Stiles
The trombone player at the little brick club on the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres was an eighty-year-old guy in a porkpie hat with lungs like a pair of bellows, and within thirty seconds of walking through the door, I was ready to pay his rent for the rest of the year.
"See?" I said, leaning close to Hope's ear so she could hear me over the brass section tearing through an uptempo blues number while the ceiling fans spun lazily through the warm, smoky air. "Redemption for the entire instrument. If the guy on Royal Street two nights ago had played like this, Trevor might still have a head right—" I paused, thinking about it for half a second. "Okay, no, Trevor would still be in the dumpster, I was pretty hungry, but I would've felt way more musical about it."
Hope laughed, sliding into the curved red leather booth in the shadowed back corner of the room while I set two heavy crystal tumblers of bourbon down on the scarred wooden table between us.
"You didn't even get carded at the bar," she noted, picking up her glass and taking a slow sip without flinching at the burn.
"Please, a little eyelash flutter and a two-second spark of siphon static on the bartender's cufflink, and suddenly we're twenty-five-year-old graduate students from Tulane," I said, sliding into the booth beside her instead of sitting across the table, draping my right arm along the back of the leather seat behind her shoulders. "Plus, I left a hundred-dollar bill on the bar napkin. Cash is basically magic that works on humans without Freya getting a migraine."
Around us, the club was packed just enough that nobody paid the slightest attention to two people in the corner booth. Couples danced in the narrow space in front of the low wooden stage, neon beer signs hummed yellow and blue against the exposed brick walls, and the open shuttered doors at the back of the room led out into a tiny courtyard strung with dim amber bulbs and overgrown banana trees.
Hope leaned back against the booth cushion, her shoulder resting warm against mine as she watched the crowd for a moment before turning her head to look at me. Under the dim amber light, the emerald silk of her top caught the shadows, and the faint golden glow beneath her skin from the garden on Prytania had settled into a steady, purring warmth that hummed against my ribs every time she breathed.
"What?" I asked, grinning as I trailed my fingertips lightly along the bare skin of her upper arm. "Do I still have Ninth Ward elder on my chin? Because I checked in the window of that antique shop on Esplanade and I looked pretty spotless."
"You missed a spot on your collar," she said, reaching up to flick a tiny speck of dried white tomb plaster off the edge of my black shirt before letting her fingers rest over my collarbone. "I was just thinking. Four days ago, if someone had told me I'd be sitting in a bar on Frenchmen Street drinking bourbon with an Upgraded Original while my dad waited at home with a stopwatch, I would've told them they were hallucinating."
"Four days ago, my biggest cultural plan for Louisiana was seeing if drive-thru daiquiri stands were an actual legal thing or just an urban legend," I said, taking a swallow from my glass. "Turns out they are real, they give you a piece of scotch tape over the straw so it counts as a closed container, and whoever wrote the traffic laws in this state is a visionary."
She smiled, her thumb tracing the edge of my open collar where my pulse beat slow and heavy beneath the skin. "Do you miss anything from before you came here? Besides the Jeep, obviously, since I think you care about that bucket of bolts more than your own spleen."
"First of all, my spleen grows back in four seconds; finding an original 1980 carburetor takes three weeks on eBay," I corrected gravely. Then I let the joke settle, looking down at her hand against my chest. "Honestly? Maybe curly fries from this twenty-four-hour diner off Route 109 when it rained. That's about it."
I didn't have to dress it up or pretend there was some bittersweet ache hiding underneath. Sitting here with the brass band rattling the floorboards and Hope's warmth pressed all along my side, the town I'd left behind felt like a black-and-white movie I'd turned off halfway through because the plot sucked.
"Back there, everything felt like holding your breath underwater," I told her quietly, my fingers sliding up from her shoulder to tangle lightly in the soft auburn waves at the nape of her neck. "Even before I woke up like this, it was always the next crisis, the next lecture, the next time somebody looked at the mess on the floor and tried to decide whose fault it was. Then I get here, walk into your courtyard, and the girl at the top of the stairs tries to set me on fire and then steals a bakery box with me."
Hope's eyes softened, that bright amber ring warming around the blue of her irises as she leaned in until her forehead brushed my temple. "You only like me for my arson skills."
"Arson skills are top three, easy," I murmured against the corner of her mouth, turning my head to press a slow, warm kiss to her lips—tasting bourbon, honey, and the lingering spark of our shared blood. "Right behind the way you blew those three elders into the magnolia trees, and right after the sound you made against that brick wall on Prytania twenty minutes ago."
Color flushed hot across her cheeks, her fingers tightening briefly in the cotton of my shirt before she bit my bottom lip just hard enough to make my breath hitch and a low rumble vibrate in my chest.
Before I could pull her across the booth onto my lap, the heavy wooden service door leading out to the club's narrow back alley clicked open behind the bar.
Over the roar of the saxophone solo and the chatter of the crowd, no human in the building noticed a thing.
Hope and I both stopped at the exact same second.
