After that I kept my bag with me at all times, and Theo kept his distance. Maybe I had made it up. Maybe I had walked past his room in the middle of the night, caught a glimpse of his Spade, and then dreamed the rest.
“It’s possible,” Anya said while we wandered around the tavern grounds. Her curious gaze lingered on him through the window. His brow was heavy as he mopped the floor of the dining room. To my bewilderment, she didn’t seem to mind Theo; actually, she seemed fascinated by him. “There must be a reason Monsieur sent him a note,” she said. “Maybe he has something that can help you. Maybe I do, too.”
The sticky ocean breeze blew through my hair. Anya had always been one to think that things happened for a reason; that when fate showed her a sign, she shouldn’t ignore it. But I didn’t want Theo’s help, and though it pained me to think it, I didn’t want Anya’s either. I had learned my lesson with Noah. The chest was my burden, to be shared with Dante only.
But Dante didn’t arrive that day, or the next. It wasn’t until the following night that I felt a stream of cool air drift in through the seam of the door. Beneath the blankets, goose bumps prickled up my arms. I opened my eyes. Anya tossed in her sleep and didn’t wake. I felt an icy strand of air wrap itself around my wrist and pull me out of bed. He was here.
I let it coax me out into the hallway, down the stairs, through the restaurant and to the front door. I held out my hand, feeling the vacant draft coil itself around my fingers.
“Dante?” I whispered, when I heard the sound of someone breathing behind me. Before I could turn around, a hand closed over my mouth and pulled me away from the door.
“Don’t move,” an old man whispered in my ear, his breath sour with sleep. Theo’s grandfather. “The Undead has come to call.”
He was a Monitor, too. I tried to shake myself free from his grasp, to tell him that it was only Dante; that I knew him; that he wasn’t dangerous; but he only clamped my mouth tighter. He was stronger than he let on. In his free hand he held a tall, rusty shovel. The old man had a Spade, too. I could barely make out the seal of the High Court through the corrosion. He wielded it like a cane, its metal tip barely grazing the floor as he felt his way through the darkness and thrust open the door.
A rush of cold swept through the room. The curtains billowed. The dark silhouette of a boy filled the frame. The old man pushed me aside, his leathery hand sliding off my lips to grasp the handle of his Spade. I called out to Dante, trying to warn him, but it all happened too quickly—the sound of rusty metal banging against wood, a grunt, the thud of a body dropping to the ground, the old man wheezing as he pulled Dante inside, Dante’s heels scraping against the wood floor as he tried to free himself of the man’s grasp.
Upstairs, a light turned on, casting a warm glow over the room. The light tap of footsteps sounded through the ceiling. The commotion had woken the rest of the house.
Finally, in the dim light, I saw him. His long hair was damp from the rain. His face was leaner and more mature than I remembered, though still as striking as the day I had first seen him at Gottfried Academy. Could he have aged in the mere days we had been apart? His eyes met mine, his irises warm and dark like the last embers of a fire.
The old man pushed him against the wall, pressing the tip of his Spade into his chest.
“Wait!” I said. “He’s with us. I know him.” But the old man ignored me.
“I can sense everything about you,” the old man whispered to him. “You’ve been dead for seventeen years. You’re still strong, still clinging on to whatever life you have left, but your body is beginning to decay. Your eyes are clouding. Soon they’ll be blind, just like mine. I can sense everything about you.”
“Tell me more, then,” Dante said, his voice steady.
The old man tilted his head. “Something is keeping you alive. Something external. You’re preserved better than you should be.” His wrinkled mouth trembled. “You’ve been taking lives to extend your own. You’ve been stealing the souls of others—”
“No,” Dante said, cutting him off. “I don’t do that. I won’t.”
The old man pushed his Spade into Dante’s chest. “Then how?” he demanded. “How are you so...human?”
Because of me, I realized. Because we had exchanged souls a year ago, extending his life ever so slightly, while shortening mine. But Dante divulged none of that. “I’m far less human than I appear,” he said, his voice rife with regret.
The old man tilted his head. “Why have you come here?”
“I received a letter.” Dante looked at me when he said it, and finally I understood. Dante had also been summoned to the Old Soul.
