White Blood | Klaus Mikaelson

Chapter Thirty

1967 — Manhattan, New York

   The thought of losing Gianni was a constant reminder to Eleanor Fraser. As soon as the Vietnam War began, he was the first to join, Nikolas Nakov—who took the last name of his adoptive father—following soon after. For the past two years, Eleanor had been worried about the boy she called her son, anxiously waiting for two soldiers in their Class A uniforms to knock on her front door. She wore worry like her own personal scent, an expensive perfume bought in France.

   Eleanor breathed deeply as she picked up the stack of letters on her dresser, each written in the messy, cursive writing of Gianni. He sent letters, of course, each giving her a story of what was happening in the places he'd been in Vietnam. Each envelope held several pages, different papers with different dates, some stained with dried blood that could have belonged to him or someone else. The last she had heard from Gianni, he was heading to the hinterlands of Dắk Tô, a village that bordered Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

   "How long have you been hiding here?" Elijah's voice broke the silence of her bedroom. He stood at the doorway, hands behind his back and his head held high.

   She put the stack of letters back in their place and smiled at him. "I just..." There was no excuse, so she let her smile fall and a sigh escape her mouth. "I don't want to go out to the city, Elijah. I've lived here for so long that I think I've seen every inch of it." There was her excuse.

   "You do know that they're building more as we speak, right?" He walked in, closer to her, his eyes moving to the stack of letters. A small smile broke on his lips as he nodded. "Is it that you've seen all of the city or that you're worried?"

   "I'm terrified," she answered truthfully. "Elijah, he's a boy."

   "A vampire," he corrected. "As much as you don't want to admit it, he's considered both a man and a vampire, and older than you by three years."

   She rolled her eyes, but then sighed. Slowly, she sat on the bed and laid her hands on her lap. "I raised him since he was seven," she said. "I watched him grow from a boy to a young man, to something far more greater than anything I could imagine. I knew that if I had ever had a biological son, I would want him to be exactly like Gianni, except for his thoughts on war. He thinks war is a game; how many enemies can I kill with both my teeth and weapons?" She turned to Elijah and smiled sadly. "He has a journal with tally marks, you know. Each mark is someone he's killed, a faceless person. None of them have names because he knows them by heart, they haunt him. He thinks I'm oblivious to that, but I watches him grow up; I know when he lies and when he's keeping secrets."

   "You really think of him as your son," Elijah said in wonder. "Does he know?"

   "I hope he does," she smiled. "If he doesn't, then I have done a terrible job in raising him." She took a deep breath to compose herself, then bit her bottom lip. "Sometimes, Elijah, I wonder if I did a good job in raising him."

   "You did," the Original said with a small smile forming on his lips. "This boy is a mixture of you and Thomas, the people that became his parents. From Thomas, he's a soldier, a man afraid of nothing. From you, he's the lover, a boy who would do anything for what he believes. It's a perfect mixture."

   A smile rose on her lips as his words sank both into her mind and her chest. "Are you praising me?"

   Elijah chuckled and shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe I am," he said, pushing his hand into his pocket. "Or, maybe I'm just talking to you so you wouldn't hear the front door open and people walk in."

   "What?"

   He motioned to the door with his hand. "Go to the living room, Eleanor."

   The young vampire slowly stood from the bed and walked out of the room, confusion running through her. The house was a five bedroom house located in Greenwich Village, adjacent to Washington Square Park. It rose on the twelfth floor of an elegant white-glove building, with multiple terraces for each bedroom and the living room. Each had a view of the Greenwich Village rooftops, Washington Square Park, and the Midtown skyline—all loved by Eleanor. Out of all of the houses she had lived it, it was her second favourite. Her first would forever be the house they had while in Poland, the big and spacious house where so many fond memories were stored.