I WANDERED OUT TO SWAN LAKE, UNABLE TO SLEEP.
I let my bare feet drag in the edge of the water. It had been over a year since I'd thrown myself into the lake, sinking to the bottom. In that time, I had grown into a person I hardly recognized. Both in wonderful ways and in awful ways.
Soon I realized I wasn't alone.
"Surely you aren't thinking of reenacting your particularly dramatic suicide scene?" Ginny called. She appeared at my side after launching herself across the lake in a single bound. She was barefoot, in a sheer vintage T-shirt, shorts that might have actually been underwear, and a mink coat. So very, very Ginny.
"Nothing like that," I said. "Can't sleep."
"You have one of the more restless minds I've ever encountered," she said.
"Sorry," I shrugged. "I'd change it if I could." She wandered along the lakeshore beside me, and I could feel heavy things weighing on her mind. "How are you holding up, Ginny? I feel like I haven't talked to you in forever."
"That's because you haven't." A bit of coldness, possibly resentment floated off her and hovered over my head.
"You're still angry with me for leaving?" I asked. She didn't answer but simply kept her eyes fixed on the ground. "We've got a lot ahead of us right now, and you're an integral part of the whole thing. If you're upset, then say it. Let's have it out."
"You're asking me to talk about my feelings? How very un-Sadie of you," she smiled. Then she bounded away again, across the lake to the far end where mountains on either side dipped down into a small plain at the water's edge. I followed her across and came up beside her as she sat on the beach. She dipped her feet in the icy black water. "Angry is the wrong word," she finally said. "Confused might be a better one."
"I'm listening," I said.
"I don't get you sometimes," she admitted. "From your own accounts, you had this hellish experience with the Survivors, and you seemed to hate your existence with them with a new fervor once you finally got out among humans. And then you met us. You found a family of creatures like you who live among humans. You found a family willing to take you in as their own. You got a mother and a father, which you've never had. You got a sister with similar interests, for crying out loud. And you got Everett. You even get a guarantee that you and Everett would end up together in the future, and yet, somehow, all this doesn't seem to make you happy."
"Maybe I'll never be happy," I said looking down at the ground around me.
Ginny laughed. "That's precisely the wrong way to look at it. I was so proud of you yesterday. That moment where you took control? It was the moment we've all been waiting for. They've waited for you to get your head together, but as the only one among us actually inside your head, I have been dying for it to come. And I was excited to see what the new, stronger, more badass Sadie would bring us, but when you say things like that I realize that maybe your attitude isn't going to be as different as I'd hoped."
I didn't know what to say. Ginny was calling me out, showing me what they all saw. I so liked to think I was unreadable, but that was obviously just a delusion.
"Say something," she said. "It's unnerving to hear you think inside and hear nothing outside."
"I'm not like you," I said. "I haven't figured out how be happy or content or even remotely less than miserable. But you're so content with your life, even when it's stressful. Always have been, I'm guessing."
She laughed a grim laugh. "Sadie, it's time to have a conversation that's long overdue between us. I've never told this story to anyone outside my family, and I guess I really didn't even tell them so much as they watched me experience it. I don't know how to start."
"Wherever you start, I'll catch up."
She sighed heavily. "I guess I'll start with a question. How would you describe me?"
I thought it over. "Tough, beautiful, sarcastic, playful, smart, confident. Maybe a bit hard to get to know in some ways."
"About on point," she said. "I wasn't always any of those things. I was a fractured person, once. Not unlike you, I guess. I've had a lot of people in my life, like you've had John, who have tried to control me, change me, mold me into something they wanted, or just tried to shut me up. The more time I spend around John, the more I know that he is far more terrible than the simple bastard he appears to be. I know what he wanted to do to you, and I can tell you, it would have only gotten worse if you'd stayed." Worse? I wondered. And she was referring to what I thought she was, right? "Yeah, exactly," she said, following my train of thought. "You never told anyone but Everett all of that, but I figured it out, being in your head and all that. It makes me hate him so much more. So much that it overshadows my desire to protect the Survivors. So much that if what happened yesterday hadn't happened, I probably would have taken off before long. I can't live in places where that kind of hatred rules."
She was shaking now. Her feet made the water ripple, and her curvy frame seemed more fragile than it ever had. I felt what she felt, as I always did, but with a new intensity. A faint blackness surrounded her in my sight, and pure grief, even purer misery flowed between the two of us.
She was remembering.
"Ginny, what happened to you?"
"You heard me say that I was ready to get out of Puritanical Pleasantville because I've endured enough witch hunts in my lifetime. You wondered about that, I caught.
