“And now the . . . numa, is it?” she asked. I nodded. “They have Vincent’s body?”
“They had Vincent’s body. But they burned it.”
I got the words out without choking, but tears coursed down my cheeks as I registered the horror in Mamie’s and Georgia’s eyes.
“But his spirit still exists? And you can still talk to him?” Mamie clarified.
“I might be able to if he can get away from Violette.”
“I always knew she was a depraved munchkin,” Georgia muttered, gnawing on a thumbnail.
“What about your evil ex-boyfriend?” Mamie scolded her. “After the Lucien story, you’ll be lucky if I ever let you date again!” She turned to me and sighed. “Oh, Katya, I don’t even know what to say.”
“But you believe me?” I asked, watching her face.
“I have no choice, other than believing that the two of you are crazy or brainwashed. Or on drugs,” she said in a tone that suggested she might prefer one of those options to the alternative. “And Antoine knew about this?”
“Just since yesterday,” I qualified.
Mamie sighed. “I hate to say this, but I don’t blame your Papy for banning you from seeing Vincent.”
My shoulders slumped, but Mamie held up her palm, cautioning me to wait. “You just told me your story. Please let me respond. I’m trying to think of how to put this without hurting your feelings.”
“What?” I asked, as a knot of self-protectiveness formed in my chest.
I watched a series of emotions cross my grandmother’s face: pity, indecision, and finally indignation. But then she glanced at my wet, swollen face and her bubble of anger popped.
“Oh, Katya,” she sighed. “Even if Vincent and his kind are the good guys, it’s like telling me you’re dating Superman. Who wants their granddaughter to be Lois Lane—constantly threatened by her boyfriend’s evil enemies? Instead of falling for a hero, I can’t help but wish you loved a normal boy. A nice safe student, perhaps.” She looked askance at Georgia. “Even a boy in a rock band would be easier to accept.” My sister suddenly found her fingernails of the utmost interest.
Giving me a final squeeze, my grandmother rose slowly and walked to the door. Pausing in the doorway, she folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes for a moment as if trying to mentally erase everything she had heard in the last half hour. Then, opening them again and seeing Georgia and me sitting there, she sighed.
“First of all, I will call your school in the morning and tell them that the two of you won’t be coming in tomorrow. That will give you time to figure out how to deal with what has happened and”—she glanced at Georgia—“to heal.
“Secondly, Katya, I believe your insane tale, even though I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. Your Papy and I will do our best to be understanding, even if we don’t approve. From now on, Vincent and his kindred are an open subject in this house. No more hiding things from us. We are on your side and want to help you make smart, well-informed decisions whether you’re talking about bad grades or the undead.”
Her nose wrinkled upon the last word. Although she was trying to be matter-of-fact, I knew it was hard for her to get those words out of her mouth. “Okay, Mamie,” I promised.
“I’m here for you, darling. This family is familiar with grief. You can always come to me for comfort and know I will understand.”
I nodded at my grandmother, and satisfied, she turned to leave. A second later we heard her bedroom door open and shut with a slam. Her voice was audible even through the closed door. “Yes, I can see that you’re asleep, Antoine. But you had better wake yourself up, because we have some talking to do.”
Georgia and I looked at each other, and even through my tears, I couldn’t help but smile.
FOUR
MY SLEEP WAS SO LIGHT I HEARD EACH CREAK OF our ancient building and every car that drove by on the rue du Bac. And even when my mind slipped off into a nostalgia-steeped dream about Brooklyn and my parents, I was halfway listening for Vincent’s voice. When I awoke, it felt like I hadn’t slept at all, but the clock read eleven a.m. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, unable—no, unwilling—to move.
It seemed like the events of the previous day had happened in another lifetime to another girl. But barely twenty-four hours ago my sister and I had faced off with Violette on top of Montmartre. This time yesterday we had discovered her plan to wield her position as leader of the numa to overthrow France’s revenants, using Vincent to accomplish her goal.
