left them alone tonight? If only she’d left the army encampment—like she’d left Europe—and never returned.

Rebekah pulled a silver crucifix from the nearest chest, admiring the evenness of the blade that some lunatic had sharpened to a point. “Now the question becomes: Did you intend to surprise this benefactor of yours with all of the good news at once? Or have you sent messages reporting your discoveries all along?”

Felix’s eyes refocused on the crucifix, and he watched it warily. “The captain sent everything we learned,” he told her defiantly. He could no longer fight her, but he could still hurt her, and he knew it. “A report the morning after you arrived, and another when your monster friends attacked my soldiers.” He smiled triumphantly in spite of the pain that lined his face. “We have known your kind was here for some time, and even heard rumors that you had made some foul nest nearby. Now I have seen the truth—that there has been one of you among us all along.”

It was worse than she thought. She had known Eric was hunting her, that he was an enemy of her kind. So why did it hurt so much to hear it said out loud? Felix’s strained voice spitting out her worst fears felt like actual torture. “Why now?” she asked, hating the note of weakness in her voice. The ache in her heart had cost her control, and now instead of questioning him she was almost pleading. “Why try to kill me now, after I’ve been here so long?”

“I followed you out of camp,” he explained, his labored breath hissing in and out of his lungs. “When you snuck away without a word to anyone, I followed you into the city. And then, as I watched you feed, I remembered everything. I saw what you are, what you do. I am sworn to keep the peace in New Orleans, and there can be no doubt about my duty. The captain did not know the intricacies of my plan, but he will understand what I had to do. You’re a murderer, and you deserve to die.”

“And yet I won’t.” She shrugged coldly. There was no victory to celebrate in defeating him, especially now that fear and pain had driven him into delusion. But Rebekah hurt, and it made her want to hurt Felix. And Eric, especially Eric, but she could only worry about one hunter at a time.

“Killing me will accomplish nothing, demon.” Felix’s words carried conviction, but his eyes looked delirious. “The hunt is only beginning. Your days are numbered.”

Rebekah bent down, enjoying the dread that grew on his face as she came near. It made her feel strong. “Killing you will accomplish a great deal,” she disagreed, tracing the collar of his uniform jacket with her fingernail. “Your little plot interrupted my dinner, Felix.” She smiled so that he could see her fangs clearly. “Now I’m hungry.”

He tried to fight her off even then, but it was hopeless. He died with a strangled cry, and she drank her fill. She didn’t bother to try to cover the marks—there wasn’t a point. Eric would find the corpse, and know that it was the work of a vampire. Even if he didn’t know that Rebekah was the daughter of the very man he took his orders from, it didn’t matter. Her father wanted to kill all vampires, and that he’d finally found his children again would just be a special treat. If it was true that Eric had reported that vampires resided in New Orleans, Mikael might already be on his way to the New World.

Every time the facts crossed through her mind, it was as if she were learning them for the first time. She couldn’t absorb them, because then she would have to believe them. The ambush may have failed, but she had still fallen into the trap.

Eric was far more to her than just an attractive man, or even an opportunity to escape into a new life. She had loved him. She loved him still. The betrayal was more than she could stand, but the thoughts kept coming, reminding her over and over that she had let him play her for a fool. Had he flattered her, wooed her, begged to marry her, solely with the intention of keeping her close until Mikael could arrive to dispatch her?

Rebekah rolled beneath the back of the tent and broke for the river, running so fast that a human eye would see no more than a blur. She hoped that Elijah had gotten the protection spell working on that sorry old house he was always rambling on about. They were going to need it.