Love Reborn (A Dead Beautiful Novel) (20 page)

The last of the scents drifted past me, a swirl of memories that I would never get back. I turned to them as they swept down the far side of the mountain. And there I saw it: a circle of clouds swirling low in the sky. Jutting out of them was a lone mountaintop, which looked almost like it was floating. I recognized it from the underside of the chest, and though the engraving was far cruder, the likeness was unmistakable. According to the map, the fourth point was nestled somewhere in those clouds.

I should have felt happy. We were almost there. But there was no
we
anymore. There was barely a
me
.

My grandfather didn’t say anything about what we’d found, nor did any of the other elders. The junior Monitors were busy burying Pruneaux and searching for any signs of the Liberum and the white-clothed girl, but they’d found nothing. When they were finished, the elders led them around the edge of the mountain, avoiding the gash in the earth as though they hadn’t found anything there at all.

We followed the wisps of the Undead until the sun waned in the sky. A building emerged through the mist, built into the rocks on the side of the mountain, its gray stone blending into the rugged scenery. Its windows were fogged over, light flickering softly behind them. A sign hung above the door.
WEILTERHÜTTE
. My eyes watered with relief. An alpine refuge. A sign of life.

A burst of warmth welcomed us inside. A boy my age fed wood into a fire, making the embers crackle and dance, while a wiry man who looked like the boy’s father sat at the table, peeling potatoes. He had a ruddy face, and eyes set close together like a hawk’s. He led us down the hallway to the lodging rooms out back. My grandfather dropped his bag in front of the dormitory closest to the hallway. “Wash up and rest,” he said. “We’ll regroup again in an hour for dinner.”

I shared a room with the seven other female Monitors, including Clementine, who chose the top bunk next to mine. We didn’t speak while we unpacked, nor did we look at each other while we changed our clothes and washed our faces in the shared bathroom. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves, lest the Monitors grow suspicious. Our only communication was a brief glance we shared as I slipped out the door. I motioned to the two rooms at the end of the hall, where the elders were staying. She nodded as I disappeared into the hallway.

I nudged open the door of my grandfather’s dormitory with my foot. His rucksack was there, but otherwise the room was empty. The adjoining chamber was also vacant; the only sign of the elders was their gear, resting by their beds. Their Spades were gone. I ventured into the main room, where the innkeeper and his sons were busy prepping for dinner. Some of the junior Monitors were sitting by the fire, but the elders were nowhere to be seen.

My heart began to race. Where were they? Clementine had said they’d planned to meet tonight—to go to the camp of the Liberum, I’d assumed. Had they already managed to slip away? I peered back down the hallway, wondering if there was some other room I didn’t know about, but all I saw were three doors: one leading outside; one to a broom closet, which was slightly ajar; and one to the bathrooms. When I turned back into the main room, Clementine brushed past me.

“Have you seen them?” I whispered.

She shook her head. “I checked my father’s room, but there’s only one other junior Monitor there.”

I peered out the window at the white landscape that surrounded us. The snow had let up, though the wind was still howling against the sides of the refuge. “They must have already left,” I murmured, and turned to her. “We have to find them.”

We snuck to the back door. “Wait,” Clementine said, and ran down the hall to our rooms. When she emerged she was carrying two white bath towels. “Wrap this around your shoulders,” she said, handing me one. “You’ll blend in better.”

I did as she said, and with our shoulders draped in white, we burst out into the cold once more. I’d expected to spot them easily in the snow, but when we scanned the mountainside around us, we appeared to be alone. I spun around, shuddering as the wind thrashed about us. Dark rocks lined the slope, hanging over the trail in clusters; otherwise, everything was white and still. I searched the ground for footprints, but the ground was already so uneven with the prints we’d left hiking up to the refuge that it was impossible to tell which were new.

“I saw them last night,” I told Clementine. “A draft woke me up from my sleep. I thought it was...” I wanted to say Noah, but was it? Or had that part been nothing more than a dream? I couldn’t tell, so instead I continued, “...an Undead, so I followed the presence down to the woods, where I saw my grandfather and a few other Monitors doing something to three Undead boys.”

“Doing what?” Clementine said. “Burying them?”

