Life Eternal (28 page)

“We need to talk to you,” I said. “In private.”

Shutting the door, he rubbed his hands together in the cold. “Is everything all right?”

I nodded. “It’s about the Liberum.”

The smile faded from the headmaster’s face. “Excuse me?” he said, bending over us.

Down the path, Clementine watched us.

“We know where they are,” Noah said. “We saw them.”

The headmaster looked in either direction and then buttoned his coat. “Come with me,” he said.

Inside his office, he cleared stacks of paper from two chairs and motioned for us to sit. Then he settled himself behind his desk and crossed his hands. “Now tell me.”

“It started with a vision of a farmhouse,” I said, and told him about our trip, the nightmarish house, and what I’d overheard through the heating vent. Noah finished the rest of the story while I stared at the plants on the windowsill, trying to push the image of the boy in the basement out of my head.

“You’re certain the person you saw was a Brother of the Liberum?” the headmaster asked when we were finished.

I hesitated. “Not certain, but I heard him speak in Latin when he was talking to the children.”

“You knew this last night and you didn’t tell me?” he said, staring at me.

“We went to your office, but you weren’t there,” Noah said, not knowing what the headmaster was referring to.

“Did they see you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But most of them were blind,” Noah interjected.

The headmaster’s shoulders slumped in relief. “And they had no way of identifying you?”

“No,” Noah said, just as I blurted out, “Maybe.”

The headmaster glanced between us, his eyes wide as he waited for a clear answer. “Did they follow you here?”

I swallowed as he turned from Noah to me. Someone had broken into my room, and it hadn’t been Clementine. Could it have been the Brother of the Liberum? “Maybe.”

The headmaster’s face seemed to drain of its color. His eyes darted to the window, and without warning, he stood up and closed the shades. “Then you need to prepare yourselves.”

But how?

I skipped the rest of my classes that day and ran to the waterfront, the wind chapping my cheeks as I slowed and stared at the icy waters of the St. Lawrence River. Across the water on the opposite bank, the rounded peaks of the grain silos stuck out of the snowy gust like mountaintops. I walked toward them, my feet making fresh footprints in the snow as I approached the railing.

The wind swirled through, making my eyes water as I leaned over and spoke to Dante. “If I don’t see you again,” I said, swallowing, “I wanted to say good-bye.”

“Bye, bye, bye, bye…”
The sound sent a chill through my bones as it echoed back to me.

Wiping my cheek, I was about to turn away when I noticed a message scratched into the metal of the handrail among the rest of the graffiti. Except this one was written in Latin.
I’ll come for you,
it said, as if he had heard me and spoken back.

“Being on the defensive isn’t enough,” I said to Anya over dinner late that week. Four guards were manning the doors of the dining hall; otherwise, everything seemed to carry on as normal. No one else knew about the threat of the Liberum.

“Are you suggesting we go out and find the Liberum before they find you? Because I don’t want to do that.” Anya slid down in her chair, sipping a glass of milk. Noah was nowhere to be seen. He had barely said a word to me after our meeting with the headmaster, and after classes he had just disappeared.

I lowered my voice. “Of course not. The Liberum are looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters. The last part of the riddle—that’s what they really want, right? But we can’t let them have it. You should have seen what he was like….” I said, remembering the dark figure, his body thin and somehow sunken.

The table behind us erupted in laughter. Probably from some stupid joke.

“We need to find the riddle,” I said. “We need to find it before they do.”

Anya glanced over her shoulder. “But how?”

I chewed on my straw. “I don’t know.”

And then from somewhere behind me, I heard one of Clementine’s friends say, “Gottfried should be shut down. It’s just breeding the Undead.”

“That place is cursed,” another girl said.

“Gottfried,” I repeated. “Curse.”

The Gottfried Curse. I had almost forgotten about it. Pushing my plate aside, I turned to Anya, my face flushed. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” she said.

“I have to go.” I stood up.

“Wait!” she called after me. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll tell you later.” And I was gone.

Back in my room, I rummaged under my bed until I found the book I’d bought last year on Grub Day, our school outing to the town of Attica Falls. Its binding was a worn cream, with the title
Attica Falls.
I wiped it off with my hand, sneezing from the dust. I flipped through it until I found the article called “The Gottfried Curse,” the same one I’d read last year.

I skimmed the pages.
Since its founding in 1735, Gottfried Academy has been plagued by a horrific and unexplainable chain of tragedies, including disease, natural catastrophe, and a string of accidents of the most perverse and bizarre nature.…

I flipped ahead, scanning the paragraphs about how Gottfried was founded first as a hospital for the Undead, until the head doctor, Bertrand Gottfried, died, and the school closed its doors. That’s when I found what I was looking for.

