Life Eternal (16 page)

Suddenly I felt queasy. I put a hand to my head, my knees growing limp. “Renée?” Dante said, just as I fell. I landed on the frozen earth beside the crooked stone.

Its inscription was barely visible through the frost.

“Are you okay?” Dante said from above me, bending down to offer me a hand. But I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Had he lied to me?

Rolling over, I stood up and brushed myself off.

“What’s wrong?” he said, studying me. “You look sick.”

I took a step away from him. “Did you see that headstone?”

“Of course. That’s why I told you to watch your step.”

I paused, trying to sort everything out. “But it’s so dark. How did you see it from all the way over there?”

Dante gave me a confused look. “I was right behind you.”

Was he? I couldn’t remember.

“What’s going on?” he said, his voice betraying a hint of alarm.

“I had another vision. I came to this cemetery, looking for a grave, but while I tried to find it, I tripped over a headstone. The same headstone you just warned me about.” I squinted at him in the dark.

“What are you implying?”

“That my visions are yours. That I’m somehow seeing what you’re doing.” I swallowed. “That you’ve been lying to me about it.”

Dante gave me a baffled look. “Lying to you about what? What do you think I’m doing that’s so terrible?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “Digging up a grave. Looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters.” But the more I spoke, the more absurd everything sounded. If he had been looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters, he would have told me.

“Is it really so hard to believe that I saw the headstone just before you fell?”

“I—I don’t know,” I said, and looked up at him, hoping the truth would be somehow etched in his face. “Tell me where you’ve been this whole time. Tell me what you’ve been doing. I feel like I’m walking in the dark.”

“I’ve been in hiding,” he said. “Moving around so the Monitors can’t find me. You know that.”

“But why won’t you tell me any specifics?”

“I don’t want to put you in any danger. If the Monitors here ask you questions, I don’t want you to have to lie. It’s better if you don’t know where I am.”

“So ask me to run away with you,” I said. “I would say yes. You just have to ask me.” My back went rigid as I leaned against the trunk of a tree and waited for him to say the words:
Come with me.

But they never came.

“I can’t.”

I felt something inside me wither. It was too dark for me to see Dante’s face, and I was glad. I didn’t want to see what he looked like when he was pushing me away. “Why?” I said, my mouth suddenly growing dry.

“Because if we go somewhere together, I’ll still die in five years. And you need to be at St. Clément. You need to train as a Monitor so you can protect yourself.”

“Protect myself from whom?” I said, my voice cracking. “The Undead? I can—”

“From me.”

“But—but you wouldn’t hurt me.” The words got caught in my throat.

“Not now, but what if I change?” The wind whistled through the branches above us as I waited for him to continue. “The Undead have been known to grow uncharacteristically violent in the final stages of their existence. Maybe it’s desperation, or maybe it’s something less easy to control. I don’t know. But you have to prepare yourself.”

My hair blew across my cheeks. I didn’t know what to say. The only thing I had been certain of was that Dante would never hurt me. It was the only thing that had given me hope these past months; hope that we would make it, that we would find a solution and be together for as long as time would let us. But I had been wrong, because he was hurting me now.

“And I need to stay here,” Dante whispered. “I need to stay here and keep searching for a solution.”

“But I already found one,” I cried, and then lowered my voice. “I think you know what it is.”

Dante tilted his head as if he wanted to tell me something. “I…” He let his voice trail off in the wind.

I wanted him to say more, but he didn’t. The wind quieted until everything became still. In the silence, I heard something rustle across the way, as if someone were stepping on dried leaves. I put a finger to Dante’s lips.

“Do you feel that?” I heard a girl’s voice say. It was the same voice I heard through the walls every night before I went to sleep. Clementine. Had she followed me here?

“What?” another girl said. It was Arielle.

“An Undead,” Clementine said.

“We’re in a cemetery,” another girl said. “Everything here is dead—”

Clementine cut her off. “No, this is stronger. It’s coming from over there. Where the voices were.”

Realizing she was talking about Dante, I dropped to the ground, pulling Dante with me behind a tall headstone.
Go,
I mouthed to him, hoping he would know to get as far away from Clementine as he possibly could.

Before I could say anything more, he was gone, the shadows shifting around him as he moved soundlessly through the night.

The sound of Clementine’s footsteps got closer. “Stop being so scared,” she said to one of her friends, who must have been hesitating. “We’re Monitors. We can handle this.”

“But I’ve never seen an Undead.” I recognized Josie’s voice.

The wind engulfed the rest. I heard Clementine say something to the girls, but I couldn’t make out what. Someone responded. There was a brief argument. And then suddenly, everything went quiet.

I was beginning to think they had left, when, without warning, something sharp jabbed me in the side.

“Ow!” I yelped.

