The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(28)

“If you are a figment of my imagination, some wild dream, I hope I never wake,” I said.

Indigo reached for me, drew me down to her, and I forgot everything else in the hot press of petals and skin.

When I woke the next morning, I was bloodied. We hadn’t noticed the small thorns forgotten in the bouquets the night before. Indigo was horrified.

“There weren’t supposed to be any thorns,” she said, touching my broken skin.

I was scratched, but she was unscathed.

I remembered that night, those petals, the marigold falling from her neck when she rose up on her knees to touch me.

His flower bride was never real at all, but he didn’t care because she had been made to please him.

I have closed my eyes to be with Indigo. I have chosen not to care about the waking world.

Now, waiting in the hall for Indigo to take us away from this place, I looked at my palm and noted the small scar, puckered and colorless on the heel of my hand, a reminder of that night. In this, too, I saw a warning:

Even an illusion can wound.

Perhaps more so than anything.

Later, I would remember this as the moment where some part of me knew that I would break my vow. Later, the knowledge would be sharp, bright as a match struck in the darkness.

But even so, I could never have foreseen how it would end.



“Would you like some tea while you wait for Miss Indigo?” asked Mrs. Revand. I had been standing near the front entrance for the better part of an hour, some animal part of my brain itching to get away from the House’s reach. But I could not leave without Indigo. “The lawyers have her tied up, I’m afraid.”

Mrs. Revand led me into a parlor on the main level. It was full of stately upholstered chairs and had that sweetly musty scent of disuse that I’ve long associated with aristocratic decay. A massive bay window looked out over the spectacular grounds and water. My eye caught on something else entirely though.

Against one of the seafoam-colored walls stood a large armoire. It was dull and blocky, the color of blood-soaked wood. Beside it, an ugly industrial-size fan with sharp blades whirred. The longer I looked at the armoire, the more my mouth turned dry. I began to cough.

“Sir?” prompted the housekeeper. “Are you all right?”

I cleared my throat, my cough over as suddenly as it had begun.

“Tea, yes?” asked Mrs. Revand, edging toward an ebony door that stood half-ajar. I could not see what lay on the other side.

I nodded.

“I apologize for the presence of this unsightly fan, sir,” she said, glaring at the whirring blades. “The room must be kept at a particular temperature, and the cooling system is under repair.”

“That’s fine.”

The housekeeper left me alone in the parlor. I was glad Indigo was preoccupied. She would want to know what Tati had said, and I didn’t yet know what to tell her.

A sky of azure and a sky of indigo walked hand in hand into the Otherworld, but only one of them came out.

I walked to the window facing the sprawling grounds of the House of Dreams. A labyrinth of stone walkways disappeared beneath sculpted vine arches and passages of knitted honeysuckle and ivy. A row of silver lindens marked a pathway to the water.

I imagined there was a private harbor for the Maxwell-Caste?ada family. A boat, perhaps, named after some river goddess. But when I looked closer, a structure knifed out from the top of the trees—thin and slender, a shadow of that black turret I had first glimpsed from the driveway.

I breathed deep. Gone was the sense of heavy omens. There was nothing except the plodding whir of the fan. Whatever I had felt in the upstairs hallway couldn’t toy with my senses here, and I saw the House for what it was—an old, creaking pile of wood. Nothing more.

I raised an eyebrow, feeling smug in this knowledge.

I thought if there was anything at all to be deciphered in this House, I would be the one to do it. After all, I had much practice. Even as a child, I had been fascinated with the ways the ancients interpreted the world. I’d turn branches of bleached driftwood in a fire and imagine I was heating the shoulder blades of slaughtered goats. I’d eat spaghetti with my hands and think of a Roman haruspex kneeling over an altar, the entrails of beasts running between his fingers in thick, uneven ribbons.

Even now, I preferred the idea that the universe preferred to speak through lightning and shadows. I stared out at the water, lost in daydream—for it certainly could not be a memory—of a brother who rarely used his voice. If we were in different rooms or levels of the house, we would speak in our own language. He’d knock on the floor or a shared wall, and I’d come to him.

What followed was a series of images I knew to be true—my father’s playfulness, how my mother sang, the smell of cigarette smoke and violet candies, the scratchy houndstooth coat with the missing button, my fairy-tale book with the split spine and my father’s ketchup thumbprint on the first page that looked so much like blood I thought it had been used for ink. Our family once played endless games of hide-and-seek. My favorite spot was under the checkered tablecloth of the dining table. I could picture the illusion of a brother fitting neatly into those memories—how we would have crouched under the table, knees huddled, the milky smell of his breath as we waited to be found.

I was lost in that image when I heard a thud. For a moment, I was convinced I had imagined it. But the sound came again—a clatter, and then, softly, a loud and resolute knock.