CHAPTER 9

MAL DE MER

I DIDN’T REMEMBER GOING HOME that night; I just remembered Noah. How he kept finding ways to brush his hand against mine. How our shadows angled together as we walked beneath the street lamps. How if I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine that he was Dante.

Before I knew it, I was back in the darkness of my room, alone. I took off Noah’s blazer and draped it over the back of my chair. But in the dark it almost felt as though Noah was there, sitting with me. Even though I knew Dante couldn’t see me, I quickly tucked the coat into my closet, ashamed that I even had another boy’s blazer in my room. And pressing my back against the door, I shook Noah out of my head, picked up my towel, and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

But when I turned the knob, the door was locked.

“Occupied,” Clémentine called out. Through the door, I heard a chorus of giggles.

I threw my towel on a nearby armchair, and was about to collapse onto my bed when I heard one of them mention Anya’s name.

Crouching by the door, I listened.

“I don’t even understand how she got into this school.” Josie’s voice was full of spite. “You should have seen her the other day, trying to find the dead animal in the river. She had no idea what she was doing.”

Another girl chimed in. “She can barely speak French or Latin. She can’t sense a dead thing when it’s on her plate; she can’t dig a proper hole or even build a makeshift pyre; but she still ranked number four. Can you believe that?”

I glared at the door, but the truth was, they were right. If Anya had any talent as a Monitor, I hadn’t witnessed it either, and I had no idea how she’d ranked number four, or how she’d been placed into the top Strategy and Prediction class.

Clémentine’s voice rose above the others. “I heard she tried to commit suicide a couple of times. Obviously, it didn’t work. How is she going to kill the Undead when she can’t even kill herself?”

At that, I gave the door a firm kick and stormed out of my room, taking my towel with me.

Walking down the hall, I knocked on Anya’s door. I could hear heavy metal blaring from inside. I knocked twice more, louder, and eventually the door opened.

Anya stood before me in an oversized collared shirt and shorts, a towel draped over her neck. Her hair was held up in all sorts of odd angles with pieces of tinfoil, and smeared with a reddish paste.

“Oh, hi,” she said, looking at me and then my towel.

Her sleeves were rolled up, showing the insides of her arms, which were covered with irregular white scars that looked like burn marks. They appeared to have been there for a while. I had never noticed them before; she always wore long sleeves.

Anya must have caught me staring, because she immediately rolled down the cuffs of her shirt.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she muttered, and looked down the hall.

“Can I use your shower? Clémentine and her friends are in my bathroom.”

While Anya sat on the bed and flipped through a magazine, I shut myself in the bathroom and turned on the tap, listening to Anya’s music blaring in the background.

Standing under the hot water, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Noah had said. Should relationships be hard? The question didn’t even seem to apply to Dante and me. It didn’t matter if it was easy or hard – with him gone, it felt like a piece of me had been carved away. Did that mean that I didn’t have a choice? Water trickled down my face, collecting on my lashes. What if Dante had lied to me about the cemetery? What if he had been there before, and all of my visions had really been his? What would I do then?

As steam clouded the room, I pressed my eyes closed and tried to feel the warmth of the water, but the more I concentrated on it, the more tepid it felt. I turned the temperature up, letting it beat down on my back, and then turned it up again and again, waiting for something to happen as the water pooled about my feet and the skin on my fingers wrinkled.

By the time I emerged, Anya had changed the music to a mellow folk album.

“You were in there for a while,” Anya said as I sat next to her on the couch, the steam following me.

She was sitting cross-legged, stringing something onto a piece of twine. Her hair was still pressed in pieces of foil.

“What are you making?” I said, rubbing my head with my towel.

“A charm necklace,” she said. “For you.”

Beside her, a buzzer went off. She hit the top of it and stood up. “Time to wash the dye out,” she said, and threw the necklace into my lap. “Be right back.”

While she washed her hair out in the sink, I studied the necklace. The frayed twine was strung with dozens of different dried beans, some as small as a pea, some as large as a quarter. Most of them had a white spot in the middle, which made them look like eyes. In the middle of the necklace hung what seemed to be a white rabbit’s foot. I touched it. The fur was delicate and soft.

“So what do you think of it?” Anya said from the doorway.

“It’s – nice,” I said. “What’s it made of?”

“Mung beans, black-eyed peas, fava beans, kidney beans… They’re supposed to bring you health.”

“And the rabbit’s foot?”

“Oh, it’s not a rabbit. It’s a cat.”

Letting the necklace drop into my lap, I said, “What? Why? Where did you—”

“It’s from an herbal store I go to sometimes. It’s for protection. It’s supposed to give you nine lives.”

“Oh,” I said, examining the necklace again, trying not to feel queasy. “Thanks.”

“And here,” she said, picking up a mug from her nightstand and carrying it to me. “This is for you.”

