Fairytale Ending

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.

Summary: Klaus takes his girl and his hybrid and gets out of that one pony town.

Spoilers: Through 3x05, The Reckoning

Rating: R

Warnings: Discussion/Implication of Non-Con/Hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst/extremely dubious consent/potential character death

Marcel takes her to a black sedan parked surreptitiously around the block and bundles her into the back seat, where Davina waits, anxiously tapping her fingers against the plush leather seats.

"Isn't it a bit dangerous for you to be waiting out here by yourself?" Elena asks her after a quick hug.

Davina taps her wrist. "Cloaking bracelet. Makes it so other witches can't sense me, or find me with a locator spell."

"Nifty."

"Yeah. I've had to up my game since Sophie took over, or, you know, die trying."

Outside, Marcel slams the trunk shut, sliding into the front seat a moment later. Turning around to face them, he hands them each a hunting knife with a wicked blade. "In case anything goes wrong once we get there," he says. "Only if, though. I'm hoping we can leave all necessary violence to me."

Relief floods her as she tucks the knife into her jacket. At this point, she knows enough to never want to be caught unarmed. Over the past week, she's practically turned Klaus's rooms upside down hunting for something sharp she could brandish in an emergency, but has had no luck. The suspicious, cynical part of her wonders if that had been merely coincidental, or if someone—probably Stefan—had known her well enough to know how she could turn things around with just the touch of a blade. Then again, maybe Klaus would feel no need to keep weaponry like that in his living quarters. Not when he is the weapon.

They pull away from the Abattoir, and Elena watches the familiar night time streets of the French Quarter roll past as they slowly make their way over to the back of the Quarter. The sights unleash a wash of memories, of bright mornings in the sun on Klaus's arm, long hours spent getting to know him for the first time, before the shine had come off him. For a little while, he had taught her a kind of happiness that had been easy and simple, and she can admit to herself in retrospect that she had fallen for the version of himself he had presented to her for those few short weeks. As bitter as the moment when she had remembered him for who he truly is had been, the seed of her longing for him had been planted here on these streets, along that dark vast river which she can sense even now, just beyond sight.

(She has a secret which she's afraid to let herself know. A secret which makes going through with tonight's work just a little bit harder than it should be.)

They park alongside a long stone wall nearly hidden beneath tumbling vines of night blooming jasmine. A soft, warm wind carries their sweet smell into the night. Cicadas hum in the deepening twilight, their song overlaid by a street musician playing the trumpet on a corner several blocks down. Every now and then, small clusters of pedestrians meander past their intersection, their laughter lingering ghost-like in the air.

The neighborhood is faintly familiar. She had caught glimpses of it as Klaus had carried her away through the foggy pre-dawn morning.

Marcel huddles with Elena and Davina close by the wall. "Okay, listen up. There's a garden wall that runs along the back of their building. After I make sure the coast is clear, I'm going to hoist you girls up over the wall so you can sneak in the back. I'll then go 'round the front to create a diversion so you two can get in, find the stone, and get out. Sound easy enough?"

What he doesn't say aloud is what happens after they steal the stone back. As though jumping that far ahead will jinx their success in overleaping this first outrageous hurdle.

She's already been gone perhaps fifteen minutes. How long do they have before Klaus comes looking for her? How long can Stefan hold him off for her?

They'll have to find the stone and finish the rebinding ritual very quickly if they have any hope of success.

Automatically, Elena glances up at the sky, looking for a moon which hasn't risen yet. Her eyes snag instead on two bright stars, nearly on top of each other. Not quite in alignment yet. Without the full power of this celestial event, would Davina have the strength to complete the ritual?

She reaches into her pocket. Maybe. If all of their plans come to fruition tonight.

Everything that happens afterwards is a blank in Elena's mind.

Somehow, she can't quite imagine herself running home like she would have last fall.

She can't imagine facing the fallout of her actions, either.

She wishes she had more time to think about this. More power to decide what to do. That she hadn't set all of this in motion last December.

"Doesn't that plan put you kind of unnecessarily at risk?" Elena asks, instead of voicing any of her real concerns.

Marcel's lips twist into something almost like sadness before determination overpowers the expression. "Sophie won't kill me," he tells her simply. "Anything short of that I can walk off."

