I grabbed my shovel from beneath the bed and braced myself to meet the others head-on, but when I turned, I was alone. A group of Undead was by the door, fighting to get past Anya and Theo, and another group was struggling by the balcony, but for some reason no more of the boys were coming after me. For a moment I thought I saw two Undead boys standing in front of me, directing the Undead in the other direction. Why weren’t they attacking? One looked taller than any of the other Undead boys working for the Liberum. The other was around my height. One of them spoke to the Undead boys before him, and pointed to the balcony. “The Undead is the one that we want,” I heard him say.
He was talking about Dante. I searched the room for him amidst the faces of the Undead, but they all looked the same: cold, empty, lifeless. Their pale skin was all I could see through the darkness—a face, an arm, a bare foot lying on the floor in a tangle of sheets and gauze, shuddering as the life left it. A group of Undead rifled through the dresser drawers, pulling them out of their tracks and tossing them on the floor before moving on to search beneath the beds. They were looking for the chest. Above it all I saw the glint of Theo’s Spade as it cut through the air, knocking an Undead boy out of the way. I heard Anya shout to him. They were fighting off a handful of Undead, pressing them out the door and into the hallway.
“Force them into the basement!” Theo shouted over the fray.
Dante was standing by the balcony, his tall silhouette curled over as dozens of Undead boys tried to pin him down. Then one of them felt the shape of the chest inside his bag. “It’s here!” one of the boys said. He snatched the bag from Dante’s shoulder, opening it to make sure it contained what they were looking for, then tucked it away beneath his coat while the others pulled at Dante’s hair, his clothes, his arms, dragging him toward the broken window. But why? Why were they taking him, too?
“Dante!” I screamed, and tried to run toward him when two hands gripped my arms.
I lashed out at the Undead behind me, hitting him with my shovel, only to find that it was Theo, his lip bleeding, his face glistening with sweat. Still, he held on to me.
“What are you doing?” I cried. “They’re surrounding Dante. I have to help him.”
“I’m trying to help you,” said Theo. “There’s too many. They’ll kill you.”
I squirmed, trying to wrestle myself free, but his fingers dug into my skin. On the other side of the room, I could see Anya pressing a tangle of Undead out the door.
“Get off of me!” I tried to twist my arms from his grasp, but Theo held tight. “They’re taking him! They could kill him!”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said in my ear. “He’s one of them. The Undead won’t kill him. But they will kill you. Let him go.”
But Theo was wrong. Though they couldn’t take his soul, they could take him to the Liberum, who were known to kill their own kind. They could bury him or set him on fire, mummify him or force him underground....
I struggled against Theo, unable to do anything while the Undead boys dragged Dante over the broken glass of the balcony window. Just before they pulled him over the threshold, Dante caught my eye. Let me go, he mouthed.
When I finally wriggled free, the Undead had disappeared over the railing. The ground was a twenty-foot drop away, the snow littered with tiny footprints. For a moment, I considered risking it, but quickly changed my mind. For the Undead, there was no threat of injury or death; they were already dead.
I watched them run toward the road, dragging Dante with them through the snow. And then they stopped.
Nine hooded figures emerged from the night, their bodies so dark they looked like an extension of the shadows. The Brothers of the Liberum. Their black cloaks slithered over the snow behind them. Beneath each hood I glimpsed a pair of thin blue lips and a hollow nose, which looked as if it had been decaying from the inside out. They walked toward the Undead boys, their feet barely making an imprint in the snow.
I gripped the railing. In the light from the inn I could just make out the fear in Dante’s face. He twisted out of their grip and turned, locking eyes with mine. He no longer looked scared, but fierce.
The black cloaks of the Liberum swept toward him. Their shadows stretched across the snow, engulfing him in darkness. The high-pitched cry of the Undead boys sounded through the night. And like a cold gust of wind, they were gone.
I ran back inside, ready to gather my things and follow them, when I spotted a dusty handprint on the wall. Dante’s handprint. Suddenly, I remembered Dante’s bag, with the chest inside. Had they taken that, too? I ran to his bed, where he’d kept it, but found nothing. The tarot cards were scattered across the floor, all of them save for one. I picked it up and traced the shape of the white tower, the heavy clouds lingering above, the lightning bolt that struck the stone, sending a fissure all the way down the middle.
Anya burst into the room. “I was trying to push them into the basement, when they just stopped fighting and retreated. Did they take something?” she said. “What’s missing?”
“Do you still have the chest?” Theo said.
It was gone, though I barely had the energy to tell them now. “No,” I said, my voice cracking.
Anya’s face sank. “And what about the black box?”
My hands trembled as I lowered my bag from my shoulder and took out the small black box. “I still have it.”
Anya frowned. “But Monsieur said the Undead would take two things from us.”
“Maybe he was wrong,” Theo said.
The words that Anya had uttered during Dante’s tarot card reading echoed in my head. You will become lost. Only now did I understand what that had meant.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “They took Dante.”
