*It goes without saying that The Originals – the story and all related characters – belong to the writers, cast and crew of the show. I claim no ownership or association to the TV series titled The Originals. This was written by a fan solely for the enjoyment of other fans.*
Prologue
The Black Cube
"When you come to a crossroads, by definition, you
had to pick a course, because going straight on the
path you were on was no longer an option.
– Jim Heron
Covet, by J.R. Ward
"Do you know the deepest desire of your heart?"
A boy asked me this, over cappuccino and almond cream éclairs at a chic cafe in the city.
I was sixteen and thinking back on that evening I found it telling how close he'd come to getting me into bed on the strength of a good line and my own inexperience. How terribly impressed I'd been by him. I thought it was love.
Two years later and I couldn't even tell you his name.
But I remembered the question.
Did I know – did I? . . . no.
I couldn't have known, then, the significance of that evening or that things – invisible, intangible, but still very real things had already been set in motion.
There were too many coincidences to allow for chance and in those periods of calm almost lost to me a new question would surface. Why?
Why me?
Why . . . him?
XxXxXx
White votive candles floated in crystal glass bowls.
Each flame a perfect little spade. Orange, fading to yellow and brilliant blue at the wick where they were hottest. I slid my fingers along the razor-edge lip of the bowl, temptingly close to upending the small centerpiece.
How my parents managed to score an invitation to the political fundraising dinner masquerading as a Christmas party was anyone's guess, but I'd bet I was the only guest wondering how close I could get to the fire before it burned me.
I'd done my part.
I danced with the mayor's son. Made conversation with the people at our table. Ate the catered turkey dinner . . .
. . . and did not embarrass my parents.
My parents, shameless social climbers, were not above using their only daughter to buy their way into those esteemed circles, of wealth and influence, and I was only nine years old the first time they brought me to a party.
Still too young to realize that I'd been blessed with my father's golden crown, my mother's sparkling turquoise eyes; I looked so much like an angel that it couldn't have been any more perfect if they'd designed me.
Their precious blue-eyed blonde.
I remembered that evening and how I had felt so grown up, so beautiful, in my brand new dress sparkling under the crystal lights of a hotel ballroom. Like a princess in a fairytale. To me it was magical and more than a little naughty, being allowed to stay up so far past my bedtime.
That party had been my first.
This was my last. I stood up from the table as if yanked by my shoulders, the sharp flavors of heavily seasoned turkey and stuffing souring on my tongue. My last. The thought eliciting a clutch of panic that surprised even me.
I smoothed damp palms over the skirts of my festive dress.
Crushed velvet in cranberry red – my mother approved of the dress for this evening. Curls of hair swept my neck, stiff with spray but glistening in the soft lamplight. No need to catch my own reflection to know that I was a vision.
Men stared when I stood up. Women stared. Upstairs, the deep, ponderous gong of a grandfather clock chimed. Once. I pretended not to notice the eyes following after me as I left the dining room.
The Governor General's house was grand. Not a mansion but a far cry from our two-story with a yard in the 'burbs. Fresh green pine boughs were hung like mistletoe in doorways, their spiciness mixing with the perfume of cinnamon-scented candles.
Warm light spilled from a spacious sitting room. With sweat stinging my eyes, I came to rest against the doorframe.
It was beautiful. A crackling fire in a wide hearth, the ambience enhanced by the sparkle of a blue-green spruce decorated for the season. The wink of colorful lights on shiny wrapping paper . . . Those were empty wrapped boxes, I knew. Not presents.
And of course that's where I wound find my mom; standing with our host and his wife, her polite laugh tinkling over the melody of holiday classics crooning through discrete speakers.
She held a champagne glass in one delicate hand, the small diamond of her wedding ring catching the firelight. Her sparkling dress, like mine, festive. Though hers was a clean winter white.
Frustration smoldered as I watched her there.
She was beautiful. Intelligent. Her smile as decorative as those gifts under the tree, she didn't look ready to leave . . . ever.
I slid off the doorframe, leaving smudges on the dark lacquered wood.
The intimately lit hall seemed to sway a little. I didn't rush. As late as it was, the party had died down to a few dozen people milling about. In the dining room, in the foyer, at the front door where I retrieved my coat –
Nobody stopped me.
Why would they? I wasn't a prisoner.
The instant bite of freezing air on sweaty skin was a balm to my frazzled nerves, and I sucked in the first clean breath I'd taken all night. The sheer, dizzying relief I felt to be away – just, away – reinforcing the idea that that I was doing the right thing.