"This will work," Davina says, as though saying it will make it true.

Elena shrugs. It's not like any of her old schemes were much better orchestrated than this, and those had usually worked out in her favor.

"Okay, good. Wait here." Marcel disappears around the corner, leaving Elena and Davina to wait.

"So, do Marcel and Sophie have a history?" Elena asks the other girl, trying to find a topic to distract her from the roiling tension inside of her.

Davina glances at her. "She was the one who told Marcel about the Harvest to begin with. She wanted to stop it. The fact that they were close once upon a time is why I'm still alive."

"Are you really going to kill her?"

"Yes," Davina replies. There is an unwavering finality to the word. Her resolve hangs in the air between them, hard and simple. Hesitantly, Davina asks her, "Do you think less of me because of that?"

"No." She's surprised by how quickly the truth spills from her lips. The fact that she admits this so easily is almost more uncomfortable than her actual lack of moral judgment.

Davina chews her lip, and for a moment, she looks every bit as young as she really is. "I wasn't sure what you would think of all this. It's hard sometimes, to know what's right and what's wrong when your only friend is a vampire."

Elena's not sure she's a very good yardstick to measure right and wrong by, but it wouldn't help Davina to bring that up now. They can question their actions as much as they want, but the fact is, they are both already committed, and there is no backing down from anything. Not anymore.

"I could be your friend," Elena offers, because she knows it would be no good to parse their motives any more than they already have.

"I would like that. Kind of a lot."

They share a brief smile, before Marcel reappears around the corner.

"We're good. C'mon."

He leads them around the block, to a narrow alley overlooked by ancient brick walls. He stops in front of one no more descript than any other.

"How do we know when to go?" Elena asks him.

"If you hear any screaming or anything catches on fire, that would be a good time."

Davina rolls her eyes fondly. "Otherwise, I have a talisman in my pocket spelled to grow hot when Marcel gives us the signal."

She steps up close to Marcel, who gives her arm a quick squeeze before bending and cupping his hands to make a stirrup for her to step into. "You look out for yourself, and I'll see you on the other side, kid," Marcel tells her before he boosts her up, onto the wall.

Elena watches Davina scramble over the top, her drop into the garden below heralded by the rustle of bushes.

With nothing left for it, she steps into Marcel's waiting hands and lets him hoist her up.

They wait pressed against the garden wall, obscured by a line of althea trees and tall rows of wildly blooming agapanthus, their drooping heads bobbing in the breeze. Davina holds the talisman, a polished piece of cat's-eye the size of her thumbnail, clutched in her fingers.

Across the short expanse of the courtyard, they can see straight into the house through the brightly illuminated windows, to the witches moving within.

Animal fear thuds through Elena's veins as she watches them. Now that she's here, it doesn't seem too long ago that she had been trapped inside this same house. In her memories, this place exists as a trap from which she had barely escaped.

"We should be okay here," Davina says, picking up on her anxiety. "They can't sense me, and they won't be able to get a read on you unless they're already right on top of us anyway."

Several minutes pass in tense silence.

Elena stuffs her hands in her pockets, vacillating over whether or not to make this next overture. Any moment now Marcel will trigger the signal, and then there will be no time for stopping or changing her mind. This could be her only chance. If she wants to take it. If it's a good idea. She decides to hell with it. "I have something for you," she murmurs, pulling a cloth bundle out from her jacket. She is careful to avoid grasping it too tightly while she holds it out for Davina's inspection.

Frowning, Davina gingerly lifts the object out of Elena's hand and pulls the cloth away. She sucks in a lungful of air. "Where did you get this?" she asks, staring down at the eight point star with the crimson stone.

"I stole it out of Klaus's desk drawer. He doesn't know I took it."

"Do you know what it is?"

"It's a device for controlling a witch, right?"

Davina nods shortly.

Elena settles back, satisfied. She had found a description of it in an old journal entry, written in an old-fashioned masculine hand which she did not recognize. The journal had been one of several mildewed volumes stuffed into the back of the armoire in Klaus's study, and not the only one to detail Dark Objects and their properties.

"Then I'm glad it's in your hands now. Use it to make things right."

"Why did Klaus have this?"

