The forest was on the other side of the wall, the strictly prohibited side. But apparently, even the most stringent rules had exceptions. When we got to the school entrance, Professor Urquette nodded at the guard, who opened the gates.
She brought us to the outskirts of the woods, holding her skirt up as she stepped through the snow in galoshes. Behind the trees, the White Mountains jutted up from the horizon. After walking a few feet, we stopped. Professor Urquette hung her bag on the crook of a tree and bent over. Grunting, she picked up a stick and hoisted herself back up.
“You’re looking for sticks, the thicker the better,” she said, snapping the twig in half and handing each of us a burlap bag. “Meet me back here in two hours. And don’t be late, or you’ll be in the woods after dark. I’ll be waiting by the entrance. If you need help, just holler.” With that, she waddled back to the guard’s hut by the gate.
I turned to Dante, wondering if he was angry, if he would forgive me. I tried to think of a way to apologize, but before I could say anything, he looked away and ventured into the woods, leaving me alone. Stung by his coldness, I waited until he was a few paces ahead, then headed through the trees in the opposite direction.
The ground was covered in snow, which I sunk in up to my shins. The oaks were naked, their branches sticking into the sky like fingers. Oddly shaped mushrooms clung to the trunks, creating yellow staircases that spiraled up the bark. Taking giant strides, I walked into the confusing maze that made up the forest.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Dante called out to me.
“We’re picking up sticks. There is no wrong way.”
Shaking his head, he changed his course to my direction. Suddenly, an odd whiteness peeked through the trees. I walked toward it. As I approached, the number of trees diminished until there were barely any. It wasn’t until I was standing directly in front of it that I realized that it wasn’t a clearing. It was the Dead Forest.
I stopped at its outskirts. The landscape was vast and desolate, the snow peppered with splintered wood. The trees were white, and had no branches or leaves. They littered the horizon like toothpicks. Decaying stumps stood beside them, their bark charred a permanent black.
“The Dead Forest,” Dante said beside me, staring out into the abyss of trees. “I knew you were going the wrong way.”
“What are you talking about? This place is full of wood.”
“It’s all rotten,” he said. We exchanged an uncomfortable look before I trudged forward.
“So it’s true,” I said softly, my nose running as I stopped beneath the trunk of a tree that leaned tenuously over the ground like the lip of a bridge.
Dante stepped closer. “That I could hurt you?”
He took another step. “That I would never hurt you?”
Everything was silent except for the hollow echo of the wind. “Yes,” he said.
My hair blew around my face in the wind. “That you feel sensation around all humans?” I asked.
He reached out to touch my face, but let his hand hover just inches away. “No. Only you.”
I let out a breath, unsure of whether or not I should believe him. “That you’re dead?”
Dante ran his hand up my back, so gently it could have been the wind.
“The paper cut. The séance. The night in Attica Falls. It’s all true?”
“Yes.”
My lips trembled as I turned to him, my eyes searching the familiar contours of his face for some sign of death. “Show me.”
Suddenly, I heard a crack, and with the full force of gravity, the dead tree above me began to fall. Underneath it, a nest of moths burst out of a hole in the trunk and flapped around me. I screamed and fell into the snow.
It all happened quickly. With inhuman strength, Dante caught the tree before it crushed my body. With two hands, he lifted the trunk as if it were weightless and threw it to the ground. And in no time he was beside me, cradling me in his arms.
I stared at his face in disbelief.
“When we reanimate, we’re born into the best version of ourselves,” he explained. “The strongest. The smartest. The most beautiful. Whatever your best qualities were when you were alive, those would be augmented.”
“Why me?” I said. “Why did you keep calling me? Keep waiting for me?”
“I couldn’t help it. I had to see you,” he said. “I know my situation is...unusual, but it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
When I finally spoke, my voice was so small I could barely hear it. “How do you feel about me?”
Dante took a step closer. “I miss you.” He spoke gently, his words delicate, as if he wasn’t ready to part with them yet. “I miss everything about you. Your laugh, your voice. The way I never know what you’re going to say next. It’s like the entire world is dead, and you’re the only one living....” His voice trailed off; he seemed embarrassed to have said so much. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I just want you to know that. That I’m sorry. For everything.”
I didn’t want to blink, didn’t want to close my eyes for a minute. I raised my hand and touched his cheek, feeling the coldness of his skin for what seemed like the first time. He smelled like earth, like pine and grass and soil.
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“I am,” he said, closing his eyes.
And just like that, he became human again.
CHAPTER 15
Tragedy in the Mountains
WITH EVERYTHING AROUND ME BLURRING into confusion, nothing else was certain except this: I was alive. Dante was not.
The rest was speculation, and this is what I pieced together. Cassandra Millet and Benjamin Gallow were in love. Benjamin was a Plebeian, Cassandra Undead. They went to the forest. Cassandra slipped and kissed him. She couldn’t control herself, and he died. She left him in the woods. That’s what I told Dante after dinner. We were in the library, not studying.
