Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully

by Megan Tayte

  Table of Contents

  BEGINNING

  BOOKS BY MEGAN

  DEDICATION

  COPYRIGHT

  EPIGRAPH

  PART 1: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

  1: MAVERICK

  2: WHAT I MAY BECOME

  3: FOR NOW

  4: THE SCARLET THREAD

  5: UP IN THE HEAVENS

  6: COLD, HARD REALITY

  7: DEAD END

  8: THE WOLVES

  9: MIND MELT

  10: VISION OF FORMER WOES

  11: NOBLE

  12: ALL THAT MATTERS

  13: CUPCAKES AND FROSTING

  14: AFTER ALL THE DRAMA

  15: FAMILY – THAT’S US

  16: A LADY AND A TRAMP

  17: LETTIE AND ENNA

  18: THE POSSIBILITY

  19: PERHAPS

  20: EMPTY

  21: HIM

  22: A BEAST OR A GOD

  23: CRYSTAL CLEAR

  24: GONE

  PART 2: SOMETHING BORROWED

  25: WHAT HE LEFT BEHIND

  26: SOMEONE

  27: LIMBO

  28: PURGATORY

  29: A TERRIBLE THING

  30: COME TO ME

  31: A CHANCE

  32: THE GHOST

  33: SON

  34: COME DOWN

  35: LET GO

  PART 3: SOMETHING BLUE

  36: LITTLE MERMAID

  37: AN ELEMENT

  38: INSPIRE

  39: PETER

  40: READY

  41: SACRIFICE

  42: THERE

  43: THEREAFTER

  44: EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE BIT WHERE MEGAN INTERVIEWS MEGAN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CONTENTS

  Books by Megan Tayte

  THE CERULEANS:

  Death Wish

  Forget Me Not

  Wild Blue Yonder

  Devil and the Deep

  Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully

  For George and Matilda: every word I write is my legacy to you.

  Copyright 2016 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.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.

  Interior design: Tattered Page Ink

  Cover design: Race-Point

  To contact the author, visit www.megantayte.com.

  Everything changes, nothing perishes.

  – Ovid, Metamorphoses

  I began the day in my usual way: telling my sister that no, she was not permitted to kill our mother. My sister began the day in her usual way: turning a threat to murder into a blazing row.

  ‘Scarlett, we can’t keep doing this!’ she protested loudly. ‘Look at her. She’s a turnip.’

  I looked from my mother, lying prone in a tangle of wires and tubes, to my sister, standing hands on hips at the other side of the hospital bed.

  ‘She is not a turnip, Sienna,’ I hissed.

  ‘Fine, you pick the vegetable, but there’s no getting away from the fact that’s what she is now. The doctors have been clear enough – she’s dead.’

  ‘Why are you always so dramatic? If she were dead, she wouldn’t be lying here breathing, would she?’

  ‘Well, she’s as good as. She’s not going to wake up.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Do!’

  I let out a shriek of frustration and slumped onto the hard plastic chair next to the bed. I’d positioned it to be level with Mum’s head, and as I had so many times in the past week – in the long seven days since I’d found my mother unconscious on the floor of her bedroom, half-throttled and bleeding from a massive blow to the head – I gazed at her eyelids and willed them to open.

  Wake up, Mum! I yelled silently. Wake up and tell us to stop squabbling like children. Wake up and prove Sienna wrong – prove you’re still in there, prove there’s life in you yet.

  I waited. I hoped.

  But the only movement on the bed was the slight rise and fall of my mother’s chest.

  ‘Scarlett.’ Sienna sat on her chair, set parallel to mine at the other side of the bed. ‘You have to see, it’s the kindest way. The only way.’

  ‘It’s no way at all. It’s murder.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Call me dramatic? It’s not murder. It’s euthanasia.’

  I shuddered at the word, delivered in a tone that implied the act was as simple and reasonable as brushing Mum’s hair or straightening her hospital gown.

  ‘I won’t hurt her,’ said Sienna, kinder now. ‘Just a few moments with my hands on her and she’ll drift away. Peacefully. With dignity. And then we’ll see her – we’ll see her spirit before she passes on. We can say goodbye.’

  Her voice choked a little on the last word, and that pierced the anger I wore as a shield. I knew my sister well enough to be aware that the bossing and arguing were her way of coping. Beneath the bravado she was just as devastated as I was at the position in which we found ourselves: at the bedside of our mother, our mother, who was in a deep coma from which doctors had poor expectations of recovery.

  ‘I’m not ready to say goodbye,’ I told my sister now. ‘You have to respect that.’

  She looked at me for a very long time, and then she sighed and dropped her head onto the bed. ‘I know,’ she said, her voice muffled by the sheets.

  This was new. Until now, our daily row had ended with us achieving exactly zilch – we gave up shouting, but we never actually reached a resolution. Which was why I’d had to hire a private nurse to ensure Mum’s safety from her own daughter.

  ‘You promise?’ I said urgently now. ‘You promise you won’t do it?’

  Sienna looked up. ‘Yes, Scarlett,’ she said. ‘I promise. I know you think I’m some kind of monster these days, but she’s our mother, and I’d never do anything without your agreement.’

