Life Eternal (31 page)

All of it was blackened with smoke stains, including the walls.

“There was a fire here,” I said to Noah, touching the dark billowing patterns on the walls, the dust tickling my nose. “This was the fire she died in. That’s why the room was closed off.”

I gazed out the window, trying to imagine what the courtyard looked like when Ophelia lived here.

She must have been just around my age when she’d died. If I were her, and came back to this room to plant a message, where would I have put it?

Anya had opened the French doors of the closet, and Noah was scouring the walls, but I knew they were wrong. I wouldn’t leave a message anywhere that could be easily painted or papered over or burned away.

With sudden conviction, I spun around. There, on the far wall, was a sturdy brick fireplace, the red darkened to a smoky brown hue from the fire. This must have been the fire Dustin had told me about that led the school to ban the use of the fireplaces. It was the only part of the room that wouldn’t be torn down or changed in any way, unless the entire building was demolished.

Kneeling on the floor, I flung off my coat, rolled up my sleeves, and reached my arm into the chimney. It was soft with spiderwebs and ash. I brushed all of that away. The flue was shut and locked in place, so I patted around below it, tracing the lines of the brick until I felt something cool and smooth, like metal. I went over it again, this time slower, passing my palm across it. There were lines etched into it. I was so shocked that I pulled my hand out and glanced around the room. Anya and Noah were busy searching the far wall. When I put my hand back, I half expected the metal to have disappeared, a figment of my imagination, but instead, it seemed even more real, the lines carved into it forming letters beneath my fingertips.

“I think I found it,” I said, my voice cracking. But no one seemed to hear me. “I found it,” I repeated, this time louder. Noah froze, his face softening to a smile.

“Can I borrow your flashlight?” I asked.

He handed it to me, and I ducked into the chimney. Dust sprinkled from above, making me cough as I shined the light on the inner wall. And there, cut neatly into the metal, was a message.

If you wish to find what the nine have kept, from the highest rank to the lowest depth, you must be schooled in my grief;

I read it out loud three times, until I was sure I had it committed to memory, and then climbed out, shaking the dust from my hair. “We found it.”

“What do you think it means?” I said, writing the full riddle on a piece of paper and spreading it in front of us on the carpet in Anya’s room.

If you wish to find what the nine have kept, from the highest rank to the lowest depth, you must be schooled in my grief;

to arrive there

follow the nose of the bear

to the salty waters beneath;

here it is laid to rest

where to only the best

of our kind it shall be bequeathed.

“The first verse doesn’t tell us anything,” I said, reading it all again, even though I knew it by memory.

“Highest rank? Schooled in grief?” Noah said, tracing the second and third lines. “Clearly, the hiding spot has something to do with a school.”

I bit my lip. “But not this school. She couldn’t have hidden the secret at St. Clément. Ophelia would never have hidden the secret in the same place as the first part of the riddle. That would defeat the purpose.”

Anya sat down between us and pushed the riddle aside. “You’re going about it the wrong way. I think the last few lines mean that Ophelia hid these riddles for only a very specific kind of person to find the secret. Probably someone like her. Top rank.”

Noah and Anya both slowly turned and looked at me.

“The riddle gives us half the information,” she said. “It tells us that the secret is submerged in salt water, beneath a bear. And that it might be associated with a school. But it isn’t enough. I think in order to find the secret, we have to
think
like her.”

Closing my eyes, I tried to imagine what it would have felt like to have a secret so big you couldn’t tell anyone. It wasn’t hard; all I had to do was think of Dante. So if I were going to write down the story of our relationship and hide it, where would I put it?

Where we first met.

I opened my eyes. “If I were her, I would have hidden the secret where I had first
used
it. That seems lucky. So let’s just consider what we know.” I looked at Anya. “Ophelia Hart died here, in this fire, in her dorm room at St. Clément. She was sent to the Royal Victoria, where she reanimated into an Undead.”

Noah adjusted his glasses, deep in thought. “Then she went with her doctor to his hospital in the American colonies.”

