Stiles
The jazz band three doors down on Royal Street was butchering a trombone solo so badly it honestly deserved to be a felony, which made me feel a lot better about the guy I currently had pinned against the exposed brick of the alley.
"Okay, look," I told him, shifting my grip on the front of his linen shirt so the arterial spray wouldn't hit my sneakers. "I'm not saying you made a series of terrible life choices tonight, Trevor—can I call you Trevor? You look like a Trevor—but following a girl into a blind courtyard off Bourbon at two in the morning when she very clearly told you to back off? That's strike one. Carrying a switchblade in your Chino pocket? Strike two. Tasting like cheap gin and Red Bull? Honestly, buddy, that's the real tragedy here."
Trevor couldn't say much back, mostly because half his jugular was currently in my mouth and his vocal cords were severed. His heels drummed a frantic, wet rhythm against the cobblestones, his hands clawing uselessly at my forearms. To him, my arms probably felt like poured concrete wrapped in vintage flannel.
I sank my fangs in deeper, letting the second set of teeth—the longer, heavier werewolf canines tucked right alongside the vampire ones—puncture all the way to the spine. His heart gave three big, fluttering thumps, pumping hot, copper-heavy blood across my tongue, and then stuttered out.
I drank until the pressure dropped, then gave one sharp twist with my right hand. The cervical vertebrae popped like bubble wrap. His head lolled sideways, coming clean off the shoulders when the skin and muscle tore the rest of the way through, and I let the body slump behind the green restaurant dumpster while I held onto the collar for a second just to let the last drip clear my boots.
"And the shoes stay clean," I murmured, inspecting the toe caps under the flickering amber streetlamp. "Miracles really do happen in the French Quarter."
I dropped the head into the bin on top of a pile of crawfish shells, wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist, and licked a stray ribbon of red off my thumb. My pulse was humming—that thick, electric purr that sat right behind my sternum whenever I fed well. No guilt. No heavy, brooding existential crisis staring at my reflection in a puddle. Just a really solid meal and the mild annoyance that gin always left a metallic aftertaste.
Back in Beacon Hills, Scott would have already been hyperventilating into his lacrosse jersey if he saw that. I could picture his face—that tragic, kicked-puppy scowl he perfected whenever somebody didn't adhere to his sacred no-kill rule, right before he lectured me about how *there's always another way, Stiles*. And Derek would have stood three feet behind him with his arms crossed, jaw clenched hard enough to crack molars, looking at me like I was an rabid dog that had slipped the leash. Even my dad—especially my dad—had looked at me across the kitchen table that last night with his hand hovering two inches above his service revolver, eyes wide and hollow, like the kid he raised had died and something wearing my skin was sitting in his breakfast nook.
I hadn't laid a finger on a single one of them. Not Scott, not Lydia, not Malia, not Derek, not my old man. I hadn't hurt anyone in that whole miserable town who wasn't actively trying to murder us first. All it took was waking up with a pulse that didn't need to beat, magic humming under my skin that I could drink right out of my own hybrid veins, and teeth that could shred an Alpha in four seconds flat, and boom—suddenly I was the monster under the bed.
Took me about two weeks of listening to them whisper behind closed doors before I realized something hilarious: they were right. I *was* a monster. And the second I packed my Jeep, drove across six state lines, and stopped giving a single solitary fuck about what Scott McCall thought of my moral fiber, life got exponentially more fun.
A sharp, prickling heat crawled up the back of my neck.
I paused halfway through buttoning my cuffs, tilting my head toward the wrought-iron balcony overhanging the mouth of the alley. The air smelled like rain, fried dough, stale beer, and—underneath it all—ozone and crushed sage. Witch magic. Alongside two heartbeats moving way too fast and way too quiet along the slate roof across the street. Vampires.
"Oh, come on," I said aloud to the empty brick wall. "Can a guy not even finish dessert in peace? What is this, the neighborhood watch?"
A figure dropped from the second-story ironwork, landing in a crouch on the wet flagstones twenty feet away. Tall, shaved head, leather jacket, vampire veins ridging dark and ugly beneath his eyes. His friend stayed up on the balcony railing, flanked by a woman in a dark green coat whose fingers were already twisting in a binding sigil, whispering rapid-fire French under her breath.
The air around my boots flashed violet. Heat flared up from the stones as a containment boundary snapped shut, meant to pin me in place and boil the blood in my veins.
I looked down at the glowing purple circle around my sneakers, then back up at the witch on the balcony.
"Ooh, lavender," I said, grinning. "Very atmospheric. Does it come in citronella, or is it purely decorative?"
The vampire on the ground bared his fangs, taking a slow step forward. "You're hunting in Marcel Gerard and Klaus Mikaelson's Quarter, freak. Nobody leaves bodies like this on Royal without answering for it."
"First of all, 'freak' is hurtful and unimaginative," I replied, crouching slightly to rest two fingers against the glowing boundary line on the pavement. "Second, Trevor over there behind the dumpster was about thirty seconds away from stabbing a college sophomore, so really, the city owes me a plaque. Maybe a key to the parade route."
The witch on the balcony snarled and clenched her fist, pouring more power into the hex to snap my spine.
Instead of breaking my back, the purple light hit my fingertips and *pulled*. I let the siphon open inside my palm—that familiar, greedy vacuum that lived right under my skin—and drank the spell straight out of the cobblestones. A rush of warm, spicy energy flooded up my forearm, blending seamlessly with the heavy, dark reservoir of my own vampire-wolf blood. The glowing circle flickered once, sputtered like a dying neon sign, and went dead.
The witch gasped, stumbling back against the balcony door as the tether snapped.
"Delicious," I called up to her, rolling my shoulders as my veins lit up a faint, incandescent red along my wrists. "Little heavy on the sage, maybe dial back the Latin conjugation next time, you're mixing dialects."
The vampire on the ground didn't wait. He blurred forward—fast for an ordinary bloodsucker, maybe a couple hundred years old—aiming a hand straight at my chest to rip my heart out.
I didn't even bother dodging. His fingers slammed against my sternum, tore through my t-shirt, and hit my ribs like he'd just punched the hull of a battleship. Bone crunched—his, not mine.
He howled, jerking his mangled hand back, eyes bulging in terror as the scratch he'd left on my chest sealed up before a single drop of blood could spill.
"Yeah, see, that's the Upgraded Original package," I told him conversationally, catching him by the throat with my left hand before he could blur away. My own eyes shifted, the world sharpening into crimson and gold as the wolf and the beast rose to the surface together, double-fanged and thrumming with the magic I'd just siphoned off his witch friend. "Nothing kills me. Wood, fire, white oak, magic, bad attitude—none of it works. Which is great for me, terrible for your medical insurance."
Up on the balcony, the second vampire was already bolting across the rooftops toward the center of the Quarter, dragging the terrified witch with him.
I watched them go without making a move to chase them. Instead, I looked back at the guy wheezing in my grip, his feet dangling four inches off the ground.
"Now, here's the part where I'd normally take your head off and go find a beignet," I said, tilting my head. "Except your buddy just ran straight toward the Abattoir, and honestly? I've been in town for four days and the local nightlife has been a huge letdown. Tell me something—are all the Mikaelsons home right now? Klaus, Elijah, the witch sister, the whole dysfunctional dynasty?"