Yet, just as suddenly as the hospital closed, it reopened. This time, as a school. The head nurse at the time, Ophelia Hart, ascended as the first headmistress. She named it “Gottfried Academy,” after its founder.

Ophelia Hart. Or Ophelia Coeur? Coeur meant “heart” in French. Could they have been the same person? This was where I’d recognized her from. Ophelia Hart was the first headmistress of Gottfried Academy. She was the nurse who had turned it into a school, and who seemed to preside over it while all of the strange tragedies were occurring. And then in 1789, the tragedies mysteriously stopped. I flipped ahead, trying to figure out if they had anything to do with Ophelia Hart leaving the school, but there was no other information.

I leaned back on the carpet, deep in thought. Ophelia could have changed her name to “Coeur” to keep her real identity a secret. But it was easy to see through. Why didn’t any of the books about her scientific work mention it? Why hadn’t Noah’s father, a celebrated historian, considered that Ophelia Coeur could have been the first headmistress of Gottfried? The names seemed far too similar to be coincidental. He hadn’t even mentioned anything about that.

And then I realized: the Ophelia that Noah’s father had told us about had done all of her water research in the early 1900s.

The Ophelia on the page in front of me, the one who was the first headmistress of Gottfried, had been alive in the mid-1700s, which was right around the time when the Nine Sisters had been killed.

It seemed impossible that there were two Ophelias in the Monitoring world, and each with a variation of “heart” as a last name. But did that then mean that these two Ophelia Harts—one a nurse in the 1700s, the other a nurse and scientist in the early 1900s—were the same person?

We were right, I thought, piecing it all together. Ophelia was the ninth sister. That was the only explanation for how a woman could stay alive for two hundred years, maybe more. She
had
used the secret of the Nine Sisters to become immortal.

“It’s true,” I said out loud, even though there was no one else in the room to hear me. I stared at her name in the book, unable to believe that I had finished what my parents had started, that I had actually found her. I was one step closer to discovering eternal life, the secret that everyone had been searching for. But as I traced the
O
of her name, my excitement faded to fear, and I realized that I now had exactly what the Liberum wanted, and that soon I would have to face them. Life
and
death, Zinya had predicted. I was one step closer to that, too.

S
HUTTING THE BOOK
, I
THREW IT IN MY BAG AND
went to the closet to get my mother’s shovel, not sure where I was planning on going, just that now I knew I had to take protection with me everywhere I went. The only person I wanted to tell was Dante, but the mere reminder that even after everything I was somehow still in love with him, made my chest ache. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I let him go?

I was about to shut the closet door, when I realized something was wrong. I hadn’t noticed it the night I’d confronted Clementine and her father, but now a wave of unease overcame me. I pushed through the mess of hangers, throwing shoes and clothes out onto the floor until I had a clear view of the back. The long rectangular case was there, but the shovel I kept inside it was gone.

But how? Hoping I was somehow mistaken, I pulled out the case and checked behind it, but found nothing. All the while, my own words echoed in my head. “Just don’t let them see your shovel,” I’d told Noah in the farmhouse. Could the Undead have followed me here, to my own room, and stolen my shovel? Feeling faint, I glanced at the window, and then at the door, wishing there was a lock on it, when I realized that there was a far simpler explanation.

Furious, I stormed through the bathroom and burst into Clementine’s room. She had just gotten back from dinner and was chatting with two of her friends by the door.

“Did you take it?” I demanded. “Did you go through my room?”

Clementine turned to me. “Take what? What are you talking about?”

“My shovel. It’s gone. Where is it?”

And barging toward her closet, I flung open the doors. Clementine yelled at me to stop, but I didn’t care. I pushed her clothes aside and fumbled through her shoes and bags, but nothing was there.

“It’s here somewhere. I know it is,” I said. Ignoring her protests, I checked behind the door, beneath her bed, beside her bureau. All I found was her shovel, which was made of a dark metal and smooth, oiled wood.

“I didn’t take your shovel,” she said firmly. “And I didn’t go through your room before, either.”

“Then who took it?” I demanded. “You’ve already gone through my things. You waited in my room for me when I wasn’t there. It was you. I know it was you.”

Clementine hesitated. “It wasn’t me.”

Before I could stop myself, I grabbed her slender wrist and dragged her into my room. “Then why is the case empty?”

She squirmed out of my grasp and parted her lips to respond, when her face gathered in a wince. “What is that smell?”

