I Should Die

ELEVEN



BRAN WAS SITTING PROPPED UP AGAINST PILLOWS in Vincent’s bed while Jeanne fussed with a tray next to him. “My good lady, I assure you I am perfectly fine,” he was saying when we entered.

“You have improved since yesterday, but you’re still too weak to get up,” the housekeeper insisted.

Bran looked for help from Jean-Baptiste, who was seated by the bed. “Don’t expect me to cross Madame Degogue,” JB said with a smile, lifting his hands in a gesture of powerlessness. “If she says you stay in bed, then I advise you to do just that.”

Bran closed his eyes in frustration and leaned back against the pillows. “Kate is here,” announced Gaspard as we approached. He pulled two chairs up to the bed for us.

“Thank you for coming,” Bran said, squinting as he looked at me. Why does he keep giving me such weird looks? I thought. Bran seemed almost repulsed by me at times, and at others like he wanted to adopt me as a favorite niece.

“Monsieur Grimod, Monsieur Tabard, and I were about to discuss what I know about the Champion, and I wanted you to be here since we are discussing your . . .” He hesitated.

“Boyfriend,” I said, filling in the blank for him, and he smiled oddly. There he went again, looking at me like there was something wrong. I combed through my hair with my fingers and, finding nothing sticking up out of it, settled for crossing my arms and fidgeting.

“Yes. Well, we were comparing the bardia’s version of the prophecy with the one my family has passed down. It is basically the same.” He closed his eyes and began reciting from memory,



In the Third Age, humankind’s atrocities will be such that brother will betray brother and numa will outnumber bardia and a preponderance of wars will darken the world of men. In this time a bardia will arise in Gaul who will be a leader amongst his kind . . .



I was listening to the strange old phrases when all of a sudden I felt another presence in the room. Kate, you’re here! The words sizzled through my mind like lightning bolts. “Stop!” I yelled. Bran’s mouth snapped shut and the three men stared at me. “It’s . . . it’s Vincent. He’s here!” I stammered in shock.

My heart thumped so hard against my rib cage that it actually hurt. “Thank God, Vincent. You got away,” I said, choking on my words.

No, my love, I didn’t. I only have a minute before Violette draws me back. Speak to the guérisseur for me.

“He wants me to talk to Bran,” I explained to the astonished men, and I began relaying his message word for word.

“Violette wants to know if you have the secret to the power transfer: the transmission of the Champion’s power to the one who defeated him.”

“I know there is something about that in my family’s records,” Bran confirmed, speaking toward a point in the air to the right of my head.

I glanced up to see what he was looking at, but the space next to me was empty. Vincent spoke again, and I translated. “Can you get that information for her?”

“I would need a few days to retrieve it,” Bran replied.

And like that, Vincent’s voice disappeared.

“What just happened?” Jean-Baptiste looked confounded.

“He said he only had a minute,” I explained. “Then Violette was going to pull him back.”

“Who was this ghost you were speaking with?” asked Bran, confused.

“That was Vincent.”

“I could see him,” Bran replied slowly.

“You could see him?” I blurted.

“I saw his aura. He was hovering right next to your shoulder,” he said, nodding to the space he had been staring at. “Amazing! I actually saw a volant spirit!”

A hushed shock settled over our little group, all of us awed by this apparent miracle, and then, all of a sudden, Vincent was back. Mon ange, I am here, his words came.

Bran’s eyes flicked back to the space next to my head. “He has returned.”

I nodded. “He says Violette will give you three days to find the solution to the power transfer. She is leaving Vincent with us to stay and watch, but will pull him back to her as often as she chooses.”

“And he is the one whose powers Violette seeks?” Bran insisted.

“Yes,” Gaspard affirmed. “As we explained, after murdering your mother, Violette killed him and burned his body in order to get the Champion’s power.”

Bran leaned back on his pillow. “Well, that explains why the power transfer didn’t work,” he said softly.

“What do you mean?” Jean-Baptiste asked.

“It’s simple. This boy is not the Champion.”

Jean-Baptiste, Gaspard, and I stared at one another, speechless. Bran continued, “As my mother and I suspected might be the case, it turns out that I am the VictorSeer. The one guérisseur from my line who has been chosen to identify the Victor . . . your Champion.”

“But how do you know?” I asked, incredulous. “Just last week you told me you weren’t certain.”

“Ah, but it only just happened,” Bran said, smiling weakly and shifting his gaze to JB. “From the moment you took my hand yesterday—the head of the revenants touching the representative of my family of guérisseurs—your auras all changed in my eyes.”

“So that’s what happened,” JB said.

Bran nodded. “I felt the power possess me, and . . .” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully, “I know quite definitively that I am the one who will identify your savior. And this volant spirit that is with us is not the chosen one. I am sure of it.”

“But how—” Gaspard began to ask, but Bran cut him off.

“Don’t ask me how, my new friend. I have agreed to help you as much as I can, but there are some secrets I am bound to keep.”

There was radio silence in my mind as Vincent began talking directly to Gaspard. “Yes. I agree.” Gaspard nodded in response to something he said, and turned to Jean-Baptiste. “Vincent says that, if what the guérisseur says is true, we can’t let Violette discover her error. The more time she wastes attempting to achieve this fruitless task, the longer we stall her from bringing war to our doorstep.”

“But if we stall, won’t that put you in danger?” I asked Vincent. The more I saw her in action, the more afraid I was becoming of Violette.

Violette can’t do anything to hurt me, he responded reassuringly, but the way he said me inferred that Vincent wasn’t the only one at risk.

“If we do delay for the three-day period Violette has set, we might have a chance to find the true Champion, now that we have the man who can identify him,” JB said, nodding to Bran. “We could call together all of Paris’s revenants so that you can see if he is amongst us.”

“I will do what I can,” Bran said.

“I will tell Ambrose to arrange a meeting of Paris bardia immediately,” said Gaspard, and bustled out of the room.

“Vincent, does Violette actually hold enough power over you that she can force you to tell her what we are doing if she draws you back?” Jean-Baptiste asked. He listened for a moment and his eyes flicked to me, his expression dark. “She can’t compel him to do anything against his will,” he relayed. “However, as we suspected, she plans on using something dear to him to do the compelling for her.”

Jean-Baptiste was silent for a second, and then said, “I promise you, Vincent. For the next three days we will not let Kate out of our sight.”