He’d told her once that New Orleans was the city that care forgot.
That’s ostensibly why she’s here.
Why she leases an apartment off Leake Avenue, where the arm of the Mississippi curls into an arc the locals call the river bend. The apartment is part of an old house that has been subdivided into four separate living spaces. Hers faces out over the levees, where she can see the slow muddy river trudging by on its way to the Gulf.
The apartment should be out of her price range—only a few blocks off of St. Charles Avenue, and still near enough Tulane and Loyola campuses that all of the rentals are artificially inflated to catch up any college students hoping to live off-campus—but the money he’d left her takes care of it with ease.
When he’d sworn he would take care of her, when she’d said yes, she’d had something different in mind.
It had never occurred to her that he would no longer be here to see his promise through.
.
Oak trees keep the street in dense shade all day long, but when she looks out over the river, she can see the sun sparkle like a sickle off the water’s surface.
At night, she can hear the boats on the water, their horns echoing through the dark like a ghostly dirge. She likes it here, surrounded by water on all sides.
If she closes her eyes, she imagines herself cradled in that water, the way his arms had cradled her. Cradled her in the slow still hours of the night, both of them awake, their throats sore from long hours talking just to hear the sound of each other’s voices. Cradled her as he made love to her, his hands on her face, keeping her safe even as he pushed her past the point of desperation, past the point of sanity. Cradled her as she had died.
She had cradled him, just so.
She wonders what it would have been like if they had ever come here together. Would he have played tour guide? Shown her all of his old haunts? Would they have stayed? Built a life together?
.
The immortal’s fortune he had left for her is more than she will ever be able to spend in her short mortal lifespan.
If she wanted, she could live anywhere, in a grand estate or a private island or the moon, frittering away her time on nothing but pleasure pursuits day in and day out for the next eighty years and she would still have barely skimmed the surface of his assets. Her assets.
.
There is no pleasure for her.
There is no life to build.
.
And so she builds their death.
.
Her death is a long one. She is, for all intents and purposes, eighteen and in extraordinary health.
She passes her time with a job in the neighborhood bookstore, housed in a neat little cottage with a deep wrap-around porch. Every morning she walks to work beneath the canopy of live oak trees, picking her way over the uneven sun-dappled sidewalks, sweat coating her skin the way his ashes had coated her the night it had happened.
After work, she meanders to the coffee shop down the block and orders a large ice coffee so she can hold the chilled cup to her throat, searching for a relief that is impossible to ever find. Sometimes she likes to go to the park after that, even though the sun beats down like molten ore, threatening to burn away everything in its path. There’s a lagoon, there, still and black, and the chattering of the ducks and egrets is almost enough to drown out the sound of his voice, whispering to her always.
.
Most of the time, she goes out to the little park called the Fly that directly overlooks the river. There are always scads of people hanging out, sunbathing under the whispering pine trees, throwing frisbees in the late afternoon light, dancing and laughing and bottle drinking.
She always slips past these knots of happy strangers, preferring to meander out to the banks of the river itself. It’s closer here than in other parts of the city she’s surveilled. There’s just a little wooden lip that gives way to gray rocky steps bound up in heavy-duty mesh. The river laps directly into these little steps, brown and sluggish. Lazy, the way a giant is lazy. All potential energy. She likes to climb down, careless of that potential for danger. For her death.
Cargo ships and passenger ferries shuffle by, and she settles in, wills herself to be like the trees rising up out of the river. Maybe if she wants it badly enough, she could be like one of those nymphs from Greek mythology, transmogrified into a tree in order to escape the love that hounds her.
.
He had offered her a different sort of transformation, once.
His way of proposing.
.
The moon rises, full and heavy. Its reflection doubles in the water below it.
If she reached out her hands, she thinks she could scoop it up and don it like a necklace.
She closes her eyes.
Sees another full moon.
That one had hung overhead as he had jumped in front of her, taken the white oak stake meant for her.
The white oak had been superfluous. Any old stake would have done the job just as well.
But it had been white oak.
In that terror laden second, he had looked at her with such love. Such unwarranted devotion. He had breathed her name, or maybe she had whispered his—imperfect, fuzzy human memory. She can never recall anymore exactly what had been said, exactly what had been done.
But she knows they had had that moment of connection, when all she had felt was relief, because he had her in his arms, and she was safe—
Until a spate of flame gouted from his chest. Until she had noticed the stake, sunk so deep into his heart that no frantic grasping or tearing could ever pry it free. She had tried anyway, desperate despite the flames licking up her hands, until the fire had leaked from his eyes like phoenix tears.
She had thought then, that she would die with him—and how fitting, to die in his fiery embrace! – but the fire had consumed him entirely, and somehow failed to kindle in her as well. As if it had known that she had already died by fire once, and could never succumb to its appetite again.
He had disintegrated in her arms, as though he had never been at all.
In the end, she had been left staring up at the full moon, their moon, his ashes heavy on her tongue.
