CHAPTER NINETEEN

KLAUS WOKE IN the late afternoon, fully rested for the first time he could remember. He reached for Vivianne by pure instinct, needing to pull her closer again, to be touching every inch of her. But his hand found nothing but cold, crumpled bedding, and he jumped to his feet in alarm.

She was gone. Her dress, her shoes, even her scent was fading. She had been gone for hours and hours, and soon it would be as if she had never been there at all. What had happened to her?

He dressed quickly, thinking over what had happened. Whatever they had experienced together, something had obviously gone wrong. He had missed something...something she hadn’t wanted him to see. When she had given herself to him, she’d also been preparing to take herself away, and he had misunderstood everything.

He circled her family’s home, prowling like an animal with every sense attuned to the slightest change. He could feel her moving between its rooms, even when he could not see her. And so he knew when she stole out of the house, although her own mother had no idea she was gone. She was escaping his love and now her family’s, believing they could never understand what she was about to do.

She was wrong. She was young and impulsive and sincere, and that combination made her incredibly vulnerable to the manipulation of the werewolves.

And people called Klaus a monster.

She wore a long, black cloak with a deep hood that hid her face, but he did not doubt for a moment that it was she. He followed soundlessly, pursuing her through the shadowed cobblestoned streets until they gave way to dirt tracks. She did not hesitate, and he did not take his eyes from her concealed form. He would have killed anyone or anything that troubled her, but he couldn’t protect her from herself.

He knew Vivianne better than anyone. If she truly wanted to do this, then blocking her path was futile. If he didn’t stop her he might lose her, but he would lose her for sure if he tried. So he could only watch, hoping against hope that he had misunderstood her intentions.

He had not. He smelled the werewolves before he saw them. Dozens and dozens, all waiting for Vivianne. Her first kill would not be some accident in a narrow back alley—they would make a production of her joining their ranks. They would draw her in with their celebration so that she wouldn’t be able to stop, and then it would be done. Irrevocable. She would become the wolf that he could not, and then she would be allied with his bitterest enemies.

They had gathered in a semicircle near the edge of the forest, waiting for her with torches and the requisite human sacrifice. Klaus was repulsed by the makeshift altar, which tried to lend an air of legitimacy to the proceedings. An unconscious man lay across it, naked to the waist with his hands bound behind him. How could Vivianne not be revolted by it? That she could believe she was amongst her own kind turned his stomach.

Vivianne threw back the hood of her cloak, and Klaus closed his eyes for a moment, remembering every single emotion he had seen on that lovely face the night before. There was no hint of a smile on her bloodred lips now. Even in the soft golden light of sunset, she looked pale and serious. Armand stepped forward to greet her, but stopped halfway, apparently reading her expression. Vivianne was obviously in no mood to be comforted. She had come to kill.

“Welcome, all,” Solomon Navarro bellowed, tugging his son back into the semicircle. “And welcome, Vivianne. We are here to welcome you into our ranks, and to celebrate the union of our families. It will be formalized at the wedding, but we all know it begins here, with this bridge between our two worlds.”

“Thank you,” Vivianne answered. “As a girl I never gave much thought to my werewolf heritage, and I certainly never expected to find myself here. But there is no denying what I am—the common ground between the witch and the werewolf clans. And tonight I will fully embrace both halves of myself in order to make this city whole.”

Klaus longed to shake sense into her, but a rumbling of approval rose from the werewolves. Their energy was high, yet so was their tension. So far, Viv had said the right things, but she hadn’t actually killed anyone yet. The real party wouldn’t start until she had backed up her pretty words with murder.

“Who is he?” she asked, gesturing to the man on the rough wooden altar.

“A criminal,” Armand Navarro assured her. “This death is better than the one he deserves.”

Vivianne lifted her chin. “I would prefer to be the judge of that,” she told him. Klaus smiled in spite of himself—she couldn’t bring herself to be sweet to Armand so soon after being in Klaus’s bed. “What was his crime?”

A female werewolf stepped forward from the pack. She was young, with long blonde hair that was pulled back severely. “He attacked me,” she answered, her voice full of steel. “He said I wasn’t the first, there’d been other women before me.”

Solomon crossed the line of werewolves to rest a heavy hand on Vivianne’s shoulder. “He has committed innumerable crimes against humanity,” Sol continued for the woman, “but it is for the crime against a pack member that he dies. You will grow used to our ways in time, and they will protect you as fully as any one of us.”

Vivianne considered those words, her gaze level with Sol’s. Finally, she unfastened the clasp of her cloak, letting it fall in a puddle of darkness at her heels. Armand offered her a knife, and in the flickering torchlight Klaus could see strange carvings running the length of its blade. Vivianne took it, shifting the hilt in her hand as if to test the balance. “It is for all of his crimes that he will die,” she countered.

Sol nodded his consent, and Vivianne walked slowly to the altar. She seemed to be studying the man who lay across it, but Klaus wasn’t sure. He hoped that this was harder for her than she wanted the wolves to know, and he wished that she would just turn and run. They would pursue her, but Klaus would be waiting. She only had to feel Klaus’s presence.

Instead, she lifted the knife.

A howl rose from the werewolves, and they closed in around her and the man. There was no chance left to hesitate, and so the knife flashed down, slicing the man’s throat in two just as neatly as if Klaus had done it himself.

There was a moment when the man’s blood spurted out and the air meant for his lungs bubbled through the gap and nothing else happened at all. Klaus watched, stunned. The split second lasted longer than the rest of his entire life. He had been so sure that she would run. He had imagined spending lifetimes with her, and in one brutal moment she had thrown it all away. Thrown him away. She wasn’t the person he thought she was, not at all.

The response from the werewolves was deafening, like they had all gone mad. The howling drowned out any individual voices, overwhelming anything Vivianne might have said. She was lost to him now, just another member of the pack. She might as well have cut his heart apart with her knife.

And then the pack was changing, shifting, crying out in an agony that matched their ecstasy. The sun had fully set, Klaus realized, and the full moon was rising over New Orleans. Vivianne would greet it as a wolf.

All around her, men and women turned into wolves one by one, but she writhed on the ground in her shuddering, breaking human form. No matter what pain this transition caused her, though, her feelings about what came after would be worse. She didn’t have the luxury of shutting off her emotions the way a young vampire might have. She would have to live with her condition long after the werewolf change had grown easy for her.

It was the least she deserved.