Chapter 03
Kol didn’t know what Keelin and Freya were talking about when it came to the contents of Bella’s blood stream, and he didn’t particularly care because Freya was ‘taking care of it’. They had already slipped some cleansing herbs into Bella’s food and Freya even cleansed her up close with some spells, but it was going to take time to undo all the magic, and she wasn’t even sure she was supposed to undo all the magic, as she and Keelin had discovered that magic was in her DNA, amongst other junk.
However, he cared about the other things that Freya had informed him, and Klaus, of after reading Bella’s file. She had, on many occasions, had had uncharacteristic temper tantrums or freak outs and had turned brains to mush. Vampires had to be destroyed, and who better to do that than the wolf Bella had broken? In her cell, nonetheless! Right in front of her, too.
As of right now, it didn’t seem like Bella was going to freak out any time soon or have a temper tantrum. No, she was passive and only ‘lived’ underneath her table. The bed hadn’t been slept in, at all. She had grown more alert by the day, but Klaus posed a ‘what if’ question. What if she’d do such a thing? Not only would they be affected, but also the area around them, worst case scenario. But it could also mean nothing, that it was something else that had hurt those vampires and the wolf.
Bella was mildly telepathic, that was something they had already discovered, and were glad that she was using her words upon their request. But the only ability that hadn’t fully branded her as a ‘failure’ was her shield ability. She could trap someone in her shield, and it could deflect objects. People. Very useful in a child snatching situation. Was this ability the reason she’d been able to take care of herself with a demented wolf sharing her space with her?
And also very useful is she wanted to make a run for it.
Oh, he was in trouble. He had challenged her to escape and she had been determined to try. Truthfully, ever since learning of that ability, he made sure that all of her exits were blocked when he went outside or had a quick nap. She’d never make it out there by herself.
Bella had been eating better than she had previously; he made sure that she’d still get some of her oats, but then warm, with milk and berries and other fruits in the morning, some fruit in the afternoon and he’d tried to get her to eat some meat in the afternoon but she claimed to be too full to eat. Maybe skipping lunch was a better idea. However, she was pinking up even after a couple of days, still frail, but pinking up. And now he had to be careful. She was eating regularly, and she was getting stronger.
“You’ve neglected to tell me something, darling,” he said after knocking on her door and letting himself in, a playful smile on his face as he brought her a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table. She looked at him from her spot on the floor, puzzled, before getting to her feet and sitting down opposite of him. “You have other abilities than merely your telepathy.”
This wasn’t good, he knew what she could do. While she wasn’t at full strength, she could make a run for it now. Run away. Escape. But even though she could push people away with her shield, she couldn’t run fast, she was only human. She’d get caught eventually, that was the only reason why she hadn’t attempted to run away the day before, because she realized that she was a human, and she was surrounded by vampires. She looked down to her hands and nodded. “Yes sir, but you’ve never asked, either.”
“You’re not going to hurt my mind, are you?”
“N-no, sir!” She was slightly panicked, knowing that it was a bad thing to hurt other people and she didn’t like her accidents. “I’m a good girl, sir!”
“Relax,” he said soothingly. He had tried to compel her, but it hadn’t worked and Nik had laughed at him for even trying, because he already knew that the girl couldn’t be compelled. “I’m not worried. I understand that it’s a part of you that you don’t like to tell people about. After all, I’m your enemy, aren’t I? You’re still waiting for your Cold Ones to come back for you and you’re merely biding your time. I understand, darling,” he replied, a small smile on his lips. “You’ve been instructed well on that part. Very smart. I like that.”
She watched him rise from his seat again and there was no doubt in her mind that he was going to punish her for having those thoughts as he opened the door.
“Come on then,” he said as he pointed at the door. “The door’s open. The gate towards the outside is open. It basically never closes, so…” he shrugged as he leaned against the doorpost. “Let’s go.”
She was unsure what to do. He didn’t sound angry with her, but there was something in his voice that was different than before.
“I said, come here. Let’s go,” he said a bit more forcefully and hated himself as the girl scrambled to her feet and nearly tripped over them as she made her way over to him. “You have been here for a week, Bella,” he said as he gently pushed her in the right direction. “Granted, your first two days were a bit of a bad start on our behalf, but we have showed nothing but kindness to you, trying to help you get better, while you were here,” he continued as he kept pushing her towards the exit. “We’ve not done anything to hurt you, nor have we experimented on you. We’ve been trying to understand what’s been done to you so we can undo it and continue to help you. But that’s not enough for you, is it?”
