The next drawing was of a body with coins on its eyes, resting on a funeral pyre. The use of coins, Descartes explained, was a discovery of the Greeks, and were given to the dead so they could pay the boatman on the river Styx to take them to Hades. Below it was a picture of a child with cloth stuffed in his mouth. I stared at it, unable to believe what I was seeing. My parents couldn’t have been Undead; they were adults. So why would they have died that way? And what did their deaths have to do with any of this?


V. OF LATIN AND ITS EXTINCTION

Latin is the language the Undead speak. In ancient times, before the founding of the Roman Empire, before people discovered burial rituals, Latin was only spoken by children. It was the one way to tell who was Undead and who was alive.

In Roman mythology, two children were the original founders of Rome. Their names were Romulus and Remus, and they were brothers. While this is a commonly accepted myth among educated society, what most are not aware of is that Romulus and Remus were Undead, having both drowned in the River Tiber before rising again.

Before the founding of Rome, knowledge of the existence of the Undead was not prevalent.

Romulus and Remus gained followers by displaying their incredible abilities in large public gatherings. People were awed at their inhuman healing powers, their inability to be killed by normal means, and their advanced rhetoric and linguistic skills, and believed the children to be sent from the gods to found their city. However, they quarreled over who would be king. Romulus slew Remus by burying him alive. As the first king of Rome, Romulus instituted Latin as the primary language, teaching it not only to children, but to adults of the upper class who were involved in governmental matters.

Eventually the clergy adopted Latin. Since Latin came so naturally to the Undead, they believed it had to be a language sent from the gods. Meanwhile, Romulus was trying to find his lost soul, and worried that the other Undead in Rome would accidentally take it. He thus instituted burial rituals and funeral pyres to rid the city of the Undead.


Skimming through the history of Latin through the ages, I skipped ahead to the part on its decline.

With the spread of Protestantism and the reform of the Catholic Church, Latin slowly died out, replaced by the Romance languages. Many people forgot about the Undead and, consequently, the origins of Latin. Thus, it came as a surprise when an entire language ceased to exist. Of course, one realizes that a language can only become extinct when the people who speak it have been exterminated.


Romulus and Remus. The first things that came to mind when I heard those names weren’t children, but cats. Siamese cats. The ones roaming about the headmistress’s office. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The rest sounded vaguely familiar from Latin class, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to fully comprehend what Professor Lumbar had meant. Still, Latin wasn’t my concern. Cassandra was Undead. Benjamin’s soul was taken. Then Cassandra was somehow killed again. Buried. And the school’s administration knew about it and was covering it up. Why?


And then there was Dante. My Dante. Undead Dante. Slowly, everything began to make sense. I went over everything, every subtle turn of phrase, every unexplainable moment—the séance, the paper cut, the way I felt when he touched me.


He had been on the green the night of the séance because I had accidentally conjured him. He couldn’t go in the tunnel with me. His Latin was perfect, but he told me he hadn’t studied it before coming here. I thought about what Professor Lumbar had written on the board on the first day of class. Latin: The Language of the Dead. “I just woke up one morning and it clicked,” Dante had explained that night in the classroom. By that logic, the rest of the Latin club—Gideon, Vivian, Yago, and Cassandra—must have all been Undead too.


His skin was always freezing. He didn’t use a blanket and he rarely wore a jacket unless he knew I might need it. He kept his windows open even in the winter and seemed impervious to the weather.


And he never slept. He rarely came to the dining hall. He wouldn’t kiss me on the lips. And when he touched me, the world blurred, sounds and smells and tastes collided into an unrecognizable dissonance. Maybe that was why I always felt weak when I was around him: because he was somehow draining the sensation from my body into his.


But if I accepted the fact that my boyfriend was dead, what did that mean? Did these sensations happen to everyone who was around him? Suddenly I felt weak. I crawled into bed, where I stared at the ceiling and thought about death and life and everything in between, until the sun cracked open its eye.


On Christmas morning, Dustin knocked on my door. “Miss Winters,” he said cheerfully. “Breakfast.”


I didn’t move. My parents were dead. My boyfriend was dead. My grandfather had a mysterious hidden room that had books about the walking dead—which is what I knew I would feel like if I attempted to stand up.


“I don’t feel well,” I said meekly, and rolled over.


“Miss Winters,” Dustin said, knocking again. “Are you quite all right?”


“No. Please go away.”


He lingered a few seconds longer before I heard the muffled sounds of his footsteps disappearing down the stairs. Not long after, there was another knock. This time, no one waited for me to reply. My grandfather ducked into the room. “Dustin told me you weren’t feeling well,” he said, cautiously stepping close to my bed. He set a glass of orange juice on my bedside table. “I’ve brought you some juice.”


“Please go away,” I said, my voice trembling.


There was a long silence. I heard my grandfather bend over and pick up Seventh Meditation, which I had stupidly left on my bedside table.


He sat on the edge of my bed and placed his hand on the outline of my ankle beneath the blankets. He smelled of cigars and leather. “Death is nothing to be afraid of.”


“It’s not death I’m afraid of.”


“What is it, then?”


“Life,” I said, my voice small. The thought of living without my parents was practically unbearable, and Dante was the only person who gave me something to live for. Now that I knew he was dead, it seemed like there was nothing left.


“I haven’t been honest with you, Renée. I know this,” he said gently. “But if you’ll get dressed and come downstairs, I’ll explain everything over breakfast.”


I blinked back tears. He waited a few seconds longer, but I made no effort to respond. Finally he stood up. I heard the door click shut behind him.


Slowly, I willed myself out of bed and got dressed. I rinsed my face and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. When I glanced at my reflection in the mirror, it was frightening: my eyes swollen, the circles beneath them making my face look hollow.


“Is it true?” I asked, sitting down at the breakfast table.


My grandfather looked up from his coffee and newspaper. Outside it was sunny and snowing, the entire world white and happy, as if the day were mocking me. Beneath the Christmas tree were stacks of presents.


“Is it true that my parents were killed by the Undead?”


My grandfather shuffled around his newspaper and glanced at Dustin, who left for the kitchen. “Yes.”


A portrait of Charlemagne standing valiantly over a slaughtered boar hung on the opposite wall. I stared at it in silence as I imagined my parents’ last moments. The gauze and coins, which I still couldn’t make sense of. And then a faceless child, wild and bestial, sucking the life from their bodies. I closed my eyes as the face transformed into Dante’s. Had he killed people? Had he taken innocent lives?


“Who was it?” I demanded, suddenly angry.


My grandfather clasped his hands together and shook his head. “I have spent every day since their deaths trying to figure that out. But sadly, I do not have an answer for you. The Undead are hard to track, especially when they perform random acts of violence, which I suspect was the case with your parents.”


A random act of violence? It couldn’t be. There had to be a better reason than that. “But what about Benjamin Gallow? He’d died under almost exactly the same conditions.”


“Exactly. They were all killed by Non Mortuus. It isn’t as rare as you think. Why do you think Gottfried exists?”


“So...so everything in the book is true?”


“Most of it. The rest is based on myth and assumption.”


“The Undead,” I said, trying to get used to the idea. “What exactly are they?”


“Children who died and were not buried.”


“So they’re like zombies?” “The common depiction of the zombie does not do them full justice. They have functioning minds, they have thoughts. The only difference is that they don’t have souls, which leaves them unable to feel sensation. They can see and hear, but they cannot perceive beauty or sadness or wonder associated with the things they see or the sounds they hear.”


“Are you sure?” Dante definitely felt sensation when he was around me. Hadn’t he told me that in his room the night after Grub Day?


“Quite positive. It’s one of the primary characteristics of the Undead.”


“Even when they’re around a living person?”


“Yes, even when they’re around a living person.”


I hesitated. “So anyone can become Undead?”


“Only people who die before the age of twenty-one. You, for example, could become Undead if you died and were not buried or cremated or mummified.”


“And then someone else would have my soul?”


“Yes. A child born on the same day that you died.”


“And then I would be soulless for twenty-one more years, before I died again?”


“If you weren’t buried, yes. Though the myth is that if you somehow found the person with your soul, you could take it back by Basium Mortis, or sucking the soul back into the body. Then you would be human again, and live a natural life span.”


I imagined Dante taking his soul back from a child, but quickly shook the thought from my head. “Why is it a myth?”


“Because finding one’s soul is an almost impossible task. Think of the odds—how many people are born and die each day, all over the world. There hasn’t been a single recorded episode of an Undead finding and taking its soul back. It is the great myth of history. That one can cheat death.”


I couldn’t ignore my grandfather’s use of the word its. “So why do people think it’s possible?”


“Because it is possible for the Undead to take souls that aren’t theirs. It delays the decaying process, giving them a few more years of ‘life’ before they begin to decline.”


“And the human who loses his soul dies?”


My grandfather nodded. “Or, if he isn’t discovered and is under the age of twenty-one, he could also become Undead.”


“But then couldn’t he just take his soul back from the Undead who took it?”


“No, because a taken soul will not occupy the Undead who performs Basium Mortis unless it is the original soul of the Undead. Otherwise, it will soon leave the Undead and be reborn anew.”


Dustin brought out a plate of poached eggs and Canadian bacon.


“So Gottfried Academy is...is a school for zombies?”


“The Undead,” my grandfather corrected. “And no, it isn’t. Not exclusively, at least. Though at one point it was.”


I waited for my grandfather to continue. He cleared his throat. “It was originally founded to educate the Undead about who they were. As you probably know, Bertrand Gottfried was a doctor who built the school as an infirmary for children. What many do not know is that it was an infirmary for dead children.


“He had learned about the existence of the Undead years before founding the infirmary. His idea was to create a hospital that housed Undead children, so he could study them. He was trying to figure out how the bodies of children differed from adults, for only children can reanimate. The seclusion of Attica Falls was one reason why the location was ideal, as was the altitude and climate. At the age of twenty-one ‘Undead years,’ as some call them, the children begin to rapidly decay. Cool temperatures help prevent that process, much like the effect of a refrigerator. The last reason was the lake. Salt is a preservative; each patient was required to take a bath in the lake every morning.


“Now, as you may know, soon after the infirmary was founded there was a reported outbreak of the measles and mumps, which killed over a hundred children. Of course, disease wasn’t the real cause of death. Many of Bertrand’s patients were due to expire around the same two-year period. Although Bertrand had devised many ways to help prolong the ‘life’ of the Undead, he had not discovered a way to stop their decay. They all perished. Most of the children didn’t have parents or families, so there were no further inquiries.” My grandfather held out his coffee cup, and Dustin stepped up to the table and spooned sugar into it.


“When all the children died, Bertrand didn’t know what to do with the bodies. Instead of burying them in plots, he dug a vast underground tomb. Yet these catacombs also served another purpose: if Bertrand encountered an Undead that he wished to put to rest, he could bury them there.


“Unfortunately, Bertrand died not long after the infirmary opened. He was found in the lake. Of course, it wasn’t a natural death. One of his patients took his soul.


“After he died, the three founding nurses shut down the infirmary, keeping only the current patients inside. During that time, they went through his office and discovered hundreds of pages of notes and a journal, in which he had documented his findings. His notes have been integral in shaping our understanding of the Undead and how they function. He had also developed plans to turn the infirmary into a school for the Undead. The nurses carried out his wishes and reopened the school as Gottfried Academy. The purpose of the school was to teach the Undead how to live out their ‘lives’ without searching for their soul or taking the souls of others.


“At first it was only a school for the Undead. The nurses sought to educate them not only in worldly matters, but in matters concerning their situation. Many Undead children were unaware that they were dead. As a result, they suffered from existential crises.”


“What do you mean existential crises?”


“Imagine waking up one morning and everything is the same, except different. You don’t like food anymore. You never sleep. You can’t hear or see or smell things the way you used to. You feel a constant emptiness within you.”


“That’s the way I felt when my parents died,” I said softly.


My grandfather nodded. “Existential crises happen to everyone. With humans it’s emotional rather than biological. This is the real Gottfried curse—the fate the Undead are faced with—and when they are unaware of what is happening to them, they can be very dangerous. Imagine an Undead girl trying to kiss a boy. She would accidentally take his soul and kill him.”


Which was why Dante wouldn’t kiss me, I thought.

“With the medical and technological advances over time, the Undead became rare, as fewer children died and more of those who did were buried. Slowly, the school began to integrate living children into its student body. Gottfried needed money, and accepting normal students, or what we refer to as ‘Plebeians,’ was a secure way to keep the school running.”


Plebeians. I had seen that word before, in Benjamin Gallow’s file. “But wasn’t it unsafe for them?”


“At first, yes. There were a slew of ‘accidents,’ all caused by the Undead. The school opened and closed, and was soiled by scandals that were artfully covered up by the faculty as natural disasters or epidemics. They only stopped when a new headmaster took over and revolutionized the school, training faculty in defense and burial rituals, designing more proactive course work, and instituting a stricter code of rules and regulations, which has now become the Gottfried Academy Code of Discipline. All of the rules have practical safety applications. For example, the banning of romantic relationships was designed to prevent accidental Basium Mortis.” “But it’s still unsafe.”


“Although the Undead are rather rare these days, there’s still a chance of encountering the Undead at any school in the country. Plebeians are far better off encountering them at Gottfried, where there are trained professors and rules. Moreover, the only way to truly teach the Undead not to kill is to expose them to the living, so that they learn to value others not only in theory, but through their friendships. An Undead is far less likely to take the life of a friend than a stranger.”


I stared at the food growing cold on my plate and considered Dante. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that he was dead.


“One of the last safety precautions the school took was to dig tunnels that ran through Bertrand Gottfried’s original catacombs. As you recall, the Undead cannot go underground. In the chance of attack, professors could direct the Plebeians to the tunnels, where they could seek refuge.”


“So all of the professors know about the … the … Undead?” I still had trouble saying the word, as if speaking it out loud made it more real.


“Yes.”


“And the... Pleb—”


“Plebeians.”


“Right, the Plebeians know about the Undead?”


“No. It has long been Gottfried’s policy not to explicitly tell Plebeian students about the existence of the Undead. It was feared that teaching living students about the Undead would create natural segregation and discrimination. The classes at Gottfried address issues that are pertinent to all students, not just the Undead.” “But the Undead can tell the difference between the Undead and the living?” I asked, thinking about Cassandra and Benjamin. Had she known that Benjamin was a Plebeian?


“Of course. They were once living themselves; they can recognize the changes one goes through after reanimating because they experienced them firsthand. They also have special classes, in which they are taught about what they are and what it means for them.”


Advanced Latin, I thought.


“But more important, they are drawn to life. That is perhaps their only ‘sensation,’ if you could call it that. So it is a safe assumption that they know the living from the Undead.”


“And Gottfried is the only organization in the world that knows about the Undead? No one else knows?”


“There are others. Gottfried is one of three sister schools, each founded by one of the three original nurses who worked with Bertrand. Most of the Undead were listed as disappearances rather than deaths, because the bodies were never found. So when they reanimate and wander home, their loved ones aren’t usually aware that they’re dead. If they are still in contact with their parents, they might inform them; though more often they prefer to keep their condition to themselves.”


“But why? I mean, why is it such a big secret? Why not tell someone? Like the police. Or the government.”


My grandfather laughed. “And what would you tell them? Imagine trying to explain the theory of the Undead to someone else. They would think you were insane.”


He had a point.


“And even if they believed you, it’s difficult to tell the Undead from those who are alive. Can you imagine the kind of damage the police could do if they started blindly arresting children? If the outside world found out, it would be the start of the biggest witch hunt in history.”


“How are you so sure? I mean, a long time ago people did know about the Undead, didn’t they? That’s how they created all the burial rituals. And then over time we just forgot what they were for.”


“Discrimination has always existed, which is exhibited in the fact that they created the rituals in the first place. Romulus killed most of the Undead children in Rome, including his own brother, out of fear.”


“So … why did you send me to Gottfried? I’m just a Plebeian, right? What does this have to do with me?”


My grandfather studied me pensively. “Because it is an excellent school. And a safe school. The Undead exist everywhere; at least at Gottfried the professors are aware of their existence and are trained to deal with them. That, and I wished you to know the truth about the world. Aren’t you glad you know?”


I shook my head. “I don’t know. I mean, yes. And no.” Of course I wanted to know the truth. The question was, could I accept it?


That afternoon I went downstairs and knocked on the door to Dustin’s quarters. The door opened suddenly. “Miss Winters,” he said warmly. “You should have rang the service bell instead of coming all the way down here.”


