**STILES**
The suite at the top of the hotel on Royal Street had belonged to a hedge fund manager from Connecticut until about four o'clock that morning. The man had checked out early and was now on a flight home, convinced he'd had a wonderful weekend and would never think about this room again. The staff believed Stiles had been a guest for a week. The minibar had been restocked twice.
Stiles woke at noon with the sheets stiff and brown beneath him where he hadn't bothered to shower. He lay there and looked at the ceiling. It had a crack in the plaster that ran from the light fixture to the corner. He followed it with his eyes, then followed it back.
He wasn't tired. He never really was anymore. Sleep was just something his body did out of habit, the way it still blinked and still breathed.
He got up, showered until the water ran clear, and put on clothes from the hedge fund guy's closet. They were too short in the arms. He didn't care.
Room service knocked at twelve-thirty. The waiter was young, maybe nineteen, with a nose ring and an accent that turned every vowel into three. He wheeled the cart in, lifted the silver cover off a plate of eggs, and turned to say something about the coffee.
Stiles caught his eyes.
"Stand still. Don't make a sound."
He fed from the kid's neck, standing up, one hand braced on the cart. The eggs went cold. The coffee stopped steaming. The kid's heartbeat went from fast to slow to very slow, and somewhere around the point where it started to stutter, Stiles lifted his head.
It wasn't mercy. He'd just had enough. He wiped his mouth on a cloth napkin.
"You tripped in the hallway and hit your head. You're going to feel dizzy, so go downstairs and sit down. Drink some orange juice."
The kid nodded, pale and swaying, and let himself out. Stiles ate the cold eggs standing at the window. They were fine.
Below him, the street was busy with tourists, street performers, and a man in a gold-painted suit standing motionless on a milk crate. Across the street, in the shade of a gallery balcony, stood a woman in sunglasses who had been there since he woke up. A block down, there was a man pretending to read a menu at a café. Both of their hearts beat far too slowly.
Klaus's people. Watching.
Stiles finished the eggs and thought about going down there. He could rip the woman's arms off in front of the café crowd, just to see what Klaus would do about it. The thought came and went. They weren't doing anything. They weren't even interesting enough to kill.
He went out anyway, because the room was boring.
New Orleans in daylight was a different animal. It was hot enough that the air stuck to his skin, and loud. It smelled like horse manure, beignets, and old stone baking in the sun. He wandered. He bought a coffee he didn't drink and left it on a bench. He stood in the back of a jazz club for half an hour listening to a trumpet player who was really, genuinely good, and felt nothing about it one way or the other. When he left, the watchers followed him at a distance. The woman in sunglasses was replaced around two o'clock by a heavyset man in a Saints jersey.
In an alley off Decatur, a man with a knife stepped out in front of him and asked for his wallet.
Stiles looked at the knife, then at the man.
"Seriously?"
The man was dead before he finished deciding whether to be scared. Stiles left him behind a row of trash cans and walked back out onto Decatur, his hand still wet. The guy in the Saints jersey was standing across the street, staring at him, sweat soaking through his collar.
Stiles raised the wet hand and waved.
The guy took out his phone.
---
**ELIJAH**
The Sheriff of Beacon County answered on the fourth ring.
"Stilinski."
His voice was rough, as though he hadn't slept well in a very long time. Elijah stood in the study with the door closed. The afternoon light slanted through the shutters in bars across the desk, and he took a moment before speaking. He'd made a great many difficult calls over the centuries, and he'd found it paid to choose the first words carefully.
"Sheriff. My name is Elijah Mikaelson. I'm calling from New Orleans. I believe we have a mutual acquaintance."
A silence. Elijah listened to it and learned more from it than he would have from most sentences.
"Is he hurting people?" the sheriff said at last.
He didn't ask who. He didn't ask whether Elijah had the wrong number or what kind of acquaintance. He went straight to the only question that mattered to him.