CHAPTER 9
The Dead Earth
I COULDN’T TRY TO GET DANTE BACK. The Liberum would kill me. The best thing we could do was go on without Dante, and make our way toward the second point with the hope that he would find his way back to me. That’s what Theo and Anya told me as they dragged me back into the inn after I’d run after the Undead, following their vacancy through the night. “We know exactly what they want and where they’re headed—toward the second point,” Theo said. “The Liberum have been searching for eternal life for centuries; the only reason they’ve been following us in the first place is to get the chest and find the Netherworld. So it’s not like we don’t know where they’re taking him.”
“But why did they take him?” I said. “Why didn’t they take the box instead?”
“They probably don’t know about it,” Anya said. “You’ve barely showed it to anyone.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question.”
Theo sighed. “I don’t see why any of this matters. We can’t change what happened. All we can do is go forward.”
“How are we even supposed to start looking for the second point without the chest?” I demanded. “You saw Pruneaux’s notes on Descartes’s life. There’s no information about where he traveled to after Egmond-Binnen. Which means that the only way we can find the rest of the points is to follow the clues on the map.”
“I practically have that map memorized,” Theo said. “And I know you do, too.”
“So do I,” Anya said.
“See?” Theo said. “Which means we all know that the second point lies just beyond the braid of rivers we saw from the well. Once we find that, we’re set.”
“The major markings I have memorized, yes,” I said, “But those etchings were complex. It’s not like there’s going to be a billboard advertising where the next point is. It could be anywhere beyond those rivers, and without the exact context of the map, we’ll just be wandering aimlessly. We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
Theo squinted at me. “So you have a better idea, then?”
“I would have stopped the Undead from taking Dante and the chest in the first place,” I countered. “You could have helped, but instead you held me back.”
“Be
cause there were too many of them. They would have taken you, too.”
“I wish they had,” I said miserably.
“No,” Theo said. “You don’t. And Dante wouldn’t have wanted that either.”
“Don’t you dare try and tell me what Dante would or wouldn’t have wanted.”
“But you can’t deny it, can you?”
I faltered, not wanting to admit that he was right.
“Maybe it’s for the better,” Anya said. “Remember what Monsieur’s note said?”
“Exactly,” Theo said. “Now come on, let’s go inside and figure out our next move.”
The inn was bustling, the other guests shuffling around the halls, talking to each other in hushed German. The local police arrived. They surveyed the scene: the broken glass, the tangled sheets still left on the floor from which the Undead boys had extricated their dead and carried them away. The police questioned us about the break-in, asking if we recognized any of the intruders; if we could describe them; if they had taken anything. “No,” we lied. “No, we can’t describe them, it was too dark.” We glanced at each other. “No. They didn’t take anything.”
Downstairs, the innkeeper sobbed while the police interviewed her. She would barely notice if only three of us checked out tomorrow.
We huddled in our room and waited for the police to leave or the sun to rise, whichever came first. Theo lay on his bed, studying the black box, while Anya gathered her tarot cards from the floor and began to shuffle them. I watched her lay them out.
“What’s going to happen?” I said by the balcony, where the night wind blew in from the broken windows.
Anya picked at her nail polish. “I don’t know,” she said, and turned over the first card.
I almost wanted her to read my own fortune, but was too scared that I would find out exactly what I had been dreading. That Dante would die. That I would live. That I would be forced to go on without him.
“Whose fortune are you reading?” Theo asked.
“My own,” Anya said, turning over the second card, then the third. “Though I worry it’s too biased. Many of the cards can be read both positively and negatively, depending on the context.”
Theo jumped off the bed and leaned over her. “Well, I can help with that,” he said. “Let me try.” Before Anya could protest, he pointed to the first card. “So that one represents you, right? The Sorcerer. That means that you’re a witch. Just like I said earlier.”
He studied the second card, rubbing his chin. “You were always lonely as a child. You thought you weren’t good at anything.” Theo squinted at the next card. “You were depressed. You tried to kill yourself.” The smirk faded from Theo’s face as he looked up at her. “Is that true?”
Anya swallowed, averting her eyes, but said nothing. Quickly, she turned over the next card.
“You went to school. You were happier there.” At the next card, Theo scratched his head. “And then something happened. Something terrible.”
Anya bit her lip, hesitating before flipping the next card. “A woman?” Theo said. “I don’t know what that means.” Before he could go on, Anya flipped the next card, as though she didn’t want to dwell on the one previous. “Death?” Theo studied the new image. “A plague. A woman is dying of a plague?” He furrowed his brow. “Or maybe it isn’t a plague, but an illness. And it’s not just a woman, but someone you know. A grandmother—no, a mother. Your mother is dying of an illness?”
Anya averted her eyes and began fidgeting with her sleeve, her chipped polish mirroring the black spades on the card. Is that why she wanted to find the Netherworld, because her mother was dying? But how would that help her mother?
