“We don’t have to do this,” Klaus offered magnanimously. He certainly wouldn’t mind pummeling Armand into a pulpy corpse, but just this once he should give the werewolf a pass. He had, after all, spent a glorious and extremely thorough night with Armand’s fiancée, and that was probably injury enough. If Armand was willing to walk away, Klaus would let him.

“Stand up,” Armand growled menacingly. “You’ll answer for your brother’s crime whether you want to or not, so meet your fate like a man.”

The intoxicated wheels in Klaus’s head turned slowly around that new piece of information. It seemed possible this wasn’t about Vivianne after all—maybe Armand still didn’t even know about what had happened between them. Maybe Viv had kept their secret. Maybe she cared for him even now....

“What has my dear brother done to you?” Klaus asked, rising to his feet. He was pleased to discover that he did not sway.

Armand’s smirk was tainted by the ugly yellow gleam in his eyes. “He attacked us in the woods,” he explained, sounding both murderous and a little bit triumphant. “On his own, during the full moon. The fool died in the Saint Louis River, and now you’re going to join him.”

Well, good for him, Klaus thought. Elijah had taken on the entire werewolf population of New Orleans. Klaus realized that he must have interrupted the changing celebration, and for whatever reason he’d decided to fight off the wolves. In spite of Armand’s cocky assurance that Elijah had not survived, Klaus knew differently—mere werewolf venom wouldn’t kill an Original. Klaus felt a slow burn of pride for his idiot brother.

Klaus didn’t hesitate. He cocked his fist back and punched Armand squarely in the nose, and the werewolf’s hot blood spurted out in a sudden torrent of red. Armand looked surprised for a moment, and then his eyes went fully yellow and he struck. Klaus heard the sound of wood splintering as Armand knocked him first into a grandfather clock, and then downward through a low table. Klaus would pay for a lot more than the whiskey and his brunette’s time before he would be welcome back in the Southern Spot again, and the thought enraged him even further.

He drove his knee up into Armand’s stomach, pressing his advantage when the wolf gasped. He used the distraction to grab one of the shattered legs of the coffee table, and bashed it into the side of Armand’s head. The blow dazed him for a moment, and Klaus seized the opportunity. Driving his arms and legs upward, he threw Armand off of him and against the wall behind their heads, which made a dry cracking sound when the wolf hit it.

Armand fell heavily to the floor, but somehow managed to pull all of his long, awkward limbs into order and rolled to his feet with improbable grace. Klaus was still half crouched when he was knocked to the floor again, and the two of them struggled for a moment with neither getting the upper hand.

Elijah had struck at the werewolves when they were strongest. Drunk or no, Klaus could certainly do his part. And while Armand might not have realized it yet, he had Vivianne to pay for as well.

Klaus trapped one of Armand’s legs with his own and twisted, putting the tall werewolf flat on his back and rising up to sit on his chest. He lashed out with his fists, hitting Armand again and again. In his mind, Klaus saw Elijah wounded, Vivianne changing. Blood flowed freely until Armand’s face was barely visible through it, and then his eyes returned to their normal, dull blue and rolled back in his head.

Klaus watched him for a moment to make sure he would really stay down, and then staggered inelegantly to his feet. “Ladies,” he offered politely to the few whores who had remained cowering against the walls. “I apologize for any inconvenience this brute has caused you. Rest assured that I will always be available to defend your honor, just as I have today.” He tried to smooth his shirt, and realized that it was soaked with Armand’s blood.

He reached into his pocket and grabbed the hand of the nearest girl to drop in a handful of gold coins, folding her fingers closed around them in case she was too stunned to do so herself. He kissed her on the cheek for good measure, feeling more like his old self than ever. Whiskey, the company of half a dozen good women, and beating a werewolf unconscious: That was the recipe for Niklaus Mikaelson.

With a spring in his step, he left the brothel and turned his feet toward the house Elijah had acquired. He couldn’t wait to hear his brother’s side of this bizarre tale. If it was half as entertaining as Armand had made it sound, it was past time for the Original vampires to catch up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ELIJAH HAD GIVEN up on trying to figure out what was real. Rebekah had been gone so long that he wasn’t sure whether she had been there to begin with. Esther had walked in and out of the cellar more than a few times, which probably hadn’t really happened, but the man in the blue soldier’s coat with the wooden stake in his hand seemed almost as improbable.

Certainly, Kol and Finn had not stepped out of their coffins to visit with him, and his two mortal—and long-dead—brothers had not stood vigil at his bedside. But that meant it was possible Niklaus was not there, either. The werewolves’ poison had spun wild dreams and visions that he was sure were more meaningful than true, and yet Elijah could not quite grasp their message. Perhaps that was all a part of the hallucinations—the conviction that the nightmares must be trying to tell him something.

It had been hours or days or weeks since Rebekah had pulled the unconscious blue-clad man through the ceiling, and yet she had never returned. So that may not have been real, either. Except how could Elijah have gotten here, in this dank cellar on a bed of soft blankets, if Rebekah had not first brought him, and then inexplicably abandoned him?

There was something about a sunrise across the river and a bleeding man in the bayou, but it was confused with the conviction that he had flown away from the wolves and then nested here like some strange, unlikely bird. He had no sense of what had happened since he’d been attacked, but each hour was a little less confusing than the last, and so Elijah suspected he was drifting toward lucidity.

He ached all over. His wounds itched as they faded into smoothness, and with every tiny movement he discovered a new source of tenderness. But there was no doubt that he was healing, and Esther’s magic had served its purpose once again.

He opened his eyes and blinked, trying to distinguish the faint difference between the darkness in the cellar and the kind behind his closed eyelids. There was the slightest outline of light around the edges of a trapdoor, and he stared at it intently until it was all he could see.

When the trapdoor was suddenly thrown open, the flood of light behind it nearly blinded him.

“Brother,” an amused voice called down, and Elijah wondered if he was hallucinating again. Klaus was haloed by sunlight and covered in blood, hardly the most encouraging sign of his mental recovery.

“Brother,” he replied cautiously, lifting himself gingerly onto one elbow and discovering with relief that it did not hurt as much as he had expected. “Did you bring me here?”

Klaus jumped down into the cellar and stared at Elijah, his eyes appraising. “You look well,” he remarked, sounding grudgingly impressed. “I heard you took on the entire Navarro pack under a full moon, but if that’s true I would hate to see how they fared.”

Elijah pulled himself up to a sitting position and sighed. “It’s true,” he assured his brother. “A few of them will certainly remember me.”

Klaus crouched companionably beside the blankets, looking totally unaware that his clothes were soaked with blood. It must not have been his, but that stirred something troubling in the back of Elijah’s foggy brain. Someone else’s blood had been the point of this fiasco, and he felt around frantically to find...something. Something that was missing.