Vincent took my hand and laced his fingers through mine, sending little shock waves through my heart. My phone rang as we got to the top of the steps. It was Georgia.
“Yes?”
“So, who are you going to dinner with?”
“So, why do you want to know?” I smiled, glancing sideways at Vincent.
“Let’s just say that I’m taking my role as your legal guardian seriously,” she purred.
“You are so not my legal guardian.”
Georgia laughed. “Who are you with?”
“A friend.”
“V?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Oh my God, where are you going? I’ll come by and just pretend I was in the area so I can get a look at him.”
“No way, and besides, I don’t even know where we’re going yet.”
Vincent gave me a sly smile. “Georgia?” he asked. I nodded, and he reached for the phone.
“Hello, is this Georgia? Vincent here. Should I have cleared this date with you before taking your sister out?” He laughed, and I could tell Georgia was working her irresistible charm on him already.
Finally he said, “No, I don’t think that a meet-the-folks session was in the plans for tonight, but I’m sure we’ll run into each other soon. Why not, you ask?” He winked at me, and I shivered. It was incredible how he affected me. In a dangerous way.
“You’ll have to ask your sister. She’s the one calling the shots.”
Chapter Seventeen
WE SAT FACING EACH OTHER ACROSS A TINY table in a cavelike restaurant in the Marais. Dozens of flickering candles illuminated the space around us. Our legs were crisscrossed under the table, mine resting between his, and the feeling of his body touching mine kept my blood on a constant low boil from the moment we sat down until we left.
I kept trying to fight the feeling that Vincent and I were already a couple. It was our first real date, after all, and, besides the barely believable information Vincent had given me about his monster-hood, I didn’t know anything about him. This was no time to let my guard down. I resolved to keep things light.
“You’ve been speaking English to me all afternoon, and you haven’t made one mistake yet,” I complimented him as we waited for our food to come.
“When you sleep as little as we do, you have a lot of time for things like books and films. I’d rather read in the original language and watch movies without having to read the subtitles. So I’ve managed to learn my favorites: English, Italian, and some of the Scandinavian languages.”
“Okay, I’m starting to feel intimidated.”
“I’m sure if you had enough decades to work on it, you’d totally show me up,” he responded, his eyes vivid in the flickering candlelight.
The waiter set our plates in front of us. “Bon appétit,” said Vincent, waiting for me to pick up my fork and knife before touching his own.
“So you eat normal food,” I commented, watching Vincent cut a piece off his magret de canard.
“What? Were you expecting me to order raw brains? I thought we were going to stay away from unearthly topics of conversation tonight,” he said with a grin.
“It’s not every night I have dinner with an immortal,” I joked. “Give me a little leeway.”
“We eat normal stuff. We drink normal stuff. We don’t sleep, except when we’re dormant, which doesn’t really count as sleeping. Anyway, everything else works the same. . . .” His eyes narrowed brazenly, and his lips formed a sexy smile. “Or so I’ve heard.”
I blushed and concentrated intently on my silverware.
“Kate?”
“Mmm?”
“What’s the rest of your name?”
I met his eyes. “Kate Beaumont Mercier. Beaumont’s my mom’s maiden name.”
“It’s French.”
“Yes. I’ve got French roots on both sides of the family. Anyway, naming your kids after your maiden name is a Southern thing. And the South is where Mom grew up. In Georgia, actually.”
“It’s all falling into place now.” Vincent smiled.
“How about you?”
“Vincent Pierre Henri Delacroix. We get two middle names in France. Pierre’s my dad’s name, and my grandfather was Henri.”
“Sounds very aristocratic.”
“Maybe way, way back.” Vincent laughed. “But my family was nothing like Jean-Baptiste’s. It’s easy to tell what kind of background he’s from.”
“Jean-Baptiste,” I murmured. “He doesn’t seem very fond of me.”
Vincent’s face darkened. “I want you to know that, though Jean-Baptiste is like my own family, his opinion of you doesn’t matter to me. If you want him to like you, then I will reassure you: It will come. You have to earn his trust . . . he doesn’t give it easily. But until then, you are with me. He will respect my choice and be civil from now on.”
Vincent saw the doubt on my face and said quickly, “That is, of course, if we keep seeing each other. Which I hope we will.”
I nodded to show I understood, and Vincent, seemingly relieved to see I hadn’t made a run for it after his overearnest diatribe, changed the subject. “So are you and your sister very close?”