I shrugged. “It’s no problem. I don’t like using bells anyway.”


“What can I do for you?”


“I was wondering if there’s a video-rental store around here that’s open?”


“There is one but twenty minutes away. Would you like me to take you there?” “Please.”


We drove through the back roads of Massachusetts until we reached a dingy strip mall with a liquor store, a convenience store, a barber shop, an ice-cream parlor, and a place that read king’s videos.


A gawky teenage boy behind the counter eyed us as we came in. I went straight to the horror section in the back.


Without much discrimination, I started pulling movies from the shelves, all about the Undead. Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, and about two dozen others. When I was finished, I brought them to the register. Dustin trailed behind me, carrying the rest.


The boy behind the counter smiled, his teeth crooked and covered with braces. “A zombie freak,” he said, giving me a wide grin. “I love this one,” he said, holding up a movie with a ghoulish creature on the cover. “It’s a classic.”


I nodded. “Yeah.”


“These are due back in seven days,” he said, ringing us up.


“That’s fine,” Dustin said from behind me. We took the bags and left.


Dustin set up the DVD player in the Red Room, and I arbitrarily picked a movie from the pile and put it in. Images of the Undead flashed in front of my eyes—people rising from the grave, cemeteries overrun by staggering corpses, women screaming as they ran to their houses, chased by zombies; men trapped in their cars, swarmed by the Undead. Over each zombie face I mentally superimposed Dante’s, trying to come to terms with what he was.


I didn’t leave the Red Room for days. I went from one movie to the next, falling in and out of sleep to the blue light of the screen. Dustin left plates of food outside the door, but I barely touched them. A few times a day my grandfather came in to check on me, hovering awkwardly over the couch before giving up. Every so often I would venture down the hall to get a glass of water from the bathroom. Otherwise, I stayed put. The mansion creaked and groaned as the days grew darker. Gusts of wind rattled the windows. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Dante continued to call every night, but I wasn’t ready to talk to him. “Tell him I’m busy,” I told Dustin when he appeared at the door holding a silver platter with a call note. I couldn’t talk to him. Why hadn’t he told me? And what was I going to say to him? Hi, Dante, I know you’re the walking dead and that you have a secret desire to kill me. How was your day?


Nighttime was the hardest. I called Annie, but I couldn’t tell her about Dante because, where would I begin? So I told her about the mansion and about Eleanor, and she told me about my old friends, who seemed more and more alien to me now. With my parents gone, friends far away, and Dante Undead, I felt so lonely that sometimes I thought I couldn’t bear it. I felt betrayed and used and alone—completely and utterly alone. Now that I knew what Dante was, I couldn’t fathom how I hadn’t seen it before. I wanted to believe that Dante was the kind of boy I’d always dreamed of, the kind of boy who was too perfect to actually exist. And he didn’t. Or at least not exactly. Every night I stayed up until the early hours of the morning, curled up on the couch, staring into the darkness until I cried myself into a fitful, haunted sleep.

Wow such a wonderful piece... is it fiction or non fiction

it is a fiction

Waoh! Been following this story since last week. Keep it coming please!

CHAPTER 14

The Dead Forest


ON THE FIFTH DAY I WOKE UP TO TWO KNOCKS on the door. Wearily, I opened my eyes. In front of me the screen had turned to a scrambled static. Before I could answer, Dustin opened the door, holding a shotgun. I winced at the sudden stream of sunlight. “Miss Winters,” he said. “I was wondering if you might accompany me while I hunt for wild game?”


Rubbing my eyes, I gazed from the screen to the gun. It was a bizarre sight, though after watching almost forty hours of horror movies, it didn’t seem that weird. I pulled myself off the couch. “Okay.”


“Renée,” my grandfather said, delighted to see me at breakfast. “How are you feeling?”


“I could be better.”


“I hear there’s a boy calling for you,” he said over his newspaper. I shrugged, patting down my hair, which at this point felt like a bird’s nest.


“Tell me about him.”


“He’s no one.”


My grandfather gave me a knowing look. “No one indeed. I once heard that from your mother. Two weeks later she had eloped and moved to California, with nothing but your father and the clothes on her back.”


I stopped chewing. My parents had eloped? They’d never told me that. “Well, I don’t want to talk to him. I’ve already told Dustin.”


“I see,” he said, frowning. “Might this have something do with the films you’ve been watching, and our chat the other night?”


I narrowed my eyes. “No.”


Just in time, Dustin walked into the room, armed with the long-barreled gun, a goose whistle, a bag marked Shells, and two brown paper bags.


“Whenever you’re ready, Miss Winters.”


“I’m ready now,” I said, eager to leave the questioning eyes of my grandfather, who was definitely not going to let Dante go unnoticed.


He clasped his hands over one knee. “What is it today, Dustin?”


“Wild snow geese, sir.”


“Excellent. Excellent. Well, have a good time. Try not to shoot any people, now. And if you do, bury them.” He winked at me, but I didn’t appreciate his humor.


Donning a pair of high rubber boots, a fur-lined parka, and earmuffs, I set out with Dustin to the grounds behind the estate. The sky was a cloudless blue, the branches of the evergreens around us heavy with snow. Dustin showed me how to blow the goose whistle, and we followed the sounds of their response calls until we reached a frozen pond.


“Be very still,” Dustin said, crouching low while looking through his binoculars at a flock of geese pecking at the snow by the edge of the water. Slowly, he took the duck gun from his shoulder and handed it to me. “Now, all you have to do is aim in their general direction and pull the trigger.”


I stared at the gun as if it were a foreign object, not realizing that I was supposed to do the shooting. “I...um... I don’t think I can... I mean, I don’t really want to kill anything.”


“As you wish,” he said, handing me his lunch bag. Putting on his goggles, he squinted along the barrel of the gun and aimed it at the pond. And fired.


The birds scattered into the air, flying frantically toward the trees above us. Without flinching, Dustin aimed again, this time almost directly up. There was a squawk, followed by a cloud of feathers. Dustin ripped off his goggles and searched the sky.


“Call!” he shouted.


I looked up. Suddenly I heard something descend through the air. My arms moved without me, and before I knew it, the dead goose dropped into my arms, a flurry of blood and down.


Dustin turned to me, a smile spreading across his face. I screamed and dropped it, shaking the feathers off my hands in a panic.


“An excellent catch, Miss Winters! Excellent!”


“Just Renée,” I said, correcting him as I wiped my hands on my jacket. “And nice shot.”


“Why, thank you,” he said, slinging the bird over his shoulder. “In my time, I was a great skeet proficient.”


I nodded, having no clue what he was talking about.


We ate lunch by the pond. Since I didn’t want to shoot anything, we ended up sitting by the water, feeding the remaining geese bits of our sandwiches instead.


“Thanks for taking me out here,” I said. “It’s a nice change of scenery.”


“It’s my pleasure. I thought you might need a bit of fresh air after all of those films.”


I let out a laugh. “Yeah. They were pretty bad.” I threw a piece of bread onto the snow.


“Miss Winters—”


“Just Renée,” I interjected.


“Very well, then... Renée. I feel compelled to tell you that movies often do not depict reality. The people in your life are still the same people you knew before.”


“Except they’re not people.”


Dustin gazed out over the lake. “This Mr. Berlin. Has he offended you in some way?”


“He lied to me about who he was. He made me think I was losing my mind and seeing things, when he knew I wasn’t.”


Dustin frowned and hoisted himself up. “I see. Well, I suppose it’s settled, then. Shall we pack up and head back?”


I let my eyes wander over the geese still grazing by my feet, realizing that I didn’t want it to be settled. “Yeah, I guess so.” And in the dwindling afternoon light we made our way back to the mansion.


“Dustin, did you know about...?” I asked him before we went inside.


“About what?”


“I know you were listening at breakfast. You were there, in the corner. You must know.”


“I have been aware of the existence of the Undead since ...since I was your age,” he said, opening the door for me. “And yet I still trust your grandfather with your safety.”


Wiping my boots on the mat, I stepped inside, peeling off my outerwear piece by piece. Normally, my grandfather worked with talk radio on, but now the house was strangely silent. “Hello?” I called out as Dustin unloaded our gear and brought the goose to the kitchen to be defeathered.


As I took my hat off, my hair wild with static, I noticed a note on the foyer side table. It was on my grandfather’s stationery.


R,


Left on business. Dustin will see you back to school.


—BW


January was blustery and bleak. Dustin drove me back to school, where, against his protests, I dragged my suitcase up to my room. The snow moved like sand dunes in the wind, and icicles hung tenuously from the roof, thick and irregular. Everything was white, even the sky, the clouds blurring the horizon into an endless barren landscape.


Even though the investigation about Eleanor was technically still going on, with no leads, no suspects, and no evidence, it had degenerated into guesswork and speculation. A few students didn’t come back to school because their parents thought it was too dangerous. In response, Gottfried tightened its security by increasing the number of guards both on campus and around the wall, and by enforcing stricter rules for day students entering and exiting the campus.


Although I had no decent theories, my discovery of the Undead made everything more logical. Gideon and the rest of the Latin club had to be Undead. It fit with their behavior—and their files. And if Benjamin had died of Basium Mortis, that could mean that Cassandra had taken her boyfriend’s soul. But who killed Cassandra? And was the same person behind Eleanor’s disappearance?


After spending winter break recovering at her mother’s house, Eleanor returned to Gottfried. She burst into the room and was about to give me a hug when she stopped as if she had changed her mind, and pulled away before we touched. “Is everything all right?” I asked, giving her a weird look. It wasn’t like Eleanor to be standoffish.


“Yeah,” she said. “I just have a cold. I don’t want you to catch it.”


“We’re living in the same room,” I said with a laugh. “I’ll probably catch it anyway.”


For a moment we stood in silence, Eleanor looking uncharacteristically humorless. I didn’t know what to say, and small talk had never been my forte. So I just asked her what was on my mind. “Eleanor, what happened?”


She took off her beret.


“You have to tell me,” I said. “I know that look. You’re hiding something.”


She sighed and sat on her bed. “Okay, so don’t get mad at me, but this past semester, I was secretly dating...” She closed her eyes and bit her lip, bracing herself for my reaction, “Brett.”


“What?” I said, too loudly. It was so far from what I was expecting that I couldn’t help but stare, waiting for her to confirm that I had heard correctly. “Brett Steyers? You and Brett Steyers?”


Eleanor nodded.


“Why didn’t you tell me?”


“I don’t know. I liked the idea of a secret fling. It was so exciting and romantic to think we could get caught. And then when they found me, I didn’t want to tell anyone what really happened because they might suspect him, and it wasn’t his fault.”


“What do you mean ‘what really happened’?”


“On Grub Day I went to the library to study. Later, I snuck out to meet Brett, then tried to sneak back into the dorm through the basement. But just after I stepped inside, someone locked the door behind me. I tried to climb into the chimney to get back to our room, but the flue was closed. I heard four loud bangs, like a hammer on metal, and water came rushing in from somewhere in the ceiling. I tried going to the furnace room to find another way out, but the basement was already filling with water. I screamed and screamed, but the water was too loud for anyone to hear me.”


“How did you get out?”


She shrugged. “One day I just woke up and the flue was open, so I climbed out.”


“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”


“I didn’t want them to know about the chimney. It’s our only way out. And I didn’t want anyone to suspect Brett.”


“But what if it was Brett?”


Eleanor shook her head. “It wasn’t. Because I was coming back from meeting him when it happened. He would have had to be in two places at once to have broken the pipes while I was in there. Besides, why would he want to kill me?”


“So are you guys still...you know?”


Eleanor sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him yet,” she said, and unzipped her bag.


Sitting on the bed while she unpacked and told me about her winter vacation, I wanted to believe that nothing had changed, that we were back to the first day of school, before the flood, before Dante, before everything got complicated. But it wasn’t true. She avoided talking about the flood any further, and remembering what it felt like after my parents died, I didn’t ask. Whatever happened in the basement had changed her. It was something about the way she carried herself, the way she now slouched and dragged her feet, the way her smile seemed thinner and crooked. They were subtle differences, barely noticeable to anyone except me. It was as if she had been replaced by a twin, identical, yet essentially different. So instead of talking about what happened, we went to lunch.


“So how was your break?” she asked as we sat in the dining hall. Groups of students gathered in clusters at the tables around us.


More than anything, I wanted to tell her about what I had learned at my grandfather’s house. “I was at home and I found this book,” I said, trying to figure out how to best explain everything. Where to begin? Should I start with the Seventh Meditation, or just skip ahead to what the Undead were and how everything in the book described Dante? “So you know howDante has all of these unexplainable things about him—like his cold skin and the fact that he never...he never...” My voice trailed off as Eleanor’s plate caught my eyes.


“Renée?” she said to me. “Hello? You were saying something?”


“Ate anything,” I said blankly. Eleanor’s plate was virtually empty. Putting my cup down, I studied her again. Could it be?


“You’re not eating anything,” I said quietly as I tried to remember how many days Eleanor had been in the basement. Ten?


Eleanor looked at her plate. “I sort of lost my appetite since the flood.”


“And you didn’t wear a coat when we walked over here.”


Eleanor didn’t notice until I pointed it out to her. “I guess you’re right,” she said, looking at the thin sweater covering her arms with surprise. “I didn’t even realize. Anyway, what were you saying about Dante and something about a book?”


Should I tell her about it? I wasn’t sure that Eleanor even knew what she was yet, and I definitely wasn’t the right person to tell her. But I also didn’t want to get accidentally killed. “Oh, um, nothing. Nothing.”


That night she didn’t sleep. She tossed around in bed, tangling herself in the sheets, while I had nightmares of zombies running toward me from every direction, their faces blank and emotionless. Every so often I would wake up in the middle of the night, my pajamas drenched in sweat. I’d kick off the covers and sit up, unable to stop thinking about all the things my grandfather had told me about Gottfried. And then I would stare at Eleanor and wonder if she was feeling the impulse to take my soul.


Suddenly she stood up and started pacing around the room. “Are you feeling okay?” I asked, my voice trembling.


Startled, she turned to me. “I don’t know. I have to think about it,” she murmured as if she were talking in her sleep, the hem of her nightgown fluttering around her legs in the moonlight.


The next morning I woke up early to go to Horticulture. It was our first day back in classes. Eleanor was in bed, curled up, facing the wall. I prodded her gently. “Eleanor, get up. We have Horticulture at six.”


Eleanor lay with her back to me. “I’m not going,” she said miserably. “I’m not in that class anymore.”


“What?”


“They switched my schedule. Just go without me.”


I waited a moment to see if she would roll over, but she didn’t move; and with nothing else to do, I left for class without her.


That morning we gathered by the chapel, until Professor Mumm showed up and led us out the gates of the campus.


“Renée,” Brett called out to me as we walked.


I stopped, looking at him in a new light. “Oh hi, Brett.”


He jogged up to me, looking like a robust ski instructor in a winter coat and a blue-and-yellow Gottfried scarf, his brown curls emerging from the bottom of a knit hat. “How’s it going?”


“It’s okay,” I said. “You know, I’ve been better.”


“Break wasn’t so great?”


I laughed and shook my head. “That’s the understatement of the year. But I did watch a lot of movies.”


“Crappy horror movies, I bet.”


I looked up at him, surprised.

He shrugged, pleased with himself. “You seem like the type.”


“What do you mean?”


“Well, you do always seem to find dead things whenever we’re in class.”


I bit my lip, thinking back to the first day of class, when I found the dead fawn, or later in the semester when I found the carcass of a bird when we were supposed to be collecting baby saplings; or when I found a frozen squirrel when we were supposed to be learning about seasonal mosses. “I guess you’re right.”


Brett stuffed his hands in his pockets. “It’s not a bad thing. Professor Mumm loves you; you’re like her prodigy. Maybe it’s some sort of special talent.”


Letting out a laugh, I said, “Yeah, right. More like a curse. A Gottfried Curse.”


I looked at him to see if he recognized the term, but he didn’t seem to be familiar with it. “Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Brett said. “About Eleanor.”


I smiled, unexpectedly comforted by normal conversation. “Thanks.”


“How is she?” His forehead was furrowed with worry.


How to respond. “She’s … different. Quieter. I think she’s traumatized,” I said, which was partially the truth.


“How was her break? Was she at home with her mother? Or was she in the hospital?”


“I think she was with her mom. It sounded like her break wasn’t so great. Recovering and all. Why don’t you just ask her yourself?”


“Oh, no. I don’t think so. Is her brother around a lot?”