She had misled him into following the Dark Way. He had spent a couple of months absorbing the malevolent energy of the numa he killed so that he could withstand the urge to die. For me. It had weakened him to the point that Violette could have easily captured and killed him, if he hadn’t preempted her move by charging headfirst into our skirmish and plunging to his death off a precipice. Death for Vincent wasn’t permanent. But having his body incinerated was.
A compartment inside my heart that had gradually, over the last nine months, become a huge Vincent-shaped space was suddenly and violently empty. And the rest of my heart’s contents—my love for my parents, my sister, my grandparents, my passions for art and books and film—stood cautiously aside, refusing to crowd their way into the hollow space left by my love’s disappearance. How could anything—or anyone—replace him?
I was done crying. I could feel it. And as I lay there, I felt a fiery determination begin to fill the void. A resolve to make sure that what was left of Vincent—his “wandering soul,” as Gaspard had called it—would be safe.
I sat up cautiously, wincing as I felt a dual pain in the middle and upper part of my chest: grief and my cracked collarbone, both compliments of Violette. Reaching for my cell phone, I saw I had received a text from Ambrose not even a half hour ago. I eagerly clicked to see it, but my heart fell when I saw the content.
Just checking in. No news. Jules still at castle trying to see Vin. Hang in there, K-L.
I was about to put the phone back down when I noticed that there had been a call during the night with no message left. I recognized the number. It was Bran’s.
I was up and out of bed in an instant. I stood bouncing nervously on my toes as I phoned him back and was fed directly into his voice mail. “Bran, it’s Kate. I saw that you called last night. Call me back.”
I tightened the Ace bandage the doctor had given me and, after checking the kitchen and finding a note from Mamie, went to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. Leaning forward into the mirror, I gently touched the swollen flesh beneath my eyes. Pulling out a concealer stick, I went to work to make myself look normal. A couple of minutes later, I was tiptoeing into Georgia’s bedroom where I stood watching her sprawled, snoring form before poking her gently.
“Georgia. Get up.”
“Wha . . . Goway,” she mumbled, opening one eye before pulling the pillow securely over her head.
“Georgia, it’s almost noon. Papy’s at his gallery and Mamie went out. I need you to come somewhere with me. But we have to leave before she gets back, or she’ll want to know where we’re going.”
She just lay there, hiding as I poked again. Finally she sat up and tossed the pillow to the floor. “What is wrong with you? Can’t you see I’m grievously injured?” Eyes still closed, she lifted her chin to show her face. Her multicolored bruises had now consolidated into half-moons of deep purple and black under her eyes and one cheek was swollen like an apple. My sister looked like a boxer post-knockout. Or a hit-and-run raccoon.
My heart tugged seeing her so banged up, but I knew her injuries were just surface deep. And there were more important issues at stake. “Georgia, I need you to go with me to find Bran. He might have an answer to what’s going on with Vincent.”
She fluttered her eyelids for a few seconds, not in a girlie way, but because they were totally stuck together with eye goop. “I think I’m blind,” she moaned. I handed her a facial wipe from her dresser and she swabbed her eyes before squinting at me. As soon as she saw my serious expression, she was alert. “Sorry, Kate. Forget about me. What’s the plan?”
“Do you remember me talking about those special guérisseurs? The healers that deal with revenants? I need you to go up to Saint-Ouen to find one of them with me.”
She squeezed the bridge of her nose to wake herself up. “Okay. But it’s Friday. A school day.”
“Mamie called school to tell them we weren’t coming, remember?”
“That’s right,” Georgia said, still nose-pinching with eyes closed. “So you and I are sneaking out . . .”
“Mamie’s gone. We’ll just leave her a message that we’re popping out for a few minutes.”
She let go of her nose and stared at me. “We’re going to leave her a message that her two granddaughters who got mixed up in a battle between supernatural creatures yesterday, one of whom has multiple injuries, and the other whose boyfriend was killed, are just popping out unsupervised to . . .”
“Hunt down a member of an ancient family of healers in order to get information to protect my dead boyfriend’s ghost.”