"The first fifty years of my life were solidly miserable. They'd kill me if they knew I told you, but mom and dad were separated when I was born. That was the year Patrick stopped aging, and when Adelaide saw what he'd become, she couldn't stand it. And then, as the story goes, my father made it worse when he wouldn't stop obsessing over the need for power. He hadn't had the vision of Mark and the war between immortals yet, but he was just the same then, if a little less justified. Mom was pregnant then, and she couldn't bear the thought that whatever was in her womb would turn out to be whatever Patrick had become. So she left him. She went to live in Paris with some immortal witches while Dad kept building a warrior lifestyle for his boys in Canada."
I was so shocked by these admissions that I feared anything I'd say would be the wrong thing, so I kept quiet.
"This didn't go well for us," she continued. "When she had me, she hated me. A supernatural post-partum depression, you could call it. I was the first of her children she'd held as a baby knowing the monster I would become. I set off everything she didn't like about her life, about her beloved Anthony, about what she knew and hated about him."
"She told you this?" I asked.
"She didn't have to. I remember it. Every child they had got more powerful at a younger age. Patrick hardly showed any magical elements before he stopped aging, but Everett had the full strength and speed by the time he was a teenager. I've had some powers since I was born. The Mirror kicked in when I was still a kid, but the other magical traits — like a memory of every moment in my life — began when I was born, so I remember all of this about her. I remember going through it."
"So what happened?"
"She got over it. We were still in France when we got word that Everett turned. I was five then. He'd always been the sweetest, softest of us, and his temperament remained the same, at least in any time other than winter, so she started to see that we were still her children. I think she was filled with regret about how she'd started my life. Who could blame her?
"Dad, Patrick, and Ev came back and forth between Canada and France for a while, then, to spend time with us. I got to know my family, and Mom tried to get her head around how our lives were going to work. It went on for years."
"Why didn't Anthony bring the boys to France so you could all live together?" I asked.
"He wasn't willing to give up his acquisition trips or the alliances he was building with people all over the world, especially in Canada. We've been on that land since before I was born. He got Adelaide to move out of Paris, away from the city, and they built the house in the south of France, so that Patrick and Everett and I would be in a more isolated environment, especially during the winter. But even though she was better, Mom never got over it, not really. She would take me into Paris on my birthday to shop, but she'd worry nervously the whole time, wondering when her little girl with the blonde curls and the puffy dresses would snap and kill someone in the street. I hated how I worried her, and so I hated myself."
"I'm so sorry, Ginny."
"Don't be. The nice part about immortality is that time heals all wounds, and I've had a lot of time to get over it."
A silence fell between us, and I realized she was working hard to block me out of her mind. There was more to the story. Her trauma with Adelaide wasn't the witch hunt, merely the set up.
"Whatever it is you're afraid to tell me, you shouldn't be. You can trust me," I told her gently.
Then she was crying. Tears of solid venom ran down her face and her eyes turned redder. "I'm sorry," she said, wiping the golden tears, "I just haven't . . . had to . . ." she stumbled. "This is so stupid! Why can't I just say it?"
I saw it then. A flash in her mind of a Victorian-era France, corseted dresses and cobblestone streets, elaborate Versailles-inspired mansions, and Ginny wrapped away in the arms of a beautiful girl. The skirts of their dresses were so intertwined that I couldn't see where one ended and the other began. Their hands gripped each other's hair, one girl's painted lips pressed tightly to the other's.
I put it together then. Realizing Ginny was afraid of telling me about who she was, about whatever her deepest tragedy with this girl had been, I had to reach inside myself and find something I typically lacked: compassion.
I slid closer to her and put my arm around her shoulders, "Tell me about the girl," I said.
She cried so freely then. Sobs wracked her body. "I loved her," she said in a tear-strained voice. "And I . . . I . . ."
I stroked her hair back and hugged her tight. "Start from the beginning."
"Her name was Clara," she said, and sat up straight. "I met her when I was sixteen, near our house in France. Her parents were very wealthy and lived in the hills where we did, and they'd visit the same town," In her mind, the beautiful brunette was with her mother, a sharp and cold French woman. They walked into a tiny shop where Adelaide and a teenage Ginny were. When Ginny laid eyes on the girl, her then-beating heart leapt, heat rushed to her face, and she felt an unfamiliar knot in her stomach.
"We left France two weeks later to go live in Canada. Dad complained that he always came to us, and we never came to him. We lived there for years, and I hated it. I missed Paris and the countryside. I missed the people. I missed my old life.
"So when I was twenty, I went back to stay in the house by myself. The family came and went, but I was mostly alone. One night, I couldn't sleep. There was an infamous local place that served wine until dawn, nearly incomprehensible in that era, and so I took myself there. I walked in and saw her again. I hadn't seen her face in years, but it had the same effect on me. Only this time, I was alone and so was she. So I swallowed hard, found some guts, and talked to her."
