by Yvonne Woon
I wanted to tell him how much I’d thought about him, about how much I’d missed him. I wanted to tell him about my dreams, about how I kept reliving that awful day, about how his death had haunted me. With every step, I could feel the guilt reaching up through the earth and pulling me down by the ankles, as though it were trying to bury me in his stead.
I wanted to tell him about my regrets. If only I had done something differently. If we had missed our train down from Montreal; if we had run out to the lake five minutes earlier. Or the one that hurt most of all: if I hadn’t let him come along with me in the first place. Maybe then, things would have turned out differently; maybe then I could have saved him.
He spoke first, his voice so lifeless that I barely recognized it. “The Undead have followed us. We have to leave.”
They each stepped into the courtyard, their eyes bleary and unfocused as they emerged. We ran down the mountain toward the three lakes in the distance, each larger than the next, until we spotted the first sign of life. Trees. Dante and I led the way, weaving through the snow until we were under the cover of the woods, when a shout rang out behind us.
“Wait!” Theo said. He was far behind us, huddled over Anya, who was lying in the snow.
I ran to them. Her face was ashen, her hair tangled with ice. The clothes hung limp around her frame, which looked astonishingly thin. She had lost weight. Her chest heaved, her breath so quick it frightened me.
“What happened?” I asked, but Anya didn’t answer. Her eyes fluttered shut, as though she were struggling to keep them open.
Theo shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “She started to slow down. I turned to ask her what was wrong, and she collapsed.”
I knelt over Anya. “What’s wrong?” I said.
She pressed her lips together, still trying to regain her breath. She took my hand and placed it on her heart.
I didn’t understand why until I felt it beat, its rhythm quick and irregular, like the heartbeat of an Undead.
My arm recoiled. “What—what is that?”
“Is it still beating?” she asked.
I nodded. “Though not like mine.”
“Good,” she said. “It’s hard for me to tell anymore if I’m alive or dead. The line is so thin these days.”
“But it feels like...”
“An Undead,” Anya whispered, finishing what I couldn’t bring myself to say. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“I’m dying,” she said. “I’ve been dying.”
Her words struck Theo in the face. He shrank back into the snow, stunned. They knocked the breath from me as well. I sat back on my heels, feeling a pit form in my stomach. I finally understood why she had carried around a tin of elixirs, why she had always reserved a few pills only for herself, why she frequently looked tired and breathless. I thought back to her tarot reading, to the card of the woman dying of an illness. It hadn’t been referring to her mother; it had been referring to Anya.
“Of what?” I asked, trying to steady my voice. I wished I had already lost my sense of touch, for then I wouldn’t have had to feel so overwhelmed with guilt, with sadness. Why hadn’t I noticed? All of the clues had been there, but I had missed them. I had been too wrapped up in Dante, in my own quest.
“Cardiomyopathy. A disease of the heart. The muscle is wasting away. It has been for years.”
That was why Monsieur had sent her with us, why she had been willing to come in the first place. “Tell me what to do.”
“You can’t do anything,” she said. “No one can. Eventually my heart will stop, though now it seems it might be sooner rather than later.”
While she spoke, Theo rifled through her bag until he found her tin. He sifted through the bottles and salves inside, measuring out five different kinds of pills. “These are the ones you normally take, right?” He took a bottle of water from his bag and offered it to her. “Take them.”
Anya gave him a weak smile. “You’ve been paying attention,” she said, and with some difficulty sat up, taking the water from Theo. “I never realized.”
“Neither did I,” Theo said, studying her. “What about the black pill?” he said, holding up the thin vial with a single tablet inside. “You said it was for emergencies.”
Anya shook her head. “Only the bad kind of emergencies,” she said. “If I’m in pain and want to end it.”
Her words startled Theo. He dropped the vial back in the tin, as though he no longer wanted to touch it. “I didn’t think anyone could surprise me,” he said softly. “But you always prove me wrong.”
Dante stared up at the mountains, where I could see the small figures of the Undead moving toward us. “Can you make it a little bit farther?” he said. “I can help you.”
Anya shook her head. “I can walk,” she said. With Theo’s help, she stood. “Though I have to go slower.”
We pressed onward until a vast frozen lake came into view: the first of the three circles that led to the final point. When Noah saw it, he stopped. His eyes lingered on the frozen ripples, which looked eerily similar to the ice he been pulled under at Gottfried. His bag slipped from his shoulder but he made no move to pick it up; his gaze was distant, as if he were staring back into the past.
Watching his shoulders curl forward and his hand tremble by his side, I wanted nothing more than to stand beside him and tell him that I would fix everything that I had done, that I would give him his life back. But I didn’t know if those were promises I could keep.
While Anya rested, I peered through the trees at the mountain in the distance. The Undead were closer; I could feel their wisps licking at my skin, beckoning me toward them. They looked like a group of dark silhouettes trailing behind us down the slope. Yet one by one, they began to vanish. I scanned the mountainside, wondering if they were splitting up and trying to surround us, when I saw something white dart through the snow in the distance, like a fist of wind and ice billowing toward one of the Undead boys. It knocked him off his feet and dragged him out of sight.