"Yes," Elijah said. "Nine that we know of, since last night."
He heard the man breathe out. It was a long, slow sound, the sound of someone setting down something heavy he'd been carrying for too long, only to find it hadn't gotten any lighter.
"I can't help you."
"I don't believe you've heard what I'm asking yet."
"You're asking how to stop him." There was a creak, a chair, perhaps, or a man leaning back against a wall. "I don't know. None of us knew. Scott tried. Derek tried. They had people, you understand? People who knew about this stuff. Nobody could touch him. And he never—" The sheriff stopped. "He never laid a hand on us. Not once. He just looked at us. Right through us, like he was trying to remember why we were there."
"Was that before or after you kept a weapon on the kitchen table?"
It was a cruel question. Elijah asked it because he needed to know how much of what the boy had said was true.
The silence this time was worse.
"He told you that," the sheriff said.
"He did."
"And did he tell you how he felt about it?"
"He told us he didn't feel anything at all."
"Yeah." The sheriff laughed, and there was no humor in it. "Yeah. That's what I was afraid of. That's why the gun was on the table, Mr. Mikaelson. Not because of what he'd done. Because of what was missing." A pause. "I raised that kid. He talked from the minute he woke up until he went to sleep. He cared about everything. Too much. It used to wear me out." Another pause. "Then one day it stopped. He left in the middle of the night. He didn't say goodbye. I found his room exactly the way he'd left it, except the Jeep was gone."
Elijah closed his eyes.
"Sheriff," he said carefully. "My brother will want to know whether there's anything—anyone—your son might respond to. Whether threatening those he left behind would—"
"You want to threaten me? Go ahead. Come on out. I'll leave the porch light on." The sheriff's voice had gone flat and hard, the voice of a lawman. "It won't do anything. You've met him. You know that."
Elijah did know it. He had known it last night, lying on the floor under the boy's heel, watching Niklaus search that face for something to grasp and find nothing there.
"Thank you for your time, Sheriff."
"Mr. Mikaelson." The man hesitated. "If you do find a way... tell me. Either way. I'd rather know."
He hung up before Elijah could answer.
Elijah set the phone down on the desk and stood for a while in the striped light. Then he went downstairs.
The family had gathered in the courtyard, where the damage was worst. There were workmen in the upper gallery, compelled and diligent, shoring up the wall that Hayley had gone through. Freya sat at her table under the arches with three grimoires open and a bowl of something dark and bitter-smelling in front of her. She looked better than she had last night, though not much. Hayley stood beside her with her arms folded.
Niklaus was pacing. Of course he was.
"Well?" he said as soon as Elijah appeared.
"The father has nothing for us."
"Everyone has something."
"He told me the boy never harmed his family. Not once. And he said the only thing that frightened him was that his son stopped caring about anything at all." Elijah sat on the edge of the fountain. "He also invited you to come and threaten him in person. He said he'd leave the porch light on."
Hayley made a small sound, not quite a laugh.
"Brave man," Klaus said. "Perhaps I'll take him up on it."
"And accomplish what?" Elijah asked. "You heard the boy. He'd let you do it. He *offered* to let you do it. The sheriff knows as much. Killing a man who loved his son won't stop the son from killing us."
"Then what do you suggest, brother? We let him have the Quarter? Let him drain half the witches in the city for sport?" Klaus spun toward the table. "Freya. Tell me you have something."
Freya didn't look up from her books. "I might have a way to stop him from pulling magic from a distance. A ward, bound to the person, not a place. If it works, he'd have to touch someone to siphon from them, the way the Gemini did." She rubbed her eyes. "I don't know if it'll work on him. I've never seen anything take magic the way he does. I don't even know what he is."
"How long?"
"Days. Maybe a week. I'll need blood from everyone who wants to wear it."
"Hope first," Hayley said immediately.
Klaus nodded. It was, Elijah reflected, the only thing all three of them had agreed on without argument since the boy had walked through the wall.
