Первородные: Восхождение

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SOONER OR LATER, Rebekah knew that she would have to face her brothers. The harmony she had with Eric had stretched on blissfully, but it couldn’t last forever. She was still an Original, with ties and obligations. And he was still a human, with all the dangerous vulnerabilities that entailed. Eric was ready to become a vampire, but she couldn’t change him in New Orleans, and they could not leave until she made things right with her family.

Eric had managed—barely—to contain his frustration, but she could still sense it. He had been forced to accept her judgment, since he couldn’t deny that he didn’t understand the complexities of being an ancient, immortal vampire. But she could see how the rules annoyed him, and how eager he was to leave and be free with her.

But it was time to visit Elijah and Klaus, in order to set her future in motion.

She heard a strange wailing sound as they approached the house, as if an animal were crying out. The protection spell must finally be in place, she realized. Her brothers would be safe behind its barrier....And they would have been warned that a guest was coming: Eric.

Sure enough, as they reached the front porch, the door banged open. “Sister,” Klaus greeted her broadly, extending his arms to indicate the entire quadrangle of land around them. His muscular frame filled the doorway, and his amused smile gave way to a dangerous gleam in his pale eyes. “You have returned to our happy home at last.” Klaus was still mad at her—weeks later—for their encounter in his hotel room, and now she had walked Eric straight into the lion’s jaws.

“Not now,” Rebekah hissed, pushing him aside and dragging Eric through the door, and Klaus followed gamely. With Klaus in this kind of mood, she’d need a cooler head to mediate.

Elijah was at the rough-hewn table, and he put down his set of papers when he saw her. She was relieved that there were no lingering traces of the terrible attack he had suffered. Then he saw Eric’s uniform and jumped up in surprise. “You have returned our cousin to us,” Elijah guessed, his brown eyes darting from Eric’s to Rebekah’s and back again. “We had heard her husband was killed in the woods, but—”

“He knows,” Rebekah interrupted, unwilling to cope with layers of lies. It had not been easy to explain the wagoner to Eric, but he understood that the price of immortality was blood. “He knows everything.”

Klaus and Elijah went completely still, staring at her as if she must be joking. “He knows what?” Elijah asked incredulously, and his serious face pleaded with her to go back to being the wagoner’s widow, or to show him that this was just some further deception.

“Perhaps I should give you a little time with your family,” Eric suggested, and beside his composure, her brothers looked to her like a pair of thugs. Rebekah nodded, and he gently disengaged her hand from his arm, passed Klaus without flinching, and returned to the solitude of the front porch. Rebekah steeled herself for what was next.

“My dear sister,” Klaus shifted his weight to block the doorway, “it seems you have been keeping things from us. Elijah, do you remember ‘Tell the good captain everything’ being part of her plan?”

“She didn’t mean everything,” Elijah insisted stubbornly, still trying to read Rebekah’s expression. “Explain yourself, Rebekah, because at the moment it sounds like you’ve betrayed our deepest secrets to the humans you were meant to recruit.”

Put that way, it sounded even worse. She decided in that moment that her brothers didn’t need to know about Eric’s brief involvement with Mikael. It was going to be hard enough to convince them not to kill him as it was. “It’s true that I have abandoned my mission,” she told them, keeping her chin resolutely high. “And I have also revealed our deepest secret, but only to one human, not all of them. He already knew of our kind, and desires—more than anything—to become a vampire. And I love him, and intend to do as he asks.”

Klaus made to follow Eric outside. Rebekah intercepted him, taking a hard blow to her stomach before Elijah pulled them apart. “He’s a liability now,” Klaus snarled, baring his fangs at Elijah in turn. “I’ll kill him and stake her. Get out of my way, brother, or I will be forced to question your loyalty along with hers.”

“Loyalty,” Rebekah scoffed. “To our family’s cause, or to you, Niklaus? How are things going with your little witch?”

“That’s over,” Klaus replied, his eyes darting away from her for the briefest moment. “You have no right to even speak of her, traitor.”

“Really, Klaus? And what have you done for us, except for meddle in the affairs of the witches and werewolves, and put us all at risk in the first place? And as you seemed determined on bringing everything down on our heads, I found something more. Something real.” She turned to Elijah, hating the tears that sprang to her eyes. “I love him,” she repeated. “And he loves me. He asked me to marry him before he knew what I was, and now he feels I’m the answer to his every prayer. I am going to turn him, and I am going to be with him. I’m sorry to tell you this way, but no matter how or when I say it, it will happen.”

