Life Eternal (12 page)

The professor interrupted my thoughts. “What do the Undead fear most?”

As the class fell silent, a shudder crept through my body. All at once I felt cold and sweaty, my heart palpitating against my ribs, its beat quick and irregular. Fear—it was in me, overwhelming me, as if I knew what the professor was talking about.…

“Hey, are you okay?” Brett whispered to me. “You look kind of pale.”

Before I realized what I was doing, I blurted out the answer. “The Île des Soeurs.”

All heads turned in my direction. Confused, I slid lower in my chair. What had I just said? Something in French? I barely even knew French, and whatever phrase I had said was one I had never known before.

Monsieur Orneaux studied me. “What did you say?”

I pulled at the neck of my shirt, which suddenly felt damp and far too tight. “I—I can’t remember,” I said. The words I had just spoken were gone, as if someone else had said them.

Across the room, Clementine answered, an eyebrow raised as if challenging me. “She said, the Île des Soeurs.”

The professor studied me. “That is correct.”

“What is it?” Brett asked, looking at me and then at the professor. I let my hair fall across my face, not wanting to reveal that I had no idea what I meant.

“It’s the island just outside of—” Arielle began to answer, but Monsieur Orneaux held up a hand to silence her.

“Island of the Sisters, to Monitors,” Monsieur Orneaux translated, “Or Nuns’ Island, to regular Canadians. It is an island just outside of Montreal, known in Monitor history as the place where they used to send the Undead to be punished.

“It was a barbaric place. Run solely by female Monitors, who operated out of an old convent. They did terrible things. Torture, seclusion, exorcism. They bled the Undead with leeches, they probed them with medical equipment in an attempt to cure them of their evil….” Monsieur Orneaux’s face remained utterly calm as he recounted all the ways the early Monitors attempted to “cure” the Undead.

“It has a reputation among the Undead, though few Monitors are aware of it.” His eyes met mine, as if trying to understand how I had known the answer. “It’s one of the reasons why the Undead rarely come to Montreal. Along with, of course, the fact that Montreal is historically a Monitors’ city.”

“I’ve heard of it,” a boy with a French accent said. “The convent is still there; it’s now abandoned. In primary school there used to be a rumor that it was haunted, though I never knew why. The story was that any child who passed through the gates would disappear forever. We used to dare each other to go inside—”

Monsieur Orneaux cut him off. “That’s enough. This is not a history course.”

He was about to return to his lecture on Latin and what it told us about the Undead when Clementine raised her hand. Monsieur Orneaux ignored her until she finally just spoke up.

“Why was it run only by female Monitors?” she asked, holding the end of her pencil up to her lips.

Monsieur Orneaux clenched his jaw. “Female Monitors are not my area of expertise. If you’re interested in the Nine Sisters, go to the library in your free time.”

Clementine’s back went rigid. “What do you mean, the Nine Sisters?”

Monsieur Orneaux blinked, looking like he wished he could take back his last words. “That’s enough,” he said again, raising his voice for the first time. “Latin. Back to Latin.”

And picking up his class notes, he continued his lecture on roots and verbs and declensions, the Undead, and how the way they spoke could teach us about how they behaved.

I spent the rest of the afternoon gazing out the windows of my various classes, hoping I would sense Dante.

“When you restrain an Undead, the most important step is to protect your mouth,” Headmaster LaGuerre said in Strategy and Prediction, during a lecture about the art of burial. On the board he had drawn a series of diagrams of a Monitor attacking an Undead from behind, pinning him to the ground as he secured his arms and legs, and finally wrapping his head with gauze to prevent a kiss. On each of them, I mentally superimposed Dante’s head, and shuddered. How could everyone else in the room be taking notes on this? Didn’t they realize we were learning how to kill people?

“Renée?” Headmaster LaGuerre said. “Do you know what the primary cause of Monitor death is?”

Sitting up straight, I felt my cheeks flush. “I—um—no.”

“Trying to speak to the Undead in the process of burial,” Clementine said, shooting me a smug grin.

I don’t belong here, I thought. I don’t belong here.

When the last bell rang, I made my way downstairs and through the school gates. I had hours of homework to do, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t sure where I was going, exactly, only that St. Clément was the last place I would find Dante, which meant that if I wanted to see him, my best chance would be out in the city.

I only made it a few blocks before I caught a glimpse of a gray Peugeot, just like the one I’d seen Miss LaBarge in the other night. Or someone who I thought was Miss LaBarge.

“Wait!” I said, watching as the car turned down the street ahead of me. I pushed through the people on the sidewalk.

