by Megan Tayte
A week at Hollythwaite, and it was a simple zipper that would be my undoing.
I couldn’t leave her.
I couldn’t do this.
I loved her.
I needed her.
My mother.
Luke’s hand closed around mine. ‘Now or never,’ he said. Jokingly, for Mum’s benefit. Only he wasn’t joking at all.
I looked at Mum, smiling so easily at us. Smiling. How seldom she’d done that through my childhood. She was happy. I would not take that from her.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
Out in the hallway Luke picked up my bags. Mum opened the front door.
‘Goodbye, Luke,’ she said. ‘Lovely to see you again.’
‘And you, Mrs Blake.’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Elizabeth.’
He moved outside and hovered at the bottom of the steps, waiting for me.
Mum hugged me. ‘Bye for now, darling,’ she said. ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘You too, Mum. Promise me that you will.’
‘Of course!’
I pressed a last kiss on the apple of her cheek, right where I’d always kissed her goodnight. Then I turned and walked away from her. Luke held my hand tightly as we crunched across the gravel of the drive, but said nothing until I veered to my Mini.
‘You’re not driving,’ he hissed. ‘Come with me, in the van.’
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘I love my car. I need my car.’
He fought himself for a moment, then gave a brusque nod. ‘But you drive slowly, got it? I’ll follow right behind.’
I nodded and got in the car and focused on starting up and navigating around the wide turning circle. Only when I reached the drive leading down to the gates did I look for her, in the rear-view mirror. She was waving. I wound down the window and waved back, until my view was blocked by the van. Then I forced my foot onto the accelerator and I drove away from the mother I’d finally found only to lose her all over again.
44: HOLY CARDEA
It was late when I finally pulled up on the drive of Luke and Cara’s house, all of ten seconds before Luke, who’d pretty much tailgated me all the way. Several hours of my ‘Chill’ iPod playlist and deep breathing had not, as intended, calmed me down: I was stiff with tension. Massaging my neck, I got out of the car and looked up at the house. Lights were on in every window.
‘You all right?’ asked Luke, beside me already.
‘You’re going to need to stop asking me that all the time,’ I told him. ‘Wasting words.’
Movement at the living room window caught my eye. Cara was looking out at us. She held up a hand in a rigid wave. I smiled at her.
Luke sighed. ‘Can we do the whole “Cara says sorry for hating you” thing later? I’d much rather go to your place and be alone.’
‘No. I need to talk to you. And Cara. Right now.’
His eyes widened. ‘That sounds ominous.’
Stretching up on tiptoes, I kissed him. Then I took his hand and tugged him to the door. I didn’t even make it over the threshold before I was felled by a deliriously excited Chester.
‘Chester!’ roared Luke. ‘Careful.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘He missed me.’
I let him shower me with meaty dog kisses for a little while, and then struggled upright. Luke grabbed the dog’s collar and attempted to pull him off me, but Chester resisted furiously enough to make his eyes bulge. Changing tack, Luke disappeared into the kitchen. I heard a bag rustle and Chester’s head snapped around. With a joyous woof that was clearly dog-speak for ‘Doggie drops!’ he hurtled across the hall and through the kitchen doorway. Moments later, the door closed.
Cara was waiting for me in the living room. Her eyes were red, her shoulders slumped.
‘Hey,’ I said to her.
‘Hey,’ she said miserably.
I walked over to her and hugged her hard. She started crying.
‘I’m so sorry, Scarlett! I was such a bitch. I thought…’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told her, letting her go.
‘But –’
‘No!’ My tone was sharp.
‘What’s up?’ said Luke, who’d just entered the room, minus our canine friend.
‘I need to talk to both of you. Sofa. Sit. Now.’
Wide-eyed, they looked at each other, and then shuffled over to the sofa and sat down. I walked to the patio doors at the back of the room, looked out at the dark garden, walked to the front of the house, looked out at the lights of Twycombe below, walked to the back, walked to the front, back, forth.
‘Er, Scarlett…’
‘Wait!’
I needed to think, to work out what to say.