I squinted. What had I just seen? It happened so quickly that the other Undead didn’t notice.
After a moment, another Undead boy fell to the ground, and was pulled by some invisible force into the woods. A person, or a white specter of the woods? I thought back to each of the points, and how I’d kept seeing the white faces of girls watching me through the snow.
“The Keepers,” I whispered.
“What about them?” Eleanor said from behind me.
“They’re up there,” I said. “Taking the Undead.”
If Noah heard me, he didn’t let on. When he finally turned, he lowered his eyes to the ground so that we couldn’t see his face. He hefted his bag onto his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
I glanced at Anya, who was leaning on Theo’s shoulder. “I’m ready,” she said.
The second lake was wider and deeper than the first, and covered in a thin layer of ice, through which I could see the water pressing against the surface. I felt the presence of the Undead fade behind us.
The sun was setting over the trees when we stumbled upon a sleepy mountain town. The snowy roofs of the houses blended so perfectly into the landscape that at first, I thought my eyes were betraying me. There was only one main street, laid with cobblestones, and so quiet it looked deserted. It was lined with wooden houses, their rooftops blanketed with white.
“Where is everyone?” Anya said.
One of the buildings bore a sign that read: boulangerie. We were back in France. Through the window, I caught a glimpse of a woman rolling out dough on a table. She stopped working when she saw me and watched us as we passed.
Dante looked up at the darkening sky. “We should stay here tonight,” he said.
I scanned the houses. Each door had a large metal knocker and was studded with iron rivets like the entrance of a fortress. They looked like they hadn’t been opened in decades. Rising over the houses stood a steeple topped with a metal cr
oss. I followed it down to see a simple stone church. Dante must have seen it, too, for he nodded and walked toward it.
The church greeted us with the calmness of a place that hadn’t changed for centuries. It was modest in size, with bare wooden beams vaulted beneath the ceiling. The waning light shifted through dusty stained glass windows, though the colors looked monochrome to me.
We settled near the pulpit, gathering prayer candles for light. Anya nestled in by the front pew, her breathing thin and weak. She closed her eyes, trying to steady herself while Eleanor lit the candles one by one, their flames making our shadows stretch over the walls. Eleanor curled up beside me. Even Undead, her face was like a burst of sunshine, her rosy cheeks now pale but just as full, her blue eyes now faded but just as warm. Her ringlets were sheared off into a boy’s haircut. I wrapped a lock around my finger.
“It was the only way to blend in with the Undead boys,” she said, touching a curl by her ear. The length still seemed to startle her. “I wish you had been there.”
I shook my head. “What happened?”
Eleanor looked to Noah. “You should start,” she said. “It’s your story.”
He adjusted his glasses. They were the same pair he’d worn at St. Clément, though they seemed more fitting now; more mature. “I rose from the lake. Everything was bleary and dull. I was so cold. The last thing I remembered was being pulled under the ice by the Undead. And there I was, wet and cold, yet no one else was around me. I didn’t know what had happened or how much time had passed. I didn’t know I was dead.” He let out a breath, as if he still couldn’t believe it.
“I looked for you,” he said, gazing at me. “But the lawn was empty. At first I thought the Undead had taken you. Then I saw her.” He looked to Eleanor. “She found me.”
“I saw everything,” Eleanor said. “I saw the Undead pull him into the lake; I saw them chase you in the woods, the Monitors following them. But I didn’t know what happened after that. I thought the Undead might have taken you. But there was nothing I could do alone. So I waited, watching the lake. All of the professors had gone to track down the Liberum, leaving us in the care of the school groundskeepers. I figured they would come back for Noah in a day or two, but no one did. It was too chaotic; they each must have thought that someone else was tending to him. I wanted to help him. Every day I watched the lake from my bedroom window, but I was too afraid to fish him out. If I got caught, I could be buried. So I waited. Nine days passed. On the tenth day, I went outside. After he got over the shock of how everything looked and felt—the muted colors, the dullness of the smells and sounds...” She let her voice trail off, as if she were trying to remember what the world had been like before, too. “I told him everything.”
Noah stared at the floor. “I thought she had made a huge mistake.”
Eleanor swallowed. “But I hadn’t.”
My dreams of Noah hadn’t been true, I realized. They had been a creation of my guilt, of my imagination. All that time, Eleanor had been with him. She had helped him. The thought put me at ease.
“We tried to figure out what to do,” Eleanor continued. “We could stay at Gottfried, where Noah could be taken care of for the remainder of his time on earth, but I already knew what that existence was like. It was bleak and empty, with nothing separating one day from the next. We were all wasting away. And then Noah told me about the chest. I knew then that there was only one thing to do. Leave.”
“That’s when we got the note,” Theo said.
“A note?” I said. “From whom?”
“A man named Monsieur,” Eleanor said. “He told us that we didn’t know him but he knew us. He instructed us to go to the Liberum and join them. That they would help us find you. He told us where they were headed, and where we could find their camp. So we went.”
