CHAPTER 1: DEAD MAN WALKING
The void tasted like absence.
Marcus Chen—or what remained of him—drifted through endless darkness, consciousness fraying at the edges. No up. No down. No time. Just the whispers, constant and incomprehensible, threading through the nothing like silk through water.
He'd been crossing the street. Boston. Rain-slicked pavement. The screech of tires, too late, always too late. The impact had been a flash of white-hot agony, and then—
Nothing.
Except it wasn't nothing. It was this. The space between spaces. The breath between heartbeats stretched into eternity.
The whispers grew louder. Urgent. They pulled at him, tugging his dissolving consciousness in a direction that shouldn't exist. Marcus wanted to resist, but resistance required form, and form was a concept he'd left behind with his shattered body.
Light erupted through the darkness. Not light—wrong word. Sensation. Reality reasserting itself with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
His consciousness slammed into flesh.
Pain exploded through every nerve ending. His heart lurched, then beat—one thunderous contraction that sent blood screaming through veins. Lungs expanded, dragging in air that tasted of candles and old wood and something sharper, metallic. His fingers twitched. His eyelids peeled back.
Unfamiliar ceiling. Wooden beams crisscrossed overhead, shadows dancing in candlelight.
Marcus jolted upright, and the world tilted sideways.
Memories crashed into him like waves—but they weren't his memories. A dagger between the ribs, silver and burning. Klaus's face, twisted in rage and something uglier. "You've gone too far this time, little brother." Centuries of magical experimentation, bodies piling up in the name of knowledge. The coffin's interior, gray and silent, as decades blurred together. And further back—so much further—a village burning, a mother's spell, mortality traded for an eternity of hunger.
"Oh god," Marcus gasped, and the voice that came out wasn't his. British accent, sharp consonants, aristocratic edges worn smooth by time.
He tried to stand. His body moved too fast, vampire reflexes he didn't understand propelling him forward. His hand shot out to catch himself on a wooden support beam, and his fingers punched through the wood like it was wet paper.
Marcus stared at his hand—pale, long-fingered, not his—protruding from a hole in solid oak.
"What—what the—"
A scream cut through his confusion.
Marcus whipped around, and the world blurred. One instant he'd been facing the beam, the next he was across the room, back pressed against cold brick. His eyes found the source of the scream.
A girl. Eighteen, maybe younger, dark hair wild around her face. Her hands glowed with barely-contained power, magic crackling between her fingers like electricity. Terror and confusion warred in her expression.
"Who are you?" Her voice shook, but she held her ground. "What did I do wrong?"
Wrong question. She'd expected someone else. Someone who wouldn't gape at his own hands like they were alien appendages.
More memories surged forward, unbidden. Davina Claire. Harvest girl. Marcel's witch. She brought me back. The knowledge felt like it had always been there, but the perspective was wrong, filtered through someone else's experiences.
"I'm—" Marcus started, then stopped. What was he? A dead corporate executive from 2024 wearing a thousand-year-old vampire's body like an ill-fitting suit?
"Bloody hell," he muttered, and even that felt wrong in his mouth. The curse belonged to the memories flooding his skull, not to Marcus Chen who'd never said 'bloody' anything in his life.
Davina's magic flared brighter. "Kol, you're scaring me."
Kol. I'm Kol Mikaelson.
The name settled over him like a weight. Not his name, but his name now, because the alternative was admitting he was a hitchhiker in someone else's resurrection, and that was a conversation that ended in magical lobotomy or a stake through the heart.
"Sorry," Marcus—Kol—managed. He pulled his hand free from the beam with a splintering crack. Sawdust rained down. "The resurrection, it's... I'm confused. Everything's jumbled."
Amnesia. The oldest excuse in the book, but Davina latched onto it like a lifeline.
"You don't remember?" She lowered her hands slightly, magic dimming to a faint glow. "Anything?"
He did, but which memories were the problem? Kol's lifetime of magical experiments and family dysfunction, or Marcus's thirty-five years of quarterly reports and morning commutes?
