“Would you like some tea while you wait for MissIndigo?” 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-Casteñada 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.
It was coming from inside the armoire.
Chapter Thirteen
Azure
For Indigo’s sixteenth birthday, Tati planned a masquerade, and the entire school was invited. The graduating class of Hawk Harbor was barely a hundred people. The House could easily fit them all inside. But Indigo didn’t want them there, and for this I was selfishly happy.
“It’s time to show face,” Tati said, the day the invitations were sent out. “It’s not only for the island, Indigo. The investors are coming in from overseas, shareholders want to know the girl who will take her parents’ place. People want to know whoyouare.”
I thought—hoped—that Indigo would fight Tati as she usually did, but even if she didn’t like how bossy Tati was acting, she liked being a part of the Casteñada tradition. Her father had been formally introduced to his father’s business associates the day he turned sixteen, and his father before him.
“Think of all the people, the dresses, the cakes...” Tati said. We were standing in the kitchen while she examined the final stack of invitations—heavy blue cardstock with silver foil and a navy silk ribbon. “You’ll love it, Azure.”
I knew I wouldn’t. When Tati had insisted on invitingeveryone, I’d been terrified that my mother and Jupiter would come and only slightly relieved when my mother turned up her nose and said they’d be too busy on vacation to “celebrate a poor little rich girl.” But even without Jupiter and my mother there, the party would be a disaster.
I could already picture it—Indigo on one side of the room, me on the other, a sea of people between us, the House rendered strange underfoot. I sensed the way people would stare at the grand windows and brilliant chandeliers, the sweeping grounds, and the hall of portraits. None of it was mine, and I knew that. But it wasn’t ownership I cared about. I had been a part of the House for so long that it now held pieces of me, and by the end of the party, I would feel rummaged through, like the House, stained by all who’d entered.
Before Indigo’s party invitations, I had thought our classmates never noticed us. We were a pair of silent, dark-haired cuckoo chicks sitting in a nest of cream-colored finches. We never lined up for the ferries to go shopping on the mainland or attended the beach bonfires, drinking beer out of canteens. We rarely spoke to anyone other than each other. But the Monday after the invitations were mailed, I realized that what I had thought was apathy was actually awe.
I felt the change the moment I stepped into homeroom, an electric hum tracing the lines of my skull. Indigo and I had entered the building together that morning, as we always did, but the principal had pulled her away for a quick word and scowled when I tried to follow, so I arrived alone.