Anya appeared in the stairwell, her makeup smudged from sleep. The old man’s dull eyes turned to her as if he could see, then to me, and finally, back to Dante. “You’re the third stranger from Theodore’s note,” the old man realized, as if he had never expected the final visitor to be Undead.
“Yes,” I said. “I know him. His name is Dante. He doesn’t mean us any harm.”
The old man hesitated before lowering his Spade. “Very well,” he said carefully, though his voice remained skeptical.
“Thank you,” Dante said. I ran to him, expecting him to fold me into his arms, but he held me back.
“Do you still have it?” he asked. The urgency in his voice startled me.
“Of course I do.”
“Where?”
I glanced over my shoulder, where I usually slung my bag, but soon realized that I didn’t have it with me. I must have left it in my bed when Dante’s presence woke me in the middle of the night.
“Upstairs. Why? Is something wrong?”
“Show me.”
I led him upstairs, past Anya, whom he barely registered. She followed us. When I opened the door to our room, I found Theo huddled over my bag, the chest open in his hands.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Put that down!”
But this time, Theo didn’t seem to care that I had caught him going through my things. Instead, he looked at me in awe. “Where did you find this?”
“Get out!” I yelled and ran toward him, but Theo held the chest out of my reach.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had the Cartesian Map?”
“The what?” Dante said, narrowing his eyes as he stepped toward him. The warmth drained from his face. Suddenly he was no longer the boy I had fallen in love with two years ago, but just another Undead close to expiration, cold and merciless.
Theo fell silent, as if he had only just noticed Dante’s presence in the room. He eyed him as if he were a wild animal and backed away. “The Cartesian Map,” he repeated. He held up the open chest and pointed to the underside of the lid, where I could just make out the five points etched into the shape of a canary. “Do you have any idea what this means?”
Cartesian? As in René Descartes, the philosopher who first wrote about the existence of the Undead? I had read his
Seventh Meditation
two years ago after finding it in my grandfather’s mansion, but I had never heard of a map. I gazed at the chest in Theo’s hands, as if seeing it for the first time. The five points in the shape of a canary suddenly made sense. The elaborate tangle of lines etched around each of the points had always vaguely looked like a landscape: a twist of etchings that looked like three rivers braiding together; a collection of straight lines that almost looked like a forest; a series of triangles that mimicked the jagged peaks of mountains. How could we not have realized?
“How do you know so much about this chest?” Dante asked in a voice so steady that it was frightening.
Theo took a step back. “Just stumbled across it in my studies.”
“Oh?” Dante said. “Is that why you felt you had the right to go through our things?”
“It’s not yours either. You only found it,” Theo said, though his voice didn’t have the same confidence it normally did. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s still up for grabs. And this is my house, you know. I received a letter from Monsieur, too.”
Dante’s face hardened. He walked toward him, saying nothing, and placed his hands on the chest. Theo glanced at Anya’s small shovel leaning against her bag on the opposite side of the room, as if the only way he knew how to deal with the Undead was with a weapon between them. It was too far away now. Dante’s cold hand brushed his, making him flinch. Theo shrank in his shadow and let go.
A look of relief passed over Dante’s face as he felt the weight of the chest in his hands. He stepped forward, pushing Theo back into the hallway. When he was out of the room, Dante shut the door.
“And who are you?” Dante said, gazing at Anya curiously.
“Anya,” she said. “I received a letter from Monsieur, too. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Dante looked to me, as if to ask if she were okay. I nodded, and Anya stepped toward him, studying his face. “You’re the first Undead I’ve met up close.” She squinted at something I couldn’t see. “Renée was right about you. You have a complex aura.”
I pressed my ear against the door, making sure Theo wasn’t listening, then turned to Dante. “What happened? I thought they found you. I thought...”
“They were close,” Dante said. “They split up the next morning. Half of them went south toward Massachusetts.”
My phone call, I thought.