I swallowed. “I don’t think so,” I said. “It looked like they were torturing them with gauze.”

A flash of red caught my eye in the distance. The scarlet scarf of an elder. I turned to an outcropping of gray rocks just over the edge of the hill. Unlike all of the other boulders around us, which were dusted in a healthy layer of snow, these were a little more dark and void of any accumulation.

Clementine must have been thinking the same thing I was because she stopped walking. “Were those rocks there before?”

I didn’t have to respond. Pulling our towels tighter around our shoulders, we crouched low to the ground and ran toward them, using the overhang of rock and ice to shroud us from view.

I had expected that when we found the elders, they would lead us to the camp of the Liberum; but instead, they stood in a huddle beneath a ledge of snow. The lapels of their coats were flipped upward to protect from the wind. I could just make out the large ruddy nose of my grandfather while he spoke to the others. We inched closer.

My grandfather huddled over a piece of paper. “‘Dear Mr. Winters,’” he read. “‘You don’t know me, but I know you. I know what you’re doing, and I want you to know that I’m watching you. Sincerely, Monsieur.’”

“Monsieur?” one of the elders said. “He has no name?”

My grandfather shook his head and tucked the page into his coat. “I received a similar note thirty years ago, just before the incident at the courthouse.”

Clementine’s eyes met mine. The incident at the courthouse?

“The day before the trial for the Undead, I found an envelope sitting on my desk,” my grandfather continued. “It had no postage or return address, just like this one. It said:
Dear Mr. Winters, I know what you’ve been doing and I cannot
let it continue. Please accept my apologies. Sincerely, Monsieur
. The next morning, the bomb went off in the courtroom. I didn’t show the note to anyone; I wasn’t sure whom I could trust. To my relief, I heard nothing more from him after that day. Over the years, I started to hope that he had passed away or stopped caring, though now I know that I was wrong. He is still here; he is still watching us.”

“If this Monsieur knows about what we’ve been doing all this time,” said one of the elders, “then why hasn’t he told anyone?”

All this time
? Clementine and I shared a questioning look. Did that mean that what Clementine had seen the elders doing in the woods—it had something to do with the bombing in the courthouse all those years ago?

“Perhaps he has been waiting for the right moment to expose us,” one of the elders offered.

“Or perhaps he didn’t have enough evidence back then, and has been slowly gathering it,” another added.

“Monsieur must have hand delivered the note to the hotel,” my grandfather said. “Which means he has either been following us—”

“Or is among us,” another elder said. “One of the other Monitors, perhaps.”

My grandfather nodded. “We have to be more careful than ever. From now on we will only talk about our business late at night, and in seclusion.”

“We are far away from the others now,” another elder said. “Tell us—what of the Undead?”

“We made contact with our sources inside the Liberum last night,” my grandfather said. “They didn’t have any information for us about the Brothers. They said they needed time.”

Sources?
Clementine mouthed to me. Had the elders been planting Undead boys in the Liberum, and using them as spies?

“Did you press them?” one of the elders said.

His choice of words me cringe. Was that what I had witnessed?

“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Three of them last night. All they were able to tell us before we released them was that the Liberum are getting desperate. They’ve been taking souls along the way to prolong their lives.”

“Should we take action?” an elder said.

My grandfather paused, as if considering it. “Not yet.”

I held in my gasp. The Liberum were killing people, and my grandfather was just going to stand by and let them do it?

“The Liberum can do things that we cannot, at least not out in the open,” he continued. “We’ll need them when it comes to the end. We’ll need someone to deal with the Keepers. They haven’t struck yet, but they will. They’re waiting, picking off Undead boys on the way. I’ve found their bodies strewn in the snow at night near their camp. It’s only a matter of time before they begin with us.”

Who are the Keepers?
I mouthed to Clementine, but she only put a hand on her mouth, shocked. Moments later the elders disbanded and walked, one by one, back to the refuge. Clementine and I pressed ourselves against the overhang of ice behind us, wrapping our towels tightly over our bodies to make sure we couldn’t be seen.

“The Keepers are rumored to protect the Netherworld,” Clementine said as the elders disappeared down the slope. “Incredible Monitors. They work silently, blending in to the scenery around them. When they strike, you won’t hear them, you won’t see them, you won’t feel them until the life is already leaving you. Supposedly, they’re descendants of the ninth sister. There are five of them, one for each point.”