"I'm not sure he even remembered that he did. I found it locked in a desk drawer with some papers and paints that were about a hundred years old." That much is true. And if he had thought to use it on Davina… well, now he never will. At least in this the right thing to do is clear.

"Why are you giving me this?"

"Because I said I'd be your friend. And because we're about to raid a witch compound and giving the most capable team member a potentially valuable tool seemed like the smart thing to do."

"I told Marcel we could trust you," Davina mutters to herself, recovering the star with her free hand and tucking it into her pocket. "Oh!" She drops the cat's-eye and sucks on her fingers. "That's scalding!"

They both look to the house.

"There's our cue," Davina notes, needlessly. "Let's go."

Halfway across the courtyard, she feels it. That familiar ripple across her soul. Instantly, she freezes.

Davina turns back. "What is it?" she whispers, even as her eyes scan the surrounding shadows. "Do you see something?"

Elena tries to speak, but finds her throat tight, her mouth dry as dust. It takes her several erratic heartbeats before she can regain enough composure to say, "I think Klaus is in the house."

"What?"

Elena drags Davina back into the shadows and explains, all the while keeping her eyes on the house for any signs of a commotion. "It's been a while since it's happened, but sometimes I can sense him."

"Sense him how?"

"It's like—like—" She struggles to convey the feeling in ordinary language. Gives up. "It's like the feeling the wave must have before the moon sweeps back the tide. Huge and elemental and primal. It's like there's an arc between us, connecting us. Like I could find him anywhere because I'm so attuned to him." (Because his power was her own.)

Davina frowns. "Like if you called for him, he would answer."

"…Yes."

"Elena… I don't think Klaus is in there."

"You think I'm crazy."

"No! No, I don't! It's just that what you're describing sounds a lot like a maybe unintended consequence of that sacrifice ritual you went through last spring. I mean… it's your blood in him that lets him be both a vampire and a werewolf at once, against all Natural Order, right? You're your blood, your power, that made him. It… makes sense that he would be yours."

"What do you mean, mine?"

"And you said you haven't felt it in a while though? But you feel it now?"

"Davina—"

"This is important, I promise. When was the last time you sensed him?"

"I dunno, last winter sometime. It got fainter over time, and now I can't feel anything it at all when I'm with him."

"That makes sense!"

"But what did you mean by Klaus being mine?"

"Okay, okay, hear me out. So you did the sacrifice, and after that, you started feeling this special connection to Klaus."

"Not right away though. I didn't start noticing it until months later."

"Huh. Maybe the connection was dormant. Did you do something to trigger it?"

She's about to say of course not but then a memory flits across the surface of her mind, of an oozing bite wound and Klaus offering his blood to heal her, and tasting a power in him that she had recognized as akin to own. Of coming awake to him in ways she hadn't even known were possible until that moment.

Davina shakes her head, and hurries through her explanation, oblivious to Elena's train of thought. "No, it doesn't matter. Look, my point is that you had this strong connection because, in a magical sense, you created Klaus. He is your creature, and he exists because the magic that is your blood animates him. Like the bloodstone. You made both of them with a piece of yourself, and now you're their master."

All of this is too much information too fast. Even if a lot of it skates disturbingly close to her own ruminations on the matter. In her agitation, she reaches for the easiest bit to dispute. "That's absurd. I'm not Klaus's master."

"No one but the one who rules him could have the power to destroy him. You made the bloodstone to do just that." Davina grabs her hand and pulls her up. "And that's what we're going to do. Now c'mon. Marcel is counting on us to get this done as quickly as possible."

As they approach the edge of the house, that unnatural feeling sings along her nerves. "Remind me again why you're so sure Klaus isn't in there?"

"It's gotta be the bloodstone you're sensing."

"No, this feels like Klaus. I don't remember sensing anything from the bloodstone when I spat it out."

"Think about it! The bloodstone was made from your essence with the specific purpose of rebinding Klaus, thus breaking apart the hold your blood has on his by siphoning that power into the stone. If Sophie's been channeling the stone, that means she's probably triggered it—not enough to actually bind Klaus, but enough to loosen your hold on him enough that you couldn't sense the connection anymore."

"…But I'd be able to sense the stone because it's holding my connection to Klaus."