Out in the wet brick service passage behind the ice machines—just beyond the banana trees of the patio—three heartbeats had just dropped off the low roof of the neighboring laundry mat. Two of them were fast, cold, and sharp with the stale river-mud scent of the Algiers dock vampires who had missed the cemetery fight earlier; the third was slower, ragged, and reeking of burnt hair and graveyard salt. One of the perimeter witches who had bolted over the north wall of Lafayette Cemetery before Klaus and Marcel closed the net.
"She's inside by the back booths," one of the vampires hissed through the cracked service door, his voice barely a whisper under the rumble of the air conditioning unit outside. "Klaus's kid. And the guy with her doesn't smell like Elijah or Marcel. We grab the girl through the back door while the band's loud, snap her neck to keep her quiet, and use her to buy passage on the midnight freighter out of Chalmette before the Originals lock the river down."
Inside the booth, Hope didn't look scared; she looked deeply annoyed, glancing down at her half-full glass of bourbon. "Seriously? I haven't even finished my drink."
"Stay right here and guard the bourbon," I said brightly, sliding out of the booth and buttoning the cuffs of my black shirt so I wouldn't get anything on my sleeves. "I'll be back before the trombone solo wraps up. Don't drink mine."
"Don't get blood on your shoes, we have eighteen minutes until curfew," she murmured, picking up her glass and leaning back against the red leather as I strolled across the back of the bar toward the rear patio door.
I stepped out through the beaded curtain past the restrooms, pushed the heavy wooden service door open into the dim, brick-walled alley behind the ice machines, and let it click shut behind me, cutting off half the noise of the band.
The two Algiers vampires and the singed perimeter witch froze ten feet away between the stacked beer kegs and the puddle-slick brick wall.
For two seconds, none of them moved as they realized the guy who had just walked out to meet them was the exact same guy who had turned Lafayette Cemetery into an abattoir an hour ago.
"Okay, honest question," I said, leaning one shoulder against the humming metal side of the commercial ice machine and crossing my ankles. "Do you guys have a group chat that you're just not checking? Because five of your buddies turned into patio dust at noon, eight of them lost various body parts on Bourbon Street last night, and four more got flattened by a granite tombstone about forty-five minutes ago. At what point do you just pack a suitcase and move to Ohio?"
The witch backed up a step, her soot-stained hands flying up to throw a concussive hex down the narrow three-foot alley—*"Phasmatos motus—!"*
I didn't even uncross my ankles. I just flicked my left hand out, caught the wave of kinetic magic mid-air with a sharp flare of crimson siphon light, and snapped it straight back down the alley like a rubber band.
The witch's own concussive blast hit her square in the chest, lifting her off her boots and slamming her backward into the brick wall at the dead end of the passage so hard her skull cracked against the mortar like an eggshell. She slid down behind the empty kegs without a twitch.
The two Algiers vampires didn't try to run—the alley behind them was a twenty-foot brick dead end topped with razor wire, and I was standing squarely between them and the street. Instead, they lunged together, fangs out, the one on the left swinging a rusted tire iron he'd picked up by the dumpster while the one on the right went low for my knees.
"Oh, a tire iron, classic," I said, catching the swinging iron bar in my right palm.
I didn't take it away from him; I just shoved his own hand backward, driving the flat hooked end of the tire iron straight through the center of his own throat and out the back of his neck into the brick wall behind him, pinning him upright four inches off the wet pavement while he gurgled and clawed at the metal shaft.
The second vampire hit my waist and bounced off like he'd tackled an oak tree.
Before he could scramble up off his knees, I grabbed a fistful of his greasy hair, hauled him upright, and sank both sets of fangs deep into the side of his neck.
I hadn't fed on anything lethal since the warehouse down in the Bywater before dawn, and after burning through the plague censer in the cemetery, tearing into a fresh carotid artery hit the spot immediately. Hot, dark vampire blood poured across my tongue as I let my venom flood back down the bite, blackening the veins across his jaw and chest in seconds. I drank three long, heavy pulls until his heart seized up from the toxin, then gave his neck a clean twist until the bone snapped and dropped him onto the bricks beside the kegs.
I pulled a clean white bar napkin out of my back pocket, wiped my mouth, and glanced down at the dead vampire's wrist before tossing the napkin onto his chest.
Silver wristwatch, slightly cracked crystal, reading 11:44 PM.
"Ooh, sixteen minutes," I muttered, stepping carefully around the dark red pool spreading toward the drain so my Converse stayed dry, and pushed the service door back open into the warm, brass-filled glow of the jazz club.
When I slid back into the red leather booth ten seconds later, the eighty-year-old trombone player was just hitting the final sustained note of his solo.
Hope looked up from her glass, her gaze sweeping over my completely clean shirt and dry sneakers before rising to my eyes, where the faint crimson-gold ring of a fresh kill was still fading back into whiskey brown.
"Three of them?" she asked softly over the applause as the band wrapped the song.
