Die Once More (7 page)

“The easiest way is by car. I would be happy to accompany you, but with all the wedding preparations, I'm afraid—”

“I'll take her,” I say, cutting Gaspard off. Ava stares at me in surprise. “Gold wanted me to be your French tour guide,” I explain, even though that's not really the reason. I'm not really sure why I'm offering—it has something to do with her panic and the feeling that I need to do something to help.

“Yes, of course, that would be best,” Gaspard says.

“Faust can be our third,” Ava adds quickly.

“No can do,” Faust says. “I'll be sleeping the sleep of the dead.”

“You're dormant this weekend?” Ava asks, accusation in her tone.

“Hey, I was awake to accompany you on the plane,” Faust says with a shrug, “and I'll be awake again for the wedding and the trip home. You can find another third for the trip to Brittany, right?”

“Don't worry about your safety getting there and back,” Vincent reassures Ava. “Numa activity is at a record low in France—you won't need a third.”

“Thanks to Kate's super-Champion-numa vision,” interjects Ambrose.

Kate responds by blowing cockily on her fingernails, and then grins as Ambrose laughs.

“How far is Bran's house?” Ava asks, looking distinctly uneasy.

“Paris to Carnac is about five hundred kilometers,” Gaspard responds. Ava gives him a blank stare.

“Americans don't think in kilometers,” Ambrose explains. “That's a four-and-a-half-hour drive.”

Ava gives me a pained look, and I'm sure my face is a mirror image. A six-hour plane trip was bad enough with Faust serving as a buffer. Now we have to drive four and a half hours in a car. Alone.

THE NEXT FOUR DAYS ARE A BLUR OF ACTIVITY.
Once it's decided that Ava and I will leave for Brittany on Saturday, she practically disappears. Kate and Charlotte enlist her help with the wedding preparations and, on their breaks, take her to see the sights of Paris. On one of the rare occasions that our paths cross, I ask how her research for Gold is going.

“I have to start with Bran,” she claims, and that's the end of that.

I spend the time catching up with my kindred over meals, sparring in the armory, and walking the Paris streets. In a way, it's like nothing ever happened, but my return to New York lurks, ever-present, in the back of my mind.

Vincent and I spend the next few evenings in the great hall, sprawled on the leather couches, catching up. People come and go, knowing we will be there, and join the conversation, before leaving us alone once again.

Vincent wants to know about New York, and I give him all the details. But we both carefully skirt around the subject of Kate and her everyday life with my kindred. It's unnatural to feel this uncomfortable around my best friend. We know everything there is to know about each other. But we're both being careful. Tiptoeing around each other's feelings. And knowing that we both feel weird about it.

Although we don't sleep, everyone needs their downtime, and in the early hours of Saturday morning, I say good night to Vincent and go back to my room. I try to read but can't focus. I pull some old drawings out of a cupboard and sort through them. God, I'm glad no one dug through my stuff while I was gone. All the drawings from the months before I left are of Kate. Kate lying on a couch, reading. Kate sitting in a café, laughing. Kate in my studio, lying on her back and staring dreamily at the ceiling as she poses for me.

I toss the sheaf of papers onto a table and realize I'm no longer pining. Following the conversation with Kate, I've begun to pull myself back together and am starting to feel like my old self again. Maybe, when I get back from Brittany, I'll talk Ambrose into going to one of the clubs we used to go to. I could pick up a high-spirited French beauty. Charm her into taking me back to her place. And find solace in the arms of a woman for a few delicious hours. I think back to the last time . . . it's been a while. Sacha? Or was it Sandra? I can't even remember her name.

And suddenly I feel empty. Like a century of affairs that felt like a bubbling source of sparkling springwater—water I needed
to survive—had actually just been a mirage. A dry streambed in a desert of emotional void. And I know that's not what I want anymore. I crave something else. Something real, tangible, lasting.

