by Megan Tayte
I waited for him to make eye contact. When he finally did I took that as an invitation to go on.
‘I’ve been thinking. She doesn’t want us here – we knew she never wanted us to come; she made that clear on the beach at Twycombe. I thought then that she was being possessive, that she wanted Gabe to herself. Or that her confidence in the alley was a front, the night she… you know, and she’s ashamed for us to see her as one of the Fallen. But tonight she was so mad to find us here.’
‘I don’t think mad quite covers it,’ said Jude. ‘Furious, incensed, livid…’
‘No,’ I broke in. ‘None of those. She’s not angry, not really. I know her: that’s a mask she wears. What she is, is frightened. Really, really frightened.’
He blinked. ‘Of what? She’s one of them now. Nothing scares them.’
‘It must have something to do with the three of us being here,’ I said. ‘It’s not Luke; Sienna barely knows him. And I don’t think it’s me so much. After Mum… she wanted me to join with her. So she was willing to have me here.’
‘Which leaves me,’ said Jude. ‘I know. It’s me.’ He closed his eyes and leaned wearily back on the headboard. ‘Sienna wants me nowhere near her.’
But I had to disagree again. ‘I don’t think that’s it at all.’
He cracked open an eye. ‘It’s not?’
‘It’s not that she doesn’t want you near. It’s that, for some reason, she can’t allow it.’
‘What’s the difference?’
I sat up and turned to face him properly. ‘Jude,’ I said. ‘Do you love her?’
He grimaced.
‘You do, don’t you? Despite everything.’
He made a noise of frustration deep in his throat.
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
‘God knows I’ve tried to exorcise her,’ he said.
I smiled. ‘Terrible as she can be, she has a way of getting under your skin. But you know, under all the bluster, she’s not incapable of caring. Even now, with all she’s done. I saw her with Mum when we found her. She was ripped apart. She still is.’
‘Of course I know she’s not without feeling, Scarlett.’
‘Yes, but it’s a very specific feeling I’m talking about.’
Jude crooked an eyebrow.
‘She loves you,’ I told him.
‘You can’t know that!’ he protested at once.
‘I can,’ I said. ‘I do.’
‘How?’
‘It’s in everything she does when you’re near her. It’s like you’re the sun and she’s the fiery planet bound to orbit you – only she fights against it at every turn.’
Jude looked unconvinced.
‘You saw Gabe,’ I said. ‘He was relieved we’re not together. Because of Sienna. How she’d react. She’d have been jealous.’
Jude looked thoroughly unconvinced.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Love isn’t jealousy or fury. And it sure as hell isn’t betrayal and abandonment.’
I opened my mouth to argue, but then closed it. Who was I to fight Sienna’s corner here – to convince Jude that she loved him? I cared about Jude a lot. He was kind and giving and loyal. And good. Far too good for my selfish, hurtful sister.
‘This isn’t some fairytale,’ said Jude. ‘It’s real life. There is no love that conquers all. There’s just cold, hard reality. You fall in love with the wrong person. You get hurt. You walk away. Done.’ He reached over to the lamp on the chest of drawers. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m more tired than I thought. Do you mind?’
‘’Course,’ I said, though exhausted or not, I’d have talked all night.
He switched off the light, threw one of his pillows on the floor, pulled the duvet to his chin and curled up on his side, back to me.
I followed suit.
For a long time, I watched lights winking on in apartment blocks across the river. I thought about Sienna and Jude, and I thought about Luke and me. Was I guilty of blinding myself to cold, hard reality, of losing myself in the fairytale? Was I just like one of the heroines in Cara’s novels – swept away by romance, heedless of the consequences of following my heart?
I loved Luke. God I loved him. But what future did we have together? A relationship based on distance, not unity. And not intimacy, unless we were prepared to create children destined to die and turn Cerulean, and so be doomed to either a life of loneliness or the same fraught relationships as ours.
‘Anyway,’ said Jude suddenly into the gloom of the room, ‘even if I did believe Sienna loved me, it would make no difference.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Why isn’t love enough?’