"Two and a half, the witch basically took herself out on the brickwork," I said, picking up my bourbon and knocking the rest of it back in one swallow. "Apparently word travels slow when you don't pay your cell phone bill. Ready to go beat your dad's midnight deadline by sixty seconds just to see the look on his face?"
Hope grinned, finishing the last sip of her drink and sliding out of the booth to take my hand. "Make it thirty seconds."
***
Hope
The cathedral bell in Jackson Square was just drawing back its hammer for the first stroke of midnight when Stiles and I turned the corner onto Royal Street at a dead jog, laughing breathlessly in the warm river wind as the wrought-iron gates of the compound came into view.
Through the open ironwork, the courtyard lanterns were still burning bright.
My dad stood directly beside the stone fountain in the center of the flagstones, his arms crossed over his chest and Uncle Elijah's antique silver pocket watch held open in his right palm. Elijah stood four feet to his left by the bottom of the stairs, while my mom and Freya leaned over the second-floor gallery railing above them.
We crossed the stone threshold of the front archway just as the first heavy bronze *bong* of midnight rolled across the rooftops of the French Quarter.
Stiles didn't stop at the gate; he strolled three paces inside the courtyard with my hand still tucked warmly in his, reached down with his free hand to scoop his charcoal suit jacket off the iron bench where he'd left it four hours ago, and slung it over his shoulder on one finger.
"Eleven fifty-nine and fifty-eight seconds!" Stiles announced brightly, pointing at the silver pocket watch in my father's palm as the cathedral bell echoed a second time across the night air. "By official Naval Observatory standards, the stroke doesn't count until the third ring. Which means the Jeep stays on dry land, Klaus, and I remain a paragon of punctuality and good manners."
Klaus snapped the silver cover of the pocket watch shut with a sharp *click*, his hybrid eyes narrowing as he caught the faint metallic tang of Algiers vampire blood still lingering on the breeze behind Stiles—followed immediately by the warm, unmistakable glow of the deepened bond humming beneath my skin and the flushed color in my cheeks.
"You smell of an alley, Mr. Stilinski," Elijah observed from the base of the stairs, though there was less frost in his voice than there had been at eight o'clock.
"Two stragglers from the Algiers docks and one perimeter witch behind a club on Frenchmen," Stiles replied cheerfully, not even pretending to hide it. "They thought they were gonna grab Hope by the ice machine and buy a boat ticket out of Chalmette. Now one of them is pinned to a brick wall with a tire iron and the other two are waiting for the morning trash pickup. Honestly, I should start charging the city an hourly consulting fee."
Hayley looked down from the second-floor railing, her dark eyes moving between the two of us. "Are you hurt, Hope?"
"Didn't even spill my drink, Mom," I said, turning toward Stiles at the archway before my dad could find an excuse to start another fight in the courtyard.
With Klaus, Elijah, Freya, and my mother all watching from less than twenty feet away, Stiles didn't step back or give me a polite handshake. He slid his free hand around the back of my waist, pulled me close against his chest right under the wrought-iron arch, and kissed me—slow, warm, and completely unhurried—until a spark of golden light jumped visibly between our lips and made my dad's jaw clench hard enough to be heard across the courtyard.
"Get some sleep," Stiles murmured against my mouth with a crooked grin when he pulled back an inch. "Unless somebody else tries to blow up the neighborhood before breakfast, in which case, you know where my balcony is."
"Drive safe," I whispered back, smiling up at him as he gave Klaus and Elijah a lazy two-finger salute over his shoulder and strolled out into the gas-lit shadows of Royal Street.
As soon as his footsteps faded past the corner of the block, I turned back into the courtyard, fully expecting my dad to launch into a lecture about midnight curfews or what had happened between the cemetery and Frenchmen Street.
Instead, Klaus didn't say a word about Stiles kissing me.
He tossed Elijah's pocket watch back to my uncle and looked up at Freya on the gallery, his expression grim and focused.
I paused by the fountain, sensing the heavy, lingering tension in the air and the smudge of boundary chalk still fresh on Freya's palms. Down in the parlor, the three Ninth Ward elders I had knocked out on the tomb steps earlier were nowhere in sight.
"What happened while we were gone?" I asked, walking toward the stairs as Freya came down to join us on the ground floor. "Where are the three elders from Lafayette Cemetery?"
"In the dungeon beneath the carriage house with vervain shackles on their wrists," Elijah answered, buttoning his coat. "After Freya broke the silence hex on their tongues an hour ago, we learned why Celestine was willing to sacrifice herself with the plague censer to hold our attention at Lafayette."
My stomach tightened. "The censer was a distraction?"
"Not a distraction—a stalling tactic," Freya said, stepping up to the cedar table where the map of the Quarter was still pinned down by black candles. She tapped her finger against the white square of St. Louis Cemetery Number One on the western edge of the district. "When Celestine's faction broke into the Regent vaults beneath St. Louis Number One at dusk, they didn't just take the plague thurible. The remaining six elders of the Ninth Ward inner circle and the last four nightwalkers from Julian's crew never came to Lafayette at all. They stayed inside the subterranean vault beneath the Glapion crypt."
