Life Eternal (8 page)

“Apparently she had some sort of seizure in class today,” she was saying, popping her gum as if to punctuate her sentence. “I heard from one of the fourth-years that she wasn’t even that good of a Monitor at Gottfried,” she added, turning to April and Allison and three other girls who had lived down the hall from me last year.

I hid behind a column and watched them. “She was good,” April said, looking to her sister for approval.

“Well, she wasn’t
that
good,” Allison corrected. She was only distinguishable from her sister by the mole on her chin and her haughty tone. “She just made a big show whenever she found a dead animal. I bet in reality she was only a little bit above average.” The other girls nodded in agreement.

“So how did she do it?” Clementine asked, her voice calm. “How did she survive the kiss of an Undead?”

I leaned closer, trying to hear Allison’s response, when her eyes met mine. Her face dropped and everyone turned.

Swallowing, I raised my chin and pushed through them, using all my courage to act like I didn’t care. I was almost at the doors when Clementine slipped off the ledge, her legs bare and smooth beneath her wool skirt. “So are you going to answer my question? Or are you keeping it a secret because you know you’re a fraud?”

A fraud? Her words tripped me midstep. Maybe they stung so much because somewhere inside me I agreed with her—I didn’t know how I had gotten first rank, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. All I knew was that it was real—it was all real, and it was separating me from the person I loved the most—Dante. Slowing, I turned around. “Or maybe the truth is too painful to relive,” I said. “But of course you wouldn’t think of that because all you care about is your own ego.”

A hush fell over the girls as Clementine struggled to respond, but I was already through the doors and up the stairs to my room. Opening my dresser, I rummaged through my underwear drawer until I found a half-burned candle left over from Eleanor’s stash last year. Even though it was still light out, I lit the wick and set it on my desk, feeling suddenly better as I stepped back and stared at it, imagining I was still at Gottfried.

Before the wax could even melt, a gust of wind came in through the window and blew the flame out. Except it didn’t feel like wind, exactly. Approaching the candle, I held my hand up, letting the black smoke coil around my fingers. The breeze had a smell to it, a taste, a wetness, as if it were the long cold breath of someone I had known in a previous life. Dante.

I ran downstairs, bursting through the doors to where the girls still stood on the stoop. Clementine put a hand on her hip. “You have something to say to me?”

But I barely heard her. She couldn’t feel it; none of them could. When I made it to the school gates, I stopped and balanced at the edge of the curb, feeling the breeze lick at my ankles.

I could feel Dante before I could see him. A prickling sensation climbed up my legs, making them move, and suddenly I was winding through the Montreal streets, following a thin strand of air as it swirled past people on the sidewalk, coaxing them out of the way.

My skin tingled as I passed butcher shops, fish markets, a veterinary clinic, and a funeral home. Animals, humans, soulless and empty, I could feel all of them—some intensely, some weakly; their presences grasping at me like the fingers of a ghost. Disoriented, I spun around, the lights of the intersections changing from green to yellow to red as I glanced down one street and then the next, trying to figure out which one led to Dante. A throng of people in suits pressed past me as the walk sign blinked white.

I had to find a way to filter it all out. Letting my hands drop to my sides, I closed my eyes and concentrated on Dante, remembering the way his presence felt—its weight, its texture, the way it seemed to absorb me.…

“Are you okay?” a balding man with a briefcase asked, tapping me on the shoulder.

Frustrated, I brushed him off and closed my eyes. Unbuttoning my cardigan, I let the breeze lap against my chest until everything around me—the cars, the people, the traffic lights, and the yelling; the wisps of the dead beckoning me—blurred into white noise.

I found myself outside a looming cathedral, its arches chiseled with saints, their faces darkened by the elements. Running up the steps, I pushed at the doors until they parted with a gasp. Tea lights lined the entrance. A handful of people were scattered about in the pews, their heads bowed. Windows stained the light red, blue, purple, gold. No one looked up when I followed Dante’s presence down the left side of the cathedral to an alcove behind the altar.

