Life Eternal (21 page)

“Sure,” I said, trying to compose myself.

Grasping the arms of his chair, Luc hoisted himself up and disappeared into another room, returning with a large envelope.

“Are you okay?” Noah whispered.

I picked at my cheese. Why hadn’t he said anything when his mother talked about the Undead like that? Did he agree with her? “I’m fine.”

Noah’s father pushed the plates out of the way, slid a portrait out of the envelope, and placed it on the tablecloth in front of us. It was a faded black-and-white sketch from the shoulders up, its lines dulled from age.

A woman stared back at us, her eyes wide and black. Or
was
it a woman? It was a hard to tell. She looked more like a creature: an anomaly of nature, beautiful in her deformity. Scalloped white welts climbed up her cheeks, layering themselves on top of each other in an odd, sloping pattern, like the feathers of a bird. Her expression was grim and focused, as if she were studying me. Her lips were pursed, somehow giving me the impression that she knew something I didn’t.

“This was drawn after her first scientific publication. She must have been in her thirties or forties.”

She looked much younger than that, I thought, though it was difficult to guess her age. “She’s…terrifying,” I said in awe.

“
Oui,
” Noah’s mother said, resting her head on two fingers. “
C’est incroyable.
”

“They look like waves, no?” Luc said, touching her scars with his fingers. “I think this will be the cover of my book.”

“What will you call it?” I asked. “Your biography.”

“
Mal de Mer.
”

Seasickness.

Before we left, Noah ran upstairs to collect a few clean shirts for school. Halfway up, he peered down at me through the balcony railing. “Well, come on.”

On the walls lining the stairway were photographs of Noah and his sister growing up. A five-year-old Noah standing in front of St. Clément in an oversized shirt and tie, as if he were already preparing to attend. A ten-year-old Noah posing in front of a cemetery with his sister. A somber thirteen-year-old Noah holding a shovel beside a small plot in the backyard. “That was my first pet,” Noah said, suddenly standing behind me. I thought I felt him touch a lock of my hair, but I must have imagined it, because in no time he was on the second floor, leading me down the wallpapered hallway that led to his bedroom.

“Do you think Ophelia Coeur was the ninth sister?” I asked when we were out of earshot.

“She worked at the Royal Victoria—” he said.

“She could have put the riddle in one of the rooms she worked in,” I said excitedly. “And Lake Erie—that’s where Miss LaBarge was found dead. Maybe she knew about the riddle,” I said, thinking of the letter my mother had written to her about “the lost girl.” “Maybe the last part of the riddle is hidden on Little Sister Island, and Miss LaBarge was going there to check on it.”

When I finished I was breathless, brimming with the possibility of our discovery.

Noah’s eyes were wide as he studied me. “There is one problem, though.”

My smiled faded. “What?”

“The dates. My father said she began her career as a nurse in the 1890s. The Nine Sisters were killed in the 1730s. That’s more than a hundred years off.”

“What if…” I paused, thinking. “What if she used the secret and is immortal?”

After pondering the possibility for a moment, Noah shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. She had to have died. Otherwise, why would she have put part of the riddle on a headstone?”

He had a point. Before I could respond, his mother’s voice echoed from downstairs. “Noah? Can you help me sort your laundry?”

“
Un moment
!” he said, and turned the knob to his room.

When I stepped into his room, I immediately felt younger. It was filled with primary colors. Faded posters of rock bands were taped to the walls, handfuls of wrinkled ties were draped over the bedposts, and a dozen plastic figurines of Mexican wrestlers lined his nightstand. Noah tried to hide his embarrassment as I gazed around the room.

Turning away from the stacks of CDs and comic books on his desk, I smiled. “I like it.”

While Noah rummaged through his closet, I sat on his bed playing with a telescope that pointed out one of the windows, and tried to figure out what made his room so different from Dante’s. It wasn’t just an excess of things.…This room had had a childhood. I couldn’t even imagine what Dante was like as a child. He had never told me about it.

