Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully

by Megan Tayte

  I should have felt awkward, sitting at a table alone with a stranger whose blood ran in my veins. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the food warming my stomach. Maybe it was the restorative power of a micro-nap. Or maybe it was just that Gabe was easier to be around now I knew more about the Vindicos.

  ‘You loved her a lot,’ I said. ‘My mother.’

  He laid down his fork. ‘Yes,’ he said gravely. ‘For a long time, Elizabeth was my muse. I wanted to make the world a better place for her.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her the truth back then – what you are?’

  ‘I was frightened to. At the time, I was wrestling with being a Cerulean. I wasn’t secure in who I was. I didn’t want her to know that of me. I wanted to protect her from the mess I was in.’

  His stark honesty surprised me. And compelled me to push further.

  ‘What about now? Would you tell her now, if you could? Do you still…?’

  Gabe took his time answering. ‘No, I wouldn’t tell her. Not for my own gain. That wouldn’t be fair. We had our chance, and I blew it.’

  ‘But if you loved her and she loved you, all that came between you was the lie. If she’d known why you were distant, why there was blood on your hands, she might have –’

  ‘No, Scarlett. It was more than that. I didn’t deserve her. I never will.’

  ‘Because you’re not good? But today, those people we talked to – you do amazing work here. You’re not the demon Evangeline paints you to be.’

  ‘It’s not about being good. It’s about being good enough.’

  ‘I don’t understand. If you love someone…’

  ‘Love isn’t always enough.’

  He was echoing Jude’s words of the night before. Jude and Sienna. Gabe and Elizabeth. Was this gift a curse – did it shatter any dream of a happy-ever-after?

  ‘Why not?!’

  I banged my hand down on the table hard enough to make juice leap from my glass. Gabe didn’t even flinch.

  ‘You need it to be enough,’ he said. ‘For you and Luke. And maybe it is – for you. But for Elizabeth and me… As I said, I had the chance and I blew it.’

  ‘Because you weren’t honest.’

  ‘Because love wasn’t enough. Loving her wasn’t enough for me.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘I love being what I am, Scarlett,’ he said. ‘I love that more than anything. I wasn’t noble enough to give it up, even a little, for Elizabeth. I’m still not noble enough. It could never have worked between us. She deserved someone who put her first. I couldn’t do that. I was constantly away from her while I used my light. When I returned, I itched to be back out there, doing something. I loved your mother, I did. But I loved being a Cerulean – a Vindico – more. Do you see?’

  I did see, on a logical level. But on an emotional one – no. I’d never felt passionate about being a Cerulean. I’d only ever felt passionate about being me, ordinary me, in a sleepy Devonshire cove with a surfer/chef boyfriend and a fashion-obsessed best friend and a shaggy misfit of a dog.

  ‘Do you believe me?’ Gabe pressed.

  I nodded.

  ‘You don’t look sure.’

  ‘I guess I’m not used to such honesty. People telling the truth even when it doesn’t put them in the best light.’

  ‘Well, you can get used to it around me,’ he said. ‘If you ask me a question, I’ll always tell you the truth – when it’s my truth to tell. The lies I told your mother and the lies I lived with growing up in Cerulea, they broke me. I made a decision the day your mother left me that I was done with deceit. So ask away – ask whatever you like. We have all the time in the world.’

  I looked away from him, out at the pinkening sky, and wondered what to ask.

  His history with my mother? That was personal: their past, not mine. I was curious, but given what Gabe had said – that he loved his gift above my mother – I had no illusions that he’d spin some romantic fairytale that would inspire me.

  His role as a father? Words meant little to me on that score. Perhaps in the future he’d be in my life. Perhaps over time a relationship of sorts would develop between us. But no chummy chat over fettuccine Alfredo would iron out a lifetime of absence and the fact that we were strangers.

