Die for Her: A Die for Me Novella (2 page)

“A girl. Human,” she says.

“Long, dark hair, pale skin, blue-green eyes?” I ask.

“That’s the one,” Charlotte confirms, stealing a glance at Vincent, who happily spoons a mountain of sugar into his coffee.

The next day I’m patrolling with Vincent when we spot her, and end up following her from her building to a cinema on the rue Champollion that’s screening
Les 400 Coups
. She’s changed since the last time I saw her. Her skin is lightly tanned and she no longer looks skeletal. She has been eating, obviously, and it looks good on her. She’s still sad, but definitely looks stronger.

“Okay, man, she’s safely in the theater. Can we go now?”

“Have you ever seen
Les 400 Coups
?” Vincent asks, his face total innocence.

“About fifty times. If you recall, we went to the premiere together in 1959. And no, we are not going to stalk her into the cinema just to watch the back of her head for an hour and a half.”

An hour and a half later, we step out of the cinema, blinking in the sunlight as the girl walks ahead of us, making her way back home.

“You know what?” I say, not even attempting to mask my sarcasm. “That movie hasn’t changed a bit in the last twenty years.”

Vincent thrusts his hands in his pockets and does his hunched-over walk as we follow Sad Girl down the boulevard Saint-Michel. I grab his arm and yank him to a stop. “Vince. Dude. No more. This is getting unhealthy. I’m not going to say anything to the others about it, but man . . . you need to get a hold of yourself. Or I’ll talk to Jean-Baptiste.”

He fixes me with this soulful look like he’s dying inside. “Jules. I can’t help it.”

I exhale. “It’s okay, Vince. But we’re not following her home. She’s fine. Let’s go check out the park.” And he follows me up the boulevard toward Luxembourg Gardens looking like a boy who has been punished but is trying to be brave about it.

For the next couple of weeks he stops following her, at least when I’m around. I don’t want to ask Charles or Charlotte or even Ambrose where he goes when they are with him. I don’t want to call attention to it. Jean-Baptiste would be breathing down his neck if he found out, and we all know how unpleasant that can be.

And then it happens. We’re at the Café Sainte-Lucie with Ambrose, sitting at our regular table, when Vincent’s lips curve into a slow smile. I turn to see what he’s staring at, and there she is, Sad Girl, sitting at a corner table, reading. She has this rapturous expression as she reads, like there is nothing she loves better than sitting outside, turning pages. Her berry-red lips are quirked up into an unself-conscious smile.

“Great,” I moan, turning back around. Ambrose leans over to see who we’re looking at and exclaims, “Hey, isn’t that . . .”

“It’s the girl,” Vincent says. “But she’s not as sad as before.”

“Well, well, well,” Ambrose says, folding his arms across his broad chest. “Why don’t you go over and talk to her?”

“And say what?” Vincent scoffs.

“She seems to like reading. Tell her you’re in a book club and invite her to join.”

“A book club with one member. Good one, Ambrose. She’s really going to buy that,” Vincent remarks dryly.

“Naw, Jules and I could come and pretend we read the books too,” Ambrose says with only a soupçon of humor.

“I don’t need to
pretend
I read books,” I interject.

“Man, movies trump books any day,” Ambrose counters, leaning back in his seat.

“We are not having this conversation again,” I say, but glancing over at Vince, I see he’s not listening. He’s lost in the girl. And Ambrose has the gall to look amused by the situation.

Sad Girl starts hanging out there regularly, at the same table in the far corner of the café terrace. Which, of course, means that what used to be our few-times-a-week coffee break becomes an everyday ritual. Sometimes twice a day, from what I gather from Charlotte and Charles. But I have more important things to worry about than Vincent and his obsessions. Lucien, the numa leader, and his crew have been setting off mini catastrophes all over town. Over the last few months, the numa have gotten more and more active, and JB and Vincent are wondering what the numa chief has up his sleeve.

We saved a potential suicide from him a couple of weeks ago. She was fourteen and pregnant, and Lucien had convinced her that life wasn’t worth living. As usual, he and his crew tagged along to see the deed done. To revel in their repulsive glee at having tricked yet another human to her doom.

