Until I Die
Page 32
“Well, that’s probably because you’re insane. Besides the fact that I think Arthur is deliciously dreamy—”
“And your taste has been so reliable in the past,” I cut in.
“Touché,” Georgia admitted. “But I know I’m right this time. I actually had coffee with him this afternoon.” She gave me her sly cat grin and pretended she was fanning herself from the memory of his hotness.
“What?” I exclaimed. “He asked you out?”
“Well, not exactly,” Georgia allowed. “I just kind of stumbled across him sitting at the Café Sainte-Lucie, and he asked me to sit with him. And since the evil munchkin wasn’t there to piss me off, I said yes.”
“This afternoon after school?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” she said, eyeing me suspiciously.
“That’s when the standoff at Papy’s happened. Arthur was probably waiting for the numa to report back to him.”
Georgia’s mouth fell open. “Um, paranoid much? Earth to Kate: You’re losing your grip on reality. Arthur is a totally normal and very nice dead guy. I would be much more suspicious of Violette.”
I shook my head. “I trust Violette. If Arthur is behind it—wittingly or unwittingly—she must not know a thing about it. Otherwise she would have told me. We’ve gotten really close, Georgia. I know you don’t like her, but I do.”
She patted my arm, as if comforting an invalid. “I think the key word in what you just said was ‘unwittingly.’ If he does hang with fringe numa types, it’s possible he could have given something away. Although I just can’t see him buddying up with the evil ones. I seriously don’t think that Arthur would hurt a fly. He seems kind of anxiously reserved, but he’s such a nice guy I’m starting to suspect he’s actually too nice for me. He seemed genuinely upset about having offended you.”
“See! He was talking about me. And he’s probably just pretending to be remorseful to throw everyone off.”
“That’s enough, Kate. You’re on a one-way train to cuckoo-land.”
“I’m going to prove that he’s the one.”
“Okay. It’s a challenge. I’m going to prove that he’s not. Especially seeing that if you’re right and he’s evil, that will mean I’ll have to cancel my date with him for Saturday night.”
“Georgia!”
“Just kidding,” she said, and then under her breath added, “Not really.”
A pot of tiny purple-spotted violet flowers sat on the hall table the next morning. Papy lowered his newspaper long enough to nod toward them, and I wondered if he would have been so blasé about it if the card attached had said “Vincent” instead of “Violette.”
Heard about your frightful experience yesterday. Let’s have coffee later on. Café Sainte-Lucie after school? Kisses, Violette
I pulled my flower dictionary out of my book bag and found the picture of the flowers—they were oak-leaved geraniums. “True friendship,” I read, smiling as Georgia walked up behind me. “Those are pretty,” she commented, leaning down to smell them.
“They’re from Violette,” I said, watching for her reaction.
“They look like weeds,” she replied, straightening, and went to sit next to Papy at the breakfast table.
“Are you okay?” was all Papy uttered at breakfast, but he said it with a look of concern as he glanced over at Georgia—like he would say more if she weren’t there. If my grandfather thought I wouldn’t tell my sister everything, then he really didn’t know us. Maybe our occasional fights threw him off the scent of just how close we actually were.
A half hour later, we stepped out of the house to see Ambrose waiting for us at the corner, standing next to a black 4x4. “Ladies,” he said in a Barry White voice, and stretching his arms in front of him, cracked his thick neck from side to side. “This way, please.” He opened the door, and I jumped into the backseat. “And the lovely Georgia?”
“All this yummy muscleness first thing in the morning is almost too much for me to take,” she cooed, and gave him a playful wink as she scooted herself into the front seat. I shook my head. If “Flirt” qualified as a foreign language, my sister and Ambrose would both have PhDs in it.
“So where is everyone this morning?” I asked Ambrose as he put the car in gear and headed toward the river.
“Vincent and Jean-Baptiste have gone off to visit the revenants staying in Geneviève’s place. You know . . . to dig around to see who tipped the zomboids off to your leader-slaying extravaganza. How’s it feel to be Numa Enemy Number One, Katie-Lou?”
