The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(14)

“Yes.”

Hippolyta’s gray tongue snaked out from her lips.

“They say you’re good at finding things,” she said. “Baubles, stories . . . secrets.”

“I try,” I said, thinking she was referring to my work as a historian.

“You see, I lost a secret . . . it was very poorly done of me,” said Hippolyta, shaking her head. “It was not a secret I was supposed to lose. Maybe it is not a secret at all, but an idea grown up in the dark and fed on dusks and twilights. Don’t you think?”

The question was not directed to me, but to the invisible thing beside her. I felt like the House was playing tricks on me, the walls leaning at an angle. Again, I thought Indigo wouldn’t like this, and the thought made me straighten my back, look over my shoulder to the door. It was closed.

I did not remember closing it.

“I don’t think I can help you, ma’am,” I said, moving backward. Hippolyta’s hand darted out with surprising speed and grabbed me. Her bracelet slid down her thin arm, hitting my skin. The material felt wrong. Warm, somehow. Too soft. Not like twine or silk. Something tickled the back of my throat.

“You’re wrong, beautiful,” she said. “Tell me, how well do you know your bride?”

I slid my tongue around my mouth, working out whatever was stuck at the back of my throat, moving it to the front of my teeth. Perhaps it was a piece of wool from my scarf.

“Does she love you?” asked Hippolyta. Her milky eyes found mine. “Does Indigo love you?”

“Yes,” I managed.

Hippolyta laughed. I could not take it anymore. I reached between my lips and my fingers closed on something caught on my tongue. When I pulled, I saw that I was holding a strand of long, black hair. I had seen it before, I realized. Twisted into a bracelet, a tooth hanging off the end with a single engraved letter:

A.

Azure.





Chapter Seven

Azure




The first thing you have to understand is that I loved her.

I loved Indigo from the moment I saw her outside the House of Dreams. She was carrying a crystal punch bowl of milk and blood in her arms, the splay of her shadow and the rhythm of her steps summoning magic in her wake.

My mother and I had moved into the town of Hawk Harbor two weeks earlier. Our house back in Oregon was small and red, surrounded by fields of sunflowers. Maybe we would have lived there forever if Jupiter hadn’t shown up at the diner where my mother waitressed on weekends.

Jupiter seemed to possess some magic of his own because he took one look at my mother’s red mouth and empty eyes and fit himself into those hollows until all she could see was him.

The first time I met Jupiter, he tried to give me a bag of candy. I really wanted the candy. Still, I wouldn’t go near him. I hated how his eyes tracked me, how he smiled with his mouth closed. Like he was trying to hide his teeth. A month later, my mother came home flushed and bright-eyed as she showed off a dull stone on her hand.

Within weeks, we were making plans to move to Jupiter’s thin, squat house. I’d only ever seen pictures of it. It was hidden behind a sunken driveway, the windows peering out over the grass like the half-lidded eyes of a predatory animal.

I didn’t expect the town to be anything special that day when Jupiter met us at the ferry. The place of my earliest childhood years wasn’t much either. A general store, a church, a white-slatted sign announcing a school game, a boat dock, the wharfs.

So when we rounded a corner and the House of Dreams appeared, I thought it couldn’t be real. I sucked in my breath, nearly slapping the car window.

“That,” said Jupiter, as he slowed the car, “is the Caste?ada family home. They named it something fancy and Latin. You know how rich people are.”

My mother cranked down the window and glared at it.

The moment I saw the House, I knew it held magic. That dragons slumbered beneath its floorboards, that the trees on its property grew wish-granting fruit, and that in the highest turret lived a queen and when she combed her hair, jewels clattered to the ground. For the first time, I became aware of what my life looked like in comparison. Greasy and cheap, a construction of cardboard to the wonder baked into those red bricks. If I’d known better, I would have shut my eyes and never looked at the House again. But I couldn’t stop staring.

“All that for one family?” said my mother, wrinkling her nose.

“Not even one,” said Jupiter. “Parents got drunk on a plane and crashed it.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Now the whole thing belongs to some ten-year-old girl with a crazy fucking aunt—oops—” Jupiter paused, as if remembering I was in the back seat. “Sorry, princess.”

“I think it’s tacky,” said my mother, rolling up her window.

Jupiter met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “And what do you think of the house, princess? The little girl who lives there is about your age. Imagine if we were the ones who lived in that place? We could play hide-and-seek for hours.” He smiled, flashing his too-white teeth.

My mother paused. The lipstick tube in her hand halfway to her mouth.

“She hates that game, J,” she said. I didn’t understand why she sounded annoyed, like she’d been left out of something. “She’d probably hide under the bed to read another book. You’d be searching for days.”