“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.”