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Pressingto her, to her whispering back To the sound of a bra strap snapping against skin To Cle ined that it washi

I wasn’t jealous of Clementine; it wasn’t that Orthe tile, I wished, just for a moment, that I could be her, that Dante could be Noah, and that when I went back tofor me But I knew I could never have that

The shower curtain billowed as I reached over ers, touched the indentation on h note of a soprano, but I held , low ache It was all I had left of him And in five years, when he died, I wouldn’t even have this, unless I did soethe hot water cascade overanymore, and the bathroom was filled with so much steam that it was hard to breathe

My roo my towel, I went to my desk and pulled h it until I found the section on Les Neuf Soeurs The painting Madame Goût had showed us in class stared back at irl with the canary, wondering who she was and what had happened to her But the text didn’t help It only mentioned the few facts Madame Goût had already told us, and spent the rest of the chapter talking about their influence on Monitoring culture and society

Had they really found the secret to immortality? I had to know And if it existed, I had to find it But where was I supposed to start? Skipping ahead, I spotted a photograph of a stone carving on the botto--a small bird entwined hat looked like vines --yet still, it was enough to rew shallow as I leaned back in : the same bird that had flashed into my mind on the airplane with Dustin The Canary Crest of the Nine Sisters, the caption read

My voice cracked "I on ht: it was the same bird I had seen when I’d blurted out the word canary

Did this , the information I’d suddenly known, all had to do with the Nine Sisters?

A crisp swirl of air blew in, turning the pages of my book But hadn’t I just closed the ? I stood up The as indeed still shut, yet the air was strea around my wrists, my arms, my chest, until I let out his na on an iht And standing in the middle of the rooht, and then an even smaller step to the left, until I could feel the streaot dressed as quickly as I could, coers as I ran down the stairs and out the door At the school gates, a group of boys were joking around with a security guard

"Renée," a voice said It was Brett

"I--I have to go," I said, and squeezed through the streets of Montreal

I didn’t knohere I was going; e that connecteddistracted by death that I sensed nearby: crowded raveyards I hts, but then lostmy breath until I could feel him

Eventually I found myself at the far end of the old port, at a fisherman’s wharf The air was raw and cold, like the inside of a freezer, and filled with sounds of the ocean at night: the chug of the water splashing against the dock, the boats swaying in the ainst their masts like chimes

By the pier was a wholesale shack filled with beautiful six-foot-long fish hanging froht in oily shades of red, orange, and purple I felt their pull on me as if they were the Undead A weathered loves wheeled a barrel of sthe rabbed my wrist

I knew I had found Dante froto his clothes, the pine so sharp that for the first tih a forest at dusk

"Is it safe here?" I uttered, but Dante put a finger over my lips

"Nowhere in this city is safe," he said, and pulled me into the shadows between two oversized boats, his hand on ainst the back of my ear, as aited, hushed, for the last workers to leave

The dock rocked beneath our feet as Dante led me to the end of the platform, where a small white boat called The Sea Maiden was docked Its sails were rolled up

"Whose is it?" I asked as Dante put one foot on the deck

"Ours tonight," he said Before I kneas happening, he lifted htless and carriedwheel,hi all of this "I ht would be over and he would be gone

He carried me to the middle of the deck, where a set of stairs led down into the cabin I held on to the collar of Dante’s shirt, touching the curves of his neck as he stepped over a pile of life jackets and into the hull of the boat