"Exactly! And because it, too, is yours. So, in other words, this should be a piece of cake for you to find. Remember: it wants you to find it."

Davina says it like it's all so easy.

Once upon a time, it was.

That time was another lifetime ago.

Davina doesn't ask her if she's ready. Instead, the witch simply throws her arms up and blows open the door. In seconds, she has the three witches gathered in the kitchen unconscious and bound in slim metal chains that twinkle strangely in the lamplight.

At Elena's raised eyebrows, Davina shrugs. "I was a Girl Scout."

They turn together toward the door to the side hall, the same side hall she had scuttled down trying to break through a window to no avail the last time she was in this building, only to find that the door has gone missing. In its place, there is only a blank wall.

"Got anything useful for this one?" Elena asks.

Davina narrows her eyes. "It's got to be an illusion." She grabs hold of Elena's hand and pulls her to where the door should be. They reach forward together and pass through the hidden threshold, only to stumble back into the kitchen, through the back door.

Elena takes a step forward, toward the door to the hallway which has reappeared, only to realize that everything in the room has flipped orientation, as though she is looking at a reflection of the room. Even the faces of the three unconscious witches are reversed. The idea of her own face in mirror fills her with an irrational horror.

Nothing I haven't faced before, she reminds herself, trying to put the uneasy thought to bed.

"Don't go through again," Davina warns. "You'll just make it worse."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a trap of some sort. Can you still sense the bloodstone?"

"Yeah. It's that way," Elena says, pointing behind them, in the direction of the back door.

"That's good," Davina says to herself. "That means we didn't trip through a portal just now, or into a pocket holding cell." She shuts her eyes for a moment and, taking a deep breath, holds her hand out, as though testing the air. "We're caught in an orb-weaver spell," she announces after a minute, lowering her hand.

"What does that mean?"

"It's a spell to catch trespassers, like in a spider's web." She pushes her shoulders back and looks Elena square in the eye. "It won't let both of us leave now that it's been activated—But if I stay here to disentangle the spell, I could reel it in enough to let you escape it."

The sound of rising voices filters in from another part of the house, growing closer.

"No, it's too dangerous, I won't leave you."

"There's no time for that. Follow the stone. I'll find you once I dissipate the spell. Go!"

With regret weighing down every step, Elena turns and, instead of heading for the hallway door, throws herself through the backdoor, toward the whispery beat of the bloodstone's presence.

She lands in the hallway, barreling over a surprised female witch no doubt come to check out the residue of magic emanating from the kitchen. They collide into the hallway table, knocking the lamp and a silver statuette onto the floor. The room kaleidoscopes between yellow light and mothy darkness as the lamp rolls away.

The witch raises her hand to stop her, to raise the alarm, maybe to kill her—but adrenaline and experience in fighting for her life combine to make Elena faster. She launches herself onto the witch, tackling her down to the ground and striking her hard on the jaw the way Tyler had taught her. The witch tries to buck her off, but Elena snatches the heavy silver statuette of a minotaur off the floor and smashes it against her temple. The witch crumples mid-thrash. The minotaur statuette comes away sticky, and Elena drops it, rubbing her reddened fingers clean against her jeans.

Hastily, she grabs the witch under the shoulders and drags her into a darkened room, alternately cursing and praying that no one discovers her there before she has time to escape, that the other witch she had been talking to doesn't reappear any moment. Her hand and wrist throb viciously while she labors, but she cannot let that slow her down. Every second counts.

She only has time to get a look at the damage she's done once she has the witch propped up against a wall. The weak light from outside is barely enough for Elena to make out the way her right temple has already begun to turn an alarming shade of blue, and how blood oozes from the crushed temple. The witch's breaths are so shallow she could almost be mistaken for a corpse.

Don't feel guilty don't feel guilty don't feel guilty

She's one of them she wants to kill you

Don't feel guilty

Elena eases out of the room and shuts the door behind her.

Down the hall, she can hear Marcel, who declares, "It's high time we come to an alliance between our peoples. Niklaus Mikaelson's tyranny cannot be allowed to continue unchecked."

