Life Eternal Part 6

I stared at the paisley patterns in the carpet to avoid his gaze. How had I dreamed of the hospital when I'd never actually been there? It seemed alarmingly similar to my dream of Miss LaBarge.

He studied me with one eye while the other wandered off to the right. "I unsettle you," he said, his lip curling into a frown. "It's this." He motioned to his eye. "I don't blame you; it makes most students uncomfortable."

"Oh, no. I, um-" I stammered, feeling suddenly guilty. "It's not that. It's just, well..." He waited for me to finish, but I let my sentence trail off.

His expression softened. "Just a moment ago, you were patting your pockets. Did you lose something?"

The rubbing. The dream had been so vivid that when I woke up, I thought I might still have it in my pocket. "Oh, it was just...nothing."

He raised an eyebrow, but then let it drop. "Do you have any preexisting neurological conditions or a history of brain trauma?"

"No."

"Have you ever fainted like this before?"

"No."

"Do you remember anything that might have triggered the event this morning?"

I thought of the slide of the hospital, of how I was overwhelmed with the need to know what was behind the building's walls. "No."

Lowering his pad, Dr. Newhaus tried to meet my eyes, but I looked away. "I'm not your enemy," he said. "I'm here to help you."

"I've had a lot of bad doctors in the past."

"I understand," he said. "So have I. That's why I decided to become one."

He smiled, one eye resting on me, the other on the trees swaying outside the window. He seemed trustworthy.

"Can you remember what happened before you fainted?" he said. He crossed his legs, revealing mismatching striped socks.

For some reason, they put me at ease. "I remember Mr. Pollet telling us about the founding of Montreal and its tunnels. I remember him showing us slides of a bunch of old buildings. The last one I saw was of the Royal Victoria Hospital, before everything went black."

He s.h.i.+ned a flashlight into my eyes and asked me to count backward from ten. When I was finished, he asked, "And you don't remember anything in between then and now?"

Wringing my fingers together, I thought about my dream of Miss LaBarge, about all the sleep I'd lost, and all the mornings I'd woken up in sheets drenched in sweat.

But at least those dreams had happened at night. Pa.s.sing out in cla.s.s was different; it was abnormal, intrusive, and frightening. "I had a dream," I said, looking at my feet. "Or something like one. I'm not really sure."

"Of what?"

"Of the Royal Victoria Hospital. I was walking through it to a certain room, looking for something. Everything was so clear and detailed, like I'd been there before."

"Have you?"

I shook my head.

"Can you describe what you saw?"

I told him about the hospital waiting room, about going to the pediatric ward and entering the boy's room and making a rubbing beneath the bed.

He looked unnerved. "That's startlingly accurate," he said. "The layout, the interior of the hospital-that's all correct. Are you sure you haven't been there before?"

I nodded.

The doctor frowned. "Have you had other dreams like this?"

I swallowed. "At night, yes. In each of them, I'm searching for something."

He took notes as I told him about the nightmares I'd had all summer. When I was finished, he made me stand up and walk across the room. He then tested my balance, my vision, and my hearing.

"Physically, everything seems to be fine, though your body is exhausted and sleep deprived. I'm going to schedule you for some tests, just to make sure everything inside is okay." He leaned forward. "But if I may speak candidly, you've been through a lot in the last year, and I think you'd benefit from a little help. I'd like you to consider coming in to see me regularly."

I wiped off a dusty mark on my stockings, which must have been there from when I fell out of my chair.

"You can think about it if you'd like. In the meantime, these may help you get some sound sleep." He jotted something down on a pad and tore off the prescriptions for two kinds of pills.

"What are they?" I asked, trying to sound out the names in my head.

"One is an antianxiety medication. The other is an antidepressant."

"But I'm not depressed."

"That may be," he said, in a way that made me think he was humoring me. "However, for now, this medication should put an end to these dreams of yours, and hopefully help you relax and get some much needed sleep."

"But what if I don't want to stop them? What if I'm seeing them for a reason?"

"And what reason would that be?" he asked, puzzled.

I let my hands drop into my lap. "I don't know."

I spent the rest of the day undergoing tests and scans of my brain. When they all came back normal, Dr. Newhaus reviewed my chart one last time and let me go. By then it was already late afternoon, the shadows s.h.i.+fting over the courtyard as the sun sank in the sky. Cla.s.ses were over, and students poured out of the buildings. Keeping my head down, I clutched my bag to my chest and hurried through the columns that lined the perimeter of campus. A group of girls was sitting on the stoop of the dormitory, Clementine LaGuerre's voice ringing above the others.

"Apparently she had some sort of seizure in cla.s.s today," she was saying, popping her gum as if to punctuate her sentence. "I heard from one of the fourth-years that she wasn't even that good of a Monitor at Gottfried," she added, turning to April and Allison and three other girls who had lived down the hall from me last year.

I hid behind a column and watched them. "She was good," April said, looking to her sister for approval.

