It looks like volant revenants aren’t the only ones I can communicate with telepathically. I lob the thought toward him, and he starts in surprise.
“Okay,” Vincent says, shaking his head in confusion. “So you telepathically offered this numa amnesty?”
“Louis told me his story on the boat, Vincent. Violette wasn’t the only one unhappy with her status. And Louis is still new.”
“Six months,” Louis clarifies. He’s staring at his shoes, his face beet red.
“What he did sounds bad,” I say, “but he doesn’t want to follow that path.”
Vincent looks at the ceiling as if the solution lies above the plate glass. “Kate, what do you expect me to do? I don’t understand what you’re asking for.”
“I don’t know either,” I admit, “but taking him in is the right thing to do. You just have to trust me.”
Vincent stares at me, not knowing how to respond. “Kate. I trust you. But I don’t trust him,” he says, throwing his gaze toward Louis, who scowls and pushes his hands into his pockets.
“I take full responsibility for him,” I say. Vincent raises his hands to his head, like he wants to tear his hair out. A strangled sound escapes his throat as he walks away. He says something to Arthur as he passes him.
Arthur walks over to us. “I’ve been told I’m ‘on you like glue,’” he says to Louis, and waits, making it clear he’s not leaving the numa’s side.
As we walk toward the exit, Arthur is very obviously checking Louis out. “What?” Louis asks finally.
“So you’re Violette’s new consort,” the older revenant says, amused. “You’re with her for six months and you want to run away? Try five hundred years.” Louis’s jaw drops.
I leave them to follow Vincent, who is talking to the head of Charles’s group. “We’ll stay as long as you need us,” says the girl in German-accented English. She looks like Lisbeth Salander’s tougher little sister, her wiry body painted with tattoos, face dotted with piercings, and blue hair cropped short and sticking out as if she used a live electrical wire to style it.
“There’s not enough space at La Maison to give everyone a room, but across town . . . ,” begins Vincent.
“We don’t need beds,” the girl says. “No one’s dormant this week.”
“But space to put your things . . .”
“We share everything, including personal space,” she says, amused by Vincent’s concern. “Seriously, it’s better to keep everyone together. Plus, you say the big battle’s about to go down. Well . . . just consider us inseparable,” she says, crossing her middle finger behind her index.
“Regrouping at the Frenchie’s house,” she yells to her crew in English and then repeats herself in German. The group has been busy cleaning up the passageway, stowing dropped weapons and mopping up blood with T-shirts that are summarily thrown into trash cans outside. When we leave, the space looks like nothing ever happened. Charles’s kindred bare their ink-decorated chests like medals beneath their leather jackets, jostling one another and joking in German as we begin the walk home.
We make two stops on the way to join up with our groups that were attacked by numa. There were no deaths within their ranks. Whether it was because they were too exposed to fight for long or if the numa were only distracting our backup from supporting us, they had engaged quickly and then had run off.
As Vincent rounds everyone up and sweeps them along with us toward home, the German leader keeps close to me, studying me unabashedly from beneath her blue shorn spikes.
“I didn’t get your name,” I say finally, looking her straight in the eye.
She doesn’t flinch, seeming to like the direct attention. “Uta,” she says. “You’re the Champion.”
“I guess so. Not that that did us much good tonight,” I concede. “I’m glad Charles got Charlotte’s messages. Otherwise, we’d be toast.”
“Charles didn’t get Charlotte’s messages,” Uta says, lifting a pierced eyebrow. “At least, not until we were halfway here. We were on a wilderness motivational retreat. No cell phone service.”
“Then . . . how did you know to come?” I ask, confused.
She smiles widely. “I’m a Seer. Saw your light. Brighter than anything I’ve ever seen. Spotted it from hours away. Knew it was something we had to check out. It just took us a while to get here.” Uta laughs at my bewildered expression.
“Gotta be weird being the Champion,” she says. “What are your powers?”
I feel kind of embarrassed. As if she asked me to list the things I like best about myself. I focus on the things I’m most worried about. “The prophecy says I’m supposed to have ‘preternatural levels of strength.’ Not sure if you noticed back there, but I’m no stronger than anyone else.”
Uta nods and thinks for a second. “Maybe in your case it’s not physical strength. Seems like you’ve got a lot in here,” she says, thumping her chest with her fist. “Doesn’t always take muscle to be mighty.”