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Freya is used to the world changing, between one sleep an the next, but it changes much slower than the people around her believe. Kol knows. He’s staring at her like he knows her from somewhere, and she thinks she hasn’t been careful enough. This is her third year away from Dahlia, her third century. The only things that really change are her siblings. Last time, last century, she snuck into their morbid little dungeon and found his coffin. There he was, gray and hard like stone. She thought about pulling out the dagger in his heart, but she heard movement upstairs and scampered away without returning. This is how Niklaus treats his siblings, she learned, hanging around with the witches, who admonished her interest in vampire business. She would tell them, honestly, that it was family business and they would scoff but say no more. No place on earth was safe from vampires and so all witches were entangled with vampires one way or another. But Freya knows, knows it like she knew it the moment they all turned. Her family is waiting for her, and as soon as she can figure out how, she will be reunited with them.
“And you’re name, darling?” Kol is looking at her.
“Oh.” Freya is caught off guard. “Freya.”
“I had a sister named Freya,” he says. Sometimes, she thinks Kol might be the sharpest of all her brothers, the way his eyes narrow to look at her. “She died before I was born. It’s an unusual name.”
“So is Kol,” she says lightly.
“I am an unusual man.” He grins at her, all teeth, and he looks all the monster that he is. She knows he is searching for a way to take out Niklaus, and she wants to help him. As far as she can tell, Niklaus is a threat to her family, and the only reason they have not undaggered poor Finn. Kol knows what she is, and she knows what he is, but he hasn’t quite accepted her into his harem of powerful witches. Mary Alice Claire glares daggers at her from across the the table. Kol isn’t a man, not really, and not just because he is a monster. He looks a little older every century, but now, nine hundred years from the date of his death, it’s hard to tell the age of any of her siblings. Nineteen though. That’s how old he was when they turned. He doesn’t look nineteen. All of them look ageless and elegant and inhuman. She wonders how she looks to him.
Freya works hard to stay close to Kol. He is mistrustful and devious, but Freya is exactly the kind of witch he needs by his side. The kind with nothing to lose, and more powerful than he knows. She wants to tell him, explain, that witches from their mother’s line are powerful, firstborn witches more so. Dahlia channels her, but Freya channels her right back. But this would be dangerous. They’re hiding from Mikael, here in plain sight, and she is hiding from Dahlia among her family. The less they know about each other the better. Still, she will tell him. She would have told him. After the Christmas Ball when he would have told her the spell he was working on. He doesn’t reappear. Niklaus stuck a dagger in him, stole the diamond back. Mary Alice Claire never leaves the Fauline Cottage, which is alright by Freya, who never could explain to her that she wasn’t interested in Kol like that.
Freya disappears into the backdrop of New Orleans in 1915. Her in was Kol. Next time, she will work on Rebekah, who sours towards Niklaus everyday. She won’t need her to turn her back on him forever, just long enough to help her win her freedom from Dahlia. She has another chance, another century. With any luck, Kol will be awake for her to finish his spell and they will all get what they want.
It is March and her year is almost up. This time she had been asleep for one-hundred-and-two years, last time only ninety-nine. Flowers are blooming and music floats around her. Conflict is brewing among the witches, and the allies she has left are afraid she is going to get caught up in it. Her friendship with those vampires, they say, will be the death of her, but she’s nearly as immortal as they are.
“Witches are like humans,” Renee Devereaux tells her. “We keep this city alive and we get killed for our efforts. The werewolves are as bad as the vampires. The humans are as bad as the werewolves.” She’s making a move against the wolves, who take another city block every night, taking over businesses and homes. The witches are simply fighting back. Freya has seen this play out over and over again. Her life is lived only in snatches. Across time, people are all the same. This will end with everyone dead. Except her and her family.
She does get caught in the middle. She’s in the French Quarter watching Niklaus dance with Rebekah. The wolves are gangsters in the regular order — machine gun fire rockets through the little club. Out of instinct, Klaus pushes Rebekah to the ground and disappears into the crowd. She can hear the screams of thew olves, who didn’t know he was there. They thought the witches didn’t allow vampires, but Originals are allowed wherever they please, especially when they’re as pretty as Rebekah. The doorman as a thing for her, and Klaus, Freya knows, only allows it because he gets to drink for free.
She and Renee are ducked behind a booth. “Well,” she says breathlessly. “Perhaps having vampires on our side has a few benefits.” The screaming stops, and Klaus comes barging back in, pulling Rebekah away from the dying doorman who is so hopelessly in love with her.
The danger, it seems, has passed. She finds him, a little wisp of a boy called Paul. He’s not dead and Freya can do this for her sister. She can heal him without turning him into one of them. And she does. But the danger has not passed.
Another round of bullets shatter the window, and Freya who exposed herself too soon, can see the wolves standing imperiously in the entrance, a bullet to the gut, tearing her organs to shreds. They grin wolfishly, meanly. “Pretty witch,” says the meanest of the bunch, leaning down to brush one of Freya’s curls from her face. “Shame she has to die.”
He doesn’t kill her though. He rounds up the rest of the witches and puts them out on the street, and the wolves make themselves drinks. In the morning, the bar will be under new ownership and Freya has to watch as she bleeds out slowly on the ground.
When she wakes up, the world will be different.