Mad Crow Diner - Appalachian Mountains

"If you find him, do not hesitate," Klaus seethed into his phone and hung up sharply.

I sat down in the booth opposite him, and asked, "was that Elijah?"

Klaus nodded once; he was clearly still seething from the conversation. I gave him a minute to pull it together and told him, "Hope's down for the count. She fell asleep as soon as Mary started the car. I doubt she'll miss either of us over the next few days."

I reached over for the list of addresses he'd been scribbling out in my absence, and asked him, "so...which of these Kingmaker offices should we hit up first? Oh god, there's ten of them?"

After a moment, I finally noticed Klaus was stuck on pause. He was looking at me, worriedly. I asked him, "what? What is it?"

"Lucien has revealed his true nature. He's taken Freya," he told me, anxiously, "and now, it seems her rescue depends on Elijah working with my ever-reliable brother Finn."

"You uh...you should've led with that. I guess you want to go back to New Orleans to head up the hunt?" I inferred from his troubled expression. Klaus hesitated for a moment, clearly torn between the two very different missions before him. Yeah, I was a little disappointed, but his sister was in mortal danger; it made sense. I nodded in agreement and assured him, "it's fine. You should definitely go. I'm sticking with Kingmaker, though. Lucien's working very hard to cover up these kidnappings, and I want to know why."

I shoved the crumpled up list into my pocket, reached over for the car keys, and got up to leave. We had a moment back in that clearing in the woods, reached a pivotal understanding; everything that had come before, all of the hatred, and the pain, and the anger, it all got pushed to the side and stripped back to one simple principle: we both loved Hope, we both wanted to do right by her. I'm not saying I liked Klaus now, I didn't exactly revel in his company, but I was hoping that we could have stuck together and seen this through. I would have appreciated having a really Big Bad watching my back, yes, but I was pretty sure I'd kept my disappointment clear off my face.

He grabbed my wrist as I walked past him, and stopped me. He rose up and said, thoughtfully, "no. The wolves, Freya's abduction...it can't all be coincidence. We'll let my brothers pursue the obvious path. You and I...will pursue this one. No doubt all roads...lead to the same treacherous bastard."

Kingmaker Land Development Office - Lexville, Tennessee

"Does he just build these from a kit or something?" I asked, incredulously, as we approached another standardized office building, "it's the exact same as the last five offices. Same windows, same landscaping-"

"-and inside: same generic abstract art, same compellable receptionist," Klaus smirked back at me.

"Are you sure you wouldn't be better off with your brothers?" I asked him, genuinely, "I can do the leg-work. I don't mind."

Klaus smiled wildly and whined, "and split up the team now? Just when I'm discovering your carpool karaoke skills? I think not!" I couldn't help but laugh. I laughed...with Klaus. Yeah. It was a weird time, okay. He told me, "no, Lucien is playing a game here; each unassuming little office building we search, the more sure I am of it. We keep going. Together. Even if we have to scour one hundred of these poxy places."

I looked around the reception area and played a quick game of Kingmaker Bingo: splodgy art on that wall, empty seating area, water bottle vending machine. Tick, tick, tick. Oh, middle-aged bespectacled receptionist. Bingo. The woman behind the desk finished up her call and looked back at us both, expectantly.

"Ah, hello, love!" Klaus greeted the woman, cordially, "we're here for a spot of search and potentially destroy," he looked directly into her eyes and requested, "do tell: where are the areas off-limits to general staff?"

The receptionist sat back in her chair slowly, and smiled back at Klaus, maniacally. She hummed and declared, "you just wait right there...and I'll get someone out to help you with your inquiry."

She reached down and pressed a button under her desk; an alarm blared loudly throughout the building. The reception area went dark; red lights flashed; armed guards flooded the place, demanding we stay right where we were. We were surrounded. The laser sights of their assault rifles were stuck on us. I shared a look with Klaus that intimated this was new. We must be at the right cookie-cutter place.

"Shall we?" I rasped.

"Ladies first," Klaus smirked back.

Happily. One swipe of my wrist threw up a shield; the other snapped the closest guard's shin bones; he screamed out in agony and slammed to the ground. The rest of the guards instantly opened fire; bullets pinged and repelled against the vacant thin air before me. I launched one of them backwards as a bowling ball of sorts, scattering the formation behind him. Klaus roared out and stormed toward the stunned heap; he turned into a blur of broken bones, snapped necks, and guns impaling their owners in all manner of creative ways. The shots from what remained of the resistance did not faze Klaus one bit; he tore them all to shreds and tossed the last man standing through a glass door. He panted as the last of the glass twinkled and scattered across the floor.

"You alright?" he asked.

"Grand," I rasped back and led the search deeper into the building.

