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"There are too many tenses and cases in Latin Itquickly "There is no love in it, no emotion, no joie de vivre! With French, it just spills out"

The heat rattled through the radiator, punctuating Mada notes, pushing her red braids aside when they got in the way of her pencil As the professor wrote a list of pronouns on the board, I could hear Cle to two of her friends

Madame Goût must have heard, too, because she put down the chalk and turned around, her heels rapping against the floor "If you insist on whispering in my class, I would rather you share it with all of us"

The sharp edges of Clementine’s shoulders shifted beneath her shirt as she faltered She looked starched and pressed, her collared shirt crisp as an envelope

"Well, speak up," the professor said

"We were talking about the Île des Soeurs About the women who used to torture the Undead there"

Madame Goût raised a pencil-thin eyebrow "Torture? Who told you that?"

"Monsieur Orneaux"

Madaroaned "Of course Monsieur Orneaux would say that He is e call un homme pour les hommes A man’s man Like most men, he is not interested in the endeavors of wo her hand in the air "He does not know anything," she ain that he is not qualified to teach"

The room fell into an uncomfortable silence

"The truth is that wo society" Madame Goût lowered her voice "And the women you speak of are Les Neuf Soeurs, or the Nine Sisters"

"Who were they?" Cle to the blackboard, she erased all of the pronouns scrawled across it She then picked up a piece of chalk and wrote down the following na cursive:

Gertrude Fine

Marie Champierre

Victoria Limon

Josephine Klein

Prudence Beaufort

Hester Olivier

Chrisette Longtemp

Alma Alphonse

"They were a secret society of fe out her skirt, Madame Goût went to the door and closed it "It started in 1728 in Paris, as just a group of friends Brilliant Monitors, young, incredibly smart, and all husbandless, which was very uncommon at the time They called themselves Les Neuf Soeurs, after the nine y"

"What did they do?" Anya asked

"It is believed that they were behindschools, hospitals, the convent on the Île des Soeurs But most farew still, listening

"A secret? What kind of secret?" Cleether "That’s where the facts end The rest we can only guess at The prevailing rumor is that they had discovered the secret to eternal life"

My pencil slipped froers and dropped to the floor I felt Cle my reaction I tried to hidebeen speculated that since children can defy death for twenty-one years, there ht be a possibility that adults could defy death indefinitely The myth of immortality has powerful allure"

Immortality The word floated around ht This is the solution that Dante and I have been looking for

"As the story goes, once Les Neuf Soeurs found the secret to eternal life, they decided they could never use it They were frightened by the power they held Eternal life is perverse, unnatural A world without death is even ic, the épherave;…it would all be lost So before they died, the Soeurs supposedly made a pact to let their secret die with them"

The room went so still I could hear the footsteps of the professor in the classroom across the hall as he paced

"So that’s it?" Cleone?"

The professor tapped her finger on the table "Maybe Maybe not Maybe the secret was never about iin with; maybe it was about a family heirloom or a dirty rumor It all depends on what you want to believe"