Brandon had been hanging around Eleanor a lot these days, looking even more stern and angry than normal. And who could blame him? His sister had probably died, and from the scrutinizing look he gave anyone who talked to her, it was clear that he was certain someone was responsible, and was determined to find out who it was and punish them. “He is.”


Brett shrugged. “I figured as much. Did she say anything about how it happened?”


I shook my head. “She doesn’t know.”


We stopped just at the edge of the woods. Professor Mumm cleared her throat. “Today we’ll be learning how to read snow. Like soil, the texture and topography of snow and ice can tell us what lies beneath. A dune, a crevasse; whether the snow is powdery or packed, blue or creamy or a brilliant white—each of these characteristics can tell us what’s hidden beneath”—she held up an index finger—“if we learn how to read them. Now, what I want you to do is partner up.”


Brett elbowed me. “You and me?” I smiled.


When I got out of class, Dante was leaning on the stone at the entrance to Horace Hall, waiting for me, as beautiful as ever. He looked up at me as I approached, his face young and dark and gallant, his hair pulled back like an Italian model. If I hadn’t known everything that he was, I would have fallen in love with him all over again. He was wearing a crisp blue shirt and tie. Only a thin coat, no scarf. Snowflakes collected on his hair. Everything about him reminded me of how different we were.


“Renée,” he called out, but I kept walking. “Renée, wait. Why won’t you talk to me?” He reached out and grabbed my arm.


Unprepared for the coldness of his skin, I pulled my arm away and stared at him as if he were a stranger. For the briefest moment our eyes met, and a flicker of understanding passed between us before I looked away.


What does it feel like to discover that your boyfriend is Undead? Shocking. Unfair. But mostly disturbing. How was it possible that I had spent so much time with Dante without knowing what he truly was? I couldn’t decide which was more disturbing—that he was dying, or that a killer was dormant inside him. Was there a part of him that wanted my soul? I thought back to every time we almost kissed. I shivered at how close he had come to taking my life. Could he do it? I didn’t want to ask him or talk about it. What could I possibly say? I was alive, he was dead, and no amount of words would change that.


“Renée, please,” he said as I turned to go. “Just listen to me. Talk to me. I’ve been trying to call—” But I was already gone.


“How was Horticulture?” Eleanor asked while we were sitting in Philosophy, waiting for class to start. “We had it in the forest,” I said.


Eleanor’s eyes went wide. “What was it like? What did you do?”


“Snow topography. With partners.”


Nathaniel frowned. “What does that have to do with horticulture?” He looked at Eleanor. “So you weren’t there?”


I shrugged. “It’s pretty useful. You can figure out what the terrain is like below the snow, or if there’s stuff buried beneath it, or what the temperature of the ground is.”


“They switched me out,” Eleanor said. “Now I’m in something called Elementary Advanced Tongues. What does it even mean for a class to be elementary and advanced at the same time?”


“I was in that last year,” Nathaniel said, giving her a quizzical look, while I gave him a quizzical look. Was he Undead too? I ran through the criteria in my head, my mouth forming a tiny pink O as he spoke. His skin was cold, his senses were terrible, yet he was incredibly smart. “It’s Latin. Sort of.” He was fluent in Latin.


Eleanor rolled her eyes and collapsed back into her chair. “Great. When they said I didn’t have to take Elementary Latin, I thought they were giving me a break after what happened in the basement.”


I had been trying to figure out if Eleanor knew she was Undead. So far, the verdict was no.


Nathaniel and I went quiet at her mention of the flood, waiting to see if she would talk about it. I hadn’t talked to Nathaniel about it. I thought about telling Miss LaBarge, but assumed that the school knew, especially since they had switched Eleanor’s courses. I tried calling my grandfather, but he was away. So instead I tried to stay up as late as I could with Eleanor every night so she would have someone to talk to, hoping that when she did learn what she was, she would confide in me. Plus, it wasn’t exactly easy sleeping in a room with someone who I knew had the urge to kill me.


Eleanor looked between us. “What? You’d think a near-death experience would at least exempt me from the most boring class of all time.”


Slowly she smiled. I did too, as did Nathaniel, which quickly degenerated into laughter, and for the first time in a long while, even if just for a moment, I felt carefree again.


I didn’t see Dante again until last period. When I got to Crude Sciences, he was already sitting at our lab bench, looking statuesque as he leaned back in his chair, his tie and oxford artfully crinkled around the musculature of his neck. In front of him was a tray, upon which a neat row of medical tools was arranged: a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, a needle and hook, and a spindle of string. Without a word, I sat down next to him, trying with all my will to keep my eyes on the board. Dante turned to me. “Renée, I meant to tell you, but every time I tried, something always interrupt—” Ironically, before he could finish, the bell rang and Professor Starking walked in carrying a large plastic tub. He set it on his desk.


“Life sciences,” he said. “Otherwise known as Scientiae Vitae, the counterpart to Disciplina Mortuorum, or Science of the Dead.” He hoisted the tub from his desk and walked down the aisles. Using tongs, he fished around inside until he emerged with a dead frog.


“I tried to stay away from you,” Dante said. “The beginning of the year. I kept my distance because I didn’t want to put you in danger.”


“We can’t study life sciences until we study death,” Professor Starking said while he walked. “I have given each of you a frog. This is your vessel.”


“But I couldn’t stay away. I still can’t stay away from you. I wanted to tell you, I planned on telling you, but I didn’t want to lose you.”


I blinked back angry tears as I stared at our frog. It gazed back at me with glassy eyes. It wasn’t fair. Maybe it wasn’t Dante’s fault that he was dead, but it was his fault for involving me when he knew what he was.


“Renée? Say something.”


“Who can tell me what some of the characteristics of decay are?” Professor Starking looked around the room.


“Cold skin,” I whispered to Dante, looking at him from the periphery as I steadied my voice. “Stiff limbs. No sensation. Disconnected from the rest of the world.”


“Living people can have those characteristics too,” Dante replied. “The paper cut? The séance? You knew and you let me second-guess myself all semester.”


“I tried to tell you—”


“You make me feel alive?” I said, repeating what he had told me that night in Attica Falls. “I thought that was so romantic. I didn’t realize you were being literal.”


“Why does that have to make it mean less?”


“Have you killed anyone?” I asked quietly.


“No,” he said. “Of course not.”


“Will you kill anyone?”


“No.”


My lip quivered. “Will you die?”


Dante didn’t say anything for a long time. “Yes. But one day you will too. It isn’t so different.”


“Everything is different,” I said loudly. In the background, Professor Starking had stopped lecturing and was telling us to quiet down, but I didn’t care. “You’re... you’re …” I looked at the frog. “I don’t even know what you are.”


The class erupted in murmurs. Professor Starking anxiously tried to calm everyone down and get the class under control.


“I’m still the same person I was before—”


“You’re not a person!” I said, my eyes watering as they searched his for an answer that would help me understand what he was. Suddenly the room seemed incredibly silent. The entire class was looking at us.


“I don’t know what’s going on,” Professor Starking said nervously from the front of the class, “but you can figure out your differences in work detail.”


We walked in silence to the headmistress’s office, me three paces ahead. The secretary asked us to wait outside while she fetched Headmistress Von Laark, so I sat on the far side of the bench, arms crossed.


The office door opened. “Come in,” Headmistress Von Laark’s voice said soothingly. “Both of you.”


When we were seated in front of her, she asked us what happened. After a moment, we both spoke at the same time.


“He provoked me.... I was answering a question and he interrupted me,” I said.


“I provoked her,” Dante said. “It was my fault.”


Surprised at his selflessness, I suddenly felt embarrassed for blaming him. But it was his fault, I reassured myself. He did provoke me. If he hadn’t been dead, and if he hadn’t kept it from me, we never would have been in this situation. I crossed my arms, trying to convince myself that I was right, but quickly felt overwhelmed with guilt.

“I see,” the headmistress said. “Still, since you disrupted class together, you will both have to serve a work detail. Five o’clock tonight. The fifth floor of Horace Hall. Room eight, north wing.”


I left without saying a word to Dante because I didn’t know what to say. Not wanting to walk in the same direction as him, I went to Horace Hall. I couldn’t confide in Eleanor because she already had enough problems of her own, and Nathaniel just wouldn’t understand. The bell rang as I entered the building, and I waited for all the students to empty out before I climbed up the stairs to see Miss LaBarge.


The floorboards creaked as I walked down the narrow hallway that led to her office. It was tucked into the corner, a thin strip of light peeking out from beneath the door. I knocked.


Miss LaBarge’s voice floated through the wood. “Come in.”


She was sitting in an armchair under a yellow cone of light, reading. When she saw me, she smiled and stood up. “Renée,” she said, taking off her reading glasses. “What a pleasant surprise.”


I wiped my shoes on the doormat and stepped inside. Her office had a warm glow to it, and smelled like cinnamon and burning wood.


“Have a seat.”


I took off my scarf and sat in the love seat across from her. A thick hardcover book sat on the ottoman between us, a ribbon resting in its crease.


“What are you reading?”


Miss LaBarge picked it up. “Oh, just some silly stuff. Beyond Good and Evil, by a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s about how to decide what’s right and what’s wrong.” “That doesn’t sound silly at all.”


She frowned. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”


“How do you tell the difference?”


She closed the book and put it on the side table. “Sometimes you can’t.”


“So...say you’re dating a boy, and he tells you that he’s something, but it turns out that he’s actually something else. Is that wrong?”


“Would this supposed boy have a good reason for keeping it a secret?”


I thought about it. Dante probably hadn’t told me because he thought it would scare me. And he was right. “I guess so. But it’s still lying, isn’t it?”


“It is, but if the lie is meant to protect the other person from harm or pain, is it really that bad?”


“But I didn’t want to be protected; I wanted to know the truth,” I blurted out. She shrugged. “Sometimes there isn’t just one truth. Just because you discovered more about him doesn’t mean the person that he was before was a lie. You just had a less complete picture of him.”


I wanted to believe that what Dante and I had had before was real; that the things he’d said and done were still genuine even though he was Undead. But even if I could, that reality was slipping through my fingers. Dante had an expiration date, and there was no way I could help him.


“But what if I know we can never be together?”


“Hmm. That’s tricky. I think this calls for some tea. Hold on to that thought.” She got up and disappeared into the anteroom. I heard water running and then the sound of steam hissing out of a kettle, the clatter of dishes, the delicate clinking of a spoon against porcelain. She returned holding two cups and a teapot. “Chamomile?” I nodded.


“Never only exists in your head. Anything is possible.”


“But what if he’s too...too different?”


“Do you still have feelings for him? Even after knowing who he is?”


I shook my head. “I don’t know.” And then I thought about it. “Well, maybe... Yes.”


“Then you’ve answered your question. In love, everyone does things that hurt the other person, so really there is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ You just have to decide what you’re willing to forgive.”


“But what if I know it’s not going to last?”


“Then savor every moment.”


The pitter-patter of footsteps reverberated from the floor above us. I cradled the cup of tea in my lap. “Have you ever been in love?” She smiled. “Oh, I’d like to believe that I’m always in love with something. After all, what else is there?”


Professor Urquette was assigned to oversee our work detail. She was our Art and Humanities teacher. Her body was shaped like an eggplant, which she emphasized by always wearing multiple shades of purple and green. Even though she’d never married, she had the je ne sais quoi of a jaded divorcée. She hid the baggy skin on her throat beneath crocheted shawls and velvety scarves, and held her pen in the side of her mouth like a long cigarette. Her graying hair was kinky and defied all laws of gravity by puffing upward, making her seem three inches taller than she was. Every few months she dyed it back to its original color—red—and when the gray grew in beneath it, her head looked like it was on fire.


I arrived at her office a few minutes before five o’clock. Dante was already there, sitting at the desk by the door. Embarrassed about how I’d behaved earlier, I hesitated before going to the opposite end of the classroom and sitting by the window. Outside it was a beautiful clear day, and I could see Eleanor walking down the path with some girls from our floor. A cool breeze blew in, and I felt the tickling inkling of a sneeze. I tried to hold it in, but it came out suddenly, loud and unflattering. My face grew red and I began to rummage through my backpack for a tissue.


“Bless you,” Dante said quietly from across the room.


I looked up at him with surprise. “Thanks.”


We sat in silence until the door opened. Professor Urquette bounded into the room, wheezing from walking up the stairs. After dropping her bags on the desk, she collapsed into her chair and let herself catch her breath. Delicately, she patted her hair, making sure it was still in place.


“I understand you were both disrupting a school lecture?”


Neither of us said anything.


“Okay,” she said, hoisting herself up. “Normally I wouldn’t do this, but the school play is nearly upon us and we need wood to start building the set.”


We stared at her blankly.


“Well, gather your things. We’re going into the woods.”


The forest was on the other side of the wall, the strictly prohibited side. But apparently, even the most stringent rules had exceptions. When we got to the school entrance, Professor Urquette nodded at the guard, who opened the gates.


She brought us to the outskirts of the woods, holding her skirt up as she stepped through the snow in galoshes. Behind the trees, the White Mountains jutted up from the horizon. After walking a few feet, we stopped. Professor Urquette hung her bag on the crook of a tree and bent over. Grunting, she picked up a stick and hoisted herself back up.


“You’re looking for sticks, the thicker the better,” she said, snapping the twig in half and handing each of us a burlap bag. “Meet me back here in two hours. And don’t be late, or you’ll be in the woods after dark. I’ll be waiting by the entrance. If you need help, just holler.” With that, she waddled back to the guard’s hut by the gate.


I turned to Dante, wondering if he was angry, if he would forgive me. I tried to think of a way to apologize, but before I could say anything, he looked away and ventured into the woods, leaving me alone. Stung by his coldness, I waited until he was a few paces ahead, then headed through the trees in the opposite direction. The ground was covered in snow, which I sunk in up to my shins. The oaks were naked, their branches sticking into the sky like fingers. Oddly shaped mushrooms clung to the trunks, creating yellow staircases that spiraled up the bark. Taking giant strides, I walked into the confusing maze that made up the forest.


“You’re going the wrong way,” Dante called out to me.


“We’re picking up sticks. There is no wrong way.”


Shaking his head, he changed his course to my direction. Suddenly, an odd whiteness peeked through the trees. I walked toward it. As I approached, the number of trees diminished until there were barely any. It wasn’t until I was standing directly in front of it that I realized that it wasn’t a clearing. It was the Dead Forest.


I stopped at its outskirts. The landscape was vast and desolate, the snow peppered with splintered wood. The trees were white, and had no branches or leaves. They littered the horizon like toothpicks. Decaying stumps stood beside them, their bark charred a permanent black.


“The Dead Forest,” Dante said beside me, staring out into the abyss of trees. “I knew you were going the wrong way.”


“What are you talking about? This place is full of wood.”


“It’s all rotten,” he said. We exchanged an uncomfortable look before I trudged forward.


“So it’s true,” I said softly, my nose running as I stopped beneath the trunk of a tree that leaned tenuously over the ground like the lip of a bridge.


Dante stepped closer. “That I could hurt you?”


He took another step. “That I would never hurt you?” Everything was silent except for the hollow echo of the wind. “Yes,” he said.


My hair blew around my face in the wind. “That you feel sensation around all humans?” I asked.


He reached out to touch my face, but let his hand hover just inches away. “No. Only you.”


I let out a breath, unsure of whether or not I should believe him. “That you’re dead?”


Dante ran his hand up my back, so gently it could have been the wind.


“The paper cut. The séance. The night in Attica Falls. It’s all true?”


“Yes.”


My lips trembled as I turned to him, my eyes searching the familiar contours of his face for some sign of death. “Show me.”


Suddenly, I heard a crack, and with the full force of gravity, the dead tree above me began to fall. Underneath it, a nest of moths burst out of a hole in the trunk and flapped around me. I screamed and fell into the snow.


It all happened quickly. With inhuman strength, Dante caught the tree before it crushed my body. With two hands, he lifted the trunk as if it were weightless and threw it to the ground. And in no time he was beside me, cradling me in his arms.


I stared at his face in disbelief.


“When we reanimate, we’re born into the best version of ourselves,” he explained. “The strongest. The smartest. The most beautiful. Whatever your best qualities were when you were alive, those would be augmented.”


“Why me?” I said. “Why did you keep calling me? Keep waiting for me?”


“I couldn’t help it. I had to see you,” he said. “I know my situation is...unusual, but it doesn’t change how I feel about you.” When I finally spoke, my voice was so small I could barely hear it. “How do you feel about me?”