“Gottfried,” I said, deep in thought. “When she was there, she somehow transitioned from patient to nurse and headmistress. But she couldn’t have survived long enough to be either of those as an Undead. They only have twenty-one years to find their souls.” The lines of the notebook paper blurred as the dates swirled in my head. The realization came to me before the words to articulate it did, and I let out a strange squeak that halted conversation. Anya and Noah stared at me, waiting. My back went rigid as I looked up. “What if she used the secret while she was there?”

Noah held a finger to his lips in thought. “Isn’t there a lake there?”

“A salt lake,” I murmured, still unable to believe what I was saying. “With a statue of Ursa Major looking over it.”

“A bear,” Anya said in awe.

“Yes,” I said, my pulse racing as I realized that the answer to my soul, to Dante’s soul, had been at Gottfried all along.

Noah looked up at me with a small smile. “So when are we leaving?”

I
T WAS THAT WITCHING TIME BETWEEN FOUR AND
five in the morning when Noah and I boarded a train to Maine. The cars were rickety old things, mostly empty, as we walked through them and took two seats near the back. I wedged our shovels by the window, Noah’s and mine. Anya wanted to come, but I hadn’t let her. Someone had to stay behind in case we didn’t come back.

With a groan, the train heaved forward, hurling us south, though I wouldn’t have known it from the view. It was all black to me. Noah fell asleep almost immediately, his head slumping until it was resting against my shoulder. Gently, I shifted beneath his weight, trying to nudge him awake.

This whole search had started with something simple, just Dante and me; but now I was on a train, crossing the border in the middle of night with two shovels and Noah, the weight of his head pressing me deeper into the seat. I felt so far from where I had started that it seemed I would never be able to find my way back.

A conductor sauntered down the aisle in a black uniform. “
Billets,
” he said.

I reached into my sweater pocket for our tickets and handed them to the conductor. He stamped two of them, and studied the third before handing it back to me. “
Ceci n’est pas un billet,
” he said.

Taking it from him, I turned on my overhead light and gasped.

It was a worn photograph of a small stucco house with an overgrown garden that was overexposed with yellow California light. I knew that door, I thought, tracing its edges. I knew the carpet behind it, the way it felt plush between my toes. I knew the rooms beyond: the living room, the den, the stairs with the creak in the third step. Through the front window I could see a man and woman standing over the counter in the kitchen. It looked like they were laughing. My parents. My kitchen. My life.

I gripped the photograph, staring at the blur of their faces. I had never seen it before. How had it gotten into my pocket? Where had I been when it was taken? The longer I stared at it, the more agitated I began to feel. My eyes darted about the train car to the other passengers, slumped in their seats. They didn’t know, I thought. No one knew except for me. I gazed at the photograph, overwhelmed with regret. I was the only one who could have warned my parents. If only I had gotten there sooner. I could have saved Annette LaBarge, too. I could have saved all of them.

My eyes grew wet. I blinked. A tear fell onto my lap.

I blinked again, my eyes growing heavy, and the sky outside seemed to brighten.

A third time, and the leaves budded on the trees, as if it were spring. Exhausted, my head fell back against the leather of the seat, and my world disappeared.

Then it was morning. I was walking on a muddy road surrounded by a green birch forest. I saw no sign of life other than the twin ruts of tire tracks caked in the dirt. I didn’t stop until I was in front of a log cabin hidden behind the weeds. A mailbox stood outside, labeled with the number 66. Beside it hung a sign that said:
BEWARE OF DOG
.

Crouching low behind the bushes, I waited until a car drove up the road where I had come from. From the bottom of the shrubs, I could only see four feet as they stepped out of the car, but I already knew who they were. Two Brothers of the Liberum. “How did you find this woman?” one of them said in Latin, his voice smooth and easy, like a teenager.

“I followed her through Europe,” the second brother said in a low baritone. “I think she found something that might lead us to the Sisters.”

“They never find anything,” the other one said, kicking a rock. It landed inches away from my face. And without saying anything more, he opened the mailbox and placed a slip of paper inside. Looking both directions, they got back into the car and drove away.

