BKBKBKBK
When Klaus was ten, his father woke him up before dawn, his heavy boots shuffling over the dirt floor, 'Klaus', he ordered under his breath, where his sleeping siblings couldn't hear, but Klaus heard him as clear as if he had yelled because he was always listening to him, always listening to hear if he would acknowledge him.
His father loomed over him as they walked through the silent village, his graven face peering at the cold sun rising, his blood-stained sword by his side," I pierced one last night but in the dark, it disappeared.
Klaus kept up with his father pace for pace, holding his spear that he practiced with daily along with his brothers. The boys had to learn the spear before the axe and after the axe was won, then came the sword. His father was a hard taskmaster, boxing the boy's ears if they didn't hold the instrument as he instructed them, 'It's the difference between life and death how you carry your spear" He would start, jerking Klaus's arm to a proper position, "The spear is useless without you, you are the weapon."
The father and son approached the edge of the village and saw the bodies littered outside a thatched roof home. They were pale and blue, mother, daughter and son. Klaus's gasp created a soft billow of air in the cold, "What happen to them Father?"
"Wolves are a menace to a community. You must kill them if they come to close to your family or they will think it belongs to them, do you understand, Niklaus?"
Klaus bent his head, hiding the hot wetness behind his eyelids, as he studied each person, their limbs stretched as if they were reaching for one another before death, the blood-soaked ground around each of them, and the absence of animal marks on their bodies.
His father pointed to the thicket bordering their village that he and his siblings were never allowed to pass in this foreign land with no name.
"We will separate and meet by the river, you kill on sight." Mikael said his sword high as he vanished behind the wall of brush and trees.
Klaus was scared but he tried desperately not to be, holding his spear high and near, ready to aim, ears perched for the slightest shift in the air or crumple of leaf. He had never killed anything more than a rabbit before and always with his brothers near, and the thought of being caught one on one with a wolf shook him.
Wolves were in their old country, and in their old tales, told to them before they learned to speak, tales of wolves mangling men who flaunted to be greater than Odin, or wolves who ate the small children who strayed from their mothers, these tales flew through him, raised his fear, and his scent as he inched his way through the forest.
The wolf saw Klaus before Klaus saw him.
Glowing yellow eyes glued to the young lad with the puffed-up chest, holding a wooden spear, tracking Klaus slowly behind the brush, hiding,
"NIKLAUS!"
Panicked at the sound of his name, for it was not Mikael who yelled out to him, and before he could spin around, Mikael's sword flew through the trees, inches from his face, and Klaus stumbled backwards, scared to see a slumped naked man on his knees, with his father's sword lodged in his stomach.
The man with the glowing eyes, fingers stirred, reaching for Klaus, and he tried to speak but when he opened his mouth, blood spilled out.
Mikael's boots separated Klaus from the man, and Klaus scurried from his father as he heard the sword fall across the bones of the man's neck.
"We have killed the wolf, boy."
BKBKBKBKBK
Marcel sends weres.
Marcel sends vampires.
Marcel sends witches.
But as Klaus tears the arms from a young pup, a newly turned were, he wonders when he will send Mikael.
Another werewolf dives into battle, beneath the thin streak of moonlight, in the backwater of the Louisiana woods of his sister's former home. Six of them crowd him, but he takes the bloody stump from the last one to beat the growling elder, his fangs bared and claws gory from their torn flesh, they fight under the hanging corpses of their brethren that Klaus had unceremoniously hung from the trees.
His dangerous bite finds its way to the wolf's neck, and Klaus releases him, ready to fight another, when out of the corner of his eye he believes he sees the dark-haired father, his tormentor, but the figure dissipates into the mist of the night air.
Mikael is dead. You killed him yourself. Remember?
He does not remember. Past and present blur, memories bathed in blood, the stress of war playing tricks on him, the loss of Bonnie and of love clouding his handle on reality. Not that he was sane before.
The dead paterfamilias haunts him in these woods.
Maybe he will finally end me this time.
It wouldn't take much to resurrect him. Just a willingness to dig up his bones and a gifted witch to do a bit of magic.
"Niklaus!" He hears the voice of his real father; the naked man Mikael had killed in those woods long ago, and although he had heard it only once out loud in his life, he could recall it across a millennium.
The remaining weres eyes begin to bulge, clutching at their throats, they convulse in unison, and for a split second, Klaus is curious, beholding the circle of wolves turn to men, and then to corpses and eventually to bones.
The night sighs and the wind blows their dust away.
Klaus regains himself and snorts, "Come out, come out, wherever you are." Klaus thinks it's another one of Marcel's witches, a clever trick to sacrifice a few of their own men to throw him off guard.
And he does.
Out from the darkness and into the moonlight, Mikael steps forward, "What have you done to yourself, boy?"
Klaus chest rises and falls, and for a moment feeling as he did when he was a helpless child in his presence, "Come to kill me, have you?"
"Marcel is on his way to collect you." He states, dressed as he was that day, long long ago, leather boots and bearskin hides, his sword unsheathed and high above his dark-haired head, "Like father, like son," He says, drawing near the hybrid, letting the sword fall to his side, "Do not put up a fight, you have lost."
Klaus eyes the man he once called father and waits for him to turn, for the hand holding the sword to slightly twitch, or the curl of his vicious lip, but it doesn't come and Klaus immediately steps forward and pushes Mikael out of the light of the moon. And as soon as the shadowy dark falls across Mikael, so does the disguise, and it is Bonnie who stumbles, steadying herself against a tree.
"Bonnie?"
He catches his own whisper as he realizes it is her, beautiful and glowing, her green eyes ablaze with life and passion. Months he has longed for her, wanted only her, as the days and nights dragged with agony and death.
In the beginning, he welcomed war in the name of a crown, but in the end, when the war finally came, he did it to blot out the pain of her.
The air changes and he hears the heavy footfall coming from the north.
He flashes before her, pulling her wrist to follow, to where he doesn't know, but he will not lose her again.
But she recoils, taking back her wrist, and when he picks up her defiant hand again to yank behind him further into the woods, she punches her hand through his skin, and through his chest cavity, and he wretches, his eyes bleary as he calls out her name in disbelief, and she clenches her fingers around the organ that is his heart and says between clenched teeth, "I do not belong to you."
Author's Note
Hola! I hope you all have been well and have been thriving. I have started writing fiction for Radish, so be sure to check me out there in the future. In the meantime, I am really trying to finish up this story by the summer. Fingers crossed. Thanks for reading!