“No, hush hush, I know. There’s only so much time,” she said before sniffing in my direction. “Come, come. Come closer to me.”
I moved to her bedside and Hippolyta came fully into view. She was small, bald, and dark as a chestnut. Her frilled nightgown was doll pink and hung raggedly off her body. Her thin neck and thinner wrists were adorned in braided jewelry. Her face was not beautiful, but it was arresting. Those wide-set, martyr eyes I had seen in the press photos now milky and mottled blue. Her mouth was a lopsided slash, framed by wrinkles. Thick, raised scars made her skin appear oddly folded, and when she opened her mouth to speak, I smelled the rot on her breath.
She cocked her head to one side. “Well? Are you?”
“Pardon?”
“Are you beautiful?”
I considered this, faintly amused. I was aware of how men and women looked at me, of how Indigo had looked at me that first night we met and every night after.
“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 invisiblething 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’sthin, 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.