"Where is she?" Elijah asked.
"Upstairs," Hayley said. "In her room. She hasn't come out since breakfast."
"She saw what he did," Freya said quietly. "To all of us."
"She saw more than that." Klaus had stopped pacing. He stared up at the gallery, at the boarded-up doors of the studio. "He looked at her, Elijah. You saw it."
Elijah had. "Yes."
"He didn't look at the rest of us like that. He looked at us the way you'd look at a locked door, something in the way. But her—"
"He can feel her magic," Freya said. "She's the strongest thing in this city, Niklaus. Stronger than me, and she barely knows how to use half of it. If he's what I think he is, she's—"
She didn't finish.
"Say it," Hayley said.
"A meal." Freya looked at her. "To something like him, she's the best meal he's ever seen."
The courtyard went silent except for the scrape of the workmen's trowels.
"She doesn't leave this house," Klaus said. "Not until the ward is finished. Not without one of us."
"She's nineteen, Klaus," Hayley said. "She's not going to like it."
"I don't care if she likes it."
"I didn't say I disagreed." Hayley looked up at the gallery. "I said she's not going to like it."
---
**HOPE**
She lasted until eleven.
She'd been told at dinner, and she'd been expecting it. Her father had laid it out in that clipped voice he used when he'd already decided an argument was over before it started. No leaving the compound without an escort. No going into the Quarter. No magic that might be felt from outside the wards, because they didn't know what he could feel or from how far. Her mother had sat beside her and held her hand the whole time. Hope had understood that the hand-holding was a kindness and also a way of keeping her in her seat.
She'd said yes. She'd meant it at the time.
But her studio was boarded shut. Her room was too small. The magic under her skin had been restless since last night, like something had stirred it and it couldn't settle back down. She'd tried to meditate and couldn't. She'd tried to read, and she read the same paragraph nine times. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt it again: that pull, that sliding sensation of her own power leaning toward him like water toward a drain.
She needed to use it. To push it out and remind it that it belonged to her.
Lafayette Cemetery was twenty minutes away on foot, less if she ran. It was where the witches of the city had done their work for two hundred years. The ground there was soaked with old magic, and it would soak up hers, too, and muffle it. That was the whole point of it. No one would feel her there. Not her family. Not him.
She told herself that at least three times on the way.
She went out through the window, down the drainpipe, and over the back wall where it met the alley, the way she'd been doing since she was fifteen and thought no one knew. Her mother knew. Her mother had always known. But her mother was asleep, or at least in her room, and Hope didn't let herself think about it past that.
The cemetery gates were locked. She opened them with a word.
Inside, the air was cooler and very still. The tombs rose in white rows, stained gray by the damp, some with iron fences, some crumbling, some bright with fresh flowers. Moonlight lay on everything like frost. Hope walked until she found the open square near the center, where the ground had been worn flat by generations of feet, and sat down cross-legged in the middle of it.
She breathed in and let it go.
The magic came up out of her like a held breath being released. She didn't shape it into a spell. She just let it move: out through her hands, along the ground, up into the air, across the old stones. It was warm and familiar, hers, and for the first time since last night her chest loosened. The candles she'd brought lit themselves in a circle around her. Then the flowers on the nearest tomb stirred, lifting their heads as if the sun had come up.
She smiled a little, with her eyes closed.
"There you are."
Her eyes snapped open.
He was sitting on the roof of a tomb ten yards away, one knee up and his arms folded across it, watching her. He was wearing a shirt that didn't fit him. Button-down, expensive, the sleeves too short. There wasn't any blood on him tonight, which somehow made him look stranger.
The magic went still inside her.
"You were quiet all day," Stiles said. "That house must be warded to hell. I could feel the wards, but not you. Then about an hour ago you lit up like a flare. From across the city." He tilted his head. "The whole cemetery's supposed to muffle it, right? Doesn't really work. It's like a radio in a closet. You can still hear the music."
