Chapter 4

Five years later

"Hey, Caroline!" calls Turner from the kitchen, "I think we're out of blood!"

Slowly, Caroline sits up from the loveseat she's currently sharing with a blood-soaked, tan boy of around twenty. She takes one last swig of blood and releases him. He collapses, pale and faint, onto the oaken floor of her isolated house outside of Kashmir, India. Sweat drips from his brow, mixing with blood and pouring through the small cracks in the floorboards. She grins, watching the beautifully macabre sight. Then she stands and leaves the boy to find Turner.

When she gets to the kitchen she finds the windows open. The tendrils of lukewarm wind rustle the silk curtains slightly. Her eyes find the full moon and her lips form a mirroring 'o'. She shuts them immediately. "What is it, Turner?" Caroline asks irritably.

Her friend points to the fridge, shelves emptied of blood bags positives. "No more blood."

Caroline raises one eyebrow and she chuckles a bit. "Why do we bother with the frozen stuff when it's so much tastier from the vein? You taught me that much."

"You're beginning to attract attention, mate," he said lowly. "We don't want people asking too many pesky questions if we want to remain incognito here."

A hand place on her hip, she replies, "And emptying the hospital blood banks doesn't attract attention?"

"No, you're right, it does," begins Turner. Self-satisfied, Caroline drops her fangs and turns away, deciding to go drink from one of the footmen. Turner continues, though, "That's why I was thinking we might be better off going somewhere else? Rome, maybe?"

"No." Caroline shakes head violently. "Not Rome."

"Why the hell not? Italians are tasty, aren't they?"

"They're fine," she says feebly. "I just don't want to go to Rome."

A look of realization illuminates Turner's face. He guesses, "It's because of Klaus, isn't it? That's why whenever we move; you never want to go to certain places? You're running away from the places which remind you of him?"

Caroline hands fly to his throat as she pushes him to the wall. "Shut up!" she shouts. "Don't you dare talk about him!"

"You're scared, aren't you? You're scared that, if you begin to think about him, you'll start feeling again and-

"Shut up!" she screams again. She sounds like an impetuous child throwing a temper tantrum but it doesn't stop him.

"- Then you'll feel the pain of every single person you've killed in the past five years and, worst of all, you'll feel the guilt from having abandoned him for five year-" Caroline doesn't realise what she's done until she sees the heart barely beating in her hand.

Rebekah Mikaelson never, ever drinks in the morning except on very special occasions. Waking up to her brother's scream, she decides, entitles her to a blood cocktail for breakfast. She voices this opinion to her brother, who is daintily eating his toast and jam like every morning. He replies, "You cannot pretend that this is an exception, sister. He has been suffering from the Hunter's Curse for the better part of six years now."

"Well, I was on holiday for six months. I'm not used to it yet!" Rebekah says indignantly. She swears she sees Elijah ever so slightly roll his eyes at her. "Have you heard from her since I left?"

He shakes his head. "Miss Forbes has made it very clear she does not wish to be found. The last time I heard of her was when Stefan called to say she flipped her humanity switch. Since then, she's changed phone numbers, banks, credit cards...she even stopped using Klaus' private aeroplane."

"Then, that's that." Rebekah held all the finality she could muster. "Klaus is going to stake us both when he is freed and finds out we don't know where his lover is."

It turns out that fear came back first for her. Slipping through the cracks of her hardened shell, the fear of her past egged her on as she ran away from every place, every moment that reminded her of Klaus.

After she kills Turner, all her emotions come back. Fear is jumbled together with pain and guilt and anger. She sees the blood on her hands and her very insides scream in protest. She walks around the villa, ghostly, finding every human body she barely remembers killing. As if she was drowning in water and finally came to the surface, she gasps for the air that her lungs cannot yet breathe. It's too much. It takes too much energy to live like this.

But Caroline Forbes has never let the magnitude of any task stop her before. She focuses on the task before her: finding the potential hunter. Five years have been wasted by callous, bitchy Caroline and she needs to continue her search for Klaus' saving grace. She sets forth a plan: she'll use her psychology degree (which she does have from the University of Tulane) to interview as many young people as possible. Her mission: to find the one person with the unexplained tattoo.