I pick out a sketchpad and some charcoal and take them over to my easel. Who to draw . . . who's not Kate. I start sketching the lines of Faust's face. Handsome, square jawline. Deep-set eyes and defined brows. I smile when I think of his unself-conscious earnestness. His natural openness. And I add a few shadows to his cheekbones and some white to his forehead, and here he comes, emerging from the paper. Faustino Molinaro: a hero with a heart.

Satisfied, I flip the paper over the back of the easel and start from scratch. I draw without thinking, my hand moving while my mind drifts back across the ocean to that foreign place I've made my home. New York: where I speak the language but don't yet understand the people. It is still a beautiful mystery to me—the danger that lurks just beyond people's everyday lives, the vertiginous mix of nationalities, ethnicities, languages, foods, dress, religions . . . everything in the world condensed into one shining city.

I am drawing New York, it's New York in my mind, but staring out at me from the surface of the paper are the eyes of Ava. Exotic eyes, whose color I haven't yet figured out.
For fear of getting freezer burn
. High cheekbones. I pick up a copper-brown pastel and brush it across her face. Warm-dark skin that seems to glow from within. Bow lips, the color of currants.

I sit back and inspect my work. New York. Ava. They are the same in my mind. The same on the page. I can see what people
love, what draws her kindred—and apparently mine as well—to her. There's something about her that makes you want to get closer. To be near her. To have her accept you into her court of admirers.
Well, that's not going to happen for you, buddy,
I think.
You're going to have to make your own friends
. A few days in Paris haven't made her warm to me, it seems. She ignores me at the rare meals we've all had together and was as glacial as ever when we crossed paths in the garden this morning.

There's a knock on my door. I yell,
“Entrez!”
and it cracks open. And, holy crap, speak of the devil. I flip the page with Faust back over, covering Ava's portrait before she's able to get a glance.

She steps into the room. “Sorry for disturbing you,” she says, and then, getting a glimpse of my jam-packed walls, begins the gawking process that everyone who walks into my room goes through.

“Wow!” she says, starting at one wall and working her way up and down the rows of portraits. “Are these your saves?”

“Yeah, well, I've had a hundred years of rescues,” I say. “Demands a lot of wall space.” I stay seated on my stool, body-blocking the sketchpad where her portrait hides under Faust's.

“I'd say!” she says, stopping at a portrait of a little girl I saved from drowning in the 1960s. “She's a beauty,” she remarks.

“Went on to found an NGO in Africa. Her group has saved countless lives,” I say. “One of those times when your sacrifice pays off big for humanity.”

Ava moves on to another—a rough kid with glazed-over eyes and a hollow face. “Unlike others,” I continue, “who, even after
you've saved them, manage to finish themselves off anyway.” She gives me a quick look of understanding and moves on, perusing my walls like a gallery.

“You
are
talented,” she says.

“Why, thank you,” I respond, half-curious. “But weren't you the one who introduced me to your clan as an accomplished artist?”

“Honestly,” Ava says, “I'd never seen anything of yours in person. Just some black-and-white photos from old exhibition catalogues . . . before your death, of course. I have no idea what pseudonyms you've been using since then.”

“There have been several,” I admit.

“Yeah, well, let's just say your reputation preceded you,” she says, and gives me a significant look. But what it signifies, I have absolutely no clue.

She strolls over to the couch and, before I can stop her, picks up the sheaf of drawings I tossed there.

“No, wait!” I say, jumping up and lunging toward the stack, but it's too late, she's already shuffling through. Kate after Kate after Kate. She stops at one: a drawing of Kate looking up from her
café crème
. Her eyes are sparkling, and she has a playful smile on her lips. Vincent asked me to draw it from a photo he took of her. I didn't tell him that I made a copy for myself.

Ava stares at the drawing and then up at me. She's put the pieces together. Smart girl. Damned insightful. “She's why you ran away.”

I tuck the pages back into the cabinet and then sit back down
on my stool. “I didn't exactly run away.”

She lifts an eyebrow.

“Okay, I ran away,” I admit.

“I've seen how you are with your kindred,” she says. “How close you are. You're practically family.” She pauses, and then asks, “Vincent loved her first, right?”