“Yeah, she’s not even two years older than me, so we’ve always joked about being twins. But we’re totally different.”
“How so?”
I took a bite and thought about how to describe my sister, the social butterfly, without making her sound shallow.
“Georgia is a total extrovert. Not like I’m exactly a shrinking violet, but I don’t mind spending time by myself. My sister has to be with people twenty-four/seven. In New York everyone knew her. She always managed to find the best parties and was continually surrounded by her entourage: band members, DJs, performance artists.”
“And let me guess . . . you were too busy reading and going to museums to join her.” I laughed when I saw Vincent’s wry grin.
“No, I went with her sometimes. But I wasn’t in the spotlight like Georgia. I was just Georgia’s little sister, along for the ride. She took care of me. She always nominated someone in her group to make sure I had a good time.”
I didn’t explain how she would always choose a “date” for me: gorgeous hipster guys who, to my amazement, enthusiastically took on the challenge of entertaining Georgia’s sister. A few of these setups had turned into something more. Not much more, really, but if one of these guys happened to be at a party Georgia and I went to, I knew I had someone to dance with, sit next to, and maybe kiss in some dark corner of the room later in the night. Georgia called them my “party boys.”
Now, with Vincent sitting across the table from me, larger than life, they seemed like ghosts. Shadows, in comparison to him.
“I worried how she would handle having to step down from her queen-of-nightlife throne when we moved,” I continued, “but I underestimated her. She’s well on her way to reaching the same level here.”
“Different city, same scene?”
“She’s basically out every night that Papy and Mamie don’t force her to stay home. But unlike in New York, I don’t go with her.”
“I know,” he said, spearing a potato with his fork, and then stopped and looked quickly up to see if I had noticed his slip.
“What?” I asked, surprised, and then Ambrose’s words suddenly came back to me. We’ve been checking her out, and she’s not a spy. “You’ve been following us!” Feeling simultaneously flattered and appalled, I pulled my legs back from his and kept to my side of the table.
“No one was following Georgia, just following you. And it wasn’t me. At least after the day we talked at the Picasso Museum. After that, I felt I owed you some privacy. It was Ambrose and Jules; once they knew that I was . . . interested in you, they insisted on making sure you weren’t a danger to us. I never doubted you, though. Honestly.”
“A ‘danger’?” I asked, dismayed.
Vincent sighed. “We have enemies.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s change the subject,” Vincent said. “The last thing I want to do is get you involved in something that could put you at risk.”
“Are you at risk?” I asked.
“We don’t come into contact with them that often. But when we do, it ends in each side trying to destroy the other. So since you asked me to be honest, I have to say yes. But I’ve had decades of experience protecting myself. I don’t want you to worry.”
I suddenly remembered my early morning walk with Georgia along the quay. “The night I saw you dive into the Seine after that girl. People were fighting under the bridge. With swords.”
“Well, then, you’ve already seen them. Those were the numa.”
Even the word sounded evil. I shuddered. “What are they?”
“They’re the same as us, but in reverse. They’re revenants, but their fate isn’t to save lives. It’s to destroy them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We become immortal when we die while saving someone’s life. They win their immortality by taking lives. The universe seems to like equilibrium.” His smile was bitter.
“You mean they’re resurrected murderers?” I felt a cold blade of panic scrape a path from my stomach to my heart.
“Not just murderers. They all betrayed someone to their death.”
I inhaled sharply. “What? Wait a minute. Do you mean that anyone who dies after betraying someone to their death turns into an immortal bad guy?”
“No, not all. Just some. It’s like us. Not everyone who dies saving someone else is resurrected. I’ll explain some other time—it gets a bit complicated. All you need to know is that the numa are bad. They’re dangerous. And they never die because they keep on killing. Which is facilitated by their line of work: They’re basically glorified mafiosi, running prostitution and drug rings, and in order to have a legal face for their business dealings, they own bars and clubs. Not surprisingly, in their world the opportunity for death and betrayal comes along frequently enough.”
“And those are the . . . things, who were fighting under the bridge that night?”
Vincent nodded. “The girl who jumped. She had gotten involved with them. They drove her to decide to kill herself, and then went along to make sure she followed through.”
“But she looked so young. How old was she?”
“Fourteen.”
I flinched. “So why were you there?” I asked.
“Charles and Charlotte were walking, with Jules volant. Jules saw it before it happened and rushed home to get me and Ambrose. When we got to the scene, the twins held some of the numa off beneath the bridge while the girl . . . well, you saw what happened. I reached her just before she jumped.”