"Doing what?" I asked, stepping up beside the table.
"Rigging the vault," Klaus said softly, his voice carrying that quiet, lethal edge that meant the city itself was on a knife's edge. "There are forty years' worth of confiscated dark objects, sacrificial talismans, and ancestral bone-totems sealed inside that subterranean chamber. According to the elders downstairs, the six practitioners inside have woven every single artifact in the room into a unified dead-man's lattice."
I stared down at the map as the math clicked together in my head. "If forty years of dark objects detonate inside the ancestral well beneath St. Louis Number One at the same time—"
"It will level eight blocks of the French Quarter to rubble and poison every ley line in New Orleans for a century," Freya finished grimly. "Marcel has the outer cemetery surrounded right now, but none of his vampires can cross the threshold without triggering the collapse, and I cannot unravel a sealed lattice of that magnitude from outside the stone doors. They sent word through Marcel ten minutes ago: either we grant them safe passage to the river with the Regent artifacts at dawn, or they drop the match at sunrise and take the Quarter with them."
Silence fell over the courtyard, broken only by the splash of the fountain.
I looked from Freya to Elijah, and then straight at my father.
All three of them already knew the answer. It was sitting right there in the middle of the courtyard like an elephant wearing Converse sneakers, and the only reason nobody had said his name out loud yet was because the idea of Niklaus Mikaelson walking down to the Hotel Monteleone to ask Stiles Stilinski for help looked like it was physically paining my father's ribs.
"Freya can't drain a sealed vault of forty dark objects without it killing her," I said calmly, folding my arms across my chest as I looked at my dad. "And you and Elijah can't move fast enough to kill six linked witches before one of them drops her hands and sets the bomb off. Good thing we know somebody who literally drinks dark magic for fun and can siphon an entire room through a stone wall."
Hayley let out a short, quiet breath from the stairs, looking at Klaus. "She's right, Klaus. You saw what he did to that plague censer tonight. If anyone can eat the magic out of that vault before it blows, it's him."
Klaus stood motionless beside the fountain for five full seconds, staring into the dark water as a thousand years of stubborn, unbending pride collided head-on with the survival of his city.
"He has been out of that gate for less than four minutes," Klaus said tightly, each word sounding as though it were being pulled from between his molars with pliers. "If we summon him back now, we will never hear the end of it for the next three hundred years."
"Oh, longer than that, Dad," I said, unable to stop the small smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. "Probably closer to five hundred. Want me to call him, or are we walking over to Royal Street before dawn?"
Elijah sighed faintly, smoothing his cuffs with the resigned dignity of a man preparing to walk into a hurricane of sarcasm. "Allow him a few hours to rest after the censer, Niklaus. They have set their deadline for sunrise. At four-thirty, we shall pay a visit to the Hotel Monteleone—and I suggest you bring another bottle of scotch."
***
Stiles
At four-thirty in the morning, the terrace of the Monteleone penthouse was the best seat in the state of Louisiana.
The river mist was rolling in thick and silver over the levee, the Quarter was dead quiet except for a street sweeper humming three blocks over on Canal, and I was stretched out barefoot in sweatpants and an old gray *Beacon Hills Lacrosse* t-shirt on the wicker daybed outside, tossing green grapes thirty feet straight up into the dark air and catching them in my mouth without missing once.
Up to thirty-seven in a row. New personal record.
I tossed grape number thirty-eight into the mist right as three sets of footsteps landed on the stone balustrade at the far end of my terrace—two of them heavy and silent in leather boots, the third light and familiar accompanied by the warm, electric hum of the bond behind my ribs waking up into a bright purr.
I caught grape number thirty-eight cleanly between my teeth, chewed it, and propped myself up on one elbow to look down the terrace.
Standing between the potted palms in the pre-dawn gloom were Hope, Elijah, and Klaus Mikaelson.
Hope was wearing a dark zip-up jacket over jeans, biting back a grin so hard her shoulders were practically vibrating. Elijah looked like he had already mentally prepared himself for a migraine, and Klaus stood dead center with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his long coat, looking like a man who had just been forced to chew a lemon rind dipped in vervain.
I didn't say a word for three full seconds. I just stared at Klaus, then at Elijah, then back at Klaus, while a slow, blindingly delighted smile spread from ear to ear across my face.
"Wait," I said, sitting all the way up and swinging my bare feet onto the cool terrace flagstones. "Hold everything. Don't nobody move. Is this—are we doing a dramatic four-thirty-in-the-morning rooftop consultation? Did Klaus Mikaelson just jump across three hotel roofs to ask me for a favor?"
Klaus's eyes flashed molten gold in the dark. "I did not jump across roofs, I used the service elevator, and you have ten seconds to wipe that expression off your face before I throw you off this balcony on principle."