Hope made herself breathe. The candles were still burning. She didn't let them go out.
"How long have you been there?"
"Since you got here. I followed you from your house." He said it like it was nothing. "Your window. The drainpipe. You're pretty good at that. You've done it a lot."
"Are you going to kill me?"
She hadn't meant to ask it so plainly. It was out before she could stop it.
He considered the question. He actually did. She watched him turn it over like he was checking the price on something.
"I don't know," he said. "Probably not tonight."
"That's not very reassuring."
"I'm not trying to reassure you." He dropped off the tomb and landed on the path, and she was on her feet before she'd decided to stand. The candle flames leaned toward her. "I'm going to take some of that, though. What you've got. I've been thinking about it since last night."
"No, you're not."
"Okay." He started walking toward her. "Stop me."
---
**STILES**
She was fast, and she didn't hesitate. He noted both things.
The first spell hit him in the chest before he'd taken three steps, and it wasn't anything subtle. It was just force, raw and hot, hard enough to lift him off his feet and throw him backward through the iron fence around a tomb. The bars bent around him. His ribs cracked, and something inside him tore and knitted back together in the time it took him to hit the ground.
He sat up in the wreckage of the fence and looked at her.
She stood in the middle of her candle circle with her hands raised, her hair lifting in a wind that wasn't there. Her eyes had gone gold, the wolf in her rising to the surface. The magic pouring off her was so thick he could taste it in the back of his throat, like ozone before lightning.
"Huh," he said.
She hit him again.
This time he didn't let it throw him. He opened himself and pulled, and the spell came apart halfway across the distance between them. It unraveled into light and heat and poured into his hands, up his arms, and into his chest.
It was *good*.
It wasn't like Freya's, which had been old and deep and cool, like well water. Hope's magic was wild. It was alive. It tasted like the wolf in her and the vampire in her and the witch, all of it at once, twisting together into something that shouldn't exist and did. It went through him like the first breath after a long time underwater.
For about three seconds, he wasn't bored.
He noticed that. He filed it away in the same flat place where he kept everything else. It was information, like the watcher's slow heartbeat or the price of the room on Royal Street.
Hope staggered. She'd felt him take it. He could see it in her face: shock, and then anger, and under that, something else. She'd felt it slide out of her and into him, the same way she'd felt it last night.
"Stop," she said.
"No."
He crossed the distance between them before she could throw anything else. She tried anyway, a spell half-formed, and he took that one too, breathing it in as he walked. Then he caught her wrist.
Skin on skin, and suddenly it wasn't a trickle anymore.
It was a flood. Her magic came pouring up his arm like water through a broken dam, bright and wild and roaring, and it filled every hollow space in him. For a moment the world disappeared. There was no cemetery, no city, no hunger, just this: heat and light and something rushing through the place where he'd been empty for so long he'd stopped noticing it was empty.
Hope cried out. Her knees buckled. He caught her with his other arm without thinking, pulling her against his chest so she didn't fall, and kept drinking.
Her heartbeat stuttered, and her magic started to thin.
He could feel the bottom of it now. It was deep, deeper than anything he'd ever touched, but it wasn't endless. If he kept going, he'd hit the end. She'd be empty, and so would he, again, just like before, looking for the next thing and not finding it.
He let go.
It wasn't a decision, exactly. It was the same thing that had happened with the waiter that morning. He'd had enough. Except that wasn't quite right, because he hadn't had enough. He could've kept going. Part of him was still leaning toward her like a starving thing.
He let go anyway, and he didn't look too hard at why.
Hope sagged against him. Her face was gray, and her breathing was ragged. The candles around them had all gone out. He held her up, one arm around her waist, while she got her feet back under her.
When she could stand, she shoved him away with both hands. It didn't move him, but he stepped back anyway.