“Get up,” Clementine said from above me. “Slowly.” She was holding a shovel against the back of my neck, the tip of it cold on my skin.

I did as she said.

“Now turn around,” she said. “And keep your hands out so I can see them.”

I closed my eyes, feeling Dante’s presence disappear into the distance, and turned around.

“Who were you with?” Clementine demanded from beneath the hood of her coat. A group of girls stood behind her.

“No one,” I said quickly. “I am alone.”

“That’s a lie. We heard voices.”

“Do you see anyone else? I’m here alone.”

Clementine studied me. “I heard a boy’s voice. You were with a boy. An Undead boy.” Her eyes wandered to the spot in the distance where Dante had disappeared.

“That was me. I was trying to talk to the dead,” I persisted. I had to distract her. “This is the Monitor section. I thought I could contact one of them to ask about the Nine Sisters. There’s no one else here but me.”

“Then why could I feel you? Why did you feel like an Undead?”

“Because I died once. Remember?”

Clementine looked me in the eyes, measuring whether or not I was telling the truth. I saw her falter, and before she could react, I grabbed the shovel and twisted it out of her arms. With more ease than I expected, I flipped it around and pointed the tip at her.

Her friends seemed to want to do something, but they were too terrified of me to get close. Now I was in control.

I pushed the tip of the shovel into Clementine’s neck. “Why did you follow me here?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow, trying to maintain her cool. “Because I thought you were up to something. And I was right.”

“Do you really want to know what I was doing?” I asked, holding the shovel steady.

Clementine lifted her chin, but said nothing.

“Okay, I’ll tell you. Or how about this? I’ll show you.”

“Fine,” she said, though I could tell she didn’t trust me.

“Bend down,” I said.

She did as I said.

“Wipe away the frost from that headstone.”

I watched the muscles in her neck tighten as she rubbed her palm over the crest of the canary. The moon glinted in her eyes as she glanced over her shoulder at me. “Is this a joke?”

I turned the shovel around and held out the handle to her. “No. I came here tonight to find it.”

Cautiously, she took the shovel from me, and we took a few steps away from each other. Breaking my gaze, she knelt down and read the inscription.

“‘Here it is laid to rest,’” she read, and turned to me. “The secret of the Nine Sisters is buried here?” she asked, as if she didn’t believe it.

The grave before her was mounded higher than the others, the soil loose and scattered about the grass as if it were fresh. Or recently unearthed? I didn’t know if the secret was there or not, but I did realize then that my visions were more than just wanderings.

“I don’t know,” I said. Whoever I had been in my vision —Dante or otherwise—had never made it to the bottom of the hole.

“You really don’t know,” Clementine murmured, studying me before telling the girls to start digging.

I wanted to leave, to be anywhere but here, where everything—the headstone, the shovels, the girls tossing dirt over their shoulders—made my head spin. What was Dante going to tell me? Had he been here before, or was I losing my mind?

But I couldn’t leave. Clementine had sensed him. I could tell by the way her eyes darted toward the edge of the trees, as if she were searching for him. If I left, she might follow and find him. So I stayed, and as soil flung past me, and the hole got wider, deeper, I took a surreptitious survey of the cemetery, and let out a sigh of relief. I couldn’t feel Dante anywhere.

W
INTER CAME TO
M
ONTREAL TWO MONTHS
early. Or I should say, two months early to me. By the end of October I had only just gotten ready to take out my autumn coat, when the school started delivering a bundle of wood outside each of our doors in the morning for the potbellied stove. But no matter how close I sat to the fire, I couldn’t get rid of the cold vacancy within me.

So instead I embraced it, and ventured out into the chilly Canadian air until I found my way to the edge of city. There, I wandered along the waterfront, where I could almost feel Dante watching me from the other side of the river. I spent most of my evenings there, pacing around the perimeter of Montreal, waiting for him to come to me.

Abandoned grain silos lined the opposite shore; lonely brown cylinders that rose behind the water. If you stood on a particular spot on the wharf and spoke over the river, your voice would bounce off the silos and echo back. At nightfall, when everyone had left, I approached the edge of the water and leaned on the railing.

It was scratched with graffiti: initials of lovers, etched in hearts. When the wind died down, I spoke.

“Did you lie?” I said, the words wobbly.

When they bounced back, my voice was low and round, repeating itself over and over:
lie lie lie lie.

“No,” I said into it again, and imagined it was Dante when it came back:
No. No. No. No. No.

After that, I kept going back to the waterfront, speaking to myself through the silos. I was so intent on finding Dante that I barely thought about the riddle on the headstone. And to my surprise, Clementine didn’t remind me, even though I knew she’d been just as disappointed as I’d been after our run-in at the cemetery.

