“What if I told you I’m just a deep sleeper?” his low voice came, slow and with great effort.
“Vincent, you were dead. I saw you. I touched you. I know. . . .” My eyes filled with tears as I had a flashback to the Brooklyn morgue and my parents’ bodies laid out on stretchers. “I know what ‘dead’ looks like.”
“Come here,” he said. I inched my way toward him, not knowing what to expect. He lifted his arm, slowly, and touched my hand. He wasn’t as cold as before, but he didn’t feel quite human, either.
“See?” he said, the corners of his lips curving upward. “Alive.”
I stepped back, pulling my hand from his. “I don’t understand,” I said, my voice mistrustful. “What’s wrong with you?”
He looked resigned. “I’m sorry I ever got you mixed up in this. It was selfish. But I didn’t think it would turn out this way. I didn’t think . . . at all. Obviously.”
My feeling of general alarm was replaced by a creeping sensation of fear of what would come next. I couldn’t imagine what sort of revelation he was going to come out with. But a little voice inside me said, You knew. And I realized that I had.
I had known that there was something different about Vincent. I had felt it, even before I saw his photo in the obituaries. It was something just a little east of normal, but too obscure for me to put my finger on. So I had ignored it. But now I was going to find out. A frisson of expectancy caused me to shudder. Vincent saw me tremble and frowned regretfully.
We were interrupted by a tapping at the door. Charlotte rose to open it and moved aside as, one by one, people stepped into the room.
Jules walked up to me first and, gently touching my shoulder, asked, “Are you feeling better?”
I nodded.
“I am so, so sorry for how I handled things before,” he said with remorse. “It was a knee-jerk reaction, trying to get you away from Vince as soon as possible. I was rough with you. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Really. It’s okay.”
A familiar figure walked up behind him and jokingly pushed him aside. The muscular guy from the river turned to Jules and said, “Trying to hog her for yourself?” and then, bending down to my height, he held out his hand. “Kate, enchanted to meet you. I’m Ambrose,” he said in a baritone voice that was as thick as molasses. Then, switching into a perfectly American-accented English, he said, “Ambrose Bates from Oxford, Mississippi. It’s nice to meet a fellow countryman in this land of crazy French people!”
Clearly enjoying the fact that he had surprised me, Ambrose laughed deeply and clapped me on the arm before sitting down next to Jules on a couch and giving me a friendly wink.
A man I had never seen before stepped toward me and gave a nervous little bow. “Gaspard,” he introduced himself simply. He was older than the others, in his late thirties or early forties. Tall and gaunt, he had deep-set eyes and a shock of badly cut black hair sticking up in all directions. He turned and walked away toward the others.
“This is my twin brother, Charles,” said Charlotte, who had stayed by my side as presentations were made. She pulled forward the redhead copy of herself. Bowing and giving my hand a mock kiss, he said sarcastically, “Nice to see you again, now that it’s not raining masonry.” I smiled unsurely at him.
I don’t know if it was my imagination, or if everyone actually took a step backward, but all of a sudden it seemed like the only people in the room were me and the man I was facing. It was the aristocratic gentleman from yesterday—the owner of the house. Though everyone else had greeted me in a somewhat friendly manner, my host was not smiling.
Standing before me, he bowed stiffly from the waist. “Jean-Baptiste Grimod de la Reynière,” he said, looking stonily into my eyes. “Although the rest of my kindred may reside here, this is my house and I, for one, feel that your presence here is very unwise.”
“Jean-Baptiste,” came Vincent’s voice from behind me. “None of this was intentional.” He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes, seeming to have used all his energy with those six words.
“You, young man . . . you were the one who broke the rules by bringing her into our house in the first place. I have never permitted any of you to bring your human lovers here, and you flaunted my injunction most egregiously.”
I felt my cheeks flame at his words, but wasn’t sure which I was responding to: the “human” part or the “lovers” part. Nothing made sense anymore.
“What was I supposed to do?” Vincent argued. “She had just seen Jules die! She was in shock.”
“That was your own problem to solve. You shouldn’t have gotten involved with her in the first place. And now you are going to have to clean up your own mess.”