“All your parts still there?” Klaus grinned, and Elijah glowered at him.

Blood! That was what he had needed—werewolf blood. And despite all his cuts and bruises, he had succeeded. So where the hell was his handkerchief? He patted his clothes again, rifling through the tatters, but the bloody cloth was gone. It’d been the one thing he’d needed to work the protection spell, and he’d failed.

Elijah closed his eyes and breathed. He would have to regroup and come up with a new plan—that was how it always went. There were setbacks and then there were solutions, and then there were more setbacks. His next plan would have to wait until he absorbed the magnitude of this failure.

“Where have you been?” he asked Klaus, rather than answering him. “Is all that your blood?”

Klaus grinned happily. “None of it, as far as I recall. That idiot Armand decided to bother me during an otherwise lovely morning. He was under the impression you had been killed, and that he was capable of doing the same to me. It ended bloodily for him.”

Elijah opened his mouth, then closed it again, momentarily stunned. If he hadn’t felt his healing wounds so acutely, he would have sworn he was still dreaming. But when he reached out and grabbed Klaus’s soaking-wet shirt, he knew this was really happening. Suddenly, his grin matched his brother’s. “You did well,” he told Klaus, whose blue-green eyes widened in surprise. “Now give me your shirt.”

* * *

YSABELLE STEPPED BACK from the fresh line of peat and muttered as the flames sped around the perimeter of the Mikaelsons’ land.

“Nice trick,” Klaus remarked good-naturedly.

Elijah elbowed him in the ribs. “Concentrate,” he reminded Ysabelle, with a warning glare at his brother.

“I remember how this goes,” the witch assured him. She mixed her potion deftly, this time swirling in the blood she had coaxed from Klaus’s shirt. She rehearsed the incantation one final time before she began to circle the land and pour out the liquid.

“That will take forever,” Klaus grumbled, kicking at a tuft of grass. “Was she this slow the first time?”

“I don’t really care as long as it works,” Elijah countered. He watched Ysabelle reappear on the far side of the house and waited, barely daring to breathe. She did not look at them, instead keeping her eyes fixed on the potion spilling onto the long line of fire. She allowed herself a ghost of a smile when her iron bowl emptied just when she had reached the end. This time, there was no boom, but the world seemed to ripple and the pressure mounted. Then, it seemed to Elijah that the house absorbed the brutal, urgent silence into itself, and the walls swallowed it whole.

She’d done it—and now his family was finally safe.

He would have to arrange for their belongings to be brought from the hotel. He had dreamed of seeing Kol’s and Finn’s coffins in the basement with him, but that was an illusion. It was odd, actually, that Rebekah hadn’t moved them, unless he’d only imagined her as well. That part of his memory still felt hazy. Trying to put events into their proper order only made him feel like he was sliding back into the venomous fever.

He blinked in the sunlight, trying to put his finger on what had changed. The house looked exactly the same, although that was already an improvement over their last attempt.

Klaus wandered closer to it, climbing up onto the low porch with his head cocked, looking for a sign that the spell had really worked. Ysabelle moved the other way, stepping across the extinguished line of peat. She fumbled in her bodice for a moment, then withdrew something that flashed silver in the lazy afternoon sunlight. With an agile ripple of her shoulder, she threw it squarely at Klaus’s back.

Elijah didn’t bother to move. If she had failed a second time, she might as well kill them. But the knife bounced back, landing on the grass as if it had been dropped rather than ever thrown. Ysabelle’s face was lit with her triumph, and Elijah clasped her shoulder appreciatively.

“Thank you,” he told her, but his mind was already elsewhere. The deadly point of a weapon...He had seen that before, and recently. Wading through the hallucinations, he could distinguish the memory of a blue-coated man with a stake.

He’d crept in from one of the passageways, his weapon held at the ready. He’d said something, hadn’t he? Something about Rebekah. About taking Rebekah. And then she appeared, attacked the man, and pulled him out of the cellar.

So why had she not returned? He was now sure that she’d rescued him from the river but that had been at least a day or two ago. Who was that man, and why had Rebekah not simply disposed of his body and returned?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

REBEKAH STARED OUT at the ocean, watching the waves chase and break across one another. She could have stayed there forever. She felt finally, totally at peace.

Eric joined her on the little terrace, resting a warm, possessive hand on her shoulder. She smiled up at him, remembering the feeling of safety she had experienced the first time they met. He was waiting, and he must feel like his entire life depended on the choice she had to make. But he looked relaxed, simply happy to be with her in this little abandoned cottage facing the sea.

Rebekah had fully intended to make good on her plan to drown him, but she had been overcome by fear and curiosity in the end. She’d wanted to know the details of his messages to her father, and she’d needed to understand why he’d gone to such lengths to deceive her. He could have pretended to shelter her without pretending to love her. He certainly didn’t need to propose to her, and so why had he? What had been the point of his twisted game?

Once she had reached the seashore, she had waited impatiently for him to wake up so she could kill him. And then, with his first breath, he’d said that he was so relieved she was safe.

It was too much, that he would try to keep up the charade even now. But something in the softness of his lips, the trusting look in his eyes, gave her pause.

“How did you get away from that monster?” Eric gasped, and then he looked around them in confusion. “What is this place, and how are we here?”

“‘That monster’?” she repeated. “You were the one who was trying to kill him.”

Eric nodded then winced and rubbed at his throat. “He killed Felix,” he explained, grimacing. “I returned to find Felix murdered, and you gone. I knew the creature was punishing us for our curiosity. We had heard that there was a nest of his kind near here, and so when I realized you had been taken I searched the area. I found the tracks where he carried you from the river. A piece of your dress had snagged on the reeds and so I knew you had been there. I followed your trail to this house. I watched from the trees, and finally I saw you.”

Rebekah tried to make sense of his halting speech. He had found their house, and must have seen her come up through the trapdoor while she had been exploring the tunnels beneath it. And then, believing her to be Elijah’s prisoner, he had used that same door to try to set her free.

It was a ludicrous explanation, but she found that she still wanted to trust him. The way he stared up at her, as if he were drinking in her presence, she could actually believe that he had thought her a helpless victim all along.

Except that Felix had said otherwise before he died.

She could not stand the layers of lies between them anymore. It was not serving her purpose to keep pretending. And the only way to figure out the truth was to reveal what she was. There, in the light of day, where Eric could see.

“The man in the cellar is a vampire,” she told him bluntly, and then she concentrated for a moment so that her own fangs extended into view. “He is my brother. I am a vampire, too, and so you understand why I couldn’t let you hurt him.”