Whether or not to tell them the truth wasn’t the issue – I’d decided to do that back in the treehouse, the moment I’d understood what Jude had done. In playing God for his own unfathomable reasons, he’d eliminated one hurt from Luke and Cara’s hearts and thrust into it a new, worse one: losing me. I remembered too well Cara’s question to me at Bert’s funeral: ‘Do you believe in heaven?’ I knew both of them were torn apart by the loss of their parents, and a big part of the pain was the not knowing – were they okay? Did they exist still? I would not let that pain be part of my passing for them. I would do all I could to provide solace for them now. And answers, real answers. I was done with lying.
But where to start? How to explain everything that had happened – all the detail in Sienna’s diary, all that Jude had told me, all that had happened to me, all that I’d done…
That was it. There were no words. But there were actions.
I stopped pacing and they both looked up at me expectantly. Cara’s cheeks were wet and she was gripping a cushion to her chest. Luke was leaning forwards, hands fisted at his sides. They were poised for bad news.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Really.’
Neither of them relaxed an iota.
I moved over to them and sat down on the coffee table so that I was knee to knee with Luke.
‘Scarlett –’
‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Watch.’
I leaned close to him, so close that his breath tickled my face, and I raised my index finger and touched it lightly to the scar on the bridge of his nose – the scar he’d had since the night of the car accident that had taken his parents’ lives, the scar that had remained after Jude’s healing. Slowly, very slowly, I stroked along the scar, willing it to heal, picturing smooth, even skin. My fingertip glowed blue.
Cara let out something between a gasp and shriek and a very rude swearword.
‘What?’ demanded Luke. ‘What are you doing?’
I ignored them both, just kept moving my finger along, until…
I sat back.
‘OMG, OMG, OMG!’ Cara sprang up, arms flailing about. ‘I KNEW it. I frickin’ KNEW it.’
Luke’s head snapped from me to his sister to me. ‘What is it?’
I took his hand and pulled him up, over to the mirror above the mantelpiece. ‘Look,’ I told him.
He did, but he didn’t see it, the difference. Until Cara yelled:
‘Your scar, dummy! Look – it’s gone. Scarlett took it away. Scarlett did that!’
‘Scarlett... but how… that’s...’
He let me lead him back to the sofa and push him down. ‘Cara,’ I said. ‘Sit.’ She stopped squirling about the room and plomped down next to her brother.
‘Fiction is fact!’ she declared. ‘Oh man, this is –’
‘Pipe down,’ I told her. ‘And lift up your trouser leg.’
She blinked for a second and then a wickedly wide grin spread across her face. ‘I-knew-it-I-knew-it-I-knew-it,’ she crowed as she pulled up the leg of her loose pyjama bottoms.
I checked on Luke. No sign of a grin on his face.
‘Watch,’ I told him.
I picked a scar right under the knee – much less angry than it had once been, but there nonetheless, the skin around it puckered, the scar i
tself silvery and thick. This time, for the first time since I’d healed Luke on the beach the night he’d nearly drowned, I didn’t hold back. Electric blue shot from my hand for a second, two, and then winked straight out. I inspected the result. Smooth, healthy, beautiful skin.
‘HOLY CARDEA!’ shouted Cara.
Luke leaped up and grabbed my hand, inspecting it and muttering stunned questions I couldn’t hear over Cara’s whooping and shrieking and cackling.
‘What... how...’
‘She’s a frickin’ SUPE, Luke,’ announced Cara gleefully.
‘I’m a what?’
‘Supernatural being. All those movies and books you scoffed at – fact, not fiction! What are you? Tell me, tell me!’
Well, at least Cara was taking it well. Luke, on the other hand, was a worrying shade of white.
‘Sit down,’ I said urgently to him, pressing him back onto the seat. ‘Head between your legs. Breathe. It’s okay, it’s okay.’
‘Your hands were blue,’ he spluttered. ‘And you… you healed her. Oh God, when I said you were my angel, I didn’t mean it literally…’
‘I’m not an angel, Luke.’