.
The thing about old bookstores is that sometimes, they hold secrets.
She understands secrets. Their language is her mother tongue.
It’s how she finds the book one day while shelving new arrivals. When her hand brushes over the cracked spine, the book sings to her the song she hears at night tossing and turning and never, ever sleeping.
It’s an historical text, full of local lore. Names and dates. It leads her to another neighborhood bookstore, this time in the Garden District. The street car takes her within a block, and she spends the whole ride there biting her thumb nail and contemplating her next steps as the wind from the lowered window whips her with the sound smell taste of the city.
The Garden District bookstore dedicates much more of its shelf space to local history and small release prints. Even the occasional unique text. It’s how she finds the diary, tucked away at the way back of the store, mumbling to itself in the shadows.
She takes it home with her that night and reads it in the bath, her damp fingers tracing over history, the wetted ink bleeding into the page.
.
Blind grief had followed his death.
Years of rage, of hatred, directed at the one who had wielded the stake, at her friends for trying to pull her out of it, at herself for being so slow at just that wrong moment. For surviving him.
At him, for leaving her and refusing to take her with him. Her worst fear come to terrible life.
At her worst, at the very bottom of the ravine inside of her soul, she had jumped from Wickery Bridge. Let herself sink to the bottom of the lake, intending to let herself rest there, amidst the lakeweeds and the silt.
The water had closed in over her head, and the moon had filtered down, down through the dark, and that was when she had first heard it. The lulling, sweet song of the water, echoing through her ears. A remnant of something which had once been far, far stronger, a fire that had once burned within her blood, now languid and cool as the waters of her death.
Her blood, that had once had the power to bend Nature to her will.
That had been the first moment of her inspiration. That first inkling of an idea, hopeful and improbable in equal measure.
And somehow she had found the resolve to kick up, to breach the surface and pull herself from the water, where she had emerged as shaky and gelly-limbed as a newt.
There had been many nights since, when she had returned to the water to hear it sing to her once more. To contemplate and plan, with all the fierceness of will and quickness of mind inherent to her line.
.
The diary leads her to a French Quarter library. To a grimoire.
“You’re not supposed to have that.”
The witch sits at her table in the apartment overlooking the river, drinking her tea from one of her mugs, utterly cool and collected as though she had not broken in to wait for her. Despite the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, the gray streaking her hair, she is still a beautiful woman. Made all the more striking by the power emanating from her like shimmers of heat.
She hugs the grimoire closer. “What’s it matter to you?”
The witch studies her. “I’ve heard of you. The Petrova doppelganger turned vampire who took that near-mythological cure last spring before pulling an impressive disappearing act.”
Elena tips her chin up in turn. “And you’re the High Witch of the French Quarter Coven. The one who resurrected an Original vampire, once.”
Davina Claire stares down her nose at her. “Once. When I was young and foolish.”
“I’m not young.” Neither of them are, anymore.
Davina crooks a smile, and it’s not unkind. “But you are a fool, if you’ve come to hunt what rumor suggests you seek.”
“Aren’t we all fools in love?” Elena mutters to herself. Then, straightening, “I’ve come to this city to beg for your help.”
“The last time I resurrected an Original vampire, he went on a killing spree. I had to put him down, my own heart’s beloved.”
Elena narrows her eyes. “If you were actually set against this, you would have held yourself back and made me seek you out. You want something from me just as much as I want something from you.”
“Ah, no one ever mentioned you were smart, too.” Davina’s gaze turns inward, toward some point Elena cannot see. “When your vampire died, he took with him every vampire in his lineage.” Every vampire who did not belong in turn to Katherine’s line, so carefully excised from Klaus’s sire line so many, many years before his met his end. That was how she’d had a chance to survive him at all. “It’s not possible to pull a vampire from the Other Side if the entire lineage is extinct.”
“And there’s a vampire you’d like to… pull out.”
“There is.”
She can’t help but ask. “You’ve never considered resurrecting Klaus the same way you did his brother?”
“The vampire Niklaus is not like his brother, though, is he?” Davina Claire takes a long sip of her tea. Watches her over the rim. “No, to resurrect that vampire, that hybrid, I had to have a very special catalyst.”
Elena slides the grimoire onto the table and sits down across from Davina. “How convenient I took the cure, then, so my blood could be used for just this purpose.”
.
Together, they make their plans while sitting in Elena’s little kitchen.
Carefully, Davina draws up schematics for the ritual she has in mind. Walks Elena through their plans.
“Normally something like this would require a sacrifice. A life for a life.”
“Except I’ve already given him my life.” In a circle of fire.
“And what a binding spell that was. That was part of the problem I had trying to resurrect him. He’s inextricably bound to you, even now as he traverses the afterlife. We can use you to anchor his soul to this plane, and use your blood to seal him here. To transform him from the living to the dead.”
As Davina continues explaining the spell, Elena stops her. “No, not fire.”