It all happened before I could move out of the way. I stepped into the intersection, not realizing the light was still red. From the curb, an old woman yelled at me to stop. The brakes of a car squealed, muffling her voice, and I turned just in time to see something metal hurl itself toward me. This is it, I thought; just as Zinya predicted. I am going to die before I can even say good-bye to Dante.

A sharp pain shot up my right side as a bicycle and a bouquet of flowers flew into the air. Covering my face, I fell over and landed on something soft.

After a long moment, I sat up. To my surprise, the ground beneath me groaned.

I was lying on top of a boy. A tall, lean boy. I looked closer. A cute boy. Yellow daffodils were crushed into the ground around us. He groaned again, and I jumped off of him.

“Are you all right?” he said, wincing as he looked at his palms, which where scraped from the pavement. His bicycle was a few feet away, its front wheel still spinning.

I nodded. Save for what was probably going to be a big bruise on my right thigh, I was fine.

The boy’s eyes traveled up to mine. He was clean shaven, with olive skin and hair that reminded me of the best months of autumn. He wore a rectangular pair of glasses that made him look like a college student. “You saved my life,” he said, with a slight French accent.

“I’m so sorry.”

“About saving my life?” He smiled. He had three artfully placed freckles. One under his eye, one on his chin, one on his neck.

“Oh—oh, no,” I said. “Wait, what do you mean?”

“I didn’t see the red light. If you hadn’t blocked me, I would have run it and been hit by that car.”

“Oh,” I said, blushing. “It was an accident.”

He laughed and helped me up.

“You’re warm,” I said, accustomed to Dante’s coldness.

He took me in. “You’re the girl who can’t die.”

“You go to St. Clément?” I asked, surprised.

“I sit three seats down from you in Strategy and Prediction. And in History and Latin. I held the door for you today?”

“Oh.” I felt my face grow red as his features grew familiar. I was used to seeing only the side of his head.

He smirked. “It’s okay. You’re the famous one.”

I looked away and brushed off my skirt. “Those are just rumors.”

“Or maybe some of your immortality just rubbed off on me.”

I smiled. “Then I guess you owe me one.”

“Owe you one what?”

“I won’t know until I want it.” The words came out of my mouth automatically. What was I saying? Was I flirting with this boy?

“Deal.”

“I’m Renée, by the way,” I said.

“Noah Fontaine.”

He held out his hand, and I hesitated, staring at it and thinking of Dante. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, looking at his scratches and then wiping his hand on his jeans.

I looked at my feet and fidgeted with the buttons on my sleeve.

Bending down, he picked up his bag and the remains of the bouquet of flowers he had been carrying, which had spilled out around us, coating the road in crushed petals.

“I’m sorry about your flowers,” I said.

“Oh, it’s okay. She probably won’t even notice,” he said, holding up a wilted stem.

And even though I had no idea this boy existed until a few seconds ago, for some reason, as I watched him collect the loose flowers, my heart sank imagining the girl he had bought them for.

He stood up. “Do you believe in fate?” he asked.

“No,” I said quickly, and then reconsidered. “Well, maybe.”

“My thoughts exactly,” he said. And with the grace of a cat, he picked up his bicycle and pedaled off, grinning at me over his shoulder before he vanished into the crowd.

A
CCORDING TO MADAME GOûT, FRENCH WAS AN
irregular language, a secretive language; the language of Monitors. The last three letters of almost every word were silent, which had the strange effect of making all words sound alike, regardless of their meanings. Everything was about accent, pronunciation, performance; as if the entire language were a disguise, designed to make us blend in with everyone else.

The other girls called it romantic, but I thought it insincere. The Latin Dante spoke made his love for me feel ancient and timeless, as if it could never die. What I didn’t realize until later was that French had depth, too; the trick was to hear the words that weren’t spoken.

Our classroom was in the attic, where it was oppressively hot,
comme un état Vichy,
our professor joked, saying it would improve our throaty accents.

Madame Goût was a slender woman in her fifties who wore high heels and belted dresses. She had a gap between her front teeth and spoke with a thick French-Canadian accent. Her favorite word was “
Non,
” which she said in a definitive kind of way, to make sure we all knew when we were wrong.

“There are too many tenses and cases in Latin. It makes you think too much,” she said, gesticulating quickly. “There is no love in it, no emotion, no
joie de vivre!
With French, it just spills out.”

The heat rattled through the radiator, punctuating Madame Goût’s lecture. Next to me, Anya was taking notes, pushing her red braids aside when they got in the way of her pencil. As the professor wrote a list of pronouns on the board, I could hear Clementine whispering to two of her friends.

Madame Goût must have heard, too, because she put down the chalk and turned around, her heels rapping against the floor. “If you insist on whispering in my class, I would rather you share it with all of us.”