"He'll—he'll flay you alive," the vampire choked out, clawing at my wrist.
"Oh, buddy, I really hope he tries," I said brightly. Then I bit into the side of his neck, letting the lethal venom flood his bloodstream along with the tear of my fangs. He convulsed once as the toxin hit his heart, already burning through his veins. I dropped him onto the flagstones, where he lay groaning and clutching at the bubbling, blackened wound on his throat.
"Walk it off," I told him, stepping over his legs. "Or don't. Actually, you definitely won't, that stuff kills vampires in about twenty minutes, unless you want to crawl back to your bosses first so they get a preview. Tell Klaus I'll be over in fifteen! Tell him to put on a pot of coffee or open the good bourbon!"
Whistling the tune the trombone player had been mangling earlier, I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and strolled out of the alley toward Café Du Monde. If I was going to introduce myself to the most famous family of apex predators on the planet, I wasn't doing it without powdered sugar first.
***
Hope
"If you pace another trench into the stone, Niklaus, the foundation will collapse before whatever is out there ever reaches the gates," Elijah said smoothly, not looking up from smoothing the cuffs of his charcoal suit jacket.
Down in the central courtyard of the compound, my dad didn't stop moving. He stood near the fountain, a crystal tumbler of bourbon untouched on the iron table beside him, his jaw set in that razor-tight line that usually meant someone was about to lose several limbs before sunrise.
Up on the second-floor gallery, I leaned my forearms against the wrought-iron railing beside my mom, watching Aunt Freya spread a map of the French Quarter across the long cedar table. Three black candles burned at the corners of the parchment, their flames leaning sharply toward the east despite the still night air inside the courtyard.
"That's the fourth body in forty-eight hours," Hayley said beside me, her voice low, arms folded across her leather jacket. Her eyes flicked from the map down to the archway leading to the street. "All of them on the edges of the Quarter. None of them drained neatly. Whoever's doing this isn't trying to hide it."
"Wait until you hear the rest," Freya said grimly. She looked exhausted, a smudge of graveyard ash near her temple from the boundary spell she'd been maintaining around the district since dusk. She held up a silverathame stained dark with coagulated blood—a sample Marcel's scouts had brought back from a dockside warehouse an hour ago. "I tested the residue from the vampire found near Esplanade. It wasn't just torn apart by brute strength. There was venom in the wound."
Klaus stopped pacing at once, his head snapping up toward the gallery. "Marcel's?"
"No," Freya said, meeting his eyes. "Not Marcel's, and not Lucien's old strain either, though it's close enough to be a cousin. It carries all seven pack strains fused into something heavier, older, and twice as fast-acting. And when I tried to cast a tracking spell on the blood..." She set the blade down on the map with a sharp clink. "The magic was gone. Not blocked. Not cloaked. Siphoned straight out of the sample before the heart even stopped beating."
Silence dropped over the courtyard, thick and sudden.
I straightened up from the railing, a cold pulse of adrenaline kicking behind my ribs. "A siphoner? With Upgraded Original venom? That doesn't exist."
"Nothing exists until someone makes the mistake of creating it," Klaus murmured, his voice dropping into that quiet, lethal register that made the hair on my arms stand up. He walked slowly to the bottom of the iron staircase, looking up at the three of us. "Where is the scent leading now, Freya?"
Before Freya could reach for the pendulum over the map, the front doors of the compound burst inward.
Thierry's old lieutenant, Lisette, stumbled across the threshold supporting a shivering witch by the elbow. Behind them, half-dragging himself along the limestone wall, was Marcus—one of the night walkers who patrolled Royal Street. The left side of Marcus's neck was a mangled ruin of black, blistering veins, his skin already gray and slick with sweat as the venom ate through him.
Elijah was across the courtyard in the space of a heartbeat, catching the dying vampire by the shoulder before he hit the flagstones, while Klaus appeared straight in front of Lisette.
"Speak," Klaus commanded, his eyes flashing gold under the courtyard lanterns.
"Royal Street," Lisette breathed, chest heaving. "Two blocks from the cathedral. We caught him over a fresh corpse—human, head torn clean off. Sabine threw a locking boundary on him, and he—he touched the ground and *drank* it, Klaus. Drank the whole hex with two fingers, laughed in our faces, and when Marcus lunged at him, Marcus broke his own hand on the bastard's chest."
Down on the stones, Marcus coughed up a mouthful of black blood, his fingers spasming against Elijah's sleeve. "He said..." Marcus rasped, his eyes rolling wildly toward Klaus. "He said nothing kills him. Said to tell you he'd be here in fifteen minutes. Wanted you to open the good bourbon."
My mom's jaw tightened, her hand dropping instinctively toward my shoulder before she remembered I wasn't seven years old anymore. Even so, I felt the shift in the room—the immediate, closing-ranks lethality of my family whenever a threat walked directly toward our door.
"Freya," Elijah said, rising smoothly and wiping a smear of dark blood from his palm with a white handkerchief. "Raise the compound wards to full strength. Hayley, take Hope upstairs."
"I'm not going upstairs," I said immediately, stepping back from my mom's reach as my fingers tingled with the sudden, hot surge of magic rising in my blood. "If he can siphon spells, Freya's wards won't hold him on their own. You need another witch—"
"What I need," Klaus cut in sharply, though his eyes were fixed on the dark street beyond the open iron gates, "is for you to stay on that balcony where I can see you, little wolf. If this creature is half as arrogant as he sounds, walking through those gates will be the final mistake of his unnatural life."
Freya threw a handful of crushed bone and salt into the brazier on the table, chanting under her breath. A deep, resonant hum vibrated through the floorboards and the brick walls as the ancient boundary barriers of the Abattoir locked into place—layers of protective magic woven into the mortar over decades, strong enough to fry an ordinary vampire to ash on contact.
Two minutes ticked by. The jazz music down the street had cut off, replaced by the eerie quiet that always settled over the Quarter right before a storm—or a slaughter.
Then I heard the footsteps.
Not sneaking. Not blurring with vampire speed. Just the casual, unhurried scuff of rubber soles on damp stone, accompanied by the crinkle of a waxed paper bag.
I looked down through the iron balusters of the second-floor railing just as a guy in a blood-spattered burgundy flannel over a dark jacket strolled up to the threshold of the compound gates. He couldn't have looked past his early twenties—dark brown hair sticking up slightly at the crown, sharp cheekbones, warm whiskey-brown eyes, and a dusting of white powdered sugar on the lapel of his coat.
He stopped directly in front of the invisible shimmer of Freya's boundary ward, holding a paper bag from Café Du Monde in one hand and a half-eaten beignet in the other.
"Man, you guys really went all in on the gothic plantation aesthetic, huh?" he called out, his voice echoing brightly across the silent courtyard. He looked around at the brick arches, the hanging ferns, and the fountain, completely ignoring the dying vampire twenty feet away and the four killers staring him down. "Don't get me wrong, the ferns are a nice touch—very *Interview with the Vampire*, very moody—but the magic bug-zapper on the front door? Kind of aggressive for company."
Beside me, Freya's hands clenched into fists over the brazier, reinforcing the ward with everything she had.
Down at the gate, the stranger popped the rest of the beignet into his mouth, dusted the sugar off his right hand onto his jeans, and pressed his open palm flat against the air at the threshold.