Dante took a step closer. “I miss you.” He spoke gently, his words delicate, as if he wasn’t ready to part with them yet. “I miss everything about you. Your laugh, your voice. The way I never know what you’re going to say next. It’s like the entire world is dead, and you’re the only one living....” His voice trailed off; he seemed embarrassed to have said so much. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I just want you to know that. That I’m sorry. For everything.”


I didn’t want to blink, didn’t want to close my eyes for a minute. I raised my hand and touched his cheek, feeling the coldness of his skin for what seemed like the first time. He smelled like earth, like pine and grass and soil.


“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I’m not afraid of you.” “I am,” he said, closing his eyes.


And just like that, he became human again.

I think Gideon and Vivian took her mum and dad' soul while Cassandra took Benjamin soul then school authority found out and buried her alive. Just guessing though ride on more ink

CHAPTER 15

Tragedy in the Mountains


WITH EVERYTHING AROUND ME BLURRING into confusion, nothing else was certain except this: I was alive. Dante was not.


The rest was speculation, and this is what I pieced together. Cassandra Millet and Benjamin Gallow were in love. Benjamin was a Plebeian, Cassandra Undead. They went to the forest. Cassandra slipped and kissed him. She couldn’t control herself, and he died. She left him in the woods. That’s what I told Dante after dinner. We were in the library, not studying.


“She told you, and you went and found him. Am I right?”


Dante nodded. “Cassandra came to us after she had accidentally killed Benjamin to ask us what she should do. I told her to turn herself in. When she didn’t, I went and found Benjamin myself. Gideon told her to leave Gottfried; disappear forever. After that, it’s mostly speculation, though your theory sounds right. Cassandra disappeared, which makes sense, considering Gideon suggested it, but we all knew that Cassandra would never have just left without saying good-bye. We argued about it, Gideon, Vivian, Yago, and I. We knew something was wrong, and Minnie’s story led us to consider the possibility that she was dead.”


“What was the fight about?”


“Gideon didn’t want me to search for Benjamin. He didn’t agree with the counsel I gave Cassandra. But after seeing what she was capable of doing to someone she loved, I was afraid of myself. That’s why I moved off campus. To protect the school from me.”


“Is that why Gideon had the files?”


“I don’t know. I’ve been following him around all year; you know that. But I don’t have any evidence that he was involved in Cassandra’s disappearance. The files you found in his room sounded promising, but those are gone now.”


I took his hand. “You’re a good person.”


Dante shook me off. “I’m not.”


I gave him a level look. “I’m not afraid of death.”


But I was afraid of losing the people I loved. And the question still remained: Who killed Eleanor and Cassandra?


Dante and I spent time together every evening, his “condition” bringing us closer together than we had been before. I finally felt like there were no secrets between us, and Dante suddenly became comfortably familiar and excitingly unfamiliar, like exploring an old mansion and discovering things that were always there but you never noticed before. I sat through my classes impatiently, counting the minutes until I would see him. The more I learned about the Undead, the more I grew to accept who Dante was, and even envy it. There were a lot of upsides to being Undead. For one, because he was already dead, he couldn’t be killed by normal means, which made taking risks a lot easier. He never had to worry about the weather being too cold, and since he never slept, he had endless amounts of time. That’s why he was so well read. And best of all, he couldn’t feel pain—emotional or physical. Unless I was near him. What I wouldn’t give to have that power. If I didn’t feel pain then I wouldn’t be tormented by the death of my parents, which I still couldn’t make sense of.


Later that week when I went downstairs to meet him, I saw the silhouette of a figure standing in the shadows by the stoop. I ran over and wrapped my arms around him, only to discover that it wasn’t Dante; it was Brett. He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else,” I said, my face turning red.


“That’s okay,” Brett said, letting out a sigh of relief. “I’m just glad you’re not Mrs. Lynch.”


I laughed. “Yeah. Okay, well I’m going to go.”


Brett nodded and retreated into the shadows.


Dante was waiting around the side of the building. Before I could ask where we were going, he took my hand and led me toward the center of campus. It was a cold and windless evening. The trees stood around us, barren and lifeless.


“How old are you?” I asked, leaning against the trunk of a giant oak.


Dante played with a lock of my hair. “Seventeen.”


I looked up at him. “How old are you really?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the sky, counting in his head. “This will be the sixteenth anniversary of my seventeenth birthday.”


“And how long have you been at Gottfried?”


Dante laughed. “Just two years. And I’ll only stay here two more. Gottfried might be eccentric, but it’s still a high school.”


Right, I thought, blushing at how silly my question was. Obviously it would look suspicious if all of the Undead stayed here while everyone else was graduating.


“How did you die?”


Dante took my hand and led me into the middle of the green. “I drowned.”


I thought about all the times I’d been swimming in the marina. Drowning seemed lonely and alien, like dying in a different world.


“What happened?” “I told you how we lived in a really remote area of British Columbia?” I nodded and he continued. “One summer, I was out on a walk with my little sister, Cecelia, teaching her how to split wood, when she fell through a partially frozen pond. I jumped in to get her and brought her back to the house, but after a week she couldn’t eat and was coughing and shivering uncontrollably. Pneumonia, we thought. Our neighbor was a bush pilot. He offered to fly us to the nearest city.


“We all got into his tiny water plane, and about an hour in, something went wrong. The plane crashed in the ocean, somewhere off the Pacific coast. The whole way down my father was holding us, shouting prayers into the wind. I was seventeen.”


My scarf blew loose from my neck, dangling in the wind, but I barely noticed. “Everyone died?” “I think so. I don’t know. I washed ashore somewhere in California. I never saw my parents or sister again.”


“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”


“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”


I turned to him. “If your sister wasn’t buried, and she washed ashore like you, she could be out there somewhere too.”


“I know. I think about her all the time. But her body might have been destroyed. The plane caught fire when it went down. That much I do remember.”


“So, since you weren’t buried, you...you...reanimated, and now you don’t have a soul?”


“Yes.”


“What does it feel like?”


He paused, trying to find the right words. The sky was bruising into night, framed by the silhouettes of the trees lining the path, their brittle skeletons swaying in the wind. “Do you trust me?”


I nodded. Dante led me to the snow by the side of the path.


“Close your eyes,” he said.


I closed them, and he tied something around my head. It felt like a scarf. I stood very still. He slipped off my jacket. “What are you doing?”


“I’ll give it back.”


I began to shiver. After a few minutes my fingers started to go numb in the cold. My nose began to run. My lips felt dry and chapped. Without being able to see the world around me, all the sounds of nature blurred into white noise.


Dante took my hand and led me around the path. I walked with small tenuous steps, stumbling over bumps in the ground and relying on Dante to make sure I didn’t fall.


“This what it feels like on the worst days,” he said. “I can’t feel anything. I can’t smell, I can’t taste, I can’t hear music—just noise. Even my vision is different. I can see things, but it’s like I’m color-blind. Everything is the same, but somehow muted.”


He took the scarf off. I blinked at the brightness of the night as the world slowly came back into focus. “And this is what it’s like when I’m around you.”


I studied him with a newfound understanding. How could someone live like that? “But it doesn’t happen with anyone else? You’re sure?”


Dante shook his head. “Do you feel the same way around other people as you do around me?”


I shook my head. “No.”


We stopped in front of the Observatory. The door was normally locked after hours, but tonight it was propped open with a book. Dante glanced around, making sure no one was watching, and led me inside, letting the door click shut behind us.


The lab was dark, and I had to feel my way around the room until my eyes adjusted to the light. Above us, the night sky was clear and blue through the glass ceiling.


I looked around, and then at Dante. “It’s so different at night.”


Dante lifted me onto the countertop, and we lay side by side, staring at the stars through the roof.


“How did you know you were dead?”


“It took me a while to figure it out. I woke up not knowing where I was, with no way of getting home. I wandered around some marina town in California for a few days, trying to figure out what had happened. I asked about my family at the local hospital. They sent me to the police, who told me there had been a crash. I was the only one from my family who had been found. They checked me into the hospital. I stayed for a week. I felt like part of me was missing and I had to go find it. At first I thought that was just my way of grieving the loss of my family, but there were other things. I wasn’t hungry, and when I forced myself to eat, I couldn’t taste anything. My body temperature was far below normal. A rare circulation condition, the doctors said, but I knew they didn’t have a clue. That’s when I realized something was wrong.


“So I left. My parents’ bodies were found, but my sister was still missing. I had no desire to contact anyone I knew, except for her. In fact, I had no desire at all. Only the feeling of an absent desire. I could remember that once I had felt happy, felt alive, but I couldn’t actually feel it again, if that makes sense. I thought finding my sister would help fill that void. So I searched for her. For weeks. Months. Years, I guess. Since I didn’t need to eat or sleep, I’d just walk for days at a time. In the meantime, I found work. I enrolled in schools but dropped out when I realized I wasn’t interested in what anyone was teaching. Years passed, and I noticed that I wasn’t aging—at least not in a normal way. Although my senses were deteriorating, I wasn’t growing older. In fact, the rest of my body was abnormally healthy. I didn’t know what was happening, so I kept to myself. I didn’t want to become a freak show or a science experiment. But I did my own experiments to learn my new limits. It was easy to pick up, like learning not to touch a hot stove. And it was easy to be alone, since I had no urge to date or make friends. I was, in essence, a shell.

“Eventually I went back to the hospital, knowing that there had to be something wrong with me. Outside in the parking lot, there was a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. It read, ‘For Questions of the Existential Nature.’ Below it was an address. At that point I was completely lost. I wrote a letter, talking about all of the unexplainable problems I was having, and sent it to the address. A few weeks later, Professor Lumbar sent me a letter back, asking me to visit the Academy. She said it was a school that specialized in existential questions, and that they might be able to help me with ‘my condition.’ She didn’t explain what that meant. So I went, partly because I wanted help, partly because I was curious. That’s how I ended up here.”


I turned to him, gazing at his profile as he stared into the sky. “And you’re looking for your soul?”


“I’m looking for something. Not my soul, though. I don’t want to kill anyone. That’s what I’ve been researching at Gottfried. Another way to live.”


“But if you kiss me, you’ll kill me?”


“Yes. But I won’t kiss you.”


“How can you be so sure?”


“Because I can choose. Just like everyone else.”


In a way he had a point. I suppose anyone had the capacity to hurt another person; it just depended on the choices they made. How was Dante any different from me in that regard?


He took my hand. “Here,” he said, placing it over his chest.


I held it there, but nothing happened.


“Listen to it.”


Slowly, I lowered my head to his chest.


At first there was nothing. And then suddenly I could hear his heartbeat. It was like nothing I had heard before: its rhythm was erratic, like the sound of someone running down a flight of stairs.


“Whatever life I have left, it’s yours.”


Later that night I snuck into my darkened room through the fireplace and slipped beneath the sheets. Eleanor was curled up in bed, and even though I knew she wasn’t sleeping, I still tiptoed so as not to disturb her. I then fell into a peaceful slumber, where I dreamed about Dante holding me in his arms in a field as we gazed at the stars. The grass was prickly beneath my neck, and slowly he turned to me, propping himself up on one elbow. And then he leaned forward, his lips thin and red, so red as they inched closer and closer to mine.


With a start, I opened my eyes.


Eleanor’s face was inches away from mine, her ringlets grazing my pillow.


“Eleanor?” I asked. With a start, she jumped back. “What are you doing?”


“Renée,” she said, surprised. “I was just checking to see if you were awake.”


I sat up and backed against the wall, giving her a frightened look. “Are you sure?”


Eleanor nodded. “Yes.” I kicked off the covers and rubbed my eyes.


“Renée, are you scared of death?” She was looking intently at me, but seemed as if her mind were elsewhere.


“No. I think I’m scared of dying, though.”


“What do you think it’s like?”


“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I always imagined it’s like falling asleep and never waking up.”


She paused. “Renée, there’s something I need to tell you.”


“Okay,” I said.


“I’m... I’m...” She sighed. “I don’t know how to explain it. Professor Bliss did such a better job in class.”


I straightened out my pajamas. “You don’t have to explain. I know.”


Eleanor paused, her forehead wrinkling with surprise. “You do?” “The Undead.”


Upon hearing the word, Eleanor’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah. How did you find out?”


“Dante.”


Eleanor looked at her feet and then took a step away from my bed. “You must think I’m a monster.”


I shook my head, silencing her. Finally I spoke. “What was it like?”


“Being reborn?” She closed her eyes. “It felt like being woken up from a dream. Like the way you feel when you take a nap in the afternoon, and you wake up and you’re not sure where you are or what day it is, and the line between yesterday and today and tomorrow is blurry.”


She let out a sad laugh, and there was a long silence as we both considered everything that had happened. I imagined Eleanor drowning alone in the basement. It was a harrowing image. “Life after death. It’s got to exist,” Eleanor said. I knew she wasn’t referring to life literally, but an emotional life after death. She looked at me for an answer, her eyes searching for meaning.


“Yeah, I think it does.”


This seemed to put Eleanor at ease. “So what would you do if you only had a few days left to live?”


She waited for me to answer. I considered all the things I wanted to do—backpack through the Himalayas, see the pyramids, take a road trip across America, learn Spanish, live in the city and then in the country, write a novel—the list seemed endless. “I think I would try to spend as much time as I could with the people I cared about.”


Eleanor considered it. “Me too.”


I curled up beneath the covers. I told her about the files, about Cassandra and how she had accidentally killed Benjamin, and finally about Dante. “What do you think happened to Cassandra? Do you think the school buried her, like Minnie said?”


Eleanor looked troubled. “No.”


“Yeah,” I said quickly, “they wouldn’t do that.”


We lay there until the early hours of the morning, talking about the things we wanted to do, the places we wanted to go, the kind of people we wanted to be.


By the middle of March—the ides, as Professor Urquette ominously called them—the weather had warmed and the snow was just beginning to melt. As the water trickled down the sides of the pathways, the campus and all of its secrets were slowly revealed—the yellow grass, soggy and matted down; the benches and statues and fountains that punctuated the natural landscape; and the occasional Frisbee or garden spade or mitten.


I had barely seen Nathaniel since break; he was busy with the school play, in which he had one of the leading roles as Electra. Sometimes I helped him practice his lines after lunch. I never imagined that he’d be interested in acting; it always seemed like numbers were his natural language, not English. But when he took off his glasses and delivered his lines, he transformed into a suave, confident hero, his voice deep and rich and entirely not his own. Otherwise, the only real time we spent together was in class. We had math in room π, commonly referred to as “the Pi Room,” not to be confused with the dessert section of the dining hall.


Professor Chortle was round and cherubic, with thin lips and rosy cheeks that bespoke an uncorrupted innocence that he could only have obtained by spending all of his formative years indoors, thinking about math.


Imaginary Numbers, he scrawled on the board. “Imaginary numbers are numbers that exist in a different world than ours. As a result, we can only sense their existence.” All of his lectures had a dreamy quality to them despite their content, making it seem like his natural habitat wasn’t here, but in some Renaissance landscape, where he would spend his days sprawled out on the grass, nibbling an apple and pondering the meaning of infinity.


I chewed on my pen. Nathaniel was sitting across from me, his eyes glued to the board.


“For example, when people act older than their age, it usually means they have a lot of imaginary years behind them,” the professor explained.


I tore off a corner of my notebook paper.


Do you think Eleanor is okay?


I was pretty sure Nathaniel was Undead, but I hadn’t talked to him about it. What would I say? Are you dead? But now that Eleanor was Undead too, I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I folded up the note and tossed it into his lap when the professor wasn’t looking.


Surprised, he looked down at it and turned around to scowl at Yago, who was sitting behind him. Then he brushed the note out of his lap and onto the floor.


I tried to get his attention, but he was too involved in the lecture. I dropped my pencil on the floor, leaned across the aisle, and picked up the note. This time I made sure to write his name on it, and tossed it into his lap again. Nathaniel was about to turn around again when I caught his eye.


Finally he figured it out. He unfolded the note and then scrawled something back.


I think so? Why wouldn’t she be?


I considered how to respond.


She looks exhausted, but she can’t sleep or eat. She’s cold all the time but barely notices it. She doesn’t enjoy doing any of the things she used to do. She talks about death all the time.


Nathaniel stared at what I wrote, clearly surprised that I knew. I waited until he tossed it back and unfolded the paper.


She sounds depressed.


His response was baffling. Nathaniel was Undead; I was almost sure of it. I was also sure that he fully understood what I was telling him. My message wasn’t that subtle. Yet for some reason he was being obtuse. I wrote back.


