on your bed, so the creep factor was already pretty high."
"Well, Charlotte and I had to fight over that one," he said. "Did you notice the photos on my walls?"
"Yes. On Charlotte's, too. She said they were people she had saved."
He nodded. "They're our `rescues.' And after we saved you, we both laid claim to your picture."
"How's that?" I asked, confused.
"Well, you know that day at the caf� when you almost became a bit of Paris history?"
I nodded.
"Charlotte waved you over, which is why you moved in time to avoid the falling stone. But I'm the one who told her it was about to happen."
"You were there?" I asked, stopping in my tracks and staring up at him.
"Yes . . . in spirit. Not in body," Vincent said as he pulled me along with him.
"In spirit? I thought you said you aren't ghosts."
Vincent put his hand on mine, and I began to feel like I had been hit with a mini dose of tranquilizers.
"Stop it with the `calming touch' thing. Just explain. I can handle it." Vincent left his hand on mine, but the warm fuzzy feeling went away. He smiled guiltily, like he had been caught cheating on an exam.
Without patting myself too much on the back, I felt I was handling things pretty well. Besides learning that the guy I liked was immortal, I thought I was taking the supernatural how-things-work lessons in stride. I hadn't freaked out. Much. Okay, except when I saw Jules get killed. And found the obituary photos. And came across Vincent "dead" in his bed. All of which were totally understandable freak-out occasions, I reassured myself.
Vincent was talking, so I tried to focus. "I'll come back to the spirit thing. But what I was saying about me being with Charlotte and Charles-- that's kind of our modus operandi as revenants. We usually travel in threes when we're `walking.' That's what we call it when we're . . . um . . . on patrol. That way if something happens . . ."
"Like it did to Jules in the M�tro?"
"Exactly. Then the others will alert Jean-Baptiste, who will make sure we get the body."
"And how does he do that? Does he have connections at the city morgue?"
I said it jokingly, but Vincent smiled and nodded. "And the police, among other organizations."
"Handy," I said, trying not to look surprised.
"Very," he agreed. "They probably think Jean-Baptiste is some kind of gangster or necrophiliac, but the amount of money he pays for the services he needs seems to make people forget their questions."
I was quiet, thinking about how complicated the whole undead-lifesaving business must be. And here I had unwittingly crashed their carefully planned party. No wonder I wasn't on Jean-Baptiste's invite A-list.
"Charlotte explained about how when we're dormant our bodies are dead but our minds are still active."
I nodded.
"She was oversimplifying a bit. Actually, for the first of our three dormant days we're `body-and-mind' dead. Everything is turned off, as if we were any other corpse.
"But on day two we switch into another mode--we're only `body' dead. If we've been injured since our last dormancy, our body starts healing itself. And our mind wakes up. For two days our consciousness can kind of . . . detach from our bodies. We can travel. We can talk to one another."
I couldn't believe it. There were more "revenant rules." This can't get any weirder, I thought. "Floating around outside your bodies? Now I get why Charles said you were ghosts."
Vincent smiled. "When our minds leave our bodies, we call it being volant."
"Volant like `flying'?"
"Exactly. And while we're volant we've got this kind of refined sixth sense. It's not exactly fortune-telling, but we can sense when something is going to happen that the others can use to save someone. It's like seeing into the future, but only for what's happening close to our immediate location, and only a minute or two past where we are."
Strike that . . . it does get weirder.
Vincent must have felt the hesitation in my step and correctly guessed that I was getting overwhelmed. He pulled me over to a stone bench by the side of the quay and sat with me, giving me time to process the whole impossible story. Before us, the reflections of the buildings along the river swelled over the surface of the water.
"I know it sounds strange, Kate. But it's one of the gifts we possess as revenants. One of our only `superpowers,' as you put it. Like when