The mug was warm when I took it from her, the liquid inside murky and a brownish-green. “What is it?”

“It’s tea,” she said.

I swirled the cup around, but the contents were so viscous that they barely moved. “Really? What kind?” I said with a grimace.

“Oh, it’s just an herbal thing. Good for the cold season.”

I glanced in her mug. The water inside was a pleasant peach colour. A normal teabag dangled from a string.

“Why aren’t you drinking any?” I asked.

“Oh, I already had some.”

“Right,” I said, taking a sip. It tasted like water from the bottom of a flower vase, and was oddly gritty.

She watched me, pleased. I told her about how I saw Miss LaBarge while I was with Noah, how she and my parents had died with gauze in their mouths. When I was finished, Anya’s forehead was furrowed, her wet red hair dangling over her shoulders, leaving water marks on her shirt.

“Maybe they found the secret of the Nine Sisters and became immortal,” I said. “Maybe that’s why I’m seeing Miss LaBarge everywhere – because she’s still alive. And maybe – maybe—”

“Your parents are still alive then, too?” Anya offered, finishing my sentence.

I fiddled with the hem of my shirt, nodding.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right. Your parents were searching for the ‘lost girl’ when they wrote Miss LaBarge the letter, right? So that means they couldn’t have found the secret. They were probably just searching for it, like us. And after they died, Miss LaBarge took what they found a step further. She was looking for something having to do with lakes or water—”

“Which is kind of what we’re looking for,” I said, thinking about the saltwater riddle.

“Exactly. Which means she hadn’t found it either. And then she was killed.”

I spun the beans on the necklace, unable to accept what she was saying. Why couldn’t Miss LaBarge be alive? Why couldn’t immortality be real? Why couldn’t my parents still be alive? “But that doesn’t explain why I keep seeing Miss LaBarge.”

“You keep having weird visions,” she reminded me. “Couldn’t she be one of those, too?”

“But Noah saw her. Not just me.”

“He never met her when she was alive, did he? He could have been mistaken. It could have just been someone who looked like her.”

I sat back, frustrated. “Fine,” I said. “You’re right. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Does that make you happy?”

“It’s better this way,” she offered. “If your parents had been alive all this time, and hadn’t contacted you, that would be even more disturbing.”

I gazed at the lamp until it burned a yellow orb into my vision. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, she was right. If my parents were alive, they would’ve found a way to contact me. And Miss LaBarge – maybe I had been seeing things. “You can’t know for sure, though,” I said. “The only way to be certain is to follow the riddles. Maybe they’ll all lead us to them.”

It could have been a trick of the light, but Anya seemed to grow uncomfortable. “Yeah…” she murmured, and took a sip from her tea. “Drink up,” she said, staring at my mug. “You’ve barely touched yours.”

I ignored her. “Noah thinks there’s one piece left of the riddle, the first piece, which will tie the clues together. We have to find it.”

“You told Noah about them? As in Clémentine’s Noah?”

I shrugged. “He chased Miss LaBarge with me. What else was I supposed to do? Besides, he helped.”

“Barely,” Anya said, sipping at her tea. “You know, I’ve been thinking about the riddles, and we’re asking the wrong questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Sisters vowed to let their secret die with them. So why would they hide the riddles?”

“You already asked that,” I said. “And I still don’t know.”

“Well maybe we should figure it out. Think about it. The hospital room. The headstone. The riddles we’ve found so far haven’t been hidden in major historical landmarks or encrypted in pieces of art. They’re in places that would be important to an individual – a headstone, a hospital bed.”

I leaned back, crossing my legs on the couch as I considered what she was suggesting. “The ninth sister,” I said. “You think the ninth sister hid these in places that were meaningful to her.”

Anya nodded.

“But why?”

“I don’t know,” Anya said, tapping her nails on the arm of the couch. “But we can guess a few things about her. Judging from the portrait of the Nine Sisters, she had to have been around our age in the 1730s, when the other Monitors were killed. She had ties to Montreal, which we know because of the headstone. And she was associated with the Royal Victoria Hospital.”

As the first snow began to fall over St. Clément, dusting the shingles of the buildings in a thin layer of white, the wind blew through to my bones, rattling around inside me as if I were hollow. Anya and I searched for the ninth sister, going through as many records as we could in the St. Clément library, pulling dusty tomes out of the shelves one by one, and scanning every page. But before 1950, the information was slim and disorganized.