The sharp edges of Clementine’s shoulders shifted beneath her shirt as she faltered. She looked starched and pressed, her collared shirt crisp as an envelope.

“Well, speak up,” the professor said.

“We were talking about the Île des Soeurs. About the women who used to torture the Undead there.”

Madame Goût raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. “Torture? Who told you that?”

“Monsieur Orneaux.”

Madame Goût groaned. “Of course Monsieur Orneaux would say that. He is what we call
un homme pour les hommes.
A man’s man. Like most men, he is not interested in the endeavors of women,” she said, waving her hand in the air. “He does not know anything,” she muttered. “I have been telling them time and time again that he is not qualified to teach.”

The room fell into an uncomfortable silence.

“The truth is that women were the founders of our entire Monitoring society.” Madame Goût lowered her voice. “And the women you speak of are Les Neuf Soeurs, or the Nine Sisters.”

“Who were they?” Clementine asked.

Turning to the blackboard, she erased all of the pronouns scrawled across it. She then picked up a piece of chalk and wrote down the following names in a swirling cursive:

Gertrude Fine

Marie Champierre

Victoria Limon

Josephine Klein

Prudence Beaufort

Hester Olivier

Chrisette Longtemp

Alma Alphonse

“They were a secret society of female Monitors,” she said. “A sisterhood.” Smoothing out her skirt, Madame Goût went to the door and closed it. “It started in 1728 in Paris, as just a group of friends. Brilliant Monitors, young, incredibly smart, and all husbandless, which was very uncommon at the time. They called themselves Les Neuf Soeurs, after the nine muses in Greek mythology.”

“What did they do?” Anya asked.

“It is believed that they were behind most of the early Monitoring advances—Monitoring schools, hospitals, the convent on the Île des Soeurs. But most famously, they were the protectors of a secret.”

Everyone grew still, listening.

“A secret? What kind of secret?” Clementine asked.

Madame Goût clasped her hands together. “That’s where the facts end. The rest we can only guess at. The prevailing rumor is that they had discovered the secret to eternal life.”

My pencil slipped from my fingers and dropped to the floor. I felt Clementine’s eyes on me, watching my reaction. I tried to hide my surprise.

Madame Goût continued. “It has long been speculated that since children can defy death for twenty-one years, there might be a possibility that adults could defy death indefinitely. The myth of immortality has powerful allure.”

Immortality.
The word floated around my mind like a feather. This is it, I thought. This is the solution that Dante and I have been looking for.

“As the story goes, once Les Neuf Soeurs found the secret to eternal life, they decided they could never use it. They were frightened by the power they held. Eternal life is perverse, unnatural. A world without death is even more frightening than a world
with
death. The beauty, the magic, the
éphemérè…
it would all be lost. So before they died, the Soeurs supposedly made a pact to let their secret die with them.”

The room went so still I could hear the footsteps of the professor in the classroom across the hall as he paced.

“So that’s it?” Clementine said. “The secret is gone?”

The professor tapped her finger on the table. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the secret was never about immortality to begin with; maybe it was about a family heirloom or a dirty rumor. It all depends on what you want to believe.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, raising my voice over the sputtering heater. “If Les Neuf Soeurs was a secret society, then how do you know so much about them? Or is it all made up?”

Madame Goût raised an eyebrow, as if she had anticipated my question. “Oh, but it’s not. At first, no one knew anything about them.” She stood behind her chair and leaned on its back. “Until they died.”

“What do you mean?” Anya asked.

Madame Goût’s expression grew solemn. “They were killed. Each found murdered at home in France in 1732. That was how their identities were discovered.”

Madame Goût motioned to the list of names on the blackboard as a murmur rose over the class.

There was a long pause as we read the names on the board.

“There are only eight names here,” I said, breaking the silence. “Who was the ninth sister?”

“Ah, yes. The ninth sister. I told you that each of the Soeurs was killed at her home. Well, only eight bodies were found.”

“What happened to the ninth?” Clementine asked.

“No one knows. Some believe she died. Others believe that she used the secret and is still alive, guarding it from evil.”

Madame Goût paused. The hands on the clock above her crept toward noon.

“Who was she?” I asked.

“No one has been able to confirm her name or anything about her identity. Other than this.” Madame Goût’s heels clicked against the floor as she walked to her desk and removed a heavy book from the lower drawer. Flipping through it, she opened to a painting and passed the book around the table.

“This is the only painting we have of the Sisters. Many believe this was painted just days before their deaths. It is very famous; you will find it in all of the books about Les Neuf Soeurs.”