‘So what are you?’ demanded Cara. ‘Was it some kind of science experiment that backfired? Bitten by an exotic insect? Freaky witchy spell? Ooo – did your mum have it off with an alien?’
‘Cara!’
‘What else can you do? Can you read my mind? Are you really, really strong? Really, really fast? Immortal – wow, are you immortal?’
‘No, Cara,’ I said. ‘I am not immortal.’
Luke looked up at that, and he grabbed my hands. ‘Tell me. Tell me everything.’
‘Tell us,’ echoed Cara. ‘Tell us everything.’
So I did. Over the next hour I told them the whole story – from the moment I first met Jude in the graveyard of St Mary’s, through to the sorry mess he’d created for me last Sunday when he stripped off his t-shirt and climbed into my bed. They both listened attentively, hooked on every word, and after a few excitable interjections from Cara that led to Luke shoving her into the cushions and shouting at her to shut up, they stayed silent, letting me talk freely.
When I was finished, Cara said, ‘So you’re dying, but you’re not dying dying – you’re going someplace else, where your kind live, but you can never come back.’
‘That’s about the sum of it.’
I looked at Luke. His hair was standing on end madly where he’d been running his fingers through it and his chest was heaving up and down.
‘I wanted to tell you both,’ I said. ‘Right from the start. I hated keeping it a secret. But how could I tell you? You’d have thought I was mad. And, well, I don’t think it’s something I’m meant to share with…’
‘… with regular humans like us. But we won’t tell, will we, Luke?’
He said nothing. He just stared at me with an expression in his eyes I couldn’t read.
‘I knew something weird was going on,’ declared Cara. ‘You’ve been mental – manic. Up and down, sad eyes one minute, desperate to party the next. And that “magic cream”! Ha! Nice try. I knew no cream could do that much to me.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘So you knew I was healing you?’
‘Well, no. Who’d bloody guess that? But my weirdar was certainly going off.’ She whistled. ‘Holy Cardea.’
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘Cardea – you know, the Roman goddess of healing. And door hinges, randomly...’ She had a sudden thought and clapped her hands together. ‘If you exist, maybe goddesses do too! Heck, there could be anything out there. Vampires. Werewolves. Wizards. Goblins. Those little Irish pixie things at the end of rainbows!’
Still Luke was silent. I moved to sit beside him. ‘Are you all right?’
That at least raised a small smile. ‘So it’s okay for you to ask me that…’
‘Well, I did just lay rather a lot on you.’
I’d put my hand on his a hundred times, a thousand, but he’d never flinched as he did then. Still, he wouldn’t let me move my hand away – he grabbed hold of it.
‘Why did you tell us, Scarlett?’
When I looked in his eyes, I couldn’t read the meaning behind the question. Did he wish I hadn’t? Cara was euphoric at discovering the existence of Ceruleans. Luke, not so much.
‘I thought it would help,’ I said. ‘Jude – him telling you I’m dying. All that pain for you. I thought, if you knew what it all meant, if you knew I’d be okay, still out there somewhere, not lost, just away…’
‘Jude,’ said Luke, and his lip curled. ‘I hate that guy.’
Cara sighed. ‘Status quo ante bellum, then.’
‘What?’
‘It means –’
‘Look,’ I interjected. ‘We’re all exhausted. Can we save the rest until the morning?’
‘You’re right,’ said Luke. ‘You should rest.’
‘And tomorrow, will you heal some more scars on my legs?’ said Cara.
I beamed at her. ‘Absolutely.’
She hugged me. ‘So glad you’re back. Love you.’
‘Love you too, crazy lady.’
She laughed and walked to the door.
Luke stood up. ‘Come on.’
He pulled me up by the hands, but the combination of an hour sitting on a hard wooden surface and two bouts of healing had taken their toll, and I staggered. He caught me before I could collapse back onto the table and held me up.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘Shush,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’
‘Is it your head? Do you need your medication?’
‘No. It’s just…’
‘What?’
‘The healing. It wipes me out.’
‘Dammit, why didn’t you say?’