On that night, the girls had dug and dug, but there’d been nothing in the anonymous grave, not even a casket. Clementine had said nothing as we walked back to the dormitory, our face and hands streaked with dirt. She was quieter after that; she never stopped me in the halls or tried to embarrass me in front of her friends. At first I thought we had reached some sort of truce, but then I realized she was waiting, watching me closer than she ever had before, trying to figure out what I knew and who I had been with that night.

At first I didn’t tell Anya what happened, partly because that night confused me, too. That was why I went to the silos—with the hope that I would find Dante. But after a week of nothing, I gave up and told her everything.

“You went to the cemetery without me?” Anya said. We were sitting in Latin class, waiting for everyone else to show up.

“I was in a rush,” I said. “Everything happened quickly.”

She rotated the cuff in her ear. “What do you think it means?”

“What?”

“The riddle, obviously,” she said in disbelief.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

She sat back, staring at me.

“What?” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’ve barely eaten anything for days,” she said. “You’re not interested in the riddle even though just a few weeks ago you were dragging me to the hospital with you. What’s going on?”

The door opened and Clementine and her friends walked in, followed by Monsieur Orneaux. I lowered my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t talk about it.”

Anya bit her fingernail. “It’s about a boy,” she said, studying me. “I’ve felt like this too. That’s why I pierce my ears whenever I’m upset. It takes my mind off of things I don’t want to think about.”

“I don’t think I want to do that.”

“Of course you don’t,” she teased, pinching my virgin earlobe as the professor sat at the head of the table and took out his lecture notes. “But maybe figuring out the riddle will distract you from your boy problems?”

“There was nothing buried beneath the headstone,” I whispered as Monsieur Orneaux cleared his throat. “And I already checked the cemetery map—there’s no body of salt water anywhere near there, and if there is a bear on one of the headstones, it could take years to find it. The cemetery is huge.”

“Okay,” Anya whispered. “You don’t have to get testy about it.”

That’s when Clementine raised her hand. Monsieur Orneaux tried to ignore it while he recited Homeric phrases. But after a few minutes had passed, she decided to just speak up.

“Who killed the Nine Sisters?”

That woke everyone up.

Monsieur Orneaux narrowed his eyes, making his face look even more hollow. “I don’t know anything about that. I teach Latin.”

“Then why did Madame Goût say the murder of the sisters was your area of expertise?” Clementine said.

I put down my pencil, appreciating Clementine’s pushiness for the first time.

Monsieur Orneaux’s face darkened as he leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingers together. “Madame Goût. I should have known.” And without saying anything more, he stood up and wrote a word on the blackboard.

Liberum


“The group widely believed to have murdered the Nine Sisters call themselves the Liberum.” He tapped his chalk to the blackboard, just over the letter
i.
“What do the roots of this word signify?”

Without giving us any time to respond, he underlined the beginning of the word. “
Liber
means
child.
” He gazed at us. “As you know, only people under the age of twenty-one can potentially become Undead, which is clearly why the Liberum chose this word.”

“It also means
freedom,
” I said, my voice cutting through the classroom. I felt a pair of eyes on me, and I lifted my chin to see Noah gazing at me, a pencil tucked behind his ear. He gave me a half smile, and then looked away when Clementine leaned over and whispered something in his ear.

Monsieur Orneaux met my gaze for a split second, barely acknowledging me. He repeated, “It also means
freedom.
”

“Who are they?” Noah asked.

“They are a brotherhood of Undead,” the professor said, sitting down. “A secret brotherhood. Although we know they exist—for we’ve found their name scrawled in their abandoned abodes—no Monitor has ever captured one.”

A brotherhood, I thought. A brotherhood to oppose a sisterhood.

“How come?” Clementine asked.

“They’re nameless. Faceless. Dangerous,” Monsieur Orneaux said, his face solemn. “Desperate. More so than you could ever imagine.”

A few people shifted in their seats. “What?” I heard someone murmur.

“All Undead can take souls at random to gain a bit of life,” the professor explained. “But the Brothers have pushed it to the extreme. We believe they have taken enough souls to live far past their natural span of twenty-one years, and may have even survived for centuries, killing for life. As a result, they’re shells—barely human except in form.”

“How many are there?” Clementine asked.

“We believe there are nine of them.”

Just like the Sisters, I thought.

“But they’re vagrant,” Monsieur Orneaux said. “We don’t know where they are. We don’t know who they are. All we know is what they want.”

“Which is what?” Noah asked.

When he answered, Monsieur Orneaux looked at me. “Freedom. They want to be human again. They want their souls back. Not just temporarily, but forever. They want immortality, and they will stop at nothing to find it. That’s why they killed Les Neuf Soeurs. To find their secret.”

“What?” I said. “But why would they kill people if they wanted information?”

“All eight of the Nine Sisters who were found dead had gauze stuffed in their mouths.”

