by Amy Plum
Jules and Ambrose are both dating machines, but they both know what it would mean to seriously fall for a human. Like Charles did. Since that calamity, he’s had a couple of short-term romances, but he’s so seriously messed up and angsty that girls aren’t exactly on his radar at the moment. And Charlotte has her unrequited love thing going on, so it would be cruel to bring the subject up with her. As for talking with Jean-Baptiste and Gaspard . . . I can’t even think about going there.
But I had almost gotten to the point of desperation—I was practically on the verge of confessing to Jules—when she came back. And my life, or afterlife if you want to get technical, suddenly made sense again. I began following her everywhere.
Besides lingering shadows under her eyes, the dark circles were gone. Her sallow pallor had been replaced by a healthy glow. Her sky seemed to have lifted, because she now walked standing straight. And her hopelessness had turned into something else: defiance. As if she was standing up to something terrible and proving that it couldn’t beat her down. I was even more obsessed with the girl’s new incarnation, and although the others hadn’t copped onto the fact that I was constantly trailing her (she lived in the neighborhood, so it was normal enough to cross her path on a regular basis), they knew that something was up.
Then one day I saw her at our regular café—the Café Sainte-Lucie. Jules was telling Ambrose and me some crazy story from his beatnik artist past, when I looked over and there she was across the terrace from me, reading a book. For once, I hadn’t followed her; she was just there. I wasn’t prepared, and couldn’t tear my eyes away from her face. After a minute, she looked up and her crystal water-colored eyes met mine. From that point on I was lost. There wasn’t a hope in hell of breaking the girl’s hold on me.
I have been obsessed before. It’s an occupational hazard. If a revenant takes a fall for someone, gets stabbed, burned, or goes as far as dying for someone, they’re going to want to know if their sacrifice has made a difference in the person’s life. Following your rescues is discouraged, of course. But I must have a hundred names saved in my web browser’s electronic alerts. Even if it’s been years since I saved them, I want to know how my rescues are doing, and if anything shows up about them on the internet, I’m the first to know about it.
This is different, though. I can’t help myself. The girl leads me from museum to cinema to café. I feel like I know her now. She likes all types of art but gravitates most toward paintings. She’s a regular at the old places that show classic movies, and always sits in the middle row: I know the back of her head by heart. And she barely even people-watches at the café. Once she picks up a book, she’s gone for hours. I know her expressions, recognize her moods. I tell myself that I do know her. As much as I can safely know any human. But it isn’t enough.
Although I’ve seen her a couple of times with other people—a strawberry-blond girl who acts close enough to be her sister, and an older couple that I would peg as grandparents—I’ve never heard them say her name. She is the center of my universe and I don’t know her name.
Meeting her, touching her, spending time with her—I know those are all impossible. About as likely as my transforming from undead back to human. But I feel if I could just know her name—the sound that identifies her . . . the combination of letters that, if I were able to speak it to her (and I’ve sworn I never would) would make her raise her head and look me in the eye—if I could only own those precious few syllables, I feel like it would be enough. I could live with that.
CHARLOTTE’S VALENTINE LETTER
Today is Valentine’s Day—le jour de la Saint-Valentin. The day of lovers. The only day of the year I can’t look you in the face. Because on this day, I can’t keep my mask from slipping just slightly, and I don’t want you to see what’s behind.
I have known you now for almost seven decades. Lived under the same roof as you for sixty-eight years. I know you as well as my own twin brother.
I know how you’ll react to any given situation. What you will say. How you will respond.
Which should mean that by now I should be totally bored of you. Your predictability should make me yawn. Seeing you in the same scenarios day after day, year after year, should make me roll my eyes. And yet, it doesn’t.
Instead, I find myself anticipating your reactions and congratulating myself on guessing them right every single time. When I hear your laughter ring through the house when you come home, I am unable to resist the smile it brings to my lips. I love you, Ambrose. Passionately. Irremediably. Hopelessly.
