"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 h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s. 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, Renee."
"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 NOAH AFTER THAT. OR 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 cla.s.s, 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.
"Renee?" 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 cla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses. "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 cla.s.s. I had even shunned one of the only people at St. Clement that I enjoyed being around: Noah.
"Renee?" he prodded. "Are you okay?"
Catching my scarf as it fluttered around my face, I said, "Anya and I are going to a cafe to study. Do you want to come?"
His face softened in relief. "Sure."
We went to a cafe 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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."
"Renee?" 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 gla.s.s 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: THE DEATH OF CHILDREN.
Interviews by F. H. Newhaus October 1998 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 cla.s.sroom. 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 cla.s.s. 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."