Until I Die

  “I would,” said Vincent without hesitation.

  “No, Vincent!” I cried. “What are you saying?”

  Vincent wouldn’t look at me. “You’re right, Violette. I’m weak enough for you and your men to take. And I’ll go with you. Just put the girl down and you have yourself a deal.”

  Violette stared at him, weighing his offer.

  And before I knew what was happening, a figure raced up on Violette’s left. Arthur took advantage of Violette’s focus on Vincent to wrench my sister’s body from her grasp and pull her away to safety.

  “Sorry, Vi. Deal’s off,” Vincent said softly, as if consoling a small child.

  She screamed and threw herself on Vincent, using her fingernails to scrape long, red lines down either side of his face.

  And it was because I was staring at the crimson blood flowing down Vincent’s cheek that I didn’t see the numa coming.

  As the giant man lunged toward me, Vincent turned from Violette and threw himself forward, grabbing the numa in a crippling embrace as the two of them smashed hard against the guardrail. I screamed as the force of the impact bent the rail backward, and locked in each other’s arms, they toppled over the leaning barrier and out of sight.

  My heart fell with them. It felt like my entire chest had been ripped out, lungs and all. I couldn’t breathe as I ran to the guardrail and peered over, desperate for a miracle. Desperate for something from the movies—a branch sticking out that Vincent could grab on to. A ledge conveniently placed just feet below the rim of the precipice.

  But this wasn’t a movie. It was real life. And by the time I got to the edge, their bodies had already hit the ground, and neither one was moving. “No!” I shrieked, as a man in a fur coat rushed into the area below, a couple of others following him closely. Turning, I saw that Violette was gone.

  “Arthur, stay with Georgia!” I yelled. I arrived at the bottom in time to see the numa leap inside the back of an awaiting van and slam the doors behind them, and the van sped off. Panicking, I doubled back and ran toward the bottom of the cliff but stopped halfway there. There was nothing to see. The bodies were gone.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  VINCENT WAS DEAD AND HIS BODY HAD BEEN taken by the numa. The realization of what that meant filled me with an immobilizing horror. Normally, he would simply reanimate in three days. But the numa would never allow that to happen.

  If they destroyed his body immediately, he would be gone. Forever. However, Violette could do worse. She could wait a day and destroy him once he was volant. Eternity as a wandering spirit, unable to take physical form again—that seemed like an even more horrific fate to me. I had to do something before the numa and their new leader had a chance to act.

  I called Ambrose.

  “Katie-Lou? You still at Montmartre? Has Vin gotten there yet?” he asked before I could speak.

  “How did you know—” I began.

  “Jules was volant at the house when you girls decided to tail Arthur, so he followed you. Once he saw where you were going, he let Vincent know and then came to get me. You guys okay? Hand Vin the phone, will you?”

  “Ambrose, Vincent’s gone. Violette and a numa killed him and took his body. They’ve got him, Ambrose!” My voice was starting to sound hysterical. It was all I could do to get the words out.

  “What? Violette?” he yelled. “Where did they go?”

  “They drove off from the base of the Sacré-Coeur staircase in a white truck. Like a delivery-van-looking thing.”

  “How long ago?”

  “It’s been two minutes, tops.”

  “Is Arthur still there?”

  “Yeah. He’s with Georgia. She’s hurt.”

  It took him all of three seconds to come up with a plan. “Okay. Arthur will know if Georgia needs a hospital or not. If she doesn’t, the three of you get back to Jean-Baptiste’s. I’m calling him now. He’ll sound the alert for our Paris kindred to begin searching. You just hang in there, Katie-Lou.”

  “Thanks, Ambrose.” My voice cracked as I hung up. But I couldn’t let myself cry. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And I needed to be strong.

  Looking back up the staircase, I saw Arthur making his way down with a fully conscious Georgia, who leaned heavily against him. The handkerchief she held to her mouth was stained poppy red with her blood. I sprinted up the stairs toward them.