It wasn’t love at first sight. When Jean-Baptiste carried your body back from that Lorraine battlefield, I found you intriguing in your complete Americanness—your Yankee bravado. Your passion for jazz and film and dancing brought a welcome breath of life to our household of kindred. I liked you for all those things. Loved you as a brother.
Until I got to know you better. Your joie de vivre was infectious. It infected me. It made my heart swell with happiness—not only when I was with you, but when I learned to see the world through your eyes. You brought me joy, and I should be satisfied with that. But I’m not.
When Charles told you how I felt and you admitted to him that your sentiments weren’t the same, I spent the next decade hoping you would change your mind. Doing everything I could to make you see me in a different light: desirable, not little-sister-ish.
When that didn’t work, I spent the next ten years trying to be okay with my lot. To find someone else. But while you are here living with me, walking with me, joking your way through every meal, my heart can go nowhere else.
Now I’m resigned. As I do every year, I will finish this letter, feel a bit better for it, and then place it in the back of my journal. It will join the other forty-three letters to you. Forty-three declarations of love that you will never see.
On this Valentine’s Day I wish I could tell you that even though you don’t love me the way I love you, every day with you is a gift.
VINCENT’S THOUGHTS
AT THE BEGINNING
OF UNTIL I DIE
When I began writing Until I Die, it had been several months since I had been inside Vincent’s head. So I wrote this POV piece to try to connect with him again. It shows Vincent at his most vulnerable—thoughts he only admits to himself. He’s not the perfect boyfriend—he has his flaws. But in my mind, he is a broken hero.
Kate. She is mine. But she is completely her own. That is one of the things that draws me to her like an insect flitting perilously close to that oh-so-mesmerizing but lethal flame: Kate doesn’t need me. She protects herself against me. She doesn’t want to be consumed, like I am in her.
Kate is everything to me . . . more important than my own existence. I am obsessed. And not only because I saved her life. Being fixated on the future of one’s human rescues is natural for a revenant. But we take steps to avoid that trap. It’s dangerous. It’s against our code. But in this case it just doesn’t seem wrong.
My kindred might not agree with me, but they wouldn’t dare say it. My mind is made up. My heart given away. And my body waiting for her to take hold of it.
Although she has agreed to be with me, her promise is contingent on a vow I made—one we both wonder if I can keep. She never speaks about it, but once in a while her eyes flicker to me uncertainly and I know what she is wondering. Can I do it? Can I resist dying, at the cost of my physical comfort and mental stability?
For me it is not a question. It is a requirement. I must find a way to resist death’s powerful enticement. I will not fail. Not only for my own selfish need to have Kate by my side. But for her. I cannot hurt her. She has been hurt enough. She deserves a stable life, full of love. And I’ll be damned if I can’t give it to her.
She’s so young. She’s barely seen life. And I can’t help wanting to be the one to show it to her. To see her reactions to each new experience. To see the world through her eyes.
She makes me feel human again. She makes me feel alive, afte
r I was sure that the heart beating in my undead chest had gone completely and permanently numb. She is worth every second of agony that will inevitably come. Because without her, I am a dead man walking.
VINCENT ON WHAT IT FEELS
LIKE WHEN YOU SEE A HUMAN
WHO IS ABOUT TO DIE
It’s like a surge of compassion along with the adrenaline. You want to help them. You want them to survive. It’s like you’re cheering on these weak, fragile beings from the sidelines. You’re no longer in the living game. But you’ll do anything you can to help them make it just a little bit longer. Until it is truly their time to go.
We can’t save people from diseases or old age. We just save them from accidents. Or attacks. From things that shouldn’t happen. From a destiny that can be changed or avoided.
JULES ON KATE,
WRITTEN AROUND THE
BEGINNING OF UNTIL I DIE
I am in love with a girl who’s not mine to love. It is destroying me . . . ripping me apart. But I can’t tell a soul.