“Y-you’re trying to confuse me, sir,” Bella stammered as she felt the cold tiles of the courtyard underneath her feet. “You’re trying to break me, because you think I had it bad at home and my—”
“We took you, like you were taking children. To give you a better life, like you did for those children. But we never hurt you, and the thanks we get for that is you’re wanting to leave. Well, go ahead. Leave. See how long you last out there on your own. You’re alone, Bella, truly alone. The center in Phoenix has been burned down, you have nowhere to go.” He shoved her over the threshold for good measure. She looked ridiculously out of place in the heat with her sweatpants, bare feet and fluffy cardigan. “Oh, and as you can see, New Orleans is too sunny for your kind of vampire to roam around in, especially by day, so I suppose… in three days or so someone might come and get you? But allow me to remind you, that they abandoned you. They could have taken you easily from Niklaus but they abandoned you. Left you.” He closed the gates behind her and locked them, before walking away.
He had no idea why, but he felt hurt, and he hated Nik for making him take care of the girl who clearly didn’t want to be helped. Perhaps it was cruel of him to treat her like this, but she needed to learn a lesson. No more kid gloves. If she’d truly leave the vicinity, he could always find her, her scent was burned into his nostrils, and he hated that. He hated himself for still wanting to save this girl and show her that life was to be enjoyed. He hated that he cared. He hated that he was fighting himself for walking back and to pull her back in. No, he wasn’t going to do that. At least not for a few hours. She needed to witness life outside the walls and realize that her life wasn’t normal and that he was merely trying to help her, yes.
Bella looked at Kol’s retreating back and she wasn’t sure what to do. He had let her go, just like that. Even locked the gate so she couldn’t get back in, but why would she want to get back in? She had liked his visits, she never received many visits when she was in confinement, but she also knew she had to go back home. Was this another test? What would happen if she’d truly walk away, would he come back to stop her? Did she want him to stop her?
She sat down at the gate and pulled her knees towards her chest, making herself as small as possible as she tried to make sense of her conflicting thoughts. Her loyalty was supposed to be to the Cullens, to her people, but they did abandon her and allowed her to be taken by Kol’s brother. Just like that. Because she was defective and they didn’t like her, anyway. They weren’t going to get her. To them, she may be dead, or perhaps she’d be that soon due to her change of diet.
Kol treated her like Jasper would. Like someone who was allowed to have her own thoughts and opinions, he asked her questions to make her think, and was being locked in a room that was warm that bad? It was different, because these vampires had a different lifestyle. She had to use a toilet and the shower. She wasn’t allowed to feel anything, but she couldn’t help but feeling warm. Everything was light, not dark. And Kol had been right, there were no experiments by doctors, only that one time when the girl doctor came to pull blood out of her body instead of injecting her with something. That had been strange. Or how Freya started to speak in a different language and blew smoke in her face on several occasions, that had been extremely strange.
She had seen everything as a punishment. The food. The shower. The room. The talking. But it hadn’t been a punishment, she didn’t have to pretend it didn’t hurt because it didn’t hurt. It hadn’t hurt. Not being allowed back into the building was what hurt. Because now she was alone. All alone. No one was going to come to help her, and while she had said she was capable of taking care of herself, she wasn’t. Her strength would diminish over the course of a week or two, depending on how much food she had had, and she had had a lot in the last few days.
She was like the children she had sent home; ungrateful and unfit for a different life, hanging on too much onto the past, from the place they’d been taken. But, in her case, there wasn’t someone like Jasper who’d bring her home. There wasn’t a home to go home to, she didn’t know where New Orleans was, or Alaska, for all she knew it was worlds apart or extremely close, but how was she going to get there? By herself?
The main question she needed to ask herself was; if she’d run into a Cold One now, would she beg them to take her home? Or would she run away? Because there were good Cold Ones and bad Cold Ones. And not every Cold One knew each other. And according to Jasper, most of them didn’t even like each other. There were even Cold Ones who wanted puppets so they could have their way with them, and according to Doctor Carlisle, that was a bad thing, especially for Bella.
