Wake Unto Me (36 page)

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Authors: Lisa Cach

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Europe, #Love & Romance, #Girls & Women

BOOK: Wake Unto Me
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She felt someone standing behind her, and turned.
Monsieur Girard stood considering her picture. He had one arm crossed over his chest, that hand grasping his other elbow, and his index finger tapped his bottom lip. His eyes were narrowed, his head tilted.
“An interesting departure from your usual style,” he said at last. “The proportion of nose to chin is not quite right, but the image holds emotional power. Good work.”
Caitlyn stared at him in astonishment.
He ignored her surprise and moved on.
Caitlyn met Naomi’s eyes, needing confirmation that she’d just been complimented for her black smear of a picture.
Naomi’s lips quirked. “Teacher’s pet,” she teased.
Caitlyn felt a dart of amusement and surprised herself with a chuckle, and for the first time since she’d woken that morning felt a connection to the world.
She looked around her as if waking from a dream.
This was the world she returned to every morning, with the regularity of clockwork. There had been no skipped days, no missing time, no gaps in the story of her life here. She did not vanish from rooms, as she did in Raphael’s world. She did not step in and out of time. She wore no unexpected cherry-rose satin dresses. She lived here. She was
real
here.
She was alive, not a ghost. She was not dead in any physical sense.
She looked back at her drawing and recognized herself. She
was
the Woman in Black, but she was also Caitlyn Monahan.
It took her several more days to figure it out. When she did, she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. When she explained it to Naomi and Amalia, they were as dazed as her. There was no arguing with the logic, though.
Caitlyn was not, as Raphael had concluded, dead. The Fortune School was not a dream of a lost spirit. She had not perished in a car crash on the way here from the Bordeaux airport. Her soul might have withered and died when Raphael breathed his last, but she could not mistake her present reality for a dream or an afterworld.
She was a ghost, but not dead. It was an idea that made no sense until she remembered what Amalia had said: no one knew what ghosts were truly like. Who was to say that a ghost could not be of a living person?
When she was asleep there were no Screechers visiting her, no evil spirits coming to torture her. Rather, she was the one suddenly appearing in the darkness and terrifying people who lived in the past. Her so-called Screechers were the people who caught a glimpse of a dark shape in the night, a shadow moving where all should be still.
Her spirit walked through time while she slept. She saw it now: every dream she’d ever had had taken place in the past of the locality where she lived. In Oregon she had dreamed of the pioneer girl Emily, and as a ghost she had ridden behind Emily on her horse;
she
had been the Umpqua Maiden, spoken of in legends that went back centuries.
Her mother had not come to visit her on the night before she left Oregon for France.
She
had been the one to travel back in time to visit her mother.
She
had been the one who told her own mother that she would die when Caitlyn was four. Her mother had said she was no good at predicting her own future.
She hadn’t had to be. Caitlyn had done it for her.
Caitlyn hadn’t just dreamed the past. She’d visited it. And as the Woman in Black, she’d haunted it.
A spiritual fly on the wall, she’d been invisible to most of the people she’d encountered. Most who had seen her or sensed her had turned into Screechers, their frightened screams sending her tumbling back through time to her own bed, where she woke drenched in sweat, her own screams of terror ripping at her throat. They’d scared each other half to death.
A few had been different. Emily, the horse-riding pioneer girl, had known that Caitlyn rode with her and enjoyed the secret.
Raphael had been real. Her dreaming soul had traveled through time and found him, when he had lived at Château de la Fortune over four centuries earlier.
She didn’t know what purpose might have been served by their meeting. If Bianca had brought her to Raphael, it must have been so that she could help him find the treasure and preserve Bianca’s heart. But maybe Caitlyn had been meant to save Raphael’s life, as well.
She’d failed Bianca there, though.
Caitlyn understood, now. Bianca had not wanted Raphael’s spirit to be with Caitlyn for one simple reason: she didn’t deserve him. Bianca had chosen the cruelest punishment of all.
Caitlyn would live out her life without ever seeing Raphael again.
CHAPTER
Thirty-one
 