Behind his eyes, the memories continued their collision course. Kol's first spell, fire dancing between child-sized fingers. Marcus's first apartment, IKEA furniture and student loans. Klaus turning on him, again and again, a cycle of betrayal and forgiveness spanning centuries. His mother's funeral, rain on the cemetery grass, knowing he'd never make partner now because he'd taken too many days off.
"I remember..." Kol started, then stopped. The void whispered in the back of his mind, a sensation like pressure change before a storm. Energy threaded through his veins, cold and foreign, nothing like the warm rush of magic in Kol's memories. "I remember dying. And then... darkness. Voices. And then you."
Davina's expression softened. "The spell worked. I brought you back." She hesitated. "But something felt wrong during the ritual. Like I opened a door I wasn't supposed to."
She had no idea how right she was.
Before Kol could formulate a response that wasn't a confession, reality tore.
The sensation hit him first—his void sense, though he didn't have a name for it yet, screaming a warning. Then the fabric of space itself ripped open between them, a wound in the world bleeding darkness and purple light.
Davina stumbled backward, throwing up a shield on instinct. Kol raised his arms uselessly, no idea how to defend against whatever was coming.
A book fell from the tear. No—it didn't fall so much as arrive, hovering in the air between them like it had always been there and reality was just catching up.
Black leather cover, gold inscriptions writhing across its surface in languages Kol shouldn't understand but somehow did. The book radiated power, old and hungry and patient.
The void in his veins surged toward it, recognizing something familiar. The book surged back.
They collided.
Magic exploded outward. The attic windows shattered, glass cascading into the New Orleans night. Candles guttered and died. Davina's shield cracked and reformed, barely holding. Kol felt the book sink into his chest, not physically but deeper, wrapping around his soul like a parasite or a symbiote—he couldn't tell which.
Then it was over.
The tear sealed itself. The pressure equalized. Kol stood in the wreckage of Davina's attic, glass crunching under his feet, with a black leather book hovering at his shoulder.
"What," Davina whispered, voice small and terrified, "did I resurrect?"
Kol stared at the book. The book stared back—he could feel its attention, a weight behind his eyes that suggested sentience.
In the memories that weren't his, Kol Mikaelson had spent a millennium collecting magical knowledge. He'd experimented with spells that would make most witches blanch. He'd traded decades in a coffin for the chance to push boundaries no one else dared approach.
But this? This was new.
Slowly, carefully, Kol reached for the book. His fingers brushed leather, and information flooded his mind. Not memories this time—knowledge. How the book worked, what it could do, the price it demanded.
A grimoire. His grimoire now, bound to his void-touched soul by the accident of his resurrection.
"I don't know," Kol said honestly, meeting Davina's eyes. "But I think we're about to find out."
Across the city, in a compound decorated with the spoils of two centuries, Marcel Gerard froze mid-move. His hand hovered over a chess piece, black king trapped by white pawns.
"Did you feel that?" Josh stood by the window, young face creased with concern.
Marcel had felt it. Every vampire in New Orleans had felt it—a shockwave of power radiating from the French Quarter, witch magic with an undertone of something else.
"Call everyone," Marcel said quietly. "I want eyes on the Quarter. Someone just did something very stupid or very brilliant."
He suspected it was both.
In Mystic Falls, a phone clattered to the hardwood floor.
Klaus Mikaelson stood motionless in his study, amber eyes wide, every muscle locked tight. The sensation rolled through him like thunder, impossible and undeniable.
A presence. Familiar. Infuriating. Impossible.
"Kol," he breathed.
But Kol was dead. Klaus had watched him die, had mourned in his own complicated way, had moved on because that's what one did after a millennium of losing siblings.
Except.
Klaus's hand tightened around the glass he'd been holding. Crystal shattered, bourbon and blood dripping between his fingers.
If Kol was alive—if somehow, impossibly, his baby brother had clawed his way back from death—then the game had changed.
And Klaus was very curious to learn the new rules.
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