The alarm was still bellowing. I tried another door and shot a defeated look back at Klaus; we needed a pass-card of some kind to get anywhere useful. Klaus spied a frantic man in a white lab coat bursting out of a locked door, and flashed into him. He snatched the man, snapped his neck and reached into the now floppy man's lab coat pocket. He pulled out the credentials needed to get into the super-secret areas of the laboratory. He dropped the body without another word and held up the key card in tickled amusement, as though he'd bested me. I rolled my eyes and snatched the card out of his hands, checked the coast was clear, and slipped through the locked door.

Kingmaker Land Development Laboratory

I froze pretty much the second the door closed behind us. I was horrified; everywhere I looked made me sick to my stomach. At least a dozen unconscious men and women were chained up to various machines, wires weaving in and out of them; the decaying corpse of a transformed werewolf was tossed inside an open cage. Klaus wandered ahead of me.

"They're all wolves," I whispered, as I forced myself to wander further in.

The first young man I came to had what looked like a breathing mask secured over his face; two vials on one side were full of a reddish-orange fluid. I wasn't sure if it was going out or in. I leant in closer to the man, to get a better look and his golden-yellow eyes pinged open, he moaned out in heart-piercing agony, and then slumped back into unconsciousness. I jumped back, in fright, and huffed out, "Klaus, they're still alive!"

Klaus looked equally disgusted by what Lucien had been doing. He clocked a clear plastic curtain at the back of the lab, pulled it back, and revealed a dead woman bound to an exam table, painful-looking lesions swallowed up her face, neck, and chest. I looked away from it. I heard Klaus breathe in deeply and then infer, "this one's a vampire...what the hell is Lucien up to here?"

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, relieved for the momentary distraction, and read a message from Matt: Your boyfriend's a dick. Keep him out of the town's limits. I squinted down in confusion, until Klaus asked for my help. He was attempting to remove the apparatus off a middle-aged werewolf's face. We worked him out of his restraints and gently helped him sit down.

"No. No vampire blood..." he pleaded.

"That's okay. I'm a witch. I'm going to try and ease your pain," I assured him. He looked up at me, hesitantly, and I nodded in encouragement. He reluctantly let me help him as Klaus paced around, brainstorming on what we'd just learned.

"He needed their venom," Klaus mused. He looked around the room, eventually poking around a small refrigerator to find a vial of cloudy white liquid. He scoffed and intimated, "he harvested the venom he needed, then reverse-engineered a vaccine. Clever stuff."

"And her?" I asked, jerking my head towards the plastic curtain, concealing the dead vampire woman strapped to the exam table.

"It was the wolf venom that killed her," Klaus explained as he inspected a syringe full of werewolf venom, "just Lucien testing his cure."

"Why does he need to test out something he knows already works?" I scorned.

Klaus didn't answer. He looked at a message he'd just received. He told me, "Freya's safe."

"What about the others?"

"Well, it seems Finn's in a bad way. Some kind of werewolf bite. Elijah thinks I should return home and heal him. Ease his pain," Klaus said, and then tucked his phone back in his pocket and continued moseying around.

"Klaus, you should go," I insisted, "as soon as these last few recover, I'll get them home, gather what I can, and torch this place."

Klaus chuckled back, "no. Finn can purge it himself. He's earned the agony. Besides, you know how much I love burning things to the ground."

I rose up and squared up to him, insisting, "Klaus, when you said that you wanted to work together for Hope's sake, I wanted to know what that looked like. And now, I do. I appreciate you helping me rescue the wolves, but if there is any chance of making Finn an ally, you should take it. Go."

"If anything, you are consistent, little one," Klaus said, with a smirk, and then he paused for a small moment, deliberating whether he should say anything more.

"Go, Klaus," I repeated.

"Elijah loves you, deeply, he cares only for your happiness," Klaus said, "he's not judging you for ripping apart Hayley's murderers. We are never in a position to judge. He's hoping that nothing takes away from the woman that he loves, including her own grief. But, he has nothing to worry about."

I finished pouring gasoline all over the laboratory, including the dead vampire's corpse, and tossed the last can absentmindedly. I'd had my eyes closed for that last bit. I couldn't bring myself to look down upon her. The middle-aged werewolf watched me all the while, I think it was oddly therapeutic for him.

"That should do it. Go outside and tell the others to keep their eyes peeled for trouble," I requested, "as soon as this place burns, I'll take you back to the Crescents."

The man frowned and told me, "I'm not from there. One was. He died last week. We're from the seven packs: Deep Water, Malraux, BasRoq, Barry, Poldark...I'm a Paxon."

"I think I recognise the other names, but I've never heard of your pack."

"We were small to begin with. Not many left. They wanted all seven strains of werewolf venom, you see," he explained. He pointed over towards the dead vampire and he recounted, "they kept...pumping it into her, over and over and over again. Then, they'd heal her with some drug. Except the last time. They shot her up with something so powerful...there was no saving her."

"Go," I asked of him, tersely, "I'm gonna burn this hellhole."

The man nodded sadly and left. I plucked up a random piece of paper, ignited it, and tossed it like a Frisbee at the feet of the dead vampire. I prayed that she would know peace, and followed the man out. The laboratory quickly burst into flames behind me.