What's At Stake, Part Ten

Author's note: Hmm. Okay, this may sound kinda weird, but others of you who write may be able to relate (or you may just think I'm nuts; it could go either way): Even though you spend a lot of time plotting a story and being inside a character's head space, sometimes they still surprise you. Elijah took this whole thing a little harder than I expected him to. I didn't anticipate that tonal shift. As always, though, I'm anxious to see where he takes me. :-)


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Blood.

It was the first thing that crept into his awareness. His throat convulsed on it, cold and thick, and a little stale to the taste. But it jump-started his heart, filling and soothing the dry, ragged veins as it flowed through his system. Six swallows, seven, then he pushed it away and sat up, opening his eyes.

He was back in the Salvatore house, once again on the basement floor. And he wasn’t alone.

Andie Starr crouched next to him, holding the blood bag from which she'd just fed him. “More?” she offered.

Before she could blink, he had her pinned to the wall with a hand on her throat and his body weight pressed against hers, knocking the bag out of her hand to splash on the floor a few feet away. She held herself still, even relaxed, making no effort to struggle lest she risk inciting him further. Letting the wall and his hand support her weight, she returned his gaze calmly, and waited.

“Explain,” he growled, his face close to hers.

Andie rolled her eyes down to his forearm, then back to his face, and raised an eyebrow. Elijah relaxed his grip, but didn’t let go of her completely.

She cleared her throat. “Easy, tiger. If I weren’t here to help you, I wouldn’t be feeding you, and I wouldn’t have pulled that out.” She tilted her head to indicate the dagger, lying on the floor next to the spot where his body had lain.

Reluctantly conceding the point, he removed his hand from her and stepped back a couple of paces, careful to keep himself between her and the weapon. Andie rubbed at her neck and slid along the wall toward the door, which had something hanging from it.

“How long?” he rasped out.

“Two weeks, or thereabouts.” She grabbed the thing from the door as he stifled an oath. “There’s a lot to catch you up on." Her tone brightened considerably. "But first, maybe you’d like to, oh, I don’t know, put some pants on or something?” She held up what turned out to be a garment bag. “Not that I don’t enjoy the view…”

Elijah glanced down. He was naked. He took stock of the room as he accepted and unzipped the bag. Charred remnants of what he presumed to have been his clothing littered the grey stone. That, and the flamethrower propped in a dark corner of the room, gave him a pretty good indication of what had occurred. He had a guess as to who had wielded it; his dark sense of humor asserted itself as he imagined Damon Salvatore’s expression when he had realized that Elijah’s corpse wouldn’t burn.

“Are we alone?” he asked, with a glance toward the ceiling.

She gave him a look of mock flirtation. "Why, what did you have in mind? You Originals must have quite the powers of recovery, if you can go right from being a stiff to having a – "

"Andie..." He warned.

“Fine! Jeez. Watch where you aim that look. You could hurt someone." She leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms. "Yes, we're alone. No one should be back for at least a few hours.”

“Then I’m taking a shower.” Before heading out of the room, he made it a point to retrieve the dagger.

“There are seven of them upstairs. Take your pick.”

He paused next to her in the doorway on his way out the door. What had Jenna said about men being territorial? “Which one is Damon’s?” he asked.

She chuckled approvingly. “Follow me.

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Ten minutes (and the shedding of layer upon layer of grime that he didn’t care to name) later, Elijah rejoined Andie in the library. She held a brandy out to him. “Or, there’s more blood downstairs if you'd prefer,” she offered.

Elijah wrinkled his nose in distaste. “That stuff is vile. I prefer it warm, and a whole lot fresher.”

She held up a hand. “Don’t look at me, pal. I gave at the office.”

Accepting the brandy, Elijah withdrew the dagger from the inside jacket of his pocket. “Where is the rest?”

“Huh? Oh!” Andie opened the liquor cabinet and withdrew an ornate wooden box. Opening it, she grabbed the antique bottle of white oak ash, and passed it to him. Elijah pocketed it along with the dagger and seated himself in one of the overstuffed chairs flanking the fireplace, gesturing her toward the other. “All right. Talk. You can start by explaining who you are. Clearly, you're no reporter.”