***
Stiles
If you've never siphoned an ancient, blood-soaked ancestral compound ward right after eating fried dough, I cannot recommend it enough. It hits like three shots of espresso chased with a nine-volt battery.
The magic woven into the Abattoir's archway was dense—layered with decades of dark sacrificial witchcraft, old Norse runes from the witch sister up on the balcony, and enough raw lethality to turn a normal nightwalker into barbecue. As soon as my palm touched the barrier, the spell tried to sear my skin off.
Instead, I opened the tap and pulled.
Red light crawled up my fingers, spiderwebbing under the skin of my forearm as the ward unraveled like a cheap sweater. Up on the second-floor gallery, the blonde witch—Freya, definitely Freya—let out a sharp gasp, her knees buckling slightly as the feedback loop cut off and the magic she'd been pouring into the stone drained straight into my bloodstream.
With a soft *pop* like a soap bubble bursting, the boundary vanished.
I stepped over the threshold into the courtyard, crumpling the empty paper bag and tossing it neatly into a decorative brass urn near the archway.
"Three points," I said, looking around the courtyard with a grin. And there they were—the whole infamous band, altogether in one room. Klaus Mikaelson standing dead center by the fountain looking like an angry Renaissance painting; Elijah off to the left in a suit that probably cost more than my old Jeep; Hayley Marshall up on the balcony looking fifty seconds away from turning into a wolf and diving off the railing; Freya bracing herself against a table full of candles; and right beside Hayley at the iron railing—
My gaze snagged for half a second on the girl with the auburn hair and the fierce, striking blue eyes staring down at me like she was already calculating the exact trajectory to set me on fire.
Okay. Huh. Well, *she* was interesting.
I forced my attention back to the center of the courtyard as Klaus took two slow steps forward. Up close, you could feel the weight of a thousand years rolling off the guy—that coiled, suffocating predator aura that usually made normal supernaturals wet themselves and beg for mercy.
"You walk into my home," Klaus said, his British accent smooth as oiled steel, every syllable vibrating with barely leashed violence, "slaughter in my streets, mock my family, and leave your filth upon my courtyard floor. Give me one reason, boy, why I shouldn't tear your tongue from your throat before I take the rest of you apart piece by piece."
"Ooh, the accent really is better in person," I said, pointing at him with both index fingers before dropping my hands into my jacket pockets. "Okay, look, Klaus—can I call you Klaus? 'Niklaus' feels a little formal seeing as I just ate your boundary spell—let's get a couple things straight right out of the gate. People are monsters. All of us in this room? Monsters. Look at you: Klaus Mikaelson, the Original Hybrid, the guy who spent a millennium building a brand around being the biggest, baddest nightmare in the dark."
I strolled a few steps closer to the fountain, completely relaxed, letting my heartbeat stay slow and steady.
"Now, see, Klaus, I'm a monster too," I continued, gesturing vaguely at my bloodstained flannel. "Except there's a big difference between you and me. You spent a thousand years torturing people because your stepdad was a dick and you were terrified of being unloved, or betrayed, or whatever Shakespearean tragedy you guys have going on this week. Me? I'm here for one reason, and one reason only. Because I was bored."
To my left, Elijah shifted almost imperceptibly, angling himself into my blind spot. I didn't bother turning my head, just flicked two fingers toward him without taking my eyes off Klaus. "I can hear your cufflinks clinking, Suit. Stay right there, I'm in the middle of a monologue."
Elijah froze, his dark eyes narrowing by a fraction of an inch.
"See, a couple months ago—or maybe six weeks, honestly time gets a little weird when you don't sleep as much—I woke up like this," I said, pacing a lazy half-circle around the fountain edge and trailing my fingertips through the water. "Upgraded Original, wolf, siphoner. Literally unkillable. Nothing on this planet can put me down. And the people I grew up with? My best friend, my pack, my own father? The second they saw what I was—before I ever hurt a single innocent person, before I ever laid a claw on any of them—they looked at me like I was an abomination. Like a rabid animal they needed to lock in a cage or put down for the greater good."
A flash of genuine irritation tightened my jaw for half a second—the memory of Scott's self-righteous voice and my dad's shaking hand on his holster—before I shrugged it off and grinned again.
"So I left! Because screw those guys, right? Why stick around a crappy little California town listening to hypocrites lecture me about humanity when I can come to New Orleans, listen to terrible jazz, eat my weight in powdered sugar, and rip people apart whenever I feel like a snack?" I spread my hands wide. "There's no tragic mask here, Klaus. I didn't 'flip my humanity switch'—which, by the way, sounds like the dumbest coping mechanism ever invented. I feel plenty. I get pissed off, I crack jokes, I have a great time. I just genuinely, from the bottom of my black little heart, do not give a single fuck about the people I kill."
I nudged Marcus's boot with the toe of my sneaker; the vampire had finally stopped breathing ten seconds ago, his veins black and desiccated.
"Like this guy! Couldn't care less. Or Trevor in the alley behind Royal. Zero remorse. Doesn't keep me up at night, doesn't make me stare broodingly off balconies in the rain. I'm hungry, I feed. Somebody annoys me, I take their head off. I came to New Orleans to have fun and enjoy my life, and since you guys are the only ones in this city who won't die if I sneeze too hard, I figured I'd drop by and say hi."
Silence hung over the courtyard for two full seconds.
Then Elijah moved.
He didn't make a sound—just a blur of charcoal wool and lethal speed closing the fifteen feet between us in less than a tenth of a second, his right hand cocked like a spear aimed straight at my carotid while Klaus lunged simultaneously from the left to pin my arms.
I didn't blur. I just pivoted on my heel, caught Elijah's wrist in my left hand an inch from my throat, and let Klaus's grip slam onto my right shoulder.
The air cracked with the force of the impact, a shockwave rippling the water in the fountain.
Elijah's eyes widened in genuine shock as his momentum hit a brick wall. I squeezed his wrist until the ancient, indestructible bones groaned under my grip, spun on my heel, and used Elijah's own weight to swing him straight into Klaus's ribs like a six-foot-tall battering ram.
Both Originals went flying across the courtyard, crashing through the iron patio table and slamming into the brick pillars on the far side in a shower of shattered crystal and splintered mortar.
Up on the balcony, Hayley vaulted the iron railing in a single fluid bound, shifting mid-air—Wait, no, she stayed human, landing between the stairs and the gallery with her hybrid fangs bared, while beside her on the second floor, Hope threw both hands forward.
*"Incendia!"* Hope's voice rang out—clear, fierce, and backed by a shockingly heavy wave of tribrid magic.
The courtyard air erupted into a roaring column of white-hot fire that engulfed me from head to toe.
I stood right in the middle of the inferno, letting the flames lick across my jacket and hair for a second before I inhaled deeply, opened my siphon across both palms, and *pulled* the fire straight out of the oxygen around me. The roaring column of flame spiraled inward, collapsing into two swirling ribbons of orange-red magic that sank directly into my palms until the courtyard dropped back into cool darkness.
Even my flannel wasn't singed. I looked down at my hands, flexing my fingers as the warmth of *her* magic settled into my veins—different from Freya's cold, sharp runes or the street witch's muddy hexes. Hope's magic tasted like wildfire, honey, and lightning.
I looked straight up at the balcony where she stood with her hands still raised, her chest rising and falling fast, those bright blue eyes wide as she felt me drink her spell right out of the air.
