I thrust my hand inside my shirt, pulled out my pendant, and held the signum out for her to see.
She sat there stunned for a second, and then stood to face me. “Well, if you had shown me that when you arrived, we wouldn’t have had to go through this charade, my dear,” she said, her expression changing from distant and professional to complicit and friendly. “Welcome, little sister.”
It felt like a dozen bees were buzzing around in my head as I sank back down into the chair. I couldn’t believe it: Was this really happening?
“Are you okay, ma puce?” she said, looking worried, bustling over to a sideboard where she poured me a glass of water from a pitcher. She set it on the table next to me and then sat back down.
“Yes!” I said, a little too loudly, my voice sounding strange to my still-ringing ears. “Yes, I’m fine. I just . . . I’m so surprised that you’re really . . .” I didn’t know what else to say, so I just shut up and waited.
“Ha! Yes, I am really. Or rather, my family is. Although I’ve never been consulted on the subject of revenants. It’s been a few hundred years since one of us has. So this is quite exciting for me, really.” Her eyes sparkled, as if to prove it. “You must have found both of the books?”
“Um, yes. How did you know?”
“Ah, well, we had a bit of a problem back in the eighteenth century. Some of the baddies—the numa, they’re called—got their hands on one of the books and came to find us. Very nasty occasion, that was. So my ancestor took possession of it and tracked down the nobleman who owned the only other existing copy. They are the ones that did that little bit of ink work on the two manuscripts to make us hard, but not impossible, to find. We do have our purposes,” she clucked proudly. “You don’t happen to have the books with you, do you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well, that’s a shame. I would have loved to see them. All I’ve got is a handwritten copy of the text that my ancestor made. We couldn’t exactly keep the originals. That would be a bit counterproductive, wouldn’t it?”
“Um, yes,” I said, working hard to keep my thoughts moving as rapidly as she was throwing out new information.
“So, tell me . . .” She waited.
“Kate. Kate Mercier.”
“Tell me, Kate Mercier, what have you to ask me?” She spoke the words as if they were a formula she had been told to follow.
“I . . . I’m in love. With a revenant.”
The woman’s face dropped. “Oh, my dear.”
Her look of pity only bolstered my resolve. “He’s still young: He’s only been a revenant for eighty-five years. So the compulsion to die often is still really strong. I love him. But I’m not strong enough to stay with someone who dies the gruesome deaths they do . . . over and over again.”
“Very few would be, my dear. Unless you cast all feeling from your heart, it would be a terribly traumatic life for you. And if you were able to succeed in numbing your emotions to that extent, well, you wouldn’t be the same sensitive girl that you are now—the girl that he fell in love with.”
I thanked her silently for understanding. “I’m searching for a way to ease the suffering that comes with his resisting death. So that he can hold out for longer. Perhaps for my lifetime,” I said, but in my mind the words were, Until I die. “I don’t want him to suffer for me.”
“I understand,” she said, sighing. “But I must tell you, I don’t have any kind of mystical cure sitting around. No bottle of healing unguent or potion hidden away in a cupboard. As you remember, the boy in the story never made it to my ancestor in the end. But after the story was passed to us, the gifted ones in my family have, over the ages, written down their thoughts on this and other matters.
“I will have to find my records, Kate, to see what I can come up with. There are things I know about the revenants. Secrets I’ve been given. But none of them would provide a solution to your particular problem. You have chosen a hard path, and I do not envy you that. But I will do my best to find something to ease the suffering—for both of you.”
She stood and walked to the door. “Let’s go downstairs,” she said. I followed her down and into the shop, where we came to an abrupt halt as we took in the scene before us.
Jules stood in the middle of the room, the tip of his drawn sword pressed to the chest of the bottle-glassed man, who looked like he had shrunk a foot under the revenant’s fierce gaze.
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man was stuttering. “There’s no one here but me!”
“I know the girl is here, now take me to her!” Jules roared, and pressed harder with the sword, trapping the man against the front desk.
“Jules, stop!” I yelled.
Both men turned, and Jules dropped his sword, slipping it into its sheath as he walked quickly in our direction.