I know what you are.


Nathaniel avoided my gaze as he read it.


I don’t know what you’re talking about.


I shook my head, holding my pencil over the page, unsure of how to proceed. Why was he lying to me?


You don’t have to pretend. There’s nothing wrong with it. I won’t tell anyone. He wrote a quick note back.


Thanks, but there’s nothing to tell. Pretending to do what? Are you coming to the play tomorrow?


I knew that Nathaniel was insecure, but I never realized he was in such denial. I crumpled the note in my fist and nodded.


The performance was to take place in front of the great oak at sunset. Ever since coming back to Gottfried after winter break, Eleanor hadn’t felt comfortable in large crowds. Everyone always pointed and whispered, so instead of going to the play, she went to the library to catch up on her homework. I met up with Dante in front of the dining hall, and we walked over together.


Rows of benches were set up on the edge of the green, which was lit by six massive torches positioned around the lawn in a semicircle. Dante took my hand and pulled me toward the back. We found a spot on the edge of the green under a large maple tree, and sat down. We couldn’t see much of the stage because of the benches in front of us, but neither of us minded. Soon the din of the crowd grew hushed, and a line of students, headed by Gideon, filed onto the stage.


I pretended to watch the play, but I was only paying attention to Dante sitting beside me, his shirt grazing my arm. Through the darkened silhouettes of the treetops I could just make out the campus buildings, each engraved and named after a philosopher or headmistress or master: a looming reminder that we were surrounded by the dead.


Dante moved closer until our arms were touching. In the eerie torchlight of the far distance, the chorus recited words about murder and betrayal, enveloping us with voices from the ancient world.


“‘Woman,’” Dante whispered in time with the chorus onstage. “‘Be sure your heart is brave; you can take much.’”


My head resting in my palm, I looked up at him, perplexed. “Do you have every book memorized?”


“I’ve been alive for a while,” he said. “It’s not as difficult as you think.”


Taking my hands in his, he pulled me into his lap and wrapped his arms around me. “Two lovers, doomed to death,” he said, explaining the play as he nibbled on my ear. “Killed out of jealousy.”


“Doomed,” I murmured, gazing out into the night.

“‘There is a breath about it like an open grave,’” Dante recited in time with the actor playing Agamemnon’s lover, Cassandra, on the stage.


I couldn’t believe that this was, in many ways, my story too. I closed my eyes, listening to the words, wishing we were somewhere else, anywhere else, as if that would help the fact that Dante was going to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it.


Dante faced me, his eyes sad and watery as they gazed into mine. “‘I am going in, and mourning as I go my death and Agamemnon’s. Let my life be done.’”


“‘Let my life be done,’” I repeated, pressing my forehead to his, our fingers and legs intertwined as if we were two people sharing one body. And together we listened to students recite the lines that Aeschylus had written thousands of years ago, about obsession and desire, about vengeance and curses and lovers, doomed to die side by side.


But our reverie was interrupted by an unnaturally long silence. We turned to the stage, where the boy playing Orestes was standing onstage, blinking blindly into the audience as if he were confused.


All was quiet as everyone watched him. He repeated his line and leaned back, signaling Professor Urquette urgently.


The crowd began to murmur. “Did he forget his lines?” someone said.


I stared at the stage. “This is where Nathaniel is supposed to come in,” I said to Dante. “I helped him practice his lines. Where is he?”


Then, from behind the torches, someone pushed a skinny boy out onto the lawn.


“That’s not Nathaniel,” I said, staring at the pasty redhead.


And it wasn’t; it was his understudy, a lanky third year named Kurt Mayburg. He wasn’t in costume, and looked wholly unprepared. Orestes repeated his line, and Kurt was just about to give Electra’s response when the ground beneath him collapsed. All at once he fell, grasping at the air until he disappeared into the earth.


The audience went silent for a moment, unsure of whether or not it was part of the performance. I arched my neck, trying to see what was happening between all of the heads in front of us. Someone in the front row screamed. The crowd erupted in chaos.


Dante and I stood, trying to see what had happened. Headmistress Von Laark, Professor Bliss, Professor Lumbar, and Miss LaBarge were pushing through the throngs of people to the front. They knelt around the hole in front of the great oak, the headmistress shouting inaudible commands at Professor Bliss, who lowered himself into the hole.


Around us, people were running down the aisles; some were screaming, while others were gathering at the front, trying to see what had happened.


Suddenly a hand shot out from the top of the hole, grasping at the edge of the dirt. Professor Lumbar and Professor Chortle grabbed it and pulled, dragging Professor Bliss out of the hole and onto the soggy grass. He was holding a body.


I clutched my collar. It was Nathaniel; I knew it was, even though he was so covered in dirt, I couldn’t see his face. Pushing through people, I forced my way to the front. Dante followed a step behind. Amid the chaos of the crowd I couldn’t see anything except for Kurt climbing out of the hole, coughing and shaking dirt from his hair. Everyone else was standing over Nathaniel. Two nurses from the audience had run to his side and were checking his pulse, feeling his chest for a heartbeat, opening and closing his eyelids, shining a tiny flashlight into his pupils. Nathaniel remained unresponsive.


By the time I made it to the front, they were already carrying Nathaniel to the nurses’ wing. Mrs. Lynch and a few of the administrators were attempting to keep students away from the hole. “Is he okay?” I kept asking over and over, but no one seemed to know the answer.


Up ahead, I spotted Annette LaBarge. She was standing with the headmistress and Professors Lumbar and Urquette in a secluded area of the lawn. I moved behind the trees until I was within earshot, and listened, with Dante just behind me.


“Did you authorize this?” Professor Lumbar said in a voice so low I thought I might have misheard her.


I looked at Dante. “What does she mean, authorize it?”


Dante shook his head and put a finger to his lips. Maybe she meant authorize the play being performed over the catacombs.


The headmistress looked agitated at the question, and hesitated before answering. “No. And this is not the appropriate place to discuss such matters.”


“Students are being attacked, Calysta,” Professor Lumbar said firmly. She stood like a stone fortress next to Miss LaBarge’s slender body, her hands braced over her enormous hips like a jail warden. “Appropriate place doesn’t apply anymore.”


“Edith is right,” Miss LaBarge said. “We should send the students home. It isn’t safe here. The incident last spring, and then Eleanor Bell, and now this.”


“Last spring has nothing to do with this,” the headmistress said, gazing at the hole in the ground. “I have it under control.”


“Last spring has everything to do with this,” Miss LaBarge said. “You can’t ignore the facts. Three students are dead. Nathaniel might never fully recover from this. And if we can’t find the person behind it, we shouldn’t allow students to stay at this school.”


When the headmistress finally replied, her voice was sharp and cold. “Enough. You’re out of line, Annette. This matter is closed.” They dispersed as the headmistress strode off to Archebald Hall. “Fill that hole,” she said to the maintenance workers as she passed them. “It’s a safety hazard.”


I motioned to Dante and we snuck past Mrs. Lynch, making our way to the edge of the hole. The dirt crumbled as I knelt down. It was deep and gaping, and opened into some sort of chamber that must have been part of the tunnel system. The catacombs, I thought, staring at the roots of the great oak, which broke through the ceiling of the chamber, their tendrils hanging over the center of the cavern like a gnarled wooden chandelier.


At the bottom was a giant mound of dirt and sticks and grass where Kurt had fallen. “Someone must have buried Nathaniel alive,” I said to Dante. “Just like they did to Cassandra. And then Kurt fell through under the weight of the actors. But who would bury him? And right below the school play?” “Someone who wanted him found,” Dante murmured, deep in thought. “Just like Eleanor. The person who killed Eleanor wanted her to be found too. A flood isn’t the easiest way to kill someone, or the most inconspicuous. The person who trapped Eleanor wanted her to become Undead....”


Behind me, Mrs. Lynch was ushering everyone back to the dormitories while the professors convened in a group by the oak to discuss what to do next. Hoisting myself up, I felt something hard in the soil. I pushed the dirt away until I found, buried beneath it, Nathaniel’s glasses. I wiped them off with the bottom of my shirt and joined the crowd. I slowed as we walked past the professors.


“I don’t know how this went under the radar,” Professor Lumbar said. “The Board of Monitors has been patrolling the grounds at night, and the headmistress wasn’t aware of it.” Aware of what? That the board was patrolling?


“Who was on patrol tonight?” Miss LaBarge asked.


“Brandon Bell,” replied Professor Lumbar, her tone ominous, as if the fact that this had occurred while he was patrolling made it all the more distressing.


“Do you think a student is behind this?” Professor Urquette asked.


“I don’t know. At this the point, all we can do is conduct a thorough search, and hope the boy saw his attacker,” Professor Lumbar replied.


But I knew they wouldn’t find anything, because at Gottfried, as in a Greek tragedy, the violence always seemed to happen offstage.

Wow babe you are just too unique... I'm a writer also but reading this work of art made me feel less special I salute you for this

Please don't stop here. You've been amazing

CHAPTER 16

The Burial of Nathaniel Welch


I COULDN’T SLEEP. AND SINCE ELEANOR COULDN’T either, we kept each other company until the sun rose over the mountains. From the window of our dorm room we watched the professors run back and forth between the nurses’ wing and the boys’ dormitory, their flashlights bouncing around on the patches of yellow grass like fireflies. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reliving the past.


When morning broke, I went directly to the nurses’ wing. It was on the fifth floor of Archebald Hall. I knocked. Suddenly it cracked opened, and I stumbled forward, catching myself in the door frame.


A nurse stuck her head out. “Yes? May I help you?”


She was short and stubby, with thick fingers, a tight bun encased in a hairnet, and a name tag that read Irmgard. Dark bags hung under her eyes. She looked like a person who had spent the majority of her life being miserable.


“I’m here to see Nathaniel Welch.”


“I’m sorry, but no visitors are allowed in right now.” She began to close the door.


“But I’m his friend.”


“Mr. Welch is still unstable,” she said, her voice stern. “Unless you also have a health problem, I’m afraid it will have to wait until tomorrow.”


I put my hand on the door to keep her from closing it.


“Please,” I said.


She disappeared inside, and for a moment I thought she might be letting me in. Instead, the door opened and I was met by Headmistress Von Laark. “Renée,” she said, her blue eyes studying me. “Are you ill?”


“No,” I said, trying to be discreet as I craned my neck to see what was going on behind her. Brandon Bell, was sitting in the hallway, flipping through some sort of notebook.


“Then you shouldn’t be here. I believe you have Physical Education now, no?”


Defeated, I nodded and stepped back as the door closed in my face.


I jogged across campus, stopping by the dining hall on the way. But when I got there I had no appetite. Instead of eating, I took a saltshaker from one of the tables and shoved it into my pocket.


When I reached the green, the rest of the class was gathered by the lake in front of the Ursa Major statue. The night fog was lifting, and the morning was hazy and cool. An owl hooted in the distance. Everyone was talking about Nathaniel. “It must have been a student,” Rebecca said. “Someone who knew him. It’s too much of a coincidence that he was buried right below where the play was being performed.”


“But why Nathaniel?” asked Greta.


And why Eleanor, I asked myself. What did they have in common? Me, I realized.


Thankfully, before I could dwell on my conclusion, our gym teacher, Miriam Hollis, strode through the trees. She was androgynous and energetic, with a boyish voice that cracked when she was excited. She wore gym shorts all the time, even at night when it was freezing.


“I didn’t realize it was already nap time,” she said, checking her watch. “All right. Everybody up. And try to look alive.”


Our Physical Education classes were less about sports and more about survival. Each class focused around a life-threatening environmental situation that required athletic skills. How to shoot a bird with a slingshot. How to run for an extremely long time if we were being chased. How to build a makeshift shelter if we were trapped outside in a storm, which I personally thought was the most unpleasant lesson so far.


“Swimming! Every year thousands of people die from falling into cold water. Why is this? Because they never learned to master their minds and control their bodies! Therefore, today’s objective is to master the art of temperature acclimation and buoyancy.”


I raised my hand, interrupting her. “Ms. Hollis, I don’t feel well. May I go to the nurses’ wing?”


“Certainly not,” she said.


I sighed. It was worth a try.


“Only dead bodies float naturally, and that’s because they’re incapable of sinking. Hence the term, dead man’s float. In order to control your buoyancy and your temperature, you have to train your bodies to be comfortable both above and below the water. Our first exercise, therefore, will be to float for thirty seconds without moving any of your limbs.”


We lined up along the creaky dock on the near bank of the lake, where the shore dropped off into deep water. It was dark and unnaturally still. While everyone else stripped down to their bathing suits, I slipped to the end of the line and fished through my pocket until I found the saltshaker. I was determined to see Nathaniel. He must have seen the person who buried him alive; he had to know.


Ms. Hollis marched down the line, barking commands. “Pull your shorts up,” she said to Brett. He tugged at them, but she rolled her eyes. “Higher. No one wants to see your genitals.” Brett’s face went red. A few of the girls giggled. “Rebecca does,” Bonnie whispered.


I unscrewed the top of the saltshaker, and when I was sure no one was watching, I poured a mouthful of salt onto my tongue and swallowed.


At first, no one noticed. Emily Wurst was clutching a towel that barely covered her large figure. With one swift movement, Ms. Hollis yanked it off and threw it aside. Some of the boys started to snicker, but stopped when Ms. Hollis spun around and glared at them. I began to sweat. A chill ran under my skin, and I started to shiver uncontrollably. My breaths grew deeper, until I was heaving over the ground.


“Stand up straight,” Ms. Hollis said to Neil Simons, who was slouching and scratching at his nose. “And for God’s sake, stop picking your nose.”


Everyone laughed. The sound of it seemed so loud it was deafening. I covered my ears with my hands.


“Stand up straight,” Ms. Hollis repeated to Minnie Roberts, whose gnarled braid seemed to be growing longer. My eyes watered, and I blinked, watching the world slow down.


“Stand up straight,” she said to me, her words echoing in my ears as my knees buckled. My legs felt too weak to support me, and as if in slow motion, I tottered and then collapsed with a splash into the water.


The shock of the cold twisted my lungs, squeezing the air out of them. With a gasp, I surfaced and then sunk back under, unable to keep myself above water. Unlike the world above, the atmosphere beneath the surface was eerie and muted. Things moved slowly, without sound—the weeds swaying with the waves, the fish meandering between rocks and plants. I tried to will my limbs to move, but they were growing so cold that I could barely feel them.


And then something hit the surface above me. At first all I could see was a blur of white plunging through the water. As the water calmed, a shape began to take form, and before I realized it, Dante was beside me. The sunlight filtered through the surface of the water, and he grabbed my arm. Almost as if he were floating, he pulled me up toward the light.


With another gasp, we surfaced, and I coughed up mouthfuls of water. I wrapped my arms around his neck as he lifted me onto the dock. Everyone gathered around us, but Ms. Hollis herded them away. Dante took a towel from the group and wrapped it around my shoulders. I let my gaze drift up to his, wandering from his pants matted against his thighs to his shirt and tie, transparent with water. His skin glistened in the sun, and I watched his chest rise and fall, the water from his hair dripping down his neck. Where had he come from? He wasn’t in my gym class.


A crowd of people hovered over me, their faces blurring into one.


“Renée,” a voice said. “Just hold on.” I nodded and let my eyes flutter closed. I felt two arms scoop me up, and all of sudden I was being carried across the lawn, through the trees and down the path toward Archebald Hall.


“Renée, are you okay?” Dante asked me when we were out of earshot.


I nodded weakly.


“Can you see me? How many fingers am I holding up?”


I blinked. My hair was matted to my face with water and sweat. All I could see was a blur of colors. Maybe this is what Dante felt like. “I ate salt,” I said, my voice weak. “I had to see Nathaniel. It was the only way I could get in.”


He wiped the water collecting on my eyebrows. “Shh,” he said soothingly. “Don’t talk now. Rest.”


“Where did you come from?” I said weakly.“I was walking to the front gate when I saw you from the path,” he said. “Then I saw you fall in, so I ran.”


I closed my eyes, until all I could see was the outline of Dante’s face, white and radiant, like the sun. “Thank you.”


Nurse Irmgard frowned when she saw me again, and from the way Dante was talking to her, I could tell she was skeptical of my “illness.” But after she pressed the back of her hand to my forehead and felt my pulse, her frown quickly changed to a look of concern.


“What happened to her?” she asked, addressing Dante, who was still holding me in his arms.


