If I had any remaining doubts about my mortality, they are now gone. I am undeniably supernatural.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit there, feeling the blood rush into my thighs. The pins and needles return with full force. I try to stand, but slump immediately to a sitting position until finally I can feel my toes. I stay like that for another moment before trying to stand again. Then I limp painfully across the room to the window.
Picking up Louis’s key, I slip it into the lock. It fits, and I turn the handle carefully, teeth clenched, trying my best to avoid making noise. I push the window open slowly—an inch at a time—and after nothing happens, dare to stick my head out and look down. There is a six-foot drop to the main deck. No one is in sight.
I shake out my arms and legs, trying to get my circulation going before easing a still half-limp leg through the window and following it with the other. I hang over the side with my elbows and then ease myself down until I’m holding the window ledge with my fingertips and drop silently to the deck.
Or at least, that’s what I attempt. My blood-encrusted Converse make a kind of crunching sound as they hit the wood, and the impact—one I could normally spring back up from—has me crouching, unable to straighten myself because my long-unused leg muscles have seized up.
I’m stuck there for a full three seconds, my heart beating like a drum, panicky that Violette will appear in front of me before I can get safely into the water. Be calm and think, I urge myself, and scan the space around me for anything that can be used as a weapon.
Just in time. As I push myself, with effort, into a standing position, I feel a hand clamp down on my shoulder. I look around to see one of the numa guards from the hotel scowling down at me.
THIRTY-NINE
“HEY!” THE NUMA SHOUTS. BEFORE HE CAN ALERT the others, I grab a metal oar attached to the wall next to me and swing it as hard as I can against his head. I am still weak, but seem to have hit him in the right spot, because he releases my shoulder and staggers backward just as another numa arrives on the deck and starts toward me.
“What is going on?” I hear Violette scream, and then I am diving off the boat’s deck into the frigid water below.
I swim with determined strokes toward the shore. If I am the Champion, it definitely hasn’t made me any stronger. I am tired and weak, but panic moves me quickly through the water. I thank my lucky stars that I was already a good swimmer when I was human.
When I was human. My chest constricts, and I falter in my stroke. I’m a monster. No, you’re a revenant, I correct, urging my body forward.
I hear a splash in the water behind me. And then another. I assume that the numa guards are chasing me, but I don’t take the time to look back. I struggle through the water, my muscles searing with pain, heading straight for the riverbank.
Suddenly someone else is in my head. Gaspard. Kate, I am leading the others to the point where you are coming ashore. The numa will reach land before the kindred get to you. You will have to fight.
Can your future-sight tell me if I will win? I ask, fighting to maintain my speed.
No, I can’t see that.
Another few minutes and my feet touch the ground. I surge out of the water onto the shore. There are no buildings around, so we must be near one of the national parks outside of the Paris city limits. No one to see me. No one to call to for help, I think. It’s just me against the numa.
Without looking back, I stumble forward, dripping and waterlogged and leaving a trail of bloody water behind me. Searching for anything I can use as a weapon, I grab a broken tree branch, snap it off, and strip it of its twigs as quickly as I can. It is almost the same size as the quarterstaff I trained on with Gaspard, although quite a bit heavier.
I turn to face the water and am thrown for a moment. The two men swimming in the water have the same creepy red halo of light shining around them that they did on the boat. But now that they’re farther away, the red is illuminating the inky water beneath them and shooting straight up into the air like a beacon. I blink. The light subsides while my eyes are closed, but it flares back up when I focus on them again. As they approach, the light grows dimmer, until they are upon me, charging up out of the water and the beacon disappears, leaving only the misty red haloes.
I don’t have time to consider what the strange optical illusion means right now. Gaspard was right to warn me: They are so close that if I run, they will quickly catch me. And I have no idea where I am. No sense of direction. It would be too easy for me to get lost trying to find a way out of the woods.