Like a wraith in the night, she slips through the house, searching for the bloodstone. She imagines herself as she was last winter, following the draw of her own power to where it slept in Klaus. She had reached inside herself—to that pearl of pure elemental command, to the part of herself that had dominion over— but also was— the sun and the moon, the sea and the flame. She had found that power in herself, sleeping, burning, and then she had reached outside of herself and followed it down to its external source. She does the same thing again, hunting, hunting.

Elena passes through empty rooms, pausing at thresholds to be certain she can hear no one within before silently twisting the door knob and sliding through.

The witch's abode is almost as labyrinthine as the Abattoir, and has the air of having been inhabited by this coven just as long. Twice she hides herself before a group of witches spot her, holding her breath, fingers clutched around her hunting knife, willing them not to notice her, and on a third occasion, she overhears them whispering Marcel's name on just the other side of the door.

Minutes tick by as she crosses the length of the house, following the pull of the bloodstone.

She finds a staircase, old and creaky, at the front of the house. She has to skirt past a front parlor, the imposing pocket doors pushed wide open, to make it up the stairs. From inside the room, she can hear a witch, her voice deep and ringing with authority, say, "And what, Vampire King, can you give me as a token of your goodwill, other than the return of our most beloved and precious daughter, Davina Claire?" She doesn't dare to look inside the room, doesn't dare to stop as she flings herself up the stairs, fervently praying that no one noticed her, heard her, that they were all too distracted by Marcel's slick smiling prevarications.

She has just reached the top of the stairs when a violent blast rattles the house. Elena has to scrabble at the bannister to keep from toppling down the stairs. Another wave of energy shatters windows and crystals, and this time Elena pinpoints that all of the chaos emanates from the back of the house, where Davina has either been discovered and caught still ensnared in the trap or where she is fighting her way out. Either way, Elena has to move now.

It is as Elena scrambles into the dark upstairs hall that she hears Marcel quite distinctly announce, "Well, I guess the peace talks couldn't last forever."

It is the last thing she hears before the witches unleash themselves on her allies. Or, maybe, before her allies unleash themselves on the witches.

The firefight going on downstairs rocks the house on its foundations. The further she runs toward the back of the house, to where Davina must be fighting beneath her feet, the worse it gets. Lamps spit jagged blue veins of electricity across the rooms, and the floor super-heats beneath her feet, burning through the soles of her shoes and leaving behind the scent of smoking rubber. Plaster rains from the ceiling as the house groans, and Elena almost loses her eye to a wicked shard from an exploding mirror. Every moment she expects to run into a witch to slow her path, but the maelstrom unfolding downstairs must occupy every single one of them, because she sees no one.

Through all of this chaos and distraction, the stone whispers to her. Begs for her to find it. It sings in her ears, hums in her bones, tugs at her skin.

Elena pushes forward, blindly, following. Calling.

Only the need to find the stone drives her.

She stumbles into a bedroom, an old canopy bed at its center draped with gossamer thin mosquito netting. Faded daguerreotypes line the walls, and strange amulets and objects cover every surface. Gray smoke snakes into the room from the hall, casting everything in a hazy mist.

The bloodstone's presence reverberates in her blood, like a double heartbeat.

Elena shuts the door behind her and steps into the center of the room, spinning slowly with her arms outreached. Her hand passes over closed boxes and drawers and piles of odd trinkets, some of which make her hands itch to pick them up. She knows better than that now. Understands her connection to items of a sacrificial nature, and will not allow that affinity to interfere with her mission.

Taking a deep breath, Elena reaches inside herself, into the sleeping power in her blood, the power to wipe out Nature's Laws and replace them with her own. She uses that power to call out to the bloodstone, to her creation.

And the bloodstone answers to its master.

Though she cannot see it, she can feel it. When Elena stretches her hand forward, into the empty air, her fingers brush against the smooth, fever slick surface of the stone. Triumphantly, she pulls it from beneath of veil of nothing, and grasps it tight in her hand.

Looking at it closely for the first time, it is smaller than she expected, merely half the size of the moonstone. In the fitfully flickering electric lights, it gleams clear and deep as a garnet.

At that moment, the door to the bedroom shatters inward, the smashed wood careening into the room like a cyclone. She throws up her arms to protect her face, but a piece of it embeds itself in her shoulder. Elena has to grit her teeth through the searing of that wound as she straightens to face the witch standing in the doorway.