At first I didn’t move. I stared at the cabin windows, checking to make sure no one had stirred inside. When I thought it was clear, I opened the mailbox door. It made a loud screech. My eyes darted to the cabin, where I heard the sound of little footsteps. Quickly, I took the paper and vanished into the woods, just as a swarm of Undead children burst through the front door.

Before I knew it, I was on a train traveling south. In my lap was a photograph of a small stucco house with a garden. Through the window were the blurs of two people. I flipped the photograph over. All it said was
Lydia Winters.

“Costa Rosa, California,” a man announced over the intercom.

I got off and hailed a taxi outside the station and told the driver the address. He drove me through the tree-lined streets and neighborhoods colored with little square houses until he stopped in front of a stucco house. I took out the picture to compare it. It was the same.

I paid the driver and stepped out. There was a sprinkler on in the front yard, which skipped in a semicircle and then back again. I hesitated, and then jumped through it just before it splashed my ankles.

But before I could approach the house, the screen door opened. Startled, I jumped back and hid behind a bougainvillea as a girl stepped out. She was young, maybe sixteen, and looked fearless and carefree. Her long caramel hair was tangled and unkempt. Freckles spotted the bridge of her nose. She raised her chin in the air, as if sniffing something, and then turned to me, her eyes out of focus as she stared at the leaves that blocked me from view. She was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a baggy T-shirt. Her feet were bare as she stepped toward me.

“Renée? Who’s there?” her mother called from inside. Music floated out from the open window.

She gave the bougainvillea one last look before turning. “No one,” the girl said, her voice deeper than I had expected. Crisp. “I’m going to meet Annie now. I’ll be back by dinner.” With that, she slipped on a pair of sneakers from inside, and picked up a bicycle leaning on the side of the house. I watched as she hopped on and pedaled down the street.

After she left, I snuck out from behind the bush and darted along the side of the house to the back door. Lydia Winters was in the kitchen. The faucet was running.

I approached slowly. They were Monitors, after all. I didn’t want to scare them.

“Robert, do you feel that?” Lydia said.

“Feel what?” a man called out from somewhere in the house.

A bee buzzed around my head as Lydia turned off the faucet. I swatted it away as the back door slid open. Lydia stepped outside, gripping a garden trowel in one hand, and before she could scream, I put a hand over her mouth and pulled her against the side of the house.

She kicked beneath my grip, trying to hit me with the trowel, but I was stronger than her. Slowly, I twisted her wrist until the shovel dropped to the grass. Squirming, she yelled something, but it was muffled beneath my hand.

“Don’t scream,” I said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

It just made her thrash more. “Stop moving,” I said. “I don’t want to break your wrists.”

A flash of fear shot through her eyes, but quickly transformed to rage.

“You’re being followed by the Liberum,” I whispered. At the mention of the brotherhood, she grew still. “I’ve been following them. I intercepted a note with your name on it and a photograph of this house. They know you found something in Europe. You have to hide it.”

She had now grown totally still. Carefully, I removed my hand from her mouth.

“Lydia?” her husband called.

“They’re coming for you,” I said in her ear, just before I let her go. “Prepare yourself.”

I woke up to Noah shaking me. “Renée,” he said. “Renée.” With a start, I opened my eyes.

“You were talking in your sleep,” he said. “You were saying something about them coming. About preparing yourself.” His hand was wrapped around mine. I slipped my hand out and held it in my lap, opening and closing my fingers as he touched my cheek and wiped it. “You were crying,” he said.

“Was I?” I said, but I was still miles away, years away. Crumpled in my fist was the photograph of my home. I held it tighter, trying to hold on to the sound of their voices, to the feel of my mother beneath my grip. Dante’s grip.

“He was warning them,” I whispered, my voice cracking as I realized what Dante had done. He was an Undead, they were a pair of Monitors; they could have buried him in an instant, but still he risked his life to try to save them. “The whole time, he was warning them.”

