Until I Die

Page 8

I opened my mouth to say something, but Vincent shook his head, grinning. “Actually, don’t answer that. Of course you are. I wouldn’t be so totally into you if you weren’t.”
I laughed. And just like that, the force field of fear and worry dematerialized and I was kissing him. And he was kissing me. And as we touched, everything suddenly seemed very simple. It was just Vincent and me, and the world and all its complicated problems lost their importance. I pulled him closer to me.
“You’re . . . ,” he began.
“Yes?” I said, tilting my head toward his.
“Hurting me,” he gasped, clenching his teeth.
“Oh no, what did I do?” My hands flew to my mouth.
His pressed his hand to his chest and tested it gently. “I forgot about the rib,” he said. We looked at each other for a second, and then both started cracking up, Vincent laughing carefully, his eyes scrunched up in pain.
“I guess I don’t know my own strength,” I joked, and then leaned toward him again, holding him more softly this time, and losing myself in the kiss. And, what seemed like two seconds later, we were in the middle of the sun bed, Vincent lying down and me hovering above him on hands and knees with my hair draped around his face, sealing out the world. We were in our own mini universe. He reached up to hold my head in his hands as our lips met in a kiss that communicated everything we hadn’t been able to express with words.
Vincent kissed me like it was his very last chance to touch me. And, feeling feverish and wild, I returned his kiss unreservedly.
As if he could tell I was losing myself, Vincent’s kisses became softer. He pulled me down so that my body was covering his and every part of us was touching. Lying like that for the longest, sweetest moment, he brushed his lips against mine once more before sitting up, scooting back against the wall, and pulling me to him. I sat between his legs, leaning back carefully on his chest as he held me and we stared up into the night sky at the reflecting gold of the rising moon.
Unfolding Vincent’s arms from beneath my br**sts, I shifted around so that I was looking into his eyes. I didn’t need to say anything. Watching him was enough. But after a moment, he spoke. “Kate, I’ve spent a lifetime waiting for you. Before I saw you, I hadn’t cared for anyone for . . . well, for the good part of a century, and it felt like my heart had been permanently disconnected. I wasn’t even looking anymore. And without expecting anything . . . without any hope at all, suddenly you were here.”
He raised his hand, and running his fingers from my temples through my hair, he spoke softly. “Now that you are here—now that we’re together—I can’t imagine going back to the life I had before. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you now. I love you too much.”
My throat constricted. He had said the magical three words. Out loud. When he registered my stunned expression, his lips curled up at the corners. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
My heart became a gooey mess inside my chest, and then he said it again.
EIGHT
IT WASN’T UNTIL LATER THAT NIGHT THAT THE idea occurred to me. I had returned to my grandparents’ apartment to find that they had left for a dinner party. Mamie had stuck a note to the fridge with dinner instructions. I pulled out the plate of leftovers she had prepared for me and sat at the table for a few minutes, picking at it distractedly as a plan took form in my mind.
Vincent had said he was trying to come up with a solution for our quandary. Well, why did I have to sit around and wait for him to come up with all the answers? Maybe I could do some research myself. I was living in an apartment with a fully stocked antiquities library. It wouldn’t hurt to go digging around and see if I could discover something in Papy’s book collection.
The previous year I had seen a Greek amphora in his gallery that was decorated with na**d warrior figures he called “numina.” His startled reaction when I forgot myself and stupidly remarked that the word sounded like “numa” made me suspect that he had come across the term before. And if he had found out about revenants in the course of his research, that book might still be around.
From everything I had heard at La Maison, revenants boasted a long and colorful history. Gaspard was constantly checking his documents for examples of past aberrations. Well, maybe Papy had some books that Gaspard didn’t. In any case, if Vincent was searching for an alternative, one might actually exist. And maybe I could find some information he didn’t already have.