“Scary, actually,” I confessed. “I thought that your chauffeuring me around for the last week was pretty useless until yesterday.”
“Does that mean you’re happy to see me for once?” Ambrose said, his teeth gleaming white against the dark-chocolate brown of his skin.
“I’m always glad to see you, Ambrose,” I said, knowing that if the same line had come from Georgia it would have sounded as seductive as Mae West.
“How about your oh-so-tempting medieval friend?” Georgia said.
“I suppose you’re referring to Arthur and not Violette?” Ambrose replied with a chuckle. “They’re both training with Gaspard this morning, before going to visit some of the other kindred on their own. Jules is volant, so I’m going to drop you off at school and walk with him and Gaspard this afternoon before I come back to get you. Stay inside the school gates, will you? We don’t need any drive-by numa action while you wait for me on the street.”
Ambrose watched as we entered the school grounds, and once we were through the doors, he drove off. Georgia turned to me. “Well? I got the intel on what Arthur’s up to. What are we going to do with it?”
“This is our chance,” I said. “We know where he is right now. We can stake out the house and see where he goes when he leaves.”
“You heard Ambrose. Arthur’s supposed to be going somewhere with the Royal Pain.”
“Well, what will it hurt to spy on them for a couple of hours? Besides skipping school, that is. This is our only chance not to be followed by the revenants.”
“Or the numa, for that matter,” Georgia agreed. “Everyone thinks we’re in school. We’ll have to go now—we don’t know how long Gaspard’s kick-ass training lasts.” She glanced around the hallway, and her eyes landed on an athletic-looking guy carrying a pile of books. “Hey, Paul!” she yelled. “Remember that time you offered to loan me your scooter?”
THIRTY-FIVE
MY SISTER AND I HUDDLED AT THE END OF THE rue de Grenelle, looking ridiculously suspicious as we hid behind the corner, throwing glances every few minutes down the road toward Jean-Baptiste’s mansion.
“What time is it now?” I asked, my teeth chattering in the February cold.
“Five minutes after the last time you asked,” Georgia growled. “It’s eleven oh five and we have been here a total of an hour and thirty-five minutes. How long do your training sessions with Gaspard run?”
“An hour,” I said. “But I’m sure that Violette and Arthur can go for longer than me, and we have no idea when they started.” My heart dropped an inch as our mission began to seem much stupider than it had within the hallway of our warm and safe school.
“Wait!” Georgia hissed in a dramatic whisper. “The gate is opening. And here comes . . . it’s Arthur! He’s wearing a motorcycle helmet, but I know it’s him—he’s got on the same leather jacket he wore at the café yesterday.”
I struggled to look past her, but she pushed me backward. “Shh!” she insisted, even though we were yards out of his hearing range. “He’s driving the motorcycle slowly to the end of the block. He’s getting off and walking the bike backward onto the sidewalk. Holy cow—he looks like he’s hiding!”
Georgia’s commentary was beginning to sound hysterical. “What do you mean ‘hiding’?” I pushed her out of the way. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Okay. Far end of the street. Just behind the last building. He’s hiding down there.”
“Did he see us?”
“No! He didn’t even look our way when he came out of the driveway.”
“Then why is he—”
“Wait!” Georgia interrupted me. I poked my head around the corner of the building above hers. A taxi had just turned past us to drive down the road and was now parked in front of the hôtel particulier. The gate swung open again, and Violette stepped out, peering both ways before jumping into the cab. We pulled back, waited a second, and then stuck our heads around the corner.
The taxi drove to the end of the street and turned left on the one-way avenue. Georgia and I had our helmets on in a second and were on the borrowed scooter, heading down the rue de Grenelle, as we saw Arthur’s motorcycle pull out onto the road a safe distance behind Violette’s taxi. We turned left onto the avenue, a few cars behind Arthur.
