by Amy Plum
A revenant can only be destroyed (permanently) if his head is removed and both head and body are immolated by fire.
If this is done immediately, or during volancy if the spirit is inside the body, the revenant will no longer exist.
If, however, the killer waits twenty-four hours until the spirit becomes volant and then lures the spirit outside the body before incinerating it, the spirit will forever be trapped as a disembodied “wandering soul.” This is primarily done in cases of vengeance.
The only other reason for creating a wandering soul is for a binding: The killer chooses to bind the spirit to herself or himself, preventing it from escaping. This is done by incinerating a part of the killer’s own body with the body of the revenant they are binding. In this case, the killer revenant will not regenerate that body part in their next dormancy. They can then control the wandering spirit to a certain extent (mainly for seeing into the near future or spying), but cannot force the spirit to do anything it does not want to (except by blackmail, such as threatening loved ones who are still alive).
LIFESAVING
A human who survives a near-death experience often suffers post-traumatic shock. If a revenant is responsible for his or her rescue, the energy that has been figuratively “sucked out” of the would-be victim is literally infused into the revenant for the hours or days that it takes for the human to recover. The revenant becomes stronger with this transfer of energy, which is like a drug for them.
The reward if revenants die during a rescue is even greater: After dormancy, they are reanimated at the age of their original human death.
The infusion of energy that a revenant receives after saving someone is what helps lessen their urge to die. Revenants who satisfy their need to die by saving people, which most do, are using what’s referred to as the “Light Way.”
The alternative, the “Dark Way,” is when a revenant kills numa and absorbs their energy. The historical reason for using this was if a wounded bardia killed a numa in battle, the immediate power surge gave them enough strength to escape to safety. However, when used repeatedly over a longer period of time, the absorbed dark energy will destroy the bardia.
Even though dying hurts revenants just as much as it would hurt normal humans, death is a powerful compulsion that revenants can’t resist for more than a few years. Therefore, they can always stay young.
The longer a person has been a revenant, the easier it is for she or he to resist dying. However, when revenants begin to near an age around when most people die, the temptation to sacrifice themselves is so intense that they cannot resist it.
Bardia become obsessed with the humans they save.
THE STORY OF L’AMUR IMMORTEL
(IMMORTAL LOVE)
SUMMARIZED BY KATE MERCIER FROM A
TENTH-CENTURY ILLUSTRATED MANUSCRIPT
This is the story of Goderic, a nineteen-year-old revenant, and Else, the girl he married just months before he died.
It was Else who was there when Goderic awoke, the day he was to be buried. She gave him food and drink, and he attained his immortality. They learned what he was from a Seer who had followed his light.
Else and Goderic became transients, moving every time he died so that the locals wouldn’t become suspicious. As she got older, they had to change their story, claiming to be mother and son. After several years Else became sick. Goderic called a guérisseur to heal her, and the healer recognized what Goderic was by his aura.
Goderic pleaded with the man to find a way to let him age normally with his beloved—to resist the powerful desire to die. The guérisseur didn’t possess that knowledge but told him of another healer who had great power in the way of the immortals. The man told Goderic, “From his family will come the one to see the Victor. If anyone holds the key to your plight, it will be the VictorSeer’s clan. He lives in a faraway land, among les Audoniens, and can be found under the Sign of the Cord, selling relics to the pilgrims.”
Goderic and Else began traveling north, but she contracted another illness along the way and died in Goderic’s arms. He was so distraught that he traveled to the city and hunted down a numa, who delivered him from life.
CHAPTER 4
THE PARIS OF DIE FOR ME
AMY PLUM’S PARIS
WRITING ABOUT PARIS IS LIKE WRITING A LOVE letter. I am passionately in love with the city. So when I set out to write a romance, Paris was the obvious setting. It is the most romantic place I know, so what better place for Kate to meet Vincent? Sparks were sure to fly.
In writing Die for Me, I wanted you, the reader, to be right there with Kate, experiencing the city in all of its cultural wealth. Kate has been coming to France since she was a baby, but she is still an outsider and doesn’t take the city for granted. She still sees Paris with a fresh eye, like I did when I first lived there.
I moved to Paris when I was twenty-three and stayed for five years. I had an office job that I commuted to every day, taxes to pay, food to make, nights to sleep—a completely normal existence. But every single morning of those five years I stepped out my front door and experienced a frisson of wonder as I beheld the city around me.
As I still do, even though I’ve spent a quarter of my life in France. I now live three hours south of the city in the Loire Valley. But as soon as I get off the train and step into Paris, it’s like I’ve been filled with helium. I am floating and giddy when I am there. Even though it’s not all beautiful, it is all pure magic to me. (Especially the not-so-beautiful parts.) I hoped that my love of the city and its joys and idiosyncrasies could be translated to you through Kate and her story.
During my five years in Paris, I accumulated some amazing experiences. So while writing Die for Me, I tapped these memories and wove some of them into Kate’s tale. I didn’t meet any revenants (as far as I know), but I did ride on a scooter through the streets of Paris behind a handsome artist. I kissed someone on the Pont des Arts. And I held hands with a devastatingly gorgeous boy on the quai of the Île Saint-Louis. (That one became my husband.)