Kol had asked her if she’d hurt him and she said ‘no’, because he was a good person, a good vampire, and he didn’t deserve to end up like Sam had. And he had told her to leave, because he discovered her plans, her thoughts, about leaving. But now that she was outside, it was scary. It was getting dark, people were getting louder and were tripping over her because she was in the way.
She couldn’t breathe. Her chest felt heavy and she couldn’t breathe, she could feel her insides tingle, her brain was swimming and she couldn’t breathe. The last time this happened she’d hurt a handful of vampires and she was far too close to the building for this to happen now. This wasn’t good. She couldn’t contain it in her bubble, they didn’t work well together. Bella needed to run and hope she’d be as far away as possible from the building when she’d explode.
She tried to get up but was knocked over by a passerby and that knocked the air straight out of her chest. No. It was happening. There were tears rolling down her cheeks. Tears were a foreign thing to her, and they always came when she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t allow her to hurt Kol or his family, they didn’t deserve it. Nobody deserved it, but she couldn’t stop it. The least she could try was to direct it into one direction. Not to her back, but only towards the front, outward.
Her brain exploded then, she let out a cry as the sharp pain shot right through her head, causing her to start breathing again as several people dropped in the street before her, a car was coming right for her but she was just in time to put up her shield so it bounced right off, into a building opposite.
She hugged her knees to her chest again and started to sob. She had hurt people again, because she was hurt. She was alone and now there were people hurt. It had been her fault. She was a bad girl. A very bad girl, what was going to happen to her now? She should have allowed that car to hit her, it’s what she deserved.
~o.O.o~
Jasper had sensed her from miles away and they had to hurry, she could hurt a lot of people if she was set off, and he worried about the safety of others. Unfortunately, they arrived too late, there’d been no sign of her, and Klaus and a pretty little blonde were doing damage control.
Myriam felt how her heart sank. “What exactly makes her do this?” She questioned as they watched from afar. “I mean, this is bad, Jasper. She’s a danger to people around her, how the hell are we supposed to take care of her?”
“Well, we can take care of her because I can regulate her emotions,” Jasper replied coolly, hating the scene before them. “Ease her into feeling things the way things should be felt. She was taught not to feel. Not to show any emotion, but under duress or extreme stress, she can’t stop herself from feeling and everything comes at once. Then this happens.” He nodded towards the building next to the street. “She’s in there. She’s confused, or she’s feeling torn about something. She’s also sad and lonely. She feels abandoned. Shame. Defective. It’ll take a few hours for her to compose herself again, but she’s haven’t had an episode like this for about a year now. She knows she’s a danger to everyone.”
“So it’s something mental. I can deflect this,” Myriam realized. “I can make sure nobody gets hurt, and we weren’t fast enough.”
“Unfortunately we weren’t,” Jasper agreed, feeling how sad Myriam was about all of this. “But if it makes you feel any better, the person who’s now with her seems to adore her. They’re not like the Cullens, Myriam, perhaps she’s better off with them.”
“No. She’s better of with us,” she said determined. “I didn’t come this far to leave her with some wannabe vampires who, whatever their intentions might be, could turn her into a weapon. You’ve said it yourself, Klaus Mikaelson is a monster.”
“And yet, he genuinely seems to be affected by the people in the street.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to get her back. Now. We’re so close!”
He put a hand on his lover’s shoulder. “Let them deal with the fallout first. For now, she’s safe. Your presence will only aggravate them.”
“Let go of me.”
“Myriam,” he said calmly as he reached out to her with his gift, only to have it reflected back. “That’s not fair.”
“No, you’re not being—” She narrowed her eyes before turning around, coming face to face with a traditional vampire. “What do you want?”
“Your kind is not welcome in the Quarter,” the vampire replied as several more vampires appeared behind him. “We’re here to keep the Quarter safe, especially after what has just happened.”
“Bite me, asshole,” Myriam spat, and wanted to take the vampire down, but Jasper held her back. “Jasper!”
“They’re Klaus’ vampires. It won’t look good for you if you kill them now. Let’s leave.”
“Oh, but I can’t allow you to leave either,” the vampire replied. “You’re coming with me, I’m sure I know someone who would love for you to pay for your atrocities against children, especially his daughter.”
Myriam growled when the vampires took hold of them and couldn’t help but to kill them all in one fell swoop. “You see, that’s the downside of your kind, you’re so damn breakable,” she snarled, leaving the one who was seemingly in charge alive. “Don’t put your filthy hands on me again! Let’s go, Jasper.”