The corners of my sister’s lips curled up. “Right. I’m in.” She hopped out of bed and began pulling clothes on. “What do we do if we run into her on the way out?” she called from underneath the shirt she was tugging over her head. I winced as I saw the bruises on her ribs where Violette had kicked her. It wasn’t as bad as the contusions and swelling on her face, but she ignored her injuries as she grinned at me.
“We’ll tell her we’ve gone out for bread,” I replied.
“The one excuse a French person would never question. Baguettes or die!” Georgia cheered, and we raced out before my grandmother could return.
We were all the way across town before I realized I had left my cell phone at home. “I’ve got mine,” Georgia said, patting her coat pocket.
“Yeah, but Ambrose was supposed to let me know if anything happened.” My chest constricted with anxiety. Today was not the day to be out of contact.
“Call him,” Georgia offered, holding her phone out to me.
“No, that’s okay. We’re here,” I said, pointing ahead to Le Corbeau’s darkened storefront.
Georgia peered dubiously at the old wooden sign with the store’s namesake raven creakily flapping back and forth in the staccato gusts of winter wind. “Are you sure this place was actually ever open? It looks medieval,” she said, pulling her coat tighter to her.
I rapped on the door window, but it was obvious that no one was in.
“Is that a giant tooth?” Georgia asked, leaning toward the window display.
“It’s called a relic. It’s probably a dead saint’s finger bone or something,” I replied, pressing down hard on the door handle. I watched astonished as the door swung smoothly open. “It wasn’t even locked!” I exclaimed, and stepped over the threshold.
“Why would they lock it?” Georgia said, following me in. “Who would steal . . . ‘an eighteenth-century rosary featuring a sliver of the true cross trapped inside Bohemian crystal’?” she read off a tag, and dropped the beads carelessly back onto their stand. “That’s just weird. Man, they could really use a cleaner here. The dust is enough to give you asthma.”
We moved deeper into the darkened room, shuffling through the tight space between ancient waist-high statues of saints with knives through their heads and display cases holding contemporary glow-in-the-dark pope memorabilia. My foot creaked on the parquet, and immediately there came a thump from under the floor. “Ssh!” I whispered to Georgia. “Did you hear that?”
“Oh my God,” she murmured, her eyes widening in alarm. “They’ve got a dungeon.”
The thumping started again: three evenly spaced knocks from beneath our feet. It sounded like someone was tapping a Mayday code on the ceiling of whatever room was below. Like someone needed help. It could be only one person.
“Quickly!” I ran toward the door that led to the back stairway. Instead of going up to the apartment where I had met Gwenhaël, we headed down toward a rusty door that opened with a grinding creak as I shoved it with my hip.
I burst into a low-ceilinged storage cellar, and was blasted by the sharp stench of dank, mildewed air. In one corner was a gated area, penned in from ceiling to floor with chain-link fencing and protected by a padlocked door. Behind it were stacks of boxes—most likely valuables being stored in the shop’s most secure place. And next to the boxes, gagged and tied to a chair, sat Bran.
FIVE
“ARE YOU OKAY?” I YELLED, SPRINTING TO THE cage door.
Bran shook his head, His stick-figure body trembled beneath its bonds, and fresh bruises distorted his face, one eye so swollen that it was only a slit. His face was wet with tears and sweat, and since his mouth was taped shut, he snuffled loudly through his nose in order to breathe.
“Oh, Bran!” I said, covering my mouth in horror.
He had somehow managed to pick up a broom handle, which he had banged against the ceiling when he heard Georgia and me walking above. Now he let go of it, and its hollow clatter against the stone floor broke the muffled silence.
“Do you know where the key is?” I asked, yanking on the padlock.
He shook his head once again.
“Okay, we’ll find something to break it off with. Georgia?” My sister stood motionless, staring wide-eyed at Bran. “Help me find something heavy.” She leapt into action, rushing to an enormous bronze candelabra propped against the wall. “Perfect!” I said, and helped her pull it across the floor to the cage.
