“When I Died”: Relive the final moments of Until I Die from Vincent’s point of view

My mind awakes.

As usual I have a moment of fogginess. Of wondering where exactly I am, while my spirit lingers inside its dead shell.

As my awareness grows, I feel a stab of alarm. Something is very wrong. Wake up! I urge my sluggish thoughts, and force myself to focus. My eyelids remain firmly closed—my muscles have been dead for hours—but I don’t need them to see. Not when I’m volant.

Normally it’s the white gauze of my bed curtains I notice first. Not an enormous fireplace with white-hot flames sending dark billowing smoke up the chimney and spilling out into the room. Where am I?

“Ah, I can sense you now. You’re awake, my dear Vincent.” The voice of a young girl echoes around the empty room, the clipped monotone sending a preternatural chill through my being.

Impelled by terror, I jolt up and out of my body and hover high above the room. But the speaker has left, slamming the door behind her. Her voice…it’s one I know well, but in the haze of awakening I can’t quite place it.

I scan the area around me. There is no one else here. My dead body lies on the stone floor of a cavernous room decorated only by a large wrought-iron chandelier fitted with burning wax candles.

I move closer to my body to assess the damage, as I always do. Most awakenings—the months I manage not to die—I find nothing. Maybe a few minor injuries accumulated during the past weeks, which will heal rapidly over the following two days of dormancy. Possibly a broken bone caused by throwing myself in harm’s way for some hapless human.

But occasionally I see my body like this and know that I didn’t even finish out the month. I died…pretty violently this time, from the look of things. My body is twisted. Shattered. Many bones broken, some so brutally that they have pierced the skin and stick out of me like twigs off a tree. My clothes have been stripped off, and I am so bloody and skinned up that I look more like a flayed animal than a man: like a beast gutted and skinned after the hunt.

My face is battered and swollen, and though the skin is intact, there are four red slashes down each cheek. The stripped flesh looks like war paint. I wonder for a split second if I was attacked while saving someone from an animal.

And then I remember. Those aren’t claw marks. They were made by fingernails. By Violette.

It all comes back at once: the struggle with the numa at the top of the precipice beside Sacré-Coeur. The crunch of metal as we smashed against the guardrail, bent it backwards, and toppled over the side. Kate’s scream—one of the most gut-wrenching, heartrending sounds I’ve heard in eighty years.

I swore to her I wouldn’t die, I remember with a rush of guilt. With her parents’ recent deaths, she can’t bear that kind of trauma. But I broke that promise, however unintentionally. And even worse, Kate saw it happen.

The door opens and a figure in a long, flowing dress enters the room flanked by two hulking numa. The flickering light from the candles catches her face. “Are you aware yet, my Champion?” Violette says with a mocking musical lilt. “You young ones take so long to wake up.”

Then, dropping the faux-sweetness, she barks, “Move it, you brainless thugs. We don’t want this fire to cool just when we need it at its hottest.” Something she carries drags against the floor with a metallic scrape. It is a cage, and inside it a living thing moves.

She sets it on a table that I hadn’t noticed before, back in the shadows, outside the firelight. I move closer to see what it holds, and catch the glint of a knife reflected off the cage, and lined up beside it a series of surgical instruments, flasks, and bottles. The creature in the cage flinches as I near: It is a small brown rabbit.

“Don’t let its cuteness deceive you, Vincent,” Violette says as she takes a box of powder from the table, and crosses the room to my body. “This animal will play a role in an ancient ritual that will bind your spirit to me once your body is burned. I’ll need your spirit close by in order to perform the power transfer. You and I will be extremely close from now on,” she says, pouring the powder onto the ground in a black stream as she moves in a circle around my battered body.

In one of those ghost-limb moments—when I experience physical sensations while unconnected to my body—I feel my flesh crawl. Something abhorrent is going to happen. Something I can do nothing about. But if I want to see Kate again, I have to act fast.

As my spirit flashes out of the room at top speed, I hear Violette call, “Go ahead, fly away, Vincent. I’ll bring you back in a few minutes.”

I speed through the castle’s thick stone walls and soar over the rooftops of the tiny town, across vineyards, and up rivers toward Paris. It is only minutes before I feel myself homing in on Kate’s presence. Since I’ve known her, she has been like a beacon to my spirit. When I’m volant, I always know where she is.

Kate. Her name is a panacea to my soul. That one syllable brings warmth…stability…the certainty that there is more to my existence than mere survival. She is my home. My anchor.

I am close now, her presence guiding me directly to her.

Just let me get to her, I pray. Just give me the time to say good-bye before that evil traitor pulls me back to her with whatever dark ceremony she is preparing. Just give me the time for a couple of words.

I see her now, standing on the bridge—dark hair whipped around her face by the wind and a look of desolation on her face. She thinks I’m gone…I can read it on those features I know as well as my own.

Now I’m close enough to touch her and ache to hold her in my arms. What can I say to reassure her that I still exist, at least for the moment?

I speak the words into her thoughts: Mon ange.