“You need to calm down,” Jasper said once they were sufficiently far away from the French Quarter. “You’re of no use when you’re like this.”
“I am this close to get her and I can’t get to her! That’s ridiculous! Just let me march in there and get her, what’s so hard about that? Fuck it, we don’t need Klaus Mikaelson as an ally, I just want her, we’ll fight the Volturi on our own if we have to!”
He sat her down. He understood her rage and in her rage she wouldn’t be able to see reason. “You need to calm down, we’ll discuss this when you’ve calmed down. Let me help you.”
“Don’t you dare,” she warned him. “Jasper, I love you, but I will kill you if you try that again.”
He held his hands up in complete surrender. “Fine, but you need to promise me not to do anything while you’re feeling like this.”
“I promise,” she snapped as she crossed her arms over her chest and looked out over the city from the rooftop they were on. “This fucking sucks!” She yelled at nobody in particular.
Oh, he knew he was in trouble. Klaus had only needed to give him that look after Bella released everything and people dropped in the street, but it had been needed. He had figured it was tied to her emotions and he wanted to make sure that the pressure went off the cooker. Perhaps then she’d start to see reason, that she didn’t have to escape to go back. Kol hadn’t expected, however, that while the people dropped in front of the building that he and his siblings would be knocked off their feet by all the emotions she’d been feeling.
He had opened the gate and scooped her up, off the streets as Klaus, Elijah and Freya went outside for damage control and had taken her inside her space, onto the sofa and he had wrapped her up in a warm blanket and was now holding her as she was still sobbing. He hadn’t seen her cry before, because they had taught her not to. Didn’t they know humans needed to cry every once in awhile? That their emotions and feelings were valid, how small or petty they may have seen? Or perhaps they wanted Bella to be desensitized, so that she’d be a mindless drone. “You’re alright, darling,” he said soothingly as he gently rubbed her back. “You’re alright.”
“I’m a bad person,” she sobbed. “I hurt people.”
“You’re not a bad person, Bella. If anything, I’m the one in trouble for pushing you to your limits like that,” he said, which made her look up to him with her tearstained eyes. “Nik might actually put me back into my box,” he said with a slight chuckle, but there was no joking around. “I shouldn’t have done what I did, I apologize. But you’re not a bad person, just so you know.”
“But—”
“The people who were affected, and their families, will be compensated, quite generously, because of a gas leak in a drug lab down the street, coming up from the sewers and knocking them all back, don’t worry about it,” he told her.
“I never want to do that… it just happens…”
“How about, from now on, you’re voicing all of your feelings and emotions? No doubt you’ve been experiencing them and thinking about them, but tell me how you feel. You’re allowed to, you know. For a start, I can tell you that I’m quite scared that Nik is going to put me away for scaring you so.”
“I wasn’t scared,” Bella said softly as she rubbed her eyes, but not moving from how they were sitting. “I can’t be scared. I’m confused and I’m alone. You seemed to be glad to see me leave. I… they left me. They abandoned me and allowed Klaus to take me here. And then he went after them. And destroying things and… they weren’t coming for me. I was alone and then you… You came to visit me and made me smile. Feel something, but I’m not allowed to feel. And you told me to leave because you found out I still wanted to leave, but I don’t. Kol, I don’t want to leave. There’s nothing for me and I-I am willing to try to become more like you. To try and see things differently.”
She called him Kol, not sir. This made him feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. In fact, she hadn’t used ‘sir’ since she started to be able to form coherent sentences again. “Is that the truth or are you saying that because you know I want to hear that?”
“No! It’s… no, it’s me. It’s me. Please,” she said desperately, clinging onto him like a small child. “I don’t ever want to feel alone again. Please. Help me. I’ll do everything, just don’t leave me. I’ll try to forget my training. Train me your way. Please.”
His heart broke for her. She was riding an emotional rollercoaster right now, and she was a mess. Hell, even he was still reeling from everything that he felt coming off of her while she had her meltdown. He sure hoped that she’d still think this way once she’d gone through it all. Pulling her closer to him, he slowly nodded. “Try to get some sleep, darling,” he said softly. “It’s been a trying evening for you.”
“You’re not leaving?”
“I’ll be still here when you wake, I’m not moving.”