My life had become a carousel of images; dinners, fundraisers, ladies lunches . . . each memory melting into the next, blurring into a collage of sameness.
Fat, heavy flakes kicked into flurried swept the yard, shooting like glittering meteors through the glow of decorative lanterns. And maybe it was that I knew how late it was, or the bobbing of wind-tossed lights, but for just a second I was struck by the most incredible sense of surrealism.
The night was alive.
I felt . . . alive. Out here. In velvet shoes on an ice-slicked brick step, my jacket flapping open in a wind strong enough to strip it off me if I wasn't careful. The wind smelled like air, not cinnamon potpourri and I pressed a hand to my stomach, forcing back the sting of sick crawling into my throat.
Not fear. Anxiety. Mild, but poignant. Things were changing. Too fast, maybe, and it would have been so much easier for me to leave it alone –
– ah. There it was.
The wheels I'd set in motion. There was no going back; too late, now, to change my mind. I was leaving. My parents had no idea.
I would have to tell them.
Not tonight, but soon.
There were snowflakes on my eyelashes.
Something changed.
The hairs on the back of my neck lifted and I scanned the yard, what I could see of it most curtained by a whipping snowfall – so thick I could hardly make out the glow of windows from the house across the street.
. . . there was a car coming.
Headlights cut through the storm.
I eased back into the heavy door, one bare hand closing around the frozen handle.
My breath caught – not a car; a limousine. Presidential black, cruising past on near-silent tires. I watched it, braced for that tell-tale flare of red break lights.
Nothing.
Nothing . . .
It was gone. I sucked in a freezing breath, searing my sinuses and wishing I could feel the burn in my chest. Skin static with nerves. Eerily quiet. Despite the wind, I could hear the snow settling on my jacket. I let go of the door and stepped carefully down one step. My breaths coming in plumes.
Head ringing with the crunch of boots on ice-slicked brick –
There was someone out there.
He appeared like a ghost from the storm; the icy dark wind whipping his hair dramatically around his face. And even from a distance, it was a handsome face. Sculpted high cheekbones, the straight lone of a jaw only lightly dusted with stubble a shade darker than our mother's chestnut locks.
"Ethan," I breathed.
This, this right here, would go down as the most surreal moment of my life – my brother gliding from the snow as if he were dragging the blizzard with him, to the faint thrum of Feliz Navidad through the heavy door at my back.
Ethan Warren moved into the light, coming to stand at the foot of the wide brick steps decorated with holly and tinsel. He was gaunter than I remembered; the leanness of hard muscle under a heavy gray coat that flapped around his legs.
It was him.
There was no mistake.
He was standing in the damn lamplight, I wasn't imagining this. "H-how are you here?"
"That depends. How long have I been back in town? Or here," Ethan's gaze tipped up, scanning the red-brick face of the house with its multitude of warm-lit windows webbed with frost and holiday greenery. His lip quirked, "at the Governor General's house?"
Right. Because it's not like we would have left him a note stuck to the fridge, letting him know where we'd be tonight.
I didn't move from y position on the step, and my brother didn't venture any closer. I could feel the heat the heat coming off his jacket. My jaw ached with tension – and the cold. But primarily tension. Two years. I hadn't seen him in two . . . years . . .
He was here.
"Why," I said. "Why did you come back?"
Ethan had such a careful smile. Since we were kids, subdued. "I made you a promise, 'manda."
Out of everything he might have said – hurt struck like a match, and then anger so profound it staggered me.
"You made me a what?" – mildly. "A promise means nothing, when you lose faith in the one who made it, Ethan." And with a touch more conviction, "I gave up on you, Ethan."
I meant to hurt him.
That wasn't a mistake. His response was a little harder to pin down. No apology. No fumbled attempt to explain himself, to justify . . .
"Do you know, what mom and dad did when you left?" I gripped the iron banister with one hand, fingers flexing. "They told everyone how proud they were. Of you," and I was furiously happy at the flicker of suspicion in my brother's eyes. "How proud they were that their eldest had gone off to university . . . in France!"
Ethan's carful smile ticked higher.
"Did they really?"
"A socially acceptable explanation for what happened to you. You were in Europe. Yes, of course they did."
And I was left to weather the fallout of our parents' lie. They were worried what would happen if he ever came back; it became my job to do justice to my brother's imaginary success.
He wasn't in France.
He hadn't gone off to school.