A murmur rose over the class. “Gauze?” I heard someone say. “Why gauze?”

“I don’t understand,” I said, remembering how my parents had died, how Miss LaBarge had died. “Isn’t putting gauze in the mouth a normal way for Monitors to protect themselves from the kiss of an Undead?”

The class went silent as everyone stared at me.

“No,” Monsieur Orneaux said. “It’s known as a method of torture that a select few Undead use on their victims.”

“Torture?” I breathed. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a simple gag, made cruel because it uses the victim’s own weapon. The Liberum didn’t kill the Sisters immediately; they systematically tortured them. The autopsy reports, along with many accounts of the crime scenes, indicate that each of the Sisters endured prolonged suffering before they finally met death.”

“What?” I whispered, my voice so small I barely recognized it. “But my grandfather said—”

Monsieur Orneaux’s eye began to pulse with irritation. “He was mistaken.” Picking up his notes, he resumed his lecture.

Outside on the window ledge, a pair of pigeons ruffled their feathers and then swooped down to the fountain below. I watched them bathe in the water. Both my parents and Miss LaBarge were found with gauze in their mouths. Did that mean they weren’t killed in a normal Monitoring accident, but that they were tortured and then killed?

The bell sounded, signaling the end of the class.

I lingered, lost in my thoughts, as everyone filtered out of the room. In the letter from Miss LaBarge’s cottage, my mother had said that she’d found a clue that would lead them to the lost girl.
Lost girl.
My grandfather thought that had been a code word for an Undead, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe that she had meant the ninth sister. And Miss LaBarge had clearly been looking for something, too, judging from the clippings and the maps in her cottage.

Was it possible that my parents and Miss LaBarge had discovered eternal life, and were killed because of it? Or maybe they hadn’t been killed. After all, hadn’t I seen Miss LaBarge at her own funeral? Driving a gray Peugeot down the streets of Montreal? My chest trembled as the impossible suddenly became possible: maybe she and my parents had used the secret and were now immortal.

The sound of a boy clearing his throat thrust me back into the world. Startled, I spun around to find Noah standing by my chair.

“Hi,” he said, his voice deep and smooth like the low notes of a cello.

Today he was the color of apple cider—his wool sweater, his hair. Embarrassed, I averted my eyes toward the window. Outside, the courtyard was crowded with students hanging out around the fountain.

“Why do you always turn pink when I talk to you?”

I felt my face grow hotter. “There, now I’m red,” I said with a self-conscious smile.

He laughed. “Do you want to get a coffee?”

“Oh, no,” I said quickly, pulling my backpack over one shoulder. “I’m really busy.” Even though my only plan was to go to the waterfront and wait for Dante.

“Busy with what?”

“Oh—um—it’s something personal.”

“Fair enough,” he said, pulling out my chair with a little bow.

I made my way into the hallway, Noah on my heels. After a moment I turned around. “You seem like you want to ask me something.”

Noah was closer than I expected, his face inches away from mine. “Why do you say that?” His breath was warm as it tickled my nose. “Aren’t I allowed to walk in the hallway with you?”

“Of course,” I said, caught off guard.

“But you’re right,” he admitted, adjusting his glasses. “I wanted to talk to you. Is that so bad?”

I tilted my head, giving him a suspicious look.

“Okay, I’ll confess I do have an ulterior motive.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll tell you over coffee,” he said.

“I have a boyfriend, you know.”

“And I have a girlfriend,” he said. “How presumptuous of you to think that I was flirting.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to figure out if he actually had been flirting, or if that’s just the way he was.

“So we’re both taken,” Noah said. “Now that that’s understood, we can just be friends. And as friends, I’d like to ask you to have a hot beverage with me.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Okay.”

Before I knew it, we were outside walking around the streets of the old port, just talking and laughing, something I hadn’t done in a while. Noah was from Montreal. He’d grown up in Outremont, a residential neighborhood on the other side of Mont Royal. His parents were professors and Monitors. “They’re very opinionated,” Noah stressed. “They love to argue about politics.”

I didn’t tell him much about myself; only the pertinent details: I was from California; after my parents died I moved in with my grandfather in Massachusetts. I preferred listening to Noah tell me about his life, which sounded sunny, happy. It reminded me of the way mine had been, a lifetime ago.

Listening to him talk about which café had the best coffee in Montreal, I realized that we didn’t have to talk about matters of life and death. I could shed that Renée, even if just for a few hours, and stroll down the winding streets and debate whether or not hockey was better than basketball or why Madame Goût insisted on calling Mr. Pollet
Monsieur Po-lay.

We were about to turn in to a bakery, when I saw the flash of a woman’s face across the street.

I froze as Noah went ahead, the bells on the door ringing as he pushed it open. The woman now had her back to me. I watched as she walked down the sidewalk, waiting for her to turn around.