He's a tall, dark haired man, dressed head to toe in suffocating winter black and with an eager glint in his eyes.

"Look what I've caught," he says, raising his hand and twisting his fingers around. The motion clamps her in a vice, pinning her arms to her sides and squeezing the air from her lungs. Her ribs creak under the pressure. The witch grins crookedly at her, a sly, delighted twist to his lips. "I knew Marcel Gerard wouldn't come here in good faith," he says. "Sophie knew it too."

Her vision starts to go black. She tries to stay calm, reminding herself that they won't kill her like this. She might still have a chance to escape.

The witch stands in the doorway, slowly curling his fingers in, increasing the constriction on her lungs. "She sent me up here to wait, just in case. To catch whatever little thief Marcel sent crawling up here. Now, what shall I do with you?"

A pair of hands reach out from behind him and break his neck. He crumples to the ground, revealing Marcel standing right behind him. He notices a second witch coming up behind him and dispatches her with neat efficiency before turning back to Elena. All of it takes seconds.

"Are you hurt?" he asks, striding over to where she hunches over, hands on her knees, gasping for air.

"Once I catch my breath," she pants.

"You're bleeding."

"Got clipped by a piece of the door when it shattered. It's not too bad."

"Goddamn witches. Always gotta enter a room in the same old overdramatic way," he mutters under his breath.

One of the lamps behind them explodes. The floor rolls under their feet, wheeling them in opposite directions. By the time she catches her balance, Elena finds herself braced against the foot of the bed, several feet away from Marcel. She looks up to find Marcel has finally noticed the bloodstone in her hand.

"You've found it," Marcel says, eyes riveted to the stone. He holds out his hand. "Give it here."

Elena hesitates.

And Marcel senses the weakness in her. With the same uncanny clarity that allowed him to read her so easily when they first met, that so easily persuaded her to join his cause, he sees that, when it counts, Elena isn't certain she can hand someone else the weapon to destroy Klaus.

And this is no night for uncertain hearts.

Marcel closes the distance between them with a regretful shake of his head. "I was really hoping it wouldn't play out like this," he says. Comprehension dawns on her as he closes in. He places his hands against either side of Elena's face, ignoring her savage thrashing to escape as easily as though she were a gnat. "I'm sorry kid."

She doesn't have time to feel betrayed, to feel angry or used. All she has time for is blind fear. Desperately, she thrusts her hand into her coat, fumbling for her knife, anything to distract him with, but it's too late, she knows it's too late—

Lightning bursts between them, tearing Marcel off of her.

Strong hands push her back, until she is sheltered behind the curve of a powerfully familiar shoulder.

Gasping relief wars with abject horror as Klaus faces down Marcel. "I don't recall ever granting you to privilege to so much as touch my doppelganger, Marcellus," he snarls, the words distended around his nightmarish fangs. The entire room vibrates with the force of Klaus's black rage.

Cautiously, Marcel picks himself up off the floor on the other side of the room, where Klaus has knocked him as effortlessly as a child would throw a doll. He throws up his hands and puts what more distance he can between them, little good as it would actually do him. An incongruous trail of blood drips down the side of his neck. "We don't really have time to get into this. This whole place is about to blow, and I for one have better things to do than get fried by a group of angry witches." He darts a meaningful look at Elena—hoping maybe that she'll give him the bloodstone despite the attempted murder.

Klaus intercepts the look with a chilling growl, at once possessive and furious. "You know, when I discovered Elena missing and thought to look for her here, you were not the one I expected to find at her throat. Though you ever were a betrayer. I see that nothing in our long history has changed."

"You're out of context," Marcel says, rubbing at his neck.

"Tell me—how then did you come to be here with my Elena? Perhaps you were here to rescue her yourself? Is that what I interrupted? Or were you here to plot with the witches behind my back? A midnight alliance—the doppelganger in exchange for their help in destroying me?"

"You know I don't parley with witches. All they really want is Davina and I'll never give them that."

The bloodstone throbs in her hand, nearly glowing in the eerie, uneven light.

The floor heaves again, and she stumbles against Klaus's back.

Righting herself, she tugs on his shirt. "Klaus, Marcel's right. We need to leave now."