Dozens of faded tapestries hung from the walls, each displaying an old map. I approached one that illustrated the path from earth to the afterlife, with a square-sailed ship traveling toward a frayed edge and beyond. In the still air of the church, the tapestry billowed.

“Dante?” I whispered, passing my hand over the heavy cloth, the material coarse beneath my fingertips. But it was just a draft that had blown in. I followed the current to a door that opened onto to a lush, tangled cemetery, its walls overgrown with flowering vines.

The wind blew patterns into the yellow grass until it rearranged itself into a path. I took a step, the grass flattening beneath my shoes, and then another, around a dry fountain and toward the corner of the yard, where a boy was bending over a grave.

Stopping behind a tree, I watched him, suddenly nervous. Was it him or someone else? This boy looked older, taller, more like a man—far older than seventeen years. His shoulders curled as if they were too wide for his body; a white-collared shirt stretched over them. His long dark hair was pulled into a messy knot, a stray lock falling in front of his face as he stood up.

Trembling, I waited for him to turn around. And when he did, he was both familiar and strange—his pensive eyes and ashen cheek as pale and angular as stone—they were all exactly as I remembered, though somehow sad, like a statue that looked all the more beautiful in person.

A branch cracked beneath my foot, and Dante’s gaze met mine, his lips forming my name.

“Renée?”

He took a step toward me and then stopped, as if he were too scared to come any closer—as if I weren’t real. Suddenly I felt like I was seeing him for the first time; like we were meeting each other all over again in Crude Sciences, shivering as our fingers touched beneath the table.

After months of feeling numb, of tossing in my sleep and waking up to another day without smells or tastes, without music or laughter or warmth, it seemed impossible that Dante was now here, stepping toward me. And without knowing why or where it was coming from, I started to cry.

Closing my eyes, I let myself collapse into him, feeling his cool skin against mine, my chest rising and falling with his, breathless, as if my soul were flitting in and out of me. “You’re here,” I said, listening to the irregular sound of his heartbeat. “You’re still here.”

Quiet, still, we stood like that—one person instead of two. I pulled back and studied his face, touching his nose, his cheeks, his eyelashes—each a vague reminder of someone I had loved in another life. How much time had passed between us?

“You look different,” I said, my voice cracking as I stared at his eyes, which almost looked cloudy.

“So do you,” he said, wiping my cheek.

Now that I was with him, it was as if a film had been rubbed off. I could smell the garden air, sticky and sweet. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. And when I raised my lips to his, I almost felt complete again. He put a finger to my mouth just before we touched.

“How did you know I was here?”

“What?” I asked, confused. “I thought you were—” and that’s when I realized he hadn’t been waiting for me. I took a step back, hurt. “So you aren’t here to see me?”

“Of course I am. Why else would I come to Montreal, where there are hundreds of Monitors searching for me? I just didn’t know how to get to you. If I got any closer to St. Clément, I worried someone would sense me. So I came here, looking for a place for us to meet. I thought a cemetery would help muffle my presence.” His eyes wandered across the headstones. “That way if someone sensed me, they would assume it was just the graveyard.”

“I felt you,” I said softly. “But I don’t think the other girls could. Or the doctor.”

Dante’s face hardened, a wrinkle forming over his eyes. “Doctor? What do you mean?”

I told him everything: About my summer with my grandfather and the doctors; about the way everything seemed dull and meaningless without him; about how I had changed. I told him about my dream of Miss LaBarge and how it came true, and then about the placement test, and history class, and how I’d made a rubbing of something beneath the hospital bed.

When I finished, Dante ran his hand down my face, his eyes worried as he searched me. “Are you okay? Is everything okay now?”

In the distance, a wind chime clinked together, its sound cascading in tiny notes like water droplets falling onto a roof. I nodded and touched his fingers. “Are you? Where have you been? I was so worried.”

Instead of answering, Dante pressed on. “What did the doctor say?”

“He gave me some sort of medication that will stop the dreams, but I don’t know if I want it. This will probably sound crazy, but I think the dreams might be useful.”

