by Tayte, Megan
The Ceruleans: Book IV
Devil and the Deep
By Megan Tayte
Copyright 2015 Megan Tayte
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means (other than for purposes of review), without the express permission of the author given in writing. The right of Megan Tayte to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
To contact the author, visit www.megantayte.com.
For those who cry in the dark.
DEVIL AND THE DEEP
‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned’
– William Butler Yeats
PART 1: THE SAME, ONLY DIFFERENT
1: BLUE MOON
It began with screaming. Shrill, ear-piercing, horrified screaming.
A girl shrieked, ‘Blood! Look, look – it’s everywhere!’ and pressed her hand to her mouth.
A man shouted, ‘Good grief!’ and another, ‘Great Scott!’
An old lady swooned gracefully and would have tipped over the balustrade of the riverboat had a lanky lad not caught her.
The cause of the excitement – a woman lying slumped on the long table on deck, cheek on her bread plate, headdress in the butter dish – twitched a little.
‘She’s alive!’ cried a lad beside her delightedly. ‘She moved!’
‘Did not,’ argued another.
‘Did too!’
‘Gentlemen,’ interjected a short, portly man with a twirly black moustache, ‘if you will forgive my intrusion, it must be noted that this woman has a bullet hole in her head and is logically, therefore, quite definitely deceased.’
Another old dear folded to the deck with a prolonged ‘Ohhhhhh’ and her husband grabbed a feathered fan and began wafting cool evening air in her face while calling, ‘Smelling salts – does anyone have any?’
I tried to keep a straight face. Really I did. I bit my bottom lip until I tasted my cherry-red lipstick. I pinched my leg through the cream satin of my gown. I dug my long cigarette holder into the sensitive flesh of my arm.
But it was no good.
The ‘What ho, chaps’ posh accents.
The buxom woman sagging in the arms of an elephant hunter wearing Converse All Stars.
The production of smelling salts in a bottle whose label read Pepto-Bismol.
The corners of the little round man’s moustache coming looser with his every word.
The fast-pooling puddle of pinkish blood on the bread plate, buffeted by the steady in-and-out breaths of the corpse.
Take it from a girl who’s really died – death on the River Dart, Devon, is hilarious.
‘Dear me, Ms Robson here appears to be quite overcome with shock,’ said the guy at my side suddenly, and he slipped an arm around me and turned me away. ‘Come, madam. Let us get some air.’
I smiled at him. Then grinned. Then choked back a guffaw. Thankfully, by the time full-scale hilarity hit me I’d been led to the rear of the boat, away from the rest of our party, and could bury my face in the bloke’s chest and shake mutely with laughter.
The gallant gentleman rubbed my back soothingly as I let it all out and said loudly, for the benefit of any onlookers, ‘There there, pigsney, there there.’
‘Pigsney?’ It was the final straw. My high-heeled sandals gave way and I melted into a puddle of mirth on the deck.
‘I’ll have you know, Scarlett Blake,’ hissed Luke, my boyfriend a.k.a. gallant gent, hoiking up his too-tight corduroy trousers so he could squat down beside me, ‘I Googled “old-fashioned terms of endearment” and pigsney’s a classic.’
I wiped tears from my eyes, dislodging a false eyelash in the process, and tried to catch my hiccupping breath as Luke went on.
‘Means pig’s eye. No idea why that’s appealing, but apparently in the seventeenth century, calling a lady pigsney was the very height of courting.’
Through his fake specs Luke’s blue eyes fixed me with a stare so earnest I almost managed to stop laughing.
‘But this is a Death on the Nile-Stroke-Dart murder mystery night, Luke,’ I managed to get out. ‘Set in the nineteen thirties, not the seventeen thirties.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but my character tonight, Mr Fijawaddle, is a historical fiction writer, isn’t he? So as well as dressing like a brainy recluse – and I’m warning you now, I won’t hear another slur against this tweed jacket – he’d know all kinds of obscure terms. Like ginglyform and jargogle and nudiustertian and bromopnea and farctate and quagswag and philosophunculist.’