I nod and rub my forehead with my fingertips.

“It was the noble thing to do,” she says quietly. She strolls over to me and inspects the image of Faust. Her own portrait is faintly visible through the paper, and I'm supremely glad in this moment that X-ray vision is not a revenant superpower. She smiles fondly. “Good old Faust. You really captured his spirit here. I don't think I know a nicer guy in all of New York.”

“Yeah, well, that good old guy's lying dormant in the east wing right now,” I say. “Useless as our third man for Brittany.”

“That's what I wanted to talk about. When do you think we can leave?” she asks, and chews anxiously on a fingernail. Ava's nervous. She sees me notice and drops her hand and squares her shoulders, slipping back into her armor.

“We can leave at daybreak if you want,” I suggest. “That way you get to see some of the French countryside. I'm not a half-bad tour guide, I suppose. I've been pretty much everywhere.”

She shakes her head and says, “Now.”

My eyes widen. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry,” she says, and her leg is jiggling. “I'm just feeling impatient. I have so much to talk to Bran about, and it would be nice to get going. Like, really soon. Now, if possible.”

I shrug. “Now works for me. Let me just grab some clothes, and I'll meet you down in the kitchen. We can pack some stuff from the fridge so we don't have to eat fast food on the autoroute.”

“I'll take care of that,” she says, and in a flash she's halfway out my door. “Meet you in ten?”

Americans—always in a rush,
I think, while saying, “Ten it is.”

She closes the door, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I lift up the sketch of Faust to look at my drawing of her, comparing it to the woman who was just standing inches away from me. It is spot on. And there's something about it. Something a little too true. Sometimes the muse does that when you create . . . drawing, painting, writing . . . she gives you insight into the soul of a near stranger or a clear picture of a situation you couldn't have known existed. And then when you find out it is true, you know you've been used. You're just a tool of the muse.

The muse gave me a view into Ava. And something inside me is glad she didn't see it. With one last look at my portrait of New York, I leave my easel and begin packing my bag.

WE DRIVE FOR THE FIRST HOUR IN SILENCE, AVA
flipping through the radio stations until we get too far from Paris to get anything but static and then changing to the iPod Ambrose gave us. His playlists are full of jazz: Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald scat and sing and croon while we drive with the windows down. Ava's head is tilted back, eyes closed, as she breathes in the fresh morning air of the countryside.

But after a while, the noncommunication gets old, and I feel like talking. Ava hasn't said a word since we left. Finally I turn the music down. “So where are you from?” I ask.

“Are you making conversation?” Ava responds, amusement twinkling in her eyes.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” I reply. “In fact, I'm the driver and you're the drivee, which means you're responsible for keeping me entertained.”

“There's the music,” she says.

“An hour of jazz is quite enough for me, thank you. So, back to the question. Where are you from?”

She was hoping to brush me off, and my insistence bothers her. She raises her eyebrows defiantly. “I don't see why I have to tell you my life story.”

“And I don't see why you've been acting like I'm your own personal public enemy number one since the moment you laid eyes on me.” Wow. I didn't mean to say that.

Ava squeezes her eyes shut and pinches the top of her nose. She breathes in and out, and then says, “I'm from Long Island.”

“I mean your family,” I prod. “Where are they from?”

She stares at me. “You mean you want to know what race I am?”

Now I'm afraid. I know about this political correctness thing in the States, and never know which terms are currently acceptable and which will get you slapped. What I wanted to know was the origin of the glowing copper skin, the thick, black, flowing hair that frames her face, the almond-shaped eyes that are . . . I pull my gaze from the road to her face for a second . . . an extraordinary tone between brown and dark green. I wanted to know what factors merged to give her such an original beauty. But something tells me not to compliment her, so I play it safe. “Well, that wasn't exactly the way I was thinking about it, but sure . . . race . . . ,” I respond carefully. “Why not?”

She gapes at me for a count, and then bursts out laughing. “Okay, then. One grandma is African American, one grandpa Cherokee.”