When it came to me, I traced my finger across each of the Soeurs, their black eyes boring through the page as they stood in a parlor, each wearing a plain housedress. They were of varying ages, some in their twenties, others not much older than me. On the far left was a girl with wild brown hair and narrow eyes. She looked the youngest. Half of her face was obscured in shadows. Perched on her arm was a yellow bird.

“The girl on the left,” Madame Goût said. “That is the ninth sister. The lost sister. Many Monitors searched for her, but all they knew was what half of her face looked like, from the portrait. But after years of nothing, everyone assumed her dead.”

“Who did it?” Anya asked. “Who murdered them?”

“I will leave that to Monsieur Orneaux to explain. I believe it’s his area of expertise. Latin is, after all, the language of the Undead.” Leaning over her book, she turned the page. “Now, back to
française.
”

“The Undead?” I said. “They were killed by the Undead?”

“Ah, ah, ah,” Madame Goût said, raising her index finger. “I never said that.”

“How come no one ever tried to look for the secret?” Clementine asked.

“Oh, but of course they have. It’s one of the most controversial stories in Monitoring history. Many Monitors have lost years of their lives searching for La Vie Éternel, or Life Eternal, as many of us call their secret. It is the Monitors’ version of the lost city of Atlantis. The Holy Grail. The fountain of youth.” Madame Goût shook her head. “And you’ve seen how many of those have turned out to be true.”

The class erupted in whispers.

“Quiet, please,” she said, rapping her knuckles on the table. “That’s enough
futilités
for today.”

As she continued her lecture on pronouns and gender, I thought back to the plane ride with Dustin, when I had blurted out the word
canary.
Could that have had something to do with the Nine Sisters?

That evening in the dining hall, I was pouring myself a glass of milk when a voice tickled my ear. Caught off guard, I nearly dropped the carton on the floor.

“You seemed awfully interested in the Nine Sisters today,” Clementine said over my shoulder. “What I’m wondering is why someone who supposedly already defied death is so intrigued by talk of the secret to immortality.”

“What do you want me to say? That I’m just a normal person and all the rumors are a lie?” I said, keeping my chin up as I walked to the condiments section.

Clementine followed me. “No. See, I don’t think you’re normal, either.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I said, and shrugged her off as I walked toward the table in the corner where Anya was sitting.

“I know you have a secret,” Clementine said as I left her behind. “And I’m going to find where you buried it and dig it up.”

When I got back to my room after dinner, it was so quiet I could hear footsteps coming down the hall, and then the sound of Clementine’s door unlocking. I was setting down my bag when a sudden cold breeze blew in from the windows. I ran to the other side of the room, hoping it was Dante, but of course it wasn’t. Clementine’s words crept into my head. If she ever found out about Dante…I didn’t even want to think about what would happen.

Closing the window, I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. While I was leaning on the sink, waiting for the water to get hot, I heard someone knock on Clementine’s door. I assumed it was some of her girlfriends, so it surprised me when I heard a boy’s voice.

“Noah,” Clementine said. Her voice sounded different. Soft. Sincere.

Noah? I thought. The same Noah who hit me with a bicycle, who had flirted with me? The Noah who had spilled a bouquet of daffodils all over the street. He had bought them for Clementine?

Pressing myself against the wall, I listened to him whispering to her, to her whispering back. To the sound of a bra strap snapping against skin. To Clementine giggling. To the silence when they kissed.

Closing my eyes, I imagined that it was me in there with Dante, but Noah’s voice kept drowning him out. And for reasons I couldn’t explain, I started crying.

I wasn’t jealous of Clementine; it wasn’t that. Or maybe it was. As I stepped into the shower, gripping the tile, I wished, just for a moment, that I could be her, that Dante could be Noah, and that when I went back to my room, he would be there waiting for me. But I knew I could never have that.

The shower curtain billowed as I reached over my shoulder and, with delicate fingers, touched the indentation on my back. The pain was shrill and shaky, like the high note of a soprano, but I held my finger steady until it calmed to a long, low ache. It was all I had left of him. And in five years, when he died, I wouldn’t even have this, unless I did something now to change my fate. As my hand slipped to my side, I hung my head back, letting the hot water cascade over my body until I couldn’t tell if I was crying anymore, and the bathroom was filled with so much steam that it was hard to breathe.

My room was cold when I shut the bathroom door behind me. Clutching my towel, I went to my desk and pulled my history book off the shelf. I flipped through it until I found the section on Les Neuf Soeurs. The painting Madame Goût had showed us in class stared back at me from the page. I studied the shadowy girl with the canary, wondering who she was and what had happened to her. But the text didn’t help. It only mentioned the few facts Madame Goût had already told us, and spent the rest of the chapter talking about their influence on Monitoring culture and society.