  “I looked down and couldn’t see his body,” Arthur said as soon as I caught up.

  “Violette took him. I called Ambrose, and Jean-Baptiste’s sending out a search party.” My voice was flat as I tried to rein in my emotion. Just a few more minutes and I could let go, I told myself, and wrapped Georgia’s free arm around my shoulders.

  “Took who, Katie-Bean?” Georgia slurred as she shifted some of her weight onto me. She had been knocked unconscious before Vincent arrived and had seen none of it. I didn’t feel like explaining. Not yet.

  “Should Georgia be moving?” I asked Arthur.

  “She’s injured, but I don’t think any bones are broken. Some tourists at the top got a good look at her. I think it’s better if we get away before someone calls the police.”

  We made our way to the bottom of the stairway and onto the street, where we slipped into a cab that had just dropped off a group of black-habited nuns. I glanced up at the basilica. Two policemen were standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at us as people pointed in our direction. I closed my eyes in relief as the taxi pulled away. The last thing we needed was to be stopped for questioning.

  Vincent’s gone. The thought raced through my mind and turned my body numb. No. Don’t think about it. Hold yourself together, or you won’t be of any help.

  I squeezed Georgia’s hand as she leaned her head on my shoulder. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Very sore,” she said. “The inside of my mouth’s bleeding where that bitch from hell kicked a tooth loose.”

  I glanced at Arthur. “Ambrose said if she doesn’t need a hospital, get her home to Jean-Baptiste’s.”

  “That’s where we’re going,” he confirmed.

  “Um … I don’t think so! I’m banned from even entering,” Georgia exclaimed.

  “I’m not giving you a choice,” Arthur said firmly. “I’ll call a doctor to meet us there. Better to get you private medical care than to take you to a hospital. And we can get some ice on your face right away instead of having to wait in a crowded emergency room.”

  He reached over and laid his hand against her arm. Georgia immediately relaxed, resting her head against the back of the seat. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, Mr. Tranquilizing Superpowers.”

  The edges of Arthur’s mouth curled up. It was the first smile I had seen on his face since the time Georgia had called him geriatric in the café. “Would you like me to stop?” he asked.

  “Hell, no,” she replied. “Feels great. I just didn’t want you to think you were pulling one over on me.”

  His eyes flitted from my sister’s face to my own, and the smile left his lips.

  “I thought it was you,” I said numbly.

  “I don’t blame you,” he replied.

  We just stared at each other, unspeaking, until I sank back in the seat, testing my painful shoulder and closing my eyes as the horror of the last half hour settled over me.

  “What’s wrong?” Georgia asked.

  I exhaled deeply. “Oh, Gigi,” I said, using my pet name for my sister from when we were small children. “While you were knocked out, Vincent came. He and Arthur saved you, but the numa … they killed him. And then took off with his body.”

  I was able to control myself for exactly one more second before I burst out crying.

  “Oh, Katie-Bean.” She pulled away from Arthur and wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, my poor Katie,” she said, her voice wavering as her own tears began to fall.

  And as the taxi drifted through the quiet Paris streets, my sister and I sat locked in each other’s arms and wept.


  The doctor was waiting for us when we arrived at Jean-Baptiste’s. Arthur helped Georgia into the sitting room and then left, closing the door behind him. The man asked Georgia a lot of questions about what happened and how long she was unconscious, shined a light in her eye, and finally declared her healthy. He suggested she see a dentist for the loose tooth, and then gave her some instant cold compresses to put on her jaw and a box of painkillers.

  My painful shoulder turned out to be a cracked collarbone. The doctor wrapped my chest and shoulders in an Ace bandage and told me to put an ice pack on it to reduce swelling. “You should both rest,” he told us.

  Yeah, right, I thought. As soon as I got Georgia home I was going to look for Vincent.

  As I led the doctor to the front door, Arthur reappeared with an envelope. He handed it to the man, shook his hand, then pointed him to the front gate.

