“Are you ready to play, boys?”
I blinked. I was still outside Hippolyta’s door. The sound of my father’s footsteps melted into Mrs.Revand’s clipped gait as she walked up the stairs. The image vanished entirely. I traced the edges of it in my mind, disturbed at how neatly that lie fit within.
How could such a thing be possible?
In answer, sunlight moved through the stained-glass windows. When I looked down, my hands were soaked in blue.
If you find Azure, the House will reward you.
The House always provides.
Chapter Nine
Azure
My hair was the one thing I possessed that was finer than Indigo’s, and I treasured it as if it were my soul exposed. To me, each strand held a version of my life as it had once been, and I believed if I tended to it, then that version would return.
As a child, my mother used to rub sweet almond oil into my hair, combing it until it poured down my back like a starless night sky. In those days, she would tell me the tale of Rudaba, a Persian princess whose hair was a river of night and who let it spill over the ramparts of her castle so that her lover, King Zal, might use it to climb his way to her chambers.
“You’re my precious fairy-tale girl,” she once said.
That was before she worked extra jobs and the skin beneath her eyes wore shadows. When we moved to Hawk Harbor, I still held on to the dream that things might be as they once were. That first week in the new house, I wore my hope in every knot and tangle of my unwashed and unkempt hair.
I wanted my mother to scold, to sigh, to plant me before her with her knees against my back. I wanted her to comb my hair and hum through the bobby pins clenched between her teeth. Itwas not her attention I caught though. It was his. At the end of that first week I sat at the breakfast table and Jupiter whistled.
“Well, where’d this little wild thing come from?” He laughed and smiled teasingly at my mother. But when he looked at me, his smile didn’t match his eyes. The air of the breakfast nook turned humid and small, and even though I was hot in my sweatshirt and pajama pants, I wished my hair were long enough to cover me up and swallow me whole.
Jupiter wet his lips with his bright-pink tongue. “Your hair is so long I could use it as a blindfold and still not be able to catch you.”
My mother sat folded up in her chair, legs to her chest, a coffee mug balanced on her bony knees. When Jupiter spoke, she slammed her hand on the table and stood so fast I flinched.
“Why are youalwaystrying to embarrass me, Azure?” she’d said, grabbing my arm and hauling me to the hallway bathroom. “You’re making me look bad,” she snarled. “Look at you. Your hair is...disgusting. I’ve been working myself to death to take care of you and you can’t bother to take care of yourself?”
She let go of my arm, breathing heavily as she shoved me into the bathroom.
“Either braid it or cut it off,” she said, slamming the door.
After that, I never wore it down at home. But in the House of Dreams, Indigo insisted I always wear it loose. Only then did I let its heavy, fragrant weight rest on my shoulders.
“It’s like magic,” she would say, combing her warm fingers across my scalp. Her voice stretched tight with yearning. “I bet itismagic...”
I had always wanted magic in my life, but one Saturday morning, in the winter of my thirteenth birthday, I didn’t want it anymore. That day, I dressed to go to the House like usual. I didn’t askfor my mother’s permission. I avoided mentioning Indigo around her because her face would twist, and her voice become silken and venomous: “Running back to Miss Casteñada’s house? She’s going to think you’re clingy, honey. And nobody likes a clingy girl.”
As much as she sneered when she uttered Indigo’s name, I knew my mother was secretly grateful for her too. Without Indigo, I’d be home.
With her.
With Jupiter.
In those days I could always feel Jupiter’s shadow—a gluttonous, sticky thing—clinging to my skin no matter where I went. When I opened the bathroom, he’d be there, smiling and surprised with a towel slung low around his waist. I would be forced to look at him then, forced to squeeze around the space he took up all around me.
I hated looking at him.
Jupiter was tall, thin, and narrow in the shoulders with a taut, hardened pouch of flesh around his navel that reminded me of an egg sac. He was the color of a tooth. That’s how I thought of him. One long fang of a man, and my mother caught up in him like a piece of wedged-in meat.
But his face was different.
“The face of a movie star,” my mother would say, leaning over to caress his cheek.