I clung to her every word. No one had ever told me a story about someone they loved. It was exhilarating to experience. I heard her words, but her sensory memories were intense. It was transcendent, like I was Ginny in 1880s France, and I was about to fall in love with the girl pouring the glass of Bordeaux.
"We were instantly inseparable," she said, lying back on the ground, her eyes tracing the constellations. "Over the next few months, we became the best of friends, but neither of us could deny that what we were feeling was . . . different. And not good different, not then anyway. I mean, it can still be scary for people to figure that out about themselves now, but then? I didn't even know what to call it once I'd figured it out."
"So what happened?"
Her spirits dropped instantly, and the blackness returned.
"About nine months in, the witch hunt began," she said. "Her father caught us in an embrace we couldn't explain away. He forbade her ever to see me again, and I thought that was the worst of it. But he went ballistic. He papered the town with notices, called me a whore and all kinds of other lovely things. The townspeople ate it up, and things got out of control quickly. I stayed in the house, never letting myself see the light of day. I'd go out at night, though. and survey the town, to find out how bad it was. I'd listen from the edges of the town, hearing people in their homes and in the restaurants, in the streets clamoring on about it. I shouldn't have left the house, I realize, but the witch hunt had gone on for months by then and, sometimes, I just needed out. I'd walk the streets once they quieted."
"Why didn't you go back to Canada? Escape?" I asked.
"You mean run?" She said it slyly, a tiny dig at me. She shrugged. "I hadn't told anyone in the family — and I wouldn't have, honestly — so I preferred fighting that battle alone. It was painful by myself, but the idea of telling my family all I'd done seemed even worse. At the time. Thank God things are finally changing.
"It got worse, of course. One night, I ran into her older brother. He screamed at me that I'd ruined his sister for life, seduced her into damnation. That incited a crowd. They chased after me. I didn't have the speed yet, or any of the strength I do now, so it's a wonder they didn't kill me right then. But Adelaide appeared out of nowhere, which is just amazing, the timing. I had been alone for months, and I didn't even know she was coming.
"She had no way to fight them except her magic. I remember watching her pull out a wand she carried back then and cast a few lethal spells. In that moment, for the first time, she acted like my mother.
"Somewhere between pride and panic, I realized we weren't winning the battle. I hadn't used it very often then, but I knew I could mirror her powers. So I started helping. And we got out okay.
"Unfortunately, a crowd of people had now seen us use magic to kill and maim several citizens, including Clara's brother. By morning, a full-scale witch hunt had ensued.
"They burned Adelaide at the stake, if you can believe it, and made me watch as my punishment. A tiny, provincial French town in the nineteenth fucking century burned her at the stake. She survived, of course, used magic to do a complicated disappearing spell that hadn't worked before or since, but it did then. I didn't know if it had worked until I got home and found her alive. Those were the longest twenty minutes of my life."
I was speechless. These were the kind of secrets they were hiding? "Ginny . . . I don't even . . ." I grappled for words. "Where was Clara during all this?"
"Locked away, I later learned. In a dungeon in her parents' mansion. They kept her there for fear that she would run away before they could find a suitable husband for her to fix her. They griped openly at Adelaide's execution about how they had to travel so far to find someone who hadn't heard of the disgraced, lesbian heiress," she said with an edge.
She got to her feet and paced behind me. She inhaled deeply and held it, willing herself to tell me the last part.
"After the quote-unquote execution, Mom left the house. I was supposed to go with her, but I wanted to do the journey alone. The last night before I left, when they thought Mom was dead, Clara broke out and came to see me," she said. Images flared across her mind then, and I tried my best to give her privacy. "She knew it would be my last night in France. So she came to apologize for everything that had happened, for the damage her family had caused. I was just overwhelmed by the sight of her. I hadn't laid eyes on her in months after nearly a year of being totally engulfed in her. When one thing inevitably led to another, I couldn't pace myself. I couldn't control any part of me. And as she got warmer, and there was nothing between me and her skin and her pulse and . . ."
Ginny lost it then. She fell to the ground and pounded her fists in the dirt, screamed out sobs. She didn't have to say it for me to understand. The image in my mind, which had gone so quickly from a naked girl to a bloodied dead one, told me everything.
"That's when you turned vieczy," I said quietly.
Ginny nodded, tears streaming down her face. "The only person I ever loved was the first person I ever killed."
I was sick with the grief coming off Ginny's body, dizzy from the love and the pain, the regret, the self-hatred. She'd begun this story to tell me she'd felt pain in her life and had learned to get past it, but in this moment, she wasn't past it. She was reliving it as if it had happened this very night.
As I held her on the beach, willing her to come back to this moment, to put the distance back between her past and her present, I realized that I wasn't the only broken girl the Winters had learned to love.