I was volant, walking with Charlotte and Charles, and foresaw what would happen. I flew to fetch Vincent and Ambrose as reinforcements just as Charlotte and Charles began fighting Lucien’s henchmen. Vincent didn’t get to the girl in time to touch her—to pass her his calm—but dove into the river right after she jumped and saved her. Charlotte and Charles killed two numa under the bridge, but Lucien and another got away while Ambrose was fending off some curious passersby.

After that incident, Lucien seems to lay low. A couple of weeks pass without our catching sight of him or his men. Although all I want to do is escape to my studio and paint, I find myself spending most of my free time babysitting Charles, who is once again in one of his existential crises: Why are we here? Why couldn’t he have just died and stayed dead? Why is he forced to live out this existence that he never chose? Sad Girl is completely off my radar.

So I am unprepared when Vince and I pass the café one morning and see her sitting at her usual table. “I could use a little caffeine fix about now, how ’bout you?” Vincent says, eyes glued to her face.

It’s useless to resist. I follow him onto the terrace, where he takes a table a few rows away from hers on an aisle she will have to pass when she leaves. I spend the next half hour trying to ignore the fact that Vincent is only half listening to the stories I’m telling. So I amp up the intrigue and give him a story I’m sure he’s never heard.

It was about 1910 and Juan Gris and I were leaving the Bateau-Lavoir, that hideous wooden building where we all lived and worked. If possible, it felt even colder inside the building than out. We were so frozen that even with gloves on we couldn’t manage to paint, so our plan was to go sit in a warm café until our fingers unstuck, and then get back to work. Between us, we had enough cash for two coffees, and I guess we were looking pretty rough—but who wasn’t in those days?

Anyway, on our way back to the Bateau, Juan and I got nabbed by the police. Handcuffed and taken in. We knew we were already on the police lists for suspicion of being anarchists and rabble-rousers (which we were not). But this was no regular roundup of indigents. No—these cops confused Juan with one of the robbers of the rue Ordener bank. They were sure it was him, even though we swore up and down we were innocent artists.

“Prove it,” one of the cops said. So I grabbed a pen and paper off the desk and drew a picture of one of the Chat Noir cancan girls. But in my sketch, she had forgotten her costume, all except for the feathered headpiece. With a whoop of raucous laughter and slaps on the back, they let us go.

I’m finishing my story when I realize that Vincent’s not even listening. He leaps to his feet and runs over to the girl’s table. I turn to see Sad Girl standing behind two women who are gathering up a gazillion shopping bags, waiting to get by them to leave. But she forgot her purse—it’s draped over the back of her chair—and that’s what Vincent went to get. He returns with it, and has just sat back down when she gets tired of waiting to leave in that direction, turns, and heads straight toward us, toward the other exit.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asks as she passes mere inches away. She turns and looks at him inquisitively. “Your bag,” he says, and holds it up on two fingers. She thanks him and reaches for it, but he yanks it back. And then they do this kind of strange dance where she’s trying to grab the bag and he’s pulling it away, insisting she tell him her name before he’ll give her the bag. A classic pickup line that he has unabashedly stolen directly from yours truly.

Of course, unlike me, he fouls the whole thing up. In one catastrophic movement, she grabs, he gives in, and the contents of her bag spill all over the terrace. Her hairbrush lands on my foot, while Vincent picks up her driver’s license and studies it like it’s the Rosetta stone.

Retrieving her book from under one of the neighboring tables, he holds it up. “
To Kill a Mockingbird en anglais
,” he says, and then launches into his near-perfect English trying to start up a conversation. “Great book—have you ever seen the film . . . Kate?”

Her expression morphs from pissed off to astonished. “How did you know my name?” she asks. Vincent holds up her driver’s license, and she turns beet red. She won’t even look at him and he’s apologizing up and down, and I finally butt in to point out the obvious. “Help the girl up, Vincent, and stop showing off.”

Vincent extends a hand toward her but she ignores it, struggles to her feet, brushes herself off, and grabs the hairbrush I’m holding out to her. Vincent hands her her book, and with a look that manages to combine humiliation with deep hatred, she stomps out of the place.

“Now that, my friend, was smooth,” I say as Vince and I watch her walk out to the street and then glance back at us. Her face is now puce, but Vincent doesn’t notice. He floats back down into his chair.