  Turning to me, he seemed to be struggling as his face began to lose its aristocratic coldness. This minor transformation suddenly made him feel like a real person for once, instead of a statue from a wax museum.

  “Kate,” he said, “I’m so sorry for what has happened. I should have done more to stop it. But Violette … she’s gone through these strange phases before, and I thought I would be able to bring her around. I had no idea what she was up to.”

  “If you even knew she was communicating with the numa, why didn’t you say something about it? You put everyone in danger by staying silent,” I said, feeling a simmering fury at the pit of my stomach. If he had done something before, none of this would have happened.

  “Everyone knew Violette had distant ties with the numa. And they all depended on that to get the information they needed. But no one, including me, knew exactly what she was doing.

  “When she began communicating with Nicolas, I thought she was using him to get closer to Paris’s numa. So she could taunt them. Flirt with them in a way before we dug in to destroy them. In the past she has enjoyed toying with our enemies before killing them. But when Vincent told me the numa knew how Lucien was slain, I began to suspect she had—unwittingly—given the information away. I never once imagined she was working in conjunction with them.”

  I stared at him. He and Violette had been together for centuries. How could he have not known what she was up to? But his actions back at Montmartre, as well as the tortured look on his face as he watched me, convinced me that he was telling me the truth.

  I looked up to see Jean-Baptiste making his way down the double staircase. His usual rigid-as-a-general posture had crumpled as he strode slowly across the hall toward me. I knew Vincent was his favorite. His second. That he thought of him as a son. He paused in front of me, and then, in a gesture that was so uncharacteristic of him that I did my best not to wince when my shoulder touched his, he solemnly took me in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he said.

  Those two words put the fear of God in me. This was Jean-Baptiste. And he was offering no long-winded speech about how we would get Vincent back. No encouragement about which options should be considered. Nothing except those two words—which might as well have been “No. Hope.” Because that’s essentially what he was saying.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I HELPED GEORGIA HOME, THANKING MY LUCKY stars that Papy was at work and Mamie nowhere to be seen. I got her into bed, where the pain medication she had taken a half hour before kicked in. She began falling asleep before I even left the room. As I closed the door, she called after me in a dozy voice, “You’ll get him back, Katie-Bean. I just know it.”

  By the time I got back to La Maison, the troops had been dispatched. Jean-Baptiste informed me that Ambrose had taken a search party to the man-made caves that honeycombed beneath Montmartre. Not only had Violette met the numa at Sacré-Coeur, but several of the Paris revenants reported numa sightings in the area, so it seemed a logical choice.

  Jules, volant, had accompanied a group led by Gaspard, following another tip in the south of Paris.

  The two remaining revenants sat in the library, trying to draw up some kind of strategy. Arthur eagerly volunteered his knowledge of Violette and her habits. He had already informed JB about the most important fact: that Violette’s plan was to capture the Champion and overthrow Paris’s revenants. But since he had caught only that end of the conversation between Violette and Vincent, I started at the beginning and told them the whole story. And after that, I recapped everything else I knew. I explained every detail about my contact with Gwenhaël and Bran. I recounted every question that Violette had ever asked me about Vincent, and the information—however intentionally misleading it had been—that she had given me about the Champion and her stories about the numa.

  Jean-Baptiste took notes, and when I was finished, he thanked me in a way that meant I was excused to go. I stood, watching him and Arthur for a moment, until the older revenant looked back up at me expectantly. “What else can I do to help?” I asked him. Over the last hour, my despair had transformed into a burning determination, and if I left them, I didn’t know where I would go.

  “There’s nothing we can do now,” the older man said gravely, “except hope that our teams come up with something.”

  “But I want to do something. I need to do something.”

  “You have fulfilled your role, dear Kate. You alerted Ambrose as soon as it happened. You took care of your sister. You gave me some very valuable information. Now the only thing you can do is wait.” His tone was sympathetic but practical as he turned back to his notes.

