I. THE OATH MADE FLESH

   ADELINE Nocturne was not born so much as arranged.

   In the crumbling compound at the edge of Mystic Falls, the women who remained of the once renowned Nocturne coven kept to lamplight when everyone else had moved on to porch bulbs and television glow. They had been witches once, so they said, before power went out of them like breath on winter glass.

   The source of their demise? Aiding the Original Hybrid. It was a devastating tale of witches who thought themselves above nature, only for them to be reminded they are the servants, not the masters.

   Now, they lived secluded in a fenced compound that smelled of iron and rosemary: eight women and one baby behind a gate that clicked shut like a sentence. The town whispered that it was a cult and truthfully, they weren't entirely wrong.

   The seer named her on the first night.

   They had pricked the soft swell of Adeline's heel and let a bright bead fall into a shallow silver bowl. The bowl hissed, though no one could say why, and the seer—whose eyes were gone milk-blue with visions that still came even when other magics did not—spoke in a voice like a page being torn.

   "She is the vessel," the seer said. "Bride by covenant. She will wed Mikaelson blood and our night will burn again."

   No one clapped, the women simply pressed their palms together until the bones showed. Adeline slept on, mouth open in the flat O of newborns, completely unaware that a future had been set in a room that would always be too dark. From then on, she was not raised so much as polished.

  Adeline had learned to kneel before she learned to walk. She knew how to bow before she was taught to run. To fold her hands just so and to stand so straight her spine ached. If she laughed, someone murmured hush and thumbed the mirth from the corners of her mouth. If she cried, someone took her to the washroom and closed the door— then taught her the difference between noise and dignity. "You are a promise," her mother said, threading Adeline's dark hair into a braid so tight it pulled her eyes. "Promises do not fidget."

   While the other girls in town learned multiplication tables and dodgeball rules, Adeline learned scripture with no God at the end of it— lines of an old covenant copied in a careful hand until they lived under her skin.

   When the beast of wolf and man is loosed,
   The daggered son shall wake to bone and bride.
   One daughter, kept in silence and sacrifice,
   shall bear the blood that stitches night to flame.

   They hung the words above her bed in a simple wooden frame. She traced them at night the way other girls might trace freckles. The letters bit her fingers, but she almost liked that they hurt— to her, it meant they were real.

   The compound was a pair of houses tacked together with hallways and prayers. A black wrought-iron fence ringed a yard that had gone to clover. The postman refused to drive up the gravel and left their parcels in a metal box by the road. Teenagers dared one another to touch the gate and shrieked as if it burned. Adeline watched through the lace curtains and imagined the way hot summer air might feel if it were allowed all the way in.

   She did not go to school. She did not have friends. She learned things in the way sequestered girls do— buried in books that smelled of old damp; from glimpses at the crack of the door when one of her aunts returned from town; from the high and bright laughter of the public school bus as it rattled past their corner. She leaned out her window and breathed in the dust of it like perfume.

   At twelve, she was given a schedule and a silver thimble. The schedule parceled her days into posture, diction, needlework for the hands that must always be busy, and of course, piano for the wrists that must stay soft. Her schedule was built to make her a perfect wife. A perfect girl to be presented on a platter to a monster to bear his children. The thimble was for pricking herself cleanly when the seer asked for a drop. "A body forgets it belongs to the covenant," an aunt said, "unless it is reminded."

   Her meals were measured; her bread cut thin, if it were allowed at all, meat trimmed of fat, sweets reserved for special days, and even then wiped from the lips with a stern cloth. "A vessel must be tended," her mother, Adelia, would say, looking at Adeline the way one looks at a porcelain bowl in a high cabinet. Owned, necessary, and never to be chipped.

   She asked once, just once, why him?

   Her mother blinked, but it was not anger that showed, not at first, but bewilderment that there could be anything to ask.

   "Because power marries power," she said softly, as if explaining the seasons. "Because our line is ash. Because Mikaelson blood can set it burning again. Because you were girl born the time it could be done. Adeline, your birth aligned with the breaking of the hybrid's curse, do you know what that makes you? Our oath made flesh."

   Adeline nodded— she had been taught to nod. She went to the washroom and pressed her palms to the cool white sink and whispered the question into the porcelain instead, where no one could hear.

   Who is he?

   She knew the answer the way one knows stories— a wolf of a man whose laugh could peel paint, a boy who had been a boy for a very long time, and a brother sleeping with a silver knife through his heart in a coffin built like a secret. Sometimes, in the thin hour before dawn, when the house felt like a mouth holding its breath, she swore she could hear him knocking. Though, it was only the old pipes ticking.

   Of course, there were small rebellions, the kind that prove a person is still a person. She wasn't entirely a doll. Not yet, at least.

   Once, she stole a sugar cookie from the pantry and ate it standing up, the sugar shocking her tongue, she was never allowed that much at once. From time to time, she pulled her braid loose and let her hair fall warm and heavy down her back, just to know what it felt like. She lifted the latch on the iron gate one inch and listened to the hinge sigh. "Adeline," her mother said from the porch, calm and terrible, and Adeline lowered the bar and went inside.

   The town had called them witches, though no one had seen a trick from them in centuries. The women of the Nocturne wore dark dresses whether it was winter or a heat wave. They always walked in twos and never did they wave back. There were rumors of babies— always girls— born on cold nights and blessed with old words and of husbands who did not exist, or did not stay.

   Rumors are a small town's way of explaining a locked gate.

   At seventeen, a girl from the high school leaned over the fence and said, "You okay?"