“Did you get the . . . bad guys?” I didn’t want to say the word, it had such an unsettling effect on me.
“Two of them, yes. A couple others got away.”
“So you don’t just save people. You kill people too.”
“Numa aren’t people. If we have a chance to destroy an evil revenant, we do. Humans can always change; that’s why we avoid killing them if we can. There is always a possibility of redemption in their future. But not the numa. They started on their path while they were human. Once they’re revenants, they’re past any hope for salvation.”
So Vincent was a killer, I thought. A bad-guy killer, but a killer nonetheless. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“And the girl who threw herself off the bridge?”
“She’s fine.”
“Are you obsessed with her?”
Vincent laughed. “Now that I know she’s fine, no.” Under the table, he pulled my legs back between his, and some of the warmth returned. “I’m just lucky revenants can’t read one another’s minds, because Jean-Baptiste would kill me if he knew I had told you about the numa.”
“Security breach?” I laughed.
Vincent smiled. “Yes, but I trust you, Kate.”
“No problem there,” I said. “You probably already know this from your spy network, but I don’t have anyone to tell even if I wanted to. It’s not like I have crowds of friends waiting around to hear my undead gossip.”
Vincent laughed. “No. But you have me.”
“I’ll be extra careful not to blab about monsters around you, then.”
“How is it that we just talked for two hours and I still don’t know anything about you?” I complained as we left the restaurant.
“What do you mean?” Vincent responded, starting up the scooter. “I told you a ton about us.”
“About you as a group, lots, but you as a person, nothing,” I shouted over the noise of the engine. “You didn’t let me ask you any questions. Puts me at a disadvantage.”
“Get on,” he said, laughing. I climbed up behind him and wrapped my arms around him, feeling close to bliss.
We crossed the river and began driving toward our part of town. With the wind whipping my hair wildly about below the edge of the helmet, and the warm body of my . . . potential boyfriend pressed up against me, I wished he would keep driving till we hit the Atlantic Ocean, more than four hours away. But when the Louvre Museum edged into view on the other side of the Seine, Vincent slowed down and pulled over to the riverside. He turned off the bike and locked it to a post before taking my hand and leading me toward the river.
“Yes?”
“So, who are you going to dinner with?”
“So, why do you want to know?” I smiled, glancing sideways at Vincent.
“Let’s just say that I’m taking my role as your legal guardian seriously,” she purred.
“You are so not my legal guardian.”
Georgia laughed. “Who are you with?”
“A friend.”
“V?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Oh my God, where are you going? I’ll come by and just pretend I was in the area so I can get a look at him.”
“No way, and besides, I don’t even know where we’re going yet.”
Vincent gave me a sly smile. “Georgia?” he asked. I nodded, and he reached for the phone.
“Hello, is this Georgia? Vincent here. Should I have cleared this date with you before taking your sister out?” He laughed, and I could tell Georgia was working her irresistible charm on him already.
Finally he said, “No, I don’t think that a meet-the-folks session was in the plans for tonight, but I’m sure we’ll run into each other soon. Why not, you ask?” He winked at me, and I shivered. It was incredible how he affected me. In a dangerous way.
“You’ll have to ask your sister. She’s the one calling the shots.”
Chapter Seventeen
WE SAT FACING EACH OTHER ACROSS A TINY table in a cavelike restaurant in the Marais. Dozens of flickering candles illuminated the space around us. Our legs were crisscrossed under the table, mine resting between his, and the feeling of his body touching mine kept my blood on a constant low boil from the moment we sat down until we left.
I kept trying to fight the feeling that Vincent and I were already a couple. It was our first real date, after all, and, besides the barely believable information Vincent had given me about his monster-hood, I didn’t know anything about him. This was no time to let my guard down. I resolved to keep things light.
“You’ve been speaking English to me all afternoon, and you haven’t made one mistake yet,” I complimented him as we waited for our food to come.
“When you sleep as little as we do, you have a lot of time for things like books and films. I’d rather read in the original language and watch movies without having to read the subtitles. So I’ve managed to learn my favorites: English, Italian, and some of the Scandinavian languages.”
“Okay, I’m starting to feel intimidated.”
“I’m sure if you had enough decades to work on it, you’d totally show me up,” he responded, his eyes vivid in the flickering candlelight.