‘It’s like that Kipling line: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”’
‘Never? But surely all the great love stories are about overcoming what stands between you. I mean, Romeo and Juliet –’
‘Died, Scarlett. Both of them. How is that overcoming?’
‘Oh. Right. Antony and Cleopatra then.’
‘Died.’
‘Tristan and Isolde?’
‘Died.’
‘Lancelot and Guinevere?’
‘He became a monk. She became a nun. They spent the rest of their lives repenting for their love.’
‘Oh for goodness… I give up. Stupid love stories.’
He chuckled a little at that, but stopped as soon as I said:
‘So if I talk to Sienna tomorrow, and I find that she thinks of you still…’
‘Then it means nothing,’ he said firmly. ‘Nothing. It’s over, and nothing will change that. People from different worlds do not belong together.’
I couldn’t tell, by his tone alone, whether he realised the implication in his words – how his blanket judgement could be applied equally to Luke and me as to him and Sienna.
I didn’t ask him whether he meant to imply that. I didn’t want to know the answer.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, good night then.’
‘Good night,’ he said.
And although I was at the top of a terrifyingly tall tower, in the heart of an exhausting city, within reach of a furious sister and an intimidating stranger of a father and a whole host of violent vigilantes, curled up beside the guy I loved but I didn’t love, cut off from the guy I did love, too far from my achingly still mother, too aware of the monster who’d made her that way – although I had every reason in the world to lie awake all night, wondering and worrying… I closed my eyes and I slept.
I woke late the next morning. At least I assumed it was late, judging by the bright light flooding the room, the empty bed beside me and the buzz of conversation leaking under the door. Still, I didn’t race out of the room to join the others. The day out in the city yesterday had left me feeling grubby with pollution, so I made good use of the en-suite shower room. Then I dressed in a clean outfit from the bag Luke had packed for me (jeans, tee and cardie; he knew me so well) and pulled a brush through my hair.
The girl eyeing me in the mirror looked pretty rested, but a touch pale and delicate for my liking, so I had a little practice of my ‘Don’t mess with me’ face. Then abandoned the attempt when I realised how ridiculous my ‘Don’t mess with me’ face actually looked (akin to ‘Good grief, I’ve swallowed a wasp’).
A laugh from outside drew my attention. Luke? He was upstairs? And laughing?
I swung open the door and walked out.
‘Morning,’ chorused two voices as I reached the main room.
Luke and Jude were sitting comfortably around the long white dining table, which was set for breakfast.
‘Where’s Gabe?’ I asked, scanning around as I walked over.
‘He stepped out,’ said Jude. ‘Back soon.’
That explained the relaxed atmosphere.
‘Toast?’ offered Luke, waving a golden triangle at me.
I nodded and slid onto the chair next to him.
‘Sleep well?’ he asked.
‘I guess.’ I clocked
the dark shadows under his eyes. ‘Not you, though, I take it?’
‘Bit noisy downstairs,’ he said. ‘Banging doors. Squalling baby. London’s no sleepy Twycombe, that’s for sure.’
I leaned in and kissed him. My way of saying ‘Sorry for putting you in this situation’.
Across the table, Jude cleared his throat before light kiss could become anything more, and I sat back in my seat and surveyed the many, many breakfast options laid out before me.
‘Blimey,’ I said.
‘Hogwarts feast was my first thought,’ said Luke. ‘Clearly, your dad wants us happy and well fed.’
‘This must have cost a bomb,’ I said, rooting around in a basket of mini jam jars.
‘Something tells me money’s no object here,’ said Jude.
‘Where d’you think he gets it all from?’ I asked, selecting a mysteriously labelled bumbleberry preserve and struggling with the lid.
‘I dread to think,’ Jude muttered.
Luke took the jam off me, twisted the lid off neatly and handed the tiny jar back.
I sighed. ‘For a girl with beyond human powers, I’m beyond feeble.’
‘Only physically,’ said Luke with a wink.