The next twenty minutes were spent maneuvering our way between cars and trucks, trying to stay out of view even though Arthur never once looked around. His attention was fixed on Violette’s taxi, and he was obviously using the same defensive tactics we were to avoid her seeing him. We headed north over the river, and up past the Louvre and across town until we arrived at the steep hill called Montmartre and began inching up its tiny one-lane roads.
“They’re heading toward Sacré-Coeur,” I yelled, looking up at the white-domed basilica perched on the hilltop. A refrigerated yogurt truck that had served as our camouflage for the last few blocks stopped in the middle of the street, and its driver jumped out to make a delivery. We spied Arthur half a block up, parking his motorcycle at the base of the rue Foyatier staircase—the landmark that pretty much everyone in the world recognizes from black-and-white Paris postcards. Its multiple flights of steep steps are lined with old-fashioned black metal streetlights, and it is so Old Paris–looking that you half expect everyone on it to suddenly break out into an impromptu Moulin Rouge can-can routine.
“Quick!” I yelled. Georgia pulled up behind Arthur’s bike and locked the scooter to a lamppost. There were enough people around that even if he turned, he probably wouldn’t have noticed us huffing and puffing up the stairs a few flights behind him. Once he got to the top, he turned right and began jogging toward the far side of the church. The sun was directly overhead, and the church’s white stone was blinding in the midday light, making it difficult to follow Arthur’s form as he wove in between the groups of tourists and pilgrims lined up to enter the basilica.
He disappeared through the swarms of people around the far edge of the church. Pressing toward him through the crowd, I reached out to touch Georgia and instead grabbed an extremely hairy forearm. A tall man in a “Heck Yeah Cowboys” baseball cap looked down at me with an amused smile. “Well, hello there!” he said in a Texas accent.
“Sorry,” I blurted, and cast around for Georgia. I caught sight of her about thirty feet in front of me, being swept along by a crowd led by a tour guide waving an Italian flag. She had just begun to realize I was gone, and turned to look for me when the tour group surged and I lost her again.
Pushing my way out of the group of Americans, I followed Arthur’s path, turning the same corner that he had disappeared behind.
I was thrust into darkness as I came around the edge of the basilica onto a deserted stone patio to the side of the edifice. It took my eyes a second to adjust from the brilliant daylight to this sun-hidden courtyard that was empty of tourists and as quiet as a crypt.
The patio was large—the shape and size of a skating rink. Its outer edge bordered a precipice and was sided by iron guardrails to protect the monument’s visitors from the perilous drop. Hulking statues of saints and angels circled the patio, casting weird shadows in the half-light and creating a distinctly creepy atmosphere. Georgia was nowhere to be seen.
I blinked, looking for Arthur, and saw him nearby, hiding behind a statue. He was staring at some people who were half-concealed in the building’s dark shadows. Right in front of me was a larger-than-life figure of an avenging archangel, crouched with sword extended as it fought its invisible enemy. I took Arthur’s example and crept behind it, squinting out from under its sword-bearing arm at the figures across the terrace.
A jean-clad girl was speaking authoritatively to two large, menacing-looking men. With a chill, I recognized them as the numa from Papy’s gallery.
As the speaker gestured, her head turned slightly. My hand flew to my mouth to suppress a gasp. “No,” I whispered. What was Violette doing? She didn’t seem to be threatened by the numa. If anything, they seemed to be hanging on her every word.
I glanced over at Arthur. He was looking at the same scene I was, yet he was hiding. I didn’t understand.
And then—suddenly—I did.
As a wave of comprehension washed over me, I felt immediately and violently ill. I clutched my stomach and prayed that I wouldn’t vomit then and there.
Then a third man stepped forward from the shadows behind the church. It was the man I had seen Arthur talking to at La Palette. And now that I saw what he was wearing—a long fur coat that looked like it had been designed for a Renaissance lord in a costume drama—I knew where I had seen him before. He was the man between the tombs at Père Lachaise cemetery the day of Philippe’s funeral. I had been right to be afraid then. Because now, without a doubt, I could tell that the trick-of-light colorless thing going on in the air around him meant just one thing. He, too, was a numa.