“She told you, and you went and found him. Am I right?”
Dante nodded. “Cassandra came to us after she had accidentally killed Benjamin to ask us what she should do. I told her to turn herself in. When she didn’t, I went and found Benjamin myself. Gideon told her to leave Gottfried; disappear forever. After that, it’s mostly speculation, though your theory sounds right. Cassandra disappeared, which makes sense, considering Gideon suggested it, but we all knew that Cassandra would never have just left without saying good-bye. We argued about it, Gideon, Vivian, Yago, and I. We knew something was wrong, and Minnie’s story led us to consider the possibility that she was dead.”
“What was the fight about?”
“Gideon didn’t want me to search for Benjamin. He didn’t agree with the counsel I gave Cassandra. But after seeing what she was capable of doing to someone she loved, I was afraid of myself. That’s why I moved off campus. To protect the school from me.”
“Is that why Gideon had the files?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been following him around all year; you know that. But I don’t have any evidence that he was involved in Cassandra’s disappearance. The files you found in his room sounded promising, but those are gone now.”
I took his hand. “You’re a good person.”
Dante shook me off. “I’m not.”
I gave him a level look. “I’m not afraid of death.”
But I was afraid of losing the people I loved. And the question still remained: Who killed Eleanor and Cassandra?
Dante and I spent time together every evening, his “condition” bringing us closer together than we had been before. I finally felt like there were no secrets between us, and Dante suddenly became comfortably familiar and excitingly unfamiliar, like exploring an old mansion and discovering things that were always there but you never noticed before. I sat through my classes impatiently, counting the minutes until I would see him. The more I learned about the Undead, the more I grew to accept who Dante was, and even envy it. There were a lot of upsides to being Undead. For one, be
cause he was already dead, he couldn’t be killed by normal means, which made taking risks a lot easier. He never had to worry about the weather being too cold, and since he never slept, he had endless amounts of time. That’s why he was so well read. And best of all, he couldn’t feel pain—emotional or physical. Unless I was near him. What I wouldn’t give to have that power. If I didn’t feel pain then I wouldn’t be tormented by the death of my parents, which I still couldn’t make sense of.
Later that week when I went downstairs to meet him, I saw the silhouette of a figure standing in the shadows by the stoop. I ran over and wrapped my arms around him, only to discover that it wasn’t Dante; it was Brett. He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else,” I said, my face turning red.
“That’s okay,” Brett said, letting out a sigh of relief. “I’m just glad you’re not Mrs. Lynch.”
I laughed. “Yeah. Okay, well I’m going to go.”
Brett nodded and retreated into the shadows.
Dante was waiting around the side of the building. Before I could ask where we were going, he took my hand and led me toward the center of campus. It was a cold and windless evening. The trees stood around us, barren and lifeless.
“How old are you?” I asked, leaning against the trunk of a giant oak.
Dante played with a lock of my hair. “Seventeen.”
I looked up at him. “How old are you really?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the sky, counting in his head. “This will be the sixteenth anniversary of my seventeenth birthday.”
“And how long have you been at Gottfried?”
Dante laughed. “Just two years. And I’ll only stay here two more. Gottfried might be eccentric, but it’s still a high school.”
Right, I thought, blushing at how silly my question was. Obviously it would look suspicious if all of the Undead stayed here while everyone else was graduating.
“How did you die?”
Dante took my hand and led me into the middle of the green. “I drowned.”
I thought about all the times I’d been swimming in the marina. Drowning seemed lonely and alien, like dying in a different world.
“What happened?”
“I told you how we lived in a really remote area of British Columbia?” I nodded and he continued. “One summer, I was out on a walk with my little sister, Cecelia, teaching her how to split wood, when she fell through a partially frozen pond. I jumped in to get her and brought her back to the house, but after a week she couldn’t eat and was coughing and shivering uncontrollably. Pneumonia, we thought. Our neighbor was a bush pilot. He offered to fly us to the nearest city.
“We all got into his tiny water plane, and about an hour in, something went wrong. The plane crashed in the ocean, somewhere off the Pacific coast. The whole way down my father was holding us, shouting prayers into the wind. I was seventeen.”
My scarf blew loose from my neck, dangling in the wind, but I barely noticed. “Everyone died?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I washed ashore somewhere in California. I never saw my parents or sister again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”
I turned to him. “If your sister wasn’t buried, and she washed ashore like you, she could be out there somewhere too.”
“I know. I think about her all the time. But her body might have been destroyed. The plane caught fire when it went down. That much I do remember.”
“So, since you weren’t buried, you...you...reanimated, and now you don’t have a soul?”
“Yes.”
“What does it feel like?”
He paused, trying to find the right words. The sky was bruising into night, framed by the silhouettes of the trees lining the path, their brittle skeletons swaying in the wind. “Do you trust me?”
I nodded. Dante led me to the snow by the side of the path.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
I closed them, and he tied something around my head. It felt like a scarf. I stood very still. He slipped off my jacket. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll give it back.”