Dante glanced at me. “She ate salt,” he said.


She gave him a confused look that bordered on frustration. “Why would she do something like that?”


Dante shook his head. “The cafeteria food is pretty bland.”


Nurse Irmgard didn’t appreciate his humor. She called in another nurse, whom she addressed as Wendy. “Prepare Room Three, and start setting up an IV. Her pulse is at ninety beats per second and she’s low on electrolytes.”


“She’ll be okay, won’t she?” Dante asked.


Wendy scurried away, and Nurse Irmgard ignored him and marched down the hall and into an exam room. “Set her down here.” Dante placed me gently on the exam table. He lingered as she listened to my heart with her stethoscope, and then took my blood pressure. When she realized he was still there, she shooed him away.


Dante tried to protest. “I’d like to stay, if that’s all right.”


“Absolutely not.” Just before she pushed Dante out of the room, the headmistress entered. The nurse busied herself over amovable table as the headmistress approached us.


“Mr. Berlin,” she said, and then noticed me on the bed. “And Miss Winters. Back so soon.”


“I fell in the lake,” I said weakly.


“She ate salt is what she did,” the nurse said impatiently, while she sanitized a needle. “And it’s a good thing he told me, otherwise it would have taken a lot longer for me to diagnose and rehydrate her.”


“And Mr. Berlin jumped in after her?” the headmistress said pensively.


No one said anything.


“Gallant,” she said to Dante, “if not slightly familiar, no? As much as I enjoy seeing you so frequently after these mishaps, perhaps one of these days you will each start to focus on your studies?” She rapped her fingers on the table. Neither Dante nor I responded. And without saying more, the headmistress left. Nurse Irmgard turned her attention to me. “Just a little prick,” she said, and inserted an IV drip into my forearm.


“You’ll have to stay on this for twenty-four hours in order to replenish all of your water content.”


“Okay,” I tried to say, though no sound came out. My mouth was dry and frothy. I took one last look at her and let myself drift into sleep.


I woke up after dark to a flickering fluorescent light. The nurses’ wing was the only place on campus that was permitted to have artificial lights after sunset. At ten o’clock a nurse checked on me one last time, then retreated to her office for the night. I waited until I heard her door close, and saw the lights switch off, and then pulled the IV out of my arm and stood up. My clothes were piled on the countertop. I rummaged through them until I found my jacket, and took Nathaniel’s glasses out ofthe pocket.


I walked down the hall in my hospital gown, my bare feet slapping softly against the tile floor. Every time I passed a room I peeked through the window in the door. Finally I found Nathaniel’s room. Trying to keep quiet, I pushed open the door.


When I stepped inside, I was met with an odor so acrid that I had to steady myself against the wall before continuing forward. The burning hair at the séance had given off a similar smell, though this was stronger and more concentrated. The smell of decay. Was this what happened when an Undead was buried? I opened the windows. A draft floated in, and my hospital gown billowed around me.


Nathaniel was lying in bed. The outline of his frail body jutted out under a thin white sheet. A fly circled above him.


I swatted it away. Traces of soil still stained the edges of his face, and his eyes were closed. Without his glasses he looked tired and old—much older than he actually was. The skin on his cheeks sagged, and purple bags hung under his eyes. A folding chair was positioned by his bed, and I sat down in it, watching him shift around in bed, the closest he would ever get to dreaming.


“Renée?” he said in a small voice, squinting at me.


I jumped. I didn’t think he was conscious. “It’s me.”


“What are you doing here?”


“I ate a bottle of salt.”


Nathaniel tried to ask a question, but could only mouth it. “Why?”


“So I could see you.”


“That’s a little extreme.” His voice cracked. “They’re going to let me go in a few days.”


I highly doubted that. I wasn’t even sure if he could sit up.


He patted around the nightstand for his glasses. “Salt is a preservative, you know.”


Typical Nathaniel, lying on what could have been his deathbed, talking about the chemical properties of salt. “I have them,” I said, holding up his glasses. “I found them on the lawn.”


“Thanks,” he said. His fingers trembled as he pushed them onto his nose.


“How are you feeling?”


“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired.”


I looked at him in disbelief. He didn’t look fine. “Are you sure?”


“Yeah,” he said, his voice weak, as if he barely had breath to speak the words. “It’s just a little dirt.”


I sat back in my chair. So he was still denying the fact that he was Undead. “Nathaniel, you were buried. We both know what that means for you. You don’t have to lie. I know what you are and it doesn’t matter to me.”


I touched his arm, but he pulled away.


“Fine,” I conceded. “You’re fine.”


Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Eventually I broke the silence. “So what happened?”


“After you showed me the files you found in Gideon’s room, I got interested. I wanted to go back and look through them again, but they were already gone. I was sure Gideon had followed you to the library and taken them back. So I snuck into his room to look for them.”


“Why didn’t you tell me?”


“I don’t know. I’m just not like you, Renée. I don’t really tell people things.”


I fidgeted with the tail of my hospital gown.


Nathaniel lapsed into a fit of coughing. I offered him a glass of water, but he refused.

“I’m not that good at snooping, so it took me a while to find anything. But eventually I found the files. And Eleanor’s diary.”


I shook my head. “What?” I had completely forgotten it had even been stolen.


“I found it in Gideon’s room. And inside, there were all these notes in Latin about where she went and what she did and at what time. Parts of her schedule were circled, like he was memorizing her routine.”


So it was Gideon who killed Eleanor, I thought, my mind racing. But why? “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked, incredulous. “Do you still have it?”


“No. I only found it yesterday. The night before the play. I took it from his room and was running to the headmistress’s office to show her, when I ran into Brandon Bell on the green. I figured I might as well just show him, since he was on the Board of Monitors. But when he saw Eleanor’s folder and diary, with all the notes in it, he went totally berserk. He started accusing me of attacking Eleanor. He kept asking me why I killed her.


“I tried to tell him that she was still alive, but it just made him angrier. Then I told him that it was Gideon who had taken the diary, but he was too angry to listen.


“He brought me to the boys’ dormitory and locked me in a broom closet. When he let me out, he was carrying a shovel and a burlap bag. I tried to get away, but he was stronger. He stuffed my mouth, put the sack over my head, and pushed me across the lawn.


“He said, ‘I’m going to make an example of you, the same way you made an example of Eleanor. Then you people will finally see what happens when you kill innocent girls.’


“Then Brandon brought me to the green. And you know what happened next.” I was speechless. Brandon buried Nathaniel alive? That meant that Brandon knew about the Undead. He knew that Eleanor was Undead and he knew that Nathaniel was Undead. Either that or it was a huge coincidence that he chose to bury him. “But how? Why? Why would Gideon kill Eleanor? He barely knew her.” I almost confused myself saying it.


“I don’t know,” Nathaniel said meekly. “But Brandon has her diary now, and all of the folders.”


That must have been what he was flipping through when I saw him earlier today with the headmistress.


Nathaniel coughed. A deep, hacking cough.


“Are you sure you’re okay?”


“I told you, I’m fine. But I’m not sure if you are.”


I frowned. “What do you mean?” “Gideon had your file too. I didn’t get a chance to look at it, but it was definitely there.”


“Why would he want my file? He has no idea who I am.”


“I don’t know. But there must be something in there of interest. The real question you should be asking is: do you know who you are?”

:nice update

Ak86:
“I’m not that good at snooping, so it took me a while to find anything. But eventually I found the files. And Eleanor’s diary.”


I shook my head. “What?” I had completely forgotten it had even been stolen.


“I found it in Gideon’s room. And inside, there were all these notes in Latin about where she went and what she did and at what time. Parts of her schedule were circled, like he was memorizing her routine.”


So it was Gideon who killed Eleanor, I thought, my mind racing. But why? “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked, incredulous. “Do you still have it?”


“No. I only found it yesterday. The night before the play. I took it from his room and was running to the headmistress’s office to show her, when I ran into Brandon Bell on the green. I figured I might as well just show him, since he was on the Board of Monitors. But when he saw Eleanor’s folder and diary, with all the notes in it, he went totally berserk. He started accusing me of attacking Eleanor. He kept asking me why I killed her.


“I tried to tell him that she was still alive, but it just made him angrier. Then I told him that it was Gideon who had taken the diary, but he was too angry to listen.


“He brought me to the boys’ dormitory and locked me in a broom closet. When he let me out, he was carrying a shovel and a burlap bag. I tried to get away, but he was stronger. He stuffed my mouth, put the sack over my head, and pushed me across the lawn.


“He said, ‘I’m going to make an example of you, the same way you made an example of Eleanor. Then you people will finally see what happens when you kill innocent girls.’


“Then Brandon brought me to the green. And you know what happened next.” I was speechless. Brandon buried Nathaniel alive? That meant that Brandon knew about the Undead. He knew that Eleanor was Undead and he knew that Nathaniel was Undead. Either that or it was a huge coincidence that he chose to bury him. “But how? Why? Why would Gideon kill Eleanor? He barely knew her.” I almost confused myself saying it.


“I don’t know,” Nathaniel said meekly. “But Brandon has her diary now, and all of the folders.”


That must have been what he was flipping through when I saw him earlier today with the headmistress.


Nathaniel coughed. A deep, hacking cough.


“Are you sure you’re okay?”


“I told you, I’m fine. But I’m not sure if you are.”


I frowned. “What do you mean?” “Gideon had your file too. I didn’t get a chance to look at it, but it was definitely there.”


“Why would he want my file? He has no idea who I am.”


“I don’t know. But there must be something in there of interest. The real question you should be asking is: do you know who you are?”

Renee who are you

CHAPTER 17

The Board of Monitors


IT WAS THE NIGHTTIME WHEN I SNUCK OUT OF THE nurses’ wing and back to the girls’ dormitory. Dante wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and when I got back to my room, Eleanor wasn’t there either. Probably in the library, I thought. I shut the door. There was only one other person who could give me answers. I pulled out my suitcase and dug inside until I found a folded piece of paper. Picking up the phone, I dialed the nine-digit number scrawled on the bottom of the note. After three rings, Dustin picked up.


“Winters Residence.”


“Is my grandfather there?”


“Miss Winters?” he said, lightening his tone. “Of course. One moment.”


I waited until the line clicked. “Renée?” My name sounded strong and definitive in my grandfather’s baritone voice. “What aren’t you telling me?” I demanded.


There was a long silence.


“Renée, have you ever felt pulled to someone?”


Immediately Dante came to mind. “Yes.”


“I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about something else. Something more magnetic.”


“Yes,” I said, the word leaving my mouth before I could stop it.


“Good. And do you remember when I told you that the early headmasters built tunnels beneath the campus to keep the Plebeian students safe?”


“Yes.”


“They also took another precaution. The Board of Monitors.”


“But the Board of Monitors does nothing. They don’t even help Mrs. Lynch patrol the halls.”


“Because patrolling the halls isn’t their function.”


Confused, I waited for him to continue.


“The Board of Monitors was originally formed as a group of living students who had the gift of sensing death. It is virtually impossible to tell the difference physically between the Undead and the living. Monitors represent a small percentage of the population who can actually make that distinction. It’s a skill that often runs in families. Monitors are usually drawn to death even from a young age. At Gottfried, the headmistress and professors are able to identify these students through a series of examinations that take place during the admissions process. They then elect a Board of Monitors, whose role is to help protect both the living and the Undead. When a student is elected to the board, they are then educated by the headmistress about the details of the Undead; before that, their education is no different than yours.


“However, the role of the board isn’t only to protect students. It is also a way for us to begin training young Monitors for what they may face in the world outside of the Academy. After Gottfried, almost all Monitors go on to continue their work in the greater world. It is understood that Monitors are a rare breed, and trained Monitors are even rarer, and Gottfried is one of the few schools that teach a very specific set of skills to those who are perceptive enough to understand how to use them.”


“Do the Undead know about Monitors?”


“They are educated about people with the ability to sense death. They are not, however, educated about the Board of Monitors. That would create an environment of fear and resentment at the Academy.”


“And Headmistress Von Laark is a Monitor?”


“Yes.”


“And all of the professors?”


“Correct.”


I gripped the telephone. “So the headmistress and the Board of Monitors could have killed a student?”


“Only if the student was Undead, and had violated the one rule that both humans and Undead share: Do not kill.”


I let the receiver drop to my shoulder as Minnie’s drawing flashed through my mind. The Board of Monitors had buried Cassandra as punishment for taking Benjamin’s soul. Minnie had been right all along.


“So it’s okay if the headmistress or the Board of Monitors kills an Undead? That isn’t right.” “Which is why Gottfried exists. To teach the Undead not to kill. And to teach the Monitors to use their skills only as a last resort.”


But that isn’t what happened to Nathaniel, I thought. Brandon Bell was a Monitor. That’s how he knew what Eleanor had become. And he exacted punishment on Nathaniel without knowing if he was guilty. “That doesn’t seem right,” I said.


“Who can really say what’s right and wrong?” my grandfather said.


“So it’s just the professors and the board? Or are there others?”


“There are others, though Monitors are extremely rare. Usually only a few are admitted every year. Sometimes only one. And even then, there are levels of talent in Monitors, just like there are stages of being Undead, which is why we administer admissions tests. The level of sensitivity toward death varies. Often a mediocre Monitor will be able to sense a bird carcass hidden in a bush a few feet away, which is something that a normal person could probably sense too. But they wouldn’t be able to find the dead bird across campus. Only the most talented Monitors are elected to the Board of Monitors, where they are educated and extensively trained. Otherwise, it’s like giving a loaded pistol to someone who is unable to shoot properly.”


There was a long silence as I considered everything my grandfather had just told me, trying to work it out in my head. “So the Monitors protect and kill the Undead?”


“Monitors are hunters. But they’re also like judges. They have the heavy responsibility of deciding whether an Undead is harmless or harmful. If the latter, the Monitor puts that person to rest. That’s why the Monitors can’t be replaced by actual police. Because only a select few have the ability to sense death. You being one of them.” “Me?” I said with wonder. Memories began to crowd my head, memories of all the unexplainable moments in my past; things I had done but couldn’t explain, things that had happened to me that didn’t make sense and never seemed to happen to other people. Was it possible that the reason behind all of it was that I was a Monitor? Yes, I wanted to say. Yes, I was different. I had always been different.


“Renée, you have all of the traits that are characteristic of a Monitor.”


“But I can’t be. I mean, I’m just me. Renée. I don’t have any special sixth sense.”


“You found your parents, dead, in the redwood forest.”


“That was luck. I saw their car on the side of the road. It was coincidental.”


“When you first came to this house, you played croquet with Dustin and found a dead bird on the edge of the lawn.” “The ball rolled to it. It wasn’t me. I’m just bad at croquet....” My voice trailed off as I remembered my first Horticulture class, when I found the dead fawn. Or how I’d found the dead mouse in the library. Or how I always seemed to find myself in the crevices of my room, staring at a dead spider or insect.


“You’ve always been drawn to death. It’s as if you can sense it. There were hints early on. Your mother told me about how, as a child, you would wander around the yard, always returning with some sort of dead insect crushed in your tiny fist. During one of my visits when you were six, you found a mouse caught in a trap behind the refrigerator. It smelled wretched; it must have been decaying for days, but it didn’t seem to bother you. You picked it up with your bare hands and presented it to us just before dinner. Your father wanted to throw it out, but you insisted on giving it a proper burial. Sepultura, as we call it. You did the same with all of your pets.”


“Sepultura?” I repeated. The second cause of death in Cassandra’s file.


“Interment. The preferred method of putting the Undead to rest, at least in these parts. That’s another reason for many of the rules at Gottfried—to protect the Monitors while they do their work. The no lights after curfew rule, for example, was designed for this specific purpose.”


I no longer cared about the meaning behind the school rules. “But I didn’t know. If I were a Monitor, shouldn’t I have known, instinctively?”


“Underclass Monitors, such as yourself, take one training class per year, through which the faculty is able to assess their skill sets. For you, that class is Horticulture.”


“Horticulture?” I repeated, going over all of our class exercises. The burials, the soil, the graveyard, the medicinal plants, the snow topography.


“And like yourself, they are not told of the existence of the Undead, but are left to discover it on their own. The process of discovery is incredibly important, as it distinguishes a truly excellent Monitor from a capable one. Information as shocking and disturbing as the existence of the Undead is not something one can merely be told; it has to be felt thoroughly and utterly. This is why I resisted telling you about it, as much as I wanted to.”


“So you think that I’m some sort of...killer?”


“Not a killer, a Monitor.”