  He was just as duped by Violette as the rest of us, I realized, and left the two revenants in the library to work out their own penance for having been so blind.

  News came a couple of hours later. A numa had confessed to Gaspard’s group that Violette and some others had taken Vincent’s body out of the city and were headed south. Upon being informed, Ambrose’s group returned—with a huge haul of weapons they had taken from a freshly deserted numa hideout.

  I was waiting for them outside, seated on the edge of the angel fountain.

  “What do you think she’ll do?” I whispered as Ambrose sat next to me, dressed from head to toe in Kevlar and black leather.

  “Katie-Lou, regarding Violette, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “If she burns his body today …”

  “He’ll be gone. If she waits until he’s volant tomorrow or the next day, and destroys him after he leaves his body, his spirit will remain on earth. Or, if she gets in touch with us in time, and we can offer her something she wants badly enough, she might be willing to barter for his body. That’s what we will focus on, little sister. Don’t even think about the other options.”

  He leaned over and gave me a tender kiss on the cheek. “That’s from Jules. He says to tell you, ‘Courage, Kates. We’ll find your man.’”

  I wiped a tear away and thanked them both, as Ambrose left to report to Jean-Baptiste. I stayed, watching the moon rise in a spectacularly starry sky. In Paris the stars are usually invisible, unsuccessfully competing with the city’s lights. But tonight they were luminous, offering a breathtaking display for us mortals below. I was transported back to the months after my parents’ death, where at every turn I felt like nature was mocking my despair with its beauty. How could the world go on—how could this twinkling celestial extravaganza take place—when Vincent was helpless in the hands of his enemies? Nothing made sense.

  In need of a reality check, I took my phone out of my bag and texted Georgia.

  Me: Are you okay?

  Georgia: Pain drugs = good. Told Mamie & Papy I got

  mugged.

  Me: OMG!

  Georgia: Said you went to a friend’s house after school, so

  you weren’t with me.

  Me: What did they say?

  Georgia: They’re freaking and want you home.

  Me: I can’t. We haven’t found him yet.

  I had seen two missed calls from Mamie and knew I would have to come up with some explanation f
or not calling her back, but I couldn’t even think about that yet. A life in which I could return to the love and security of my grandparents’ home seemed like part of some other girl’s story. Finding Vincent was the only thing that mattered.

  I shivered in the cold, but resisted the urge to go back into the house and ask if there was any news. Someone would surely come tell me if there was. Or would they? For the hundredth time, I felt an overwhelming sense of not belonging. Anywhere. I had been training with the revenants. I knew their secrets and held their symbol around my neck. I was part of their world now, and they were a major part of mine. But I was not one of them.

  Neither was I comfortable in the skin of the human teenage girl I had been a year ago. I had gone too far now—out of the world of believing only what you can see and into one where the mystical was mundane.

  Vincent had been my link with the revenants. But—if I was honest with myself—without him I would be drifting between the two worlds with no anchor to ground me and no oars to navigate. I pushed that thought out of my head. We’ll get him back, I promised myself.

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE MOOD AT LA MAISON WAS FUNEREAL. GASpard had pressed his captive numa for further information, but it seemed that Violette didn’t trust her minions with the details of her plans. A couple of other numa had been found in the meantime, and none knew where Vincent had been taken—only that their leader had left Paris with her prize.

  I found Ambrose in the armory, sharpening a battle-ax with an old-fashioned grinding wheel. He looked as antsy for action as me.

  “What’s all this mean? Where do we look next?” I asked him, unwilling to accept that we were all just … giving up.

  “We have no other leads, and no clue of where the numa have taken Vincent. JB, Gaspard, Arthur, and some others are working on a longer-term plan.” His eyes met mine as he turned the wheel, his frustration materialized in the sparks flying from the edges of the ax blade. “Because in the short term, Katie-Lou, there’s nothing else we can do but wait to hear from them.”