Life Eternal Part 29

"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.

"Renee!" 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 ident.i.ty 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.

"Renee?" Noah said, adjusting his gla.s.ses 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 bas.e.m.e.nt; 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 p.r.i.c.kling 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.

"Renee?" 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 cla.s.s? 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. "ile 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 ile 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 pinp.r.i.c.ked with trees.

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

ile 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 sc.r.a.ps.

"This is it?" I said as a gray cat darted out from behind a garbage bin and scampered across the road.

"Yep," the man said.

We paid him, and the rumble of his car's m.u.f.fler faded away into the distance. Behind us, the setting sun was bleeding red all over the St. Lawrence River. Pulling up my scarf, I ran toward the plain rectangular building looming behind the iron gates. It was cream with brown trim and thin bars over the windows.

Parked in its driveway, hidden in the shadows, was a gray Peugeot.

"It can't be," I said. "It's the same one I saw Miss LaBarge in a few months ago."

"Come on," Noah said, and led me to the tall gates. The iron bars twisted and coiled toward the center to form the words: couvent des soeurs. In the middle of the gates, the bars were lashed together with a chain, and locked.

"Do you think she's in there?" I said.

As if in answer to my question, a light turned on in one of the windows on the third floor. I jumped, b.u.mping into Noah, who caught my arm.