“Monitors still kill people.”


“Monitors only kill things that are already dead. The instinct is genetic. It runs in families. It was your great-great-great-grandfather, Headmaster Theodore Winters, who created the Board of Monitors. He was also the man who planted the great oak. In essence, it’s literally our family tree. Every generation of our family has been connected to Gottfried since then; most have served as Monitors, even after graduating from Gottfried. Your mother and father included.”


“My parents? But they were teachers.”


“How do you think they died? They didn’t just happen to stumble across a few Undead children. It’s a mystery to others, but it’s no mystery to our kind. The cloth. The coins. They’re tools—tools to put the Undead to rest. Putting two coins on the eyes of the dead is a burial ritual devised by the Greeks. According to them, the dead would use the coins to pay the boatman to cross the River Styx into Hades. The cloth was used for mummification.”


“Are you saying that my parents were Undead?”


“No, no; that is impossible. Remember, only those under the age of twenty-one can become Undead. What I’ve concluded is that they were on the trail of a feral Undead, seeking to put it to rest. They were unsuccessful, and their target took their souls.”


“But why was the cloth in their mouths?”


“To prevent their souls from leaving their bodies just before the Undead performed Basium Mortis. Just as mummification keeps the dead body from rising, it can also keep the soul of the living from leaving the body. Your parents put the gauze in their mouths themselves, though perhaps they did not act fast enough.”


The information was overwhelming. My parents were killed by an Undead? That alone was difficult to accept, but what was even more troubling was that I thought I’d known everything about them, when really, I knew nothing.


“Why didn’t they tell me?”


“Your parents wanted to give you a chance at a normal life. That’s why we had a falling out. I disagreed. Not about your having a normal life, but about them hiding your talents from you. You can’t run away from who you really are, and you can’t change it. And why would you want to? You have an extraordinary gift. That doesn’t mean you have to use it, but the choice should be yours, not your parents’.”


I considered everything he had told me. Was that why I felt so strange around Dante? Because I was a Monitor, designed to kill him? “So I’m... I’m supposed to kill the Undead?”


“Not all of them. But some.”


“But I don’t want to kill anyone.” I said, thinking of Dante.


“They are killers. Some of them, at least. They often don’t understand the situation that they’re in, and depending on their age and how bright they are, many don’t even realize they’re dead. All they know is that something is different. Food doesn’t taste good anymore. They can’t sense changes in the weather. There’s an emptiness that wasn’t there before—an emptiness that they’re constantly trying to fill. It’s instinct. Like an animal looking for food.”


“But if it’s instinct, then why should we interfere? If it’s a part of the cycle of nature, then why can’t we just let it run its course?”


“Nature also created us. And first and foremost, nature values life. Without life there would be nothing. What’s worth more? A child’s life, or the life of the Undead, who already had the chance to live?”


I thought about Dante and the person who had his soul. Who’s to say that that person’s life was more valuable than his? How could anyone compare the value of two lives?


My grandfather interrupted my thoughts. “Renée, this is what you were born to do. It will always be inside of you, no matter how much you fight it. Any talent can be used for both good and evil. If you think it’s unfair, then use your talents to make it fair. Work with what you have.”


“Are you saying I’m supposed to train to kill the Undead? Even if I wanted to, which I don’t,” I stressed, “I wouldn’t know how.”


“There are a number of options. One way to ‘kill’ an Undead, so to speak, is to completely destroy its body. Fire, explosion, etcetera. Though I find that method to be a little messy and hard to control. The fire spreads, and suddenly you have the California wildfire situation.


“An alternative method is to capture the Undead and bury or embalm it by force. Your parents were fond of that method. It’s far more difficult and dangerous, but they found it the most humane.”


I swallowed. I didn’t want to do any of that.


“Of course, there is another option.”


I twisted the telephone cord around my finger, waiting.


“Teach them how to value the lives of others. The way that Gottfried does. The way that your parents did, as ‘teachers.’”


“And you? You’re a Monitor too?”


“It’s in our blood. In your blood.”


“A Monitor,” I repeated softly.


The realization came over me quickly, and when it did, I collapsed back into my chair. If Dante found his soul somewhere and tried to take it back, I would have to kill him. And if he didn’t, he would gradually waste away. Any way I looked at it, the outcome was the same. I was destined to watch him die.

My grandfather was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. Cutting the conversation short, I told him I had to go. And throwing on a coat, I climbed into the chimney.

CHAPTER 18

The Gentlemen’s Ballet


I RAN DOWN THE HALL OF THE BASEMENT AND slipped out the fire escape and into the cool New England night. I had to talk to Dante. Once outside, I snuck around the building and was about to run onto the path when someone whispered my name.


“Renée.” I jumped, and then relaxed when I saw Dante waiting for me in the shadows by the stoop. “I looked for you in the nurses’ wing, but you weren’t there. Are you okay?” Putting a finger to my lips, I glanced around and pulled him behind the building.


I told him everything. Well, almost everything.


“But what I still don’t understand is why Gideon killed Eleanor,” I said. Dante thought. “Last spring, when Gideon suspected Cassandra was dead, he was furious. He wanted revenge....”


“So he went and found the files,” I murmured, “to see if she had been buried, and if so, to find out who did it.”


Dante nodded. “He found something in the files. Some sort of evidence.”


My shoulders dropped when I realized it. “Minnie’s drawing. Her testimony. She said that Brandon Bell was the one who did it.”


“Killing Brandon would have been very difficult, considering he’s a Monitor, so Gideon decided to kill his sister,” Dante said. “But he didn’t just kill her. He purposely turned her into an Undead, the one thing he knew Brandon wouldn’t be able to live with.”


“Brandon understood what had happened to Eleanor,” I continued, “and wanted to punish the person who killed her. He found Nathaniel with Eleanor’s diary and the files, and assumed it was him, then buried him to make an example of him to all the other Undead. Revenge,” I said. “Just like a Greek tragedy.”


“Brandon is losing it,” Dante said when I was finished. “He’s doling out his own personal justice.”


Neither of us spoke for a long time. Finally, I broke the silence.


“We have to tell someone.”


Dante surveyed the lawn. “You have to stay here.”


I shook my head. “No I don’t. Why would I do that?”


“It’s not safe.”


“But it’s safe for you?”


“Renée, I’m already dead. But you...you’re mortal. You could get hurt.”


I took a breath. “Actually, that’s not completely true....”


That’s when I told him that I was a Monitor. That practically everyone else in my family had been one too. After I broke the news, I closed my eyes, not wanting to see his reaction. He was silent for a long time. Finally, he bent over and kissed me on the forehead. “I’ve always liked you the way you are, and still do.”


But just as the words left his mouth, a hand grabbed my arm. And it wasn’t Dante’s.


“Caught in the act.”


I gasped. Dante and I turned to see Mrs. Lynch smiling behind us. She was gripping me so tightly that I could feel her fingernails pressing into my skin.


“To the headmistress’s office.” She could barely contain her excitement.


I shook my head. “No, please, we can expla—”


Dante cut me off, taking my hand. “Mrs. Lynch, I made Renée meet me here. It’s my fault—” “How valiant of you,” Mrs. Lynch said. “But I highly doubt that.” And with that, she tightened her grip on my arm and dragged us toward the headmistress’s office.


Archebald Hall was empty and dimly lit now that it was after hours. All of the secretaries had gone home or retreated to their quarters. I gazed at the portraits hanging on the walls as Mrs. Lynch led us into the office, her heels pressing softly into the carpet. She rapped twice on the door, and the headmistress opened it.


“Caught these two again, outside after curfew,” Mrs. Lynch said.


“Thank you, Lynette,” the headmistress said, gazing at Dante and me, her eyes placid. “Come in.”


She shut the door behind us. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”


The two chairs that were normally in front of her desk were gone. So instead, we stood in the center of the room while the two Siamese cats circled in and out of Dante’s legs.


Headmistress Von Laark sat behind her desk and folded her hands. “It seems as though fate has brought us together tonight. I was planning on summoning you both anyway, but your continuing disregard for the Code of Discipline seems to have done my job for me.”


I shifted uncomfortably.


“Do either of you know why I wanted to see you?”


“No,” we said simultaneously.


She leaned back in her chair.


“Nathaniel didn’t kill Eleanor,” I blurted out. “It was Gideon DuPont. He killed her to get back at Brandon for burying Cassandra. He was the one who stole Eleanor’s diary and wrote all those notes in it. And he took the files.” The headmistress put on the pair of glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. “Really?” she said, seeming genuinely surprised, though not at all disturbed—as if I had just told her an interesting fact about the migration patterns of flamingos. “I’ll make sure to let the professors and the Board of Monitors know.”


Dante and I exchanged confused looks. Why didn’t she seem to care?


She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Normally I don’t take an interest in the personal lives of my students. My role at Gottfried and with the student body has always been an academic one. But you two”—she waved a hand between us—“your relationship has captivated me.”


“Us?” I said slowly. “Why us?” I didn’t understand. Beside me, Dante inched closer until our hands were almost touching. The headmistress ignored my question. “I have been watching you closely, Mr. Berlin, after what happened last spring. And with a name like Winters, I of course wanted to keep an eye on you, too,” she said, looking at me. “So when I discovered that you were romantically involved...well, that was a shock, to say the least. And an interesting turn of events. That’s the brilliant part about being the headmistress. You spend the year thinking you’re in control of your students, that you have to do everything yourself, and that nothing can possibly surprise you. And then something like this just falls into your lap.”


As if called, a cat jumped in the headmistress’s lap, and in long, languid strokes, she caressed its back until it began to purr.


“It was also fortunate that both of you have a knack for getting into trouble. Our meetings together allowed me to observe you.” “Observe what?” Dante asked.


Once again, the headmistress brushed off the question. “I wasn’t sure of it at first, but now there’s no longer even a shadow of a doubt in my mind.”


My mind raced through all the times I had been called into the headmistress’s office, trying to figure out what she was referring to.


“What is it that you’re so interested in?” Dante asked. His voice was calm, which comforted me. If Dante wasn’t worried yet, then I didn’t have reason to be either.


“Are you familiar with Descartes’ Seventh Meditation?”


Neither of us said anything.


“A seminal work,” Von Laark said, almost to herself. “It was banned, you know. Do you know why?”


“Because it was about the Undead,” I blurted out. “And it was supposed to be kept a secret.”


The headmistress raised a long, sinewy finger. “Yes. And no.


“In that work, Descartes not only discussed his discovery of the Undead, but the process through which they regain their mortality, a process we have since considered a myth, because in the history of history, no Undead has ever found his rightful soul.”


Beneath the folds of my coat, Dante laced his fingers through mine.


“It is the question of a lifetime,” the headmistress went on. “What would happen if an Undead finds his soul and reclaims it? Would he become human again? Would he cheat death?”


Dante tightened his grip around my fingers as my heart began to race.


“But before I continue, a few questions.”


I looked at Dante, confused, but his attention was set on the headmistress.


“Mr. Berlin, when did you die?”


At first Dante didn’t say anything. The headmistress stood up and took a step toward him.


“Your year of death? Surely you remember it.”


“Sixteen years ago.”


“Be precise.”


“August twentieth, 1994.”


I was concentrating more on the headmistress than on what Dante was saying, but when I heard the date, I went rigid.


The headmistress turned to me. “Do you recognize the date, Miss Winters?”


Of course I did. August twentieth. It was the day I found my parents dead. The same day that I turned sixteen.


Dante died on the day I was born. I didn’t have to say anything. From the look on my face, Dante knew. Finally I understood the strange connection between us. I thought about how Dante always seemed to have a craving inside him when he was around me, as if he were barely able to control himself. Why we always spoke at the same time and said the same things. Why Dante couldn’t touch me without making me numb. Why I felt drained and tired after being with him. Why he could only smell things, feel things, taste things when I was close to him. It was why we had been drawn to one another in the first place, and why, I now realized, it was impossible for us to ever be together.


I had Dante’s soul.


“How do you feel when you’re around her?” the headmistress asked, her eyes dark fixed intensely on Dante with curiosity. “Do you feel sensation? Do you feel alive?” But Dante wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at me, hoping I would say something that would prove her wrong.


“What I’m about to ask you to do should be painless. Perhaps even enjoyable. For one of you.”


She approached me and spoke in a voice that was dark and commanding. “Now, what I want you to do is to give him your soul.”


“And why would she do that?” Dante said.


“Because she’s in love with you.” She turned to me. “Think about your situation,” the headmistress said. “He only has a few years left. You alone are in control of his fate.”


Nausea curled through my body as I began to realize that she was right. But before I could say anything, Dante’s voice cut through the air.


“No. She won’t. I won’t let her.” I watched his body tighten as he readied to approach the headmistress. She took a step back.


“You can do whatever you want to me,” she said quietly, “but it won’t make this go away. Renée will always know what she has to do. I’m not forcing her to do anything.” She glanced toward the door. “It’s unlocked,” she said.


Dante gave her a suspicious look, and then took my arm. “Renée, let’s go.”


But I didn’t move.


“Renée, come on.”


“No,” I said. “Wait. I want to hear what she has to say.”


The headmistress smiled. “See? There are things worse than being Undead. Such as watching the person you love die when you knew you could have helped them.”


My stomach felt hollow as I imagined my life without Dante. He pulled my face in his direction. “Renée, no. If you give me your soul, you’ll die.”


“She won’t die,” the headmistress said. “She’ll become Undead. Haven’t you ever wondered what it was like? To never feel pain? The pain of your parents’ deaths?”


I had wondered what that would be like. I gazed at Dante. His eyes pleaded with me.


The headmistress continued. “The desire to stay alive, regardless of the consequences, is a value of modern society. In the ancient world, the only thing men aspired to was dying an honorable death. Just think of what you could accomplish in death. Not only would you be giving your love his life back, but you would be shedding light on one of the greatest mysteries of all time. The mystery behind death. If you, Renée, can give life to another, what could that mean for the world? The possibilities are endless.” “Renée, you don’t have to do this. There are other ways.”


The headmistress laughed. “No—no there are not. You will die of decay in five years, and Renée will live a long, lonely life knowing that she could have saved you but didn’t.”


“What good is saving me? We would only switch roles,” Dante argued.


I turned to him. “We would have more time,” I said. “Don’t you want that?”


Dante looked at his feet, shaking his head. “I want you. Right now. The way you are.”


“Don’t you understand? You can’t have me. We are the end of each other’s lives. One of us has to die, and I’d rather face death than live without you.”


Dante turned to me and grasped my face in his hands. “Renée, look at me.” His voice was pleading. “I had my chance. I lived my life. And now I have you, and that’s enough.”


The headmistress strode toward me, resting her hand on my shoulder. When she spoke, her voice was lower, deeper, darker. “It’s either your life or his,” she said.


Dante’s eyes searched mine, begging me not to do it. “Let it go.”


“I’m not afraid of death,” I said, looking at Dante. And this time I knew it was true. “I’m afraid of life without you.”


Before he could respond, there were two knocks on the door. I froze and stared at it as it opened. Mrs. Lynch stepped inside, pulling Gideon by the arm. “Headmistress? I found this one lurking around the girls’ dormitory again.”


“You!” I shouted, pointing at Gideon. “It was him. He killed Eleanor! He stole the files and Eleanor’s diary, and then he trapped her in the basement and broke the pipes.”


Confused, Mrs. Lynch pulled out her yardstick, but before she could do anything, Gideon pushed her out of the room and slammed the door. I could hear her protests from the hallway as Gideon bolted it shut.


“Gideon,” the headmistress said, her voice wavering. “Unlock that door immediately.”


Ignoring her, Gideon took off his dinner jacket and slung it over the doorknob, his eyes set on me.


“Gideon?” the headmistress repeated. “Did you not hear my request?”


He rolled up his sleeves.


“If Renée’s claims are true, we can still help you,” she said, taking a tenuous step toward him. “You still have options. But you must do as I say.”


Dante pushed me behind him as Gideon walked toward us, his eyes dark and wild.


“I warn you: if you touch anyone in this room, you will regret it,” Von Laark continued.


Suddenly Gideon turned to her, his voice silencing the room. “Shut up.”


Her face ablaze, she snatched a roll of gauze from her desk and approached him. “How dare you,” she said. “This is my school and I demand that you follow my orders.”


Dante shielded me with his arms as we watched them collide in the middle of the office, the headmistress trying to restrain Gideon as he pushed her back toward the wall. Even though she was a Monitor, she was no match for his strength. Pinning her against the ground, Gideon pressed his lips to hers.