I thought back to the pale girls I’d seen haunting the first three points, their hair so blond it looked as white as the snow, their complexion so fair it blended in with the winter landscape. I thought of the images of the canaries that kept appearing with them. Had I been seeing the Keepers? And were they somehow related to the Nine Sisters, or Ophelia Hart?

“That’s why the elders haven’t been attacking the Liberum,” Clementine continued. “They’ve been searching for the Netherworld for years, and now that they’re close, they don’t want to get their hands dirty by killing the Keepers themselves. They want the Liberum to get there first and do it for them.”

“And it’s why they’ve been tracking the Liberum,” I said. “Why they’ve been turning the other cheek, even when they know that the Liberum were taking innocent souls. The elders have been using them to find the Netherworld.”

“But what does that have to do with the bombing of the court all those years ago?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But if it’s up to Monsieur, I bet we’ll find out soon enough.”

T
HOUGH MY VISION HADN’T DULLED
over yet, I almost wished it had. Then I would have been able to look my grandfather in the face and feel nothing. But instead, all I could feel was disdain. When he laughed at breakfast while chatting with the High Court, all I could see were yellowed teeth, hollow and decaying, like those of the Liberum
.
When he stood, pushing his plate aside—the food barely touched—and gathered the elders to map the route we would take toward the fourth point, all I could see were their gaunt bodies, their withered skin, their thin lips, as desperate as those of the Liberum
.
Even their gray overcoats recalled the long cloaks of the Brothers, their tails billowing around their legs as they led us out into the sunlight.

As we set out from the refuge, I could feel the Undead ahead of us, their presence licking my skin. We followed it west with the sun, my grandfather leading the way. With each turn, the landscape brought the thin lines of the map to life from my memory, turning a circle into a frozen lake, a swooping curve into a slope of ice, a ridged rectangle into a rocky cliff. Then finally, a diamond, into a dark tunnel leading through the middle of the mountain.

“The Undead have drifted down the mountainside,” my grandfather said. “As they cannot go through the pass, they must go around it. We must catch up with them on the other side.”

We crowded around the passage while my grandfather and the elders ventured inside to make sure it was safe. Their flashlights faded into the darkness.

“Widow’s Pass,” Clementine whispered from beside me. “Supposedly, once you’re inside, if you’re a widow, you can hear the voice of your dead lover bouncing off the rocks.”

Dead lover. I had never used those words to describe Dante, though they were true. I peered into the tunnel, suddenly nervous. Would I hear him as we walked through it?

The dim orb of my grandfather’s flashlight appeared as he walked toward us. “We stay here tonight,” he said, hoisting up his pack. “It’s underground, which means it’s safe from the Undead, who are close. We’ll be able to sleep.”

Sharp black rock lined the passage through the mountain. I raised my flashlight and gazed up at the cavernous ceilings. They were so high that I couldn’t see the top, only a series of jagged edges jutting down from the walls. I tried to imagine what this hike would have been like if Dante hadn’t been captured by the Undead, if I hadn’t been discovered by the Monitors. How would we have gotten through this section of the map together?

Dante couldn’t have traveled underground, and I wouldn’t have been able to hike around another mountain, like the Undead were probably doing now. They were tireless; they didn’t need to sleep, and they weren’t affected by the cold like I was. Perhaps Monsieur had been right about letting the Liberum take Dante. But that meant Monsieur must have known about this place. Had he traveled this path before?

We set up camp along the broadest part of the pass, no wider than a riverbed. My grandfather positioned his tent at the head of the group, with mine just a few yards away between the two Monitors guarding me.

While I put together my tent, I listened to the dull echo of voices around me. Some of the Monitors whispered to each other while they unpacked. Others built a fire at the center of camp to cook dinner. Even though they were far enough away that I shouldn’t have been able to hear them, the shape of the cavern magnified their voices. But the more I listened, the more garbled the echo seemed. The sounds didn’t bounce back immediately, and when they did return a few moments later, they sounded like gibberish.

I called out my name to see what would happen.

