Life Eternal Part 15

"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. Clement. 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 gra.s.s 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 surrept.i.tious survey of the cemetery, and let out a sigh of relief. I couldn't feel Dante anywhere.

WINTER CAME TO MONTREAL 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 sh.o.r.e; 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 embarra.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Gout 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 Gout. 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 cla.s.sroom. 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 sh.e.l.ls-barely human except in form."

"How many are there?" Clementine asked.