The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(75)

That’s why magic kissed our bruises, coddled our hearts, and then sent us on our way. Magic hoped we would carry its echo out into the world, for we were never meant to stay here.

This truth broke my heart, even as I understood it. After all, wonder begets wonder, and to play within its borders forever meant never finding out how far we might truly go on our own. I was caught in the teeth of this truth when Indigo touched my hand.

“I have a present for you,” she said. “I’ve been working on it for ages.”

I looked up and realized that we had walked away from the revels and now stood at the stone path. I was ready for this and all that would come later. My bus was leaving soon, my tickets were waiting for me. Around my neck, my ruby-eyed starling key flashed. I felt the softest of brass flutters, as if it wished to take flight.

I followed Indigo into the dark, into the Otherworld, into the realm we had once ruled. I followed her into the shadows of the apple blossoms and the great oak tree, and up the turret where we had spent so many sunlit hours. On the roof, she held out a great floodlight, which illuminated the gnarled trunk and roots of the oak tree. When I beheld what Indigo had planned, I understood Tati’s warning.



I followed Indigo into the Otherworld that night.

I did not come out.





Chapter Thirty-Two

The Bridegroom




I stared at the body in the glass casket.

Disgust and horror reached me, but only on the heels of something far worse, a cold and viscous sense of disappointment. I was, though it repulsed me, annoyed at the sight of the corpse. For that’s all it was: a body that had festered in the dark.

I had hoped the body would be beautiful, preserved like some princess in a fairy tale. That she might be lily-necked, with a torrent of black hair, the hard swell of an apple breaking the line of her throat. But what lay within the casket was ugly. It took a full minute for pity to find me.

Strands of black hair clung to the skull. What may have once been a lushly shaped mouth was now a slash of brown. The mottled, threadbare hands clutched a starling key, the twin of the one in my hand. Yellowed bones peered through a rotted dress.

“You must be Azure,” I said. “I have heard a great deal about you.”

The Otherworld moaned.

I drew away the rest of the clumsily nailed tarp. The scene had been disguised only in the thinnest sense of the word, and I could not help but marvel at Indigo’s confidence. She knew that she could not be touched and had not even tried to conceal what she’d done.

“Did you pry into her secrets too?”

I touched the gilt edges of the casket, and the earth underfoot quivered. In my head, another petal of memory peeled back.

This was what the House had promised me. Should I find Azure, then I would know where my brother went. I would know how to follow him. I closed my eyes and reached into the image—

I see a small, wooden casket that smells of pine. I see a tiny plot of artificial grass. I watch my mother from the shadows of the staircase as she takes down the photos, throws away clothes in black trash bags, declares we will never speak of him again.

He’s dead. My brother is dead.

I strained my thoughts, wanting some other image to correct me, some memory of having glimpsed his face in the depths of another closet. But this was the only truth. I should have been relieved, and yet incompletion haunted me. There was something else here, something that demanded witnessing.

A loud, banging sound made me jerk my hand from the casket. “Get away from her.”

I swung my flashlight in the direction of the voice. Indigo was less than ten feet from me. Her speech was slurred. She wavered on the spot, still fighting off the effects of the sedative. Tears streamed down her face and a gun trembled in her grip.

I raised my hands slowly.

The flashlight skimmed over her feathered form. She was more beast than beauty. Her eyes were wild and round. She had the look of a creature cornered. She gulped down huge breaths and the feathers of her dress rose and fell like a second skin.

I almost spoke, then snapped my mouth shut at the instinct to tell her a story. It was a Filipino tale of a sky maiden with a winged dress who often bathed with her sisters in a clear pool only to be spied upon by a huntsman. The huntsman stole the sky maiden’s dress, and, unable to fly home, she became his wife.

I ached. Even if I ripped the feathered dress off Indigo’s skin and hid it in the loose boards of an attic ceiling, I could not keep her. And I did not know what it meant that I had beheld her true form, glimpsed the blood spatter on her muzzle and teeth, and still felt a thread stretched between us.

Was this how Bluebeard’s wives felt when he placed his hands around their necks? Did their smile go slack when they realized not who he was, but who they were? Mere humans who were exceptionally suited to sacrifice?

“Indigo—”

“Get away.”

She aimed the gun, flicked off the safety. I leapt aside only to slip in the wet leaves. I crashed into the glass casket. The flashlight fell from my hands, rolling across the glass pane and illuminating the husks of insect shells, the curled, yellow finger bones clasping the starling key that lay on Azure’s sunken chest.

I pushed myself up.

“Don’t move,” she said.

My hands were splayed on the glass. I looked down, staring at the starling key on the corpse. Above me, the wind screamed in the oak. “Is this really what you want, Indigo?”