Bella was quiet for a while and he was pretty sure she’d dozed off until he heard her whisper. “Kol?”
“Yes, darling?” He liked hearing her say his name.
“Is this kindness?”
He chuckled at that. “Darling, everything I’ve done for you this week is kindness, although pushing you like I have this evening is a little thing called tough love. You do that when you can’t get through to someone because they’re so stubborn.”
“I’ll stop with that,” she whispered again. “I like kindness.”
“So do I, darling, so do I,” he smiled as she then dozed off with a tiny, satisfying smile on her face and, in that moment, he found her absolutely beautiful.
A couple of hours later, Bella startled awake as Klaus just about kicked down the door and advanced on her and Kol, who had been startled awake as well. She quickly put up her shield and Klaus bounced off of it. Klaus was filled with rage and it was directed to the both of them. She couldn’t allow him to hurt Kol. She simply couldn’t. Kindness.
“Lower that shield, Bella,” Klaus growled at her. “Or I swear, I’ll—”
“No, sir,” she replied. She was only going to lower the shield when Kol told her to, she liked Kol. Klaus, not so much. He was always filled with so much anger and rage, she could even sense it when he was on the other side of the building, it was that intense.
“Nik, let me explain…”
“Explain? She,” Klaus angrily pointed at Bella as he continued to speak. “Is a danger to us all! You knew this and yet, you decided to push her to her limits! Twenty people got hurt, Kol! Twenty people because you wanted to prove a point! Couldn’t you have taken her somewhere quiet with no humans around to do your little experiment!”
“It was a spur of the moment thing,” Kol said with a shrug.
“Twenty people?” Bella asked with a small voice. That must be a record, but these were ordinary humans and that wasn’t good. “I’m—”
“Don’t say it, darling,” Kol said gently before looking at his brother again. “It won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t, because she’s going to move out, she’s a danger to the Quarter, to New Orleans. You can take her to our safe house outside the city.”
“Nik!”
“Or kill her. She’s no longer welcome in my house!” A wave of fear rolled off of the hybrid, one that made a great impact on Bella.
“He’s not angry, he’s afraid,” she said softly. “Like they were, but they couldn’t send me away because nobody wanted me. H-he believes I might use it on him, but I would never! I tried so hard to make sure you weren’t affected! A-and it won’t happen again! I promise! I-I’ll be a good girl!”
She was tensing up, he could feel it and it was all because of his brother forgetting to tuck his feelings away, and his thoughts, in this case. “Shh, breathe,” Kol soothed her. “I believe you.” Granted, she was a danger to them all, but they were more protected here. Not all the Cold Ones responsible for her care were dead yet and, he really needed Freya’s help with the magical aspect of Bella’s troubles. “I’m going outside with my brother to talk to him, okay? I’ll be safe. I promise. You won’t have to shield me.”
Bella removed her shield from Kol but kept hers up, just in case. When Kol left the space as he pushed his brother out, she got off the sofa and sat down in a corner, hugging her knees to her chest, trying to keep breathing. She wouldn’t mind being sent away, if that’s what they wanted, then she had to be sent away. And if Kol decided to leave her alone, then that was alright too. She was a monster. She had hurt twenty people, innocent humans who were now hurt for the rest of their lives. She didn’t deserve kindness. She deserved to be punished. Death.
“Do you have any idea what you just did, Nik?” Kol said furiously as he pushed his brother into the courtyard. “I was making progress with her and now it’s likely that I have to start all over again!”
“She’s a danger to us all!”
“And you knew that! You can’t deny her presence in this house merely because the unthinkable happened and you had to clean up her mess!” Kol shot at him. “Even without this ability, she’s a danger to us all because frankly, I’m not convinced that the Cold Ones have given up on her.”
“We can’t die, Kol,” Klaus rolled his eyes at him. “But we can get our insides turned into jelly!”
“And she made sure that didn’t happen.” Kol said calmly. “Instead, we all got to feel what she was feeling, every sordid feeling from the past year, since her last meltdown. Don’t you get it, Nik? They made her like this by denying her to feel. In a way, she’s like you, a timebomb, waiting to go off. Or like me, really, you know how I can get when I get really angry. We are all dangerous creatures, and fortunately, I believe that we can make her less of a danger. She’s more relaxed now, open to everything. I simply need more time.”
“I have to say that for once, I’m on Kol’s side, brother,” Elijah said as he walked down the staircase towards his brothers. “She didn’t hurt us.”