“They had Vincent’s body. But they burned it.”
I got the words out without choking, but tears coursed down my cheeks as I registered the horror in Mamie’s and Georgia’s eyes.
“But his spirit still exists? And you can still talk to him?” Mamie clarified.
“I might be able to if he can get away from Violette.”
“I always knew she was a depraved munchkin,” Georgia muttered, gnawing on a thumbnail.
“What about your evil ex-boyfriend?” Mamie scolded her. “After the Lucien story, you’ll be lucky if I ever let you date again!” She turned to me and sighed. “Oh, Katya, I don’t even know what to say.”
“But you believe me?” I asked, watching her face.
“I have no choice, other than believing that the two of you are crazy or brainwashed. Or on drugs,” she said in a tone that suggested she might prefer one of those options to the alternative. “And Antoine knew about this?”
“Just since yesterday,” I qualified.
Mamie sighed. “I hate to say this, but I don’t blame your Papy for banning you from seeing Vincent.”
My shoulders slumped, but Mamie held up her palm, cautioning me to wait. “You just told me your story. Please let me respond. I’m trying to think of how to put this without hurting your feelings.”
“What?” I asked, as a knot of self-protectiveness formed in my chest.
I watched a series of emotions cross my grandmother’s face: pity, indecision, and finally indignation. But then she glanced at my wet, swollen face and her bubble of anger popped.
“Oh, Katya,” she sighed. “Even if Vincent and his kind are the good guys, it’s like telling me you’re dating Superman. Who wants their granddaughter to be Lois Lane—constantly threatened by her boyfriend’s evil enemies? Instead of falling for a hero, I can’t help but wish you loved a normal boy. A nice safe student, perhaps.” She looked askance at Georgia. “Even a boy in a rock band would be easier to accept.” My sister suddenly found her fingernails of the utmost interest.
Giving me a final squeeze, my grandmother rose slowly and walked to the door. Pausing in the doorway, she folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes for a moment as if trying to mentally erase everything she had heard in the last half hour. Then, opening them again and seeing Georgia and me sitting there, she sighed.
“First of all, I will call your school in the morning and tell them that the two of you won’t be coming in tomorrow. That will give you time to figure out how to deal with what has happened and”—she glanced at Georgia—“to heal.
“Secondly, Katya, I believe your insane tale, even though I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. Your Papy and I will do our best to be understanding, even if we don’t approve. From now on, Vincent and his kindred are an open subject in this house. No more hiding things from us. We are on your side and want to help you make smart, well-informed decisions whether you’re talking about bad grades or the undead.”
Her nose wrinkled upon the last word. Although she was trying to be matter-of-fact, I knew it was hard for her to get those words out of her mouth. “Okay, Mamie,” I promised.
“I’m here for you, darling. This family is familiar with grief. You can always come to me for comfort and know I will understand.”
I nodded at my grandmother, and satisfied, she turned to leave. A second later we heard her bedroom door open and shut with a slam. Her voice was audible even through the closed door. “Yes, I can see that you’re asleep, Antoine. But you had better wake yourself up, because we have some talking to do.”
Georgia and I looked at each other, and even through my tears, I couldn’t help but smile.
FOUR
MY SLEEP WAS SO LIGHT I HEARD EACH CREAK OF our ancient building and every car that drove by on the rue du Bac. And even when my mind slipped off into a nostalgia-steeped dream about Brooklyn and my parents, I was halfway listening for Vincent’s voice. When I awoke, it felt like I hadn’t slept at all, but the clock read eleven a.m. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, unable—no, unwilling—to move.
It seemed like the events of the previous day had happened in another lifetime to another girl. But barely twenty-four hours ago my sister and I had faced off with Violette on top of Montmartre. This time yesterday we had discovered her plan to wield her position as leader of the numa to overthrow France’s revenants, using Vincent to accomplish her goal.
