Luc crouched and then sprang, reminding her of a lion in the middle of a hunt, his golden hair waving loose around his shoulders. She twisted out of the way just as he reached her, and Luc staggered, holding the gnarled tree trunk for support. And then he reached up and caught one of the White Oak’s lower branches. “This is what we came here for, isn’t it?” he asked, and she heard the sound of splintering wood. Realizing her mistake, Rebekah ran at him, but it was too late: The branch snapped off in his hand, the stake’s jagged point aimed straight for her heart.

Rebekah turned just enough to catch the stake in her shoulder. It felt like an icicle tearing through her flesh, but she ignored the pain and wrenched her shoulder back, hoping to surprise Luc enough that he would lose his grip on the branch.

Instead he shifted it the opposite way, a tight smile playing on his lips as he forced the wound open wider. “And to think that I once thought you were invincible,” he hissed. “Now I can’t imagine how you’ve managed to live this long.”

Rebekah heard some small bone in her shoulder break, and she felt panic rising in her chest. She swung wildly at Luc’s face with her good arm, unable to form any coherent goal except to get the stake out of her body and away from her. She heard him grunt and felt a satisfying pop as his nose burst into a fountain of blood.

He punched her back, and she blocked the blow only to see his eyes shift. It was just a distraction from the real threat: the stake. While Rebekah knocked aside his right hand, his left fist drove the stake toward her heart.

Rebekah forced her left arm to catch Luc’s wrist, and she bent it back, twisting so hard that she heard a snap. He bellowed in pain, and his fingers spasmed around the rough wood. Rebekah watched her own fingers close around the branch, and she gritted her teeth against the pain in her shoulder as she gripped the stake as hard as she could. She wrested it from his grasp and then slashed the jagged end across his cheekbone. Luc stumbled back and Rebekah pressed her advantage, slicing viciously at his face and body as he struggled to defend every part of himself at once.

She could barely see the wounds she inflicted through the fury that all but blinded her. Would she never learn? She had meant to spare Luc’s life, and that sentiment had put her in mortal danger. Luc was a pleasant enough lover, and along their journey she had imagined that they might truly grow close, but he wasn’t worth her life. Especially when he wasn’t even himself anymore.

Luc faltered under her onslaught, and the roots of the White Oak tree caught at his feet, tripping him. Rebekah drove her knee up into the pit of his stomach as he wavered, and he fell heavily to the ground. She was on him in the blink of an eye, one knee on either side of his hips. “This is how I’ve survived, you son of a bitch,” she told him, her voice hoarse and rasping from the exertion of the fight.

- The Originals: The Resurrection, Chapter 8