Noah waited for me to continue. “And then what…?”
“And then…” But the more I searched for an answer, the more I realized I didn’t have one. I let my arms drop to my sides. “I don’t know.”
“It’s not your fault that you’re having these visions. If anything, the headmaster should be grateful. It’s because of you that we found the Undead in the first place.”
Feeling all the more miserable, I gave him a slight nod.
The windows of the headmaster’s office gave off a warm yellow glow as we walked toward them. The cobblestones were packed with snow.
An older woman wearing a heavy sweater and a brooch answered. His secretary. She surveyed the state of our outfits, which were stained from the night before. “Out late practicing?” she asked.
“We need to speak to Headmaster LaGuerre,” Noah said.
“I’m afraid he hasn’t arrived back yet from the winter holidays. Is everything all right?”
Noah glanced at me. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“He’ll be in the office tomorrow morning. Do you want to leave him a message?” she asked, and took out a pen.
“No,” I said firmly. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
After we made plans to meet before class the next day, Noah walked me back to the dormitory. The snowflakes caught in my eyelashes as I stood on the stoop.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Please don’t say that,” he said softly, though there was an edge to his voice. “It makes me wonder if I could have changed your mind.”
I pushed a lock of hair from my face. “No—I—”
But before I could say anything more, he backed down the stairs. “Keep safe, Renée.”
I was so dazed when I got back to my room that it took me a few moments to notice the closet door was ajar. “Strange,” I said, flipping on the lights and glancing inside, where nothing seemed wrong. But as I went to my desk, something crunched beneath my feet. A few pieces of broken glass were strewn in front of my bed; the remainder of a water jug I kept on my nightstand. Bending over, I picked up a shard and then checked the trash bin, where I found the rest of the glass. Someone had been here.
Throwing my stuff down, I burst through the bathroom and banged on Clementine’s door.
To my surprise, the headmaster opened it.
“Renée,” he said as he put one of Clementine’s bags down. He was wearing a coat and hat, his shoulders dusted with snow. Clementine was standing behind him in tall fur boots and earmuffs.
“Headmaster LaGuerre,” I said, my shoes squeaking against the wood as I stopped short. “You’re here.”
He gave me a bemused smile. “Yes I am. Were you coming to say hi to Clementine?”
A smirk spread across Clementine’s face.
“Oh, um—yes. I’ll come back later. Sorry to intrude.”
“Well, don’t leave on my behalf,” he said. “I’ll be gone after I help Clementine carry her things in.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said, and made for the door, when Clementine stepped forward.
“Did you want to ask me something?” she said, taking off her gloves. “You can do it now. No need to be shy.”
I glanced at her, and then at her father. He blinked, waiting. “I just—found something in my room. A broken water jug. And the closet door was open, but I’m certain I closed it before I left. I was wondering if you saw anyone go into my room while I was away?”
Clementine raised a delicate eyebrow. “But I only just got back. How would I know?”
The luggage by her feet was wet from snow. Maybe she was telling the truth. But then who had been in my room?
I slept on Anya’s couch that night, beneath a coarse patchwork quilt that her grandmother had made, with the sign of the cat embroidered on it for good luck. Anya lit candles around the room while I told her about the farmhouse and the dark figure that had been standing behind the children as we’d run into the woods. Even long after she fell asleep, I stayed awake, the candles around me flickering as the clouded eyes of the boy I’d left writhing on the basement floor blurred into Dante’s, haunting me until I drifted into dreams.
Anya shook me awake the next morning. The candles had all burned out, and the January day was peeking in between the curtains. “We slept through Strategy and Prediction,” she said, throwing clothes on. Our class was supposed to have been held at a location outside of the city. By the time we made it out the door, class was over, and the van was already parked near the school gates. I spotted Noah by the curb, holding his gear.
“What happened?” he asked. “We were supposed to meet the headmaster this morning.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, lowering my voice when I noticed Clementine watching us. “I overslept.”
Noah studied me, as if trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. “You didn’t not show up because of—”
“Of course not,” I said, before he could finish.