Klaus lunged for her again, but Elijah held him back. “Rebekah, what you want is impossible,” he reminded her gently. “We have made significant progress with the local factions in your absence, but the fundamental rules of our presence here remain unchanged. If you make a new vampire, there will be hell to pay.”

“I know,” she whispered, and she saw Klaus stop struggling. He watched her intently, and although she spoke to both of her brothers, he was the one she wanted to reach. “There is no future for Eric and me here, and so we will have to leave.”

“Leave,” Klaus breathed, as if he thought he must have misheard. He shook off and straightened his collar, the motion practiced and automatic. “Leave? After everything we have done in the last few weeks—did you know how seriously Elijah was injured in the fight to stay here?”

“I found him and brought him home,” Rebekah reminded them, and Elijah’s jaw softened a bit. “I wish that I could always be there when you need me. Both of you,” she emphasized, laying a careful hand on Klaus’s sleeve. “I promised to be with you forever, but forever has still barely begun. I know we will meet again, but I can’t stay here with Eric. And you have built too much to leave now.”

“It’s just the way it is, then,” Klaus sneered. “Circumstances have gotten in the way of your vow—oh, well. When I fall in love, I’m a dangerous madman who needs to be brought to heel, but you’re just some starry-eyed romantic whose abandonment we’re supposed to accept.”

“You want other things, Klaus,” Rebekah reminded him. “You want power and admiration and notoriety in addition to love, and you will not be happy without all of them. My life is the only thing I have truly wanted since it was ripped from me. I have longed for the love I should have had for centuries, and finally, I have found it. Outside is a man who loves me, who never wants to be without me.”

Perhaps having heard her, or perhaps simply impatient with waiting, Eric reappeared, standing squarely in the doorway. He looked fearless, ready for any blow that might come.

“I am sorry to meet you under these circumstances,” Eric told the Mikaelson brothers. “I was under the impression that Rebekah had no living family when I proposed to her, or else I would have courted your approval first.”

“What an odd turn of phrase,” Klaus remarked, one eyebrow raised. “You said living...and you did not say ask.”

“I did not,” Eric admitted, ignoring Klaus’s ruse. “Your sister knows her own mind. She loves you dearly and would rather go with your blessing, but I will not demean our love by pretending that she can’t live without your permission.”

Klaus looked wrathful, but Elijah chuckled. It was a low, strange sound in the tense air of the house, and Rebekah wondered how many times she would get to hear it again. Because she knew, before Elijah stepped forward to clasp forearms with Eric like a brother, that they were going to let her go.

As if Elijah’s reserve had been the last thing shoring up his own anger, Klaus’s glower dissolved into a rueful smile. He nodded grudgingly toward Eric first and then Rebekah, who impulsively threw her arms around him and held him tightly. He kissed the top of her head the way he had when they were children, and she stretched onto her tiptoes to kiss his cheek in return.

“We should drink to your happiness,” Klaus said, smirking suggestively at Eric’s throat before stalking into the dining room to pour some whiskey into four glasses.

They drank and talked until the sun was low on the horizon, its red final rays drifting in through the homespun curtains. Once the tension between them was settled, Rebekah realized with a bittersweet pang that her brothers and Eric got along well. She could tell that Elijah liked him, and Klaus was considerate and well-behaved enough that she understood he was signaling his approval. If only they could have stayed here.

“This does not need to be forever,” Elijah reminded her when the green glass bottle on the table between them was empty. “We have a voice here now, and we will use it. The witches’ prohibition against making new vampires cannot stand eternally. In time they will waver, and we will send for you.”

“We will return,” Rebekah promised, and Eric pressed her hands lovingly between his own.

“We will,” Eric agreed. “And if we find another place in our travels where vampires are welcome and safe from hunters, we will send for you.”

The words hung in the air for a long time before Rebekah realized that there was nothing else left to say. Her brothers would throw their glittering party to cement their place in New Orleans while she left it. There was nothing to keep her, now that she’d said good-bye to her brothers. She and Eric could sail that very night.

Looking at her brothers’ faces, she knew that if she stayed even one more day, the guilt of separating their family would break her heart.