There was still so much I didn’t know. Vincent had told me the basics about revenants, and I had learned more by spending time with him and his kindred. Of course, I had searched for revenants on the internet as soon as I knew what Vincent was. But all I had found were references to the old French tradition of a revenant being a “spirit that has come back from the dead” and all sorts of contemporary spin-offs like zombies and other undead monsters. Nothing that spoke of “real” revenants—the ones I knew.
I asked Vincent once if “revenant” was just the word used in France. He said that most languages used that same word with little variation, because it came from the Latin word venio: “to come.” So that was what I had to start with: the word “revenant”; a basic knowledge of what they were; the fact that their enemies were depicted on an ancient Greek vase; and . . . nothing else. It wasn’t much to go on, but I was determined that if anything revenant-related remained in Papy’s library, I would find it.
I left my barely touched meal and hurried to his study. All four walls were lined with shelves. And all the shelves were packed with books. I had no idea where to start. Although some titles were in French and English, that didn’t even account for half. I recognized Italian and German, and Cyrillic letters clued me in that some books were Russian. At first glance, I felt completely overwhelmed.
Break it down, I thought. I started at the bookcase closest to the door, pulling up a footstool to reach the highest shelf. The Church of Hagia Sofia. Architecture in the Ancient World. Roman Architecture and City Planning. Papy obviously organized his books by themes. The shelf beneath it was the same. As was the next.
Underneath that began a shelf on Chinese funerary statues. And the bottom shelf was all about ancient Asian seals and snuffboxes. That was one whole column of shelves that could be ruled out, and it took only five minutes. This might be easier than I thought.
An hour later, I had narrowed down Papy’s entire library to six shelves of interest. Although there were dozens of books on Greek pottery, I wasn’t going to pore over all of them to find another example like Papy’s numa amphora. Even if I was lucky enough to find one, it probably wouldn’t have the in-depth information I needed. No, it was the shelves on mythology that I would focus on.
I began flipping through tomes on Greek, Roman and Norse mythology. But they were all published in the twentieth century and were the type of books found in any library. Besides listing the major gods, the mythological beings were all the typical ones you’d come across in a Narnia book: satyrs, wood nymphs, and the like. No revenants. Of course.
If they had managed to stay incognito for so long, they wouldn’t appear in a mainstream book. I began to skip anything that looked like it had been printed in the last hundred years and inspected more closely those that seemed to have been created on an ancient printing press. Papy protected most of these in archival boxes. One by one I pulled the boxes out, placed them on his desk, and gently went through their contents. Some were just pages of manuscript, and I studied the old parchments for any words that looked like “revenant” or “numa.” Nothing.
Finally I got to an ancient-looking bestiary—a type of old-fashioned monster manual. The margins were illustrated with pictures of the mythical beings described on the page. Or so I assumed, since I couldn’t make heads or tails of the Latin text.
Flipping past griffins and unicorns and mermaids, I came across a page with an illustration of two men. One was drawn with an evil face, and the other had radiant lines around its head like it was shining. Its entry was entitled “Revenant: Bardia/Numa.”
I shook my head in amazement. Trust Papy to have a book illustrating a species of undead beings who are so meticulous about preserving their identity that they’re completely unknown to the modern world.
A shiver of excitement ran down my spine as I tried to decrypt the short paragraph beneath the heading. But besides those first three words, I didn’t recognize a thing. I felt like kicking myself for not taking more than a year of Latin in middle school. I pulled a sheet of paper from Papy’s printer and carefully copied the text onto it. When I finished, I put the book back in its place, grabbed the Latin dictionary off Papy’s reference shelf, and retreated to my bedroom.
Due to Latin’s weird verb tenses and the fact that there seemed to be no order to where words appeared in a sentence, I worked on the short text for quite a while. Finally I had deciphered enough to understand that it defined revenants as immortals who are divided into the guardians of life—bardia—and the takers of life—numa. That both types are limited by the same rules of “death sleep” and “spirit walking.” That they take power from their human saves or kills. And that they are virtually impossible to destroy.