I also tapped my memories for the locations in Die for Me. Jules’s art studio is my old apartment—so my “front porch” was the steps of the Église Saint-Paul, where I sat and imagined the jousts that had taken place there. I browsed the Village Saint-Paul for vintage and antique treasures. I went to an underground club like Lucien’s. And the museums and restaurants and cafés are places that I frequented.
Kate’s grandparents’ building actually stands a few blocks away from the park that I have placed it next to on rue du Bac. Jean-Baptiste’s house has been taken over by a museum (how dare they!), and I borrowed its courtyard from an hôtel particulier a few blocks away.
So all the locations in this book actually exist—except for the Café Sainte-Lucie, which I had to make up because there wasn’t the perfect café standing where I wanted, near the Métro and both Kate’s and Vincent’s homes.
But besides my nostalgia and an abundance of romantic locations, Paris holds another element that made it the ideal place to situate Die for Me: The city is ancient. Paris is relatively small, so every inch of it is steeped in history. And when you are there, its millions of ghosts are constantly pulling on the edge of your consciousness.
It’s the macabre aspect—all the beheadings, murders, and war crimes that happened there—that lends to its being the perfect setting for a supernatural war between good and evil. Although revenants live everywhere in the world, Paris’s history made it the perfect place to introduce them to you.
Paris is undoubtedly one of the main characters of Die for Me. In my mind, the city is a sentient being. She’s a woman . . . of course! And Paris as a woman is incredibly sexy in a sophisticated way. She is extremely cool. She is bemused by her occupants but likes to toy with them, sometimes in a slightly sadistic manner. If you lose your heart to Paris, you will never regain it completely. She will hold your heart hostage until you come back to her.
If you haven’t already met her, I hope you soo
n will.
(This was written by Amy Plum just after writing Die for Me. Now she lives full-time in Paris and is insanely happy with her adopted city.)
REVENANT MAP OF PARIS
SUPERNATURAL SITES
This is your private tour of the most important locations in all five of the Die for Me books and novellas, including some photos I took especially for you. All locations are numbered so that you can find them on the map. Addresses are included in case you want to come to Paris for a Die for Me walking tour, or at the very least, you can look the street number up on the internet to spy on the sites from your very own screen.
18 RUE CHAMPOLLION (MAP #1)
This is the building listed in the 1968 obituary found by Kate when she was doing research for a school paper. Vincent and Ambrose, acting as firemen, rescued twelve people from the building after it was hit by a Molotov cocktail and went up in flames during the student riots. Both revenants were trapped under burning timbers and died.
Amy says: This was my second apartment in Paris, back in 1995. It was right off the Place de la Sorbonne, next to the university, so I figured it was the perfect spot to situate a violent episode from the 1968 student riots. When I lived there, the tiny street had three old movie theaters located on it, where there would be Hitchcock festivals and other screenings of classic films. I watched Dr. Strangelove in one of them on Christmas Day, in a year when I found myself alone in Paris during the holidays.
Address: 18 rue Champollion, 75005, Paris
ALEXANDRE III BRIDGE (PONT ALEXANDRE III) (MAP #2)
Kate and Vincent passed under it in the rowboat when he took her out on the Seine for her seventeenth birthday.
Amy says: This is my favorite bridge in Paris. You can see me standing on it in the last frame of the Until I Die trailer (http://youtube/upZi8Jbhfys), and it gives the most picturesque view of the Eiffel Tower. It was built in the Beaux-Arts style, like the Opéra Garnier, and was inaugurated at the 1900 World’s Fair. People say the Opéra Garnier looks like a wedding cake. Well, this bridge would be the perfect cake topper with its art nouveau lamps, garlands, winged horses, cherubs, and nymphs. Total over-the-top extravagance! Totally Paris!
Address: Spans the Seine at Les Invalides
ARÈNES DE LUTÈCE (MAP #3)
The location of the final battle between numa and bardia.
Amy says: I was first taken to the Arènes de Lutèce on the back of a Vespa driven by a handsome French artist named Sébastien. I had no idea where we were—he just kind of led me through this door and down a tunnel, and all of a sudden we were standing in the ruins of a first-century Gallo-Roman arena . . . right in the middle of Paris! When I was writing If I Should Die, I knew I needed a large, open-air place for the final battle to take place—one that was hidden and wouldn’t draw too much attention. In reality, there are apartment buildings not too far away. The occupants would have definitely seen Violette’s bonfire and alerted the police. But could the Paris police have gotten past the numa guards? That scene belongs in an alternate-universe version of If I Should Die!
Address: 49 rue Monge, 75005 Paris
ARRONDISSEMENTS OF PARIS
Kate describes in Chapter 2 of Die for Me how Paris is divided into twenty neighborhoods, or arrondissements. Each one is referred to by its number, which starts with 1 in the exact center.
Amy says: You always know where you are in Paris if you look up at the street signs affixed to the buildings on every corner. Directly above the name of the street appears the number of the arrondissement, from one to twenty. Much of the action in the books take place in the seventh, where both La Maison and Kate’s grandparents’ apartment are located. Jules’s studio is in the fourth, in the Marais. For each address in this guide, look at the last two numbers of the zip code. That will tell you in which arrondissement it is located!
BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN (MAP #4)
Kate’s grandparents lived within walking distance of this main Paris thoroughfare, which is lined with cafés and shops, including Les Deux Magots.
Amy says: The boulevard Saint-Germain is one of the most beautiful streets in Paris. Many celebrities live nearby because it’s seen as a glamorous, wealthy neighborhood, rich in Paris’s cultural history. Just think of the American movie stars you’ve heard have an apartment in Paris—they all live near here. (I have the inside scoop!)
BRAN’S HOUSE
After the final battle with the numa, Bran brought Louis to his family home in Brittany to get him away from any Paris numa who might target him as a traitor while Louis transited from numa to bardia. Jules and Ava visited them here to consult Bran as the VictorSeer.
Amy says: When I was trying to discover where in Brittany Bran was from, I immediately thought of the megalithic standing stones of Carnac. They are five thousand years old and are like France’s version of Stonehenge. In reality, no one is allowed to live among them. But in the Die for Me universe, the old guérisseur families have the right to live among earth’s mystical places. I’m sure there is a guérisseur family living near Machu Picchu, and I’ve heard of one living within a stone’s throw of the pyramids.
I visited the Carnac stones when I was twenty-four, and they were more magical than you can imagine from pictures of them. This photo is me at the stone called the Giant, where Ava and Jules sat and talked.
Address: Lleu-dit le Ménec, 56340 Carnac
CAFÉ SAINTE-LUCIE (MAP #5)
The local café where Kate first saw Vincent, and where she was almost killed by falling masonry.
Amy says: Although most of the locations in the books are real, I made this one up. There just wasn’t the right kind of café situated where I needed it: close enough to both La Maison and Kate’s grandparents’ apartment so that it would be the natural hangout for both Kate and the revenants. So I based it on the layout of some local cafés I know (La Palette and Deux Magots), put it where I wanted it, and gave it an original name.
Address: I imagine this to be situated at the base of the rue du Bac, near the Métro stop and just off the boulevard Saint-Germain, 75007 Paris.
CARROUSEL BRIDGE (PONT DU CARROUSEL) (MAP #6)
The bridge across the Seine that was closest to Kate’s house. Vincent dived from this bridge to rescue a suicidal teenager while a bardia-numa swordfight took place in the tunnel beneath.
Amy says: The walking path along the river passes under this bridge through a tunnel lined with empty sections used as makeshift sleeping spaces by vagrants. It smells awful and is a bit scary when you pass what looks like a pile of clothes that suddenly comes to life as tunnel dwellers shift in their sleep. It seemed the perfect place to situate a bardia-numa swordfight.
Address: Spans the Seine between the Quai des Tuileries and the Quai Voltaire.
CATACOMBS (MAP #7)
Where Lucien took Charles’s body and staged an attack on the bardia.
Amy says: When I took a class on ancient city planning in graduate school, I heard a story about how, by the seventeenth century, all the city’s graveyards were overflowing. (Not surprising for a millennia of burials!) Before they dug up all the bones and relocated them to the Catacombs, there were accounts of decomposing bodies floating around the city during floods. Since then I’ve heard equally gory tales of people’s basement walls caving in under the weight of rotting corpses. Those stories provided vivid enough images in my mind that I never forgot them.
I have toured the Catacombs several times and was fascinated to discover that it was a part of an extensive underground tunnel network that runs under most of Paris. What a perfect place for the numa to move about and hide! Plus, it was a handy place for a battle. I actually wrote a whole Catacombs battle scene, which was a bit of a problem since Die for Me is in first person and Kate wasn’t there to witness it. But it’s still there in my mind, flames flickering in the darkness, reflecting off the fighters’ swords. (If you’re curious to dip into this scene for yourself, I included it for you in the Deleted Scenes chapter!)
Address: 1 avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, 75014 Paris
CENTRE POMPIDOU LIBRARY (BIBLIOTHÈQUE CENTRE POMPIDOU) (MAP #8)
Where Kate found proof of the 1968 death of Vincent and Ambrose.
Amy says: The Centre Pompidou Library is on the second and third floors of the famous modern building, with its upper floors housing Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art. I audited several classes at the American University of Paris when I was in my twenties and used this library for research. I imagined Kate here, using the old microfiche spools I consulted in the 1990s, even though I’m sure everything is digitized by now!
Once I had written the scene, a friend informed me that French obituaries don’t use photos. So I had to bend the truth to make the story work.
Address: Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris
CRILLON HOTEL (MAP #9)
The hotel where Violette set up her headquarters and lured Kate and Vincent by kidnapping Mamie.
Amy says: The Crillon Hotel is one of the few Paris hotels regularly used by heads of state and movie stars. I thought it would be Violette’s idea of a Paris palace—fit for her brand of royalty. I actually phoned the hotel to ask if they had working fireplaces in any of the rooms. They said that there were rooms with fireplaces, but they were no longer used because of fire hazard. I figured that type of rule wouldn’t stop Violette!
Address: 10 Place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris
