“He’s coming,” I said, because he had to; without him, I was lost.
D
ANTE DIDN’T ARRIVE THAT NIGHT.
With nowhere else to go, we found ourselves following the old man up the back stairs of the tavern to his apartment, which occupied the second and third stories of the building. Anya and I shared a small guest room overlooking the street, with two twin beds and a stack of dusty sheets. If we needed anything, Theodore was just down the hall, his grandfather assured us, his dull eyes staring off into the distance. The moon glinted off of them, and I shuddered, remembering the Undead children from last fall—the way their eyes blurred to gray just before they decayed. Soon Dante’s eyes would grow cloudy, too.
Once we were alone, Anya folded herself onto the tiny bed. “Do you smell that?” she whispered. She sniffed the air, then bent over and held her nose to the coarse blanket by her feet. She winced. “Smells like farm.”
I sniffed mine, but didn’t notice anything off about it.
“I’m descended from peasants,” Anya reasoned. “My nose is extremely sensitive to this sort of thing.” She kicked her blanket aside and pulled an extra sweater from her bag.
Outside, the trees trembled in the wind, the shadows of their branches stretching across the street like a tangle of legs. How I wished to see Dante emerge from the night. “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
“Me too,” Anya said.
Who was Monsieur? We considered the facts. He was a man, probably French, and walked with a cane and a heavy gait. He was familiar with each of us, which meant he’d been watching us for a while. He knew that Dante and I would come to the Old Soul, and he’d assumed that when we did, we would need help—which is why he’d sent Anya and Theo notes.
“But why Theo?” I said. “And why you?”
Anya went quiet. “Perhaps because we’re friends? And Theo—perhaps he has some skill that we don’t.”
“Like what?” I said. “Stealing?”
Anya shrugged. “That can be useful in the right situation, too.”
“Maybe,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced. Theo, I knew, was a mistake. And Anya—though I was happy to have her with me now, her being my friend wasn’t a good enough reason to send her on this journey. Monsieur must have chosen her for a reason.
But the question that really bothered me was: Why would Monsieur want to help me in the first place?
My eyes rested on my bag at the foot of my bed. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Monsieur was intervening now. He must have known about the chest. “Maybe Monsieur isn’t trying to help me. Maybe he’s just pretending to because I have something he wants.”
I pulled my bag into my lap and unzipped it. “This—” I began to say, when I heard the floorboards creak in the hallway. I held a finger to my lips, and crept to the door. I pressed my ear against it, only to hear footsteps. I cracked it open and watched Theo disappear around the corner. He’d been listening.
“It isn’t safe to talk about it here,” I said. “When Dante gets here, we’ll leave. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
Anya nodded and, after taking off her bangles, earrings, a mood ring, a pendant, and a choker, and piling them in a mound on the bedside table, she slipped beneath the sheets. “Do you feel him?”
I shook my head, trying to swallow around the knot in my throat.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her red hair coiled across her pillow. “He’s probably just too far away for you to sense. I have a good feeling about him. He’ll come.”
Even though I never believed in Anya’s superstitions, that night I stayed awake, repeating her words in my mind and listening to the sound of her breathing as she fell asleep. It calmed me, watching her thin body rise and fall beneath the sheets. The sign outside creaked in the wind. I curled up beneath the blankets, my bag nestled safely in my lap. I wasn’t alone. Not yet.
But I couldn’t sleep, and in the middle of the night, I slipped out of bed and into the hallway. I meant to go downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water, when I noticed a light on at the end of the hall. A door was ajar. I tiptoed toward it and peered through the gap.
Theo was sitting at his desk, his back turned to me. Tinny music blared from his headphones. I inched closer. His room was stark: dingy white walls, a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. Theo leaned over something in his lap, sweat soaking the back of his T-shirt, his hair dangling about his face as he worked. The sound of sandpaper scraping wood. His arm moved back and forth, back and forth. A mess of sawdust lay scattered around his boots.
A bad feeling crept through me. Maybe it was the heavy sound of his breathing, or the way he clenched his neck, his muscles red and tense. Finally, he stopped and sat up, wiping the sweat from his brow. He brushed the sawdust from his lap and held the object up to his desk lamp.
The sharp tip of a shovel glinted in the light. I could see a sliver of it through the crack in the door, yet even from my vantage point, I could tell it was a beautiful instrument. Its face was crafted into the shape of an inverted heart, and was made of thick metal that had been polished until it gave off a brilliant luster. Elegant fluting ran down either side of the head, meeting at the tip. Engraved there was an elaborate letter
M
. I recognized it. The official seal of the High Court of Monitors.
I had heard about shovels like it in passing; older Monitoring students at St. Clément had whispered about them in awe. It was a sanctioned Spade, the kind that the High Court issued to Monitors who had completed an elite apprenticeship, after which they had to pass a rigorous physical examination, a character assessment, and what the Court called a “demonstration of specialized skills.” All of the Monitoring students had dreamed of wielding one in the future, though I had barely gave the notion any thought. I had never wanted to be a Monitor, and I certainly never planned on earning a Spade.
I gazed at Theo. Had he stolen it? The only other way he could have gotten the Spade was to have earned it. But he couldn’t have; he was too young. It took most people years of training to earn their Spades. Then I noticed two documents framed on the wall behind him, each stamped with the seal of the High Court. The font was too small to read, but it didn’t matter. I already knew what they said, for a pair of identical documents hung in my grandfather’s office, deeming him an official Monitor and servant of the High Court.
Theo had trained and apprenticed. He had passed the exams and the character check. He had been licensed by the Court: a certified Monitor, able to hunt and bury at his own discretion, without supervision or direct orders from the Court. Other Monitors were only allowed to do so on their own when acting in self-defense.
Theo passed his fingers down the handle, feeling the smooth blond wood. As he did, I caught my breath. Half of the handle had been scoured down to the natural wood. The other half had been dyed a deep red.
I realized what he had been doing. A red handle. That could only mean one thing: he had been disbarred, banished by the High Court and forbidden to bury any Undead, his Spade dyed red in a mark of disgrace. And now he was sanding it down so that no one would know. So that he could use it again without shame.
He picked up his sandpaper and went back to work. I crept into the shadows and tiptoed back to my room, all the while remembering his words.
I’m Theo. Or Theodore, to
my grandfather.... Or Case Number
5418
to the Monitors.
Who was this Theo, who had earned his Spade at such a young age? And what had he done to lose it?
I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. Not without Dante. So with nothing left to do, I crawled back into the hard twin bed across from Anya and fell asleep, cradling my bag to my ribs as if it were an external heart.
The next morning I woke to something tickling my arm.
Dante
, I mouthed in my sleep, feeling the warmth of his hand as he wrapped his fingers around my wrist. But no—it couldn’t be. Warmth? Dante’s skin was cold to the touch, pale and thin as ice. This hand didn’t feel like his at all.
I opened my eyes to find Theo standing over me, his face startlingly close to mine, his hand perched over my bag as if he were about to slip it from my arms.
I jumped back, pulling my bag out of reach. “What are you doing?”
His face softened and he recoiled. “Nothing,” he said with a confused laugh. “Just bringing you breakfast.”
He turned to the desk, where two plates of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast sat. He wore the same gray T-shirt as he had last night. Although the sweat stains and sawdust were gone, I could still picture them, as real as if I were crouching in that dark hallway.
I narrowed my eyes. “You were trying to steal my bag.”
He feigned innocence. “Me? Steal? Why would you think that?”
“You were touching my arm. You were trying to lift it so you could take my bag.”
Theo acted like he had no idea what I was talking about. “I was trying to wake you up.”
“You’re lying,” I said, incredulous. “You’ve been eyeing my bag ever since you saw it by my feet last night.”
Theo hesitated, then leaned closer, his muggy breath beating against my cheek as he whispered, “Does that mean there’s something inside worth stealing?”
Before I could respond, Anya sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What’s going on?”
I stared at Theo, challenging him to answer.
