“Is that a good thing?”
In response, as the counting reached “one,” I pulled his head to mine and he wrapped me tightly in his arms. Our lips met, and as we kissed something inside me pulled and tugged until I felt my heart was going to burst. With a drowsy, eyes-half-closed smile, Vincent whispered, “Kate. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
“Well, I’m here because of you,” I whispered.
He looked at me quizzically.
“You saved me from my darkest place.”
I wondered, not for the first time, what would have happened if I hadn’t met Vincent and emerged from the prison of crippling grief that I’d been locked inside after my parents’ fatal car crash. I would probably still be curled up in a fetal position on my bed at my grandparents’ house if he hadn’t been there to show me that there was a very good reason to go on living. That life could be beautiful again.
“You saved yourself,” he murmured. “I was just there to lend a hand.”
He swooped me up into an eternal hug. I closed my eyes and let his affection soak through me like honey.
Finally releasing him, I held his hand and leaned my head on his shoulder as we took in the scene around us. In the flickering candlelight, Jean-Baptiste and Gaspard stood proudly side by side at the front of the room, their elbows practically touching in their yes-we’re-the-hosts-of-this-grand-event pose. Gaspard leaned over to whisper something conspiratorially, and Jean-Baptiste responded with a loud guffaw. The tenseness created by his speech had all but disappeared in the romance of the enchanted evening.
Ambrose was hugging a delighted Charlotte, holding her like a rag doll about a foot off the ground in his tree-trunk arms. Jules stood near the bar, watching me and Vincent. When my eyes caught his, he puckered his lips and gave me a sarcastic air-kiss, before turning to the sultry young revenant talking to him. Violette was standing next to Arthur, her head leaned affectionately against his upper arm as they surveyed the crowd. And I noticed several other couples among the revenants who were hugging or kissing.
Some do find love, I thought.
Charlotte had told me that Ambrose and Jules were players, dating human girls but never getting serious with anyone. Jean-Baptiste didn’t exactly encourage revenant/human relationships—he banned all human “lovers,” as he put it, from the house. Besides a few police officers and ambulance drivers the revenants had in their pocket—and a few other human employees like Jeanne, whose families had worked for Jean-Baptiste for generations—I was the only outsider who had been taken into their confidence and allowed into their home.
Since the enforced secrecy of their existence pretty much ruled out the possibility of their dating a human, finding someone among their own kind was the only possibility for love. And, as Charlotte had said, there weren’t a lot of revenants around to choose from.
An hour later the crowd began thinning, and I told Vincent I was ready to go home. “We have to wait for Ambrose,” he said, draping my coat around my shoulders. My heart fell a little. I had been dying to ask him about being Jean-Baptiste’s second and the whole “Champion” thing. But it looked like that would have to wait, since I doubted he would want to discuss it in front of Ambrose. Jules was right about Vincent’s modesty. Bragging wasn’t his style.
“Do I need two bodyguards?” I joked as we headed out the front door toward the gate.
“Three,” Ambrose responded. “We’ve got Henri, an old friend of Gaspard’s, along playing guard-ghost.”
“Oh, right. Bonjour, Henri,” I said out loud, thinking, Okay, that felt weird.
As I had learned a few months ago, for three days each month the revenants returned to a dead state, which they called being “dormant.” The first of those days they might as well be stone-cold dead. But for the next forty-eight hours their minds were awake and could travel. This was being “volant.” When they were out looking for humans to save, revenants walked in pairs accompanied by a volant spirit who, seeing a few minutes into the future, could tell them what was about to happen nearby.
“All this security for me?” I said, smiling as I took the arms of my two embodied escorts. “I thought Gaspard said I was getting better at fighting.”