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.
Chapter 10
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 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.