"Okay," I called up to her, a slow, genuine smile spreading across my face as my eyes flashed gold-red in the dim light. "Now *that* had some kick to it. What're you doing later?"
***
Klaus
Across the courtyard, Klaus pushed a slab of broken limestone off his coat and rose to his feet beside Elijah, his hybrid face fully emerged—eyes blazing molten gold, dark veins webbing beneath his cheekbones, fangs bared as a low, lupine growl rumbled from deep in his chest.
In a thousand years of walking the earth, very few things had ever truly surprised Niklaus Mikaelson. He had fought Mikael across continents; he had endured the hunter's curse, the daggers, the ancestors, and the beast that Marcel had become. He knew the measure of an Original's strength down to the ounce.
Yet when this boy—this loud, grinning, absurd creature who smelled simultaneously of ancient vampire, alpha wolf, witch magic, and cheap bakery sugar—had caught Elijah's arm and hurled them both across the stone like children, the sheer physical force behind the blow had surpassed anything Marcel had ever shown. Worse still, when Hope's fire had engulfed him, he hadn't merely survived it; he had devoured it, his eyes brightening with delighted hunger as he looked up at the gallery.
At Klaus's daughter.
Fury, cold and murderous, surged through Klaus's blood, eclipsing every ounce of caution.
"Touch a hair on her head," Klaus snarled, stepping out from beneath the shattered colonnade as Elijah rose silently beside him, blood trickling from a split along Elijah's knuckles where he had struck the pillar, "and I will spend the next ten centuries discovering how much agony an immortal body can endure when it is carved into pieces and buried at the bottom of the Mariana Trench."
The boy tore his gaze away from the balcony and looked back at Klaus, blinking once as if he had genuinely forgotten the two of them were still standing there.
"Whoa, easy there, Dad of the Year," the boy said, holding up both hands in mock surrender, though there wasn't a flicker of fear in his posture—nor a single spike in his steady, unbothered heartbeat. "Nobody's carving anybody up tonight. If I wanted to kill your family, I wouldn't have knocked on the front door and announced myself with pastries. Look at Elijah's jacket—I barely wrinkled the lapel!"
Beside Klaus, Elijah brushed a speck of brick dust from his shoulder, his expression glacial as he studied the intruder. "You have a name, I presume. Or do you prefer to introduce yourself exclusively through vandalism and theatrics?"
"Stiles," the boy said cheerfully, giving a lazy two-finger salute. "Just Stiles. First name's actually a mouthful of Polish consonants that nobody outside my late grandmother could pronounce without pulling a hamstring, so we stick with Stiles. And for the record, smashing a patio table when two guys try to take your head off simultaneously isn't vandalism, it's self-defense. Ask any lawyer."
Up on the gallery, Freya raised her hand to begin an immobilization chant, her fingers trembling slightly from the earlier siphon drain, only for Klaus to lift two fingers in a sharp, silent command for her to halt.
Klaus wasn't a fool. Throwing magic at a siphoner was merely feeding him ammunition, and throwing themselves at claws and venom that had already killed Marcus on the floor was a game for idiots. More than that, Klaus knew predators—he had been the apex of them for ten centuries—and as he watched Stiles stand loose-limbed in the center of the courtyard, Klaus recognized the terrifying truth of what the boy had said a moment ago.
He wasn't posturing. He wasn't hiding behind bluster or masking some secret, fractured grief.
He genuinely didn't care. He had walked into the den of the Original family the way a man might stroll into a tavern for a drink, amused by their fury and entirely confident that nothing in the building could scratch him.
***
Hope
I kept my hands loose at my sides against the balcony railing, the phantom pull of his siphon still tingling against my palms like static electricity.
I'd grown up around monsters. My dad was the bogeyman half the supernatural world whispered about to scare their children; my uncle Elijah could decapitate three vampires without spilling a drop of merlot on his shirt; Marcel ruled the city's nightwalkers with an iron fist. Every powerful immortal I'd ever met carried their centuries like armor—solemn, theatrical, weighed down by ancient oaths and grudges.
Stiles didn't look ancient at all. He stood down by the fountain in a battered jacket and sneakers, grinning up at us with his hands back in his pockets while two bodies cooled near the gate, radiating more raw, suffocating power than anyone I had ever sensed—and acting like he was at a house party that had finally gotten interesting.
"You drained the Royal Street ward," I said, my voice cutting across the tense standoff in the courtyard as I walked down the iron staircase toward the ground floor, ignoring the sharp look my mom shot me and the low warning rumble in my dad's chest. "And you absorbed my fire without an object to channel it into. Siphoners burn out if they take in too much raw magic without somewhere for it to go."
I stopped at the bottom step, ten feet away from him, keeping my chin up. Up close, the scent rolling off him hit me all at once—pine needles, rain-wet pavement, gunmetal, lightning, and dark, rich blood.
Stiles turned fully toward me, his head tilting slightly as those warm, sharp brown eyes studied my face. Unlike everyone else in New Orleans who looked at me and saw either *Klaus Mikaelson's daughter* or *a fragile hybrid princess to tiptoe around*, he looked right at me like I was the only person in the room speaking a language he actually cared to hear.
"Yeah, well, most siphoners aren't also an Upgraded Original and a werewolf," Stiles said, his mouth curving into a lopsided grin as he tapped two fingers against his own temple. "Turns out when your whole body is basically a perpetual motion machine of dark magic and werewolf regeneration, you've got infinite storage space. Plus, I generate my own supply twenty-four-seven, so I never run dry. Honestly, it's a pretty sweet setup. Ten out of ten, would recommend, except for the part where all your childhood friends stage an intervention and look at you like you're Satan's favorite nephew."
"Maybe stopping before you tore two men apart on Royal Street would have helped your reputation," Hayley said coldly, stepping down to stand slightly to my left, her posture coiled and ready to strike.
Stiles barked out a laugh—short, bright, and genuinely amused. "Oh, come on! You're Hayley Marshall, Queen of the Bayou packs, and you're standing ten feet from a guy who used to dagger his siblings and keep them in shipping crates like seasonal Christmas decorations whenever they annoyed him! Don't get moral with me over Trevor and Marcus. Trevor had a switchblade and zero respect for women's personal space, and Marcus tried to punch a hole through my sternum."
He looked back at me, his expression shifting from mockery to something sharper, warmer, and entirely focused.
"You're Hope," he said—not a question, just a quiet observation as his gaze flicked from my eyes to the pulse beating at the base of my throat. "The tribrid. Half the witches in the Quarter cross the street and mutter protection charms just saying your name out loud, you know that?"
"They have good survival instincts," I shot back evenly, refusing to take a step back even when my dad shifted closer on my right. "Something you seem to be missing if you think walking in here to pick a fight with my family ends well for you."
"Who said I was picking a fight?" Stiles asked, raising his eyebrows. "If I wanted a fight, Elijah would be missing an arm right now and your dad would still be digging limestone out of his teeth. I came over to introduce myself to the neighbors."
He took a single step closer—slow enough that even my dad didn't immediately lunge, though every muscle in Klaus's body locked tight as a bowstring.
"Look," Stiles said, his voice dropping an octave so it carried a low, velvet edge underneath the sarcasm. "I'm staying at the Monteleone on Royal. Penthouse suite—comped it myself, long story, hotel manager's totally fine, didn't even bite him. I like this city. I like the food, I like the music, and I like that when I get hungry after midnight, nobody calls a town hall meeting about my soul. You guys don't bother me, I won't tear down your pretty compound. Deal?"