Jude was miles away. ‘I suppose,’ he mused, ‘with the Cerulean ability to be all but invisible, it’s not exactly difficult to get your hands on money if your morals are dubious.’
‘Ah,’ said a deep voice from across the room, ‘so you’re thinking thievery?’
We all turned a little guiltily to Gabe, but there was no glimmer of offence in his smile as he crossed the room to us.
‘Well,’ said Jude defensively, ‘you are already up to your neck in criminality.’
‘True,’ said Gabe cheerfully, sitting down beside me and pouring himself a bowl of cereal. ‘But then what is the definition of a criminal but someone who breaks the law? And who’s to say laws – rules – are always right? After all, you have to admit that some of the rules on Cerulea are a little… dubious, at times.’
Jude was doing a fish-out-of-water gaping thing, but whatever a bumbleberry was, it was a good source of boldness, because I blurted out:
‘Is it a Robin Hood thing? You steal from the bad guys, to give to the good guys?’
‘A decent guess,’ said Gabe, sloshing milk onto his cereal and then taking a large spoonful before continuing through chews: ‘But no, any money from them would be tainted. This’ – he gestured around the room – ‘is the product of a much less exciting means of money-gathering. You see, when I’m not being the big, bad leader you think me to be, I moonlight as a silent director in a software company. EliSoft. You may have heard of it?’
Luke’s knife clattered loudly onto his plate. ‘EliSoft? As in Elisoft?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Gabe blithely.
We all stared at him. Even I – whose knowledge of IT barely extended beyond Google, YouTube and Facebook – had heard of EliSoft. It wasn’t Microsoft by any means, but it was fairly well known as a UK business ‘done good’.
‘The elusive co-founder – that’s you?’ said Luke.
‘Well, I can’t claim credit for its success. My partner, Sayeed, is the brains. But yes, I seeded the capital to start it, oh, some seventeen years ago now, and I remain a major shareholder. Though Sayeed takes the lion’s share. He has five homes, you know, including a castle in Tuscany. I only have two. This one, and the place in Newquay.’
‘That nightclub?’ asked Luke. ‘Club Infinity?’
‘No, that’s just a business I invested in. The house is on the –’
‘EliSoft,’ I broke in. ‘You called it EliSoft.’
Gabe smiled. ‘What better name?’
He’d named his company after my mother, all those years ago. Clearly, he’d loved her deeply still, despite her rejection. And now?
I looked at the clock on the wall – one of those part-art, part-function ones where you struggle to tell the time. ‘Nine,’ I said eventually. ‘I should be at the hospital now – they expect me first thing.’
‘Your sister’s there at the moment,’ said Gabe. ‘And I think she could do with some alone time.’
‘You spoke to her last night?’ asked Jude. I wondered why he was interested, after all he’d said to me in the bedroom.
‘We had words. Sienna has a lot to think about today, not to mention a little… job to do.’ Gabe saw my shudder at the word job. ‘Which leads me neatly on to the plan for today. I thought we’d start with a little induction into the world of what you call the Fallen and we call the Vindicos.’
I was about to ask what Vindicos meant when Jude said with disgust:
‘Sienna and Daniel already gave us that induction, thank you very much, in a filthy alley behind your nightclub. I am not watching anything like that again.’
‘Me either,’ I seconded, and Luke, beside me, was nodding vigorously.
Gabe looked affronted. ‘Well, of course I didn’t invite you here to see that! But it’s precisely because of what you witnessed in that alley that you need to learn about us. See the full picture, not just a snapshot of our work – and a macabre one at that, delivered by a very angry girl and her far-too-facilitating friend.’
I looked at Luke. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that we’re here to learn.’
I looked at Jude.
He nodded, then said: ‘But at the first sign of trouble, anything harmful or distressing to any of us, we’re out of here.’
For a moment I thought Gabe would argue, but all he said was, ‘Understood.’
‘That’s sorted then,’ I said. ‘Now: Mum.’