The embarrassment of having to confess to all their important friends that their son had had himself legally emancipated and then proceeded to fall off the face of the Earth . . .
My anger was just loud emotion; I was hurt.
"You're right. I waited too long."
The admission did nothing to take the edge off. "You left me."
"I was seventeen," Ethan countered. "God, 'manda, what did you think I'd fight our parents for custody?"
From inside the house, right on the other side of the heavy wooden door with its pretty green wreath, I could just make out the low crooning of Silent Night; when had Feliz Navidad ended? I shoved cold-numbed fingers through my hair, dislodging the ice that'd caked on.
"So what do you want?"
A quiet challenge, delivered in the sparkly shine of Christmas lights.
"I told you. I made you a promise." That he would come back for me. Yes, I remembered it too. And it surprised me to catch a shadow in his eyes on the tail-end of that sentence.
Our father's eyes.
Brown, where mine were blue.
"Would you believe, I did miss you?"
"Ethan . . ."
The music changed again. A whisper of nostalgia diffused through the door, like listening to the music from my bed. Distance softening the notes.
I'll be home for Christmas . . .
. . . you can count on me.
The large decorated tree was framed in the window to the left of the foyer, the color from its twinkling lights spilling out onto t he snow in the yard. Caught by the falling flakes, glittering red and green and silver bright.
Our mom was in that room.
Had she noticed, yet, that I left the house? No. I was trusted . . .
"I have something for you," Ethan's voice, darkly resonate in the blizzard, broke through the needling pangs of fresh guilt. My family trusted me . . .
"I don't want anything," I said, quietly.
"For your birthday," he assured me, "not for . . . whatever the hell this is. Reunion."
My birthday was on the twenty seventh. Always in such a rush, my dad liked to say. When I was small. Less so, now. It surprised me to realize I actually missed his good-natured teasing. My parents had been trying for a New Years baby.
"You're early," I said, harsher than I intended. Amended it, "You really didn't have to get me anything, Ethan."
Only then did I notice what he was holding down by his hip, partially hidden in the folds of his coat.
I stepped down another step, bringing myself daringly close. Drawn by the strangeness of the thing in his hand. "What is that?"
He held it up.
A dense black block, about the size of a square tissue box. Undecorated, not particularly pretty but the block – a perfect cube – was undeniably striking. It looked expensive. Without waiting for him to hand it to me, I took the Cube from my brother's hands.
"What is it" I asked again.
It was heavy, is what it was. The sides smooth as glass. I ran my hands over it, feeling the sharp edges where one face turned into another. The thing was much, much heavier than its size accounted for. I could feel the weight of it tugging at my wrists.
"I . . . found it," Ethan stepped up next to me, and I let him. Welcoming the warmth from his body, "One of those things I picked, and just couldn't put down."
No. No, I believed him.
Still had to ask, "Tell me you didn't steal this."
He laughed. "No. I found it."
"On a shelf?" I pressed. "In a store? Ethan . . ."
"I found it," he drew out with mild, if deliberate, emphasis, "on the ground." More entertained by the accusation, then offended.
Holding the Cube lightly between both hands, my palms pressed to the flat face on either side, I stared into the depthless surface and thought, for just a second, that the impossibly dark cube might actually be transparent.
Like if I wasn't careful, I would tip forward and fall into it. Weird. Very weird, there was the strangest sense of distance under glass. I looked away, blinking, reestablishing my equilibrium. Ethan wasn't looking at me.
He stared out into the blizzard, quietly scanning the yard.
What happened next was . . . sudden. As if hurtling from the very centre, impossibly far away, like the birth of the universe, an eruption of lights. Trillions, upon trillions of stars spilling out from that centre. I could feel their light on my face; see their glow on my fingers.
Something was happening . . .
. . . well, no shit.
They surfaced as if from impossible depth. Lines in the glass-like surface of the Cube. Their color at first indistinct – blue, green, white. I watched, absolutely enthralled, not scared at all, as those lines coalesced into recognizable numbers.
0-0-15
Again, I glanced at my brother.
The shine from those glowing numbers lighting in his eyes.
0-0-13
"What is this?"
He should his head.
0-0-7
By every right, I should have let go of that cube. Dropped it in the snow, pit it down or . . . or . . . I might never know why I did it. Why apprehension had me tightening my grip, locking my fingers in place.
Maybe the universe has a way of making this happen.
Fate.
Destiny.
0-0-2
"Ethan?"
0-0-1