She had misled him into following the Dark Way. He had spent a couple of months absorbing the malevolent energy of the numa he killed so that he could withstand the urge to die. For me. It had weakened him to the point that Violette could have easily captured and killed him, if he hadn’t preempted her move by charging headfirst into our skirmish and plunging to his death off a precipice. Death for Vincent wasn’t permanent. But having his body incinerated was.
A compartment inside my heart that had gradually, over the last nine months, become a huge Vincent-shaped space was suddenly and violently empty. And the rest of my heart’s contents—my love for my parents, my sister, my grandparents, my passions for art and books and film—stood cautiously aside, refusing to crowd their way into the hollow space left by my love’s disappearance. How could anything—or anyone—replace him?
I was done crying. I could feel it. And as I lay there, I felt a fiery determination begin to fill the void. A resolve to make sure that what was left of Vincent—his “wandering soul,” as Gaspard had called it—would be safe.
I sat up cautiously, wincing as I felt a dual pain in the middle and upper part of my chest: grief and my cracked collarbone, both compliments of Violette. Reaching for my cell phone, I saw I had received a text from Ambrose not even a half hour ago. I eagerly clicked to see it, but my heart fell when I saw the content.
Just checking in. No news. Jules still at castle trying to see Vin. Hang in there, K-L.
I was about to put the phone back down when I noticed that there had been a call during the night with no message left. I recognized the number. It was Bran’s.
I was up and out of bed in an instant. I stood bouncing nervously on my toes as I phoned him back and was fed directly into his voice mail. “Bran, it’s Kate. I saw that you called last night. Call me back.”
I tightened the Ace bandage the doctor had given me and, after checking the kitchen and finding a note from Mamie, went to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. Leaning forward into the mirror, I gently touched the swollen flesh beneath my eyes. Pulling out a concealer stick, I went to work to make myself look normal. A couple of minutes later, I was tiptoeing into Georgia’s bedroom where I stood watching her sprawled, snoring form before poking her gently.
“Georgia. Get up.”
“Wha . . . Goway,” she mumbled, opening one eye before pulling the pillow securely over her head.
“Georgia, it’s almost noon. Papy’s at his gallery and Mamie went out. I need you to come somewhere with me. But we have to leave before she gets back, or she’ll want to know where we’re going.”
She just lay there, hiding as I poked again. Finally she sat up and tossed the pillow to the floor. “What is wrong with you? Can’t you see I’m grievously injured?” Eyes still closed, she lifted her chin to show her face. Her multicolored bruises had now consolidated into half-moons of deep purple and black under her eyes and one cheek was swollen like an apple. My sister looked like a boxer post-knockout. Or a hit-and-run raccoon.
My heart tugged seeing her so banged up, but I knew her injuries were just surface deep. And there were more important issues at stake. “Georgia, I need you to go with me to find Bran. He might have an answer to what’s going on with Vincent.”
She fluttered her eyelids for a few seconds, not in a girlie way, but because they were totally stuck together with eye goop. “I think I’m blind,” she moaned. I handed her a facial wipe from her dresser and she swabbed her eyes before squinting at me. As soon as she saw my serious expression, she was alert. “Sorry, Kate. Forget about me. What’s the plan?”
“Do you remember me talking about those special guérisseurs? The healers that deal with revenants? I need you to go up to Saint-Ouen to find one of them with me.”
She squeezed the bridge of her nose to wake herself up. “Okay. But it’s Friday. A school day.”
“Mamie called school to tell them we weren’t coming, remember?”
“That’s right,” Georgia said, still nose-pinching with eyes closed. “So you and I are sneaking out . . .”
“Mamie’s gone. We’ll just leave her a message that we’re popping out for a few minutes.”
She let go of her nose and stared at me. “We’re going to leave her a message that her two granddaughters who got mixed up in a battle between supernatural creatures yesterday, one of whom has multiple injuries, and the other whose boyfriend was killed, are just popping out unsupervised to . . .”
“Hunt down a member of an ancient family of healers in order to get information to protect my dead boyfriend’s ghost.”