  Her tone was testy, but I believed her: my sister never made promises lightly, and those she made, she kept.

  ‘So you can call off Nurse Watchdog,’ she added as I let out a prolonged sigh of relief. ‘And give your friends a break from hanging about this hotbed of misery. Surely they can find better things to do in the big city than sitting in a room with a view of a brick wall and a stink of antiseptic.’

  She had a point. My friends Cara and Si had been staying at a nearby hotel since the day Mum was transferred to the hospital, and visiting her when I couldn’t be there. Which meant vigils of many hours each day.

  ‘I guess,’ I said. ‘They’ve been pretty cooped up – either here at the hospital or stuck at the hotel.’

  ‘There you go then,’ said Sienna. ‘Break them free of their prison. Take them out. Get away from all this death. And while you’re at it, take some time out yourself to think about what’s best for Mum.’

  I ignored that terrible word delivered so casually: death. Instead, I turned the conversation to my sister. Again.

  ‘And you?’

  An eyebrow arched. ‘What about me?’

  ‘What are you doing today? What do you do in all the hours
you’re not here with Mum?’

  ‘Oh, you know…’ said Sienna, as if that were an answer.

  All week she’d evaded any question about her that I’d posed. Which was typical Sienna, but maddening given the fact I hadn’t seen my sister properly in more than a year and could count the things I knew about her on one hand. (She looked pretty much the same, if a little worn at the edges; she was a vigilante and proud of it; she lived with our father and the members of his Fallen faction; she got all riled up when the subject of her ex-boyfriend Jude came up – yep, four fingers. That was it.)

  ‘I don’t know, Sienna,’ I told her. ‘That’s the point. I know nothing about your life. I thought you were dead, then that you were captive, then that you were some psycho killer.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘So you’re a vigilante. Doesn’t really help me know you.’

  She looked at Mum and frowned. ‘Now’s not the time.’

  ‘But don’t you care? Don’t you want me to know you?’

  Even as I spoke I wondered why I was pressing her. I was tapping into white-hot rage against Sienna for abandoning me and Mum this past year – rage I wasn’t sure I was ready to face. It wasn’t like me to poke crocodiles. Perhaps it was just the sights and smells and sounds of this too-white room that set loose the militancy in me. Perhaps.

  My refusal to back down – out of character in Sienna’s eyes – had put her on the defensive. She stood up.

  ‘Fine, if it matters that much to you, I’ll tell you. I’m going home now to meet Daniel, and then we’ll spend the day hunting down the bastard who did this to Mum.’

  I nodded grimly, but I didn’t ask how her investigation into the attack on our mother was going. I knew already, from other sources, that the answer was ‘not well’. Instead, I leaned forward and said, ‘Can I help, Sienna?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘So you thought about it, what I said? You want to join us – me and Gabe? You want to be the one to –’

  ‘No!’ I shot to my feet to meet her on the level, though I was hopelessly short in any face-off with my sister. ‘I’m not offering to side with the Fallen, and I’m certainly not offering to be the person who kills whoever hurt Mum!’

  Sienna assumed an expression of quelle surprise, but I didn’t miss a fleeting flash of darkness in her eyes. Anger? Disappointment?

  ‘So what help are you offering then, Scarlett?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something. Anything – no, not anything. God…’ I balled my fists. ‘I just – I want to know who did this to Mum. I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

  ‘Me either,’ said Sienna. ‘When I get my hands on him…’

  ‘Him. You keep saying him. Why?’

  ‘Isn’t it a natural assumption that a bloke did this to her? I mean, what woman has the strength to strang–’

  I held up a hand. ‘Enough.’ My eyes fixed on Mum, her throat. The bruises there were yellowing at the edges now.

  ‘Besides,’ Sienna went on, ‘there were two glasses on the kitchen table the day you found her, so she was entertaining. And there were no signs of a struggle in the house, and who else but a man would she have invited willingly into her bedroom?’

  ‘Hang on, you think Mum was seeing someone?’

  ‘Seeing, sleeping with – pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to.’ Her tone was flippant, but I caught the tremble in her hand as she smoothed the sheet over Mum’s legs.

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘Sienna?’

  She dropped her hand. ‘I’d better be going. Same time –’

  ‘Sienna. What are you hiding?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘“Nothing” like when we were fifteen and I caught you creeping out of our room on holiday to go meet some greasy local lothario?’

  She grimaced.

  ‘“Nothing” like when we were ten and you scoffed all the Victoria sponge in the pantry and then made me tell Mum and Hugo that I ate it?’

  Her lips quirked.

  ‘“Nothing” like when we were five and you found a badger in the woods and smuggled it into your bedroom to keep as a pet?’

  A smile broke through. ‘Well, it was injured,’ she said.

  ‘You healed it?’

  ‘I think so. And how did it thank me? Trashed my bedroom.’