“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” I asked him. “When your mom was talking about the Undead?”

Noah shrugged. “I come from an old Monitoring family. They’re my parents; they’re always going to think like that. It’s not worth trying to change their minds.”

“So you don’t agree with them…?”

“I think the Undead have their reasons to do what they do. But we’re Monitors. And we have to do what we do, too,” he said, emerging from the closet with a handful of shirts on hangers.

I sat up straight. “Which is to kill them?”

“Which is to
Monitor
them, and bury them if they seem harmful,” he said, pushing his hair away from his forehead. “Why bother asking me questions if you don’t want to listen to my answers? I’m not a villain.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s okay,” he said, stuffing his shirts into a bag.

I picked up one of the plastic figurines. “I wish we had known each other when we were kids,” I said, sitting on his twin bed, which was so small that I was certain Noah’s feet hung off the end when he slept in it. Noah was easy to know. He had a breezy life; he got what he wanted and was good at most things he put effort into. “I bet you were fun.”

“I was the same,” he said. “I would have liked you.”

Tracing the stitches of his comforter, I allowed myself to wonder for a brief moment what would have happened if I had met Noah one year earlier. The only reason I was looking for the ninth sister was because of Dante. Because I
needed
to find her, not because I wanted to live forever, or go on some sort of mythic quest. But without that, would Noah and I have even been friends? What was there between us except this mystery and the intrigue that goes with discovering something no one else has ever found before? Of course he thought I was exciting. The problem was, I knew the Renée he liked wasn’t really me. “Maybe in a different life,” I said.

When I got back to the dorm I flipped on the light and sat down on my bed, feeling more lost than I had in a long time. My coat still felt warm on the side where Noah had leaned against me on the metro ride home.

“How did you do it?” a voice behind me said.

I nearly fell off the bed.

Clementine let out a spiteful laugh. She was sitting at my desk, her slender legs folded into the chair like the limbs of a doe.

“What are you doing in my room?” I asked, catching my breath.

She leaned forward, her face stern again. “I want to know how you did it.” The utter calmness of her voice was disquieting.

“You can’t just come in here,” I said.

“Don’t treat me like I’m stupid,” she snapped. “I know where you were tonight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how you stole my boyfriend. How you stole first rank from me. How you survived a kiss from an Undead.”

“I didn’t steal anything from you. I earned first rank. And Noah and I are just friends.”

“Then what the hell is this?” she shouted, holding up the blazer Noah had lent me the night after we saw Miss LaBarge. I kept forgetting to give it back to him.

“Did you go through my closet?”

She gave me a steady look. “I’ve been watching you in class. You’re not that smart, and you don’t act like an immortal. You’re always so cautious, so
scared.
But why would an immortal be scared?” she asked. “Unless, of course, you’re scared because you know you’re just like the rest of us.”

“Why do you care?” I said.

She didn’t even bother to dignify my question with a response. Instead, she picked up a stack of pictures from my dresser. “Who were you with in the cemetery that night? You were with an Undead. I could sense him. I could hear his voice.” When I didn’t answer, her face contorted with anger. “Who was he?”

“There was no one there except for me.”

Calming down, she raised an eyebrow. “I bet he wouldn’t be so happy knowing that you had dinner with Noah’s parents. I bet he wouldn’t be so happy if I told my father that you were meeting up with an Undead at night.”

“What do you want?” I said. “What are you trying to gain by going through my things? By threatening me and accusing me of doing things you have no proof of?”

“I want you gone. I want you out of my life.” She met my gaze and then glanced down at my photographs.

Enough, I thought. I stood up and tried to grab them from her, but she held the pictures out of reach.

“Oh, are these your parents? What happened to them, again?”

I wanted to scream at her; to rip the barrettes out of her hair, lock her in the bathroom, and make her listen while I invited Noah over and kissed him on the other side of the door. I wanted her to know what it felt like to lose everyone she loved.