The headmaster was carrying the last of the supplies out of the van when we approached him.
“Headmaster?” I said, tapping him on the shoulder.
He jumped. “Oh, Renée. And Noah. What can I do for you?”
“We need to talk to you,” I said. “In private.”
Shutting the door, he rubbed his hands together in the cold. “Is everything all right?”
I nodded. “It’s about the Liberum.”
The smile faded from the headmaster’s face. “Excuse me?” he said, bending over us.
Down the path, Clementine watched us.
“We know where they are,” Noah said. “We saw them.”
The headmaster looked in either direction and then buttoned his coat. “Come with me,” he said.
Inside his office, he cleared stacks of paper from two chairs and motioned for us to sit. Then he settled himself behind his desk and crossed his hands. “Now tell me.”
“It started with a vision of a farmhouse,” I said, and told him about our trip, the nightmarish house, and what I’d overheard through the heating vent. Noah finished the rest of the story while I stared at the plants on the windowsill, trying to push the image of the boy in the basement out of my head.
“You’re certain the person you saw was a Brother of the Liberum?” the headmaster asked when we were finished.
I hesitated. “Not certain, but I heard him speak in Latin when he was talking to the children.”
“You knew this last night and you didn’t tell me?” he said, staring at me.
“We went to your office, but you weren’t there,” Noah said, not knowing what the headmaster was referring to.
“Did they see you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But most of them were blind,” Noah interjected.
The headmaster’s shoulders slumped in relief. “And they had no way of identifying you?”
“No,” Noah said, just as I blurted out, “Maybe.”
The headmaster glanced between us, his eyes wide as he waited for a clear answer. “Did they follow you here?”
I swallowed as he turned from Noah to me. Someone had broken into my room, and it hadn’t been Clementine. Could it have been the Brother of the Liberum? “Maybe.”
The headmaster’s face seemed to drain of its color. His eyes darted to the window, and without warning, he stood up and closed the shades. “Then you need to prepare yourselves.”
But how?
I skipped the rest of my classes that day and ran to the waterfront, the wind chapping my cheeks as I slowed and stared at the icy waters of the St. Lawrence River. Across the water on the opposite bank, the rounded peaks of the grain silos stuck out of the snowy gust like mountaintops. I walked toward them, my feet making fresh footprints in the snow as I approached the railing.
The wind swirled through, making my eyes water as I leaned over and spoke to Dante. “If I don’t see you again,” I said, swallowing, “I wanted to say good-bye.”
“Bye, bye, bye, bye…” The sound sent a chill through my bones as it echoed back to me.
Wiping my cheek, I was about to turn away when I noticed a message scratched into the metal of the handrail among the rest of the graffiti. Except this one was written in Latin. I’ll come for you, it said, as if he had heard me and spoken back.
“Being on the defensive isn’t enough,” I said to Anya over dinner late that week. Four guards were manning the doors of the dining hall; otherwise, everything seemed to carry on as normal. No one else knew about the threat of the Liberum.
“Are you suggesting we go out and find the Liberum before they find you? Because I don’t want to do that.” Anya slid down in her chair, sipping a glass of milk. Noah was nowhere to be seen. He had barely said a word to me after our meeting with the headmaster, and after classes he had just disappeared.
I lowered my voice. “Of course not. The Liberum are looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters. The last part of the riddle—that’s what they really want, right? But we can’t let them have it. You should have seen what he was like….” I said, remembering the dark figure, his body thin and somehow sunken.
The table behind us erupted in laughter. Probably from some stupid joke.
“We need to find the riddle,” I said. “We need to find it before they do.”
Anya glanced over her shoulder. “But how?”
I chewed on my straw. “I don’t know.”
And then from somewhere behind me, I heard one of Clementine’s friends say, “Gottfried should be shut down. It’s just breeding the Undead.”
“That place is cursed,” another girl said.
“Gottfried,” I repeated. “Curse.”
The Gottfried Curse. I had almost forgotten about it. Pushing my plate aside, I turned to Anya, my face flushed. “Did you hear that?”