“And your taste has been so reliable in the past,” I cut in.
“Touché,” Georgia admitted. “But I know I’m right this time. I actually had coffee with him this afternoon.” She gave me her sly cat grin and pretended she was fanning herself from the memory of his hotness.
“What?” I exclaimed. “He asked you out?”
“Well, not exactly,” Georgia allowed. “I just kind of stumbled across him sitting at the Café Sainte-Lucie, and he asked me to sit with him. And since the evil munchkin wasn’t there to piss me off, I said yes.”
“This afternoon after school?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” she said, eyeing me suspiciously.
“That’s when the standoff at Papy’s happened. Arthur was probably waiting for the numa to report back to him.”
Georgia’s mouth fell open. “Um, paranoid much? Earth to Kate: You’re losing your grip on reality. Arthur is a totally normal and very nice dead guy. I would be much more suspicious of Violette.”
I shook my head. “I trust Violette. If Arthur is behind it—wittingly or unwittingly—she must not know a thing about it. Otherwise she would have told me. We’ve gotten really close, Georgia. I know you don’t like her, but I do.”
She patted my arm, as if comforting an invalid. “I think the key word in what you just said was ‘unwittingly.’ If he does hang with fringe numa types, it’s possible he could have given something away. Although I just can’t see him buddying up with the evil ones. I seriously don’t think that Arthur would hurt a fly. He seems kind of anxiously reserved, but he’s such a nice guy I’m starting to suspect he’s actually too nice for me. He seemed genuinely upset about having offended you.”
“See! He was talking about me. And he’s probably just pretending to be remorseful to throw everyone off.”
“That’s enough, Kate. You’re on a one-way train to cuckoo-land.”
“I’m going to prove that he’s the one.”
“Okay. It’s a challenge. I’m going to prove that he’s not. Especially seeing that if you’re right and he’s evil, that will mean I’ll have to cancel my date with him for Saturday night.”
“Georgia!”
“Just kidding,” she said, and then under her breath added, “Not really.”
A pot of tiny purple-spotted violet flowers sat on the hall table the next morning. Papy lowered his newspaper long enough to nod toward them, and I wondered if he would have been so blasé about it if the card attached had said “Vincent” instead of “Violette.”
Heard about your frightful experience yesterday. Let’s have coffee later on. Café Sainte-Lucie after school? Kisses, Violette
I pulled my flower dictionary out of my book bag and found the picture of the flowers—they were oak-leaved geraniums. “True friendship,” I read, smiling as Georgia walked up behind me. “Those are pretty,” she commented, leaning down to smell them.
“They’re from Violette,” I said, watching for her reaction.
“They look like weeds,” she replied, straightening, and went to sit next to Papy at the breakfast table.
“Are you okay?” was all Papy uttered at breakfast, but he said it with a look of concern as he glanced over at Georgia—like he would say more if she weren’t there. If my grandfather thought I wouldn’t tell my sister everything, then he really didn’t know us. Maybe our occasional fights threw him off the scent of just how close we actually were.
A half hour later, we stepped out of the house to see Ambrose waiting for us at the corner, standing next to a black 4x4. “Ladies,” he said in a Barry White voice, and stretching his arms in front of him, cracked his thick neck from side to side. “This way, please.” He opened the door, and I jumped into the backseat. “And the lovely Georgia?”
“All this yummy muscleness first thing in the morning is almost too much for me to take,” she cooed, and gave him a playful wink as she scooted herself into the front seat. I shook my head. If “Flirt” qualified as a foreign language, my sister and Ambrose would both have PhDs in it.
“So where is everyone this morning?” I asked Ambrose as he put the car in gear and headed toward the river.
“Vincent and Jean-Baptiste have gone off to visit the revenants staying in Geneviève’s place. You know . . . to dig around to see who tipped the zomboids off to your leader-slaying extravaganza. How’s it feel to be Numa Enemy Number One, Katie-Lou?”
