Die for Me (15 page)

IT WAS RAINING. HARD. I WATCHED THE RAINDROPS
hit my floor-to-ceiling windows with a force that made them ricochet into the pond that was forming on my balcony.

I had been thinking about Vincent ever since Jean-Baptiste had talked to me a few hours before, comparing what he had said to what Jules had told me in the café. Vincent was trying to work things out. To find a solution. Should I give him a chance to talk, or would that just be opening myself up to the risk of more pain?

What's better,
I thought,
to be safe and suffer alone, or to risk pain and actually live?
Although my head and heart were leading me in two different directions, I was certain that I didn't want my life to resemble what it had for the last three weeks: a drab existence void of color, warmth, and life.

I walked to the windows and peered out into the darkening sky, wishing the answer to my question could be printed there in plain letters across the rain clouds. My gaze lowered to the park below, and I saw the form of a man leaning back against the park gate. He was standing in the pouring rain, no umbrella, looking up at my window. I stepped out onto the balcony.

A gust of cold air caught me, and I was immediately drenched by the beating rain, but I was able to see the upturned face, three stories below. It was Vincent. Our eyes met.

I hesitated for a second.
Should I?
I asked myself before realizing I had already made up my mind. Ducking back into my room, I grabbed a towel from a chair and dabbed my face and hair as I searched for my rain boots. Pulling them from under my bed, I raced out into the hallway, bumping into Mamie outside the kitchen.

“Katya, where are you going?” she asked.

“Have to go out. I'll call you if I'm going to be late,” I said as I threw my coat on and grabbed an umbrella.

“Okay, darling. Just take care. It's pouring outside.”

“I know, Mamie,” I said, grabbing her and hugging her violently before I ran out the door.

“What has gotten into you?” I heard her call as the door slammed behind me and I sprinted down the stairs.

Once out the front door, I turned the corner of the building toward the park, and then came to an abrupt halt. There he was. Standing in the lashing rain, looking at me with an expression that made me stop in my tracks. It was an expression of dizzying relief. As if he had come across a pond of crystal clear water in the middle of a desert. I recognized it because I felt exactly the same.

I dropped my umbrella and threw myself on him. His strong arms wrapped around me, lifting me up off the ground in a desperate embrace. “Oh, Kate,” he breathed, nuzzling his head against mine.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Trying to be as near to you as possible,” he said, kissing the raindrops off my cheek.

“How long . . . ,” I began to ask.

“It's become a bit of a habit. I was just watching until I saw your light turn out. I never thought you'd see me,” he responded, setting me down. “But let's get you out of the rain. Will you come back with me? Home? So we can talk?”

I nodded. He picked up my umbrella and, holding it over our heads, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and held me close the whole way.

As we stepped into the dappled light of the foyer, I faced Vincent and gasped. He was gaunt. He had lost weight, and his hollow eyes had dark circles beneath them. I hadn't noticed that in La Palette, having other things (like a gorgeous blond revenant) on my mind. But standing here, a couple of feet away from him, his deteriorated state was unmistakable. “Oh, Vincent!” I said, reaching toward his face.

“I haven't been well,” he explained, catching my hand before I touched him and folding it into his. As soon as his skin touched mine, my insides turned into a warm gooey mess. “Let's go to my room,” he said, and led me down the servants' hallway and through his open door.

The curtains had been flung open. Scattered embers glowed in the hearth, and the room smelled like a campfire. I stood and watched Vincent add some kindling to start the fire back up. He piled some logs on before returning to me.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“I don't know if it's cold or nerves,” I admitted, and held out my hand to show him how I was trembling. He immediately reached out to take me in his arms. “Oh, Kate,” he breathed, kissing the top of my head. I felt him shiver when his lips brushed my hair.

He took my head in his hands, and his words rushed out in a torrent. “I can't tell you how I've struggled during the last few weeks. I tried to disappear out of your life. To let you go. I wanted you to be able to live a normal life, a safe life. And I was almost convinced I had done the right thing until I came to see you.”

“You came to see me? When?” I asked.

“Starting a week ago. I had to see if you were okay. I watched you come and go for days. You didn't look like you were doing better. You actually seemed worse. And then when Charlotte overheard your sister and grandmother talking at the café, I knew I had been wrong to let you go.”

“What did she hear?” I asked, a bad feeling forming in the pit of my stomach.

“They were worried about you. They talked about depression. About what they should do for you. About whether Georgia should take you back to New York.”

Seeing my shock, Vincent settled me on the couch and sat down next to me. His fingers kneaded mine absentmindedly as he spoke, and the motion and the pressure made me feel more grounded.

“I've been talking to Gaspard about this. He knows as much, or maybe more, than Jean-Baptiste about us. About our situation as revenants. I feel I've arrived at a solution that we could live with. That wouldn't demand as much from you. An
almost
normal existence. Can you listen?”

I nodded and tried to contain my feeling of hope. I had no idea what he was about to say.

“I apologize for not telling you more about myself from the start. I just didn't want to scare you off. I think that placed a barrier between the two of us. So I want to start from scratch.

“First: my story. I was born in 1924, as I told you, in a little town in Brittany. Our town was occupied soon after the Germans invaded in 1940. We didn't even try to fight them off. We didn't have the weapons, and it all happened too quickly to prepare a defense.

“I was in love with a girl named Hélène. We had grown up together, and our parents were best friends. A year after the Occupation began, I asked her to marry me. We were just seventeen, but age didn't seem to matter in the unpredictable atmosphere of war we lived in. My mother urged us to wait until we were eighteen, so we did.

“Our town was at the mercy of the German garrison stationed nearby, and we were expected to provide them with food, drink, and supplies. As well as . . . other, unofficial services.” I could hear the fury rising in Vincent's voice as he continued, but I remained silent, knowing that revisiting these memories must be hard for him.