"You hunt in our city without permission," Klaus said softly, each word dripping venom. "And you think we bargain with stray dogs?"
Stiles glanced over at my dad, completely unfazed. "Buddy, if I'm a stray dog, I'm the size of a monster truck and I breathe napalm. Try to kick me out of New Orleans and we'll see how much of the French Quarter is left standing by Friday. Or—" He snapped his fingers. "—counteroffer: we all act like civilized apex predators, and next time one of your nightwalkers tries to jump me in an alley, tell them to wear a nametag so I know who to mail the boots back to."
Before anyone could move, Stiles blurred.
I had seen my dad and Elijah move at full speed my entire life, and I still barely registered the motion before Stiles was standing less than a foot in front of me at the base of the stairs.
Klaus roared, lunging forward with Elijah and Hayley right behind him, but in that split second before they could reach us, Stiles caught my right hand by the fingertips.
He didn't crush my bones or yank me toward him as a hostage. Instead, as his thumb brushed across the heel of my palm, the tip of a single claw—needle-sharp and dark—nicked the skin of my wrist, drawing a single bright bead of blood while a spark of siphoner magic jumped between our skin like a live wire.
I gasped—not from pain, because it barely stung, but from the jolt of heat that raced straight up my arm and slammed into my chest as he drew that tiny thread of magic and blood together.
He lifted his thumb to his lips, tasting the single drop of my blood while looking dead into my eyes from six inches away, his pupils blown wide and ringed with molten gold-red.
For half a heartbeat, the joking grin vanished from his face, replaced by a flash of raw, stunned intensity as the taste of tribrid blood hit his tongue.
"Huh," Stiles breathed, his voice dropping so low only I could hear it before my dad's hand slammed down where Stiles's shoulder had been a millisecond earlier. "Okay. Definitely staying in town."
He was already at the front archway by the time Klaus spun around, standing just outside the threshold under the streetlamp with the night wind ruffling his hair.
"Great meeting everybody!" Stiles called back cheerfully, walking backward down the sidewalk with both hands tucked into his pockets while Klaus, Elijah, and Hayley glared murderously after him from the gate. "Freya, put some ice on that magic headache! Elijah, sorry about the table! Hope—"
His eyes found mine through the open ironwork of the gates, and that wicked, electric grin returned in full force.
"—see you around."
Then he turned the corner onto Royal Street and vanished into the neon and shadows of the Quarter, leaving the taste of ozone in the air and my wrist still burning where his skin had touched mine.
***
Stiles
Okay, so maybe walking straight into the Mikaelson compound with a bag of beignets had been slightly unhinged even by my standards, but in my defense, it had gone *great*.
I strolled down St. Peter Street toward the river, the humid night air cooling the buzz under my skin while a streetcar rattled past a block over. Behind me, back toward the Abattoir, I could still hear the faint, furious sound of Klaus Mikaelson shattering what remained of his courtyard furniture while Elijah tried to talk him down from leveling three city blocks to find me.
I laughed under my breath, shaking my head as I licked the corner of my bottom lip.
The taste of Hope Mikaelson's blood was still sitting right on my tongue.
I'd fed on a lot of people over the last couple months—humans, a couple rogue wolves near the Texas border who thought they could hijack my Jeep at a gas station, three vampires in Baton Rouge who tried to roll me for my watch, and that street witch's magic back in the alley. Blood was fuel. Magic was fuel. Usually, once I swallowed it down, the craving quieted for a few hours and I went back to figuring out what movie to watch or what restaurant to try next.
That one single drop off Hope's wrist?
It was still singing through my veins like liquid sunlight mixed with high-proof whiskey. Every nerve ending in my body felt sharper, louder, and ten times more awake than when I'd walked through those gates. Even the wolf and the vampire inside my chest—two halves that normally prowled around each other like grumpy roommates—had gone dead still the second I touched her hand, both of them locking onto her scent like a compass needle snapping north.
"Hope Mikaelson," I murmured to myself, turning onto Canal Street as the neon lights of the hotels reflected off the wet asphalt. "Klaus's kid. Because why make my life simple when I can make it hilarious?"
A block ahead of me, the wrought-iron marquee of the Hotel Monteleone glowed warm gold against the dark sky. The doorman in the burgundy coat took one look at me approaching, remembered the fifty-dollar bill and the casual little wrist-siphon trick I'd used two nights ago to un-hex his bad knee, and tipped his cap with a wide smile.
"Evening, Mr. Stilinski. Late night in the Quarter?"
"Oh, you know how it is, Andre," I said, slapping him warmly on the shoulder as I walked past him into the marble lobby, making sure to keep the bloodier side of my flannel tucked under my jacket lapel so the tourists by the Carousel Bar wouldn't faint into their martinis. "Made some new friends, broke a really nice antique table, tried the beignets. Solid Tuesday."
I rode the brass elevator up to the top floor, unlocked the heavy oak doors of the penthouse suite, and tossed my keys onto the glass coffee table. The suite had a wrap-around terrace overlooking the Mississippi River on one side and the slate rooftops of the French Quarter on the other.
After stripping off the ruined flannel and tossing it into the trash can—not even hotel dry cleaning was getting Trevor out of cotton—I grabbed a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch from the minibar, uncorked it with my teeth, and walked bare-chested out onto the stone balcony.
The wind off the river was cool against my ribs. Down below, the city was still humming—sirens in the distance, a tugboat horn groaning out on the black water, drunken laughter floating up from eight stories down.
Three rooftops over, crouched in the shadow of a copper cupola where a normal person would never have spotted them, two of Marcel's nightwalkers were watching my balcony. Klaus and Elijah clearly hadn't wasted any time putting eyes on the hotel.
I raised the scotch bottle toward the cupola in a cheerful toast, took a long swallow straight from the neck, and grinned when one of the vampires flinched back into the shadow.
No guilt. No pack meetings. No Scott McCall giving me a speech about my humanity, and no cage big enough in the state of Louisiana to hold me.
Wait until tomorrow night. Tomorrow night was going to be even better.
***
Hope
By three in the morning, the courtyard had finally been cleared.
Marcus's body had been burned near the river docks so the venom wouldn't linger, Freya had spent two hours weaving a new triple-layered boundary spell into the stone with enough dark objects anchored around the perimeter to give even a siphoner indigestion, and Elijah was on the phone in the study speaking quietly with Marcel about locking down the Quarter.
I sat on the wide stone ledge of my bedroom window on the third floor, my knees pulled up to my chest and a sketchbook balanced unopened across my thighs. Down in the courtyard below, my dad stood alone near the repaired fountain, staring out at the iron gates where Stiles had stood hours earlier.
A gentle knock sounded at my door before my mom stepped inside, carrying two mugs of chamomile tea infused with vervain and wolfsbane flower—an old bayou habit from when I was little and couldn't sleep after a full moon.
She handed me a mug and leaned her hip against the opposite side of the window frame, following my gaze down to Klaus in the courtyard, then out toward the lights of Royal Street where the Hotel Monteleone rose above the lower slate roofs.
