If I Should Die

Page 11

“That’s because there’s no possible way she can chop any of your body parts off,” I said, feeling buoyed by Vincent’s joking mood. Although he wasn’t letting on, he must also hope that Bran’s family secrets contained a solution . . . or at least a clue . . . to escape his disembodied state.
“I, however,” I continued, “am in grave bodily danger. Georgia with a sword . . .”
. . . might be dangerous enough to actually be of some use against the numa, Vincent said, the voice in my head trailing off in a chuckle as we headed downstairs to the armory.
FIFTEEN
“VERY WELL DONE,” ARTHUR SAID AS HIS SWORD clattered to the armory floor. Georgia smiled and, placing one hand on her hip, circled her sword in a victorious flourish, causing Arthur to duck to avoid grievous bodily injury.
“Hi, Katie-Bean!” she yelled, spotting me coming down the stairs. “Guess what? I totally rock at sword fighting! Just wait till all those haters see me do this—” she said, lunging in a crazed Three Musketeers move, forcing Arthur to skip nimbly out of the way.
“Vincent’s back!” I announced, powerless against the wide smile spread across my face. “Or at least his ghost is. Violette’s freed him for three days.”
“Oh, Kate, that’s wonderful!” Georgia squealed and, dropping her sword, ran over to throw herself on me. “And even better,” I continued, once she stopped jumping up and down and let go of me, “Bran has heard of wandering spirits like Vincent getting their bodies back. I mean, it’s a story that he heard a long time ago, but they’re going to start researching it right away.” I didn’t mention that I was going to go in search of that story in a couple of hours. Georgia would definitely want to join me.
“That’s very good news,” Arthur commented. “I can’t wait to talk to Vincent myself.”
“I just sent Ambrose up to the library to meet with Jean-Baptiste,” I told Arthur. “Your ‘presence is required,’” I quoted JB.
“Please excuse me,” he said to Georgia, bowing slightly.
“Only if you promise me more . . . ,” she said with a crooked smile. Arthur promptly turned bubble-gum pink and choked on whatever he was about to say. “More sword lessons, that is,” Georgia said, her smile widening as she saw him sputter.
“It’s urgent,” I prodded.
“Yes, of course,” said Arthur. He left at top speed, taking the steps two at a time.
“So where exactly is our lover boy?” Georgia asked.
“Upstairs talking to JB and Gaspard,” I said. “Revenant business.”
“Then do you wanna practice with me?” Georgia asked, posing her sword tip on her toe, and then recoiling as it went through her shoe. “Ouch!”
“Um, yeah. They’re sharp. Why don’t you practice with one of the blunt-tipped practice epées,” I asked.
“Oh, please,” Georgia said. “I’m not a complete wimp.”
“Well, I’m not a complete idiot,” I said and, opening the wardrobe, got out my hard-to-slice Kevlar workout suit. “If I’m getting anywhere near you with a sword, I want protection. I won’t be able to do much, though, with my battle wound,” I said, touching my collarbone.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you,” Georgia said, slicing wildly at the air while I suited up and chose a weapon. As I approached, she got into starting position, her lightweight sword held in her right hand as she leaned forward, left knee bent.
“You’ve got good starting form,” I encouraged her. Taking it very slowly, with exaggerated moves, I let her swipe at my weapon while shuffling forward and back, following her own clumsy movements.
“You see?” Georgia said after a few minutes, breathing hard with effort. “Arthur said I was a natural. I’m just as good as you are, and you’ve been training for months!”
I shook my head, and with a quick lunge I swung lightly—careful not to put weight on my injured shoulder—hitting her sword near the hilt and sending it flying through the air. As it clanged off a wall and onto the floor, Georgia righted herself and put her hands on her hips.
“What the hell was that?” she cried.
“Georgia, you’re not good—yet. Arthur only said that because he’s got a major crush on you.”
My sister looked hurt.
“That doesn’t mean you won’t get better if you keep training,” I quickly added as I registered her expression.