Color began to flow through his pale skin, like blood pooling beneath the surface. The headmistress struggled, her arms flailing against his back. Muffled cries floated through the room. “No!” I said. “Wait!” But Gideon didn’t stop. Slowly, her arms grew paler, weaker, until they fell limply to her sides. I watched in horror as her legs began to convulse against the floor, relaxing to a twitch until all was still.


Heaving, I covered my mouth with my hands, unable to take my eyes off her feet. I let my shoulders slump, unable to hold them up any longer.


When I looked up, Gideon was approaching me. I backed away from him, pushing myself against the wall. His face was flushed and pulsing as he loosened his tie, the veins in his arms flowing with life.


With a swift movement he lifted me up and lowered his mouth to mine.


“No!” I heard Dante scream as he ran to us and pushed Gideon off of me.


With a gasp, I fell back and watched as they struggled, Gideon’s strength growing with the soul of the headmistress streaming through him. The Siamese cats crouched and yowled in the corner as Gideon and Dante struggled, knocking over books and papers, breaking the glass of the hutch behind the headmistress’s desk, the shovels, which I now realized were Monitor burial tools, clattering to the ground around them. I watched in horror as Dante pushed Gideon onto the desk, breaking the hourglass, the sand and glass spilling across the floor around me.


I screamed, the glass cutting through my skin.


Upon hearing my voice, Dante turned to me. Taking advantage of the lapse, Gideon slipped out of his grasp, picked up his tortoiseshell glasses from the floor, and unbolted the door, disappearing into the hall.


“Are you okay?” Dante asked, kneeling by my side.


I nodded, barely able to speak. “I’m fine.” “Stay here,” he said, touching my cheek. “So I know you’ll be safe.” And with that, he grabbed a loose shovel that had fallen from the shattered hutch and ran out the door in pursuit of Gideon.


Picking myself up, I followed him.


I caught up to them on the green. They were in front of the great oak, teetering around the gaping hole that Nathaniel had been buried in. Maintenance hadn’t filled it in yet, but had sequestered it with caution tape, leaving only one thin rope ladder dangling into the pit. Gideon stepped around the hole and Dante followed, thrusting the shovel at him. Every time Dante swung at Gideon, Gideon seemed to move out of the way at just the right moment—a hop, a swish, an arabesque, in an elaborate gentleman’s ballet.


I circled them as Dante raised the shovel over Gideon’s head. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the outcome, even though I knew they were both already dead. But just as Dante brought the shovel down over Gideon’s skull, Gideon ducked away and grabbed the shovel from him, splitting it into shards.


The rest happened quickly. Gideon tackled Dante, thrusting him into the dirt by his neck, pushing him dangerously close to the edge of the hole. If Dante fell in, that would be the end. He couldn’t go underground, and the hole was at least fifteen feet deep. I wouldn’t be able to get him out by myself before Gideon took my soul. In horror, I watched as Gideon stood over Dante, one hand around his neck. I had to do something. I was a Monitor. I was supposed be able to handle this.


Without thinking, I picked up a broken shard of Dante’s shovel and ran up behind them. With all the force I could muster, I thrust it into Gideon’s back.


Surprised, he spun around and threw me off, pulling the shard from his back and stalking toward me, his shirt bloodied and ripped. I inched back on the grass as he loomed over me, holding the jagged shovel. Just before I closed my eyes, Dante took him from behind, and Gideon fell on top of me, pushing the wooden shard into my skin. I winced as I tried to pull the handle out of my side while they grappled around me, their bodies nudging the wood shard deeper into my stomach.


Slowly, their grunts seemed to fade as my eyes fluttered. And as I let them close, I heard Dante calling my name, clutching my hand as we both fell through the caution tape into the deep, dusty hole.


With a cry, I pulled the handle of the shovel from my side and opened my eyes. I was lying in a mound of soil and rock in the catacomb beneath the great oak. Across the cavern, I could see Gideon’s grass-stained pants and loafers, limp.

“Dante?” My voice echoed through the darkness as I dug through the dirt and felt his arm beside me. “Dante!” Brushing the soil off him, I took him in my arms and tried to wake him. “We’re underground,” I whispered. “What do I do?” He was barely conscious.


Mustering up courage, I wiped the dirt from my face and stood. “Don’t worry,” I said, trying to pick him up. “I’m going to get us out of here.” But as much as I tried, I couldn’t lift him. Sinking to the ground, I wrapped my hands around his neck and buried my face in his shirt.


“Dante, please wake up,” I pleaded. “I’m not strong enough. I can’t carry you out.”


As if I had willed it, his lips moved. I watched as they parted slightly, taking in a faint breath. And sitting there beside him, watching him die, I knew what I had to do.


Why is it that you enjoy life the most when you’re about to lose it? The only I could save Dante was to give him my soul. I was going to die. Strangely enough, the realization only made me feel more alive. I took one last look at the world. Somewhere far away, Annie was sitting down for dinner with her family; my grandfather was sipping tea and watching the evening news; and the girls on my floor were finishing up their homework and getting ready to crawl into bed. I felt as if I were worlds away from them. They had time to take it all for granted—all the small pleasures in life that I was already beginning to miss—the first cool breath of fall, the empty silence you hear just after turning off the television, the smell of chicken roasting in an oven. These things only existed in my mind now, and soon, even that would be gone.


I let my eyes travel across Dante one last time—his nose, his lips, his eyes, now closed. It all seemed familiar yet somehow still unexplored. This is what it meant to feel: realizing that part of the value in life is knowing that everything around you could be taken away. I loved him, I thought, already thinking in past tense. I love him. This would be my good-bye.


I lifted my hand to his cheek, touching his skin for the last time, and I pulled him toward me, until my lips grazed his.


“I love you,” I said.


And I gave him a kiss. A real kiss. Because if I had anything left to give, I wanted to give it.


Suddenly I felt his hand on the back of my neck, pulling me toward him with a force I had never experienced before. Unable to help myself, I succumbed to his embrace. The air escaped my lungs. I gasped and grabbed at the grass. And the world as I knew it faded away.

Awwwn true love but wait ooh is Renée truly dead

Let wait and see one more episode to go @ DivineSpecial

I'm waiting @ Ak86 come and update

CHAPTER 19

The Untimely Death of Dante Berlin


I COLLAPSED ON THE GRASS. SLOWLY, I FELT ALL OF the warmth in my body leave me, as if it were being pulled from my mouth like a thin thread of air. And as it left me, all of my memories began to unravel. Scenes from a previous life flashed through my mind and then vanished, the people and places distorted and dreamlike. Annie, my parents, California, Wes—I could barely recognize them before they disappeared; their figures fleeting and unreal, as if my entire life before Gottfried had been imagined. I grew weak. My breathing became thin. And then suddenly I woke up.


I was outside the girls’ dormitory, lying on the grass by the stoop. It was nighttime. Was I dead? I wasn’t sure. I stretched and stood up, but I didn’t feel the same. It felt like I had been lying there for hours. I was wearing clothing that was strangely familiar, yet not mine—an oxford shirt and a pair of pants that were worn at the knees. I was about to lean over and examine them when I heard movement around the side of the building, the soft padding of footsteps against the ground. Quickly, I ducked into the shadows and waited.


But the person who emerged wasn’t the headmistress or Mrs. Lynch. It was me. I was in my coat, my brown hair dangling freely over my shoulders. I looked pretty, I thought.


Unable to control my mouth, I uttered one word. “Renée.”


She turned to me, her look of surprise fading into relief as she put a finger to her lips and pulled me behind the building.


“I looked for you in the nurses’ wing, but you weren’t there. Are you okay?” The words came out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. They were the same phrases Dante had said to me earlier that night, before Mrs. Lynch escorted us to the headmistress’s office. I tried to stop speaking, but my body was out of my control.


My past self was standing in front of me, saying something about the Board of Monitors and the headmistress, but I wasn’t listening; I already knew what she was going to say. Instead, I stared at her with an affection and longing that I could never have felt toward myself. I wasn’t reliving my life; I was reliving Dante’s.


“I’ve always liked you the way you are, and still do.” I said to my former self. The scene faded away, and I was transported to a darkened classroom in Horace Hall. I was standing in the shadows, water dripping from my clothes. The old Renée was beside me, her clothes matted to her body.


“Well, as your teacher, I should make you write lines,” I found myself saying. The old Renée gave me a challenging look. A droplet of water inched down her nose. “What do you want me to write?”


I took a step toward her. “Cupido,” I uttered.


She raised her hand to my face, and I closed my eyes, feeling the softness of her palm. As she passed her hand over me, it awakened senses I hadn’t felt in years. My nose, my eyes, my lips, they trembled at her touch.


“Do you feel different when you’re around me?” she whispered.


Yes, I thought. Yes.


The room became blurry, and I was transported to the Observatory. It was a different day, an older day, and the September sun was shining through the glass panes of the ceiling. The door opened, and Nathaniel walked in, a younger version of Renée next to him. Her hair was shorter, and she looked moreinnocent, her face still sun-kissed from the summer.


I sat down next to her, feeling her presence like a force beside me. I didn’t know what to say, so I looked at the board. Something strange was happening to my body. A prickling sensation came over me, and I could actually feel the breeze floating through the window. I could hear the nuances of nature—the leaves of the trees rustling against each other, the delicate sound of sparrows on the branches, all mixing together like some sort of melody. Renée bent over to pull a notebook out of her bag, and I could even make out the smell of her shampoo. Finally she turned to me.


“Why do you keep staring at me?” she muttered under her breath.


Her voice was soft and low, and I was surprised by how forthright she was. How could I not stare at her? Even here, the afternoon sun shone through the glass ceiling, illuminating her face in a warm, rosy light, as if she were an otherworldly being, something sent to me by fate. No, she could never know that I had watched her, wanted her, loved her, from that very moment.


“You have pen on your face. Here.” Immediately I regretted saying it.


Her face turned red as she rubbed her face selfconsciously. “Oh.”


Suddenly the scene fast-forwarded. “So you think I’m charming?” I said, leaning over because I wanted to get closer to Renée. “Is that why you keep staring at me?”


“Alarming, not charming. And no, I’m just curious.”


“Curious?” I said, trying to control my desire to hold her, to kiss her.


Her voice wavered. “Why don’t you talk to anyone?” “I thought that’s what we were doing.”


She was saying something, but I barely heard her.


Dozens of thoughts ran through my mind. Where did she come from? Where had she been my entire life? What did she like and what did she hate? Would she let me learn? Instead I settled for something more reasonable. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”


I traced my fingers around her freckles, wanting to collect them in my palm. She said she was from California.


I held out my hand beneath the desk. “I’m Dante.”


She bit her lip, doubting herself. “Renée,” she said finally, and slipped her hand into mine. It was small and delicate.


Her body froze as we touched. I felt her warmth creeping into me, giving me life again. Her expression shifted from nervous to confused to bewildered. I pulled my hand away from hers and sat very still, trying to understand what had just happened. Everything blurred to black.


Finally, the world came into focus again, and I was running down a long dirt driveway. I couldn’t control my legs and I didn’t know where I was. It was a place I had never been to before—a large field with a plywood fence surrounding it. The land was flat on either side and patched with yellow, overgrown grass. To the far left were a barn and a water trough, presumably for horses. Beyond that were other houses, all spread out over acres of land. They looked exactly the same as the house the driveway was leading toward. It was small and square, with a shingled roof and a wraparound porch littered with old lawn furniture. The rocking chair swayed in the wind.


Suddenly I was standing in the doorway of a bedroom in my house; no—Dante’s house. A girl was lying in bed, the frail outline of her legs visible beneath the sheets. I didn’t recognize her, but somehow I understood that she was my sister. Dante’s sister. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark.


I blinked, and I was in an airplane, cradling my sister, Cecelia, in my arms. She was wrapped in a blanket, her eyes tired and barely open, her face red and matted with sweat. “It will be okay,” I whispered to her. “We’re almost there.”


Sitting beside us were a man and a woman who I knew to be my parents even though I couldn’t recognize them. The man was wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of worker’s pants stained with grease. He had Dante’s eyes. The woman was wrapped in a shawl and leaning over Cecelia, petting her hair. She was crying.


All at once we heard something crack. The erratic swoosh of the propellers as they slowed. And then my father screaming as we plummeted to the ground, “I pray to thee, O true and living God. I believe in thee, O eternal Truth. My hopes are fixed on thee, thou endless Good and Mercy. I love thee with my whole heart above all things, O my kindest Father, my highest Good.”


The world became darker, and I was underwater. I knew that this was my last moment on earth. The waves were violent and I was sinking. Salt water stung my eyes and throat as I was flushed under. I tried to swim to the surface, but couldn’t. I opened my eyes. Everything around me was a foggy blue. Bubbles rose around me, swirling like schools of fish. I reached out, trying to catch them in my fist, and slowly, everything withered away.


I was pulled out of my reverie by two hands pushing me away. My body convulsed as I felt Dante leave me, his memories spooling out of me like a reel of film. Our lips parted, and I gasped.

CHAPTER 20

Renaissance


TO BE REBORN. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT IT was my destiny. Even the meaning of my name pointed toward it. Renée. Renaissance. The rebirth. With a start, I opened my eyes.


I was being carried down a hallway and out into a blue sunny day, so bright I had to close my eyes. Was I dead? Was Dante dead?


Slowly, I peeked open an eye. I was wearing a hospital gown. Someone was carrying me down the path toward the chapel. Turning my head, I looked up. It was Dante.


“Hi,” I said, my voice wavering.


Dante looked down and smiled. “Hi.”


I swallowed. “Am I dead?”


Dante took a turn to the left. The path was empty. It must be early, I thought. “No.” “Am I alive?”


Dante sighed. “No.”


My eyes widened as I took in my new world. Flowers grew wildly out of the soil, and leaves budded on the trees —the first signs of life after a long, dark winter. “How long—”


I didn’t even have to finish my sentence. “Ten days.”


“And you? You’re—?”


Dante looked away.


I let out a sigh. So the kiss worked. “Where are we going?”


“You’ll see.”


He looked older now, more masculine. He aged well, I told him, like an expensive cheese.


He laughed. “Did I ever tell you how romantic you are?”


I smiled. Dante took me to the cemetery behind the chapel, now overgrown with poppies.


“Hold out your hands,” he said, lifting my arms until they extended out like wings. He carried me through the field of red, my hands dangling limp on either side. And as the cold of my fingers grazed the tops of the flowers, the petals closed, leaving a trail of green behind us.


I blinked, unable to believe that this was my life. That this was real. That life could be this beautiful.


Setting me down in the middle of the field, we lay side by side, our hands barely touching as we watched the reflection of the clouds in each other’s eyes.


“I wish I could wake up to this every day,” I said.


“You can’t wake up without sleeping.”


I looked down, realizing what he meant. It hadn’t fully dawned on me yet that I was Undead. Lifting the left side of my gown, I looked at my stomach, where the shards of the shovel had cut into me. To my surprise it had already healed, leaving behind a jagged pink scar. Dante traced it with his finger.


“Your grandfather is coming to pick you up today,” he said.


“Does he know?”


Dante shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”


“Why not?”


“Renée, this isn’t what I want.”


“Us?”


Dante gave me a sad smile. “No, this. I brought you here so we could be alone. So we could say good-bye.”


“What do you mean, good-bye?”


“Just for the summer. But you have to promise that when you leave this field, you leave me here.”


“You don’t mean you’re going to kiss me?”


Dante nodded.


“You can’t! I won’t let you!”


“I know,” he said, lacing his fingers through mine as he lowered his lips to mine until they were barely touching. “But you also can’t stop me.”


I closed my eyes as I felt an explosion of sensation run through my body. My fingers tightened around his.


“Why are you doing this? I want you to be alive.”


“Because,” he said, tracing a finger along my cheek.


“Real love is selfless.”


“I miss you already,” I whispered, my insides in panic.


Dante plucked a flower and tucked it behind my ear. “I’m with you, always.”


And then he leaned over and kissed me.

We have come to the end of this beautiful story of Dante and Renee. Thanks to those who are actually following the story and not commenting and those who commented hope to see more of you in more stories. Adios!!!!!!!!! and Shalom!!!!!!!

nice one well done

Ak86 you're the best... your stories are wonderful

U are welcome @ Divine Special looking forward to see u read more of d stories

Ak86:
U are welcome @ Divine Special looking forward to see u read more of d stories

Bro you should see a publisher. This is a superb work of art.