   Adeline held her breath so the moment would last. The girl's hair was the color of store-bought honey and fell in ribbons down her shoulders. Her fingernails were painted sky blue. The polish was chipped.

   It was startling— to see a girl who looked the same in years, but Adeline had lived far more than her. But her nails, Adeline loved her for the chips.

   It was a small rebellion. An imperfection. Adeline had never seen one before.

   "I'm fine," Adeline said, and the sentence crumbled in her mouth like communion. The girl grinned, seeming embarrassed by her own bravery, and ran when a car horn sounded.

   Adeline watched her go and pressed the sky-blue color into her memory for later.

   Nineteen came like a bell tolling. The seer woke before dawn and went room to room touching the beams, whispering the old lines to the wood that never spoke back.

   When the beast of wolf and man is loosed—

   They had told the story for years— the Original hybrid who had clawed his way into being and the broken curse that made him a storm with a face. There had been a girl with a doppelgänger's neck and a ritual written in blood.

   The now hybrid owed them a debt.

   A blood oath.

   Adeline had not been there, at the ritual, but the whole house had hummed the night it happened, jars rattling on pantry shelves, and the wind sliding a cold hand along the baseboards. The seer said a door had opened then, far away and underfoot all at once, and now the door would open for Adeline.

   It was months before they spoke of it again, Niklaus, the hybrid was returning after breaking his curse and he was ready.

Ready to awaken his family.

Ready to fulfill his promise.

   The universe was calling on an old debt— one made of desperation and written in blood.

   Then, they laid out the dress.

   It was not a bride's dress, not really, though it was white, but it was white like wall paint or white like empty houses. The fabric was light and silky. Adeline thought it was pretty, but she wasn't entirely sure if she truly did or not. Maybe she had just been raised to think anything they laid before her was right.

   She had never picked out her own clothing; she was never allowed to dictate how her hair was styled. She was a doll— one they were manufacturing to be sent off and played with.

   Her mother slid the dress down her body and closed the row of little buttons on the back with hands that did not shake. "We raised you perfectly," she said, and for once her voice was not a command but a prayer. "Be perfect. Be still. Bear well."

   Bear.

   Adeline had been hearing the word since before she could even say any.

   Bear down. Bear up. Bear him. Bear us.

   It meant to carry. It meant to endure. It meant to give your body away in pieces for other people's futures.

   The seer called for the bowl. Like a child hearing a dinner bell, Adeline pricked her ring finger with the thimble's needle and let the dot of red fall, the movement second nature. The bowl did not hiss this time— perhaps old metal learns restraint. The seer peered into the shallow shine and smiled with only one side of her mouth, the way those who see too much sometimes do.

   "Today," she said.

   "Today," reverberated the aunts, palms mashed until the blood left them.

   Adeline looked out through lace once more— the world beyond the fence was the ordinary miracle of a small Virginia town—  a woman in scrubs clicking her car alarm, a boy throwing a backpack into the bed of his father's truck, and a dog making a joyful fool of itself in the ditch. She thought of the sky-blue polish and the sound of a bus, and her heart knocked once against her ribs like a moth against a lampshade.

   "Adeline," her mother said, and Adeline turned from the window.

   They did not put a veil on her as the Nocturne did not believe in hiding what they were offering. They left her hair down for once, "it is prettier," an aunt admitted, guilty as if a compliment were sin, and tied a white ribbon at the nape of her neck.

   Someone pressed a sprig of rosemary into her palm for remembrance. Someone else tucked a tiny key into her pocket. "For luck," she whispered, and Adeline decided she would keep that aunt's voice forever.

   The car was already waiting at the gate when Adeline reached the iron that once caged her in, its engine a low, steady hum. Black and long, it seemed less a vehicle than a shadow on wheels. The women of the Nocturne waited, their dark dresses brushing the gravel, and their faces pale as scripture.

   Her mother took her hand. "Come," she said.

   Adeline always did what she was told. There was a time when she tried defiance, but it always ended in bruised skin. She learned it was easy to comply. She had learned her compliance was her safety and now, she wouldn't know what to do with free will.

   The gate sighed open, its hinges groaning like tired bones. The aunts flanked her, two at her sides, two behind, the rest following in step, and together they walked her down the gravel path in solemn procession. Rosemary snapped under their heels and the air reeked of iron and rain.

   When they opened the car door, her mother turned Adeline to her, "Remember what you are," her mother murmured, her thumb brushing Adeline's jaw. "You are our promise. You were made for him."

   Adeline wanted— wildly and impossibly— to ask what if she was made for something else. The words rose and burned, but she swallowed them, because that is what you do when you have been taught not to spoil things with want.

   She got inside the car and her aunts filed in after her, skirts rustling like wings. The car filled with the scent of rosemary, wax, and cold starch. Through the glass, the compound shrank quickly, the fence paling against the trees.

   The road unwound, carrying them out of the hollow she had called her world, and toward the estate where the daggered son lay waiting.

The old lines moved under her tongue of their own accord, words she had not chosen but had learned until they felt like marrow.

   When the beast of wolf and man is loosed,
   The daggered son shall wake to bone and bride.

—————

qotd: favorite species in the TVDU?

hi besties 😏

welcome to the first chapter of the book! i am so excited because i am a whore for an arranged marriage. mixed with the mikaelson's and magic? delicious.

anyway, i hope you all enjoyed the first chapter. it's setting the framework for adeline's character and her behavior, but the next one she will meet kol and the originals.

i hope you enjoyed!