I shook my head. “What? What are you talking about?”

She covered her nose with her hand. “How can you not smell that?”

“You’re trying to distract me,” I said.

“I’m not!” Clementine insisted, and stepped back into the bathroom. “It smells like something rotting.”

I must have looked confused, because she pointed to the radiator below my window. “It’s coming from over there.”

I glanced at her once more to make sure she was telling the truth, and bent down. I sniffed at the air, trying to smell what she did, but my senses were so dull that I could only detect a vague stale odor, like something left in the fridge for too long.

Slowly, I reached beneath the vents and patted the floorboards until my hand met something soft and wrinkled. With a gasp, I pulled back my arm.

“What is it?” Clementine said from the door.

“I don’t know,” I said, my lips trembling as I crouched low to see what it was. Something knotted and white.

Clementine picked up an umbrella that I had thrown from the closet. “Use this,” she said.

Taking the umbrella from her, I stuck its curved handle beneath the radiator and pulled the thing out. It was a thick, gnarled root, like a carrot, except it was white and rotten. I touched it with the tip of the shovel. It was soft and shriveled from age, the bottom side brown and blistered from sitting on the floor in one position.

“I think it’s some sort of vegetable,” I said.

“Why is it here?” Clementine demanded.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what it is. Someone must have put it here.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

If it hadn’t been Clementine, then who could it have been? There was no one else who would have wanted to come in my room. Except…the Liberum, I thought.

I ran down the hall to Anya’s door, carrying the root by its tip. If anyone would know what it was, it was her. But just as I raised my hand to knock, the door opened.

“Renée!” Anya said with a gasp. “I was just about to go to your room,” she said. “Why did you run away like that?”

The white root went flaccid when I held it up, pinching it by its wiry tip. “I found this in my room, beneath the window. Do you know what it is?”

She froze when she saw it. “It’s a parsnip,” she said slowly, gazing at its wrinkled skin.

“Why would someone put it in my room?”

She hesitated, as if she knew something but didn’t want to say it.

“Tell me!” I said, exasperated.

“A white root that rises from beneath the earth. It’s a symbol for the Undead.”

“What?” I said, my mind racing. Did that mean that the Undead had entered my room and left it there? Had they taken my shovel, too, to disarm me? “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would they take my shovel and leave this here to announce themselves, when they could have just attacked me? Why wait?”

Anya sniffed the root and winced.

“Do you think they were waiting for me to find the identity of the ninth sister so that if they take my soul they’ll have more information?”

“That would be stupid,” Anya said. “We might never find her.”

“That’s not completely true.”

Anya squinted at me, reading my expression. “Wait. Did you find her?”

We retreated to my room, where I showed her the article about the Gottfried Curse. “This proves that there was a Monitor named Ophelia Hart alive in the 1700s. And according to Noah’s dad, there was another Monitor named Ophelia Coeur who was alive in the 1900s.
Coeur
means ‘heart’ in French. It has to be a pseudonym. It’s too strange to be a coincidence—they have to be the same person.”

“But that means she would have been alive for over two hundred years. That’s impossible.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Unless you’re the ninth sister, and have the secret to immortality. It was her all along,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“I thought we already crossed her off,” Anya said slowly, the pages of the book fanning open as she loosened her grip. “The ninth sister died. That’s why she hid the secret. You went to her headstone.”

“Maybe she never died.”

Anya frowned. “Then why would she have a headstone?”

“I don’t know, but everything else matches up. She was alive in the early 1700s, during the time of the Nine Sisters. She was incredibly smart, had ties to the Royal Victoria, and to salt water, from her later research in water and lakes. It fits, it all fits.”

I watched Anya work it all out in her head. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wide with wonder. “It could be. So now what?”

“We figure out where she would have hidden the first part of the riddle.”

“How?”

“She probably hid it in a place that was important to her, right? So all we need to do is find out more about Ophelia’s life.”

“But how?” Anya said, exasperated. “She could
still
be alive. Where do we even start?”

My mind skipped back to the last time I’d heard about Ophelia Hart. “Noah.”

We ran outside, through the snowy campus toward the boys’ dormitory. Asking one of the boys on the stoop which room was Noah’s, we raced upstairs, winding through the maze of hallways that were arranged exactly as ours were, except the wallpaper was brown. When we reached his door, I smoothed out my hair and took a breath before knocking.

“Renée?” Noah said, adjusting his glasses as his tall body filled the doorway. “I—I’m sort of busy right now—”

“I know you probably don’t want to see me right now,” I cut in. “I don’t blame you. But we found her,” I whispered. “We found the ninth sister. And we need your help.”