“Hey, spaceman, time to come back to Earth,” I say, waving my hand in front of his face.

He pops out of his trance and looks me in the eyes. “Kate Mercier. American, Brooklyn address, birthday December ninth,” he says in this awed voice, like he’s just discovered the formula for turning mud into gold.

I shake my head in dismay. “Man, you’ve got it bad. But you know you can’t
do
anything about it.” I tap his shoulder. “Amélie and I are going out tonight. Come with us. I’ll have her bring a friend. It’s just what you need to get your mind off what’s-her-name.”

He shakes his head. “No, thanks. And her name is Kate.”

I’M HEADING UP THE STAIRS TO MY BEDROOM
after a full hour of working out in the armory. Gaspard walks out of the sitting room and, seeing me, stops in place under the chandelier. “Must you insist on walking around the house naked, Jules? It makes me feel like I’m living in some kind of sordid fraternity house.”

“I’m not naked,” I say, pointing to the towel around my waist.

“A towel does not count as clothing,” Gaspard chides.

“Whatever you say,” I respond, and, yanking off the towel, drape it over my shoulders like a scarf.

Gaspard shakes his head mournfully and wanders off toward the kitchen, mumbling, “I am living with cretins.”

Just then, Charles and Charlotte come bustling breathlessly through the front door like an angry mob’s chasing them with pitchforks. Charlotte takes one look at me and starts laughing. I return the towel to my waist and ask, “What’s going on?”

“Remember that girl who Vincent was following?” Charlotte blurts out.

“The one he talked to at the café last week? What was her name . . . Kate?” I ask.

“Yes, well, now he’s gone and saved her.”

“Where is he?” I ask, feeling a tingle of panic.

“He’s volant, so he’s probably following her home. A big stone fell off the side of the building above Café Sainte-Lucie and nearly crushed her. Vincent foresaw it and told me. I gestured for her to come over to our table, and she got out of the way just in time. The stone crushed the chair she had been sitting in. She would have been killed on impact.”

“So it was actually you who did the saving,” Charles interrupts. “Maybe Vincent won’t get the energy transfer.”

“I definitely got some—I felt it. Look, I filed these down to the nub this morning.” Charlotte holds her hands out, displaying nails that have already grown past her fingertips. “But I didn’t get the full surge—just a bit. Some of her energy definitely went to him.”

“Crap,” I say. “Whatever mystical forces created revenants, they sure complicated things by making us obsess over the people we save. That’s all Vincent needs. Even more of an urge to follow her around.”

Just then I feel a presence enter the room. Only one of us is volant this week, so I know exactly who it is. “Vince, man, you are so exceedingly stupid,” I say.

What was I supposed to do . . . let her die?
he responds.

“Of course not,” I concede. “But you know what this means. You’re playing with fire, man. And I don’t want to be around when you come home with third-degree burns.”

I know what I’m doing
, he insists.

“Like hell you do,” I say. I want to shake him and remind him of how much Charles suffered the time he fell in love with a human. But Charles is standing right there probably thinking the same thing, so I just grab my coat and leave to go to the one place where I am completely in control: I go to my studio and lose myself in my painting.

AH, THE MARAIS. MY FAVORITE NEIGHBORHOOD
in Paris. The vestiges of history within its two arrondissements span everything from the remains of a Roman wall to ultra-modern art galleries. Whenever someone proposes walking the Marais, they know I’m in.

So when a volant Ambrose mentions patrolling from the river to rue Saint-Denis, I jump at the chance. It’s easy to talk Vincent into coming along because he’s still mooning about meeting the American girl two days ago. I know, because every time he thinks about her he gets this stupid grin on his face, and he’s got it right now.

We start off at my gallery, where I show Vince and Ambrose some new figure drawings I’m working on, then zigzag down rue des Rosiers through the Jewish district, up rue Vieille du Temple past all of the trendy stores, restaurants, and bars, onto the rue des Francs-Bourgeois with its beautiful sixteenth-century mansions, punctuated by rows of fashion and cosmetic shops.

We head north toward some shadier neighborhoods, specifically the rue Saint-Denis, where our enemies are involved in the thriving prostitution and strip-show businesses. And just as we’re passing the Picasso Museum, Vincent says, “Sorry, not interested.”