Until I Die - By Plum, Amy Page 0,39
he was trying to make up for everything.
“Vincent, you look awful,” I finally said one morning.
“It has to get worse before it gets better,” was all he would say.
After a week and a half of watching him rapidly weaken before my eyes, I was getting to the end of my rope. I didn’t want to force Vincent to give me more information . . . to put any more pressure on him. And Jules and Gaspard were obviously not going to spil the beans. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask Violette.
Since her Hitchcockian introduction to the cinema, Violette and I had been to several films, each time on her initiative. A couple of days after our first movie date, I received a bouquet of blue and pink flowers and a copy of Pariscope with a note attached telling me to look on page thirty-seven.
Page thirty-seven was a list of movies. I dug my flower dictionary out of my bag.
The blue flower was monkshood, which meant “danger,” and the tiny pinkish flowers were nutmeg geranium: “I expect a meeting.” Danger . . .
meeting? I looked at the movie listings again and saw, in the middle of the page, Dangerous Liaisons. This has got to be the first time in history that The Language of Flowers was used to encode movie titles, I thought, laughing to myself as I dialed her phone number.
Violette giggled through the whole film, remarking on how the costumes and mannerisms were all wrong, and drawing angry glares from the moviegoers around us. After I convinced her that it wasn’t okay to speak out loud in a cinema (“But this is a common entertainment—it is not as if we were at the opera,” was her initial response), she limited herself to chuckling and shaking her head at the offending scenes. When I commented afterward about the evilness of the characters, Violette laughed and said, “A perfect example of royal court politics!” A few days later, the bouquet of bear’s foot (knight), lucerne (life), and asphodel (my regrets follow you to death) took me a whole half hour of looking back and forth between flowers and movie listings. When I finally figured out that Violette was using “knight” as a pun, my jaw dropped at the thought of the ancient revenant choosing Night of the Living Dead, the most famous zombie movie ever.
We fell into a habit of following up the movie with a café session. But instead of chatting, it felt more like we were trading information: Violette didn’t know how to relax. Her default setting was programmed to super intense, and she listened to everything I said with a concentration that intimidated me at first. I finally became used to it, and eventually got her to loosen up to the point where she could laugh about herself.
Violette couldn’t hear enough about me and Vincent, and after my initial hesitation, I could tell that it wasn’t from some kind of weird, voyeuristic jealousy. Obviously her crush was long gone. She explained that love between humans and revenants was so rare that it intrigued her, and apologized if it was intruding on our personal lives. But when I told her I didn’t mind, she enthusiastically dug for every single detail.
It was the way that Vincent and I could communicate while he was volant that seemed to interest her the most. She confessed that she hadn’t heard of contact between humans and dormant revenants, besides the very basic intuition that the rare married couples like Geneviève and Philippe developed after decades of living together.
“You know,” she said glibly, “that is supposed to be one of the qualities of the Champion.”
“What is?” I asked, my heart suddenly beating faster. I had forgotten that Violette was considered an expert on revenant history. Of course she would have heard of the Champion.
She paused, watching me carefully.
“Don’t worry, I know about the Champion,” I said, and saw her relax. “Vincent told me about the prophecy. Although he didn’t know much about it.
What does him speaking to me when volant have to do with it?”
“‘And he will possess preternatural powers of endurance, persuasion, strength, and communication,’” she quoted. “That is a part of the prophecy.”
“Wait a minute . . . endurance? That must be why Jean-Baptiste thinks Vincent is the Champion. He was able to resist dying longer than other revenants his age. What else did you say?”
“Persuasion,” she said, “which Vincent has got in excess. He is the one Jean-Baptiste always sends to