I heard the slap before I realized what I had done. Pulling my arm back, I watched as Clementine pressed herself against the wall, holding her cheek.

“Get out of my room,” I said softly, and opened the bathroom door.

“I’m going to find out who you were with that night in the cemetery, Renée.”

“Get out,” I repeated.

“I’m going to find him, and I’m going to bury him.” With that, she finally left.

I
STAYED AWAY FROM
N
OAH AFTER THAT
. O
R AT
least I tried to. November hardened to a colorless December, the city gray and lifeless like stone. When I felt Noah staring at me in class, I forced myself to look the other way. When he caught up with me in the hallway after the bell had rang, I brushed him off, saying I had to meet with a professor or do a group project. I knew I was hurting him from the way his face dropped, from the way his eyes searched mine for some kind of explanation, as if he had done something wrong. What else could I do? Clementine’s words haunted me, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she found out about Dante. But keeping my distance from Noah was harder than I thought, as I discovered in Strategy and Prediction.

“Renée?” the headmaster said, interrupting his demonstration on mummification and the art of wrapping a body with gauze. “You’re unusually quiet today.” We were standing in a frosted meadow a few miles outside of Montreal.

“Oh, um, I’m just not feeling well.”

I glanced over at Noah, who was studying me as if he were trying to figure out what I was thinking. Snow swirled around my feet as I sent him a silent apology and averted my eyes.

After class ended I sat in the back of the van with Anya, where we quizzed each other on our French vocabulary while the headmaster drove us back to campus. We were walking back to the dormitory when Noah called out to me across the courtyard.

I pretended I didn’t hear him, and picked up the pace.

“You’re not even going to stop?” Anya asked.

I shook my head and made for the dormitory doors, but he caught up with me and grabbed my arm.

“I don’t understand. Why are you ignoring me?”

Letting the door go, I stepped back and glanced around the courtyard to make sure Clementine wasn’t around. “There are other people you should be chasing after,” I said quietly. Anya was standing awkwardly by the stoop, pretending not to listen.

His shoulders collapsed a little.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said finally, his eyes a watery brown through his glasses. “I just want to be around you. Why does it have to be more complicated than that?”

A few girls walked by, staring at us and whispering. I wondered if they were going to tell Clementine that Noah was talking to me.

“Because life is complicated. If people see us together, they’ll think things that aren’t true.”

“Since when do you care what other people think?” Noah took off his hat, his hair a matted mess beneath it. “You know me. You know the truth. That’s all that matters.”

Beside us, the fountain was coated in a glossy layer of ice. A year ago I might have thought it was beautiful, like melted bronze against the afternoon sun, but now it was nothing but water and stone. I had spent the last months waiting for Dante, barely paying attention in class. I had even shunned one of the only people at St. Clément that I enjoyed being around: Noah.

“Renée?” he prodded. “Are you okay?”

Catching my scarf as it fluttered around my face, I said, “Anya and I are going to a café to study. Do you want to come?”

His face softened in relief. “Sure.”

We went to a café just a few blocks from school. Anya wiped her boots on the mat outside. While Noah held the door for me, a gust of wind, harsh and biting, blew between the buildings and took my scarf with it.

I grabbed at the air, watching my scarf swirl away and catch on the boxy shelter of a bus stop. I chased after it and pulled it down from where it hung on a wall of thick translucent glass. My reflection mimicked me as I wrapped the scarf around my neck. But when I adjusted my hat, the reflection didn’t move.

I held my hand up to the glass and stepped closer until my nose grazed its icy surface. There was a person on the other side, his face like mine but ashen. His hair was pulled back in a knot.

“Dante?”

I took a step back in surprise and darted around the glass wall, dragging my fingers across the siding. But when I got to the other side, the only person there was an older man, tall and wrinkled, his gray hair gathered into a ponytail. He winked when he saw me staring.