“And she won’t,” Kol was convinced that she wouldn’t.
“The girl can’t live on her own and we can’t risk her going back to the Cold Ones. She has seen too much, knows too much. It’s best we keep her here and give our brother some more time,” Elijah continued as he stood next to his brother. “I, too, have read her file as Freya needed some help figuring things out. To my knowledge, she hasn’t killed anyone, merely incapacitated them for the rest of their lives and they were all accidents.”
“Caused by her getting a meltdown because you can’t stop humans from feeling and think that it’s going to be alright,” Kol muttered. “She’s fine now. I’ll make sure she stays that way, but you barging in like that didn’t help, Nik.”
“The girl stays,” Elijah decided. “Merely because you wanted to help her and now you’ll have to see it through despite you pawning her off to our youngest brother.” He then sighed and looked at Kol. “You may return to the girl now, Kol, I will handle Niklaus.” Elijah then hesitated, wondering if he should give this piece of information and then decided yes. “Marcellus encountered two Cold Ones in the Quarter tonight, the female killed those he had been patrolling with, but kept him alive.”
“So they are coming for her!”
“Let them come,” Elijah said quietly as he lead his brother to his study. “Go back to the girl, Kol, see if you can undo some of the damage Niklaus has done.”
Kol went to fetch himself a blood bag first and finished it before going back to Bella. He found her in the corner of the room, once again made herself as small as possible. He took the blanket off the sofa and sat down next to her, wrapping her up in the blanket and put his arm back around her. “You don’t have to leave,” he said softly and gently squeezed her arm. “Majority vote, and Nik was outvoted.”
“Twenty people…”
Kol huffed. “That’s nothing. You didn’t even kill them. In the past, we used to decimate entire villages. Eat them. Burn houses, create chaos and mayhem. And look at us now, we only kill for sports or when we’re under siege!”
She blinked at him in surprise. “But you’re a vampire, that’s what you do.”
“True,” he nodded. “But as the times change, so did we. Granted, there are times where I’d love nothing but to eat my way through an entire party for shits and giggles, but that rarely happens these days.”
“Why?”
He then told her about his time as a human, recently, and everything that he had learned. She listened intently and he made sure that he mentioned that it had been a long process for him to learn to have some control over his bloodlust, and his emotions. He told her about how he was the wild one of the family, and how he was the one who needed to create a mess at times so his family could be safe and feel better about themselves for not having done atrocious things themselves. “Change doesn’t happen overnight, Bella, but making an effort is half the battle.”
“But I’m a monster.”
“Nah, compared to us you’re a saint,” he smiled at her. “You’re a good girl and in time you’ll get even better. But the most important thing is that you’re not leaving. I am not going to take you away and bring you some place else.”
“We’re safe?”
“Of course!”
She finally moved then and shifted so she was sitting against him again, like they had sat on the sofa. Only time would tell if she’d remain this open to talking openly, and not referring to him as ‘sir’, but for now, he actually liked the way that she was and he was going to try his very best not to allow his family to corrupt her, to make sure she found her own way and her own two feet amongst them. But for now, he was glad that she allowed herself to fall back asleep.
Kol left her alone for most of the next day and the day after that, he managed to get Bella out in the courtyard for breakfast. A glorious platter of assorted fruits, all the colors and they were all for her to try. And a stack of pancakes. Who didn’t love pancakes? To switch up on her bananas and orange juice. Granted, Bella’s orange juice contained something Freya concocted to try and eliminate some of the magical damage done to Bella, but it was time for Bella to experience more food choices. Again, within reason, seeing as her body was still getting used to regular food sessions and bowel movements. Kol knew that Bella hurt, at times, but she never showed it.
She had the freedom to be curious, the freedom to feel and the freedom to share what she wanted to share, and while it was hard for her, she was making an effort. “Oh, what’s that?” Bella pointed at the cup of tea, her nose nearly in it as she tried to smell it. “It’s hot?”
“That’s tea, darling,” Kol laughed. “And yes, it’s hot. When it’s cooled down somewhat, you can have a taste.”
“Why is it hot?”
“Because some beverages, and most food, are best enjoyed hot,” he said as he rolled up a pancake for her and handed it to her. “This is a pancake, and it’s warm. You can even have your banana rolled into it and I happen to know that it’s delicious with chocolate.”