The corners of my sister’s lips curled up. “Right. I’m in.” She hopped out of bed and began pulling clothes on. “What do we do if we run into her on the way out?” she called from underneath the shirt she was tugging over her head. I winced as I saw the bruises on her ribs where Violette had kicked her. It wasn’t as bad as the contusions and swelling on her face, but she ignored her injuries as she grinned at me.
“We’ll tell her we’ve gone out for bread,” I replied.
“The one excuse a French person would never question. Baguettes or die!” Georgia cheered, and we raced out before my grandmother could return.
We were all the way across town before I realized I had left my cell phone at home. “I’ve got mine,” Georgia said, patting her coat pocket.
“Yeah, but Ambrose was supposed to let me know if anything happened.” My chest constricted with anxiety. Today was not the day to be out of contact.
“Call him,” Georgia offered, holding her phone out to me.
“No, that’s okay. We’re here,” I said, pointing ahead to Le Corbeau’s darkened storefront.
Georgia peered dubiously at the old wooden sign with the store’s namesake raven creakily flapping back and forth in the staccato gusts of winter wind. “Are you sure this place was actually ever open? It looks medieval,” she said, pulling her coat tighter to her.
I rapped on the door window, but it was obvious that no one was in.
“Is that a giant tooth?” Georgia asked, leaning toward the window display.
“It’s called a relic. It’s probably a dead saint’s finger bone or something,” I replied, pressing down hard on the door handle. I watched astonished as the door swung smoothly open. “It wasn’t even locked!” I exclaimed, and stepped over the threshold.
“Why would they lock it?” Georgia said, following me in. “Who would steal . . . ‘an eighteenth-century rosary featuring a sliver of the true cross trapped inside Bohemian crystal’?” she read off a tag, and dropped the beads carelessly back onto their stand. “That’s just weird. Man, they could really use a cleaner here. The dust is enough to give you asthma.”
We moved deeper into the darkened room, shuffling through the tight space between ancient waist-high statues of saints with knives through their heads and display cases holding contemporary glow-in-the-dark pope memorabilia. My foot creaked on the parquet, and immediately there came a thump from under the floor. “Ssh!” I whispered to Georgia. “Did you hear that?”
“Oh my God,” she murmured, her eyes widening in alarm. “They’ve got a dungeon.”
The thumping started again: three evenly spaced knocks from beneath our feet. It sounded like someone was tapping a Mayday code on the ceiling of whatever room was below. Like someone needed help. It could be only one person.
“Quickly!” I ran toward the door that led to the back stairway. Instead of going up to the apartment where I had met Gwenhaël, we headed down toward a rusty door that opened with a grinding creak as I shoved it with my hip.
I burst into a low-ceilinged storage cellar, and was blasted by the sharp stench of dank, mildewed air. In one corner was a gated area, penned in from ceiling to floor with chain-link fencing and protected by a padlocked door. Behind it were stacks of boxes—most likely valuables being stored in the shop’s most secure place. And next to the boxes, gagged and tied to a chair, sat Bran.
FIVE
“ARE YOU OKAY?” I YELLED, SPRINTING TO THE cage door.
Bran shook his head, His stick-figure body trembled beneath its bonds, and fresh bruises distorted his face, one eye so swollen that it was only a slit. His face was wet with tears and sweat, and since his mouth was taped shut, he snuffled loudly through his nose in order to breathe.
“Oh, Bran!” I said, covering my mouth in horror.
He had somehow managed to pick up a broom handle, which he had banged against the ceiling when he heard Georgia and me walking above. Now he let go of it, and its hollow clatter against the stone floor broke the muffled silence.
“Do you know where the key is?” I asked, yanking on the padlock.
He shook his head once again.
“Okay, we’ll find something to break it off with. Georgia?” My sister stood motionless, staring wide-eyed at Bran. “Help me find something heavy.” She leapt into action, rushing to an enormous bronze candelabra propped against the wall. “Perfect!” I said, and helped her pull it across the floor to the cage.