  The history of the Vindicos then – their work, their plans for the future? I’d learned plenty downstairs today, but it was little more than an introduction, Vindicos 101. How much more did I really need to know, though? There was no pretending I was ready to sign up as the latest Vindico recruit. I was barely making it work as a rogue Cerulean, let alone someone more powerful, more ruthless, more godlike with her light. Mum’s attack had muddied the waters, making me think that if it came to it, I could, I would, exact suffering. But did that have to make me a Vindico? Did my need for vengeance mean I should move to this bustling, exhausting city and play happy families with my father and sister?

  Be my own person: that’s how Michael had put it. I’d walked away from the Ceruleans to be my own person, to do what was right for me. Nothing had changed. Now, I’d walk away from the Vindicos to be my own person, to do what was right for me. I’d go back to Luke and Cara and Chester and the cottage and the cove.

  ‘Actually,’ I told Gabe at last, ‘I don’t think I need to ask you anything at all. Whatever you could tell me about your life and the Vindicos – that’s another story. Not my story.’

  ‘I respect that,’ he said. ‘You have your own life, and you have to make your own way. But you know you’re always welcome here, right? And if you change your mind…’

  ‘I won’t.’

  He smiled at me. ‘If I have the right to feel it, I’m very proud of you, Scarlett. You’re one heck of a young lady.’

  Embarrassed, I busied myself mopping up the last of my pasta sauce with a hunk of bread.

  ‘So,’ said Gabe, his usual businesslike manner returning, ‘you’re leaving this evening?’

  ‘No. At least, not yet. This may be done’ – I waved the bread between my father and me – ‘but let’s not pretend I know everything I came here to find out.’

  ‘Sienna?’

  ‘Sienna.’

  He grimaced.

  ‘You know, I take it, whatever it is she’s keeping from me?’

  ‘I know. But it’s not my place to tell you – not my truth.’

  ‘Is she back?’

  ‘She came home while you were at the hospital. She’s downstairs, in her apartment.’

  ‘Will she see me?’

  ‘She has agreed to, yes.’

  ‘Under duress.’

  ‘I haven’t forced her. But I’ve done my best to persuade her, I’ll admit. Her secrecy has gone on too long.’ He leaned closer, over the table, and said with feeling, ‘She’s struggling, Scarlett, and she needs you badly.’

  I sighed. That sounded about right: my impetuous, selfish sister getting herself in a scrape and sensible Scarlett coming to the rescue.

  Like the time she’d been larking about on the treehouse roof at Hollythwaite and fallen, and I’d had to pull her the long walk back on a sledge.

  Like the time she’d done no revision whatsoever for her end-of-year exams and then panicked, and I’d given up my entire Easter holidays to tutor her.

  Like the time she’d got into the sherry at a party for Hugo’s clients, and I’d had to hustle her upstairs and convince my parents she was in bed ill – singing and giggling, but ill.

  But those were the benign little scrapes of a girl. We were older now. Life was infinitely darker and more complex. Sienna was a Vindico. I’d seen her kill a man. If she was open about that, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she’d done that she deemed shameful enough to hide from me.

  ‘Just tell me one thing,’ I said to Gabe. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Oh, Scarlett,’ he said. ‘That’s just it: it isn’t bad at all.’

  My sister showed me into her living room. I sat down on a funky yellow sofa and looked around while she made us both
tea. The design of the room was typical Sienna – movie posters tacked to the walls, book shelves lined with everything but books, mismatching cushions. And yet, but for coffee rings on the table and a forgotten biscuit fragment under the television stand, the room was conspicuously tidy. Sienna had always been a total slob. Clearly, she’d cleaned up in anticipation of my visit.

  ‘Sugar?’ she asked as she came in balancing two steaming mugs.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t take it in tea.’ Which you’d know, I added silently, if you knew me at all.

  She sat beside me, at the other end of the sofa. She didn’t draw her legs up to the side, as she’d always done. She sat with her feet planted firmly on the floor, as if ready to flee at any moment.

  ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘us drinking tea. Like grownups.’

  ‘It’s a first,’ I said.

