A/N: Okay, so this chapter is a little bit shorter, sorry about that. But it's a good chapter despite the brevity, I promise.
Thanks as always to you fantastic readers. Bonus thanks to everyone who reviewed: Dominique Cooper, kineret, Victoria, Savage Kill, CarlyLynn, Lavendor Queen, Elejah88, that one Guest, Brookeworm3, Raven Okumura, DreamonAlina, SphereShadow, willdawg992003, and SapphirexMoonlight. You guys are all so fabulous; thank you so much for all the great feedback! :D
Enjoy the chapter!
Chapter 53
"Never give up on someone you can't go a day without thinking about. "
Barely ten minutes after leaving the Abattoir, Ezra was already starting to question the wisdom of dragging Marcel along as he and Klaus investigated the to mysterious vampire deaths.
Marcel was, for one thing, in a spectacularly shitty mood, even by Ezra's standards. It was understandable, of course, and Ezra was willing to cut him some slack given the circumstances. Someone he'd cared for deeply had died in a terrible and awful way, and he was in agony from the loss.
Ezra understood that. He did.
But did Marcel really have to be such an asshole about it?
Okay, so maybe Ezra was inclined to be a little more prickly because it was Marcel, and he didn't like Marcel much just in general. But he was willing to put his own issues aside for the moment, given the givens.
But when they arrived at the scene twenty minutes later and discovered the two dead daywalkers, all Marcel did was look at their corpses blankly before turning right around and walking away. Ezra and Klaus had stopped him and tried to talk him out of bailing, but after a small, heated debate, Marcel had washed his hands of the whole mess, declaring that he didn't care about "vampire hijinks" anymore. And then he'd disappeared without a backward glance, leaving Ezra fuming and Klaus both aggravated at Marcel's behavior and resigned over how there was nothing to be done about it.
They both gave massive sighs, and then returned to the bodies of the dead vampires. Ezra, noticing something that piqued his interest, knelt down to inspect the body. Tilting the head of one of the daywalkers to the side slightly, he noticed a peculiar symbol carved into the side of the dead vampire's neck. It seemed vaguely familiar to him somehow, and not in a good way.
Frowning, he snapped a picture of it with his phone and forwarded it to Zoe, then waved Klaus over for a second opinion. "You ever seen anything like this before?" he asked.
Klaus leaned over and inspected the symbol. "No," he said after a moment, "it's not anything I'm familiar with." There was something a little off in his tone, though, like maybe he wasn't entirely sure.
"Huh." Ezra released his grip on the dead daywalker's chin and the lifeless head lolled to the side. "Me neither."
Rebekah made sure that Zoe was resting comfortably, then quietly slipped out of her friend's room, striding down the hallway and heading for Marcel's room.
Once there, she was stunned to see him sharing a bottle of bourbon with Thierry.
"I thought you were bricked up to starve down in the Garden?" she asked him.
He shot her a dark glare. "Yeah, because of some bullshit your brother pulled," he said in a surly tone. "Tell him thanks for me, will you?"
"I decided to let Thierry out of the Garden," Marcel added, taking a long pull form the bottle of bourbon. "I shouldn't have put him down there in the first place, and after some thinking I realized that he's the only one who's ever really had my back."
Rebekah flinched ever so slightly at the cutting edge in his voice, but covered it by crossing her arms. "So this is how you've decided to spend your time? Drinking the day away with your bestie, when Ezra and Klaus need your help with solving those murders?"
Marcel snorted. "I'm sure they can manage without me."
"You should go help them," she told him sternly. "The daywalkers who died are your people, Marcel."
"Technically," he replied, "they're Klaus's people now. He did take over, or did you somehow miss that from where you were hiding in the shadows?"
She bristled. "Excuse me, I was standing right there beside you, you selfish wanker."
He arched an eyebrow. "Yeah, and you told me to surrender to Klaus. Little late to be complaining about it now, Bekah. What's done is done. Now, if you don't mind, I have some catching up to do with an old friend." He poured Thierry another drink and glanced pointedly at the door behind Rebekah.
She huffed at him in frustration, but didn't bother trying to argue the issue any further. She knew him well enough to know when he was in a stubborn mood; however much she disliked it, he wasn't going to budge and go help Ezra and her brother investigate. So she just gave him one last glare before whirling around and storming from the room, making sure to slam the door very hard behind her.
