That’s enough. I have had my fill of The Card Game—at least for this life cycle. I turn to make my way out of the room, and freeze in place. My heart is pounding like a bass drum.
It’s the situation that every revenant dreads, and the reason bardia who live in small towns have to move every time they die. It’s not supposed to happen in a city of two and a quarter million people! We avoid getting to know the humans in our neighborhood. We avoid making friends with humans at all (okay—temporary girlfriends, but that’s different because they’re . . . temporary). Because if a human sees us die and then recognizes us after we reanimate, we are up shit creek.
But Vincent made a friend. A friend who saw me die. And she is sitting across the room, staring straight at me, her mouth hanging open in incredulity. She gets up from her bench and walks toward me. “Jules!” she says, and her voice is a squeak because she can’t believe her eyes. I have one second of shock before I’m able to pull the mask down over my face.
“Hello,” I say, and cock my head slightly to the side. “Do I know you?”
“Jules, it’s me, Kate. I visited your studio with Vincent, remember? And I saw you at the Métro station that day of the crash.”
I give her the kind of smile you give someone you feel sorry for. “I’m afraid that you have confused me with someone else. My name is Thomas, and I don’t know anyone named Vincent.”
Kate takes a step toward me, and anger flashes in her eyes. “Jules, I know it’s you. You were in that horrible accident when . . . just over a month ago?”
I shrug and shake my head.
“Jules, you have to tell me what’s going on,” she insists.
People are starting to look at us, and I need to diffuse the situation before Kate goes into a full-out hissy fit in the middle of a public place. But what can I do? I can’t tell her the truth. And she’s not going swallow my obvious charade. I take her gently by the elbow and lead her back toward the bench. “Let me help you sit down. You must be overexcited. Or overwrought.”
Kate jerks her arm away from me. “I know it’s you. I’m not crazy. And I don’t know what’s going on. But I accused Vincent of being heartless for running away from your death. And now it turns out you’re alive.”
Kate’s basically yelling now, and I feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead. Everyone in the room is watching us. A security guard walks briskly toward us from the front desk. “Is there a problem here?”
“No problem, sir. The lady seems to have mistaken me for someone else.”
“I have not!” Kate hisses, and does this fist-clenching foot stomp like an angry schoolgirl. She huffs off, out the museum door, and I shrug at the guard, who has lost interest now that the storm has passed. As soon as he walks away, I’m off, down the stairs, booking it back out to the car I parked on the rue Rambuteau. I know where she’s going: Vincent had the idiotic idea of taking her back to La Maison after I died, to “calm her down.” If she takes the Métro, I’m going to have to make record time to beat her back to La Maison.
The worst that can happen is that JB will turn her away at the gate, I think, but I’ve got a really bad feeling about this whole thing. Vincent is volant. If she insists on seeing him, we won’t be able to produce a walking, talking Vincent until tomorrow afternoon. And Kate looked damn well determined as she marched away from me. She’s not the kind of girl who’s going to easily give up.
Paris traffic is working against me on this all-crucial occasion, and by the time I run in through the front door, Jeanne is arguing with JB about a young visitor he said was waiting in the sitting room with a note for Vincent.
The sitting room is empty now, except for a handwritten letter signed by Kate. So I rush straight to Vincent’s room, and there she is, standing next to his cold, dead body and freaking out like an actress in a black-and-white horror film.
I can feel a volant spirit in the room. “Looks like the game’s up, Vince,” I say.
SEVEN
KATE’S INITIATION INTO LA MAISON HAPPENS the next morning when she sees that Vincent reanimated and we tell her what we are. She handles it better than I would have expected. Not that I expected her to go running, screaming out of the house. But discovering that there is a whole world of undead superheroes existing side by side with the regular human world would freak most people out. Kate takes it in stride. Only a teenager, and she accepts what we tell her with courage and grace. I am officially amazed.