"Wouldn't kill me, I'd just bounce off the awning and take the stairs back up while making fun of you the whole way," I shot back gleefully, walking over to the glass table to pick up the bowl of grapes and holding it out toward Elijah. "Grape, Suit? They're seedless. Seriously, Hope, tell me what happened, because the look on your dad's face right now is going into my permanent memory bank forever."
Hope stepped forward, her fingers brushing lightly against my hip as she stopped beside me—a quick, warm touch that sent a spark of gold between us—and told me in thirty seconds flat about the six Ninth Ward elders and the four Algiers vampires barricaded inside the subterranean Regent vault under St. Louis Number One with forty years of dark artifacts wired into a dead-man's bomb.
When she finished, I popped another grape into my mouth and whistled low.
"Okay, credit where credit's due, turning an entire underground museum of cursed junk into a magical claymore mine is way smarter than the incense burner," I said, nodding in appreciation. "Still dumb if I'm in the same zip code, obviously, because to me a room full of forty dark objects wired together is basically an all-you-can-eat Las Vegas buffet, but solid effort on their part."
"The lattice is woven into the limestone doorframe of the lower Glapion crypt," Elijah explained, stepping up to the terrace railing. "The moment the seal is breached—or the moment any of the six witches inside releases their hold on the circuit—the stored sacrificial energy will detonate simultaneously. Freya estimates the blast radius at eight blocks."
"Unless," Klaus said, the words coming out smooth and clipped as he forced himself to meet my eyes without snarling, "someone capable of siphoning the circuit through the stone threshold drains the charge before the witches realize their bomb is empty, allowing us to breach the door and slaughter everyone inside."
I crossed my arms over my lacrosse shirt, tilting my head as I milked the silence for five glorious seconds.
"Hmm," I mused aloud, tapping my chin with one finger. "I don't know, Klaus. Four-thirty in the morning is pretty early for demolition work, and earlier tonight at dinner I distinctively remember somebody calling me a stray dog and threatening to drop my vintage 1980 CJ-5 off a bridge. Usually, when people hire a bomb squad, they say *please*."
Hope coughed into her fist to hide a laugh. Even Elijah glanced sideways at his brother with one eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch.
Klaus took a single, slow step forward until he was standing four feet in front of me on the terrace tiles. "Clear the vault before sunrise, Stiles," Klaus said in a low, gravelly purr, "and not only will your rusted mechanical eyesore remain untouched by my family, I will personally ensure Marcel designates the curb outside this hotel a permanent tow-free zone."
"Throw in the 1920 Macallan from the back of your study cabinet and stop glaring at my shoes every time I come over to visit your daughter, and you've got a deal," I countered, holding out my right hand.
Klaus looked down at my outstretched palm, then up into my grinning face. Slowly, he reached out and clasped my hand once—two apex predators shaking on a slaughter in the pre-dawn mist—before releasing his grip.
"Put your shoes on," Klaus muttered, turning toward the terrace doors. "Sunrise is in forty minutes."
***
Hope
At five o'clock in the morning, St. Louis Cemetery Number One was wrapped in a blanket of river fog so thick you couldn't see the tops of the whitewashed tombs ten feet away.
Marcel and Joshua were waiting for us at the Basin Street iron gate, their breath misting in the humid chill while a dozen nightwalkers held the outer brick walls in absolute silence.
"No movement inside the Glapion crypt since three," Marcel whispered as the four of us stepped into the shadow of the gatehouse. He looked at Stiles—who had thrown his black leather jacket on over his faded gray lacrosse t-shirt and jeans—and gave a short, grim nod. "The six elders are still chanting in shifts to keep the dead-man's lattice hot, and the four Algiers vamps are bracing the inner iron grate from the stairs. If they hear us coming down the steps before the magic is drained, they'll let go of the circle and blow the whole cemetery."
"Good thing stone conducts magic like copper wire," Stiles murmured, rolling his shoulders as we moved silently single-file down the narrow, labyrinthine alleys between the crumbling eighteenth-century vaults.
As we rounded the corner of the central aisle toward the massive, stepped white brick tomb of the Glapion family, I felt the pressure of the vault ten yards out.
Even buried twelve feet beneath the cemetery clay behind solid limestone and rusted iron, the sheer, suffocating mass of forty years' worth of cursed Regent artifacts wired together into a single circuit made the hair on my arms stand straight up and a metallic copper taste coat the back of my tongue. It felt like standing three feet away from a cracked nuclear reactor humming just below the threshold of explosion.
Down in the subterranean chamber beneath the crypt floor, I could hear the rough, exhausted voices of the six Ninth Ward elders chanting in unison to hold the trigger taut, while one of the Algiers nightwalkers paced nervously behind the sealed stone slab at the bottom of the narrow exterior stairwell.
*"Twenty minutes to first light,"* the vampire down in the stairwell muttered to the others inside the vault. *"If Marcel and the Originals haven't cleared the river docks by the time the sun hits the gate, we let the witches drop the circle and take the whole damn Quarter to hell with us."*
At the top of the sunken stone steps leading down to the sealed vault door, Klaus and Elijah stopped in the fog, crouching like twin panthers on either side of the stairwell parapet.