"Well, she wasn't that good," Allison corrected. She was only distinguishable from her sister by the mole on her chin and her haughty tone. "She just made a big show whenever she found a dead animal. I bet in reality she was only a little bit above average." The other girls nodded in agreement.

"So how did she do it?" Clementine asked, her voice calm. "How did she survive the kiss of an Undead?"

I leaned closer, trying to hear Allison's response, when her eyes met mine. Her face dropped and everyone turned.

Swallowing, I raised my chin and pushed through them, using all my courage to act like I didn't care. I was almost at the doors when Clementine slipped off the ledge, her legs bare and smooth beneath her wool skirt. "So are you going to answer my question? Or are you keeping it a secret because you know you're a fraud?"

A fraud? Her words tripped me midstep. Maybe they stung so much because somewhere inside me I agreed with her-I didn't know how I had gotten first rank, and I didn't know what was happening to me. All I knew was that it was real-it was all real, and it was separating me from the person I loved the most-Dante. Slowing, I turned around. "Or maybe the truth is too painful to relive," I said. "But of course you wouldn't think of that because all you care about is your own ego."

A hush fell over the girls as Clementine struggled to respond, but I was already through the doors and up the stairs to my room. Opening my dresser, I rummaged through my underwear drawer until I found a half-burned candle left over from Eleanor's stash last year. Even though it was still light out, I lit the wick and set it on my desk, feeling suddenly better as I stepped back and stared at it, imagining I was still at Gottfried.

Before the wax could even melt, a gust of wind came in through the window and blew the flame out. Except it didn't feel like wind, exactly. Approaching the candle, I held my hand up, letting the black smoke coil around my fingers. The breeze had a smell to it, a taste, a wetness, as if it were the long cold breath of someone I had known in a previous life. Dante.

I ran downstairs, bursting through the doors to where the girls still stood on the stoop. Clementine put a hand on her hip. "You have something to say to me?"

But I barely heard her. She couldn't feel it; none of them could. When I made it to the school gates, I stopped and balanced at the edge of the curb, feeling the breeze lick at my ankles.

I could feel Dante before I could see him. A p.r.i.c.kling sensation climbed up my legs, making them move, and suddenly I was winding through the Montreal streets, following a thin strand of air as it swirled past people on the sidewalk, coaxing them out of the way.

My skin tingled as I pa.s.sed butcher shops, fish markets, a veterinary clinic, and a funeral home. Animals, humans, soulless and empty, I could feel all of them-some intensely, some weakly; their presences grasping at me like the fingers of a ghost. Disoriented, I spun around, the lights of the intersections changing from green to yellow to red as I glanced down one street and then the next, trying to figure out which one led to Dante. A throng of people in suits pressed past me as the walk sign blinked white.

I had to find a way to filter it all out. Letting my hands drop to my sides, I closed my eyes and concentrated on Dante, remembering the way his presence felt-its weight, its texture, the way it seemed to absorb me....

"Are you okay?" a balding man with a briefcase asked, tapping me on the shoulder.

Frustrated, I brushed him off and closed my eyes. Unb.u.t.toning my cardigan, I let the breeze lap against my chest until everything around me-the cars, the people, the traffic lights, and the yelling; the wisps of the dead beckoning me-blurred into white noise.

I found myself outside a looming cathedral, its arches chiseled with saints, their faces darkened by the elements. Running up the steps, I pushed at the doors until they parted with a gasp. Tea lights lined the entrance. A handful of people were scattered about in the pews, their heads bowed. Windows stained the light red, blue, purple, gold. No one looked up when I followed Dante's presence down the left side of the cathedral to an alcove behind the altar.

Dozens of faded tapestries hung from the walls, each displaying an old map. I approached one that ill.u.s.trated the path from earth to the afterlife, with a square-sailed s.h.i.+p traveling toward a frayed edge and beyond. In the still air of the church, the tapestry billowed.

"Dante?" I whispered, pa.s.sing my hand over the heavy cloth, the material coa.r.s.e beneath my fingertips. But it was just a draft that had blown in. I followed the current to a door that opened onto to a lush, tangled cemetery, its walls overgrown with flowering vines.

The wind blew patterns into the yellow gra.s.s until it rearranged itself into a path. I took a step, the gra.s.s flattening beneath my shoes, and then another, around a dry fountain and toward the corner of the yard, where a boy was bending over a grave.

Stopping behind a tree, I watched him, suddenly nervous. Was it him or someone else? This boy looked older, taller, more like a man-far older than seventeen years. His shoulders curled as if they were too wide for his body; a white-collared s.h.i.+rt stretched over them. His long dark hair was pulled into a messy knot, a stray lock falling in front of his face as he stood up.

Trembling, I waited for him to turn around. And when he did, he was both familiar and strange-his pensive eyes and ashen cheek as pale and angular as stone-they were all exactly as I remembered, though somehow sad, like a statue that looked all the more beautiful in person.

A branch cracked beneath my foot, and Dante's gaze met mine, his lips forming my name.

"Renee?"

