The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(46)

I understood why Indigo hated this place—it was crude and inelegant, hot, and loud—but even before we spilled onto the massive poured-concrete dance floor, I could feel the magic there. It was in the slow pulse that gathered the crowd, in the sheen of eyes blackened and primal beneath the broken fluorescent lighting.

Then came the music, and I understood the delicate layers of this magic, too, wrought of the crowd’s urgency, daylight stalking the edges of night, the bass trembling up your legs and into your teeth, the slanting light sweeping over our bodies in a benediction. I swayed, transfixed by the radiance of it all. Indigo and I blurred into the mass of people. I felt the bruises forming on my body—the jolts against my spine, knees knocking against mine, liquor splashing my hair—and suddenly I loved the warehouse in a way that made me angry that others knew it existed.

I didn’t know the band or the words to the song, but I opened my mouth anyway and they turned succulent on my tongue. I threw back my head and the song caught me around the throat and cast me out past the corrugated metal walls and the dusky wharf waters until I was so vast, I might wrap a whole universe within me.

When the band finished their first set, Indigo caught my hand and I almost recoiled. I stared at her, and for a moment her face seemed alien, unfamiliar. I had forgotten I was not alone.

Indigo clutched me to her, screaming so her voice could be heard: “Come on, I see someone I want to kiss.”

I followed Indigo as she moved through the throng and toward a bar at the back. I was distracted, still caught up in the infinite beat of the music. It had answered something I didn’t know I could ask, and when I walked through the crowd, my feet didn’t touch the ground.

Indigo approached one of the men who had been on the stage. He had a beautifully carved face and a full mouth that twisted in delight when she spoke to him. I looked away, watching the next band set up before I suddenly tasted cigarette smoke on my tongue. My nose wrinkled and when I turned to Indigo, I saw her arms wrapped around the man, his hands in her hair. When she broke the kiss, she laughed in his face as he leaned forward to catch her.

“Once is enough for us,” she said.

The man looked heartbroken. He stared at Indigo with a terrible thirst, and heat traced a sigil in my blood. If Indigo noticed the man’s face, she didn’t acknowledge it. She grabbed my wrist. “Your turn.”

I’d barely taken a step before the man’s arms were around me. His mouth, so soft I wanted to gasp, found mine. He parted my lips, just like Indigo had done, but he didn’t bite down, only moaned as if somehow weakened by me. After a few moments of this, I drew back, admiring how his eyes were glazed. My teeth sharpened. I had won something, and even though it was too dark to see, I felt my shadow strangle his in the dark.

I leaned forward and kissed him again. I liked losing myself to the kiss. I liked the heat painting my insides. I liked hearing Indigo laughing in the dark.



The warehouse became our weekend ritual. A place where music and men, and sometimes women, left their prints all over us. At the warehouse concerts, Indigo acted as if she were performing penance, and to her that’s what it was, a mortal debasing. She kissed with enthusiasm, though she always shuddered in disgust afterward.

“It’ll be over soon,” she would say, as if comforting me.

I never responded when she said that. The music made me vast, but perhaps it made me weak too. Because every night we spent dancing under those lights didn’t feel like penance to me. It felt like a kind of prayer.

And I didn’t know what I was praying for exactly.



One day that summer, we decided to swim in the stream beside the Otherworld. It was cold, and my body ached from the previous night’s party, my lips puffy and bruised. One of the boys I’d kissed—this one dark as night with gold threaded in his braids—had dropped his full mouth to my neck and sucked. I’d almost forgotten until morning, when Indigo rolled over in bed and I saw the circle of broken skin above her collarbone.

I was reluctant to get out of the water. The moment I did, I would have to go home to Jupiter’s. I usually went once a week or else my mother would call angrily. Each time I visited, I’d sit through a congealed dinner in the kitchenette, then I would pretend to sleep, but really I’d climb out the window and race back to the House.

Indigo always thought of my return as a game. Every time I snuck past the ogre, I proved to her that I was a fairy-tale princess. She said it was like the tale of Catskins, where the father lusted after his own daughter and tried to trap her in bed.

“He’s not my dad,” I’d told her.

“That’s not what he thinks,” laughed Indigo. Jupiter was nothing but a distant shadow to her, something to be outwitted.

“My brave and fearless Azure,” Indigo would say.

But she never asked if I wanted to be those things.

That day when we climbed out of the stream, our clothes were nowhere to be found. Picked up by the wind, perhaps. Or else scurried away by the long-fingered fae who loved us.

“Just take something of mine,” said Indigo, shivering.

“You know my mom won’t like that.”

“You can change when you get there,” said Indigo. “She may not even be home. Come on, Catskins, let’s go inside or I’ll turn to ice and become a snow maiden.”

I shivered, too, not from the chill in the air but from that nickname. The sound of it sent tendrils of ice through my veins. Inside, Indigo put me in one of her dresses. I’d never seen her wear it. It was low-necked with long, blue silk sleeves. Even unzipped it hugged my body.