Stiles didn't crouch. He walked silently down the six damp limestone steps with me right at his back, stopping directly in front of the three-inch-thick slab of consecrated granite sealing the mouth of the underground chamber. Carved across the granite face was a glowing, pulsing web of blood-red containment sigils linked directly to the forty dark objects inside.
Normally, if anyone—witch, wolf, or vampire—so much as brushed a knuckle against those exterior sigils, the circuit would snap inward and detonate the entire cache.
Stiles glanced back over his shoulder at me in the gray pre-dawn mist, his eyes already shifting into that radiant, molten crimson-gold, and gave me a tiny wink.
Then he pressed both open palms flat against the glowing red runes on the granite door, while I stepped flush against his back and rested both of my hands over his shoulder blades, linking our blood and magic together so he had the full weight of my tribrid power anchoring his core.
Inside the vault, one of the chanting elders gasped as she felt two hands touch the outer stone.
*"Someone's on the stairs!"* she shrieked inside the chamber. *"Drop the link! Blow the lattice now!"*
Inside the underground room, all six witches threw their hands apart at once to release the dead-man's switch and detonate the forty cursed artifacts across the French Quarter.
The blast never left the room.
Because the split second before the circuit snapped, Stiles opened his siphon wider than I had ever felt it—not a tap, not a stream, but a bottomless, roaring black hole of hunger backed by my blood singing through his veins—and *pulled* the entire forty-artifact explosion straight through three inches of solid granite into his palms.
***
Stiles
If the compound ward on my first night had felt like three shots of espresso and the plague censer at Lafayette had felt like drinking out of a blast furnace, siphoning an entire subterranean vault of detonating dark magic at five in the morning was like swallowing a lightning storm wrapped in a hurricane.
The granite slab under my palms went ice-cold as every ounce of stored sacrificial magic, blood curses, hexed bone totems, and ancestral fury ripped out of the underground room at the speed of sound and slammed directly up my arms.
With Hope pressed warm and solid against my back, her hands blazing over my shoulders like twin stars, the rot and poison in the dark artifacts didn't stand a chance. Her tribrid fire incinerated the curse matrix the instant it hit my bloodstream, leaving nothing behind in my veins except pure, blinding, kinetic electricity so dense that my hair stood up a quarter-inch and crimson-gold arcs of lightning crackled silently across the damp cemetery fog around our boots.
Inside the subterranean chamber behind the stone door, the expected city-leveling explosion produced nothing more than a pathetic little *pfft* of gray smoke as forty priceless dark objects turned into harmless museum paperweights in half a heartbeat.
*"What happened?!"* one of the Algiers vampires shouted in the dark behind the door, panic cracking his voice in two. *"Why didn't it blow?!"*
I grinned, letting the last drop of magic sink into my chest before I drew back my right boot and kicked the three-inch granite door slab off its iron hinges.
Eight hundred pounds of consecrated stone blasted inward down the underground corridor like a cannonball, flattening two of the four Algiers vampires at the bottom of the stairs before they could even raise their arms and shattering against the far limestone wall of the vault.
"Room service!" I roared cheerfully, dropping down into the torchlit underground chamber with Klaus and Elijah blurring down the stairs on my left and right and Hope right behind me.
For the ten occupants of the vault—well, eight now, since two of the vampires were currently human-shaped pancakes under eight hundred pounds of granite—having Klaus Mikaelson, Elijah Mikaelson, Hope Mikaelson, and a supercharged, lightning-crackling Upgraded Original drop into a twenty-by-twenty stone room with no back exit was the definition of a bad morning.
To be fair to Klaus, now that the magic bomb was inside my ribs instead of on the table, the guy really knew how to clear a room.
Klaus hit the third Algiers vampire on the left before the guy could even blink, driving both hands into the vampire's chest and ripping his spine and ribcage apart in a single savage wrench while Elijah took the fourth vampire's head off with the edge of a silver candlestick from the altar table without getting a single drop of blood on his coat cuffs.
"Solid form, Suit, nine out of ten!" I called out, right as the six Ninth Ward elders at the back of the vault tried to link hands for an ancestral desperation hex.
I didn't even let them finish the first syllable.
With the massive charge of forty siphoned dark objects roaring in my veins, I clapped my hands together once in front of my chest and pushed a wave of raw, crimson-gold shockwave pressure across the back half of the vault.
The air cracked like a thunderclap.
Three of the six elders were lifted clean off their feet and slammed backward into the stone ceiling arches with enough force to snap their necks on impact, dropping them lifeless onto the broken artifact tables below.
The fourth elder lunged left toward the stairwell where Hope was standing—only for Hope to flick two fingers sideways and send a concentrated lance of golden tribrid fire straight through his chest, dropping him smoking onto the flagstones before he got within ten feet of her.