When that didn’t work, I took to wandering the streets of Montreal, hoping that something I saw would set off another vision; though, really, I was looking for Dante. I found traces of him everywhere – a used Latin book left on my usual table at the coffee shop, a note scrawled inside that read: I’m searching; a message traced into the frost on a window: I miss you; graffiti etched into a mailbox near the corner store: Remember us. Every time I saw one, my heart trembled in my chest, and I had to force myself to look away so that I didn’t draw attention to myself. Anya came with me at first, but as the holidays approached, her father asked her to help him at his store, which left me on my own. Sometimes Noah would join me, catching up with me after class, and together we’d walk down the snowy cobblestones, gazing up at the gargoyles that guarded the roofs. Every time I felt a cold breeze blow through an alleyway, I froze, staring at the empty street, waiting for Dante to appear. But he never did.

I didn’t realize what I was doing. I thought I was just filling the time while Dante was gone, but as the weeks passed, every day pulled us further apart. I didn’t know what was happening until I found myself looking forward to bumping into Noah, and then making plans to bump into him. When we were together, it felt like the pressure had been lifted from my chest. To be able to walk with someone and not talk about anything.

It was on one of the rare days when I wandered alone that I found myself on the waterfront, staring at the abandoned grain silos.

When the tourists had cleared, I approached the railing. Gazing across the water of the St. Lawrence River to the opposite shore, I cleared my throat. “Where are you?” I said, and without waiting to hear my echo, I continued. “Why do you always disappear? Why haven’t you come to find me?”

My voice cracked and I paused, pushing my hair behind my ear as I tried to compose myself. When my questions bounced back to me, they were jumbled and confused, the words laying themselves on top of each other, each question repeating itself and merging with the next into incoherent mush. Just like the way I felt.

Where are you? I heard finally, my voice fading as it bounced off the walls of the silo. Where are you?

Tired, I leaned against the metal railing, empty of questions, of answers, of energy to even ask any more, when I heard a voice. Not from the echo, but from behind me.

“I’m right here.”

My body grew rigid as his cold breath tickled my ear. I spun around. “Dante?”

I saw the cuff of his shirt first, followed by the collar, the lock of hair dangling by his chin, the pen tucked behind his ear. “You’re here,” I said, gazing at the stubble on his cheek, at his thin lips as he said, “I’m sorry it took so long.”

“You left me those notes,” I said, my eyes darting around us to make sure no one was watching.

Dante nodded. “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” he said. “But I haven’t been able to find you alone.”

I bit my lip, feeling suddenly guilty. “That night in the cemetery. You never finished your sentence.”

Dante was silent for a minute. “I wish I could tell you what I’m doing,” he said. “But I can’t. I can’t put you in danger.”

I stood back. “Okay,” I said slowly. “But what do you mean? Are you saying you had been to the cemetery before?”

Before he could answer, a voice called out to me from the distance. “Renée?”

I jolted at the sound of my name. Dante spun around, his eyes darting around the waterfront.

Noah, I thought. Not sure what to do, I turned to Dante. “He wasn’t supposed to meet me today,” I said quickly.

“Who?” Dante said, narrowing his eyes.

“A Monitor. You have to go,” I said, and glanced over my shoulder. From across the street, Noah waved at me, but I didn’t wave back. “I’m going to go and distract him,” I said, taking Dante’s hand. Above us the seagulls cried as they wove around each other.

“Wait,” Dante said, holding my wrist. “Tell me you believe me. That you believe I would never hurt you or anyone else.”

“I do,” I said, my eyes darting to Noah. If he found Dante, he would tell the professors, and it would all be over.

“Say it out loud,” Dante said, his brown eyes pleading with me. “Please.”

“I believe you,” I said, confused. “You would never hurt me or anyone else.”

A look of relief passed over his face, and he loosened his grip on my arm. “I love you,” he said. “Now go.”

Slipping away from the cold swirl of Dante, I ran to Noah. “What are you doing here?” I said, blocking his path.

“I got out of class early and came to find you,” he said, a little perplexed. “Are you okay? You’re acting kind of nervous.”

“I’m fine,” I said, staring at the reflection of the silos in Noah’s glasses, as Dante walked down the wharf, keeping his head lowered.

Noah must have seen him too, because he said, “Who was that?”

“Who?”

“That guy you were talking to.”

“Oh, he was just a stranger asking me for directions.”

Noah stepped back. “You’re lying. I saw the way you looked at him. You seemed upset.”

I followed his gaze down the street, where Dante was disappearing into a crowd. “I can feel him,” Noah said, squinting. “He’s an – an—”

Undead, I thought, though Noah never finished his sentence. Instead, he turned to me. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said in disbelief. “Your boyfriend is an Undead.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s just a friend.”

Noah backed away from me. “That’s why you never talk about him. That’s your big secret?”

“No—” I started to say, but he cut me off.

“How could you not tell me?”

“Tell you what?” I said, going rigid. “It’s not your life, it’s mine. You have a girlfriend, remember?”

“Don’t bring Clémentine into this,” he said, his voice so firm it was unfamiliar.

“Why not? You’re with me every day. Does she know? Is that why she’s so rude to me?”