“Still, your grandfather was on my trail for days. If I hadn’t stumbled past the camp of the Liberum and their Undead boys, who distracted the Monitors, I never would have gotten ahead of him. We can’t stay here long,” Dante said. “The only way I could get away from the Monitors was to make sure that the Liberum saw me and followed me most of the way here. That way, if the Monitors caught up, they would first have to face the Undead. I lost them both early this morning, but they weren’t far behind. They’ll be able to find us. Your grandfather, he’s figured something out. He knows why you came to Gottfried in the first place, and that you found the secret of the Nine Sisters in the lake. I heard the other Monitors talking about what it could be before they turned back.” Dante paused, as if parsing what he was about to say. “They mentioned something called the
Netherworld
.”
“The Netherworld?”
“It’s some sort of underworld,” Anya said. “I’ve read about these things. A mythic place. A place you can’t get to by normal means.”
“Eternal life,” I murmured, echoing the promise of the Nine Sisters. “Maybe we’ll find it there.”
Dante looked like he was about to say something, but when he met my gaze, he stopped himself.
“There’s something else,” I said, studying him. “Tell me.”
“I was just worried about you,” he said, though he didn’t look me in the eye. Before I could ask him again, he reached into his coat pocket and removed a creased envelope. I immediately recognized the handwriting on the address. Monsieur.
Dear Mr. Berlin,
You don’t know me, but I know you. Should you ever need a place of refuge, you may find one in Pilgrim, Massachusetts. When you arrive, you will know where to go.
Sincerely,
Monsieur
“I received it a week ago, wedged in the door of one of the cabins we stayed in. No postage. I first assumed he was a Monitor, trying to trap me, but that didn’t make much sense. The only way he could have known where I was staying was to have followed me; if he wanted to bury me, he could have done it far earlier.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry. I never planned on coming here, but when the Monitors were upon us in the woods, I didn’t know what else to do. We needed a place of refuge. The letter was all I had left.”
I touched the signature, feeling the indentation of Monsieur’s pen on the paper. Why was he helping us?
“And this one is for you,” Dante said, handing me an envelope identical to all the others. Written across the front in Monsieur’s neat handwriting was my name. No postage or return address. “It was wedged in the door of the tavern when I arrived.”
“He was here?” I said. “Today?” I ran to the window and pulled back the curtains to search the street, even though I knew that I wouldn’t find him. The town was empty, the buildings lining the road dark.
“He could have left it hours ago,” Anya murmured behind me.
The letter felt heavier than the others. I ripped it open, wondering if my note was longer. To my surprise, an airplane ticket fluttered to the floor. Anya picked it up.
She gasped, her eyes widening. “Paris?”
My heart skipped. I glanced down at the envelope in my hand. There were three other tickets, each leaving the next morning for Charles de Gaulle Airport. I flipped through them, checking for an accompanying note, but none was included.
“Is this real?” I asked, not sure if I should be excited. Every time I glanced at Monsieur’s handwriting, a wave of apprehension passed over me. What did he know that we didn’t?
“If this really is a map,” Dante said, holding up the chest, “it’s possible that it starts in France. After all, René Descartes was French.”
“So were the Nine Sisters,” I added. “The entire Monitoring society began in France.” Suddenly, the tickets started to make sense. Everything in the Monitoring community went back to Europe; that much I remembered from school. But what would we do once we got there? Paris was a huge city. Even if the chest was a map, it was only comprised of five points in the vague shape of a bird, with no other physical markers. The points could be anywhere.
Anya interrupted my thoughts. “You know who else is French?” she said somberly. “Monsieur. And these tickets are only one-way.”
The room fell quiet, all of us realizing that the trip, the tickets—even the fact of our gathering there, in that creaky room in Massachusetts—had been orchestrated for reasons we didn’t understand, and by a person we weren’t certain we could trust.
I felt my pocket, where my passport sat. Anya must have had one with her, too, since she had come from Montreal just as I had two weeks before—but did Dante?
“Do you even have a passport with you?” I said.
Dante nodded at the side pocket of his bag. “I came to see you in Montreal, didn’t I?”
My shoulders relaxed with relief.
“I think we should go,” he continued. “What other option do we have? We can either go to Paris tomorrow and face whatever it is that’s waiting for us there, or we can stay here, and do nothing while our time runs out.”