Her smile returned. “More,” she said, and walked over to pick up her sword.
“Georgia,” I said, moving my sword from one hand to the other and back, enjoying the feel of its weight in my palms. “What’s this all about? The fight training, I mean. Is it just a ploy to get nearer to Arthur? Because I can promise you that’s not necessary. He’s already totally into you.”
“Of course not. I don’t need to make a fool of myself to attract a man,” my sister said, looking defensive.
“Really?” I said, biting my lip so I wouldn’t laugh. “How about that Southern accent you put on whenever cute guys are around?”
Georgia waved her free hand in the air as if to say, Oh, that—that’s nothing. And then her shoulders slumped. “Honestly, Kate. Getting whopped by a crazed zombie tween left me feeling extremely vulnerable. Not to mention weak. And those are two qualities I genuinely despise.”
My heart warmed. This was the side of my sister that made me feel I would follow her not only to Paris but to the end of the world. Complete with all of her party-girl, don’t-take-life-seriously, sometimes-maddening qualities. Because I knew this side of her too. The side some people never saw—the one defined by her strength, goodness, and loyalty.
“That is an excellent reason for fight training!” I said, and her smile was back in a second.
“So you think you can take me on with your Kill Bill sword-fighting skills?” she teased.
“Just go easy on me,” I laughed, and raised my sword.
In the end, I didn’t have to sneak away from Georgia. Knowing Mamie wouldn’t approve of her going out, but unable to stand being separated from her friends, my sister had invited them to come to our house. By five o’clock Arthur was walking her back to the apartment, and forty-five minutes later, he, Ambrose, Vincent, and I arrived at the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages.
“Perfect timing,” I said, walking up to the gates and reading the sign. “Closing time, five forty-five p.m.”
The museum was housed in a massive fifteenth-century abbey that took up most of a city block, and had been built next to first-century ruins of Gallo-Roman baths, an ancient ancestor of today’s spas. Crumbling walls extended three stories above grassy grounds, the ceilings and floors having disappeared centuries before. High up on the walls, monumental arches in red brick spanned the white stone, tracing the outlines of the palatial rooms the Roman soldiers once wandered through, moving from thermal pool to frigid bath to sauna.
In the hazy darkness of early evening, the abbey looked like a haunted castle and the ruins around it like its unearthed dungeons. I was suddenly glad for my armed escort. As if sensing my thoughts, Ambrose smiled and patted the hilt of the sword he wore under his coat. “See any numa in the area, Vin?” he asked and, apparently satisfied with Vincent’s answer, relaxed a little.
You look nervous, mon ange, Vincent told me.
“Nervous? Me?” I said. “Never.” Which was a total lie. I was about to go into a cave, deep down in the earth. I had never told Vincent about my claustrophobia. I hadn’t needed to.
Going down into the sewers hadn’t bothered me. We were in wide man-made spaces just below street level. But Bran’s cave was sure to be different—it threatened to reach right back to my childhood fear and paralyze me once I was in its depths.
My family had visited Ruby Falls in Tennessee when I was a kid. At one point the guide turned the lights out to show us how dark it was in a place sunlight never touched. I freaked out, and once we got outside, it took an hour for my mom to calm me. Since then, even the thought of spelunking made me break into a sweat. But I wasn’t about to admit that to Vincent. A little claustrophobia didn’t matter when much more important things were at stake. Like his very existence.
I wiped my forehead with my palm and tried to appear calm.
“The healer said the entrance was at the southwest corner of the monument,” Arthur said, pointing through the gate to one side of the ruins.
“How are we going to get in?” I asked, eyeing the twenty-foot-high cast-iron fencing running the perimeter.
“Never fear, Zombie Man is here,” quipped Ambrose, and wrapping his hands around two of the bars, he began pulling at them, as if he was stretching them apart. He let go after a second, turned to me, and winked. “Just kidding,” he said. “Bending iron bars is, sadly, not in my superhero résumé. I suggest we try that instead.” He nodded toward a small iron door closed with a padlock. Just behind it were steep steps leading down into the ruins.