You’d think after 114 years on earth, my heart would know better. But I swear, the whole thing took me by surprise. I didn’t have a clue what was happening.
I honestly didn’t see it at first.
Vincent was always pointing her out when we “accidentally” came across her in our neighborhood. As if he could hide his stalking from me: best friends for half a century. We didn’t know her name at that point, so Ambrose and I called her “the Sad Girl.” But sad was putting it mildly. The girl had obviously suffered some monumental loss.
A few months later Vincent made his move. He talked to her at the café. Later, I tried to drag him away at the Picasso Museum, but he thwarted my efforts and spent an hour “getting to know her.” When he brought her to my studio, I was furious.
Vincent’s relationship with Kate—it was totally against the rules. He had rescued her from being crushed by fallen masonry, for God’s sake. No communication is allowed with the humans we save, otherwise we become obsessed. Everyone knows that.
It’s not the human girlfriend thing that’s a problem. I mean, I’ve had lots of girlfriends. Thousands. But I never dated someone I saved. And I never let it get serious. But Vincent obviously didn’t care about the rules after he met Kate. And by the time he was already in over his head, nothing I said was going to change his mind.
So, although I hadn’t planned it, when Kate followed us into the Métro and saw me die, I was relieved. I was sure that would end things between them. Vincent would have to get rid of her before she could discover what we were. Trust Vincent to actually bring her into our house in order to comfort her.
And then a couple weeks later she spotted me—back from the grave—at the Museum of Modern Art. She recognized me, and the game was over. I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t going to give up until she discovered what was going on.
She made it to La Maison before I did. She found Vincent dormant and thought he was dead. She freaked out in a corner of his room, and I had to literally drag her out of there.
And still . . . I didn’t see it.
Okay, I was a little harsh. I might have grabbed her arm too tightly. And I shouldn’t have spoken to Vincent’s volant spirit in front of her. She thought I was crazy. She thought I was going to hurt her.
And it was at that moment, when I looked into her fear-widened eyes, that I saw it.
I saw that she was The Girl. The one I had been waiting for all those years without knowing I had been waiting at all.
She looked at my hand on her arm, and then up at my eyes, and I saw right through her fear into her pure, lovely soul. And I fell. Hard.
By the time I saw it, it was way too late.
My best friend was in love with her. And she with him.
I could never betray Vincent. So for the last few months I have hidden my feelings. Vincent asks me to follow Kate when he can’t. To protect her. Which I am only too happy to do. Just being around her makes me feel alive. Makes me feel like a better person—like I am capable of anything.
I’m not a big smiler. Yet I find myself grinning like a kid when she’s around.
When Vincent asked me to paint her portrait, I didn’t have the guts to tell him that that’s what I had planned to do the day that the numa broke into my studio. I had talked Kate into posing for me, pretending it was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration.
I wanted to paint her. If I couldn’t caress her body with my hands, I could paint it with my brushes. Use my fingers to trace her lines. Sketch the curve of her neck, apply the crimson of her lips, form her face into a two-dimensional tribute to her beauty. Mix my oils to the exact shade of her skin and spread it on the canvas with my trowel. Make love to the image of Kate since I would never have her in real life.
At Vincent’s request, I painted a small portrait of her in her usual position—lying on a couch, lost in a book. But once I had given it to him, I wanted to do another. So I made a drawing from my sketches, framed it, and gave it to Kate for Christmas. That won me an astonished gaze, a squeal of delight, and a hug.
But that wasn’t enough. Once I had painted her, I couldn’t stop. She is my inspiration. My muse. My obsession.
I paint like a madman now, with the door locked behind me and curtains closed. I’m afraid one of my kindred will see what I am hiding. That there are dozens of portraits of Kate hanging amongst my still lifes, reclining nudes, and cityscapes.