“Hey! The 8% hike in ratings since I joined the station would argue otherwise, thank you very much.” She took a sip of her own brandy. “But that’s not why I’m here, no.”

“So why are you here?”

“Guess.”

He eyed her speculatively. “You’re a witch.”

Andie smiled at him and raised her glass in a mock toast. “Got it in one.”

“So this… thing with Damon…”

“Was an act. I needed to keep track of what he – what they – were up to. And I could do that best by being his compulsively dedicated little – ”

“Chew toy?” Elijah flicked a glance toward the bite marks, now uncovered, along her neck. “Brava. You’re dedication is outstanding.”

“You have. No. Idea.”

“Oh, I think I have some.” He sipped at his brandy. “So, a witch. One of Klaus’s, I presume.”

“Nothing wrong with your brain.”

“Nothing at all. Which is why I don’t believe for a moment that Klaus would want me reanimated. I presume he’s now aware of…” Of Elena. “…of the doppelganger?”

“Elijah, Klaus has been aware of her almost since the moment you have.” She relaxed back into the chair, tucking her feet underneath her. “Did you really think he had just let you run off in a tiff, without having someone – several someones – keeping an eye on you?”

He hardly thought a profound difference in world view, and the future of humanity in it, qualified as “a tiff,” but he let it slide. “Where is he, then? Why wait? Why not crash in here and snap her out from under my nose?”

“Why do all the work locating the moonstone, securing a werewolf, etc., when he can sit back and let you do it for him?”

Yes, he thought bitterly. That sounded like Klaus. Always leaving him to do the dirty work, then swooping in at the last minute to collect the spoils.

“Besides, he hoped that, if he left you out there on the front line, so to speak, you’d draw the dagger out of hiding. Which you did. All very neat and tidy." She waggled a finger at him. "You’re dead and removed as a threat, same with the dagger, all of the components to break the curse are in place…”

“And now he can come waltzing into town with everything at the ready.” Elijah nodded. Pure, vintage Klaus.

“I sent him the all clear signal myself.” She shook her empty snifter at him.

Elijah gamely took the glass from her and refilled it at the bar. “Which means that you’re now working off-script.” He handed her the drink and sat, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “This would be the part where you start explaining why, and just exactly what your stake in all this is.”

Andie drained the glass in two swallows, as though to steel herself. “Simple. I want a deal.”

“A deal.”

“You know, one of those arrangements where I do something for you, you do something for me…”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” he said drily.

“You need a witch, I – ”

“I have a witch.”

She lifted her eyebrows, then looked down and away. “Yeah… about that…”

Elijah let the silence sit, charged, as his mind raced over the possibilities, none of them good. “I think you’d better bring me up to date,” he said grimly.

Andie sighed, then squared her shoulders. “The Martins are dead.”

Dead. The Martins. Plural.

“Stefan tried to talk to them, to get them to work with him and Damon, but… Jonas didn’t go for it.”

“What happened?” Elijah asked softly, dead calm.

“I wasn’t here, so I don’t know exactly, but from what I’ve been able to gather, they took an astral walk to locate you. Jonas wanted you resurrected.” Andie started fidgeting with a loose thread along the arm of the chair. “They found you, here, but instead of leaving it at that and coming back when no one was around, Luka tried to take the dagger out – ”

“Luka did?”

“He was the one being projected. He wouldn't have had the skill or power to anchor the spell. Jonas would have had to do it and send Luka.” She worked another thread loose. “Anyway, Katherine – who I'm not supposed to know is staying here, by the way – saw the dagger moving, and…”

Katerina. Damn it! With him dead, of course she'd be free to leave the tomb. And wreak God only knew what havoc with her particular brand of chaos.

“And?” he whispered.

She shifted in the chair, went back to worrying at the fabric. “Damon… Damon grabbed the flamethrower, and…” Andie straightened in the chair and met his eyes, reluctantly. “How much do you know about the mind/body link when it comes to this kind of magic?”

“Enough.” Enough to realize, with a sick feeling opening a chasm in the pit of his stomach, just what would have happened to the boy when the flames swept over his spirit form.