"Your dad wants to call Kol and Rebekah back to the city," Hayley said quietly, blowing across the rim of her mug. "And Freya's already looking through Esther's old grimoires for anything that can bind a siphoner whose magic is tied to an Original's immortality."
I wrapped both hands around the warm ceramic, my thumb brushing instinctively over the inside of my right wrist. The tiny nick from Stiles's claw had healed within seconds—my blood always healed everything instantly—but if I closed my eyes, I could still feel the exact heat of his fingers and the strange, electric pull of his magic meeting mine.
"It won't work," I said softly.
Hayley looked down at me, her dark brows drawing together. "Freya's found ways around impossible things before, Hope."
"It's not just what he can do, Mom," I said, looking back out at the skyline of the Quarter. "When I threw that fire at him, he didn't even brace for it. And when Elijah and Dad hit him together, he wasn't even trying. He was playing with us."
I remembered the way he'd laughed in the middle of our courtyard—not the cold, cruel laugh of the ancient vampires who came to New Orleans looking for a crown or a vendetta against my father, and not the brittle, manic laugh of someone who had turned off their emotions to run from pain. He had looked right at us, covered in blood from the street, and told the truth without blinking: he felt everything he wanted to feel, he laughed when something was funny, he got angry when people pushed him, and he didn't waste a single breath feeling sorry for the people he fed on.
And then he had looked at me, tasted my blood off his thumb, and gone completely still.
"Did you hear what he said about where he came from?" I asked, resting my chin on my knee. "About his friends and his father looking at him like an abomination before he ever hurt anyone?"
Hayley's expression softened slightly, a flicker of recognition crossing her face—the old, familiar ache of every werewolf who had ever been feared for what was in their blood before they even turned for the first time. Then her jaw firmed again.
"Lots of monsters have a sad story about how they started, Hope," my mom said firmly, reaching out to brush a lock of hair behind my ear. "Look at your dad. That doesn't make Stiles any less dangerous. A guy who can't be killed, who drinks magic on contact, and who rips people apart in alleys because he's *bored* is the most dangerous thing that's walked into New Orleans since I met your family. Stay inside the Quarter lines tomorrow, okay? Let your dad and Elijah handle him."
"Sure," I said evenly, taking a sip of the tea so she wouldn't see the restlessness already coiled under my ribs. "I'll stay inside the Quarter."
My mom lingered for another moment, pressed a kiss to the top of my head, and headed out into the hallway, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her.
As soon as her footsteps faded down the corridor, I set the mug on the windowsill and looked down at my right palm.
With a whispered word, I sparked a tiny flame across my fingertips—just a curl of golden-red fire dancing above my skin. Usually, my magic felt entirely my own: steady, familiar, braided into my pulse since before I was born. Tonight, right at the edge of the flame, there was a faint, unmistakable echo of the connection he'd opened when he siphoned my spell and drank my blood from my wrist.
Like a thread pulled taut between this window and a penthouse balcony six blocks away.
I closed my fingers, extinguishing the spark in the dark, and looked out across the rooftops toward the lights of Royal Street.
***
Stiles
Sunlight in New Orleans didn't so much rise as it ambushed you with ninety-percent humidity and a brass band warming up under your window at nine in the morning.
I didn't need a daylight ring—another huge perk of being half-wolf on top of the Upgraded Original package, no tacky lapis lazuli jewelry required—so by ten o'clock I was sitting at a corner wrought-iron table outside a café on Chartres Street in a clean black t-shirt, dark sunglasses pushed up into my hair, and a plate of huevos rancheros in front of me while I flipped through an old nineteenth-century parish ledger I'd liberated from the back room of an occult bookshop an hour earlier.
Not because I was researching some grand evil scheme. Mostly I was just curious how many times Klaus and Elijah had burned down the local opera house in the 1800s. (Spoiler: twice, and both times they blamed it on faulty gas lamps.)
"You know," a voice said from three feet to my left, "most people who break into the Abattoir, throw my uncle through a table, and threaten my dad at least have the common sense to change neighborhoods the next morning."
I didn't even have to look up to know who it was. I'd caught her scent—rain, cedarwood, warm honey, and that crackling undertone of tribrid magic—half a block away before she even crossed St. Ann.
I closed the ledger over my thumb and looked up, letting a slow grin spread across my face.
Hope Mikaelson stood on the sunlit sidewalk just outside the café's low iron railing, wearing a fitted maroon leather jacket, dark jeans, and boots, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and a canvas shoulder bag slung across her chest. Around us, tourists and locals strolled past with iced coffees, completely oblivious to the fact that the two of us sitting within five feet of each other represented enough combined supernatural firepower to sink the lower half of Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico.
Up on the roof of the pharmacy across the street, I could hear the twin heartbeats of the two vampire bodyguards Klaus had clearly assigned to shadow her from a block back.
"Morning, Hope," I said warmly, kicking out the wrought-iron chair across from mine with my foot. "Sit down. Have a tortilla chip. They make the salsa fresh in the back, and the waiter hasn't asked me a single question about why my eyes flashed red when he dropped the check."
Hope didn't immediately sit, though her eyes flicked down to the ancient parish ledger under my hand, then up toward the pharmacy roof across the street, before settling back on me.
"You know there are two of my dad's vampires watching this intersection right now," she said, pulling the chair out anyway and sitting down across from me with effortless grace.
"Only two?" I asked, feigning disappointment as I pushed the basket of chips toward her. "Look over your left shoulder by the flower cart. Your Uncle Elijah's been pretending to inspect those hydrangeas for three minutes. Honestly, a guy in a five-thousand-dollar bespoke three-piece suit buying potted petunias at ten in the morning? Worst undercover work I've ever seen. My dad was a county sheriff in a town with a population of thirty thousand and even his deputies knew how to wear a baseball cap on a stakeout."
Hope didn't turn her head toward the flower cart, though the corner of her mouth twitched—just a tiny, involuntary tug of amusement before she schooled her expression back into cool composure.
"He's making sure you don't try to use me as leverage against our family," she said, resting her forearms on the small round table. In the bright morning sunlight, her eyes were an almost impossible shade of blue, ringed with a faint, warm amber near the pupil. "My dad thinks you're here for territory. Freya thinks someone created you as a weapon to hunt us down now that our family is all in one place."
"And what do you think?" I asked, leaning forward on my elbows and resting my chin on my laced fingers.
She held my gaze without blinking. "I think you were telling the truth last night. Nobody made you come here, and you don't care about territory at all."
"Ding, ding, ding," I said softly, smiling at her. "Give the tribrid a prize. Seriously, what would I even do with 'territory'? Sit in a big chair and listen to vampires complain about zoning laws and tourist quotas? Sounds like student council with fangs. Hard pass."
"Then why stay?" Hope asked, tilting her head slightly. "You can't be killed. You can walk into any city in the world, do whatever you want, feed on whoever you want, and nobody can stop you. Why stay in the one city where the local family will spend every waking hour trying to figure out how to lock you in a box?"
"First of all, I'd love to see the box," I said cheerfully, picking up my coffee mug. "Second, I told you last night—everybody else out there breaks too easily. Do you have any idea how boring it is when every vampire or wolf you run into either runs screaming the second they smell my venom or dies because I hit them at thirty-percent strength? Back in Beacon Hills, my old friends spent every day acting like having claws or magic was some tragic curse we had to suffer through while pretending to be normal high school kids."