Well, nothing new there, I thought with a pang of disappointment. Except for the term “bardia.” I wondered why the revenants didn’t use it for themselves, since the word “numa” was obviously still current.
I looked back at my notes to translate a paragraph that had been written in smaller script at the bottom of the page. It was just two sentences, and I found them easier to decrypt than the rest, getting them pretty much word for word. As I deciphered them, I felt a chill creep through my body until, when I finished, my fingers felt numb.
“Woe to the human who encounters a revenant. For he has danced with death, being either delivered from or into its cold embrace.”
I shivered, and glanced toward the clock as I heard my grandparents return. Midnight. I would have to continue my research another day. But having already discovered something on the first try, I was determined to find more.
NINE
AND LIKE THAT, THE HOLIDAYS WERE OVER AND I was back in school. Junior year had proven to be easy so far, and Georgia, in her last semester of high school, kept me from feeling lonely between classes. But the excitement of being with Vincent and the revenants made this facet of “real life” feel bland. School was just something I needed to get out of the way. I wasn’t even thinking past graduation.
Georgia, however, had her future figured out. She would be starting a communications degree at the Sorbonne in the fall. And she had a new boyfriend, Sebastien, who not only wasn’t an evil killer like her last boyfriend, but had no criminal record that I knew of and was actually really nice. Of course, he was in a band. But you couldn’t be a nobody and date Georgia. Glamour and fame were her lowest common boyfriend denominators.
Georgia and I were on our way home after our post-holiday two-day school week and were passing the Café Sainte-Lucie when I heard someone shouting my name. I looked over to see Vincent in the café’s front door, waving us over. “I hoped you would pass by,” he said. Folding my hand in his, he steered us through the crowded room, where I saw a table full of revenants in the corner.
“Hi,” I said, leaning in to give cheek-kisses to Ambrose and Jules as Vincent took two chairs from a nearby table and placed them between him and Violette.
“Georgia, meet Violette and Arthur.” I gestured toward the newcomers. “This is Georgia, my sister.”
Arthur nodded and stood formally, taking his seat again once Georgia had sat down.
“Let me guess,” Georgia said, gawking appreciatively at his gallantry. “If it weren’t for that divinely handsome mask, you’d probably look like the crypt-keeper. What are you, like . . . pre-Napoleonic? Friends of Louis XIV?”
Violette gasped and placed a protective hand on Arthur’s shoulder. Her shock was offset by his look of amusement.
Ambrose cracked up. “Keep going backward, Georgia. You’ll get there in a couple hundred years.”
Georgia whistled, impressed. “It seems you have to hang with the geriatrics to find a true gentleman nowadays. Nice to meet you, Arthur.”
Violette’s ivory complexion turned puce. “Am I mistaken, or does every human in Paris know of our identity?”
Vincent smiled his charming smile at her and said, “Georgia had the distinction of finding out about us the hard way. She was the one who was friends with Lucien.”
Violette inhaled sharply. “You are the human who is banned from entering the house.”
“The one and only,” said Georgia, brushing off Violette’s comment with a laugh. “But I’ve always felt that any establishment that doesn’t welcome me with open arms doesn’t actually deserve my patronage.”
Violette sat there staring at her, seemingly not understanding a word Georgia said.
“Translation . . . JB doesn’t want me around—I don’t want him around. I have better people to hang out with than stick-up-their-butt centuries-old royal-family wannabes.” Georgia pronounced this in such a matter-of-fact way that the words didn’t sound like as much of a slam as they really were. My sister—a master of diplomacy. Oh Lord. Here we go. I put my hand on Georgia’s arm, but she just covered it with her own and stared defiantly at the tiny revenant.
As the meaning of Georgia’s words finally sank in, Violette stood abruptly. In a voice low enough so only our table could hear, she sputtered, “Do you know what we do for you, you unappreciative human?”