He took a step toward me and then stopped, as if he were too scared to come any closer-as if I weren't real. Suddenly I felt like I was seeing him for the first time; like we were meeting each other all over again in Crude Sciences, s.h.i.+vering as our fingers touched beneath the table.

After months of feeling numb, of tossing in my sleep and waking up to another day without smells or tastes, without music or laughter or warmth, it seemed impossible that Dante was now here, stepping toward me. And without knowing why or where it was coming from, I started to cry.

Closing my eyes, I let myself collapse into him, feeling his cool skin against mine, my chest rising and falling with his, breathless, as if my soul were flitting in and out of me. "You're here," I said, listening to the irregular sound of his heartbeat. "You're still here."

Quiet, still, we stood like that-one person instead of two. I pulled back and studied his face, touching his nose, his cheeks, his eyelashes-each a vague reminder of someone I had loved in another life. How much time had pa.s.sed between us?

"You look different," I said, my voice cracking as I stared at his eyes, which almost looked cloudy.

"So do you," he said, wiping my cheek.

Now that I was with him, it was as if a film had been rubbed off. I could smell the garden air, sticky and sweet. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. And when I raised my lips to his, I almost felt complete again. He put a finger to my mouth just before we touched.

"How did you know I was here?"

"What?" I asked, confused. "I thought you were-" and that's when I realized he hadn't been waiting for me. I took a step back, hurt. "So you aren't here to see me?"

"Of course I am. Why else would I come to Montreal, where there are hundreds of Monitors searching for me? I just didn't know how to get to you. If I got any closer to St. Clement, I worried someone would sense me. So I came here, looking for a place for us to meet. I thought a cemetery would help m.u.f.fle my presence." His eyes wandered across the headstones. "That way if someone sensed me, they would a.s.sume it was just the graveyard."

"I felt you," I said softly. "But I don't think the other girls could. Or the doctor."

Dante's face hardened, a wrinkle forming over his eyes. "Doctor? What do you mean?"

I told him everything: About my summer with my grandfather and the doctors; about the way everything seemed dull and meaningless without him; about how I had changed. I told him about my dream of Miss LaBarge and how it came true, and then about the placement test, and history cla.s.s, and how I'd made a rubbing of something beneath the hospital bed.

When I finished, Dante ran his hand down my face, his eyes worried as he searched me. "Are you okay? Is everything okay now?"

In the distance, a wind chime clinked together, its sound cascading in tiny notes like water droplets falling onto a roof. I nodded and touched his fingers. "Are you? Where have you been? I was so worried."

Instead of answering, Dante pressed on. "What did the doctor say?"

"He gave me some sort of medication that will stop the dreams, but I don't know if I want it. This will probably sound crazy, but I think the dreams might be useful."

Dante gripped my hand. "You're not thinking of-"

"Going to the hospital to see what's under the bed," I whispered, finis.h.i.+ng his sentence. "The dream I had before Miss LaBarge died was true. What if this one is too?"

"No," Dante said, his voice abrupt. "You can't."

I shook my head. "Why?"

"Because it isn't safe. You don't know where these dreams are coming from or why you're seeing them. You just said that you dreamt of Miss LaBarge directly before she died. What would have happened if you had woken up in time to have gone there?"

"I could have saved her."

"Or you could have died too," he said, louder than he intended. Lowering his voice, he pleaded, "I almost lost you last year. I can't risk that again. Please, promise me you won't go to the hospital."

I hesitated. Before I could respond, something rustled near the back of the cathedral. We both froze, listening to the metal gate of the cemetery creak open and clatter shut.

Before I knew what was happening, Dante led me behind a large headstone beneath the willow tree and pulled me on top of him as we both fell into the gra.s.s.

I buried my face in his neck as we waited, listening to the sound of footsteps. "Who is it?" I whispered into Dante's ear as he peered around the side of the stone. He smelled of cedar and dried leaves, of a cold winter night in the woods. Grasping the collar of his s.h.i.+rt, I held him closer. When he turned to me, our lips were inches apart. "The grounds-keeper," he said, his cool breath mingling with mine.

Dante ran his hand along my back, his hands climbing up the crests of my shoulder blades as the footsteps grew distant. When his fingers grazed the s.p.a.ce between my shoulders, a sharp pain shot through my body. Unable to stop myself, I gasped.

"What was that?" Dante said, stopping abruptly. His hand fell to his side.

Just as quickly as the pain had started, it ended. Dante's face was furrowed into a frown. Had he felt it too? "I don't know," I said, trying to compose myself.

Giving me a skeptical look, he slowly placed his palm between my shoulders again. I couldn't help but wince as the same p.r.i.c.kling pain shot through my neck. Gently, he took off my cardigan and pulled down the back of my s.h.i.+rt.

"You have a mark here," he said, tracing the lines of my vertebrae. "How long have you had this?"

"I didn't know I had one," I said, his gaze making me uncomfortable. Squirming away from him, I sat up. "It's probably nothing."

"It's not nothing. I have the same ones. Look," he said, and led my hand to the small of his back.