That left the last two elders in the corner by the shattered altar.
Before Klaus could reach them, I blurred between them, caught one in each hand by the throat, and lifted both of them off the stone floor until their boots kicked wildly against the limestone wall.
"Wait—mercy—!" the one in my left hand choked out, blood vessels bursting in his eyes as the heat radiating off my skin scorched the collar of his coat.
"Mercy left town on Tuesday, buddy," I told him brightly, sinking my fangs into the right elder's carotid and tearing his throat open in one savage bite before slamming both of their skulls together between my hands with a wet, echoing *crack* that painted the back wall of the Glapion vault dark red.
I opened my fingers and let both bodies slump onto the floor beside the shattered stone fragments of their forty useless artifacts.
In less than twelve seconds from the moment the granite door came off its hinges, the subterranean vault beneath St. Louis Cemetery Number One was dead silent.
Blood pooled across the ancient limestone floor between broken glass jars, cracked bone totems, and cold iron chains. Not a single witch from Celestine's inner circle or a single rogue vampire from the Algiers docks was left breathing anywhere in the parish.
Klaus stood in the center of the carnage, blood dripping from his right hand onto the stones, his golden hybrid eyes rising slowly from the bodies around our feet to look at me standing by the back wall with red lightning still dancing faintly across my knuckles and a wide, completely unbothered grin on my face.
"Twelve seconds," I said, checking an imaginary watch on my wrist as I stepped over a headless torso to walk back toward Hope at the foot of the stairs. "Honestly, Klaus, between your spine-ripping thing on the left and Elijah's karate-chop with the candlestick, I feel like we really bonded as a team down here. Family activity night is a huge success."
Elijah pulled a white silk handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed a solitary speck of limestone dust off his cheekbone, and looked around the decimated vault. "Every faction that sought to test our family's resolve this week currently resides on this floor or in an urn," Elijah said quietly. "And when word spreads by noon of how the Glapion vault was cleared in twelve seconds..."
"No coven or pack within five hundred miles will dare breathe my daughter's name in a dark room again," Klaus finished softly.
***
Klaus
When they emerged from the sunken stairwell of the Glapion crypt into the open air of the cemetery, the thick river fog was beginning to burn away under the first pale rose and gold light of sunrise cresting over the roofs of the French Quarter.
At the Basin Street gate, Marcel and Joshua watched from a respectful distance, neither of them needing to descend into the crypt to know what lay at the bottom of those stairs. The silence inside the vault—and the terrifying, incandescent aura of forty absorbed dark artifacts humming smoothly beneath Stiles's skin as he walked up into the morning sun—told the entire story.
Klaus stopped beside the whitewashed corner of the tomb, watching as Hope stepped up beside Stiles in the pale dawn light.
Without hesitation or self-consciousness, Hope reached out and took Stiles's bloodstained right hand in both of hers, opening the golden resonance loop between them to steady the massive overflow of dark magic still settling inside his chest. As their skin met, the crimson sparks along Stiles's knuckles softened instantly into warm, steady gold, and the boy looked down at her with an expression so fiercely, unapologetically devoted that Klaus felt the last remnants of his own resistance finally settle into quiet acceptance.
For fifteen years, Klaus had feared that the weight of his name and the darkness of his blood would condemn Hope to walk the earth alone—either feared by those weaker than her, or hunted by those who wished to use her as a weapon.
He had never anticipated a boy who was stronger than every nightmare in the dark, who laughed in the face of ancient curses, and who slaughtered an entire subterranean vault of fanatics before breakfast simply so Hope wouldn't have to breathe their smoke.
"The 1920 Macallan is on the sideboard in the study," Klaus said evenly, drawing both pairs of eyes toward him in the quiet morning light. "And the gate ward has been adjusted by Freya so that it will no longer attempt to incinerate you when you walk through the front archway—provided you use the door like a civilized guest rather than leaping off the pharmacy roof onto the third-floor balcony."
Hope's cheeks turned pink in the sunrise, while Stiles let out a bright, shameless laugh, wrapping one arm around Hope's shoulders.
"Wait, you knew about the pharmacy roof jump?" Stiles asked, grinning from ear to ear. "Come on, that landing was completely silent!"
"You smell of gasoline and cheap hotel soap, Stiles, a blind hound could track you from Canal Street," Klaus replied dryly, though there was no venom left in his gaze as he looked from Stiles to his daughter. "Take her to breakfast. If you are not both present when Hayley serves lunch at one, I may reconsider my position on your vehicle's brakes."
"One o'clock, lunch, we'll bring dessert!" Stiles called out cheerfully as Klaus and Elijah turned down the central gravel path toward the Basin Street gate, leaving the two of them standing together in the warm gold light of the rising sun.
***
Stiles
I didn't take the rooftops back to the Monteleone.