“I know you don’t like her, but Clémentine would never date an Undead while training to be a Monitor. It’s not right,” he said, his voice low.

I stepped away from him in disbelief. “So now Clémentine is my moral standard? What does she know about love? About loss? What do you know about it?”

Noah seemed to shrink back at my words, and I immediately felt guilty for hurting him. “She had to bury her brother last summer. He was an Undead. Her father made her do it. She hasn’t told anyone for the same reasons you haven’t told anyone about your secret, I’m guessing. Though her decision was very different to yours.”

July thirtieth, I thought, remembering what Anya had said to Clémentine in the hallway earlier this year. That’s what she’d been referring to. My eyes wandered from the waterfront to Noah, but when I looked up at him he was already gone.

When I returned to my room that night, it was all I could do to lie in bed with the blankets off and windows open, letting the cold air seep in, as if it were Dante’s presence wrapping itself around me. I needed something to remind me of him; to bring me back to him. So I did the next best thing. I called Eleanor.

“You sound depressed,” she said, after I had told her everything. “Maybe you should see a doctor.”

Eleanor’s suggestion caught me off guard. “What? I’m not depressed,” I said, as I curled up in an armchair by the window, watching the street lamps flicker to life as night fell over the courtyard.

“You’ve been having visions. Hallucinations. And you’re seeing another guy? What about Dante? He’s your soulmate.”

“Noah is just a friend.” I whispered so Clémentine wouldn’t hear.

Eleanor didn’t say anything for a long time. Through the walls, I could hear Clémentine yell something, her tone angry. Maybe she was on the phone with Noah.

“I’ve been going to therapy, and it’s really helping me…understand myself,” Eleanor said. “And understanding myself helps me control myself.”

“Therapy?” I said. “But you’re fine the way you are. You don’t need to see a doctor.”

Eleanor lowered her voice. “I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately. Bad thoughts.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“About life and death. About me and what makes me different. About the things I want.”

I waited for her to go on.

“I’m so scared,” she said, the words quivering through the receiver. “I don’t want to die.”

“You won’t,” I said automatically, not wanting to even think about it.

Eleanor let out a cold laugh. “Renée, you know I’m Undead. I only get another twenty-one years. That means that unless a miracle happens, I’m almost middle-aged.”

“No,” I said. “We’re going to find a way out. The Nine Sisters. The visions. The riddles. When I find the last one, you’ll—”

But Eleanor cut me off, her voice firmer than I had ever heard it before. “There is no answer, Renée. You’re in denial. I’m going to die. Dante’s going to die. We’re all going to die.”

I swallowed. “No,” I said. “You’re just upset. There’s a solution, I know it.”

I heard Eleanor take a deep breath. “The other day I was walking to the Megaron, and I saw one of the maintenance worker’s sons smoking behind the bushes when he was supposed to be watering the plants. He only looks a little older than me. I couldn’t stop staring at him. I kept thinking, why does he get to have a full life when I don’t? What makes him more deserving than me?”

“He’s not,” I said.

“I wanted to take his soul, Renée. I wanted to go up to him and just take it.”

I went quiet.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “It wouldn’t help you, though. He doesn’t have your soul.”

“I know,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just so angry. I felt like I had no time. Taking his soul would give me more time.”

I felt the same way. Dante only had five years left, and although I never would have admitted it to Eleanor, ever since Latin, when the professor told us about the Liberum living long past their lifespans, I had been trying to suppress the one thought that I knew was too terrible to consider: if the Liberum could take souls to extend their lives, so could Dante. “I know how you feel,” I said. “But I wonder if it’ll always feel like we have no time, even if we live until we’re eighty.”

“Not me,” she said. “When I was little, I used to put on make-up and picture the way I would look when I was older. But when I try to imagine it now, I can’t.”

I smiled, remembering the way she put expensive lotion on her face every night when we were at Gottfried. “You were obsessed with wrinkles.”

“I still am,” she said. “Only now, I want them.”

Eleanor’s words echoed in my head as Headmaster LaGuerre drove us to a small wooded area outside of Montreal. It was an overcast November afternoon, the trees bare and frostbitten. In front of me, Clémentine’s head rested on Noah’s shoulder as we crossed a planked bridge. I studied her slender neck and the short waves of her hair, trying to imagine what she would look like in twenty-one years, what Noah would look like. By then, Eleanor would be dead.

Noah and I hadn’t spoken since our fight at the waterfront, and even though I felt terrible about what I’d said, I was still angry. What gave him the right to make judgments about my life? And worse: what if his judgments were right?

We parked on a shoulder and carried our tools to a clearing in the woods, now dusted with snow.

“In order to be a great Monitor, you must treat burial rituals as an art form,” the headmaster said. “You must read the soil just by crumbling it in your fingers; dig the deepest holes, craft the most durable coffins, and wrap the dead as if you were draping a mannequin in delicate silk.