“Jonas…” Andie lifted her hands, let them drop into her lap. “He went off the reservation, Elijah. He showed up at the Grille, hollering for Elena. He set it on fire, he stabbed some busboy in the neck, threw a bunch of people around… and then he went after Elena at her house. They had to kill him to keep him from taking her. He just... went crazy.”

“His child was dead,” he murmured, his own words rising like gorge to coat the back of his throat in bitterness: The boy need not do anything other than make friends at his new school. Surely there's no harm in that?

Elijah’s scalp began prickling until the whole of it felt electrified. Sparks sprouted in his chest and ignited flames that pushed outward to limn his nerves in fire, all the way to the ends of his extremities. His lungs heaved, dragging in air in great gulps even though he had no real need to breathe. A rushing sound roared into his ears on the tide of a rapidly increasing heart rate, as the veins around his eyes engorged and turned them red.

He had long ago drawn the conclusion that, with strength and power such as he possessed, the sheer devastation that he could cause by indulging in a fit of pique was seldom in proportion to whatever had provided its catalyst in the first place. Consequently, Elijah very, very rarely lost his temper.

He lost it now.

Outdoors, with no real sense of how he’d gotten there save through the imperative to flee the confines of the house, he tore into the treeline and lay waste to whatever he found in his path. Trees, brush, boulders, a small shed… all were pulverized as he shredded, tossed, or crushed whatever came to hand as he whipped through in a blind rage.

And why not? Hadn’t he been making as big a mess out of everything he’d laid hands to since he’d left Manhattan? Always scrambling to get one step ahead, misjudging one situation after another… all in some vain and futile attempt to get something – anything – over on Klaus? And when had he ever been able to do that? Instead, he’d done all of Klaus’s prep work for him and played right into his hands, and what in hell did he have to show for it?

Nothing. Nothing but a dead boy, and a grief-maddened father who had followed him through the gates of death, seeking to answer for such an affront. Nothing but a hole through his heart that still bled from the betrayal that had pierced it. Nothing but a cold certainty that, despite his efforts and whatever they had cost him, Klaus would have his way again, just as he always did.

“Are you finished?” Andie asked quietly, from a little distance away.

Elijah turned his head to look at her, seeing as he did so the scope of the destruction he’d left in his wake, and climbed wearily to his feet from where he’d dropped to his knees. Was he finished? Was there any point left in fighting it? He could walk off this property, leave town, let Klaus have his ritual and break his curse, go hole up someplace quiet and solitary and just watch the world go by.

Whatever would be left of it.

The witch stood still, facing him, arms crossed as she waited to see what he would do.

“This deal,” he said at last, his voice hoarse. “What do you want?”

Evidently deciding he was through dealing violence for the time-being, Andie led him out of the carnage and back toward the house. “Klaus may make a big show out of hating technological advancement, but he’s the first to latch onto anything that he can twist to his advantage. He’s developed quite an obsession with genetics. All these centuries of stealing witches and locking them up, never finding one who had enough strength combined with the innate talent… I guess he decided, if he can’t find the perfect witch, he’ll figure out a way to breed one.” Andie paused at the open terrace door, and turned to face him, full on.

“I want the same deal you offered Jonas. I help you kill Klaus. In return,” she said, “you help me get my son.”

Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't that. “Your son?”

“Yeah. My son.” She held her hand out to him. “Do we have a deal?”

Because that’s working out so swimmingly. Bloody hell. Here he stood, the blood of one child still slick on his fingers, and she wanted to thrust the fate of another into them? How dare she? How dare he? Hadn’t all of this demonstrated quite profoundly that he wasn’t up to the task? That Klaus always had, and always would, come out on top? What did he have to give him any hope whatsoever of snatching victory from the jaws of this most resounding defeat?

Well, actually…

He had the dagger. He had one of Klaus’s witches, one who was obviously both skilled and trusted enough that he had chosen her for this particular assignment. Through her, and her surveillance of Damon, he had the location of the burial ground. He would have knowledge of Klaus’s movements, of his arrival in town. He had Jules on a nice, tight leash somewhere; he needed only to call her to heel.

And he would, by all that was holy or unholy, have the doppelganger – one way or another.

Elijah nodded slowly and extended his hand, clasping Andie’s in his own.

“Deal.”