“Who?”

I glanced down at my sweater, the same one I had been wearing when Dante had showed up at my grandfather’s house. He must have slipped the photograph to me when he had put his hand to my waist and kissed my cheek. Reaching over my shoulder, I touched the bandage covering the mark on my back and suddenly felt lonelier than I ever had before. “Someone from a dream.”

When Noah turned to the window, I opened my fist and flipped the photograph over. A name was written on the other side.
Lydia Winters.
Below it was a message scrawled in a different hand; one that I recognized, one that pulled me back in time, until I could remember how the rain smelled on the muddy paths as we ran across the Gottfried campus; how delicate the water sounded as it dripped from his hair while he guided my chalk across the blackboard; how my skin tingled beneath his lips when he kissed my neck, my collarbone, my shoulder:

It was all for you.

• • •

The sky was a dull gray when the train arrived at the station in Maine. The rain came down in a damp mist as we walked to the parking lot, where a line of black taxis was waiting. The driver of the first rolled down his window.

“Attica Falls,” I said, and climbed into the backseat. The seats were made of cheap upholstery and the windows were tinted, which colored the snowy landscape outside in sepia, as if we were traveling through an old photograph. And in a way, I was.

Attica Falls looked exactly the same as it had last year, the potholed roads lined with dilapidated houses and little shops that might have been cute fifty years ago, but now just looked dreary. The snow flanking the street was dirty, and the stores all looked closed, save for Beatrice’s and a souvenir shop. As we passed the boarding house where Dante used to live, I closed my eyes, trying to see if I could sense him, but I couldn’t feel anything.

When I opened my eyes, we were almost all the way through Attica Falls. I saw an old man carrying a bag of ice from the gas station to his truck. He watched us as we passed, black water splashing onto the windows of the truck as we rounded the bend to the main entrance of Gottfried Academy.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the vacant feeling of the Undead. A plastic bag kicked around the street in front of us and then floated up into the sky. At my direction, the driver pressed on, dropping us at a snowy field at the edge of town.

Slinging my shovel over my shoulder, I led Noah to the well shaded by crab apple trees in the back of the field. The same place Dante had taken me last winter.

“What is this?” Noah said as I brushed the snow off the cover of the well. The air inside groaned as I lifted it off, letting out a burst of warmth.

“Maine has a tunnel system, too,” I said, and lowered myself into the earth.

I led Noah through the tunnel, my muscles remembering the turns as if I had just woken up from spending the night with Dante and was running back to the girls’ dormitory to shower before class. We surfaced in the chapel, behind a corroded vent. Everything was still, the light filtering through the rose-colored windows like a kaleidoscope.

“No one can see us,” I said as we crept through the pews. We pushed with all our weight against the chapel doors until they opened against the wind.

The rain was a cold mist when we stepped outside. A few feet away from us, a man in coveralls was chopping the trunk of a tree into pieces and throwing it into some sort of furnace. Noah and I both froze, thinking we were revealed, but he just tipped his cap and kept working. He must have thought we were students. Giving him a slight wave, we walked off, keeping within the shadows of the buildings. But as I gazed around at the campus I thought I knew, my pace slowed.

Everything looked the same, yet wholly different, like a piece of fruit that had become rotten from the inside out. The green was covered with ice and slush. In the middle, where the great oak used to be, now stood a pathetic skeleton of a tree. All of the branches on its right side had been amputated. In fact, most of the trees that used to line the walking paths had now been cut down, leaving severed stumps peeking out of the snow like headstones.

“What happened?” I said, and glanced at the stump beside us, which was tied with a tag. beetle pesticide, it said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Noah said. “Come on.”

It’s amazing how quickly some things return to you. As I ran across the snowy green to the lake, the sun a glazed red over the trees, it almost felt like I had traveled back in time to last winter. I stopped in front of the dismembered oak, breathing in the cold air and imagining that I was running back to the dorm after meeting Dante. What version of the past was that? Had I known then that Dante was Undead? That I was a Monitor? That we had the same soul?