His showing off sobered me just enough to control the giggles. ‘You made those words up,’ I accused, poking a crimson talon into his mustard-yellow shirtfront.
He blinked at me innocently. ‘Did not. I told you before we left the house, I did my homework.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘All right then, Mr Fijawaddle, what does that last word you said mean?’
‘Philosophunculist?’
‘Yes, that.’
‘Er…’ Luke gave me a sheepish grin.
‘Spill it,’ I said menacingly. As menacingly as a girl dressed up as a vintage Hollywood starlet with cute little pin curls and rouge aplenty can be, that is.
‘Philosophunculist,’ recited Luke. ‘Noun. A person who pretends to know more than they do in order to impress others.’
I threw my head back and laughed. ‘Busted!’
Luke slipped an arm around me and pulled me close. Really close.
‘Bet you like it when I use long words,’ he said huskily, eyes fixed on my too-red lips.
‘Bet you like it when I wear a clingy nightgown as a dress,’ I replied, eyes fixed on his too-kissable lips.
‘Brazen hussy,’ he growled at me.
‘Randy boffin,’ I murmured back.
Then neither of us said another word for quite some time.
*
The moon, when it came into view over the hilltops, found me sitting alone on the low bench running across the back of the boat. To get some air. To catch my breath. To rest.
I’d like to say my exhaustion was due to nothing more than the highness of my heels and the couple of 1930s Corpse Reviver cocktails I’d sunk. Or even old Mrs Conway’s insistence on staying in character long after our Hercule Poirot wannabe solved the murder, and lecturing me extensively on the proper way for a Hollywood starlet to conduct herself in company (apparently, smeared lipstick on both my lips and Luke’s was a no-no).
But the truth was, it was the people who’d drained me. All of them. It came with the territory, unfortunately, of being a Cerulean, someone who sensed pain and suffering in others and had the power to relieve it. A little of the healing energy leaked out when around people. An hour or two in company was manageable, I’d found – longer if I was with just one person or two. But a four-hour cruise with a hundred other partygoers was proving to be a challenge.
Still, I thought, looking down the boat at a group dancing to Glen Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now. Certainly not on the little island of Cerulea with a woman who was quite possibly my great-grandmother and who wanted me to pop out babies for the greater good with a boy I loved but didn’t love. And most definitely not with the other faction of Ceruleans, the Fallen, whose murderous ethos would give Hercule Poirot moustache-ache and whose newest recruit was none other than my sister, Sienna.
A dingy alley in Newquay.
An old man pinned against a wall.
My sister’s hands flood
ing blue light into his chest.
The man slumping to the floor, dead, dead...
I shook my head to scatter the memories. No, sister be damned – I belonged here, on this boat. With my boyfriend, Luke, watching me from across the deck as he chatted to party organiser/elephant hunter Si. With my best friend Cara, teaching a gaggle of sniggering surfers how to jitterbug. And yes, even with the twinkly-eyed gentlemen and chatty old ladies we were mingling with, kindly benefactors of the Lux Beneficent Society we were here to support – to the uninitiated, a charity supporting local good causes; to those in the know, a major donor to the Ceruleans’ work.
So really, even though I was out partying with my non-Cerulean friends, rather than furthering the Cerulean line or using my power to heal, I was being a good Cerulean. I was supporting the cause.
That’s what I told myself.
Sighing, I turned away from the party and stared downriver, past the castles of Kingswear and Dartmouth, to the open water beyond, streaked with silver moonlight. Once, the sea had terrified me – the result of an overprotective mother who’d almost drowned, a sister who had drowned and a brush with death beneath the blue myself. Now, I longed for the rush of flying along tunnelling waves. Alive. Free. The mistress of my fate.
