On one wall hung a series of taxidermied heads—an oryx with swordlike horns, three alpine goats, an ibex, pheasants, chamois, and musk oxen, and the radiant fall of a peacock’s plumage through which a roe deer stared at me almost flirtatiously. The wall opposite held skulls and tusks. I recognized only a few of the creatures, but among them were mounted alligators and crocodiles, stately bison with polished horns, hog skulls, and the long, sinister ovals of a baboon’s face stripped of flesh.
In our own home of glass, Indigo had a Gallery of Beasts. Her beasts were all made of stone, though they were no less menacing. I had found a clue to Indigo’s secret hidden there. Even now, I could recall the cool temperature of Azure’s hair, the smoothness of the engraved tooth. What secrets did this room keep for itself?
A button from my shirt plinked to the ground. I bent to pick it up and glanced at the underside of the onyx table. The Houseof Dreams was lying in wait, and the images of my brother that I had thought were false now crystallized into memory.
My brother and I had often played under our cherrywood dining table. Once, Father had come home while we were pretending to be wild wolves. My father threw some bread on the floor, and I picked it up off the rug.
If you’re going to act like an animal, said my father, bending down to wink at us,then you’ll have to eat like one too.
We ate under the table for a whole week, making animal sounds the entire time. Sometimes our parents joined us. Our father barked and howled.
I’d never laughed so hard.
But now the memory sheered, curled along its edges. The House sought to punish me for being so slow to take up its quest, and so it poisoned the details. Now my father showed his teeth, and beneath the dining table, my brother and I stared at our parents’ feet and whimpered with hunger.
Open your eyes, said the House.
I straightened. Blood rushed to my head as the room came into focus. I would have yelled at the House for its impatience, but right then Mrs.Revand appeared in the entryway and smiled.
“The driver is here for you,” she said. Her glance darted from the polished table to the flat hollows of the baboon skull. “You know, Indigo loved this room when she was little. It was her favorite place. Well, second favorite place.”
I blinked and thought I saw a girl crouched beneath the table. But she was not my Indigo. This girl had long, black hair that puddled over thin, emaciated shoulders, and wide azure eyes. Her mouth hung open, her chin glossy with spit. A ghost girl in need of feeding.
“What was her first favorite place?”
“The Otherworld, of course. They used to spendhoursthere, my goodness,” said Mrs.Revand with a laugh. “You would think they’d have put down real roots!”
And there it was. A hint laid bare, spoken this time in Hippolyta’s rotting, rasping voice.
The Otherworld knows all their secrets.
Chapter Fifteen
Azure
You notice power. Everyone does. It draws the eye, fills the mouth with saliva. Indigo’s masquerade had drawn us into focus for our classmates, and the power we found afterward held us in place. They hadn’t noticed us for the first time at the party because we were beautiful. They noticed us because we scared them. Their eyes tried to chisel us into pieces they could hold in their hand—brown eyes, dark hair, sullen mouths. When they smiled, they imagined us between their teeth, how we’d taste as they chewed on that glittering rind until all that was mysterious about us gave way to ordinary marrow.
Like most mornings, I’d show up at the House before school, shrug off the faded clothes my mother bought for me, and let Indigo carefully arrange our outfits. If she wore a headband of pearls, I wore a collar of them around my neck. If she wore a black dress with white boots, I wore a white dress with black boots. We blurred together when we walked the hallways, our long hair melting so we looked less like two distinct beings and more like a torn reflection.
If my power was to make sure the world never came too close, hers was to make sure the world couldn’t get close enough.It was a game for her, seeing what someone would do just to place themselves directly in our line of sight.
There was the boy who wrote us poems every day for a month, the girl who shyly offered all the cupcakes her mom had baked that morning, the upperclassmen who invited us to party before denouncing us as “fucking weirdos” when we refused, even as their eyes bored holes into our backs. Whenever someone dared approach us, I held myself still, wondering if they’d disappear if I remained silent. Indigo entertained their interest until they all, inevitably, disappointed her.
She didn’t like the poems the boy wrote, the cupcakes tasted stale, the party was not a ball. For a moment, a pair of twins who started midterm caught her eye. They were short, pale-skinned, with fine, golden hair they both wore in a braid down their backs.
“Maybe they’re like us,” Indigo said.
It was the only time she offered to let anybody sit with us. I liked the twins. I liked their pink snubbed noses and cinnamon freckles, the watery blue of their eyes and their long, colorless lashes.
But soon, they bored her too.
One of them couldn’t stop sniffling. The other couldn’t stop speaking. Within minutes, the talkative one mourned their old home in Ohio and the neighborhood public pool, where only a few weeks ago, a boy with a boring name had stuck his hand up one of their shirts. Indigo never spoke to them again.
And then came Puck.
Puck was a year below us and once had a different name. It didn’t really matter what it was, because this was the one she used around us. She was short, light-skinned, her body straight up and down. She had a large nose and larger eyes that were too close together.
I liked her mouth best. It was rosebud small, with even smaller, doll-size teeth. Indigo loved her hair. It was the kind of red that resembles a brushed-out flame, which she wore cropped to her chin. On the day she approached us, she was wearing a black sweater and red pants. She looked like a drop of blood.