It took some time for her to regain composure. When she did, she said, "I know you love me like family even though I'm a monster in your eyes, but I was so afraid to tell you this."
"That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. You think I think I'm in a place to judge you for something? For what you are? For what you've done?"
"I guess I didn't want you to fear Everett more than you already did," she said, and I wish she hadn't. I didn't want that either. Wasn't that obvious enough not to say? But then, "And, while it was a lesser concern, I guess I've thought that tolerance of alternative lifestyles isn't high up on the list of things they teach you in Puritan-land."
I laughed, having never thought of this. "Gin, we live in the world of life and death, of tragedy and trauma. I can't imagine how this is relevant to anyone but you. I just want you to be happy. I generally want people to be happy. If that girl or any other would have made you happy, then who am I to be against it?"
Ginny smiled, a genuine, soft smile. "Off the record, I can think of at least two other people who will be happy to hear that."
"Who?" I asked, my interest piqued.
She shrugged. "It's not my secret to tell. But they'll be glad to know you feel that way."
"Well I'm glad for anyone to know it. It's not the nineteenth century anymore." I hadn't meant any personal significance to that, but when I heard myself say it, I thought of Everett. Of how we were evolving.
"Yeah, up there," she said, nodding up the mountain, "it's the seventeenth."
"Yeah well, down here it's the twenty-first. Maybe you were just born in the wrong time, in the wrong place," I said.
"Mark says that. He says, "This is the time you should have been born, then none of that would have happened.' He says the same thing about you," she said.
"Oh?"
"Yeah, that if you'd been born into our family, if you'd lived among humans the whole time, in the present day, then maybe you wouldn't be as . . ." she paused, searching for the right word. She settled on, "tortured."
"Maybe," I nodded. "So how old was Mark when you told him all of this?"
"Probably a bit too young," she admitted. "But, God, that kid was my savior. From the time it happened until the time he was a teenager, I lived in dark bedrooms, in empty fields, in spaces where I couldn't escape myself. For the better part of thirty years, I drowned under a depression so deep and so dark I still can't allow myself to think of it. Mark grew up with me being that way. Dad would want to take him out and start grooming his new warrior, but Mark would sit in my room with me and talk to me. Sometimes he'd read aloud. Anything so I wouldn't be alone.
"Then one day, when he was about thirteen or fourteen, he sat on the floor by the head of my bed, looked me in the eye and said, "I want you to tell me why you're like this, and I don't want you to lie.' How could I not tell him the truth? He'd been the only person to reach out to me. I owed him at least that."
"So I got out of bed. I put him on my back, and we ran until we hit the Pacific. I walked along the coast, and I told him everything. And I can't say I was magically cured that day or anything, but I can tell you it helped a lot. From the time he was born, he had some instinct to protect me, and that's never lessened a bit with him. I owe him my life in more ways than one," she said. "And before it's over, you will too, if you don't already. I'm glad that I'm well enough now that I can pretty much look out for myself because you need him. He's got a powerful love, that kid. Don't take it for granted."
"I won't," I said. I couldn't help but wonder how Everett played into all of this. Did he not worry about his sister in the years she spent in the dark place? Was he not there for her? Would he not be there for me?
Ginny caught my thinking. "Everett is a wonderful, wonderful boy. But he had his own demons to deal with back then. I can't hate him for not being there for me. I wasn't there for him. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't think that had anything to do with the way he hopes he can be there for you. He already let one important person in his life fall apart and didn't do anything about it. He's not about to let it happen to another."
In the hours since I'd wandered out here, I'd learned more about the Winter family, about Ginny, about the boy I cherished as a best friend and brother, and about the man I loved, than I had learned in the year I'd known them.
And maybe I'd learned that strength was possible, not just to attain but maintain, in the face unimaginable tragedy. Even in the face of supernatural tragedy. Ginny Winter was the (somewhat) living, breathing example of this.
Ginny looked out on the lake, listening to my thoughts. "Someone's always got it better, Sadie. Someone always has it worse. All you have to know is, no matter what you're dealt, you're going to be able to kick ass and take names. You have to believe that like it's fact. That's how you get through."
Realizing that Ginny had never once given me the kind of sidebar pep talks her family members had, I'd also learned this about Ginny: She would wait until the last possible moment to make her move, but when she did, it was more powerful than all the moves anyone had made before her.
We wandered back toward the lodge as the murky soft edge of sunlight began to fill the valley. "Thank you, Sadie, for not thinking of me any differently," Ginny said, taking my hand in hers.
"That's what family is for," I said.
She beamed. "I have faith in you, little one. I know you think we have to save you, but I know you'll be the one to save us all."
I believed her.