  As I waited for her to speak, I studied her. Beneath the usual thick layer of makeup, she looked tired. And softer, somehow, though I couldn’t quite identify how. It wasn’t that she’d gained weight – I could still count the collarbones jutting out above her plunging neckline. But I remembered her face as sharper. Or perhaps I remembered her that way because she’d always been so sharp in her manner.

  Averting her eyes from my obvious examination, Sienna slurped her tea and pulled a face.

  ‘I hate tea,’ she muttered.

  ‘So why are you drinking it?’

  ‘It’s all I have to offer,’ she said. ‘It was this or a glass of milk.’

  ‘What, no vodka, no beer, no wine? I’d have thought you’d be living it up here – single girl, own apartment, big city, party central.’

  Still she didn’t look at me as she replied: ‘I don’t really drink these days. Or party.’

  ‘Ha!’ I said. Sienna, not partying?

  When she was silent, I added pointedly, ‘Except in a club in Newquay, when seeing your sister for the first time in months and then killing someone in front of her. I seem to recall a very large cocktail in front of you that night.’

  ‘Dutch courage,’ she said.

  I laughed, a cruel laugh.

  Finally, her eyes locked on me, and the look in them made the mug in my hands jerk. She looked so devastated. So thoroughly unlike my sister.

  ‘God, Scarlett,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you? I admit it, okay – I was a mess that night. That wasn’t my first cocktail, it was my fourth. I’d been sitting there for two hours working up to you entering the club. Wondering what you’d look like. Wondering how you were. Thinking of all the hundreds of things I wanted to say to you, but couldn’t. And then in you walked, and you were the same old Scarlett. So happy to see me. Trusting as ever. But you were different too. Later, after I… I didn’t know you had it in you to be so strong.’

  ‘Funny what it does to you, watching your sister commit murder,’ I said acidly.

  Oh, her words had moved me all right; a buried part of me longed to hug her. But her little speech had also stoked the fire beneath a cauldron of fury I’d been hefting about for months. She’d left me and Mum. She’d chosen suicide over truth. She’d… she’d…

  ‘You killed a man!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To show me who you’d become. To make me hate you. To push me away.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We stared at each other, and she saw the disgust in my eyes, and I thought I saw shame in hers.

  ‘But you don’t understand,’ she said quickly. ‘Pushing you away was part of it, but not all of it. That man – he didn’t die just for my ends. If you knew, Scarlett, what the man was, what he’d done to women over and over again...’ She shuddered. ‘He deserved to die. His death saved who knows how many women. He was always going to die. Daniel had found him out. Daniel was sworn to do it. But I asked him to let me be the one, that night.’

  Her eyes begged me to understand. And for the first time since I’d heard that word vigilante I tried to put myself in her shoes.

  ‘How many?’ I said.

  ‘Just that man. I’ve been a little… occupied elsewhere.’

  ‘He was your only kill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had to ask: ‘And will he be your last?’

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know, is the answer. Did I enjoy killing? No. Did I think it was the right thing to do, an important thing to do? Yes. Am I capable of doing it again? Yes – when I get my hands on the bastard who hurt Mum. But…’

  ‘But?’

  She gave the minutest of smiles. ‘Life’s a little complicated.’

  I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. So I decided that it was about time one of us jabbed a finger at the elephant in the room.

  ‘Jude,’ I said.

  I may as well have yelled ‘Fire!’ for the way she tensed up.

  ‘What about him?’ she said, brushing non-existent crumbs off the couch.

  ‘He’s the complication, isn’t he? You want him, but you can’t be with him. Because he can’t accept who you are now.’

  Her head flew up. ‘He can’t?’

  ‘You knew that already,’ I said. ‘Whatever Jude’s learned here today, and however that changes him, I can’t see him ever accepting the idea of taking lives. He’s too –’

  ‘Good,’ she finished for me. ‘He’s good. And I’m not good. I never was. We never made sense together.’

  ‘But you loved him anyway.’

  Her answer, when it came, was barely audible: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, Sienna,’ I said.