  ‘And Mum, when she came in to see what the racket was…’

  ‘… knocked her flat…’

  ‘… screamed and screamed and screamed…’

  ‘… took to her bed…’

  ‘… necked tablets like M&Ms…’

  The fragile connection the memory had forged broke as we both frowned down at our mother and remembered too many times we’d seen her lying limp in bed. But that was before, when her best friends were gin and tranquilisers. In recent months, she’d been different – happy and animated. She looked all wrong, lifeless like this.

  ‘So,’ said Sienna. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

  I met her eyes – my eyes, Mum’s eyes, so distinctly green. Sienna was doing her best to appear mature and adult, I saw. She had assumed I’d lost the thread of our earlier conversation. I hadn’t.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘See you.’

  She nodded and, in a blur of blue, she was gone.

  Gone where exactly? Home, wherever that may be – I had no idea. To do what? She said she was hunting down Mum’s attacker. I believed that much was true; Sienna had always defended those she cared for ferociously. But there was something more, something she wasn’t telling me. I could feel it, and I didn’t like the feeling one bit.

  I was settling down on my chair again to spend a last few minutes with Mum when the door edged open and a head peeked around. ‘Good morning, Scarlett,’ said the early-shift nurse.

  ‘Morning, Cindy,’ I said. ‘Come on in.’

  She made her way in, peering over the top of the large plant she was lugging. ‘Oh. I thought I may be disturbing… I could have sworn I heard voices in here just now.’

  ‘Well, you did tell me to talk to Mum plenty,’ I said lightly, though inwardly I winced. How easily lies tripped off my tongue these days.

  ‘Absolutely! Great stuff, Scarlett!’

  Her enthusiasm raised a smile. Cindy was very much of the ‘positive thinking’ school of nursing. I had to admire her attitude: it couldn’t be easy to remain cheery in a place like this. Heaven knew I was struggling.

  ‘Here!’ she said, and she hefted the plant onto my lap. ‘This was delivered to the front desk. Now, do you want me to call the agency and tell them when to send the nurse over today?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘please could you call and cancel the service?’

  ‘Cancel it?’

  ‘I don’t need an agency nurse any more.’

  ‘Really? Well! That is good news.’ Cindy beamed at me – no doubt delighted that I was apparently now giving my full trust to the staff here at the hospital without feeling the need to bring in a silent professional to watch over them. ‘I’ll go do that right now!’ she said with gusto, and out she bustled.

  Wasting no time, I stood and plonked the plant on a nearby table. I hadn’t had the heart to tell jolly Cindy that the pot had drainage holes in the bottom and my jeans were fast becoming a soily, sodden mess.

  I surveyed the gift. It was a little unusual, I thought, for someone on her sickbed. It was pretty enough: crimson-red petals, bushy green leaves, simple terracotta pot. But the plant was kind of hardy-looking, like it had been purchased from a garden centre and was ready to be planted in a flower bed or window box. Not like the other, sweet-smelling and delicate bouquets that Cara had arranged and scattered about the room in hospital-issue vases.

  A flash of white caught my eye, and I rummaged through the leaves and drew out a miniature envelope. A single word was scrawled across it: Scarlett. The plant was for me? I’d assumed it was for Mum. Why was someone sending me a plant here? Who?

  For Mum’s own safety after the attack, her whereabouts had been kept tightly under wraps, and very few people
knew that I visited here. Cara and Si and Luke, of course – though why they’d send a plant to this room, I had no idea. William, the groundskeeper at Mum’s estate, Hollythwaite, had already sent flowers cut from the rose garden there. That left only Gabriel, my father. But he’d agreed to keep a distance from me, and from Mum. He’d promised.

  Frowning, I opened the envelope.

  The notecard within was blank but for a pre-printed ‘Thinking of You’ message. I checked the back of the card – blank too.

  Behind the notecard in the envelope the florist had slipped an information card about the plant. The front identified it as a Maverick Scarlet geranium and gave care instructions. The back offered a little background on geraniums, including some of their attributed meanings:

  The symbolic meanings of geranium flowers include true friend, gentility, stupidity, melancholy and folly. The scarlet geranium signifies comfort or consolation.

  Such a mishmash of meanings: floriology, by the look of it, was a vague language. Clearly, the gift was meant as token of sympathy. But from whom? And why address the gift to me alone, not Mum and Sienna too?

  I looked again at the blank card. It was odd. In fact, it was more than odd – it was a worry.

  I looked at Mum. Her face was as blank as the card, her hair spread on the pillow as flame-red as the flowers.

  My mother was in a coma from which no one – human or otherwise – could rouse her. The person who’d put my mother in that coma was wandering around somewhere, free. Put the two together and I was in no mood for mystery or deceit; I was in no mood to be played or to trust that any action, any word, was benign.

  Because I knew it wasn’t just the sights and smells and sounds of this too-white room that had set loose the militancy in me. I was different. I was changed. The message in the plant was in part on target: these days, I was Maverick Scarlett. I wasn’t the tremulous, passive girl I’d once been: the girl Sienna could boss about, the girl who had no sense of her own place in this world, the girl who was scared of the ocean and heights and falling in love.

  I was Scarlett Blake.

  I was someone.

  And I was damned if anyone, anyone – be they sister or father or faceless enemy – was going to play God with my life or the lives of those I loved ever again.