Noah went rigid as he took in what I had just said. And glancing over my shoulder at Anya, he pushed his door open. “Come in.”

And just like that, we became friends again.

Noah’s father had an office in the history building at the university. “There’s an entire library of archives in the basement; I go down there with my dad when I help him do research. They have stuff going all the way back to the founding of Montreal.”

So the three of us piled into a taxi and set off. I turned around and stared out the rear window as we wound through the city, my eyes glued to the sidewalks, searching for any sign of the Undead. Even though the streets were empty and motionless, something about the pressure of the air made me nervous.

The university campus was white and slushy as we ran through it, the quadrangles peppered with statues sculpted out of a dark bronze.

“Do you feel that?” I said, slowing to a jog as a prickling sensation climbed up my legs, as though a cool wisp had wrapped itself around me.

“It was probably just the specimens in the biology lab,” Noah said, glancing at the building to our right. “Come on.”

But it wasn’t just the biology lab. It was a familiar feeling; the kind of chill that made the air seem thinner, staler, as if it were rearranging itself into a path.

“Come on,” Noah said. “We’re almost there.”

But just as I started walking, I saw a flash of white. And then again.

“There,” I said, pointing to the thicket of trees. “They were right there.”

If Anya and Noah heard me, they didn’t let on.

I slowed, letting them walk ahead, and quietly, I approached the statue. “Dante?” I whispered, hoping it was him I had felt, though the cold, odorless air told me it wasn’t. I blinked into the night.

Someone laughed behind me; a child. I whipped around, but no one was there.

“Renée?” Noah shouted from up the path.

Before I could respond, two boys, short and pale, emerged from the trees, their faces round and chubby. They ran toward me from either side, their bodies so light they didn’t even sink into the snow. “No,” I whispered, but the words never left my mouth. And then they were touching me, grabbing at my legs, my skirt, my coat.

Jerking around, I flung them off, the shadows parted, and a thin figure stepped through the air, his face a streak of white against the sky. My breath got caught in my lungs as I fell backward, staring at his limbs, long and stiff like a scarecrow’s.

I tried to stand up, but the two boys were grasping at my arms, pressing me deeper into the snow. But as I struggled, my fingers digging into the ice, all I could think of was Dante; of how I wished I could see him one last time.

And then I heard a girl’s voice whisper in Latin. It was so soft, I could barely hear it, but slowly, the Undead around me seemed to become calm, their grips weakening until they slinked back, retreating into the shadows.

“Go,” she said to me, in a voice I recognized.

“Anya?” I whispered, as she pulled me up.

“Go!”

Before I knew it, I was running, Noah by my side.

“What about Anya?” I said, looking wildly behind me, but Noah pulled me on.

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s taking care of it.” Grabbing my wrist, he led me off the campus to the street, where he hailed a taxi. It screeched to the curb.

“We can’t just leave her,” I said, but Noah took my hand and pulled me in, slamming the door behind us.

“Drive,” Noah said over the front seat.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “Anya is back there, alone.”

“She’s fine.”

“How do you know?” I said, incredulous. “Haven’t you seen her in class? She can’t take them on her own.”

“She can,” Noah said firmly. “She’s a Whisperer. A rare kind of Monitor. One that can speak to the Undead; persuade them, manipulate them.”

“What?” I said, confused.

“Didn’t you hear her just now? She was speaking to them. She has it under control. They’re looking for you, anyway, not her. We can lead them away from her. So focus. Where should we go?”

I glanced out the rear window at the pale children in the distance. “Île des Soeurs,” I blurted out, before I realized what I was saying. The taxi slowed, and with a jolt, we made a sharp right turn.

As we wound through the Montreal streets, I wiped the water and dirt from my face and caught my breath. Every so often I glanced through the rearview mirror, expecting to see flashes of white trailing behind us, but the streets were empty. I don’t know why I had an impulse to go to the Île des Soeurs. Maybe it was because the convent on the island was the one place the Undead feared, though I hadn’t thought of that till after. No, it was a feeling I had, a feeling I hoped I could trust.

We drove until we reached a long bridge leading over the St. Lawrence River. On the other side was a tiny island pinpricked with trees.

“Can you drop us at the convent?” I said to the driver. He nodded beneath his cap.

Île des Soeurs was a small island with neat rows of houses, the glow of televisions flickering through the windows. Driving through the streets, I felt somehow calmed, as if everything here were visible. The driver parked in front of a gated building that looked like a junkyard. The sidewalk was covered with loose trash and scraps.