Lights Flicker And Fade : Kol Mikaelson [3]

267: Give 'Em Hell, Kid

26th MARCH 2014, 11 P.M.
NEW ORLEANS

The night sky was dark, covering the area like a dome, trapping the smell of death in the air. Pressing it down. Letting it bleed into the land, built off blood and bodies.

It was the last time the city would feel like this.

They would wake up, and the rain would have washed it all away, never to linger ever again. It was not a cruel force, but a goodbye kiss, terrified to leave, but unable to stay, leaving its mark in the heart of the city. The city left to wonder what mark it had left in return.

The rain hadn't started yet.

The sky was a deep blue, and the stars were trying to recreate history. Trying to act as eyes into the world, only for the fog to mask them like tracing paper. Not quite wiping them out, but not letting them in either. They did not get to laugh anymore. They did not get taunt.

In their place, throughout New Orleans, tiny balls of light were set into the air, a mix of colours floating above the ever busy nightlife. In the past it would have been dark. It would have been gloomy. It wouldn't have had cuts of gold, streets becoming embroidered patterns against the dark clothing on the world. Floating lanterns drifting through the city.

Were these lights laughing at them as the stars once had?

They certainly taunted just the same.

A wave of mourning, syncing up more than spirits and stars, but the living, and the dead, and everything in between, reminding every eye that lingered on them, that there will always be a higher power in the world. Waiting to step on you, the way you step on ants.

Marcel Gerards body sunk, bubbles rippling out, only to be ripped downstream as nature raced him away from the bridge that had tossed him there. His pseudo-father powerless to stop it.

A story that told so many times that the details had become vague.

Maybe pain wasn't the thing that united all witches, but the thing that branded all life.

Letting his skin turn grey, dark veins overtaking his arms until they couldn't move, chest empty, heart in someone else's hand, as the far cry of thunder fought against the lanterns in the sky.

Was there any other way for Marcel to have died?

A second boom came only moments later, like it was trying to scare the people sitting in the cemetery out of their vigil, only to be met with resistance.

His heart was gone – stolen from his body to feed the city.

And while no one wished to sit through a storm, they were not about to run from it either. Staring up at the sky to watch their lanterns pass over the moon. A full one at that. The first sign that a different day should've been chosen by his killers. That everything was too aligned. The howls of wolves who didn't have rings raced through the forest, a reminder that monsters were in fact real, and out there, and waiting for them.

The first monsters to strike The Mikaelson's.

What had started as a way to lose a son – what had created vampires to begin with, was bleeding back into their lives thanks to that missing heart.

Another son lost to the bite of a wolf.

Like the witches in the cemetery, fear was not in that river either. Someone bold enough to move against the current, a single splash, diving in, and hooking arms around shoulders before kicking up.

Kol Mikaelson.

Fear had never done him any good, it seemed, so he ceased to be afraid.

Fully clothed, he hiked Marcel Gerard to the surface, the cold air hitting their faces, hair dripping over his forehead as he looked to that sky and smiled. At that waxy yellow moon. He leant back, swimming towards the grassy Bywater-Marigny plane.