Dante gripped my hand. “You’re not thinking of—”

“Going to the hospital to see what’s under the bed,” I whispered, finishing his sentence. “The dream I had before Miss LaBarge died was true. What if this one is too?”

“No,” Dante said, his voice abrupt. “You can’t.”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Because it isn’t safe. You don’t know where these dreams are coming from or why you’re seeing them. You just said that you dreamt of Miss LaBarge directly before she died. What would have happened if you had woken up in time to have gone there?”

“I could have saved her.”

“Or you could have died too,” he said, louder than he intended. Lowering his voice, he pleaded, “I almost lost you last year. I can’t risk that again. Please, promise me you won’t go to the hospital.”

I hesitated. Before I could respond, something rustled near the back of the cathedral. We both froze, listening to the metal gate of the cemetery creak open and clatter shut.

Before I knew what was happening, Dante led me behind a large headstone beneath the willow tree and pulled me on top of him as we both fell into the grass.

I buried my face in his neck as we waited, listening to the sound of footsteps. “Who is it?” I whispered into Dante’s ear as he peered around the side of the stone. He smelled of cedar and dried leaves, of a cold winter night in the woods. Grasping the collar of his shirt, I held him closer. When he turned to me, our lips were inches apart. “The grounds-keeper,” he said, his cool breath mingling with mine.

Dante ran his hand along my back, his hands climbing up the crests of my shoulder blades as the footsteps grew distant. When his fingers grazed the space between my shoulders, a sharp pain shot through my body. Unable to stop myself, I gasped.

“What was that?” Dante said, stopping abruptly. His hand fell to his side.

Just as quickly as the pain had started, it ended. Dante’s face was furrowed into a frown. Had he felt it too? “I don’t know,” I said, trying to compose myself.

Giving me a skeptical look, he slowly placed his palm between my shoulders again. I couldn’t help but wince as the same prickling pain shot through my neck. Gently, he took off my cardigan and pulled down the back of my shirt.

“You have a mark here,” he said, tracing the lines of my vertebrae. “How long have you had this?”

“I didn’t know I had one,” I said, his gaze making me uncomfortable. Squirming away from him, I sat up. “It’s probably nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. I have the same ones. Look,” he said, and led my hand to the small of his back.

I ran my fingers across his spine until I felt them. Tiny indentations, barely visible, leading all the way up his back. They were as shallow as crease marks left from sleeping too long in the sheets; so subtle that I wasn’t surprised I had never noticed them before. Unable to help myself, I pulled my hand away. “What are they?”

Dante touched a freckle on my arm. “I like to think of them as age spots.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been getting one every year, on the exact same day. The anniversary of my death.”

“The marks count how long you’ve been dead?”

Dante averted his eyes, as if apologizing for what he was.

Grasping the bottom of his shirt, I pulled it off of him, watching his shoulder muscles roll under his skin as he let his arms drop. I reached around him and eased my fingers up his back, counting each mark like a knot in a lifeline. They stopped in the middle of his shoulder blades, one vertebra short of where my mark was.

“There are only sixteen—” I said, and then stopped. I had just turned seventeen, which meant that Dante was missing one spot.

As if reading my mind, he said, “I didn’t get one this year.”

“What happens when you run out of space?” I asked, placing my hand on his neck, just above the last mark. My fingers fit perfectly.

Dante gazed out at the gravestones peeking out through the grass.

Stunned, I pulled away and stared at the space left on Dante’s back, counting how many marks could fit. Suddenly I felt weak. Five years. That’s how much time he had left.

How do you measure someone’s life? By the scope of their accomplishments, or the number of people they’ve touched, or by the width of a hand? None of it seemed fair. None of it seemed like enough.

“But it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why didn’t they just disappear? You became human when you took my soul. And then you gave it back to me, becoming Undead. Doesn’t that mean that you should start fresh again, and have another twenty-one years?”

Dante shook his head. “All I know is that I was never fully alive even after you gave me your soul. And you—”

“I’m not, either,” I said, my voice cracking. “But I don’t understand. Why?”

“We were underground when you gave me your soul; we were both already buried, which made the transfer incomplete.”