MAY 15, SIX WEEKS LATER
 
“Geology, incomplete. Western civilization, fail,” Madame Snowe read in disgust, walking back and forth beside Caitlyn like an angry policeman. “Algebra, fail. French, fail. Madame Tatou says you cannot even say ‘My name is Caitlyn’ in French. The only class in which you have done well is art. But then, Monsieur Girard has always been impressed by black moods. He mistakes them for signs of an artistic soul.”
Caitlyn stared at her hands in her lap, barely hearing Madame Snowe through the empty darkness of her grief. She didn’t care that she was yet again in the headmistress’s office, and yet again in trouble.
Madame Snowe slapped the report onto her desk and crossed her arms, staring hard at Caitlyn. “You have lost weight. Your friends say you barely talk. Your teachers say that you go through the motions of being a student, but that there is no one home inside your head. And you send me a dream journal that says only, ‘I am dead,’ with no explanation.” Madame Snowe grasped Caitlyn by the chin, forcing her face up. “Tell me a brilliant story to explain why you have failed me, Caitlyn, or pack your bags. I will put you on the first flight back to Oregon.”
Caitlyn had been expecting this moment from the time she woke up from her final dream of Raphael, six weeks ago. Madame Snowe’s threat held no sting, however. Everything she’d thought she’d wanted had changed when she’d fallen in love with Raphael; everything that mattered to her had gone when he died. France held nothing for her, now that he was gone.
Caitlyn met Madame Snowe’s eyes. “I am a ghost.”
Madame Snowe released her chin and sat on the edge of her desk. She crossed her arms. “What does that mean?”
Caitlyn stared into Madame Snowe’s eyes, no longer frightened of the headmistress. What was she compared to Bianca de’ Medici? “ ‘I am a ghost’ means that I am nothing. I am empty. My soul has died.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“You are suffering from depression. You will need to go on antidepressants.”
Caitlyn laughed. “No pill will fix this.”
“You will take them, or you will go home.”
“Send me home. There’s nothing here I want.”
“That’s the depression talking.”
Caitlyn narrowed her eyes at Madame Snowe. “I won’t take pills.”
Madame Snowe’s jaw tightened. “Then you’ve decided, haven’t you? You’re going to throw away an education you could only dream of back in your provincial home. There are no second chances with me, Caitlyn. This is it.”
“Good.”
Madame Snowe’s cheeks brightened with anger. “You are expelled! Pack your bags. You will leave tomorrow morning.”
Caitlyn stood and turned, walking toward the door feeling strangely light, as if only loosely connected to her body. For a moment her eyes met those of the portrait of Bianca.
I’m sorry
, Caitlyn said silently.
I would have saved him if I could.
The halls of the dormitory wing were filled with flitting girls, everyone relieved that final exams were finished and break was about to begin. When she got back to her room, she found Brigitte chattering excitedly to Amalia.
“He’ll be here any minute! I didn’t even know he could drive again! But Mama says he has been working through his rehabilitation with astonishing speed, and he wanted to surprise me by driving down alone,” Brigitte said in French, and then seeing Caitlyn switched to English. “My brother Thierry is coming to visit!”
“Great.” Something more seemed in order, so she added, “Your parents were okay with letting him drive alone?”
Amalia looked at her in surprise. “How did you know he was driving alone?”
Caitlyn gave her a look. “Brigitte just said.”
“But your French—”
“He says he wants to see all my friends, too,” Brigitte interrupted. “He wants to see if he will remember anyone
.
But
I
think he wants to see
you
, Amalia.” Brigitte giggled. “I think his heart still remembers you even when his mind has forgotten the past, yes?”
Amalia’s brows went up. “I’m sure he doesn’t remember me.”
“Then you can enchant him all over again,” Brigitte said. “It would not be so bad if we were sisters some day, would it?”
Amalia smiled, but Caitlyn saw the strain of it.
“What time is it?” Caitlyn asked Brigitte. “You’d better go down and watch for him.”