Kate sitting at the café, nose buried in a book. Kate sitting in a museum, lost in thought in front of a painting. Kate throwing her head back to laugh at something I’ve said—some insane repartee her crazy sister and I have batted back and forth, fighting for the prize of making her laugh.
But I never paint serene, happy Kate. Kate in love. Passionate Kate. Because that’s how she looks when she’s with Vincent. And though I love him like a brother, I have committed the gravest sin of all: envy. Coveting what he loves more than anything else. Wanting her to be mine. To love me instead of him.
When I am with them and feel the jealousy sting my heart, I feel dirty. Wrong. I push the evil thoughts away and try to be happy for them. If I love them both, then I should want this love for them. Right?
If only it worked that way. Sometimes when I see them together I am so crippled with pain and desire that I have to look away. To leave the room.
How many times in a human lifetime does The Girl come along? And in an immortal lifetime? This is a first for me. I wonder if it will be the last.
I want to give Kate everything she wants. To grant her every desire. Which is why I can never reveal my feelings to her. It would ruin everything. Because all she wants is Vincent. Not me. Him.
My heart is sore with wanting her.
THE FINAL MOMENTS OF
UNTIL I DIE FROM VINCENT’S
POINT OF VIEW
My mind awakes.
As usual I have a moment of fogginess. Of wondering where exactly I am, while my spirit lingers inside its dead shell.
As my awareness grows, I feel a stab of alarm. Something is very wrong. Wake up! I urge my sluggish thoughts, and force myself to focus. My eyelids remain firmly closed—my muscles have been dead for hours—but I don’t need them to see. Not when I’m volant.
Normally it’s the white gauze of my bed curtains I notice first. Not an enormous fireplace with white-hot flames sending dark billowing smoke up the chimney and spilling out into the room. Where am I?
“Ah, I can sense you now. You’re awake, my dear Vincent.” The voice of a young girl echoes around the empty room, the clipped monotone sending a preternatural chill through my being.
Impelled by terror, I jolt up and out of my body and hover high above the room. But the speaker has left, slamming the door behind her. Her voice . . . it’s one I know well, but in the haze of awakening I can’t quite place it.
I scan the area around me. There is no one else here. My dead body lies on the stone floor of a cavernous room decorated only by a large wrought-i
ron chandelier fitted with burning wax candles.
I move closer to my body to assess the damage, as I always do. Most awakenings—the months I manage not to die—I find nothing. Maybe a few minor injuries accumulated during the past weeks, which will heal rapidly over the following two days of dormancy. Possibly a broken bone caused by throwing myself in harm’s way for some hapless human.
But occasionally I see my body like this and know that I didn’t even finish out the month. I died . . . pretty violently this time, from the look of things. My body is twisted. Shattered. Many bones broken, some so brutally that they have pierced the skin and stick out of me like twigs off a tree. My clothes have been stripped off, and I am so bloody and skinned up that I look more like a flayed animal than a man: like a beast gutted and skinned after the hunt.
My face is battered and swollen, and though the skin is intact, there are four red slashes down each cheek. The stripped flesh looks like war paint. I wonder for a split second if I was attacked while saving someone from an animal.
And then I remember. Those aren’t claw marks. They were made by fingernails. By Violette.
It all comes back at once: the struggle with the numa at the top of the precipice beside Sacré-Coeur. The crunch of metal as we smashed against the guardrail, bent it backwards, and toppled over the side. Kate’s scream—one of the most gut-wrenching, heartrending sounds I’ve heard in eighty years.
I swore to her I wouldn’t die, I remember with a rush of guilt. With her parents’ recent deaths, she can’t bear that kind of trauma. But I broke that promise, however unintentionally. And even worse, Kate saw it happen.
The door opens and a figure in a long, flowing dress enters the room flanked by two hulking numa. The flickering light from the candles catches her face. “Are you awake yet, my Champion?” Violette says with a mocking musical lilt. “You young ones take so long to wake up.”