“The object of today’s exercise is to build a funeral pyre. You will work alone, gathering your supplies from the forest. At the end of the class we will ignite them.” He unrolled a cloth bag and handed each of us an axe. “The characteristics of a good funeral pyre are as follows: first, it must ignite quickly and stay ignited. Second, it must be sturdy enough to hold the weight of a human without collapsing. Third, it should generate as little smoke as possible. Drawing attention to a funeral pyre is never in our interest.”

When he was finished, we dispersed, running to the trees to collect as much wood as possible. I passed Anya chopping off the branches of a birch tree; Brett, who was working at a decomposing pine; and April and Allison, who seemed to be working together despite the headmaster’s instructions. To my right, Clémentine sauntered through the trees, swinging her axe at the underbrush to make a path.

I gathered only dead wood that I foraged from the forest floor, and piled it at my spot in the clearing.

Across from me, Noah rolled up his sleeves, broke a branch over his thigh, and began to weave his wood together, his hands moving quickly as if he were working a loom.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing when I bent down and stacked the wood in pairs, threading them together until I had formed the base of a winding staircase.

Clémentine worked next to me. Her jacket was strewn on the ground, and her shirt was marked with sweat as she tiptoed around a pile of sticks that seemed to collapse in on itself every time she tried to set a new piece of wood on top. Frustrated, she threw a branch to the ground and took a big gulp from her water bottle. When she glimpsed my half-finished pyre, a look of shock flashed across her face, but quickly hardened into a glare.

Ignoring her, I wiped my hands on my skirt and traipsed off into the forest to collect more tinder.

On the way back, I passed Anya, who was sitting on the ground surrounded by sticks and twigs and leafy branches, looking dejected. Her face was streaked with dirt.

“Are you okay?” I asked, stooping next to her.

She threw her hands in the air. “No matter how I arrange them, they always fall over. It’s hopeless.”

I waited until no one was watching, and with swift motions, arranged her sticks into the beginning of a cylinder. “Like this,” I said, before going back to my place.

By the end of class, Noah and I were the only ones who had finished pyres that could support the weight of a person; all of the others collapsed. Mine looked like a spiral staircase that climbed around a pedestal. “Lovely,” the headmaster said, prodding the bottom level to check its foundations. But Noah’s was exquisite. It was hundreds of thin sticks latticed around the centre platform like the inside of shell. He looked nervous when the headmaster stood up, his face wide with shock as he ran his hands across the joints of the wood.

“Remarkable,” he said. “Tout simplement remarquable.”

And with that, the headmaster struck a match and lit the pyre. The flame caught immediately, travelling around the structure like fingers. But when he held a match to mine, nothing happened.

I raised a hand to my cheek, confused, as the headmaster struck another match, and then another.

“Your wood is wet,” he remarked, touching a branch and rubbing his fingers together.

“What?” I said. “But I specifically chose dry, dead wood. None of it was wet.”

The headmaster didn’t respond. Instead, he struck another match, and then another, until the wood finally ignited. But as the fire spread to the rest of the pyre, the clearing was engulfed in thick, black smoke.

Moving away, everyone started to cough and swat at the air.

“Why is this happening?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

The headmaster picked up an axe, and with three rapid swings, he took the pyre down, the wood collapsing outwards until the fire went out and the smoke cleared. In the middle of my pyre was a messy pile of damp leaves and weeds, hissing as the smoke curled out of the embers.

“But I didn’t put those there,” I said. “I never put wet leaves in my pyre.”

I glanced around the clearing, but no one seemed to care. As everyone began to pack up, my eyes rested on Clémentine, who gave me the beginning of a smile before bending over to pick up her water bottle. It was empty.

I threw my tools on the ground and was about to go over to her, when I saw Noah a couple of metres away. He had picked up Clémentine’s coat but was frozen in place. He must have seen her look at me, because he studied her, his face twisting with disgust as he realized what she’d done. Dropping her coat at his feet, he turned and walked back to the van.

Clémentine sat in the back row, and Noah just in front of her, as we drove back to school. When there was a lull in the headmaster’s music, I could hear the low hum of their arguing. As we wound through the streets, I felt a thin strand of cold air wrap itself around my ankles and then break free as we turned a corner.

“Did you feel that?” I asked Anya.

“Feel what?” she said, looking up from her book.

I held up a finger to silence her, and closed my eyes, trying to find it again, but there was nothing.

“Never mind,” I said, and gazed out the window, staring at the faces of the people on the street, hoping to see Dante. When we got back to St. Clément, it was raining. As I walked across the courtyard with Anya, I felt a hand on the sleeve of my coat. Hearing Clémentine’s voice near me, I whipped around. “Don’t touch me.” I was face to face with Noah.