“You joined the Liberum?” Theo said with a laugh. “What, did you just walk up to them in their camp and ask if you could join them?”
“Yes,” Noah said, his face grave. “After we cut her hair,” he said, nodding to Eleanor. “The Liberum only use boys. We had to make her blend in. Finding them was the hardest part. I can’t sense the Undead anymore like I used to be able to.” He let eyes drift to the shovel by my feet. “We searched the woods for days, looking for their tracks in the snow. I was ready to give up. We couldn’t just wander around the East Coast for weeks, hoping to stumble across the Liberum. After all, the Monitors were roaming the woods, too. What if they found us first? Then Eleanor had an idea.”
“I decided that we had to find the Monitors,” Eleanor said. “They would be easier to locate; they have to sleep and eat; they can’t just stay outside all day. They leave more of a trail. I thought if we found them, the Undead couldn’t be far away.”
“We don’t have to sleep or eat, and we don’t get tired, so it was easy to catch up to them. We traveled all night and all day, walking through the woods. We searched all of the inns and bed-and-breakfasts until we found them,” Noah said. “And just like Eleanor predicted, the Undead camp was there, too, just a few miles into the woods.”
“We tried to think of a good strategy,” Eleanor continued, “but there really isn’t any great way to approach the Liberum. So in the end, we took our chances and walked in.”
“They could have buried you,” Anya said, her face aghast.
Eleanor hung her head. “When you’re like this,” she said, gazing down at her pale skin, “risks don’t seem as risky.”
“The Undead boys seized us before we even made it into the camp. They dragged us in and brought us before the Liberum,” Noah said. “I told them we used to be Monitors. That we knew everything about how the Monitors worked and thought; that we could help them, if they would only let us. I told them I was an outcast. I could never return to the Monitoring community. They would put me to death. I still believe that.” Noah paused and looked at me. “All the while I was looking for you, wondering if you were somewhere in their camp.
“They said nothing while they listened to us. When we finished, they left to confer. A few hours later, they returned, telling us we could join. They needed us.”
“Why?” Anya said.
Noah tilted his head and gave her a funny look, as though the answer was obvious. “To get to all of you. To find the chest.”
“It was you that night in Bavaria,” I realized. “Both of you. That’s why the Undead didn’t surround me. Because you were guiding them away.”
Eleanor nodded. “We didn’t want them to take any of you,” she said. “But we knew we couldn’t prevent that without blowing our cover. So we led them toward Dante.”
“As an Undead, we knew he was the best one for the Liberum to claim,” Noah said, though his voice was so cold that I wondered if part of him liked the idea of separating Dante from me. “They wouldn’t be able to take his soul.”
Still, I had to admit that he was right. I thought back to the night at the castle in Germany, of how I had run out to find Noah disappearing into the night.
“I was looking for you,” Noah said. His eyes darted to Dante.
“The Liberum wouldn’t let me go on any of the night raids,” Dante said. “They left me under the watch of a group of Undead while we hiked up to the refuge. I asked them to find you. I wanted to make sure you were still here, and that someone was protecting you if the Liberum came.”
I remembered the voice I’d heard in Widow’s Pass. Was she there? Was she safe? I’d heard Dante say to an Undead boy. I realized then that Dante hadn’t been consorting with the Liberum or the Undead boys. All that time, he’d been talking to Eleanor and Noah. I turned to Dante. “I heard you speaking to them,” I said. “I heard your voice echo off the walls of Widow’s Pass.”
“We were planning to find you,” Eleanor said. “We were trying to steal the chest back from the Liberum.”
They’d done so much for me, and I hadn’t even known it. “I—I don’t know what to say. You put yourselves in so much danger for me.” I looked up
at Noah. “I don’t deserve it.”
Eleanor shifted her weight. “We didn’t just come for you,” she said. “We came because we want to find the Netherworld, too.”
CHAPTER 16
Good-bye
W HEN THE CANDLES HAD DRIPPED DOWN to stumps, Noah made his way to the stairwell that led up to the bell tower. Just before he disappeared into the corridor, he met my eye. Follow me, he seemed to say.
“I—I have to go,” I said to Dante.
He hesitated, as though he had known this moment would come. “Then go.”
I tiptoed after Noah, climbing the winding staircase, his presence coaxing my feet forward, cold and still like the first breath of winter. He stood by the stone barricade, his back turned to me as he gazed at the alpine view that stretched out before us, his outline dark against the night sky.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Noah said nothing. He didn’t even move.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He turned. “Sorry for what?”
“It’s my fault, what you are,” I said. “If it weren’t for me you’d be alive.”
He studied me, his face void of any warmth. “You don’t like what you see. You’re afraid of what I am now.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. I just—”
“Liked me better as a human,” Noah said, his face betraying the smallest hint of sadness. “But not enough to stay and find me.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “Dante—he took me away. I couldn’t go back; the Monitors were there.”
“You could have,” Noah said, his face softening. “But you chose Dante over me.”