Only I wasn’t. Not really. Once, Luke and I had surfed side by side. Now, I had to surf alone.
‘Why so blue?’
The deep voice behind startled me. I turned sharply, but the breeze conspired with my curls to blind me and it took several moments of untangling to get a clear view. A man, a stranger. Big and burly and too rugged to pull off a tuxedo.
‘I wondered whether you were all right,’ he said, ‘sitting here alone, away from the others?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. Just a little tired.’
‘Right. Partying’ll do that to you.’
He stood smiling at me, apparently waiting for a response, but my mind was blank. You’d think, given my la-de-da upbringing, I’d have been better at making small talk. But I was fairly stumped as to why this bloke had wandered away from the party simply to exchange social niceties with me. He wasn’t even my age – he looked forty at least.
I shot a look down the boat to Luke. He raised a Do you need rescuing? eyebrow and I nodded imperceptibly.
‘So,’ said the man, ‘are you a supporter of the Lux Beneficent Society?’
‘Er, yes,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we all?’
The stranger frowned and opened his mouth to reply, but was distracted by Luke clattering up to us in his ‘historical fiction writer shoes’ (horrendous tan brogues he’d borrowed from old Harold at his grandmother’s care home).
‘Ms Eliza Robson,’ Luke said smoothly, offering his hand, ‘I do believe you owe me a dance.’
I stifled a laugh; his plummy accent really was dire.
‘Well, Mr Alistair Fijawaddle,’ I drawled in what was no-doubt an equally shocking American accent, ‘I do declare y’all are right.’
I took Luke’s hand and stood. The stranger was standing silently, watching us, and it felt rude just to walk off, so I said politely in my own voice ‘It was nice to meet you’ as Luke led me away.
I heard him return a warm ‘And you, Scarlett’ but I was already busy scanning the crowd for our friends. I spotted most of them clustered around a table at the front of the boat, talking and laughing – the mood had chilled, the tempo had dropped, and only Si and Cara were braving it among the older folk waltzing around the dance floor.
‘Weirdometer in the red?’ asked Luke as we headed over to the others.
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘That guy was harmless enough. I’m just not in the mood for schmoozing.’
‘You’re tired?’
I looked up to meet his gaze, and the concern I saw there – that I too often saw there – made my heart twinge painfully.
‘Not too tired,’ I reassured him.
‘Good.’ He gave a crooked grin. ‘Because I was serious about that dance.’
I let him tug me to the middle of the dance floor. He pulled me close and rested his chin on my head and swayed us gently from side to side. Pressing my cheek to his chest, I relaxed into the rhythmic beat of his heart.
Ella Fitzgerald was singing of a blue moon turned to gold, and my eyes drifted to the rear of the boat, where I’d sat in the moonlight. The stranger had gone. I wondered absently who he was. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know which character he was playing tonight; he wasn’t wearing a name tag like the rest of us.
Hang on. Name tag. Mine read Ms Eliza Robson, Hollywood strumpet. Only that. Yet as I walked away, he called me not Eliza, but Scarlett. So he must have asked someone who I really was. Why would he –
A shiver went down my spine: Luke, brushing fingers lightly over the bare skin of my back.
‘Limerence,’ he said huskily. ‘Noun. The state of being deeply, helplessly, crazily in love.’
I tilted my head so I could look at him. He gazed down at me. And I pushed up onto tiptoes and kissed his smiling lips.
For what else on earth could possibly matter right there, right then, but Luke and me together – together at last?
2: TWO HALVES
The perfect end to a romantic evening with the guy I loved: going home, closing the door on the world, stripping off the costumes, climbing into bed and making up for all the time we’d lost during the long, dark months of our separation. The perfect end. But not for Luke and me.
When I awoke the next day to the sun streaming into my little bedroom in my little cottage, I was alone. And though it had been this way – had had to be this way – for the month since I’d come home, still my first waking action was to stretch out a hand and smooth the cool, unrumpled pillow beside me and wish he was there.