"Don't," she said. Her voice shook. "Don't *touch* me."
"Okay."
She stared at him. Her magic was still there, thinner, flickering like a candle in a draft, but already starting to rebuild itself. He could feel it filling back in, slowly, from somewhere deep. That was interesting. Freya's hadn't done that.
"Why did you stop?" she said.
He thought about lying. There wasn't any reason to.
"If I finished you tonight, I'd be done," he said. "Then I'd have to find something else. There isn't anything else here that tastes like you." He shrugged. "So I stopped."
He watched that land. He watched her understand, all at once, what it meant. That he hadn't spared her. He'd saved her for later, the way you'd save the last bite of something good.
She didn't look away from him. He liked that, in the flat way he liked anything, as a fact.
"My family's going to come after you for this," she said.
"They're going to come after me anyway."
"My father's going to find a way to kill you."
"He's welcome to try." He looked at her. "You're going to want to go home, by the way. Your mom just figured out you're gone. I can hear someone running this way from the Quarter. Wolf. Fast."
Hope's head snapped toward the gates.
When she looked back, he was already on the roof of the tomb again, crouched on the edge.
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
"*Go to hell.*"
"Maybe." He stood. "Your magic comes back, you know. Freya's didn't. Yours does."
He dropped off the far side of the tomb and was gone before Hayley Marshall came over the cemetery wall on four legs.
---
**HOPE**
Her mother shifted back before her paws hit the ground, rising naked from the fur and grabbing Hope by both shoulders so hard it hurt.
"Are you hurt? Hope. *Hope*. Look at me. Did he touch you?"
"I'm okay."
"That isn't what I asked."
Hope looked at her mother's face, streaked with sweat and fury and the kind of terror Hope had only seen on it a few times in her life. She thought about lying.
"He took some of my magic," she said. "Not all of it. He stopped."
Her mother's grip tightened. For a long moment, Hayley didn't say anything. Hope could see her working through it: the fear, the rage, the relief, all fighting for the same space. At last she let out a breath and pulled Hope into her arms. She held on so tightly Hope could feel her heart pounding.
"Your father is going to lose his mind," Hayley said into her hair.
"I know."
"*I'm* going to lose my mind."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"You went out the window."
"You knew about the window."
"Of course I knew about the window." Her mother pulled back and looked at her. The wolf was still in her eyes, gold at the edges. "I thought it was safe. I thought that at least if you were going out the window, it meant you were still a kid doing kid things, sneaking out to see your friends. I didn't think—" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "Come on. Let's go home."
They walked back through the cemetery. Hayley took the sweater Hope handed her and pulled it on, and Hope saw her notice the bent iron fence, the dead candles, the scorch marks in the grass. Neither of them said anything about it.
At the gates, Hope looked back once.
The tomb roof was empty. The cemetery was silent. Her magic was coming back slowly, flickering and uncertain, like a pilot light relighting itself. She could still feel where it had been pulled. It was like a bruise, a tenderness right under her ribs.
She'd felt him too, in those few seconds, while he'd held her wrist and drunk from her. She hadn't expected that. The magic had gone out of her and into him, and for just a moment, she'd felt what was on the other side.
It hadn't been hatred or cruelty or any of the things she'd expected.
It had been nothing. Vast and cold and empty, like the bottom of the ocean. A space so enormous her magic had gone into it and disappeared, and it had barely made a sound.
And then, just before he let go, there'd been something. A flicker, too small and too quick for her to name. Like a match struck in a very large, very dark room.
Hope didn't know what it meant. She wasn't sure it meant anything.
She knew one thing, walking home through the hot, silent streets beside her furious, frightened mother. He'd told her the truth about everything. He hadn't dressed it up or pretended. He didn't care whether she lived or died, whether her family hated him, or whether his own father was alive or dead.
He'd stopped because he wanted more.
And tomorrow night, whether she went to the cemetery or not, he'd come looking for it.