Zealously, Caroline loads the car and sets out on the road to New Delhi. New Delhi is one of her favourite places in the world thanks to an eventful trip to the Taj Mahal with Klaus. She smiles at the memory. Isn't it weird, she thinks, that I'm not upset anymore about Klaus?

The voice of a boy in one of the fields catches her attention. She slows down the convertible to hear. "I'm not crazy, I swear!" he says to his friend in Hindi.

"You can't possibly think that a tattoo just miraculously appeared on your arm! Not to mention you're the only one who seems to be able to see it, Vikram."

Acting on an impulse, Caroline halts the car in the middle of the empty countryside road. She gets out and walks with purpose through the field and towards the two boys. When they see her making a beeline for them, they stop and watch her with mouths open. What does a pretty American tourist want with them?

When she reached them she said, "You've got a tattoo on your arm, right?"

Wordlessly, the boy, Vikram, nodded.

"Tell me, then, what does it look like?" Her voice was wavering. Her forehead developed a slight crinkle and hope shined in her eyes. She listens carefully as he describes the pattern of swords and swirls and demons. She takes out her phone and scrolls through pictures, finding at last an old picture of Jeremy's tattoo. She hands him the phone. The boy gasps. He's nodding so hard that he looked like some kind of over-zealous punk rock star head butting. Caroline's eyes go round. She can't believe her good fortune. Dazed, she forces herself to focus. She asks, "If you want to know where these markings come from, you'll follow me."

He holds her hips in place and slides his hands down her thighs, checking that she's well seated on the dark Arabian horse. He knows, of course, that it would take a lot more than a buck from a horse to deter Caroline but he won't see her fall for anything. She's stiff, her spine erect and her hands wrapped tightly around the leather reigns but as he continues to touch her, she slowly begins to loosen up. When he's assured of her being comfortable, he adjusts his own seat behind her and in her ear, so that his breath makes the golden tendrils hanging loose from her ponytail quiver, he says, "Now kick."

She digs her heals into the sides of the horse as hard as she dares. It doesn't move. "He's not moving, Klaus," she says impatiently, brushing her left hand through the horse's black mane.

"I can see that, sweetheart," he answers with just a hint of humour in his voice. "Why don't you try kicking a little harder? You won't hurt it, I promise." She tries again, quite a bit harder, and suddenly the horse begins to plod forward. Caroline gives a little shriek of excitement and satisfaction. She pats the horse's side and gives him little kisses of praise.

Within a few more hours, she's flying across the Hungarian countryside. By the end of the day, she's challenging Klaus to impromptu races. Klaus sees her with her hair flying loose behind, laughs escaping her wide open mouth as the sky turns pink.

He sees her hair, her ears, her lips, her body. But he sees only outlines and shoulders. Her face escapes him always. Every night, he sees glimpses of her. He drinks her in, like a man in a desert taking fresh gulps of water, escaping for a moment the hot sun. He buries himself in her memory as he tries to ignore the shouting in his ear. Finally, he is forced to wake. He stares up into Mikael's red face so close to his own that Klaus can smell his onion breath. "Wake up, boy!" Mikael is screaming over and over again. He smirks when Klaus opens his eyes enough to glare at him.

"Did I disturb you, boy?" Mikael says, his voice dripping with irony. "Were you busy dreaming of your precious Caroline?" Klaus growls at the mention of her name. "It must be very disappointing to be so infatuated with a girl who so obviously loathes you, Niklaus."

"You should know," Klaus spits.

Mikael frowns as if in confusion, then chuckles. "I'm sure Caroline must be having the time of her life away from you, boy. It will be awful for her when you're freed from this blessed curse and she must come back to you..."