I began to shiver. After a few minutes my fingers started to go numb in the cold. My nose began to run. My lips felt dry and chapped. Without being able to see the world around me, all the sounds of nature blurred into white noise.
Dante took my hand and led me around the path. I walked with small tenuous steps, stumbling over bumps in the ground and relying on Dante to make sure I didn’t fall.
“This what it feels like on the worst days,” he said. “I can’t feel anything. I can’t smell, I can’t taste, I can’t hear music—just noise. Even my vision is different. I can see things, but it’s like I’m color-blind. Everything is the same, but somehow muted.”
He took the scarf off. I blinked at the brightness of the night as the world slowly came back into focus. “And this is what it’s like when I’m around you.”
I studied him with a newfound understanding. How could someone live like that? “But it doesn’t happen with anyone else? You’re sure?”
Dante shook his head. “Do you feel the same way around other people as you do around me?”
I shook my head. “No.”
We stopped in front of the Observatory. The door was normally locked after hours, but tonight it was propped open with a book. Dante glanced around, making sure no one was watching, and led me inside, letting the door click shut behind us.
The lab was dark, and I had to feel my way around the room until my eyes adjusted to the light. Above us, the night sky was clear and blue through the glass ceiling.
I looked around, and then at Dante. “It’s so different at night.”
Dante lifted me onto the countertop, and we lay side by side, staring at the stars through the roof.
“How did you know you were dead?”
“It took me a while to figure it out. I woke up not knowing where I was, with no way of getting home. I wandered around some marina town in California for a few days, trying to figure out what had happened. I asked about my family at the local hospital. They sent me to the police, who told me there had been a crash. I was the only one from my family who had been found. They checked me into the hospital. I stayed for a week. I felt like part of me was missing and I had to go find it. At first I thought that was just my way of grieving the loss of my family, but there were other things. I wasn’t hungry, and when I forced myself to eat, I couldn’t taste anything. My body temperature was far below normal. A rare circulation condition, the doctors said, but I knew they didn’t have a clue. That’s when I realized something was wrong.
“So I left. My parents’ bodies were found, but my sister was still missing. I had no desire to contact anyone I knew, except for her. In fact, I had no desire at all. Only the feeling of an absent desire. I could remember that once I had felt happy, felt alive, but I couldn’t actually feel it again, if that makes sense. I thought finding my sister would help fill that void. So I searched for her. For weeks. Months. Years, I guess. Since I didn’t need to eat or sleep, I’d just walk for days at a time. In the meantime, I found work. I enrolled in schools but dropped out when I realized I wasn’t interested in what anyone was teaching. Years passed, and I noticed that I wasn’t aging—at least not in a normal way. Although my senses were deteriorating, I wasn’t growing older. In fact, the rest of my body was abnormally healthy. I didn’t know what was happening, so I kept to myself. I didn’t want to become a freak show or a science experiment. But I did my own experiments to learn my new limits. It was easy to pick up, like learning not to touch a hot stove. And it was easy to be alone, since I had no urge to date or make friends. I was, in essence, a shell.
“Eventually I went back to the hospital, knowing that there had to be something wrong with me. Outside in the parking lot, there was a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. It
read, ‘For Questions of the Existential Nature.’ Below it was an address. At that point I was completely lost. I wrote a letter, talking about all of the unexplainable problems I was having, and sent it to the address. A few weeks later, Professor Lumbar sent me a letter back, asking me to visit the Academy. She said it was a school that specialized in existential questions, and that they might be able to help me with ‘my condition.’ She didn’t explain what that meant. So I went, partly because I wanted help, partly because I was curious. That’s how I ended up here.”
I turned to him, gazing at his profile as he stared into the sky. “And you’re looking for your soul?”
“I’m looking for something. Not my soul, though. I don’t want to kill anyone. That’s what I’ve been researching at Gottfried. Another way to live.”
“But if you kiss me, you’ll kill me?”
“Yes. But I won’t kiss you.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I can choose. Just like everyone else.”
In a way he had a point. I suppose anyone had the capacity to hurt another person; it just depended on the choices they made. How was Dante any different from me in that regard?
He took my hand. “Here,” he said, placing it over his chest.
I held it there, but nothing happened.
“Listen to it.”
Slowly, I lowered my head to his chest.
At first there was nothing. And then suddenly I could hear his heartbeat. It was like nothing I had heard before: its rhythm was erratic, like the sound of someone running down a flight of stairs.
“Whatever life I have left, it’s yours.”
Later that night I snuck into my darkened room through the fireplace and slipped beneath the sheets. Eleanor was curled up in bed, and even though I knew she wasn’t sleeping, I still tiptoed so as not to disturb her. I then fell into a peaceful slumber, where I dreamed about Dante holding me in his arms in a field as we gazed at the stars. The grass was prickly beneath my neck, and slowly he turned to me, propping himself up on one elbow. And then he leaned forward, his lips thin and red, so red as they inched closer and closer to mine.