“My parents and I were eating dinner at Hélène's house the night that two drunk German officers showed up at her family's door, demanding wine. Hélène's father explained that they had already turned over the entire contents of their wine cellar to the army, and had nothing left to offer them.

“‘We'll see about that!' one of them said, and taking out their guns, they ordered Hélène and her younger sister to strip. Their mother rushed toward the officers, screaming her protest. They shot her, and then turned and shot my mother, who had jumped up to defend her friend. My father was the next to be killed.

“Hélène's father had lunged behind the door for the hunting rifle he kept hidden there, but before he could take aim, one of the Germans grabbed it from him and shot him in the leg, while the other pistol-whipped me as I tried to jump him. They kept us alive, but only so we could watch, bleeding and handcuffed to the doors. They . . . attacked . . . Hélène and her sister. Hélène put up a fight. They shot her, too.” Vincent's voice cracked, but his eyes had become as hard as flint.

“The three of us were left to bury our dead. I offered to stay and care for Hélène's father and sister, but they asked me to go fight our attackers instead. I left that same night to join the Maquis.”

“The Resistance,” I said.

He nodded. “The rural arm of the Resistance. We hid out in the forest during the day and descended on German camps at night, stealing weapons and food and killing when we could.

“One day two of us were arrested in daylight, on suspicion of raiding a weapons shed the night before. Although I hadn't taken part in the raid, the friend I was with had organized the whole thing. They didn't have anything on us. But they were determined to make someone pay for the scandal.

“My friend had a wife and a child back in his hometown. I had no one. I told them that it had been me, and they shot me in the town square, as an example for the rest of the inhabitants.”

“Oh, Vincent,” I said, horrified, and my hands rose to my mouth.

“It's okay,” he said softly, pulling my arms down and looking firmly into my eyes. “I'm here now, aren't I?”

He continued, “The story was in the next day's papers, and Jean-Baptiste, who was staying in a family home in the area, came to the country ‘hospital' where they had laid me out. Claiming I was family, he took my body back with him and cared for me until I woke up two days later.”

“How did he know that you were . . . like him?”

“Jean-Baptiste has ‘the sight'—it's kind of like a radar for the ‘transforming undead.' He sees auras.”

“Like the New Agey kind of auras?” I asked doubtfully.

Vincent laughed. “Yeah, kind of like those. He tried to explain it to me once. Revenants' auras have their own color and vibrancy. After their first death, Jean-Baptiste can view revenants from miles away. He said it's like a spotlight pointed up into the sky.

“That's how he found Ambrose a couple of years later, after his American battalion was slaughtered on a Lorraine battlefield. Jules died in World War One; the twins in World War Two; and Gaspard in a mid-nineteenth-century French-Austrian war.”

“Gaspard was a soldier?”

Vincent laughed. “Does that surprise you?”

“Wouldn't he be a bit too nervous for battle?”

“He was a poet forced to be a soldier. Too sensitive a soul to have seen what he did on the battlefields.”

I nodded pensively. “So almost all of you died during wartime?”

“Wartime is just the easiest time to find people who are dying in others' stead. It must happen all the time, but usually goes unnoticed.”

“So what you're saying is that there are people dying all over France who could come back to life . . . under the right circumstances.” My head hurt. It was all a bit overwhelming, even after having had more than a month to get used to the idea that the world I lived in was no longer the one I had always known.

Vincent laughed. “Kate, it's not just a French thing. I'll bet you walked past a good number of revenants in New York City without knowing that you were crossing paths with a zombie.”

“So why you? I mean, in particular. I would guess that most lifesaving firefighters or policemen or soldiers don't wake up three days later.”

Vincent said, “We still don't understand why some people are predisposed to be revenants. Jean-Baptiste thinks it's something genetic. Gaspard believes it's merely fate—that some humans have just been chosen. No one's found proof that it's anything other than that.”

I wondered if it was magic or nature that had created Vincent and the others. It was getting harder for me to tell the two apart, now that the rules I had been taught were being turned upside down.

Vincent pulled over the table and poured me a glass of water. I took it gratefully and sipped as I watched him pile a few more logs onto the now dwindling fire.

He settled himself onto the floor in front of me. The couch was so low, and Vincent so tall, that his eyes were just underneath mine as he spoke cautiously now, carefully weighing each word.

“Kate, I've been trying to figure out how to work with this. I told you that I once lived to twenty-three. That was five years of avoiding the compulsion to die. Jean-Baptiste had asked me to hold out so that I could get a law degree in order to handle the family's papers. It was hard, but I was able to do it. He gave me that task because he knew I was stronger than the others. And I've seen him resisting his own urges for up to thirty-five years at a time. So I know it's possible.

“The woman you saw me with the other day. In La Palette . . .” Vincent wore a pained look.

“Yes, Geneviève. Jules told me she was just a friend.”

“I hoped you would believe him. I know it must have looked . . . compromising. But I asked Geneviève to meet with me that day so that I could ask about her situation. She's married. To a human.”

My jaw dropped. “But . . . how?”

“Her original death was around the same time as mine. She had just gotten married. And her husband lived. So when she animated, she went back to him, and has lived with him ever since.”

“But he must be . . .”

“He's in his eighties.” Vincent finished my thought.

My mind tried to wrap itself around the thought of the beautiful blond woman married to a man old enough to be her great-grandfather. I couldn't imagine what her life must be like.

“They're still madly in love, but it's been a hard life,” Vincent continued. “She wasn't able to control her urges to die, and her husband encouraged her to follow the fate she was dealt as a revenant. He's proud of her, and she dotes on him. But soon enough it'll be his turn to die, and she'll be alone. It is one option, but not one that I would ever ask someone else to endure.”