“I brought you breakfast,” he said.
Anya yawned and kicked off the sheet. “It smells delicious.”
“See,” said Theo, clearly pleased. “That’s the appropriate response.”
The ease of his smile disturbed me. He lied so effortlessly. I didn’t like it. When I said nothing, he gave me a wink—a
wink
, the audacity—and slipped out the door.
Anya rolled out of bed and nibbled on a piece of bacon. “He has a strange demeanor, don’t you think?”
“That’s an understatement,” I murmured and pushed past her. I followed Theo down the hall to his room, catching the door just before he swung it shut.
“I know what you were doing last night,” I said. “I saw you sanding down your Spade.”
Theo froze, his face surprised. I thought I had finally trapped him in a corner, when he spoke. “How did you know I had a Spade?”
“Because I saw you last night. You were sanding off the red dye from its handle.”
“Red dye?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Are you calling me a criminal?”
I gave him a steady look. “Aren’t you?”
Without responding, he opened his closet door and removed a tall shovel, almost the same height as him. I recognized its face—the polished metal, the fluting, the official seal of an
M
etched just before the tip—but the handle, I didn’t. It had a smooth finish, with no signs of red dye, or any irregular marks from sandpaper. Theo held it out to me.
I turned it around in my palms, inspecting the handle. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find a trace of what I had witnessed last night.
I backed away, confused. “But I saw you last night. You were sanding it away.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said plainly.
I traced the seal of the
M
on the Spade’s face. His name was etched into the metal beneath it.
THEODORE ARTHUR HEALY
. It really was his.
“No,” I rationalized. “You must have finished it last night. You sanded all of the red away and oiled the wood.”
“Last night? As in a few hours ago?” Theo laughed. “How would I have been able to get it this smooth so quickly? Wood can only get this worn feeling from being handled over years.”
I thought back to the scene I had witnessed last night. It had felt so real. Could I have dreamed it?
“But you were wearing those exact clothes. How would I have known that?”
He looked down at his worn cotton shirt and pants. “Because I was wearing them yesterday.”
Had he been wearing the same clothes yesterday? I couldn’t remember. “But how would I have known that you had a Spade?” I countered. Surely he couldn’t have an answer to that.
Theo’s eye twitched. “You tell me. Maybe you went to the bathroom and saw my certification hanging in my room. Or maybe you saw me polishing it, which I do most nights before I go to sleep. Or...maybe you went through my things.”
I took a step back. “What? Are you accusing me of—?”
“Maybe I am,” Theo said. “How does it feel?”
He was smart; he had to be, to have earned a Spade at his age. “What about Case Number 5418? The one you mentioned yesterday.”
Theo let out an amused laugh. “So that’s what’s been eating at you,” he said and leaned against his desk. “That case was nothing. I got caught Monitoring without my partner. The Court gave me a petty reprimand, then sent me on my way.”
It didn’t make sense. Just yesterday he’d said that the Monitors knew him only by Case Number 5418, as if he’d done something awful that had forever tainted him. But now he was saying it was nothing more than a reprimand? Why would he have even mentioned it before if it had been something so trivial? He was lying. He had to be.
“So you expect me to believe that you earned a Spade and then just moved in here with your grandfather to help him run his tavern instead of moving to Montreal and working for the High Court.”
Theo went silent for a moment. “Yes. I had a rough childhood. And my grandfather is blind. He needs me.”
“What about your parents?” I said.
Theo hesitated. “My mother died when I was a baby.”
“And your father?”
He averted his eyes. “He died as well.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he merely took his Spade back from me. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, his voice cold. “I’d rather not spend my morning reliving the harrowing parts of my past.”
“What if I looked it up in the records?” I said as he turned.
I almost detected a moment of hesitation in his face, though when I blinked, it had passed. “Go ahead,” he said coolly. “But you won’t find anything of interest.”
What was that supposed to mean? He smiled as if reading my thoughts. Before I had a chance to respond, Anya appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on?”
I backed into the hallway, whispering in her ear: “I don’t trust him.”