“Scary, actually,” I confessed. “I thought that your chauffeuring me around for the last week was pretty useless until yesterday.”
“Does that mean you’re happy to see me for once?” Ambrose said, his teeth gleaming white against the dark-chocolate brown of his skin.
“I’m always glad to see you, Ambrose,” I said, knowing that if the same line had come from Georgia it would have sounded as seductive as Mae West.
“How about your oh-so-tempting medieval friend?” Georgia said.
“I suppose you’re referring to Arthur and not Violette?” Ambrose replied with a chuckle. “They’re both training with Gaspard this morning, before going to visit some of the other kindred on their own. Jules is volant, so I’m going to drop you off at school and walk with him and Gaspard this afternoon before I come back to get you. Stay inside the school gates, will you? We don’t need any drive-by numa action while you wait for me on the street.”
Ambrose watched as we entered the school grounds, and once we were through the doors, he drove off. Georgia turned to me. “Well? I got the intel on what Arthur’s up to. What are we going to do with it?”
“This is our chance,” I said. “We know where he is right now. We can stake out the house and see where he goes when he leaves.”
“You heard Ambrose. Arthur’s supposed to be going somewhere with the Royal Pain.”
“Well, what will it hurt to spy on them for a couple of hours? Besides skipping school, that is. This is our only chance not to be followed by the revenants.”
“Or the numa, for that matter,” Georgia agreed. “Everyone thinks we’re in school. We’ll have to go now—we don’t know how long Gaspard’s kick-ass training lasts.” She glanced around the hallway, and her eyes landed on an athletic-looking guy carrying a pile of books. “Hey, Paul!” she yelled. “Remember that time you offered to loan me your scooter?”
THIRTY-FIVE
MY SISTER AND I HUDDLED AT THE END OF THE rue de Grenelle, looking ridiculously suspicious as we hid behind the corner, throwing glances every few minutes down the road toward Jean-Baptiste’s mansion.
“What time is it now?” I asked, my teeth chattering in the February cold.
“Five minutes after the last time you asked,” Georgia growled. “It’s eleven oh five and we have been here a total of an hour and thirty-five minutes. How long do your training sessions with Gaspard run?”
“An hour,” I said. “But I’m sure that Violette and Arthur can go for longer than me, and we have no idea when they started.” My heart dropped an inch as our mission began to seem much stupider than it had within the hallway of our warm and safe school.
“Wait!” Georgia hissed in a dramatic whisper. “The gate is opening. And here comes . . . it’s Arthur! He’s wearing a motorcycle helmet, but I know it’s him—he’s got on the same leather jacket he wore at the café yesterday.”
I struggled to look past her, but she pushed me backward. “Shh!” she insisted, even though we were yards out of his hearing range. “He’s driving the motorcycle slowly to the end of the block. He’s getting off and walking the bike backward onto the sidewalk. Holy cow—he looks like he’s hiding!”
Georgia’s commentary was beginning to sound hysterical. “What do you mean ‘hiding’?” I pushed her out of the way. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Okay. Far end of the street. Just behind the last building. He’s hiding down there.”
“Did he see us?”
“No! He didn’t even look our way when he came out of the driveway.”
“Then why is he—”
“Wait!” Georgia interrupted me. I poked my head around the corner of the building above hers. A taxi had just turned past us to drive down the road and was now parked in front of the hôtel particulier. The gate swung open again, and Violette stepped out, peering both ways before jumping into the cab. We pulled back, waited a second, and then stuck our heads around the corner.
The taxi drove to the end of the street and turned left on the one-way avenue. Georgia and I had our helmets on in a second and were on the borrowed scooter, heading down the rue de Grenelle, as we saw Arthur’s motorcycle pull out onto the road a safe distance behind Violette’s taxi. We turned left onto the avenue, a few cars behind Arthur.