She was just on her way back to Zoe's room when her phone went off. Frowning, she pulled it out and answered. "Hello?"
"Hello, Miss Mikaelson," an unfamiliar voice said in greeting. "How are you today?"
"Wondering who the hell this is," she replied, letting her annoyance creep into her voice. "You have thirty seconds, and then I'm hanging up."
"You'll be receiving a text message in a moment," the person on the other end told her. "It will be an address. You will go to that address, and you will go there alone."
"And why exactly would I do that?" she demanded.
"Because if you don't, your two little friends are going to meet a rather...unfortunate end. It would be such a pity, too; the one with a baby on the way and the blonde with such a bright future ahead of her. Don't worry," he added, "we're simply observing them for now. But it would be such a shame if anything were to happen to them because of your stubbornness."
Rebekah barely bit back a curse as she recalled that Cami and Hayley had gone out for the afternoon to do some maternity shopping for Hayley; she wanted to kick herself for letting them leave without a proper escort.
"And don't even think about contacting either of your brothers," the stranger said warningly. "We have people monitoring all of you, and we'll know if you do anything other than exactly what we tell you."
"Fine," she said curtly as her phone vibrated to tell her that there was a new text message. "I'll be there shortly."
Ezra was trailing after Klaus as the Original hybrid went inside another local business to question those inside about whether or not they'd witnessed anything useful that he and Klaus could use to figure out who had killed those two daywalkers and why. He hadn't heard back from Zoe yet about the symbol, so that was a dead end for the moment. He would have been annoyed, but he knew that his twin had more than likely fallen back asleep, and he was actually relieved that she was resting for a change.
They were just about to enter a small Postal Annex-type place when a sudden wave of nausea washed over him, making him gag and stumble to a halt, his vision going blurry at the edges.
Klaus continued on for several steps, but after noticing that Ezra wasn't with him anymore, doubled back with an annoyed scowl. "What's the hold up?" he asked, but then his scowl morphed into a slightly less severe frown as he took in Ezra's sickly appearance. "Now what's wrong with you?"
"I have no idea," Ezra told him, voice shaking. "I just feel really sick all of a sudden." And terribly, terribly weak, like someone had drained all the energy from his body. He took a deep breath and tried to assess his condition, but couldn't pinpoint the cause of his sudden sickness; physically, he was fine. Not in peak condition since he was still bouncing back from Sirena's torture games, but nothing was seriously wrong with him.
He was about to dive down into his inner headspace and question his wolf about what exactly was going on, but then the nausea peaked and shattered his concentration, driving him to his knees as he gagged again and struggled for air.
What the hell is going on?
Rebekah tried to scream but couldn't. No matter how hard she struggled, she couldn't even make the tiniest noise. She also couldn't move, couldn't manage even the slightest twitch.
When she'd arrived at the address she'd been given, she hadn't expected to face any sort of significant challenge. She certainly hadn't expected to encounter Alphonz Bellatunde Delgallo, especially since he'd been dead for many, many years.
And she would never have in a million years expected him to trap her in a magical containment circle and suck away her power with some sort of blasted energy-leeching spell.
As her power and life energy was pulled out of her body and into Papa Tunde, she felt herself growing weaker, almost unbearably so. As the spell went on and on and she continued to grow weaker and weaker she had no doubt that if she weren't a true immortal, she would have already died.
As the spell kept going with a sense of endlessness, she really began to wonder if she might not perish anyway.
Ezra, still queasy but somehow ambulatory, wasted no time in bolting up to his room and grabbing his grimoire from his bag the second they returned to the Abattoir. He flipped through it frantically until he found the entry he was looking for. A amalgamation of spells and hexes he'd seen or encountered over the years, his grimoire was more of a witchcraft scrapbook than a true grimoire, but in a situation like the one he was in right then, that was more of a good thing than a bad one, especially since it meant that he had an entry on a series of spells that he himself wouldn't use, but needed to know about just in case.
When he realized that the symbol he and Klaus had seen on the bodies was used in rituals for sacrificial magic, his heart started beating double-time in his chest. Sacrificial magic wasn't exceedingly rare anymore, but it took a certain caliber of warlock to pull it off with any great success. There were only a handful of warlocks in the country capable of doing strong sacrificial magic.
