Until I Die

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 represent him when there are problems among our kind.”
I hadn’t known that, either. Although Vincent had mentioned projects for Jean-Baptiste, I had always assumed they were of the legal type.
“Then there is strength. Is Vincent very strong?”
“I’ve never seen him fight except in training, so I wouldn’t know,” I admitted.
“Well, the communication thing sure had Jean-Baptiste worked up. The fact that a revenant had volant speech that was strong enough to reach out to a human. When Vincent told him about it, Jean-Baptiste called me right away to let me know. To see if I had any further information on the prophecy that might help verify that Vincent is the Champion.”
“And what did you tell him?” I asked, feeling a bit shaken by the whole conversation. Truth be told, I didn’t want Vincent to be the Champion. Whatever that meant, it sounded dangerous.
“I told him that he was lucky to have such a talented young revenant living under his roof, but that I seriously doubted that, if there were to be a Champion, it would be Vincent.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons,” she said with a teasing glint in her eye. “There are several other stipulations spelled out in the prophecy. Conditions of time and location. And believe me … it is not here and it is not now. Honestly, the prophecy of