Kate, the revenants’ Champion, saw my underlying good nature and gave me the chance to redeem myself. Which I did by helping her kill Violette. After that fatal act, Kate asked Bran Tandôrn, a healer, or “guérisseur,” to take my corpse to his home on the northwest coast of France and transition me from numa to bardia. Or at least, to try. It hadn’t been done for a millennium or so.

When a revenant (good or evil) dies, they come back to life three days later at the age of their original, human death. Remember when I said it was important that my first death was at thirteen? Under the normal rules, I should stay thirteen forever. Which would totally suck. Who in their right mind would want to be stuck in perpetual puberty?

But Bran figured I was a special case. He should know. Guérisseurs are rare, but fairly well known in France. And Bran’s one of an even smaller group who specialize in healing revenants. They’re called Flame-fingers, and he’s the one Kate contacted when Paris’s bardia needed help. He’s been my guardian since Kate entrusted me to his care.

Between the time I got to Brittany and my unfortunate run-in with lightning, I actually aged. I grew a few inches and hair sprouted...everywhere. Which was exhilarating. I wasn’t trapped in a child’s body, after all. I was beginning to prove Bran’s theory that during my transition from numa to bardia, I would age at the same rate as a human. Which was further proved when I woke back up from my lightning-strike death with my age reset at thirteen, shorter and less hairy, the telltale red lines of a numa threading back through my aura. (This especially sucked. They had almost disappeared.)

So, Bran strictly forbade me from dying. And it worked. It’s been four years, and now I have the body of a seventeen-year-old. After working out daily and following weapons training videos that Ambrose and Gaspard post on a private server for me, my shoulders are broader, and I have the beginnings of a six-pack. I’m too slim and lanky to ever be as jacked as Ambrose, but I’m...not bad.

Bran assumes my aging will stop when I die as a bardia, saving someone’s life. Right now, I don’t have the urge to die, like bardia do. And I don’t have the craving to betray, like numa do. But I don’t sleep and I’m dormant three days a month, so I’m somewhere in between. I’d like to keep it that way for a few more years. See if I get any taller and bulk out a bit. You know...finish growing. Become a little more adult before my default reset age is set in stone. I’m thinking twenty-two seems like a good age to die a fourth time.