He stepped back, retracting his hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Oh,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I thought you were…” I stopped short before saying her name.

“Ah,” he said, understanding who I was talking about. “I see. Well, I just wanted to—”

“You don’t have to apologize for her. I can take care of myself.”

Noah pushed a lock of hair out of his face. “ – apologize for my behaviour,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said all those things. I don’t know anything about the guy or how he treats you. I was just caught off guard.”

Biting my lip, I nodded. “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t—”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know.”

The mist speckled his glasses, the water catching on the rust stubble climbing up his cheeks. “I also wanted to ask what you were doing on Friday.”

“Friday?” Even though I had no plans, I pretended to think about it so as not to appear pathetic. “I don’t know. I’ll have to check.”

He hesitated, as if he were nervous. “Would you…” he said slowly, “have any interest in coming to my house for dinner?”

“Your house? Like with your parents?” I said, both flattered and confused.

“Yeah,” he said, with an amused smile. “Haven’t you ever been to dinner with someone’s parents?”

To my embarrassment, I hadn’t. At least not to a boy’s house. Dante didn’t have any parents, and before that…well, I could hardly remember life before that. The thought of having dinner with Noah’s parents was so traditional, so normal, that it was almost strange.

“I go home every Friday, and even though my parents are delightful people, I don’t know if I can take an entire evening alone with them this week. Having you there might actually make it fun.” I must have looked a little uneasy, because he added, “Take pity on me?”

“But what about Clémentine?”

Noah’s dimples disappeared as his smile faded. “What about her?”

“She’s your girlfriend. Shouldn’t you be bringing her?”

He scratched his head. “Right, well…we’ve been fighting.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “The point is, I’m asking you.”

I bit my lip. “Oh, that’s nice, but—”

“Great,” he said with a huge grin. “I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll meet you at the gates at six.”

That Friday, I spent an hour trying on clothes in front of the mirror in the bathroom, the thick fabrics tickling the mark between my shoulders, before I finally settled on an outfit that said “Just friends”.

“What are you doing in there?” Clémentine yelled through the door. I was tempted to tell her that I was getting ready to go to dinner with Noah, but then decided that was too cruel.

Noah’s parents lived in a beautiful brick town house in Outremont. We took the Metro there. It was crowded, and Noah’s hand kept slipping down the metal railing, touching mine.

His father answered the door, wearing an apron over his work suit. Comfortably plump, with full cheeks and a swirl of brown hair clinging to the top of his head like a toupee, he looked nothing like Noah. He was holding a glass of red wine. “Ah, hello!” he said with a smile, his face flushed as he gave Noah a hug, the wine sloshing out of his glass. He wore a heavy ring on his pinkie finger.

“Dad, this is Renée.”

“Luc,” he said, squeezing my hand and then beckoning us inside.

The Fontaine house was a cosy mess – all oriental carpets and stacks of political magazines and books. A large aquarium stood on one side of the living room, filled with tiny spotted fish that looked like they were made of newspaper.

The sound of clattering dishes came from the kitchen, followed by a tall woman who entered the hall holding a cutting board of charcuterie.

“Ah, and this is my Veronica,” Luc said, turning to Noah’s mother and placing his hand on the small of her back.

She looked just like Noah: tall, angular, effortlessly elegant. Her legs seemed even longer because of her high heels. “It’s a pleasure.”

As we followed her to the dining room, she said over her shoulder, “I hope you like meat.” Before I could respond, she corrected herself. “Oh, but of course you do. You’re a Monitor, no?”

The table was already set. Noah pulled out a chair for me, and in a sloppy bow, laid my napkin across my lap. I laughed as he sat next to me. His parents shared a knowing look as his mother passed around the cutting board, atop which sat an elaborate spread of pâté, sausage and paper-thin slices of roast beef. She then disappeared into the kitchen.

On one side of the room was an ornate fireplace. Above the mantel hung two tiny trowels, both mounted on wooden plaques. The first said Noah; the second said Katherine.

“That was my first trowel,” Noah said over my shoulder. “I was four when my parents gave it to me.”

“Is this how you grew up?” I asked. “You always knew what you were?”

“Every family is different,” his father said, filling my glass with wine. “Here, we are very open. We are what we are. What’s the use in keeping secrets from each other?”

I watched as Noah spread a bit of pâté on a piece of bread and took a bite. He laughed at something his father said, and then looked at me. I hadn’t caught the joke, but I laughed anyway. This was what my life would have been if my parents hadn’t died. If I could fall in love with Noah. But something was off about all of it. Why was I here, and not Clémentine? Was I really that special to Noah, or was he interested in an idea of a girl that he thought was me?

The door swung open and Noah’s mother returned carrying a silver platter and another dish. Noah’s father put his hand on her hip as she removed the lids, revealing potatoes roasted with rosemary and thyme and a rack of lamb, its ribs sticking out of its centre like a piece of modern art. I should have been overwhelmed by the aromas, but I couldn’t smell anything. The more I stared at the food, the more it looked almost waxy and unreal, as if there were a filter between me and everything else.

“So Noah told us you ranked number one at St. Clément?” his mother said, serving each of us. “Very impressive.”

Noah’s father clucked and picked up his wine. “Yes,” he said. “And what kind of Monitor are you?”

“Um – I don’t know.”

“I assume you are planning to join the High Monitor Court when you finish school?” Noah’s mother asked, crossing her legs.

Before I could answer, Noah cut in. “She can do whatever she wants,” he said. “She’s good at everything.”

I felt myself blush. “Then why wouldn’t she?” Noah’s father said. “It’s the most coveted job in our society.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be a High Monitor,” Noah offered. “Maybe she wants to do something else.”

I tried to get a word in, when his mother’s laugh stopped me. “But everyone wants to be a High Monitor. Noah, if you just apply yourself, one day you could—”

“I don’t want to talk about this now,” he said, trying to control his voice.

“Noah told me you’re both professors?” I said, changing the subject.

Noah’s mother smiled. “Oui. I am a scholar in français and the Romance languages, and Luc is one of the most celebrated historians in Canada.” She rubbed her husband’s arm. “Actually, your father just started doing research for a new book. It’s very different.”

Noah spooned a heaping pile of potatoes onto his plate. “What’s it about?”

His father leaned back in his chair and swirled the wine around in his glass. “A forgotten female scientist who had a peculiar obsession.”

Noah’s mother gave him a coy smile before going to the kitchen to bring out more wine.

“Go on,” Noah said.

“Bon,” his father said, clasping his stubby hands together. “Her name was Ophelia Coeur. And she was obsessed with water.”

Ophelia Coeur. The name sounded familiar somehow. “Who was she?” I asked, trying to remember where I knew her from.

“She is the Marie Curie of Monitors. The Mother Teresa of Monitors. The Christopher Columbus of Monitors!” his father said, spilling his wine as he gesticulated.

“But what did she do?” Noah pressed.

“Many, many things. She was the first person to study the effects of water on the dead.”

I frowned. I definitely didn’t know her name from that.

“She started her career as the school nurse at St. Clément, then moved to the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1894 just after it was taken over by the Plebeians, where she rose to become the head nurse of the children’s ward.”

“The Royal Victoria?” I repeated, my eyes darting to Noah’s. “The children’s ward?”

“Oui. She revolutionized the entire hospital.”

I coughed, my mind racing. Noah gave me a knowing glance. “Then what?” he asked.

Noah’s father dunked a piece of bread into his sauce and stuffed it in his mouth. “After a few years, Ophelia Coeur quit nursing and dedicated her life to science,” he said, his words muffled as he chewed. “She went to every body of water in North America to study drowning victims and the way the flesh and soul reacted to being submerged in different kinds of water. She was the first person to figure out that water has a ‘muffling’ effect on dead beings.”

Noah’s mother leaned over and wiped a speck of food from Luc’s chin. He smiled at her and squeezed her hand.

“She spent most of her time studying the Great Lakes, with special attention to Lake Erie. She claimed that the water in that lake muffled the dead even more than usual.”

“Lake Erie?” I said.

“Oui…” Luc said, clearly confused by my interest. “She was the first one to set foot on many of the islands in the lake. Some of them were even named by her.”

Little Sister Island. That was where Miss LaBarge had been found, dead.

“But I believe her greatest contribution was when she identified all of the lakes that had briny properties, or properties that mimicked those of salt water. That was, oh, in the early 1900s—”

“Where was she buried?” I demanded, and then shrank back when I realized how urgent my tone sounded.

Noah’s parents didn’t seem to notice. “Probably at sea, like everyone else,” Noah’s mother said, nibbling on a string bean.

“Oh,” I said. A part of me expected the nameless headstone to be hers.

“Actually, I wasn’t able to find any records of her death,” Luc corrected. “But back then, our records system wasn’t what it is today. Even now, though some of her research papers have been preserved in the archives, we know very little about her background. She was very private about her past. She rarely made public appearances, and only published her scientific findings sporadically. All we know about her past was that at some point in her childhood she was badly injured in a fire.”

By then, both Noah and I had stopped eating.

“It’s odd, non?” Noah’s mother said, gesticulating with the carving knife.

“How do you know about the fire?” I asked.

“Because much of her face was covered in burns.”

“Do you have images?” I asked, a little too eagerly.

Noah’s father seemed a little taken aback by my abrupt request, but then smiled. “There’s a spark in you,” he said, and winked. “I like that. After dinner, I’ll bring one out.”

I felt Noah’s foot touch mine beneath the table, and I blushed.