I set the mug down with a soft clink, watching her face closely.
"Then I walk into your courtyard last night," I continued, my voice dropping a little lower so Elijah and the roof-sitters fifty yards away would have to strain to catch it over the streetcar clanking past, "and instead of hiding behind your thousand-year-old dad, you step right up to the railing and try to incinerate me on the spot. No hesitation, no trembling, just pure wildfire."
Color rose faintly along her cheekbones, though her gaze didn't waver an inch. "You broke our front ward and threw my uncle into a pillar."
"He tried to take my head off first!" I protested, grinning. "And for the record, your fire spell? Best thing I've siphoned since I woke up like this. Actually, scratch that—the drop of blood off your wrist was better."
Across the table, Hope's fingers curled slightly against the wrought-iron edge. Her pulse gave one sharp, traitorous skip in her throat—fast enough that I heard it, and by the sudden narrowing of her eyes, she knew I heard it too.
"Try biting me," she said, her voice low and dangerous, a faint hum of magic stirring the sugar packets on the table between us, "and we'll find out if an Upgraded Original can survive having his brain boiled from the inside out."
Instead of pulling back, I laughed—a warm, genuine sound that made the couple at the next table glance over and smile, probably thinking we were just two college kids flirting over breakfast.
"See? That right there," I told her, pointing a tortilla chip at her before eating it. "That's why I'm staying in New Orleans. Try talking like that in California and somebody calls a guidance counselor. Here, it's just Tuesday morning conversation."
Down the block by the flower cart, the air shifted.
The street noise didn't stop, the tourists kept walking, and the sun kept shining, but a shadow fell across our table as Elijah Mikaelson stepped smoothly up to the iron railing beside Hope's chair, one hand resting lightly on the back of her seat while Klaus materialized on the opposite side of the sidewalk, blocking the mouth of Chartres Street with his hands clasped loosely behind his back.
Apparently, three minutes of me talking to Klaus's daughter was the absolute limit of Original patience.
"Good morning, Elijah," I said brightly, leaning back in my chair and gesturing toward the flower cart down the street. "Didn't go for the hydrangeas? Shame, they really would've brightened up that courtyard. Especially since you guys are down a patio table."
"Hope," Klaus said from ten feet away, his voice deceptively calm for the sake of the humans passing behind him on the sidewalk, though his eyes were fixed on my throat with murder in every line of his posture. "Your aunt is waiting for you at the compound."
"I was on my way to Rousseau's for paint supplies, Dad," Hope said, annoyance flashing across her face as she looked between her father and her uncle. "And I didn't need an escort."
"When there is vermin lounging at the café tables along your route," Elijah murmured politely, his dark eyes locked on mine, "an escort becomes a matter of basic hygiene."
"Ouch, 'vermin,'" I said, pressing a hand to my chest in mock pain. "And here I was about to offer to pick up the check for the whole table. Look, Klaus, relax—your blood pressure has gotta be through the roof right now. We were literally just talking over chips and salsa. Nobody got bitten, nobody got siphoned, and the structural integrity of the French Quarter remains completely intact."
Klaus took a slow step closer to the café railing, ignoring the waiter who wisely decided to stay inside behind the espresso machine. "You were given the courtesy of walking out of my home in one piece last night because my daughter was in the room," Klaus said softly, leaning in just enough that only the four of us could hear. "Do not mistake restraint for inability, Stiles. Come near her again, and we will test this boasted immortality of yours until the sun burns out."
Most people—hell, every vampire or witch from Baton Rouge to Biloxi—would have backed down right there, or at least flashed their fangs to prove how tough they were.
I just smiled, stood up slowly from my chair, and tossed a fifty-dollar bill onto the table next to my plate. I didn't look at Klaus first; I looked right at Hope, who was still sitting between the three of us with her chin tilted up and that fierce, stubborn spark burning in her blue eyes.
"Well," I said, slipping my sunglasses down onto the bridge of my nose and picking up my parish ledger under one arm. "Sounds like your dad's pretty set on a family brunch, so I'll let you get to your paint shop. Try the crimson cadmium at the place on Royal, by the way—way better pigment than the stuff near the river."
Hope blinked in surprise. "How do you know—"
"Walked past it at eight this morning when I couldn't sleep," I said with a wink. Then I turned toward Klaus, close enough that I had to step right past him on the narrow sidewalk to head toward Jackson Square, and gave his shoulder a friendly, solid pat that made the Original Hybrid's jaw clench hard enough to crack stone. "Enjoy the sunshine, Klaus! Let me know when that replacement patio set comes in, I'll bring a bottle of bourbon to christen it!"
Klaus didn't swing—not in broad daylight with forty tourists holding smartphones within twenty yards, and not with Hope sitting three feet away—but the low, vibrating growl that tore from his chest followed me half a block down Chartres.
I didn't look back until I reached the corner of St. Peter, glancing once over the rim of my sunglasses.
Klaus and Elijah were already flanking her down the sidewalk, arguing with her in low, urgent voices, while Hope walked a step ahead of them both—and right before she turned the corner toward Rousseau's, she glanced back over her shoulder straight at me.
I grinned, lifted two fingers in a lazy wave, and turned toward the river as my stomach gave its first pleasant, familiar rumble of the day.
New Orleans had three hundred thousand people in it, a fresh night coming in eight hours, and a girl with lightning and wildfire in her veins who looked at monsters without flinching.
Beacon Hills could keep its morality speeches. I was right where I belonged.
***
Hope
"You are not to speak with him alone again," Klaus said the moment the heavy oak doors of the compound courtyard closed behind us, cutting off the afternoon noise of the Quarter.
I dropped my canvas bag onto the bench near the fountain and turned around, crossing my arms as both my dad and Elijah stepped into the shade of the colonnade. Up on the second floor, Freya came out of the parlor, wiping her hands on a linen towel from the spell ingredients she'd been mixing all morning.
"He was sitting at a public café on Chartres eating breakfast, Dad," I said, my frustration rising hot and fast. "What was I supposed to do, cross the street with my head down like I'm afraid of him in my own city?"
"Yes," Klaus snapped immediately, his eyes flashing gold. "Because unlike the fools Marcel keeps on his payroll, you should have the sense to recognize when a predator is baiting a trap. He sat on the exact street you take to the art shop every Tuesday morning. Do you truly believe that was a coincidence?"
I opened my mouth to argue—and stopped.
*Try the crimson cadmium at the place on Royal,* Stiles had said with that easy, crooked grin. *Walked past it at eight this morning.*
He hadn't just wandered onto Chartres by accident. He'd figured out where I went, picked a table in the sun where he knew my dad's scouts would spot him, and waited for me to walk by just to talk to me.
"He wants our attention," Elijah said calmly, unbuttoning his suit jacket and resting a hand on the stone balustrade as he regarded me with steady, serious eyes. "And more specifically, Hope, he realized last night that the fastest way to provoke Niklaus and myself—and the only member of this family whose magic intrigued him—was you."
"Did he threaten her?" Freya asked sharply from the top of the stairs, starting down toward us. "Did he try to siphon from you again?"
"No," I said, looking down at my hands before glancing back up at the three of them. "He offered me tortilla chips and made fun of Elijah's suit."
Elijah's jaw tightened by a fraction of an inch. "The suit was entirely appropriate for the weather."
"In July in Louisiana?" I asked dryly.
