The Originals - Revenant

Chapter 17

»»—2014, New Orleans, USA—««

"What the fuck was that?" I asked bewildered.

Some tourists looked at us as we walked passed and Björn looked at them slightly embarrassed.

"Calm down," he said.

"Don't tell me to calm down," I snapped at him, "He has him in his fucking basement!"

"We have to be smart about this," he said, "Like it or not, we are in his city. We are guests, he won't hurt us. Just as long as we don't defy him."

"How can you be so calm about this?" I asked.

"One of us has to be, and you've already taken the role that allows for freaking out," he joked.

I sighed. The head and the heart. Björn always said one of us had to be logical if the other decided to get lost in their emotions. Only one could be the heart, the other had to be the head.

"What are we going to do?" I asked him.

"We're going to find the rest of them," he said, "And we'll find a way to help them. Then we'll come back for Klaus."

I frowned. Freya had been poisoned. Rebekah was under a curse. Kol was dying from the hybrid venom. And so was Elijah. And Nik was trapped in the compound.

"How did they get out?" I wondered.

"I have no idea," he said looking around the busy street, searching for something, "But if no other sire-lines have been wiped out then we know that, at least, Rebekah and Elijah are alive. Maybe Freya found a way to get them all out. If her powers were anything like Dahlia's, she would be powerful enough."

A spark of hope was inlighted in me. He was right. If either Elijah or Rebekah had died someone would have felt it. And if Marcel didn't know where they were, they must have got out. Freya must have gotten them out. And if she was powerful enough to do that, with our help she could fix everything.

I knew what the Insanity Curse was, I had seen it in action. On the '30s, I was travelling around Africa, as Björn wanted to visit tribes and learn ancestral magic, so I tagged along. A man had been cursed by a shaman after daring to defy his teachings, the cursed consumed its victim's sanity till he was but a shell of what he used to be. He became aggressive and volatile. When he ended up murdering his wife, I tried to compel the shaman so he would stop the curse, but witches can't be compelled, so I ended up killing him to stop the spell he had put on the man. I was too late, the man had killed himself.

I had also seen what werewolf venom did to vampires, it wasn't a pretty sight. First is the fever, the hallucinations, the hunger. Vampires could become so desperate that they would kill themselves to stop the pain. Even if they didn't, the venom would take care of them in three days, tops.

One thing was clear to me, they must have got some help. There was no way a witch could carry three dying vampires —oh, the irony— away from the grasp of Marcel Gerald.

"They were here for two years, someone must have known them," I said.

Björn nodded, agreeing with me.

"If Kol was here, he would have befriended some witches," I reasoned.

He nodded towards a little shop where a middle-aged woman sold herbs and magic remedies. "Let's try the witches then," he said.

We headed towards the shop. For the oblivious tourists, it might be a harmless Wiccan shop in the middle of the French Quarter, something to go along the attractive theme New Orleans had: home of the supernatural. But we knew better.