“Oh—I’m—I’m sorry.”

“Renée?” Noah called from down the street, his voice distorted by the wind.

Holding my hat down with one hand, I ran back to the coffee shop.

Streams of Christmas lights decorated the front window. I stepped inside, welcomed by a line of long glass counter-tops filled with cakes and pastries coated in frosting.

We were supposed to be studying for our history exam, but quickly abandoned the task to discuss Ophelia Coeur and the last part of the riddle. In the process, we devoured an entire plate of Hungarian cookies, dusting our books with crumbs and confectioner’s sugar.

“But the dates don’t match with Ophelia Coeur. So if she isn’t the ninth sister, then who is?” I said.

Noah stirred his coffee. “I don’t know. There are so many things that match with her. The scars on her face would have let her go unrecognized when everyone was looking for her. The research on water, specifically islands and salt water…” He shook his head.

“I know,” I said, tapping my fingers on the table.

Anya slid her finger through the excess sugar on the plate and licked it. “Well, it wasn’t
that
certain. The girl in the portrait is practically unrecognizable anyway, so the burned face doesn’t really matter. And how many nurses were at the Royal Victoria Hospital? So many.”

Noah leaned back in his chair. “True,” he said, taking a sip of coffee.

Anya continued. “I’ll admit that the Lake Erie connection is weird, but that’s just one fact that fits. The rest don’t necessarily mean anything.”

“So now what?” I asked.

Anya tried to cover her nose as she sneezed, but was too late, and blew confectioner’s sugar across the table.

“We’ll keep looking,” Noah said, offering her his napkin. “We’ll find the last part of the riddle.”

“But how?”

Noah shrugged. “Maybe you’ll have another vision?”

I rested my head on my palm. “I don’t know. It’s been months since my last vision. They might have stopped.”

“Or maybe it will come when you least expect it,” Anya said. “Isn’t that how it works?”

• • •

Later that week, when Dr. Newhaus walked into Psychology, he said nothing. He merely glanced at the clock above the door, turned off the lights, and made his way to the back of the room. There, he flipped a switch. A projector cast a square of white light onto the screen in front of us. After a few moments, the following words came onto the screen, the film yellow and grainy:

In the middle of the frame, a hand held up a small white board with
SUBJECT 003
written on it. When it dropped, we were looking at a classroom. All of the desks were empty, save for one in the front, where a boy was sitting, playing with a collection of rubber bands strung on his wrist.

Someone offscreen coughed. “How old are you?” Dr. Newhaus’s voice resonated from behind the camera.

The boy remained still, as if he hadn’t heard the question. Dr. Newhaus repeated himself, his voice slightly sharper.

“I don’t remember,” the boy said, fidgeting with his shirt. A map of the world was tacked to the wall behind him.

“Are you seven?” Dr. Newhaus asked. The boy made no reply. “Are you seven years old?”

The boy shook his head. “Much older.”

“Why did you try to run away last week?” Dr. Newhaus asked.

“I don’t like it here.”

“At this school?”

The boy shook his head.

“You don’t like it where?”

“I don’t feel right,” the boy said.

“Can I ask you to look at the camera when you answer?”

The boy looked up for the first time, staring at something just left of the camera. A murmur floated through our class. The boy’s face was hollow and aged, his eyes heavy, as if he were an older person stuck in a young body.

“What did you do yesterday?”

The boy didn’t answer.

Dr. Newhaus repeated himself. “What did you do?”

“I took someone’s soul.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Whose soul did you take?”

“My brother’s.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

The boy hesitated, biting his finger.

Dr. Newhaus repeated his question.

“Because he wouldn’t tell me where he hid my toy truck.”

“But why would you kill him over that?”

“Because I wanted to know.” The boy said it as if it should have been obvious.

“Why not just ask him?” Dr. Newhaus asked.