We had tried, of course we had. That first night after I returned and the next, we’d been inseparable. Nothing could come between us; we would not let it. The heady euphoria of reunion left no space for the story of our time apart, for the limitations I’d been warned we would face now that I was a Cerulean.
He said, ‘Please tell me you’re here to stay.’
I said, ‘If you’ll have me, if you want me here, I’ll never leave you again.’
And that was it: we were Luke-and-Scarlett, Scarlett-and-Luke once more, two halves of something bigger, better, brighter than its parts.
But it couldn’t last, the blissful honeymoon. The morning of my third day home, reality blew apart our hazy, happy dream when Luke awoke but I didn’t – not when Luke nudged me, not when he poked me, not when he shook me and shouted my name. Plunged into too-familiar panic, he phoned his sister and raised the alarm. Thankfully, Cara had the presence of mind to call in the one person who knew what to do (despite the fact he was also the one person Luke was loath to contact).
Once fellow Cerulean Jude arrived on the scene, calm was quickly restored. Humans were banished from the cottage, and free from their draining presence I slept off my stupor for the rest of the day and awoke refreshed and re-energised – and then horrified to discover the drama I’d caused.
A sighing Jude sent me on my way with an earful of warnings, and I headed straight to Luke and Cara’s house, where I sat far away from them in their living room and told them of my experiences in the wild blue yonder. They listened silently, taking it all in:
My imprisonment on an island mere miles from Twycombe.
My Cerulean purpose: to create with Jude a small army of babies that I would not bring up.
Our escape from Cerulea, and stakeout in Newquay for the Fallen.
My reunion with Sienna, and its terrible, damning conclusion.
I told them everything, every detail, but one: the drunken kiss I’d shared with Jude on a dark beach. There was no need to share what had been a mistake – a liberating one, as it turned out, because it had cemented that Jude and I were no more than friends. Jude loved Sienna. I loved Luke.
But would Luke love me still, want me still, given the limitations we faced with him
human and me Cerulean? Fear of his rejection had held me back, but now I had to be entirely honest with him. He had to understand that to be with me meant not quite being with me. Our time together could only ever be short, fleeting. His humanity drained me – as a Cerulean, I couldn’t be with him constantly; I needed space, lots of space, to survive.
‘My grandfather may have been a Cerulean,’ I told him. ‘I mean, I think he was. And he managed to be with my grandmother, though she was not a Cerulean, in the cottage for many years. I remember them as happy. But you have to know, Luke, that Grandad was always... distant. Detached. As I’d have to be. If we were together...’
‘If!?’
Luke leapt up from the sofa, cheeks red, hands fisted. I’d expected anger. Sadness for all we couldn’t do together now. Hesitancy, at least. But he said:
‘There’s no if. I’ll take moments, lots of moments, with you over none – of course I will.’
‘But they say it’s impossible for a Cerulean and a human to be together...’
‘Well, “they” say it’s impossible to die and come back to life too, and yet here you are.’ He crossed the room then and took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes and said firmly, ‘Being with you isn’t impossible, Scarlett. It’s essential.’
And that was that. He was mine and I was his, and the future stretched out ahead of us, full of the promise of laughter and passion and tenderness – except at night, when I retreated to my isolated cottage on the cliff, alone.
I had chosen Luke over a life in Cerulea, and he had chosen me over a life of normality, and they were simple choices, right choices. And yet my hand stroked that lonely pillow beside me.
*
Downstairs, I sat in my usual chair at the big pine table in the kitchen. I started each day here, in this spot – my favourite because it pulled together the very best of old and new. Old: the chair made by my grandfather in his garden shed; the table bearing the remnants of felt-tip pen streaks from my childhood days; the Aga breathing out heat. New: the shock-proof toaster and kettle; the regularly restocked cake tin; the colourful framed Joan Miró print; the fridge magnet letters arranged to spell THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.