The waiter set our plates in front of us. “Bon appétit,” said Vincent, waiting for me to pick up my fork and knife before touching his own.
“So you eat normal food,” I commented, watching Vincent cut a piece off his magret de canard.
“What? Were you expecting me to order raw brains? I thought we were going to stay away from unearthly topics of conversation tonight,” he said with a grin.
“It’s not every night I have dinner with an immortal,” I joked. “Give me a little leeway.”
“We eat normal stuff. We drink normal stuff. We don’t sleep, except when we’re dormant, which doesn’t really count as sleeping. Anyway, everything else works the same. . . .” His eyes narrowed brazenly, and his lips formed a sexy smile. “Or so I’ve heard.”
I blushed and concentrated intently on my silverware.
“Kate?”
“Mmm?”
“What’s the rest of your name?”
I met his eyes. “Kate Beaumont Mercier. Beaumont’s my mom’s maiden name.”
“It’s French.”
“Yes. I’ve got French roots on both sides of the family. Anyway, naming your kids after your maiden name is a Southern thing. And the South is where Mom grew up. In Georgia, actually.”
“It’s all falling into place now.” Vincent smiled.
“How about you?”
“Vincent Pierre Henri Delacroix. We get two middle names in France. Pierre’s my dad’s name, and my grandfather was Henri.”
“Sounds very aristocratic.”
“Maybe way, way back.” Vincent laughed. “But my family was nothing like Jean-Baptiste’s. It’s easy to tell what kind of background he’s from.”
“Jean-Baptiste,” I murmured. “He doesn’t seem very fond of me.”
Vincent’s face darkened. “I want you to know that, though Jean-Baptiste is like my own family, his opinion of you doesn’t matter to me. If you want him to like you, then I will reassure you: It will come. You have to earn his trust . . . he doesn’t give it easily. But until then, you are with me. He will respect my choice and be civil from now on.”
Vincent saw the doubt on my face and said quickly, “That is, of course, if we keep seeing each other. Which I hope we will.”
I nodded to show I understood, and Vincent, seemingly relieved to see I hadn’t made a run for it after his overearnest diatribe, changed the subject. “So are you and your sister very close?”
“Yeah, she’s not even two years older than me, so we’ve always joked about being twins. But we’re totally different.”
“How so?”
I took a bite and thought about how to describe my sister, the social butterfly, without making her sound shallow.
“Georgia is a total extrovert. Not like I’m exactly a shrinking violet, but I don’t mind spending time by myself. My sister has to be with people twenty-four/seven. In New York everyone knew her. She always managed to find the best parties and was continually surrounded by her entourage: band members, DJs, performance artists.”
“And let me guess . . . you were too busy reading and going to museums to join her.” I laughed when I saw Vincent’s wry grin.
“No, I went with her sometimes. But I wasn’t in the spotlight like Georgia. I was just Georgia’s little sister, along for the ride. She took care of me. She always nominated someone in her group to make sure I had a good time.”
I didn’t explain how she would always choose a “date” for me: gorgeous hipster guys who, to my amazement, enthusiastically took on the challenge of entertaining Georgia’s sister. A few of these setups had turned into something more. Not much more, really, but if one of these guys happened to be at a party Georgia and I went to, I knew I had someone to dance with, sit next to, and maybe kiss in some dark corner of the room later in the night. Georgia called them my “party boys.”
Now, with Vincent sitting across the table from me, larger than life, they seemed like ghosts. Shadows, in comparison to him.
“I worried how she would handle having to step down from her queen-of-nightlife throne when we moved,” I continued, “but I underestimated her. She’s well on her way to reaching the same level here.”
“Different city, same scene?”
“She’s basically out every night that Papy and Mamie don’t force her to stay home. But unlike in New York, I don’t go with her.”
“I know,” he said, spearing a potato with his fork, and then stopped and looked quickly up to see if I had noticed his slip.
“What?” I asked, surprised, and then Ambrose’s words suddenly came back to me. We’ve been checking her out, and she’s not a spy. “You’ve been following us!” Feeling simultaneously flattered and appalled, I pulled my legs back from his and kept to my side of the table.
“No one was following Georgia, just following you. And it wasn’t me. At least after the day we talked at the Picasso Museum. After that, I felt I owed you some privacy. It was Ambrose and Jules; once they knew that I was . . . interested in you, they insisted on making sure you weren’t a danger to us. I never doubted you, though. Honestly.”