Now that the entire city of New Orleans knew that touching the blue 1980 CJ-5 parked on Royal Street carried an immediate death sentence from both me and the Original Hybrid, I drove with the canvas top down along the riverfront, the warm morning wind whipping off the Mississippi while Hope sat in the passenger seat beside me with her boots propped up on the dashboard and the wind tangling her auburn hair across her shoulders.
By the time we rode the brass elevator up to the top floor of the hotel and kicked the heavy oak doors of the penthouse shut behind us, the morning sun was pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows, turning the whole suite bright gold.
I hadn't even taken two steps past the foyer before Hope turned around, grabbed the front of my old gray lacrosse t-shirt in both hands, and backed me straight up against the closed oak doors.
"Whoa, hey, I've still got Glapion tomb dust on my jacket," I laughed, shrugging the black leather jacket off my shoulders and letting it hit the marble floor with a heavy thud as her hands slid immediately underneath the hem of my shirt.
"Take the shirt off too," Hope whispered, her eyes blazing bright amber-gold in the morning light as she pulled the cotton straight up over my head and tossed it onto the floor beside my jacket. "Do you have any idea what it feels like on my end of the bond right now with forty dark artifacts humming inside your veins?"
I looked down at my own chest—where a faint, molten trace of crimson-gold light was literally pulsing beneath my skin in time with my heartbeat—and then down at her face.
Her lips were parted, her breath coming fast and hot against my collarbone, and her hands were trembling slightly against my bare ribs—not from fear, never from fear, but from the sheer, intoxicating pull of the resonance loop singing between our blood.
All morning down in that crypt, when I'd dragged the entire forty-year cache of dark magic through the granite door, it had been her fire at my back that kept the darkness pure and sweet. Now, standing in the quiet sunlit penthouse with nobody left in the city stupid enough to interrupt us, every drop of that power was coiled tight inside my chest, aching to pour back into her.
"Come here," I rasped, the humor melting straight into raw heat as I caught her under the thighs, lifted her effortlessly off her boots, and carried her across the sunlit carpet onto the wide king-sized bed overlooking the river.
We didn't go slow.
Her jacket and boots hit the floor in three seconds flat, followed by my jeans, until there was nothing between us but bare, burning skin and the golden static crackling across the white hotel sheets.
I pinned her wrists gently into the pillows above her head with one hand while my mouth trailed a scorching path from her jaw down the smooth column of her throat to her collarbone, feeling her arch beneath me with a breathless gasp that went straight to my spine.
"Look at me, Hope," I whispered against the hollow of her throat, lifting my head just enough so our eyes locked in the bright morning sunlight.
Her eyes were wide, glowing pure werewolf gold ringed with wildfire magic, looking right up at the hybrid veins ridging dark beneath my eyes and the twin sets of fangs pressing behind my lips.
"You know what I am," I murmured, my free hand sliding down the warm curve of her bare waist to pull her flush against my hips. "Every single bit of it. No mask, no apologies, no humanity switch."
"I know," she breathed, freeing one hand from my loose grip only to tangle her fingers hard in the hair at the back of my neck, arching her throat up against my mouth. "And you're mine. Now stop talking and bite me, Stiles."
A low, ragged growl tore from deep in my chest as I buried my face against her neck and sank my fangs deep into her vein.
She cried out against my shoulder, her back bowing off the mattress and her legs locking tight around my waist as the first rush of her tribrid blood hit my tongue.
With forty purified artifacts supercharging my siphon and her own blood blazing hot from the fight in the crypt, the loop between us didn't just hum—it erupted across the bed like liquid sun. Every swallow I took from her throat pulled the sweet, wild lightning of her blood into my chest, and with my palm pressed flat over her racing heart, I poured a massive, rolling wave of warm, euphoric magic straight back into her body.
The glass windows overlooking the Mississippi vibrated in their frames, a vase on the dresser cracked clean in half from the pressure of our combined aura, and neither of us cared in the slightest.
I drank until we were both breathless and shaking in the sunlight, licking the puncture sealed against her hot skin before my mouth came back up to crush hers—kissing her deep and slow while our magic braided together so tightly in our veins that nothing on this earth, living or dead, was ever going to untangle it.
An hour later, when the morning sun had climbed higher over the river and the brass band down on Royal Street was just starting to tune up for the day, Hope lay curled warm and bare against my chest under the tangled white sheet, tracing lazy circles over my sternum with her fingertips while my chin rested on the top of her head.
"The trombone player down on Royal got replaced," I noted sleepily, listening to the smooth brass scales drifting up eight stories from the street below. "Sounds like somebody who actually went to music school. This city just keeps improving."
Hope laughed softly against my ribs, tilting her head up to rest her chin on my chest as she looked at me with warm, bright blue eyes. "We still have three hours before my mom expects us at the compound for lunch. And my dad promised he wouldn't touch your Jeep."
I grinned down at her, sliding my hand along the smooth curve of her bare back to pull her right back up over my mouth while my eyes flashed a lazy, contented crimson-gold in the sun.
"Three whole hours?" I murmured against her lips. "Forget lunch. Your dad can save us a plate."