“Have you been here the whole time?”
How could I leave you at a time like this?
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine his arms around me.
We returned to a house that felt like a general’s headquarters post-battle. There was a muffled movement from room to room as people visited one another and helped tend to the others’ wounds.
I had explained to Georgia that we had to spend the night at Vincent’s house. We couldn’t go home like this. I led her up the stairs and helped her into Charlotte’s bed, guessing that Lucien’s body was still burning in Vincent’s room. Even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t imagine going back to the scene of that gory bloodbath. Still mute from shock, Georgia was asleep by the time her head hit the pillow.
My shoulder was starting to burn again, now that the anesthetic used to stitch up my wound was wearing off. I headed downstairs to the kitchen for some water to swallow the pain pills I had been given.
Does it hurt? came Vincent’s voice in my head.
“Not much,” I lied.
Jules walked through the swinging doors, looking much more himself in torn jeans and a formfitting T-shirt. He flashed me a smile that conveyed both tenderness and respect. “House meeting,” he said. “Jean-Baptiste wants you to be there.”
“He does?” I said with surprise. Jules nodded and handed me a clean T-shirt. “I thought you might want to be a bit more presentable,” he said, pointing to my blood-soaked clothes. He turned his back as I quickly changed and threw the ruined garment into the garbage can.
We walked together down the hallway and past the foyer into a massive room with high ceilings and two-story windows. A fug of old leather and wilting roses hung thickly in the air. A colony of leather couches and armchairs were arranged at the far end around a monumental fireplace.
Near the large fire burning in the hearth, I saw Charlotte lying down on a couch and Ambrose stretched out on the Persian carpet in front of the chimney. He had changed into a clean T-shirt and jeans, and though his wounds had been cleaned and there was no blood in sight, he had enough bandages on to qualify as a mummy. He saw me staring and said, “Don’t worry, Katie-Lou, just a couple more weeks till dormancy and I’ll be as good as new.”
I nodded, trying hard to change my expression from freaked to reassured.
“Here they are,” said Jean-Baptiste, who paced back and forth in front of the fire, holding a poker in one hand like a walking stick. “We waited for you and Vincent to get back before starting,” he said, motioning me to a chair with his eyes. I sat down.
“There are some decisions that have to be made, and I need to hear what happened, in detail, from each of your perspectives. I’ll start.” He set the poker against the fireplace and stood with his hands behind his back, looking every bit like a general debriefing his troops.
Charlotte, Ambrose, and Jules began to recount their own parts of the story, with Jean-Baptiste “translating” for Vincent. The group, with Vincent’s help, had recovered Charles’s body before finding themselves trapped inside the Catacombs by a small army of numa. An army without a leader. It took a comment from one of their captors to alert them to what was happening: Lucien had forbidden the numa to kill any revenants until he returned with “the head.” Suspecting that the head in question was his own, Vincent was off in a flash. The revenants took advantage of the numa’s hesitation to kill them and fought their way out, then rushed back to assist Vincent.
“It doesn’t seem we were followed,” Jean-Baptiste concluded. “Kate”—he turned to me officiously—“would you kindly take over the narrative here?”
I told the group what had happened, starting with my sister’s text messages, up to the moment where Vincent arrived and took over my body.
“Impossible!” Jean-Baptiste exclaimed.
I looked at him wryly. “Well, it sure wasn’t me who chopped a giant numa’s head off with a four-foot broadsword!”
“No, not impossible that he possessed you. Impossible that you survived with your sanity intact.” Jean-Baptiste was silent for a second, and then nodded. “If you say so, Vincent, but I just don’t see how it is possible for a human to experience that and come through it as untouched as Kate seems to be. Besides a few ancient and unfounded rumors, there is absolutely no precedent.” He paused again, listening. “Just because you can communicate with her while volant doesn’t mean that everything else is possible. Or safe,” the older revenant scolded. “Yes, yes, I know . . . you had no other choice. It’s true, if you hadn’t you would both be gone.” He sighed, and turned to me.
“So you killed Lucien?”
“Yes, I mean Vincent . . . um, the knife we threw lodged all the way through his eye, deep into his head. That one stroke must have killed him. At least, his face looked dead. Then we chopped his head off with the sword.”
“And his body?”