Life Eternal Part 16

"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 cla.s.s. "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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s.

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. Embarra.s.sed, 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 gla.s.ses. "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 Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 cafe 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 Renee, 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 Gout 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.

"Renee?" Noah said from behind me. "Are you coming?"

The cars stopped as the traffic light changed to red. Slowly, the woman turned, raising her face to mine.

Stunned, I looked away.

"It's her," I said to Noah, trying to control my voice.

"Who?"

"Annette LaBarge. My old philosophy professor from Gottfried. The one who died in August."

"What?" he said, letting go of the door. It swung shut, rattling the shade on the window.

He followed my gaze up the street, where Miss LaBarge was disappearing into a crowd of tourists.

"How could that be?" Noah asked.

"I don't know," I said over my shoulder, rushing to catch up with Miss LaBarge.

He ran after me. "But you're certain it's her?"

"Yes." I arched my neck to see over the crowd. Miss LaBarge was a few yards ahead of us, moving briskly through the city, her long skirt billowing around her ankles.

"Did she see you?"

"No. Or at least she didn't seem to."

"Wait," Noah said, stopping me just before I turned down the same deserted alley she was in.

"What are you doing?" I said, yanking my arm away from him. "We could lose her."

"Think about it," he said. "She clearly doesn't want anyone to know that she's here or alive, or else she would have contacted someone. Right?"

Reluctantly, I nodded.

"Let's just slow down. Keep our distance. See where she goes."

So that's what we did. Staying a safe half block away, we followed her all the way to downtown Montreal, where it felt like we were moving forward in time. Instead of the quaint stone buildings of the old port, we were surrounded by big gla.s.s high-rises and expensive designer stores. Everyone on the street was wearing a suit, talking on a cell phone, and walking quickly.

We followed her until she stopped in front of a large building. Tucked into the corner, near a bus stop, was a door covered with an accordion cage. Approaching it, she pulled the cage open, stepped inside, and shut it behind her.

"What is that?" I said as I watched her press a b.u.t.ton. A sliding door closed, and she began to move downward.

"It's an elevator to the underground," Noah said as she disappeared beneath the street.

"Then she definitely isn't Undead. She has to be alive-I mean fully alive-if she's going underground. We have to follow her."

"There's another way down."

We ran into a family-run depanneur. The store was a cramped place, its windows lined with boxed foods, cleaning agents, and a few bottles of cheap wine. Two Chinese women were working the counter, arranging plastic bags.

"Hi, Mrs. Cho," Noah said, rushing by them. "We'll just be a minute," he explained, a little out of breath.

The older of the two women nodded.

I gave them a grateful smile, but Noah pulled me along. "This way," he said, winding through the aisles of cereal and dishwashing detergent and tea until we made it to the back of the store. At the end of the aisle was a fogged-over gla.s.s door, just like the ones in the freezer sections of grocery stores, except larger, and fashioned like a proper house door. It popped when Noah opened it, breaking its suction. "Get in," he said, and closed the door behind us.

The room inside was frigid. It was long and narrow, and filled with bottles and bottles of beer. The dim light reflected off their colored gla.s.s.

"Where are we?" I asked, and then crouched by the door and rubbed a peephole in the condensation on the window to look out. The women at the counter were busy fiddling with the cash register and didn't seem disturbed at all that we had just rushed past them and climbed into their freezer.

Noah's gla.s.ses were fogged. Taking them off, he squinted and wiped them on his shirt. "The beer refrigerator. A lot of deps have them. Come on."

There was a narrow walkway in between the rows of cases. Noah walked down it. "This one's really good," he said, pointing to a dark stout. "Oh, and this one," he said, picking up a large red bottle with a corked head.

At the back of the room was a steel staircase. Moving a few boxes out of the way, Noah cleared enough for us to walk down, and I followed him, the dust from the railing collecting on my hands.

"Et voila," he said, gesturing toward the murky tunnel at the bottom of the stairs. "The underground."

A brief moment of unease took hold of me as I looked down at him and remembered my vision of the cemetery, and the suffocating feeling of standing in the hole. That couldn't have been me, I thought. Shaking it off, I ran down the remaining steps.

We searched the maze of tunnels for nearly an hour, weaving between businesswomen and men in suits, mothers pushing strollers, and teenagers slurping milk shakes; but we never found her.

"You saw her, right?" I said to Noah, slowing to a stop. "I'm not losing my mind. You saw her too."

"I saw someone. But maybe it wasn't Annette LaBarge," Noah said. "Maybe it was just a look-alike. That happens a lot."

"Maybe," I said, gazing down the tunnel one last time.

"I never met her in person," he said. "I only saw the pictures in the papers. You'd know better than I would."

It was her, I thought. Or maybe it wasn't. I wasn't sure about anything anymore. After all, how could it have been Miss LaBarge? I had watched her casket sink at sea.

Giving up, Noah led me back through a narrow tunnel to the St. Clement exit.

It was nearing dinnertime when we made it back to school, but as we approached the gates, I slowed down. I didn't want to go back yet. To what? My empty dorm room? To the library books stacked on my desk; the same ones I had been poring over all semester? Looking at the ground, I kicked a rock down the street and watched as it rolled into the sewer.

"We never got that coffee," I said, stopping before we reached the gates. "You wouldn't want to get dinner with me, would you?"

Noah grinned. "Yes."

He brought me to an Italian grocery store, a short distance from school. Inside, everything was tiny and packaged in little tins or paper wrapping tied with ribbon. The men behind the counter wore white butcher's coats. There was an entire corner devoted only to ravioli.

"What do you feel like eating?" Noah said, walking down the cramped aisles, a bounce in his step.

I bit my lip, embarra.s.sed to admit what I actually was craving. "Pie?"

He gazed at me, a big grin spreading over his face. "Me too. And olives. Oh, and spaghetti," he said, pressing his fingers against a gla.s.s counter of prepared foods.

He zigzagged through the store, picking things off the shelves and piling them in my arms until I could barely see where I was walking. One hard salami. A wedge of cheese. A package of green figs. A container of premade spaghetti with pesto. And a slice of rhubarb pie from the bakery section, with a pint of vanilla ice cream to go on the side.

I kept laughing and dropping things on the floor as he took the items from me and placed them by the register.

While Noah joked with the cashier, I gazed out the window. The streetlamps were off, but as I watched, something pale emerged from the darkness, approaching the storefront. I leaned forward, squinting into the night. A car pa.s.sed, its headlights wrapping around the silhouette of a boy, his shoulders shifting as he moved toward me.