“I did, and he didn’t tell me. So I found out myself instead.”

After a moment of focusing on him, the film cut out. A hand held up a sign that read:
SUBJECT 005
.

Back in the same classroom sat a small boy. He was younger than the previous subject, no more than six years old. He was cross-legged on the floor, his hair a mop, his face covered in freckles. His eyes were growing hazy around the edges, just like Dante’s.

“How old are you?” Dr. Newhaus asked.

The boy thought about it, sucking on his finger. “Twenty,” he said finally, his voice boisterous.

“I see. That’s quite old for such a small person.”

The boy didn’t answer.

“How many years have you been in school?”

The boy thought. “Ten.”

“Can you tell me why it’s bad to kiss people on the mouth?”

The boy looked at him as if he were confused.

“Is it bad to take someone else’s soul?”

The boy didn’t seem to register the question. “I’m hungry,” he said instead.

“I don’t think I have any food here except for a few butter biscuits. Would you like one of those?”

The boy hesitated. Without warning, he sprang up toward the camera, his limbs thrashing as he leapt toward Dr. Newhaus. Someone screamed. The camera trembled and then fell to the ground, focusing on the legs of a chair. Loud voices. A chair scuffing against the floor, and then an abrupt crash.

Two pairs of legs swathed in stockings crossed the frame. And then someone—presumably Dr. Newhaus—picked up the camera and steadied it, focusing on two nurses who were restraining the boy in the chair, while he kicked at them. They held him until he calmed, and remained by his side when silence resumed.

After a long pause, Dr. Newhaus said, “Why did you do that?”

The boy remained still.

“Why did you do that?”

His eyes darted quickly to the left.

“Look at me,” Dr. Newhaus said, his voice sharp.

Before Dr. Newhaus could ask him another question, the boy kicked out of his seat, pushing the chair over as he lashed out at the nurse to the left. Setting the camera down, Dr. Newhaus jumped into the screen and pinned the boy to the floor.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Dr. Newhaus said, only his legs visible as he threw his suit coat on the floor and bent over the boy. “Let’s get him back to his room.”

The clip ended, and a hand held up another sign: subject 067. A girl sat in front of us. She was prim and obedient-looking, like an elder sister. She sat on the edge of her seat with her knees together.

She gazed out the window, focusing on something far in the distance. “I still can’t believe that I did it.”

“What did you do?” asked Dr. Newhaus.

“I did what they asked me to do.”

“Which is what?”

“I killed someone.”

There was a long pause.

“Whom did you kill?”

“I killed a boy, a small boy.”

“How did you do it?”

“I followed him, and then I captured him, and then I buried him.” She blinked.

“Does what you did bother you?”

“Monitoring is my job,” she said.

“But does it bother you?”

“I’ve been training to be a Monitor for my entire life. This is what I’m supposed to do.”

“What are you looking at?” Dr. Newhaus asked, his voice gentle.

She looked at her knees, where her hands were clasped in a tight knot. “I’m not looking at anything.”

“Could I ask you to look at the camera?”

“I’d rather not.”

The film cut out again. We watched several more, the change of light in between each new subject making me wince. In the shadows I could see the whites of Noah’s eyes as they traveled over me. I met his gaze. For the briefest moment, he held it, and then looked away, the projector humming behind us until the film turned white. Dr. Newhaus’s voice boomed out from the darkness as if he were still offscreen. “I showed you this because you have to understand what you’re being asked to do. You have to understand who you are.

“What can we glean from these interviews?” he asked, turning on the lights.

“Why were their eyes like that?” Brett asked. “I’ve met Undead before and they weren’t like that.”

Dr. Newhaus rewound the projector to the second Undead boy, paused it, and approached the screen. “You mean this?” he said, pointing to his irises, which had just begun to blur into the whites of his eyes. Just like Dante’s. “As the Undead age, they decay and lose their senses. In other words, he is going blind.”