"Regardless," Klaus cut in, stepping closer until he was standing directly in front of me, his voice dropping its anger for that intense, fiercely protective tone he only ever used with me. "Listen to me, Hope. I saw his eyes last night when he tasted your blood. I have lived a thousand years, and I know the look of a creature that has found something it intends to claim. He has no conscience. He feels no remorse for the blood he spills. You heard him boast of it himself—he kills for sport and feeds whenever the whim strikes him."
"I know what he is, Dad," I said quietly, meeting his gaze. "I was standing right there when he walked in over Marcus's body. I'm not naive, and I'm not some human girl he can compel or charm."
"That is precisely why he is interested in you," Klaus said softly. "Because you didn't break when he touched you."
Before I could answer, the landline telephone inside the downstairs study began to ring—shrill and insistent across the quiet stone courtyard.
Elijah turned and strode into the parlor, lifting the receiver off the cradle. We didn't need to strain our vampire or wolf hearing to catch Marcel's voice coming through the line on the other end, tight and grim.
*"Elijah. Tell Klaus we've got a problem down by the St. Louis Cathedral."*
Elijah's expression darkened. "Stiles?"
*"Yeah,"* Marcel said over the line. *"Except he didn't go after humans this time. Julian's old faction—the six vampires from Algiers who've been talking about making a move on the Quarter while you guys were busy? Your new friend just walked into their bar at noon, siphoned their daylight rings right off their fingers while they were standing on the patio, and watched five of them burn to ash on the sidewalk while he drank a root beer."*
In the courtyard, Freya let out a slow breath. Even my dad went still for a second.
"And the sixth?" Elijah asked into the phone.
*"Missing a hand and currently bleeding out from a venom bite on the cathedral steps,"* Marcel replied. *"Stiles pinned a napkin to his shirt before he walked off. Says: 'Cleaned up the Algiers problem for you. You're welcome. Tell Hope the cadmium red was on sale.' "*
My dad's hand closed around the back of a wrought-iron chair beside the fountain, the metal groaning and twisting in his grip like soft lead.
I turned my face slightly toward the courtyard fountain so none of them would see the sudden, completely inappropriate rush of heat that jumped into my cheeks—or the way my heart beat twice as fast against my ribs.
***
Stiles
To be fair to the six guys in Algiers, I hadn't actually planned on turning five of them into patio ashtrays when I walked into their bar.
I'd just crossed the river around noon to check out a jazz record shop on Morgan Street, heard six vampires in the back booth of a dive bar loudly plotting how they were going to ambush Hayley Marshall the next time she crossed into the Bayou and use Hope as a bargaining chip to take the Quarter from Klaus and Marcel, and thought, *Hey, I'm right here, and these guys are annoying.*
Also, one of them was wearing a fedora indoors, which honestly should carry the death penalty in all fifty states anyway.
So I walked over to their patio table, asked if anyone was using the extra coaster, and when Fedora Guy tried to shove a broken beer bottle into my neck, I siphoned the enchantment out of five lapis lazuli rings in about four seconds flat. New Orleans sunshine did the rest of the heavy lifting. Really, the sun was the murderer there; I was just an enthusiastic bystander with a root beer.
By the time twilight rolled back over the Mississippi, painting the sky a bruised purple-orange above the iron balconies of the Quarter, I was back on my side of the river, leaning against the lamppost outside the little art supply shop on Royal with a small brown paper parcel tucked under my arm.
The street was quieter here—just an old guy playing an accordion two blocks down and the warm yellow light spilling out of antique shop windows.
And walking straight toward me down the center of the empty brick sidewalk, without Klaus, without Elijah, and without a single vampire scout on the roofs behind her, was Hope.
She stopped six feet away under the glow of the gas lamp, her hands tucked into the pockets of her maroon leather jacket, wind from the river catching the ends of her auburn hair.
"You lost your fan club," I observed, pushing off the lamppost with a grin. "How'd you pull that off? Cloaking spell?"
"Boundary mirror charm linked to a decoy coat my mom's wearing toward the Bayou," Hope said evenly, though her eyes flicked down to the brown paper package in my hand. "Gives me about twenty minutes before Freya realizes the signature is looping and my dad tears half the parish down."
"Twenty minutes!" I said, genuinely impressed. "Look at you, rebelling against twenty centuries of overprotective parenting. I got you a present to celebrate."
I tossed the small parcel lightly across the six feet between us. She caught it automatically with one hand, her fingers brushing the brown paper as she frowned down at it.
"It's the cadmium red from the shop," I told her before she could ask if it was cursed. "Plus a sable brush, because the synthetic ones in your bag this morning looked like they'd been through a woodchipper. Don't ask how I saw inside your bag, werewolf eyes are basically cheating."
Hope stared down at the little package in her palm for three seconds, then looked back up at me, her blue eyes sharp and searching in the amber streetlamp light.
"You killed five vampires in Algiers today," she said quietly.
"Five and four-fifths," I corrected, holding up a finger. "The sixth guy was pretty much done by the time he hit the cathedral steps, so technically that's a full six-pack. And before you start sounding like my old pals back in Beacon Hills, those six idiots were sitting in a booth planning how to jump your mom on the Bayou road and grab you for leverage. Personally, I thought turning them into charcoal was pretty restrained. I didn't even get blood on my shirt this time."
She took a slow step closer, clutching the paper parcel in one hand while her gaze stayed locked on mine.
"Why did you care what they were planning?" she asked, her voice dropping low over the distant sound of the accordion down the street. "You told all of us last night that you don't care about anyone. That you only came to New Orleans for yourself."
I stopped smiling for a second—not putting on a sad face, not pretending to be some brooding anti-hero in a movie, just looking right back at her with the honest truth sitting plain in my eyes.
"I told your family I don't care about the people I kill," I said softly, taking two steps until I was standing right in front of her again, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin and smell the cedar and honey in her hair. "And I don't. Those six guys in the bar? Could not care less that they're dust in a gutter right now. Doesn't bother me at all. Never said I couldn't care about *anything*, Hope. Never said I couldn't feel."
I reached out slowly—giving her plenty of time to step back or set my hand on fire if she wanted to—and tapped one finger lightly against the brown paper parcel in her grip.
"I just got real picky about who matters," I murmured, my eyes dropping for half a second to her lips before coming back up to meet her gaze as a smaller, wicked grin tugged at the corner of my mouth. "And watching six second-rate bloodsuckers talk about putting their hands on you? Yeah, turns out that pissed me off. Plus, one of them was wearing a fedora indoors. Really, I did the fashion world a favor."
A laugh escaped her—quick, startled, and completely real—breaking through the guarded tension in her shoulders before she caught herself and shook her head at me.
"You're completely insane," she said, though she didn't step back an inch, even with me standing close enough that my jacket brushed the front of hers.
"Oh, a hundred percent," I agreed warmly. "Certifiable. Ask anyone in California. Come on—you've got seventeen minutes left before your dad realizes he's following an empty coat into a swamp, and you haven't even had a beignet with me yet."
I held out my hand toward the neon glow of the Quarter down the street.
Hope looked down at my hand, then up into my eyes, the tribrid magic humming bright and electric beneath her skin in answer to mine. Slowly, she slipped the paint parcel into her jacket pocket, stepped up beside me on the bricks, and matched my stride as we walked together into the dark.