Before I could so much as say ‘No big deal’ he’d slid one arm under my knees and another around my back and lifted me up. I protested but it was his turn to shush me. He carried me upstairs, to his bedroom, sat me on the bed and started pulling off my shoes.
‘I’m okay, Luke, you don’t have to fuss.’
‘Just let me,’ he said. Then, quieter: ‘Sorry. Sorry. I just… I need to do something, okay? Let me take care of you. Please.’
I nodded, and he helped me out of my clothes and into an old t-shirt of his. Then he threw back the duvet and I climbed in. I barely had time to register that his sheets were cold before he was filling the bed with his heat. I settled into his arms, and sighed at the perfection of the fit.
For a little while, we just lay there, listening to each other breathe, being warm, being still, being together. Then I said, ‘I’m sorry for dumping all that on you. It must be quite a shock.’
‘In twenty-four hours I’ve gone from thinking you’re leaving me for a tattooed surf bum, to thinking you’re not leaving me for a tattooed surf bum but you’re dying, to thinking you’re dying but not dying but you can never come back because you are leaving with a tattooed surf bum. My head’s fit to explode.’
‘Then let it go,’ I told him. ‘Just sleep. Tomorrow things will be clearer. And brighter.’
He pulled me in tighter, then, and I felt wetness on my hair that was pressed against his cheek.
‘What if tomorrow doesn’t come?’ he whispered.
‘It will.’
‘Promise. Promise you won’t leave me.’
‘Not yet. I promise.’
45: TALKING LIKE GROWNUPS
We lay in the next morning, making up for the long, dark week apart. Eventually, though, the sounds of Cara clattering about loudly downstairs gave way to her shouting up the stairs, ‘Get up, you lazy oafs! You can’t just leave me on tenterhooks down here all day.’ So we got up – and took a hot, steamy shower, which wasted another half hour. Then, finally, we dressed, and while Luke made the bed I traipsed down the stairs.
Cara was waiting in the kitchen, sitting at the table picking chocolate chips out of a muffin.
‘Morning,’ I g
reeted her.
‘Afternoon, actually,’ she said pointedly.
I was five steps into the room before I realised we weren’t alone. Jude was standing at the patio doors, leaning against the frame, watching Chester bounce around the garden.
‘I called him this morning,’ explained Cara hurriedly. ‘I borrowed your phone – sorry! Sorry! But I thought we should all talk, the sooner, the better. Now that we’re all on the same page.’
‘Yes,’ said Jude, turning to me, ‘it seems we’re all on the same page now.’
‘Don’t you say a bloody word to me!’ I snapped. ‘After what you’ve done…’
‘Scarlett!’ I heard Luke shout from upstairs. ‘Are you shouting? What’s wrong?’
‘It’s just Jude,’ I yelled back.
Footsteps thundered down the stairs and Luke flew into the room.
‘You! What are the hell are you doing here?’
‘Calm down, brov. I called him.’
‘What? Why!’
‘Because we need to talk,’ barked Cara. ‘Like grownups. Not shouting. Not accusing. Not lying.’ She gave me, and then Jude, a pointed look. ‘So sit down, all of you, grab a cake and let’s work out where we go from here.’
I had to hand it to Cara, she had a certain commanding air you couldn’t ignore. If she ever gave up fashion design, she’d make an excellent army chief. Or nursery school teacher.
I sat down and eyed the cake selection. I was starving, I realised, so I picked up a brownie and tucked in.
Slowly, reluctantly, Luke sat down beside me. Slowly, reluctantly, Jude sat down beside Cara.
‘Right,’ said Cara. ‘I’ll be mediator then. This is the talking stick.’ She waved a cake pop in the air. ‘When you have this, you may talk. Now, let’s get it all out. Scarlett, you first.’ She passed the cake pop over the table to me.
‘Huh?’
‘Pick up the stick and explain what your beef is with Jude.’
I picked up the stick. I felt really, really silly holding it. But when I spoke, I was serious. I looked Jude right in the eye and said, ‘He lied. He set me up. Then he told you both a half-truth, as if that made it better. As if telling them I’m dying was easier for them than letting them think I was a heinous bitch.’