I Should Die

“Georgia, I need you to go with me to find Bran. He might have an answer to what’s going on with Vincent.”
    She fluttered her eyelids for a few seconds, not in a girlie way, but because they were totally stuck together with eye goop. “I think I’m blind,” she moaned. I handed her a facial wipe from her dresser and she swabbed her eyes before squinting at me. As soon as she saw my serious expression, she was alert. “Sorry, Kate. Forget about me. What’s the plan?”
    “Do you remember me talking about those special guérisseurs ? The healers that deal with revenants? I need you to go up to Saint-Ouen to find one of them with me.”
    She squeezed the bridge of her nose to wake herself up. “Okay. But it’s Friday. A school day.”
    “Mamie called school to tell them we weren’t coming, remember?”
    “That’s right,” Georgia said, still nose-pinching with eyes closed. “So you and I are sneaking out . . .”
    “Mamie’s gone. We’ll just leave her a message that we’re popping out for a few minutes.”
    She let go of her nose and stared at me. “We’re going to leave her a message that her two granddaughters who got mixed up in a battle between supernatural creatures yesterday, one of whom has multiple injuries, and the other whose boyfriend was killed, are just popping out unsupervised to . . .”
    “Hunt down a member of an ancient family of healers in order to get information to protect my dead boyfriend’s ghost.”
    The corners of my sister’s lips curled up. “Right. I’m in.” She hopped out of bed and began pulling clothes on. “What do we do if we run into her on the way out?” she called from underneath the shirt she was tugging over her head. I winced as I saw the bruises on her ribs where Violette had kicked her. It wasn’t as bad as the contusions and swelling on her face, but she ignored her injuries as she grinned at me.
    “We’ll tell her we’ve gone out for bread,” I replied.
    “The one excuse a French person would never question. Baguettes or die!” Georgia cheered, and we raced out before my grandmother could return.
     
    We were all the way across town before I realized I had left my cell phone at home. “I’ve got mine,” Georgia said, patting her coat pocket.
    “Yeah, but Ambrose was supposed to let me know if anything happened.” My chest constricted with anxiety. Today was not the day to be out of contact.
    “Call him,” Georgia offered, holding her phone out to me.
    “No, that’s okay. We’re here,” I said, pointing ahead to Le Corbeau’s darkened storefront.
    Georgia peered dubiously at the old wooden sign with the store’s namesake raven creakily flapping back and forth in the staccato gusts of winter wind. “Are you sure this place was actually ever open? It looks medieval,” she said, pulling her coat tighter to her.
    I rapped on the door window, but it was obvious that no one was in.
    “Is that a giant tooth?” Georgia asked, leaning toward the window display.
    “It’s called a relic. It’s probably a dead saint’s finger bone or something,” I replied, pressing down hard on the door handle. I watched astonished as the door swung smoothly open. “It wasn’t even locked!” I exclaimed, and stepped over the threshold.
    “Why would they lock it?” Georgia said, following me in. “Who would steal . . . ‘an eighteenth-century rosary featuring a sliver of the true cross trapped inside Bohemian crystal’?” she read off a tag, and dropped the beads carelessly back onto their stand. “That’s just weird. Man, they could really use a cleaner here. The dust is enough to give you asthma.”
    We moved deeper into the darkened room, shuffling through the tight space between ancient waist-high statues of saints with knives through their heads and display cases holding contemporary glow-in-the-dark pope memorabilia. My foot creaked on the parquet, and immediately there came a thump from under the floor. “Ssh!” I whispered to Georgia. “Did you hear that?”
    “Oh my God,” she murmured, her eyes widening in alarm. “They’ve got a dungeon.”
    The thumping started again: three evenly spaced knocks from beneath our feet. It sounded like someone was tapping a Mayday code on the ceiling of whatever room was below. Like someone needed help. It could be only one person.
    “Quickly!” I ran toward the door that led to the back stairway. Instead of going up to the apartment where I had met Gwenhaël, we headed