“Kate,” he said, “I’m so sorry for what has happened. I should have done more to stop it. But Violette . . . she’s gone through these strange phases before, and I thought I would be able to bring her around. I had no idea what she was up to.”
“If you even knew she was communicating with the numa, why didn’t you say something about it? You put everyone in danger by staying silent,” I said, feeling a simmering fury at the pit of my stomach. If he had done something before, none of this would have happened.
“Everyone knew Violette had distant ties with the numa. And they all depended on that to get the information they needed. But no one, including me, knew exactly what she was doing.
“When she began communicating with Nicolas, I thought she was using him to get closer to Paris’s numa. So she could taunt them. Flirt with them in a way before we dug in to destroy them. In the past she has enjoyed toying with our enemies before killing them. But when Vincent told me the numa knew how Lucien was slain, I began to suspect she had—unwittingly—given the information away. I never once imagined she was working in conjunction with them.”
I stared at him. He and Violette had been together for centuries. How could he have not known what she was up to? But his actions back at Montmartre, as well as the tortured look on his face as he watched me, convinced me that he was telling me the truth.
I looked up to see Jean-Baptiste making his way down the double staircase. His usual rigid-as-a-general posture had crumpled as he strode slowly across the hall toward me. I knew Vincent was his favorite. His second. That he thought of him as a son. He paused in front of me, and then, in a gesture that was so uncharacteristic of him that I did my best not to wince when my shoulder touched his, he solemnly took me in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” was all he said.
Those two words put the fear of God in me. This was Jean-Baptiste. And he was offering no long-winded speech about how we would get Vincent back. No encouragement about which options should be considered. Nothing except those two words—which might as well have been “No. Hope.” Because that’s essentially what he was saying.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I HELPED GEORGIA HOME, THANKING MY LUCKY stars that Papy was at work and Mamie nowhere to be seen. I got her into bed, where the pain medication she had taken a half hour before kicked in. She began falling asleep before I even left the room. As I closed the door, she called after me in a dozy voice, “You’ll get him back, Katie-Bean. I just know it.”
By the time I got back to La Maison, the troops had been dispatched. Jean-Baptiste informed me that Ambrose had taken a search party to the man-made caves that honeycombed beneath Montmartre. Not only had Violette met the numa at Sacré-Coeur, but several of the Paris revenants reported numa sightings in the area, so it seemed a logical choice.
Jules, volant, had accompanied a group led by Gaspard, following another tip in the south of Paris.
The two remaining revenants sat in the library, trying to draw up some kind of strategy. Arthur eagerly volunteered his knowledge of Violette and her habits. He had already informed JB about the most important fact: that Violette’s plan was to capture the Champion and overthrow Paris’s revenants. But since he had caught only that end of the conversation between Violette and Vincent, I started at the beginning and told them the whole story. And after that, I recapped everything else I knew. I explained every detail about my contact with Gwenha?l and Bran. I recounted every question that Violette had ever asked me about Vincent, and the information—however intentionally misleading it had been—that she had given me about the Champion and her stories about the numa.
Jean-Baptiste took notes, and when I was finished, he thanked me in a way that meant I was excused to go. I stood, watching him and Arthur for a moment, until the older revenant looked back up at me expectantly. “What else can I do to help?” I asked him. Over the last hour, my despair had transformed into a burning determination, and if I left them, I didn’t know where I would go.
“There’s nothing we can do now,” the older man said gravely, “except hope that our teams come up with something.”
“But I want to do something. I need to do something.”
“You have fulfilled your role, dear Kate. You alerted Ambrose as soon as it happened. You took care of your sister. You gave me some very valuable information. Now the only thing you can do is wait.” His tone was sympathetic but practical as he turned back to his notes.
He was just as duped by Violette as the rest of us, I realized, and left the two revenants in the library to work out their own penance for having been so blind.
News came a couple of hours later. A numa had confessed to Gaspard’s group that Violette and some others had taken Vincent’s body out of the city and were headed south. Upon being informed, Ambrose’s group returned—with a huge haul of weapons they had taken from a freshly deserted numa hideout.