The next twenty minutes were spent maneuvering our way between cars and trucks, trying to stay out of view even though Arthur never once looked around. His attention was fixed on Violette’s taxi, and he was obviously using the same defensive tactics we were to avoid her seeing him. We headed north over the river, and up past the Louvre and across town until we arrived at the steep hill called Montmartre and began inching up its tiny one-lane roads.
“They’re heading toward Sacré-Coeur,” I yelled, looking up at the white-domed basilica perched on the hilltop. A refrigerated yogurt truck that had served as our camouflage for the last few blocks stopped in the middle of the street, and its driver jumped out to make a delivery. We spied Arthur half a block up, parking his motorcycle at the base of the rue Foyatier staircase—the landmark that pretty much everyone in the world recognizes from black-and-white Paris postcards. Its multiple flights of steep steps are lined with old-fashioned black metal streetlights, and it is so Old Paris–looking that you half expect everyone on it to suddenly break out into an impromptu Moulin Rouge can-can routine.
“Quick!” I yelled. Georgia pulled up behind Arthur’s bike and locked the scooter to a lamppost. There were enough people around that even if he turned, he probably wouldn’t have noticed us huffing and puffing up the stairs a few flights behind him. Once he got to the top, he turned right and began jogging toward the far side of the church. The sun was directly overhead, and the church’s white stone was blinding in the midday light, making it difficult to follow Arthur’s form as he wove in between the groups of tourists and pilgrims lined up to enter the basilica.
He disappeared through the swarms of people around the far edge of the church. Pressing toward him through the crowd, I reached out to touch Georgia and instead grabbed an extremely hairy forearm. A tall man in a “Heck Yeah Cowboys” baseball cap looked down at me with an amused smile. “Well, hello there!” he said in a Texas accent.
“Sorry,” I blurted, and cast around for Georgia. I caught sight of her about thirty feet in front of me, being swept along by a crowd led by a tour guide waving an Italian flag. She had just begun to realize I was gone, and turned to look for me when the tour group surged and I lost her again.
Pushing my way out of the group of Americans, I followed Arthur’s path, turning the same corner that he had disappeared behind.
I was thrust into darkness as I came around the edge of the basilica onto a deserted stone patio to the side of the edifice. It took my eyes a second to adjust from the brilliant daylight to this sun-hidden courtyard that was empty of tourists and as quiet as a crypt.
The patio was large—the shape and size of a skating rink. Its outer edge bordered a precipice and was sided by iron guardrails to protect the monument’s visitors from the perilous drop. Hulking statues of saints and angels circled the patio, casting weird shadows in the half-light and creating a distinctly creepy atmosphere. Georgia was nowhere to be seen.
I blinked, looking for Arthur, and saw him nearby, hiding behind a statue. He was staring at some people who were half-concealed in the building’s dark shadows. Right in front of me was a larger-than-life figure of an avenging archangel, crouched with sword extended as it fought its invisible enemy. I took Arthur’s example and crept behind it, squinting out from under its sword-bearing arm at the figures across the terrace.
A jean-clad girl was speaking authoritatively to two large, menacing-looking men. With a chill, I recognized them as the numa from Papy’s gallery.
As the speaker gestured, her head turned slightly. My hand flew to my mouth to suppress a gasp. “No,” I whispered. What was Violette doing? She didn’t seem to be threatened by the numa. If anything, they seemed to be hanging on her every word.
I glanced over at Arthur. He was looking at the same scene I was, yet he was hiding. I didn’t understand.
And then—suddenly—I did.
As a wave of comprehension washed over me, I felt immediately and violently ill. I clutched my stomach and prayed that I wouldn’t vomit then and there.
Then a third man stepped forward from the shadows behind the church. It was the man I had seen Arthur talking to at La Palette. And now that I saw what he was wearing—a long fur coat that looked like it had been designed for a Renaissance lord in a costume drama—I knew where I had seen him before. He was the man between the tombs at Père Lachaise cemetery the day of Philippe’s funeral. I had been right to be afraid then. Because now, without a doubt, I could tell that the trick-of-light colorless thing going on in the air around him meant just one thing. He, too, was a numa.