Several of the more notorious ones were already long dead. One of the ones still among the living was dear old Uncle Reginald.
That thought nearly had him hyperventilating, but then he reminded himself that if Reginald were in New Orleans, he or Zoe would have already sensed him, would have picked up the taste of his power from miles away.
So. It wasn't Reginald.
But if not their uncle, then who?
Who had enough power to pull off sacrificial magic like that?
And why the hell was he still so goddamned nauseous?!
Angry and sick, he hauled himself downstairs and all but threw the grimoire at Klaus.
The hybrid caught it easily and arched an eyebrow at him.
"I figured out what the symbol means," Ezra told him.
"So did we," Klaus replied, nodding at Elijah, who was leaning against the edge of a nearby table.
"The symbol the two of you found on those bodies is nearly identical to a symbol similarly used by someone who once stood against our family," Elijah explained. "Long ago, the last time we were in New Orleans. Clearly," he added, "some upstart witch is salvaging old tricks."
"Okay, but then why am I feeling sick?" Ezra asked. "I haven't run into anyone who could have put this hex on me."
"Are you sure about that?" Elijah asked. "It's not possible someone could have laid the spell upon you without your notice?"
Ezra gave him a scathing look. "For your sake, I'm going to pretend I didn't just hear that." He shook his head. "Trust me, no one could do any sort of magic on me without me realizing it. I'm not Zoe, but I'm not a lightweight, either. I've got several layers of protection magic on me to prevent exactly this sort of thing," he added. "Our uncle's pretty fond of sacrificial magic and power transference spells, too, so my sister and I both have precautions in place, just in case."
"So why are you sick then?" Klaus asked. "If you're not the target of such a spell, there's no reason for you to be feeling any sort of effect from it. You couldn't possibly have caught it from those bodies earlier; it's not like the magic is contagious."
"That's true," Ezra admitted. "The only reason I would be impacted from someone else being drained would be if..."
If he was linked to them somehow.
Like his bond with Zoe.
Panicked again, he sought out that bond with his twin, that soul-deep connection that bound them together as blood and pack. To his immense relief, there didn't seem to be anything amiss with his twin; as far as he could tell, she was still asleep, but it was normal, healthy sleep. There was no flavor of dark magic to her energy, no indication that her power was being leeched away.
He withdrew from their bond feeling both relieved and baffled.
Relieved, because his sister was fine.
Baffled, because if it wasn't his sister who was being affected by the power-sucking spell, whose suffering was he sensing?
Who the hell else could he possibly be bonded to?
A/N: Okay, so it really was a short chapter. I mean, there have been shorter, but still...I'm sorry! But I got to that part at the end and it just felt like a good place to stop for the moment. XD
Anyway, how did you guys like the chapter? Is everyone still behaving believably? Is everyone still liking EzBekah as a pairing? Ezra and Rebekah were clearly the focus of this chapter, since Zoe's still recuperating from that massive magic battle and there's not much Zolijah action going on when Zoe's not around. XD In any case, I hope I wrote this chapter well enough; I had quite a bit of trouble transitioning into the Papa Tunde thing, since there are so many little things I changed in canon that made me have to tweak things around a little bit; most notable was Thierry not getting set free because Rebekah talked to Klaus, but rather just because Marcel was hurting and lonely and not trusting the Mikaelsons anymore. In any case, because I brought Thierry back that way, obviously he's not going to be running around as Rebekah's little minion, so I needed to come up with some other way to get her into Papa Tunde's clutches. So I fell back on what I suspect is becoming my go-to plot device for getting my characters where I need them to be: the mysterious phone call. Seriously, between all the villainous phone calls and kidnappings, I am going to end up being very, very predictable. XD
I hope you guys enjoyed the chapter. Drop me a review if you've got a second to spare; I appreciate any and all feedback I receive. :)
The next update will be in a week like always; I might do a bonus update sometime between then and now, but I've gotten slightly side-tracked by an idea for a Yugioh fanfic, so no promises. XD Don't worry, though; the new fic won't keep me from updating Inevitable on a regular basis! I doubt I'll be posting the Yugioh fic right away anyway and I know I mention it from time to time, but I really do have like twenty more chapters of this story completed and ready to post; I was working on Chapter 75, I think, when Arc-V snatched my attention away. XD
Anyway, thanks as always for stopping by to enjoy this story with me! See you next time!