Brigitte checked the time on her phone. “You’re right! But I’ll call you when he arrives.” She made kissing sounds to them both and scampered off.
“What did Madame Snowe say?” Amalia asked, when she had gone.
Caitlyn shrugged, affecting nonchalance, but she suddenly realized that her expulsion meant she would be leaving her new friends. Her throat tightened. “She said what I expected. I’ve been expelled.”
“No!”
“I go home tomorrow.”
“Caitlyn!” Amalia gripped her shoulders. “Caitlyn, did you tell her what happened?”
She shook her head.
“You have to! Or blame it all on the Ambien, and me: it was my fault you took it. It did something to the chemicals in your brain. You haven’t been the same since.”
“She wants me to take antidepressants.”
Amalia hesitated, then dropped her hands from Caitlyn’s shoulders. “Maybe you should.”
“I’m not going to take pills. Besides, I failed all my classes.”
“But—” Amalia started, and was interrupted by the ringing of her cell phone. She checked the display. “It’s Brigitte. You and I will talk about this tonight, Caitlyn. There’s no reason for you to go home.” The phone kept ringing. Amalia swore in German and answered it.
“Thierry is here,” she said, hanging up. “She wants us to come down and see him. I don’t think it’s because she thinks his amnesia will suddenly disappear and he’ll remember any of us. I think she’s nervous about being alone with him. Brigitte doesn’t do well with awkward social situations. She wants her friends around her for protection.”
“A buffer,” Caitlyn said.
“Come with me. You don’t have to meet him. You can just hang around in the background.”
Caitlyn nodded. “Okay.”
On the way down to the courtyard they stopped by Naomi’s room and dragged her along. “I need someone to loiter with,” Caitlyn told her.
The gentle warmth of May greeted them as they stepped out into the sunlight. Amalia went alone toward Brigitte and Daniela, the two of them standing by a silver sports car and a tall, blond young man. Caitlyn wandered over to the well, Naomi following.
“I still think we should get a blowtorch and cut loose the grate,” Naomi said, as they leaned their forearms on the edge and peered into the shaft.
Caitlyn wrapped her fingers in the heavy, rusted screen welded over the top of the well. “Even if the ring of stones and the heart are still there, I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to see Raphael’s bones.” She shrugged. “It’s too late to look now, anyway.” She told Naomi about her expulsion.
Unlike Amalia, Naomi didn’t try to change her mind. “You’ve given up, haven’t you? You don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Maybe it’s better that I live someplace like Oregon, where there is not so much history. I’ll stand a better chance of controlling my dreams.”
Naomi nodded, but her eyes were sad. “I’ll miss you.”
Caitlyn nodded, feeling tears sting her own eyes as well. Across the courtyard, the girls and Thierry started to move toward the entrance to the castle. Amalia gave them a nod.
Thierry looked over at them, then turned to Brigitte and asked her a question. Brigitte looked over at Caitlyn and Naomi and shook her head, then tugged him with her into the château.
“He must have asked if he knew us,” Naomi said. “How strange that must be, not to remember your own life.”
Caitlyn looked up at the blue sky, dotted with clouds. Over a wall of the castle she could see green treetops swaying in a breeze. “I’m going to walk down to the
gouffre
and say good-bye to Raphael. I won’t have another chance.”
“Would you like company?”
Caitlyn smiled and shook her head. She, Naomi, and Amalia had walked down to it the weekend after her final dream, but there had been no sound of a beating heart, no strange bursts of wind, and, worst of all, not even the faintest sense of Raphael’s presence. Whatever had been haunting the
gouffre
seemed to be gone, and with it any danger to Caitlyn, if danger there had ever been. For all she knew it
had
been a microburst of air that threw her, like Madame Brouwer suggested. Or if it had been Bianca, her purpose might as easily have been to preserve Caitlyn from harm as to cause it. Without that blast of air, Caitlyn would surely have fallen.

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