The pancake felt moist and warm in her hand, but it smelled good. She nibbled on it and than sat down in her chair to eat it all. It was delicious!
Bella let out just the tiniest of giggles as she finished her pancake and it was adorable. He hadn’t really heard her laugh or giggle in the last few days and it was great that she was allowing herself to enjoy things. “That good, huh?” He asked, a big smile on his face. “Would you like another one?”
“Can I? I think there’s still room for one more…”
“Of course,” he handed her another pancake but frowned when she stiffened. “What’s wrong, darling?”
She believed she had sensed Jasper. It felt like him, the way he slipped into her mind. And while Jasper had been her friend, helping her with the children she let out, he was a Cold One. A Cullen. He was with someone else. A female but not Alice. A very strong female and her rage was the same as that of Klaus, if not worse. And they were close. “They’re here,” she whispered as she dropped her pancake. She couldn’t be seen eating food that wasn’t meant for her, she couldn’t be seen sitting on a chair. She couldn’t be seen. She didn’t want to be taken away. “Please don’t let them take me,” she said as she looked at Kol with tears in her eyes. “They can’t take me because they didn’t want me anymore.”
“Hey, it’s alright,” he soothed her, gently putting his hand on her leg and squeezed it. “It’s going to be alright, I’m not going to let you go, remember?” He looked up to Klaus’ study. “Nik! Elijah! Freya! They’re coming!”
“What? In the morning? The sun’s out!” Freya said as she quickly put her hair in a messy bun. “Then again… this is New Orleans… stranger things have happened… It’s still early in the day… Eh,” she shrugged. “I need coffee.” She then noticed the table filled with food. “Oh, food! Fingerfood! Yum!”
“Freya.”
“Give me a minute, I’m hungover,” she muttered as she sat down next to Bella and bit down on a piece of pineapple. “Don’t worry, Bella, you’re safe here. There’s two of them and there’s four of us… well, five, including you,” she smiled before she reached for one of the cups of tea.
“Jasper, h-he can influence emotions, make you more agreeable and less angry. You all need to stay close so I can put you in my shield so he can’t do that.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Freya smiled at her before reassuringly squeezing her leg. “So, how close are they?”
“Close…”
Just as Elijah and Klaus came downstairs to join Kol, Freya and Bella, two hooded figures stood in the entrance of the courtyard. “Quite the flair for the dramatic,” Klaus huffed and motioned for the two Cold Ones to come in. Marcel and his vampires were going to make sure they wouldn’t have an easy escape. “Goodmorning, have a seat,” he said as he pointed at the empty chairs. “I hope you don’t mind, we were having breakfast. I would offer you some, but then again… you’d only decline.”
“Don’t be scared,” Freya said to Bella and handed her the pancake that she’d dropped earlier. “We made a battle plan yesterday. If they were truly coming to take you away, they would have showed up in numbers, not with just the two of them, no matter their abilities. Let Klaus do the talking and don’t allow them inside your mind, okay?”
Bella nodded, but she was unsure if she was capable of eating now. She was holding her pancake and looked at Kol, who was sitting on the other side of her now. Sitting between him and Freya, Bella felt safe. Freya was kind. Just like Kol.
“Go on, eat it. I’d like to see the scowl on their faces because we’re letting you eat what you should be eating,” he grinned as he popped a piece of apple in his mouth.
Elijah got to his feet and opened the large parasols to block the rising sun to make sitting in the courtyard be more bearable to them all. He had no desire to have a conversation being distracted by a lightshow. “Welcome,” he said as the Cold Ones removed their hoods. “I’m Elijah Mikaelson, this is my brother Klaus, my brother Kol and my sister Freya. And, of course, one of your former charges, Bella.”
“The name’s Jasper Whitlock, sir. This is my friend Myriam Jenkins and Bella was not our charge,” he said as he sat down, surprised that Bella hadn’t thrown her shield up and surprised by the fact that these traditionals genuinely seemed to care about her. Apart from the hybrid, he was still shaken by Bella’s actions only a couple of days earlier. “She was my protectee, I kept an eye on her as much as I could and intervened in some cases.”
“Is that so, Bella?” Klaus asked her as she was nibbling on her pancake like some sort of rabbit. He had to admit, she was brave. Very brave. “Is Mr. Whitlock telling the truth?”