‘You want to visit your mother now? I thought I explained…’
‘No. I’ll go later. But we’re going nowhere today – talking about nothing else – until you fill us in on everything you know about what happened that day at Hollythwaite.’ I pointed my jam-smeared knife at Gabe. ‘And I mean everything.’
‘Of course,’ he said soberly. ‘But you’ll be disappointed, Scarlett. We’ve got very little to go on.’
I glared at him. ‘You promised you’d find her attacker!’
‘We will.’
‘So why haven’t you?’
He sighed and put down his spoon. ‘Because there’s no evidence to go on. Fingerprints all over the kitchen, but that’s because Elizabeth used it as a base for meetings with suppliers. She had a meeting planned for that day at three – with a caterer. But she rang at one and rescheduled the appointment; told the lady she had a migraine.’
‘What else?’
‘Not much. No CCTV in the lodge, so it’s a matter of piecing together her movements based on the state of the place when you arrived.’
‘She’d been in the garden,’ I said, forcing myself to picture the scene. ‘There was a rug laid out. A sunhat. The back door was open. On the table inside, half a fruit cake. Two glasses. The radio was on. Blaring.’
‘Not the radio,’ Luke broke in. ‘A CD player. It was playing Muse. The 2nd Law album.’
‘“Madness,”’ I said, remembering now.
‘Elizabeth listened to Muse?’ Gabe queried.
‘No,’ I replied at once. Then: ‘I don’t know. Maybe. She had changed.’
Had changed. Past tense.
Gabe covered my slip by pressing on:
‘The bedroom door gives us the most to go on. It was locked from the inside, but you found Elizabeth alone in there. The police think her attacker was with her in the garden, or in the kitchen and… well, he made those marks on her throat. She got away and made it to the bedroom, where she locked herself in. Then somehow she fell and hit her head on the bedside table – we know that’s what gave her the head injury; her blood was on it.’
Blood.
The memory that sprang to mind was horrific. Under the table, Luke’s hand found mine. His touch focused me on the here and now.
‘Sienna seems to think it was a man Mum was seeing,’ I said. ‘That sh
e’d invited him into the bedroom with her.’
‘I disagree,’ said Gabe, his mouth twisting unpleasantly.
‘Because you don’t think she had a lover?’ I shot back. (Well, at least I managed not to ask: Because you don’t like the idea of her having a lover?)
‘Do you think she had one, Scarlett?’ he asked.
I considered the question. I wanted to say no. For all those years with Hugo, Mum had been faithful – miserable, yes, but faithful, I was sure. And since their breakup, she’d said nothing of a relationship. In fact, she’d mentioned once that she was enjoying the freedom of the single life. I’d interpreted that to mean she was alone. But come to think of it, ‘the freedom of the single life’ could equally mean the freedom to have casual partners. The thought of Mum doing that – urgh. But she’d been so much happier in herself recently: was a new man in part to thank for that?
‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘It’s possible.’
We were silent for a moment, digesting that idea.
‘Her attacker may have been in the room with her,’ said Luke, ‘and then he left through the window.’
Gabe shook his head. ‘The police checked the window – no fingerprints but hers, and no impact dents in the flowerbed below.’
‘So as the police have it,’ I said, ‘some random bloke turned up, tried to strangle her and then scarpered once she headed to her room, where Mum accidently put herself into a coma?’
‘That’s the theory.’
‘I don’t buy it. Her head – the state of her – that was no accident.’
No one replied. I didn’t know whether they were in silent agreement, or simply lacked the nerve to argue with me.
Jude had been quiet for some time. He hadn’t been at the scene; he couldn’t comment on that. But apparently he could comment on whom he thought was in the frame.
‘The police can’t see the whole picture,’ he said, eyes narrowed and fixed on Gabe. ‘They don’t know what we know: that someone can easily vanish from a locked room.’
‘No,’ said Gabe at once. ‘I’ve been over and over it – believe me, I have. It’s not one of us. I know every member of my family. None of them could do this. More to the point, though, none of them would have a reason to. I’m the only person here who knew Elizabeth, and I’ve never spoken of her – not once. Whoever did this, he’s not one of mine.’