  Oh, Jude, I thought.

  The two of them, hurting. It hurt me to think of it.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘where Jude and I were all wrong, I thought you and he would be all right. I knew he’d find you after I died. I knew he’d look out for you. I thought maybe you’d fall for him. I mean, who wouldn’t? You’d have been good together.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘You’d match-make me with your ex – who you still love? That’s creepy.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess it is. I just thought – I never wanted you to come here, be one of us. When I died and went with Daniel, I knew this was for me, but never you. You’re not back alleys and criminals and kicking ass and London. Well, at least I thought you weren’t. These days…’

  She raised an eyebrow, and I shook my head.

  ‘Thought not. But the point is, if you weren’t going to become a Vindico, you’d have to be a Cerulean. And with Jude beside you, I thought that wouldn’t be so bad for you. That you may like it even.’

  ‘Like being trapped on an island? Like having baby after baby after baby like a battery chicken?’

  She blanched at that. ‘Well, yes, Daniel did mention something of the setup there. But… well… you never were a jetsetter, were you? The island, I thought it might suit you. Nature. Quiet. All that. And you always did like babies. I remember you with Aunt Camille’s little one when we were kids. You treated her like your own doll.’

  ‘I was four, Sienna! Four! Cooing over tiny toes at four hardly makes you some kind of maternal goddess.’

  ‘No. I suppose not. Then I guess it comes down to Jude. I thought you two… I mean, he was promised to one of us, and I knew if not me… And in Newquay you were close.’

  ‘Of course we were close! He’s a good friend. I’d never have got through dying and living on that island without him. It was Jude who helped me get away, who gave me my freedom. And then he came with me to find you.’

  ‘And the search apparently necessitated downing a gutful of alcohol and snogging on a dark beach.’

  I cringed. ‘So you were there.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You must know it was a mistake. We were drunk. And emotional. And –’

  ‘Curious?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘That was your only kiss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And will it be your last?’

&nbs
p; I was struggling with a sense of déjà-vu – these questions and answers, we’d been here before, just now. Only then we were discussing killings, not kisses. And unlike Sienna, my answer to the final question wasn’t remotely ‘I don’t know’.

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘Jude and I are friends, nothing more. I love Luke. Jude loves… well…’

  I waited for her to press me – who does he love, does he love me, is there a chance? – but she was silent.

  A thought was niggling at me. ‘There’s something I’m not getting here. You thought Jude and I would couple up, so I’d be happy to live as a Cerulean on the island just to be with him?’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘I mean, when you love someone, isn’t that how it’s meant to work – all that matters is being together?’

  I thought of Estelle and Adam, my friends on the island. Estelle loved Adam, and had willingly moved to Cerulea to be with him. But the honeymoon hadn’t lasted. Recently, Estelle had been pushing for change.

  I thought of me and Luke. Certainly, he’d been a big part of my decision to turn my back on Cerulea and settle in Twycombe. But not all of it. I hadn’t gone against who I was in order to be with him.

  I thought of my mum and Gabe. Being together hadn’t been enough for my father. He’d needed more. He’d needed to be himself more than he’d needed to be one half of Elizabeth-and-Gabriel.

  I thought of Sienna and Jude…

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know whether love is all about sacrifice, giving up a bit of yourself for the person you love. Or whether it’s not love if you have to do that.’

  My sister’s eyes had filled with tears. The sight was shocking – how long had it been since I’d seen her cry?

  ‘Maybe it’s okay, Sienna,’ I found myself saying. ‘Maybe it’s right that you picked this life, who you are, over being with Jude and living a lie.’

  Her breath caught in her throat, and she reached forward and grabbed my wrist, gripping it painfully. ‘That’s what you think – that’s what Jude thinks – that I chose this because I’m such a devoted Vindico? Because Daniel so convinced me with his talk of Vindicos that I thought, that’s what I want, more than a chance with Jude?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘And because you wanted to be with Gabe. Like Gabe.’