It was a long, hearty dinner. One course and two bottles of wine later, Noah’s father was a little pink in the face, but otherwise just as lucid as when he had answered the door. We finished the meal with a platter of soft cheeses, which Noah’s mother ate as if they were dessert, scooping up the Camembert with one finger and licking it off like frosting. His father smiled, admiring her.

“So, are you interested in history, then?” Noah’s father said to me through a mouthful of blue cheese.

“It used to be my favourite subject,” I said slowly.

I must have looked confused, because Noah’s father said, “Ah, well I just thought since you were so interested in my new book.”

“What are you interested in?” Noah’s mother asked.

“I – I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe teaching the Undead? Helping them in some way?”

Noah’s mother let out a laugh as if I had made a joke. When she realized I was serious, she said, “Help them? But why?”

I froze. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they have no souls; they cannot be helped.”

I felt Noah trying to catch my eye, but I refused to turn to him.

“That’s not true,” I said. “At Gottfried—”

At the mention of my old school, Noah’s mother groaned. “Oh, that place. We’ve been trying to get them to shut it down for years. Teaching the Undead to be human. Impossible! Enfants terribles. That’s all they are.”

I clutched the cheese knife, my knuckles white as I opened my mouth to respond. Noah cut in before I could. “A lot of her friends are at Gottfried,” he said. “She’s very close with them.”

Incredulous, I wiped my mouth with my napkin. So he thought my opinions on the Undead were just biases that I had towards my friends?

“Sometimes I wonder,” I said impulsively. “Are Monitors really saving humans from the Undead, or just killing people?”

Noah’s mother coughed and put down her spoon as the table went quiet.

“There’s an art to what we do,” she said finally, her voice less friendly.

“But how is it different?” I said, trying not to sound too argumentative.

“We’re civilized. We have courts and schools, we have a system. The Undead, they’re—”

“They’re what?” I said, anticipating what she was going to say. “They’re monsters? They’re murderers?”

“Okay!” Noah’s father said. “Are you ready to see the portrait?” He glanced between me and his wife, patting a napkin to his head nervously.

“Sure,” I said, trying to compose myself.

Grasping the arms of his chair, Luc hoisted himself up and disappeared into another room, returning with a large envelope.

“Are you okay?” Noah whispered.

I picked at my cheese. Why hadn’t he said anything when his mother talked about the Undead like that? Did he agree with her? “I’m fine.”

Noah’s father pushed the plates out of the way, slid a portrait out of the envelope, and placed it on the tablecloth in front of us. It was a faded black-and-white sketch from the shoulders up, its lines dulled from age.

A woman stared back at us, her eyes wide and black. Or was it a woman? It was hard to tell. She looked more like a creature: an anomaly of nature, beautiful in her deformity. Scalloped white welts climbed up her cheeks, layering themselves on top of each other in an odd, sloping pattern, like the feathers of a bird. Her expression was grim and focused, as if she were studying me. Her lips were pursed, somehow giving me the impression that she knew something I didn’t.

“This was drawn after her first scientific publication. She must have been in her thirties or forties.”

She looked much younger than that, I thought, though it was difficult to guess her age. “She’s…terrifying,” I said in awe.

“Oui,” Noah’s mother said, resting her head on two fingers. “C’est incroyable.”

“They look like waves, no?” Luc said, touching her scars with his fingers. “I think this will be the cover of my book.”

“What will you call it?” I asked. “Your biography.”

“Mal de mer.”

Seasick.

Before we left, Noah ran upstairs to collect a few clean shirts for school. Halfway up, he peered down at me through the balcony railing. “Well, come on.”

On the walls lining the stairway were photographs of Noah and his sister growing up. A five-year-old Noah standing in front of St. Clément in an oversized shirt and tie, as if he were already preparing to attend. A ten-year-old Noah posing in front of a cemetery with his sister. A sombre thirteen-year-old Noah holding a shovel beside a small plot in the backyard. “That was my first pet,” Noah said, suddenly standing behind me. I thought I felt him touch a lock of my hair, but I must have imagined it, because in no time he was on the second floor, leading me down the wallpapered hallway that led to his bedroom.

“Do you think Ophelia Coeur was the ninth sister?” I asked when we were out of earshot.

“She worked at the Royal Victoria—” he said.

“She could have put the riddle in one of the rooms she worked in,” I said excitedly. “And Lake Erie – that’s where Miss LaBarge was found dead. Maybe she knew about the riddle,” I said, thinking of the letter my mother had written to her about “the lost girl”. “Maybe the last part of the riddle is hidden on Little Sister Island, and Miss LaBarge was going there to check on it.”

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 smile 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?”

Before he 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 colours. 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 of 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 single 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 for ever, 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.

Clémentine 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 pins 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 Clémentine 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.