If they leave now, she might just be able to pull victory out of this disaster. Take the stone off the playing field herself, so that Sophie cannot use it, and neither can Marcel or Davina—at least, not until she is ready for them to. For once, the power will be firmly in her hands.

He turns to her, finally. His eyes are black as the deepest parts of hell, his irises that unearthly luminescent gold. Blood spatters his face and chest, his mouth, full of those razored fangs. The very planes of his face are too sharp, too feral. He has never looked less human, more alien. The sight of him does not frighten her in the least.

"I nearly lost my mind when I realized you were taken from me," he tells her lowly. "I did lose it, when I saw your face in Marcellus's hands." He reaches out and brushes his fingers over her shoulder. "You're injured."

On the other side of the room, Marcel curses colorfully. "Did you fucking bite me?" he asks, fingers pressed to a wound in his neck— a wound which Elena only now connects to the bloody tracks she had noticed on his neck before.

Klaus turns to respond, but at that moment, a particularly ferocious crack, like thunder on a clear night, detonates elsewhere in the house, and the whole room flickers blue-violet in its wake.

The light catches oddly at the bloodstone in her hands, seeping into the stone like a white fire that flares between a blistering heat and a cold like sharp bright ice.

Elena stifles her cry of surprise just barely, but not before Klaus notices the stone.

The gathered light thrown by the stone casts strange shadows over Klaus's face as he stares at her hand, all of the dynamism that had fueled him like a force of nature melted away into an unnaturally eerie stillness as he gazes, transfixed, at the stone.

"What is that you have in your hand?" he asks her, voice deadly quiet.

Even Marcel freezes at this question, his mouth hanging open, unable to form words.

Elena stares at him, unable to answer, knowing that with each moment without a plausible response she damns herself more.

"Marvelous, you're all here," a woman announces from the doorway, satisfaction rich in her voice. "I do so prefer to handle these things as efficiently as possible."

Klaus grabs hold of her arm with bruising force and pushes her back behind him.

From over his shoulder, Elena can just make out through the smoke and hazy lighting Sophie herself. There's a fanatic's cast to her dark eyes that Elena does not recall. In fact, as she takes her in, everything about the witch plays at odds from how Elena remembers here. Where the Sophie of her memories had been unsure of herself, a reluctant follower too weak to stand up against the darker rituals demanded by her coven, the Sophie before her seems to have lost all of those compunctions. Instead, she faces them like a queen, back straight, chin raised, everything in her manner forcefully persuasive, painfully confident in her right to rule. Even the way she dresses has changed—instead of the jeans and tee-shirts of last December, she wears loose, flowing garments that suggest as much as they conceal, and her hair she wears coiled like snakes upon her head. Around her throat she wears a necklace of bones. She electrifies them all with the weight of her presence.

"Sophie, I take it," Klaus says. He does not let go of her arm, and she has the feeling, despite the way he has loosened his posture, appearing for all the world perfectly at ease, that he is seriously debating snatching her up and out of here before anyone can blink.

The bloodstone wrenches alarmingly in her hand, but she holds on tightly to it.

I am your master, she thinks, willing the stone to hear her. To obey her.

It settles in her hand.

Sophie looks her directly in the eye and frowns.

"That's not Sophie," Marcel says, daring to step up beside them.

Sophie smiles at them, brilliantly and takes a step forward. "Clever as always, Marcel. I've always so enjoyed that about you."

Klaus watches her carefully. "Who, then, do we have the pleasure of addressing?"

She turns to Klaus. "Surely you must remember me, Niklaus? Ah, but I see that you do not. How disappointingly characteristic." She sweeps an elegant curtsy, low and mocking. "Allow me to reintroduce myself. Celeste Dubois, High Witch of the French Quarter Coven, past and present." She lays her fingers over her necklace of bone. "Now, my lovely living mirror, I would like my bloodstone back." Her words pulse in the air.

Instantly, the bloodstone tears from Elena's grasp and lands in Celeste's outstretched hand. Celeste smiles then, the expression truly wicked. "Well done. Now we may begin."

A/N: Thank you thank you for reading and to everyone who has been kind enough to comment, you all rock!

I'm just. Completely freaked out and like losing my mind that we've gotten this far into the fic. Please leave a review and let me know what y'all think!

xoxoxo