“Probably the caretaker’s entrance,” I said as we approached it.
Arthur took out his key chain and fumbled through the keys until he found a tiny silver lock-picking tool. In a second the padlock was off. After waiting until no passersby were watching, we slipped through the door and down the stairs into the grassy area, hiding in the shadows until we were sure no one had seen our illegal entry.
It was chillier among the ruins, as if by descending into the ancient maze of open-air rooms we had actually traveled to another place and time. Like Siberia in mid-winter. I drew my coat more tightly around me and led the way through the dark maze, heading in the direction Arthur had indicated. A minute later, we were standing in a completely unremarkable corner at the juncture of two fifteen-foot-high walls. There was no door carved into the side. No suspicious cracks in the walls. No sign of a passageway of any sort.
“How about using that volant future-sight ability, bro, and telling us where to look,” Ambrose said. After a second, he nodded and said, “Vin says that in a few minutes Kate is gone and we’re here waiting for her, but he can’t see where she went or anything about how it happened. There must be some weird guérisseur juju goin’ on around here blocking revenant powers. Which means we must be in the right place.”
My spine tingled as I wondered just how powerful Bran and his people actually were. They seemed so . . . ordinary. Especially his mother, who had looked like any other little old lady knitting in front of her fireplace.
“Well, I guess we gotta do things the hard way,” Ambrose said. He dropped to his knees and began feeling around on the ground, knocking at places where the grass had worn away. “There doesn’t seem to be a trapdoor or hollow space,” he said. Arthur and I took opposing walls and began feeling our way along them with our fingertips.
“What was it exactly that the guérisseur told you?” Arthur asked as he worked.
“Same as what he told you,” I responded. “He just said that the entrance was in the southwest corner of the ruins and that I could enter by using my signum.” I pulled the pendant out from my shirt, and the little crystal memento mori clinked against it as I pulled them over my head and held them up.
What’s that you’re wearing with the signum? Vincent asked immediately.
“It’s a lock of your hair,” I responded. Arthur and Ambrose glanced at me quizzically but returned quickly to their work. For the hundredth time I thought how weird it must be for them to constantly have volant spirits around and only catch the part of conversations that were directed at them. “Jeanne gave it to me,” I continued self-consciously.
As I turned the signum in my fingers, the light of the streetlamp above flashed on the gold and reflected off something shiny embedded in the wall. I leaned forward to take a better look. Something metallic was set into the stone and completely covered in white dust, making it invisible from a few feet away. I brushed it off to uncover a golden signum bardia the size of my own.
“That’s our girl,” Ambrose crowed.
Be careful, I can’t see anything in the future from this moment forward, Vincent told me.
“I will,” I promised, and glanced to Arthur, who leaned forward, inspecting the signum. He stepped back and nodded his go-ahead.
“Let’s see what this baby does,” Ambrose said eagerly.
I held my pendant up and pressed it against the symbol on the wall, my cabochon sapphire depressing a button in the center as the encircled triangle slotted snugly into place. Arthur, Ambrose, and I stood, watching for any sign of movement. “Well, that felt very Indiana Jones-ish,” I said after a pause. “So what happens now?”
At that second, the ground rumbled slightly under our feet, feeling as if a Métro train were passing directly beneath us, and a section of the wall swung forward into the dark. Ambrose’s eyebrows shot up. “Awesome!” he exclaimed.
Not awesome. At all, I thought, peering into the pitch-black space behind the door. Noticing a flashlight hanging from a hook on the wall just beyond the opening, I tentatively reached through to detach it and quickly pulled it out. Flicking it on, I pointed it down the passageway.
A narrow tunnel carved into the stone appeared in the yellow beam of artificial light. It went straight ahead a long ways, then sloped downward at a steep rate until it turned to the right and disappeared. My chest tightened with anxiety, and I started sweating again. This didn’t look like a cave. It looked like a tomb.
I don’t want you to go in there alone, Vincent said.