Caroline takes her time telling Vikram the story of the five hunters. Hunters are tricky because they cannot be compelled. Though he wasn't resistant to the idea of having the pretty blond American woman drive him to New Delhi, that doesn't mean he will be willing to kill a vampire to free Klaus from the curse. Caroline is careful to portray herself and Klaus in the most favourable light possible. She explains that she doesn't normally feed from the vein and that she normally uses blood bags instead. She tells him that the man she loves, her fiancé, has been cursed for protecting her from another hunter.

By the time they arrive in the city, she's rather confident that Vikram will try and help her. She books them in to the best hotel in town and smiles at the boy when he gapes at the unprecedented finery around him. They take the lift up to the penthouse suite she's shared with Klaus once or twice before. When they're both comfortably settled onto twin settees facing each other, Vikram asks Caroline the question she's been hoping for. "I'm very sorry about your boyfriend-"

"Fiancé," corrects Caroline firmly, fingering the ring conspicuously and looking down as if she was trying to choke back silent sobs.

"Like I said, I'm very sorry but I still don't quite see what my place is in all of this, even if I am a hunter."

"Well you didn't let me finish," she says, quiet smile tracing her lips. She's practically flirting with him. "Klaus is cursed because he killed a hunter. But there's a way for him to be cured. All we need is a potential hunter, you, to kill a vampire."

"What?!" Vikram jumps up, his hair practically standing on its ends. "I can't kill anyone!"

Caroline stands as well, saying. "Please, Vikram! You have to help me! I cannot continue to live without him. I won't live at all without him! I'D RATHER DIE THAN CONTINUE LIVING WITHOUT KLAUS!" Caroline is in hysterics now and she isn't even faking it.

Vikram is evidently very uncomfortable seeing this powerful, regal woman break down in front of him. But that won't shake his resolution. Vikram is almost a man. He knows by now that killing anyone just leads to trouble and he guesses that killing a vampire would lead to more blood spilt than it was worth. He speaks trying to be as comforting as possible. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sure you will find somebody who will do what you ask one day. Your, um, Klaus will not suffer forever."

Caroline, who had crumpled onto the floor, tries to wipe her tears and stands again unsteadily. "I understand. I'm sorry for having wasted your time. I will arrange for you to be driven back to your village. May I recompense you in some way for your troubles?" She looks through her trunk, trying to look as if she was rummaging for money. She pulls out a heavy sword of Klaus' and hands carefully to Vikram. "I'm sorry but I have no money. This is from the 16th century, though, and I'm sure it shouldn't be very hard to sell."

The boy's eyes practically pop from his skull when he sees the sword. It's encrusted with an innumerable amount of precious stones and the biggest cream-white pearl he's ever seen rests on the hilt. He nods and murmurs that he is sorry once again. Caroline calls him an open-topped taxi before saying goodbye and sending him downstairs.

The minute the lift doors close on Vikram, her face slips from damsel back into action mode. It's time to enact Plan B. She whips out her cell phone and finds the number of an Anya Drovsky. "Hello," says the broken Russian voice that picks up.

"Hello, Anya," Caroline says coolly. "This is Caroline Forbes. Do you know who I am?"

Anya utters a short, muffled gasps, which makes Caroline smile. "Yes, you are the girlfriend of the Hybrid."

"Fiancé, actually. Am I mistaken in saying that you are currently residing in New Delhi?"

Caroline can practically see Anya stiffen at the end of the line. "Yes, that's true," she admits. She's trying very hard not to let her fear show. "What do you want?"

"I would like you to attend to a little task for me. In exchange, I can offer you a full pardon for the events of 1936 in Moscow." Caroline's voice is confident. She knows she's won.

"Full pardon?" Anya repeats. A little too quickly, she asks, "What is it that you want me to do?"

From her hiding place, Caroline can't see Anya jump onto the car taking Vikram from New Delhi. She hears Vikram yelp in fear and she hears the slash of his sword as it slices off Anya's head. She breathes a sigh of relief. It is done.

Hey! Just wanted to thank all my readers for the support and I hope you have a wonderful week! 5th and final chapter should hopefully be out next week. Please, please do me a favour and review so I can know what's working and what's not.

Hugs and thanks,

Brianne