Because You Love to Hate Me(87)

I stared at her.

I certainly didn’t hear anything, and I certainly didn’t want to believe her. The Beast was real, yes, everyone effing knew that . . . but the Hush Witch ghosts?

Dead is dead.

Of course, I hadn’t believed the twins about the Beast, and then I’d been proved wrong. But that didn’t mean I’d be proved wrong again. It was really unlikely, actually.

I sat back down and put my arm around Indigo’s waist. She lowered her hands from her ears. Her eyes were wet with tears. Girls cry so easily.

“Maybe I imagined it,” she said.

I nodded. “Of course you did. But this is an eerie place, Indigo. You shouldn’t come here again without someone like me to protect you. I mean it.”

“Brahm?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to be hanged like those women. I don’t want to die with a noose around my neck . . . snap, pain, feet twitching, dark.”

I shivered when she said that. Probably from the cold.

“What a strange thing to worry about,” I said. “People don’t get hanged anymore. If you want to worry about something, worry about the Hush Woods Beast. You really shouldn’t be out here on your own. Even in the daytime.”

Indigo didn’t answer. She slid the thick blue scarf from her neck and wrapped it around both our shoulders, like a shawl. It was warm from her skin and smelled like lavender and honey.

“Indigo, I’m going to take you to dinner tomorrow night. What do you like? Seafood? Italian? French? Thai?”

She shook her head.

“Are you a food cart type of girl? Want to get fish tacos and crepes?”

Chin, left to right.

“Well, what do you want, then?”

“I can’t go to dinner with you.”

“All right, we’ll go to a movie.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I can’t.”

This was the first time a girl had ever told me no. I didn’t know how to handle it, honestly.

“You can’t go . . . or you won’t go?” I sounded annoyed and kind of pissed.

Everything was really tense all of a sudden.

We both just stared at the sky for a bit, not talking. It was starting to turn pink and orange and purple.

Sunset.

I felt her jerk suddenly, her shoulder snapping against mine. She stood up.

“I have to leave.”

“All right. I’ll walk you home.” It was a good three miles back to town, even with the shortcuts I’d honed through the years.

She shook her head again.

“Look, I’m not trying to hit on you, since I can see you’re not interested, somehow. But the Hush Woods are dangerous at night. Let me walk you home.”

“I am home,” she said.

And just at that second, the setting sun blazed up, right in my face, and blinded me. I rubbed my eyes. When I opened them, she was gone.





It was usually easy for me to forget about girls. Far too easy. I had a lot of distractions. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Indigo Beau after I saw her in the woods. She’d crawled into my brain, and I couldn’t get her out.

I expected to see her around town the next few days. Valois is small, small enough that eventually you run into people. I asked around about her at the coffee shops and some of the restaurants, to see if anyone knew where she lived, but that went nowhere. I even spent a few hours hanging out in the downtown library to see if she’d come in, looking for more books on wolves.

Nothing.

So I went back to the Hush Woods. I waited until evening, right before dusk . . . and— I found her reading in the glen, sitting in the ferns, just like before.

She didn’t look surprised to see me.

I sat down next to her, and we talked.

We talked about our siblings. She had four sisters to my three brothers. We talked about books and wolves and trees and places I’d been and places she wanted to see.

The sun dipped lower, and Indigo heard the witch screams again. I held her this time, and she let me.

I went back the next night. And the next. Night after night. Afterward, she never let me walk her home. She’d just disappear between one breath and the next. I’d close my eyes for a second, and when I’d open them, she’d be gone.

Someday she would trust me enough to let me in on all her secrets.

On the seventh night, I kissed her. Plump, warm lips sliding into mine. I lifted her hair with the back of my hand and kissed her neck. She opened the front of my shirt and kissed my collarbone. I groaned, and she grabbed my hair in her fists.

I tried to warn Indigo about the Beast again. I tried to get her to meet me in town instead of the Hush Woods. But she’d only shake her head and smile kind of sadly.

Autumn crept into winter. During the day, I hunted buck and antelope and mule deer with my younger brothers, arrows cutting through air, into flesh, bringing moans and blood. I spent a lot of nights roaring drunk at the Valois Watering Hole, beating up anyone stupid enough to challenge me. I even tried to fight some emaciated hipsters once, with their tight jeans and stupid beards and pretentious talk about small-batch microbrews, but they scuttled away before I could throw a punch.

Philippe was the first to call me out on it. He told Jean George and Luc I was meeting a girl in the woods—how he’d figured it out I never knew. He told them I was in love. They teased me and my temper sparked, and the four of us ended up breaking two mirrors, a glass table, and my mother’s damn rococo cupid statue. Brahm Valois the First took away my credit cards and my black BMW.