“A ‘danger’?” I asked, dismayed.
Vincent sighed. “We have enemies.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s change the subject,” Vincent said. “The last thing I want to do is get you involved in something that could put you at risk.”
“Are you at risk?” I asked.
“We don’t come into contact with them that often. But when we do, it ends in each side trying to destroy the other. So since you asked me to be honest, I have to say yes. But I’ve had decades of experience protecting myself. I don’t want you to worry.”
I suddenly remembered my early morning walk with Georgia along the quay. “The night I saw you dive into the Seine after that girl. People were fighting under the bridge. With swords.”
“Well, then, you’ve already seen them. Those were the numa.”
Even the word sounded evil. I shuddered. “What are they?”
“They’re the same as us, but in reverse. They’re revenants, but their fate isn’t to save lives. It’s to destroy them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We become immortal when we die while saving someone’s life. They win their immortality by taking lives. The universe seems to like equilibrium.” His smile was bitter.
“You mean they’re resurrected murderers?” I felt a cold blade of panic scrape a path from my stomach to my heart.
“Not just murderers. They all betrayed someone to their death.”
I inhaled sharply. “What? Wait a minute. Do you mean that anyone who dies after betraying someone to their death turns into an immortal bad guy?”
“No, not all. Just some. It’s like us. Not everyone who dies saving someone else is resurrected. I’ll explain some other time—it gets a bit complicated. All you need to know is that the numa are bad. They’re dangerous. And they never die because they keep on killing. Which is facilitated by their line of work: They’re basically glorified mafiosi, running prostitution and drug rings, and in order to have a legal face for their business dealings, they own bars and clubs. Not surprisingly, in their world the opportunity for death and betrayal comes along frequently enough.”
“And those are the . . . things, who were fighting under the bridge that night?”
Vincent nodded. “The girl who jumped. She had gotten involved with them. They drove her to decide to kill herself, and then went along to make sure she followed through.”
“But she looked so young. How old was she?”
“Fourteen.”
I flinched. “So why were you there?” I asked.
“Charles and Charlotte were walking, with Jules volant. Jules saw it before it happened and rushed home to get me and Ambrose. When we got to the scene, the twins held some of the numa off beneath the bridge while the girl . . . well, you saw what happened. I reached her just before she jumped.”
“Did you get the . . . bad guys?” I didn’t want to say the word, it had such an unsettling effect on me.
“Two of them, yes. A couple others got away.”
“So you don’t just save people. You kill people too.”
“Numa aren’t people. If we have a chance to destroy an evil revenant, we do. Humans can always change; that’s why we avoid killing them if we can. There is always a possibility of redemption in their future. But not the numa. They started on their path while they were human. Once they’re revenants, they’re past any hope for salvation.”
So Vincent was a killer, I thought. A bad-guy killer, but a killer nonetheless. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“And the girl who threw herself off the bridge?”
“She’s fine.”
“Are you obsessed with her?”
Vincent laughed. “Now that I know she’s fine, no.” Under the table, he pulled my legs back between his, and some of the warmth returned. “I’m just lucky revenants can’t read one another’s minds, because Jean-Baptiste would kill me if he knew I had told you about the numa.”
“Security breach?” I laughed.
Vincent smiled. “Yes, but I trust you, Kate.”
“No problem there,” I said. “You probably already know this from your spy network, but I don’t have anyone to tell even if I wanted to. It’s not like I have crowds of friends waiting around to hear my undead gossip.”
Vincent laughed. “No. But you have me.”
“I’ll be extra careful not to blab about monsters around you, then.”
“How is it that we just talked for two hours and I still don’t know anything about you?” I complained as we left the restaurant.
“What do you mean?” Vincent responded, starting up the scooter. “I told you a ton about us.”
“About you as a group, lots, but you as a person, nothing,” I shouted over the noise of the engine. “You didn’t let me ask you any questions. Puts me at a disadvantage.”
“Get on,” he said, laughing. I climbed up behind him and wrapped my arms around him, feeling close to bliss.
We crossed the river and began driving toward our part of town. With the wind whipping my hair wildly about below the edge of the helmet, and the warm body of my . . . potential boyfriend pressed up against me, I wished he would keep driving till we hit the Atlantic Ocean, more than four hours away. But when the Louvre Museum edged into view on the other side of the Seine, Vincent slowed down and pulled over to the riverside. He turned off the bike and locked it to a post before taking my hand and leading me toward the river.
