I'll Be Your Last

How to Save a Life

By noon each of us that were staying in the mansion had showered and gotten dressed while the others kept looking for a solution to the problem. Marcel, maybe in an effort to make amends, called Thierry who showed up not long after that with lunch for fifty people. Clarice took a break to take food up to Davina and her girls while the rest of us ate, scattered around the library, frantically searching for the spell Clarice needed to save the younger witch.

“How are things coming along?” Marcel asked his lieutenant, his face grave.

“We’ve gotten word out to most of our people,” Thierry explained.

The conversation drew Elijah’s interest. Marcel sensed the ancient one’s gaze and turned to face him. “Tyler and his growing hybrid army are picking off my people,” Marcel explained. “He used us to set up camp here and to get going.”

“And yet you helped him,” Elijah pointed out.

“Yeah, I did,” Marcel admitted. “Klaus came down here ready to take back the city from me. You and I both know that whatever Klaus wants, he takes by whatever means necessary. I didn’t want any of my people to get hurt. It wasn’t hard for Tyler to convince me that he wanted to help us and with his hybrids, we’d have real muscle. We didn’t have to bow to Klaus. No one had to get hurt and I could keep the city. That’s what he sold me. Then he told us that another original was in town.”

Kol’s head shot up at that.

“And that you guys had a set of strong witches from your own bloodline,” Marcel went on.

“Haley shared that information with you?” Elijah asked calmly. I sensed that he wasn’t quite that calm beneath the surface.

“Never saw Haley that much,” Marcel told him. “Just in passing a couple of times. I never spoke to her.”

Elijah didn’t say anything, appeared to be waiting to see if Marcel would say anything else. He had to know he and his people were in danger. He seemed willing to put his cards on the table.

“More quickly than you can fathom, Tyler had himself a sizable army of hybrids and most of them? They seemed to want to do anything but help us. We quickly learned that they were werewolves first who hated our kind and with good reason. Vampires ran them out of town long ago and they haven’t amounted to much, until now,” Marcel went on. “At first, I didn’t know how Tyler was creating … changing them. I didn’t know he was using Haley and ah…”

His gaze flashed to me and dropped.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I know about the baby, who the father is.”

Marcel met my gaze, nodded.

“It didn’t take long before Tyler got in with the witches who want to get back at me for not allowing magic in the Quarter and using Davina against them, keeping her from them to complete their harvest. It became clear that we weren’t needed anymore and the hybrids have started picking off our people, one by one.”

Elijah still stared at him intently, still waiting. Kol was listening with great interest as I was.

“When I confronted Tyler about my people, he pretty much told me to stay out of his way. See, it wasn’t until then I realized what his actual plan was. It was never his intention to help us thwart Klaus. He wants to destroy Klaus. And he doesn’t want to just kill him. He wants to make a big show of it, like he’s going to take his hybrids and start a new world order. He plans to start by getting rid of Klaus and the original family.”

Kol and Elijah exchanged a glance while my chest tightened. Attempts to kill Klaus? Nothing new. I’d even been in on a few of those plans in the past. But the thought now that anyone would try to kill him? Take him out of my life? No. Pushing the fear down as far as I could, I forced myself to focus on what Marcel was telling us.