Her face grew red under his scrutiny, but she quickly gathered her composure. “Of course not,” she said, and swept up the cards, stacking the deck back into its box. “Your reading was totally off. That just proves how complex the art of tarot is.”
Our eyes lingered on her as she bent over her bag and began packing her things. As the night sky brightened to morning, the German police filed back into their cars and started their engines. While they drove off, I felt the last of the Undead’s presence blowing over the countryside with the clouds.
Anya dug through her tin, measuring out three more pills, which she threw back with a sip of water. “We’d better go,” she said. “Make full use of the light while we have it.”
But the sun barely rose that day. The sky clouded over, sweeping the sun behind a gray blur. The landscape was drained of color. The air lost its woodsy aroma. Without Dante, all of the life had withered from the world, leaving nothing but a bleary sun staring down at us like the eye of the Liberum. The snow had covered the tracks of the Undead, leaving the hills a pristine white.
From where we were standing, we could see the frozen banks of one of the three rivers we’d spotted from the well. It wove in and out of the rolling landscape, its water a deep blue. “Where the rivers meet,” Theo said. We trudged toward it, hoping that from there, we’d be able to see the spot on the horizon where its water intersected with the two rivers to form a braid. But when we reached its shore, all we could see were more hills.
“This is useless,” Theo said.
“Well, we know we have to walk either up or down the side of the river,” Anya said. “We just have to pick the right direction.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?” Theo said. “It could be miles before we reach the braid.”
Anya peered at the horizon. “I think it’s downstream. There are fewer hills there. Which means there’s more space for them to flow together.”
“That also means they have more space to spread apart,” Theo countered.
I was about to weigh in when I saw a flash of blue. While Theo and Anya argued, I headed downstream, toward the icy brush by the riverbank. A piece of blue clothing was caught on a branch. I felt sick. I knew that fabric well. My hands trembled as I pulled it from the weeds and held it up, the wind blowing the fabric into the shape of a coat. One that belonged to Dante. It was crumpled and stained with dirt, as if he’d been dragged through the mud on his chest. I raised it to my face, breathing in the woodsy smell of Dante that still clung to the collar.
The Undead had come this way. Panic rose within me as I searched the snow for any trace of Dante. They couldn’t have buried him, I told myself. The snow was too fresh for them to have done so without leaving a mound.
Behind me, Theo and Anya continued to argue.
“How are you so sure?” Theo said. “Did you consult your cards?”
“I just have a feeling about it,” Anya said.
“What if your feeling is wrong? We could be walking for hours before we realize we’re wrong—” Theo began to say, but I cut him off.
“It’s this way,” I called out to them, and held up the coat. “It’s Dante’s,” I said, my eyes watering in the wind. “The Undead must have been looking for the second point, too. Why else would they travel by the riverbank?”
Anya examined the stains. “I’m sure he’s fine,” she said. “He doesn’t feel the cold weather, right? He probably left it behind for you to find.”
I clutched the fabric as if it were Dante’s hand. I wanted to believe her. “He’s trying to help us,” I said. The thought warmed me; it made me feel like he was still here with us.
We left our car behind, and traveled down the bank by foot. All the while, I scanned the snow around us, searching for another sign of Dante.
“At least we haven’t found his ashes yet,” Theo said, watching me. “Or any trace of a burial. Without that, there’s always hope.”
“Don’t be cruel,” Anya said.
Just the mention of Dante’s ashes sent my imagination into a spiral. I thought of the Undead boys dragging him behind them by the hair; I thought of the Liberum, their cloaks sweeping over the snow as they walked toward him. And then...
“I was just being honest,” Theo said.
“I didn’t realize you knew how,” I sa
id, still sore with him from the night before.
Theo spun around. “On the contrary, it seems that I’m the only one of us who’s living in reality. You don’t know that Dante is leaving things behind for us. That was just a suggestion that Anya offered to make you feel better.”
“So, what—you think he’s dead? That the Liberum took him just to—to—” My voice caught in my throat.
“No, I’m just saying that you should prepare yourself for the worst. He’s with the Liberum, after all. I don’t think they’re going to be giving him the first-class treatment.”
“Then why did you stop me?” I demanded. “I could have helped him. I could have fought them off.”
“No,” Theo said. “You couldn’t have. I saw how many of them there were. They knew what they wanted. You should consider yourself lucky that they went for Dante instead of you.”
But I ignored him. “You could have helped me,” I said. “The three of us could have fought them off. You just didn’t want to. You’ve never liked Dante. You wanted them to take him.”
“Of course I never liked him,” Theo said. “But that has nothing to do with this.” Theo took a long swig from his water bottle. “Monsieur told us to let the Undead take him from us. So let them have him.”
“I was fine with trusting Monsieur when it was all about plane tickets and rental cars,” I said. “But why should I trust him when he told us to let the Undead take Dante? We don’t even know who he is. He could be working for the Liberum. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been feeding them information this entire time. Maybe that’s why he told us to let them take Dante. Because he’s trying to sabotage us.”