“Fire is cleanest.”
“We should use water instead.”
She shakes her head. “Too mutable. Not enough control.”
“He died in fire. I want to bring him back in water.”
“Why?”
Behind Davina, visible through the little kitchen window, a waxing gibbous moon rises. “It’s my element.”
The discussion goes on long into the night.
She wins, in the end.
.
They pick the night of the full moon.
“You’d think you’d have to wait for a bigger celestial event for something like this,” Elena muses as Davina sets up.
“What greater fuel could there possibly be than your blood, guided, as you say, by your own element?”
Her element. The water, her mirror; the moon, herself.
And Klaus. Hers.
.
The ritual demands. What she cannot relinquish willingly it takes. What it cannot take, it breaks.
And through those fissures inside of her soul, something vast cracks open inside of her.
.
Strong, familiar hands cradle her.
Her entire body freezes up.
She is freezing. Soaked to the bone. Blades of grass scratching at her from where she must lie on the riverbank.
For the first time since she started down this path, real fear takes root inside of her. The possibility that she could open her eyes and find this has all been a figment of her addled imagination.
“Elena,” she hears. A whisper.
It could be the river, sighing her name.
“Come back to me. Let me see you.”
It’s a command she cannot ignore.
.
Strangely, impossibly, she gets him back.
.
“What have you been doing all this time?” he asks her later, alone in her apartment. They’ve dug out half a dozen candles and lit them all, as though neither of them are quite ready for the artificial brightness of electricity to intrude on the hush of post-resurrection intimacy between them. He's been careful to keep the topics focused entirely on her. To avoid any discussion of where he has been this entire time. That's okay. They have time. “It’s been years. Surely not all of that time was given over to abject misery for me.”
She can’t stop staring at him. Can’t stop smiling at him. “You’d love it if I told you it was.”
“I would.”
She kisses him for that. Gets tangled up in him, and forgets, for a long, long time, about answering him at all.
Later, after she had dragged Klaus to bed with her, in every sense of the word, she tells him in the still dark, “I was building my death.”
He strokes his thumb over her jugular pulse. “Yes. You are mortal again, aren’t you? How odd. We’ll have to fix that.”
“Later. After.”
He nips at her fingers. “After?”
“After we build our life together.”
He smiles against her skin. “I think I can live with that.”
“Feed from me instead,” she said, words barely above a whisper, yet he heard her. His eyes trained on her as he sent the girl away.
“What?” Elena watched her go into a back room, hopeful that she wouldn’t die, no matter how futile such hope was. Turned to Klaus.
“You heard me,” now that they were alone in a corner, Elena felt fear prickle at her skin at Klaus’ look. His eyes full of want. She walked back. Her breath laboured. He stalked her into a corner. Pressed her into the wall beside a shelf. Her heart beat thunderously and Klaus smirked. His hand came to rest in the hollow of her breasts.
“Is that what you want?” His voice was smug, and she longed to tear it away.
“No,” she said, and found her voice trembling.
“But you’ll let me?” Klaus asked, and she nodded.
“Perhaps, I should bring the girl back.”
“You have me.”
“I want you willing and wanting,” he said.
“No one wants to be fed on,” she argued and he leaned closer.
“Oh yes, they do. Let me show you.”
The spidery webs spread beneath his eyes. Fangs peeked from behind his lips. Elena swallowed roughly. Fear rose in her chest and it was hard to decipher whether she was pressed against a wall or a tree. Whether she was drenched in her sisters blood. Whether it was raining or not.
Klaus’ hand moved, slowly rising to her throat. Bringing her away from her memory. Grounding her to reality.
His thumb brushed over her pulse point, her blood singing in her veins as he pressed his nail in her skin, cutting it open. She gasped quietly as some of her blood seeped out, and Klaus lent down. His tongue pressed against her wound. Lapping up her blood.
Elena felt eyes on her, and looked up to see Rebekah staring.
Klaus’ lips trailed up her neck and Elena startled. They stopped at her ear.
“They think you’re mine,” he spoke lowly, so only she could hear, “and you are mine love, never forget it.”
His hand slotted over her mark. His mark. That he had given her.
She inhaled.
Felt his teeth over it.
He bit down.
Elena gasped as his fangs punctured her skin. There was no more sharpness then. Just the sensation of her blood being siphoned. She sagged against the wall and Klaus pressed closer. His chest was against hers. His legs between hers. One hand trailed down to her thigh. Squeezed. She gasped as tears pricked her eyes. His hand slid up along her side, until it was at her waist.
He pulled back then. Elena’s head sagged against the wall, resting uncomfortably. The pins holding up her hair dug into the wall. Blood trailed down her neck and she felt eyes on her. She pushed away from the wall, dizzy, catching Theodore’s eyes again, staring at her with want. Elena looked away.
“I’m going back,” she said, her voice shaking, unsure she’d be able to stay here the rest of the night.