The voice that returned spoke with a mishmash of sounds, as if all the letters had gotten jumbled on the journey. It repeated itself.
Renaar—enee—entee—ante—Dante
.

I covered my mouth. Had anyone heard? I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to meet my grandfather’s watchful gaze, but he was huddled over the black box with two of the elders.

I kept hearing that echo: while we ate dinner, while my grandfather set out a strategy for what we would do if we met the Liberum on the other side of the pass.
Dante
. The cavern knew who he was. Did that mean he was still alive?

I stayed up by the fire long after everyone else had gone to bed. Tents dotted the darkness, each glowing from the lanterns within until they lit up the passage like a string of Christmas lights. When the embers died out, I tiptoed through them to the back of the camp. I could hear my grandfather murmuring in his sleep.

“Don’t leave me,” he said, his voice so low that had I not known which tent was his, I would have thought I was listening to someone else. He let out a snore. “Nora, don’t go.”

Nora was my grandmother’s name. She died when I was very young. He was hearing his widow speak to him.

“I miss you,” he said. “Every day I miss you.”

I wondered what he was hearing, what she was saying. I wanted to listen in, to find out what she was like and what he was like with her around, but instead I averted my eyes and kept walking, ashamed for listening in on such a private conversation.

My tent was a small affair, the fabric a translucent periwinkle. It rippled in the light, making me feel like I was underwater, staring at the sun shining through the waves. It should have been lovely, but all I could think of when I saw it was Dante. The plane falling from the sky. His father praying as they hit the ocean and sank into the water; the waves a brilliant blue that grew darker, darker, until the world around him turned black.

I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and crawled outside. Clementine’s tent, which she shared with her father, was on the other side of the pass. I could see her silhouette through the fabric. She sat curled over a book, holding a flashlight while she turned the pages. I coughed, and Clementine spun around, shining her light through the tent in my direction. I pointed my beam back at her, and flashed it twice.

Clementine flashed hers back at me, and for a moment it almost felt like we were just two girls on vacation, staying up late after everyone else had fallen asleep. I had that life once, I realized, though I could barely remember what it felt like.

I turned to go back into my tent when I heard a voice.

Five more minutes.

I spun around, but it didn’t seem to be coming from one of the tents.

You saw her?
the same voice said.
You’re sure she’s still
with them?

“Dante?” I breathed. His presence swept over me like a chill seeping in through my blanket. My eyes darted about the cavern, searching for some trace of him in the rocks, even though I knew he couldn’t be there.

A pause. Was he talking about me? Who was he speaking to?

Did they hurt her?

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m waiting for you.” I wanted to call his name into the cavern, to tell him that I was safe, that I was going to find him. I pursed my lips to speak, but then changed my mind. I didn’t know if anything I said would get through to Dante. What if my words echoed off the rock walls for all of the Monitors to hear? They would know Dante was out there. They would use me to find him and bury him.

Four more minutes
.
Are you ready? In exchange, I’ll tell you
anything you want to know about the Monitors. I can tell you
about the other Monitors who were traveling with us. I can tell you
about the map in the chest that they have. About the sealed box.

What? The only people he could be talking to were Undead boys. But Dante would never offer to tell them about us, about the chest and the box, about Theo and Anya. Would he?

Do you see them?

A long pause. See whom? I tried to imagine the other side of the conversation, but couldn’t imagine Dante talking to any of the Undead boys like this.

All nine of them?

He could only be referring to one thing. The nine Brothers of the Liberum.

Three more minutes.
This time, his voice was more urgent.

What was happening in three minutes?

Don’t move
, Dante said.
They’re coming.

His words made me nervous. I pulled the blanket tight around my shoulders and waited.

Did they have the boys from the village? Did they take them
into the woods?

The boys from the village. The Liberum could only be doing one thing with them in the woods: taking their souls to give themselves a little bit more life.

Good
, he said.
When we go in after them, we’ll only have a
short window of time. After they take the boys’ souls, their eyes
will shut while they pass into limbo. It will only last a few seconds,
while their bodies absorb their new life. A minute, no more. That’s
when we have to take it.

