Disgusted, Klaus turned his back on the increasingly wild scene. Their celebration would go on until morning, but there wasn’t a reason for him to stay. He’d leave her to her new family and find some other way to drown his sorrows.

CHAPTER TWENTY

IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE that there were no werewolves to be found on the night of the full moon. Elijah had been sure there would be at least one prowling the woods near Hugo’s house. Eventually, he had wandered out into the forest in the hope of crossing their path, and finally had begun tracking in earnest when he had realized that dawn might come without him finding a single wolf. At this rate, he thought, he might not even need the protection spell—maybe all of the Navarros had simply left town.

He was almost on top of them before he realized his mistake.

On a curved plain between two wings of the tangled forest, hundreds of werewolves reveled. They fought, mated, and tore into raw game with their bare teeth. There was a dead man lying on a wooden platform in their midst, surrounded by sputtering torches, and Elijah could guess what they were celebrating. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a changing ceremony this large before, and the game they were sharing was coming from somewhere.

Even as he watched, four wolves split off from the celebration. They had to be a hunting party, and Elijah crouched in the underbrush. Before he could overthink the consequences he put his head down and ran.

Their trail was wide and clear, with broken branches and trampled leaves leading straight into the depths of the forest. Elijah followed cautiously, trying to understand and predict their movements. The largest of them, a massive silver beast, nearly surprised him once. It paused as Elijah quickly slipped between the trees, lifting its angry yellow eyes straight at him. Elijah didn’t blink or breathe, and after a moment the hulking silver monster took off at a run to rejoin the hunt.

Elijah picked up the track of one of the two smaller wolves, a quick-footed brown creature with nervous, alert ears. It hunted intently, and he pursued it with the same kind of focus. When the rest of its friends were a good distance away, he crouched in the soft dirt, measuring the werewolf’s steps with his eyes.

There was no more time to lose, and so he sprang.

He wrapped one hand around the werewolf’s muzzle, both to avoid being bitten and to prevent it from alerting the others. The wolf bucked and twisted, but Elijah sank his fangs into its shoulder like a cobra striking. The brown werewolf squealed through its closed jaw and fell awkwardly to the ground, trapped beneath Elijah’s weight. He could feel warm, sticky wetness on his hand, and he pulled out the handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it to the spot.

The werewolf thrashed again, but halfheartedly this time. Elijah suspected it was wondering why he hadn’t killed it already. He would if he had to, but all he needed was some blood, not the creature’s life. He rolled off the injured werewolf, releasing its muzzle at the last possible instant before backing out of range.

“Run,” he yelled, hoping it wouldn’t try to fight back.

But instead, it crouched low and growled...and so did a chorus of other wolves. Elijah realized he was trapped. The giant silver werewolf was there, its hackles up, along with the rest of the hunting party.

Except there had only been four of them in the beginning...and now Elijah couldn’t count them all. Yellow eyes stared out from every side, and the growls vibrated through the woods. The whole pack was there.

He had been recognized. They had caught an Original vampire attacking a werewolf, and now their fragile truce would come to a bloody end.

He launched himself over the brown wolf and straight at the big silver one. They tumbled one over the other, snarling and snapping, and then the other werewolves moved in. There were too many of them, and Elijah knew better than to stick around and try to defeat them one by one. He disentangled himself from the silver and sprang forward again, kicking another werewolf in the jaw as he passed.

He was faster than them, and stronger, but they were everywhere. He lashed out with fists and fangs, and, above all, kept moving forward, but he felt a sharp set of teeth rake across his forearm. It stung like fire, and broke his concentration just long enough that another werewolf’s bite caught the back of his thigh, trying to sever his hamstring.

He tried to ignore the pain and forced himself onward. There was no chance for him to fend off the attacks, and he was bitten again and again. After what felt like hours, he staggered out into the emptied plain, where the dead man still lay across their makeshift altar.

His vision was starting to blur, but he could have sworn that he saw a snowy white werewolf, female by the size of her, lying beside the altar with her head on her paws. Her yellow eyes stared balefully at him, and the stars swam and swung overhead. She did not attack.

Elijah gained a little speed as he crossed open ground, and the werewolves were losing interest in their pursuit as dawn neared and the change came upon them again. The sun would be rising within minutes, and Elijah’s strength was fading nearly as fast. Now and then there was a nipping at his heels, almost mocking, but most of the werewolves seemed content to let their venom do its work. With the wolves’ poison burning in every inch of his body, his last thought was that he should have let Klaus kill them all. Then he saw the sun’s first rays glittering off the water of the Saint Louis, and he threw himself in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THERE WAS NO one at their “new” house, and it was even less glamorous than Elijah had described. Rebekah’s clothes were soaked from her flight out of the army’s camp, and she was not amused that the windows lacked glass. The sun was still not up yet, and the wind made her clothes stick to her body. And her brothers were missing.

She added her swim in the river to the list of insults visited on her by Eric and his late lieutenant. Felix had paid his share, but the tally was still rising. She wrung the musty-smelling water out of her long hair, tugging at its tangles with restless fingers.

From the evidence of whatever disaster had occurred there, it was clear that the house was not protected. She was no safer inside than anywhere else in New Orleans. The one place she would be safe was with her family, and so she had to stop pacing the tiny drawing room and go find them. She pulled a musty cloak off a hook, and slammed the door shut behind her, ignoring the squeal of hinges letting go of the wood. They were already out of windows—what was one extra door? She had far more important things to worry about.

There had been a full moon, and she had heard an unusual amount of howling from the woods to the north. In her heart, she suspected that her brothers were probably right where the worst of the trouble was, so she made her way back to the river, intending to follow its line as closely as possible in case she needed to make a quick retreat. She could still cover large sections of the forested land that way, and save the depths of the forest for a last resort.

The sun rising over the bayou touched it with fire, waking some living thing everywhere it reached. For a brief, dizzying moment Rebekah saw what Elijah had seen in this place: It was as wild and confusing as they were. It would shelter them and protect them, and it could be their true home.

Then the strange, almost sourceless dawn light gleamed off something white in the river, and Rebekah stepped closer, trying to ignore the way the mud sucked at her shoes. She certainly had not thought to dress for this sort of thing while flirting with Eric, but her clothes were already ruined by her first dip in the river, so a second couldn’t do them any more harm.