A wave of dread spread through me. I tried to piece together what Dante was talking about. Was Dante going to wait until the Liberum killed nine local boys, and use that moment—when each of the Brothers was incapacitated from absorbing their new bit of life—to take something from them? The chest. I swallowed, not wanting to believe it. The Dante I knew would never stand by and watch while the Liberum killed innocent people.

There’s nothing we can do to help them,
he said, as if answering my question.
If we try to save them, the Liberum will bury
us. Two more minutes.

I went still, my muscles tightening as if I were right there with him.

I don’t know which one of them has it, so we’ll have to search
all of them. We have to be careful. Make sure your cloaks are
wrapped tight around you. We can’t let them see our faces. If they
wake up while we’re there and catch us, there will be no escaping.

A pause.

No, we cannot leave it behind. Without it, we will never find
the last two points.

The chest, I realized. Dante was trying to take it back from the Liberum.

One more minute
.

I hugged my knees, waiting for what came next.

Not yet,
he said.
Not yet.

I gripped the edge of the blanket. What if it didn’t work? What if the Liberum woke up and discovered him?

Wait until you hear them fall.

All I could hear was my own breath, slow and heavy. I imagined it belonged to him, that he was sitting here beside me. “Come back to me,” I whispered.

Now!

I felt a surge of adrenaline, the mountain air whipping against his face, the drag on his feet as they sank into the snow. I waited for his voice to echo through the walls again, for him to give me some sign that he was okay, but all went still. I tried to imagine what was happening: Dante running through the evergreens to where the Liberum were lying, half dead, half alive, in the snow. Around them lay nine young boys, all lifeless. I imagined Dante approaching the Brothers and quietly sifting through their dark robes, searching for the chest. Who was he with? Who was helping him? I didn’t know. A minute had almost passed. The Liberum would wake at any moment. I waited for him to say he had found it. No word came. I pressed my eyes shut, wishing I could somehow transport myself there. But I was in darkness, all alone.

I didn’t remember crawling back into my tent or falling asleep. All I could recall was Dante’s voice as he whispered,
They’re out
. I dreamed of the icy skin of the Liberum as Dante touched each of their withered hands to feel for a pulse. None.
Quickly
, I heard him say. I dreamed that he unclasped their cloaks to search for the chest within. And then...

I woke with a jolt. I heard a clamor of noise outside my tent, followed by loud voices. My grandfather’s voice boomed over them. “Where is it?” he shouted.

I sat up, only to discover that my tent had been looted. Everything was gone—my bag, my clothes, my gear. All that was left was my blanket and my shovel.

“We searched everywhere,” said John LaGuerre, Clementine’s father. “No one has it.”

“They must!” said my grandfather. “Are you trying to tell me that someone just walked into this tunnel in the middle of the night and stole all our gear?”

I rubbed my eyes, suddenly alert. Their gear was gone, too?

“Yes,” said LaGuerre.

“Who?” my grandfather demanded. “It couldn’t have been the Undead, because they can’t go underground. So who was it?”

“I don’t know,” said LaGuerre.

“No,” my grandfather insisted. “Whoever it was must have come into my tent while I was sleeping and taken the chest from me. Who could have done that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out—” LaGuerre began to say, but my grandfather cut him off.

“The answer is no one. Don’t you think I would have woken up if someone had unzipped the flap of my tent and come inside? Don’t you think I would have heard it?”

“In some other place, maybe,” John said, “But here—it isn’t exactly quiet.”

So he had heard the echo, too.

“I don’t know what you mean,” my grandfather said, though I knew he was lying. I’d heard him speaking to my grandmother in his sleep.

“I’m just saying that because of the...ambient noise...in this passage, it’s possible someone could have snuck in and taken our things without us realizing.”

“Possible?” my grandfather said with a scoff. “Anything is possible, but is it likely? No.” He paused. “Unless...”

I heard footsteps approach my tent. Before I had time to sit up, my grandfather had unzipped my tent and ripped open the flap. He leaned inside, his face flushed. His eyes darted about my tent, searching for something. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, his face hardened.

“Stand up.”

I threw on a sweater and crawled out of the tent. Although it was morning, the only sunlight that penetrated the passage was the dim glow at the end of the tunnel.

My grandfather paced around the rocks, his white hair unusually disheveled.

“What happened?” I asked.