Indigo grinned. “Good. Now go do your quest and come back quickly.”
I should never have come home in that dress.
When I opened the door, I saw Jupiter sitting on the couch, one hand on his distended belly. The glare of the television turned him fluorescent. Usually, my mother would be in the kitchen or sitting beside him. I didn’t see her anywhere.
“I see the princess has decided to grace us with her presence—”he started to say before he looked at me.Reallylooked at me. “Where’d you get a dress like that?”
“Indigo lent it to me,” I said quickly. “Is Mom home?”
“Had to make a last-minute grocery run.” His voice was oddly flat. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“No thanks,” I said.
I was breathing too fast. I reached for my magic, the veil I could normally draw up and over me, but Jupiter’s focus held me in place.
“I have to change,” I said.
Jupiter stretched his fingers. “Looks like you might need help with the zipper.”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“It’s no problem, princess, come here,” he said, standing from the couch.
The air smelled like metal. I couldn’t hear the television.Don’t look at me. I tried, again, to summon the old power born from an even older sacrifice. But Jupiter’s attention was too thick, and I couldn’t slip away. He came closer—six steps, now four, now two. I wanted the air to disassemble me. I wanted to run. My feet held fast to the ground.
Behind me, the key jangled in the lock. The door creaked. I couldn’t see her, but I felt the air gather around the shape of my mother entering the house. Without speaking to either of them, I escaped as fast as I could to my bedroom.
That night, my mother made me stay home. She left her bedroom door open and all night I heard them grunting like beasts until I slipped out the window. This was all I knew of sex, the reminder that the body was meat and stink, and even the divine debased themselves in this. Gods became bulls and swans and wolves, and in this way, they rutted.
Fortunately, before Indigo thought we should try sex for ourselves, she said we needed to understand what it meant to lose control. Like the ancient Greeks in their frantic Bacchic rites. I didn’t like the idea, but she was insistent.
“If we don’t feel it, then what if we end up in exile again?” said Indigo. “Aren’t you bored of these bodies?”
We went to the bar room that nobody used and took down the carved crystal decanters full of honey-colored liquid and packed up the slender, velvet-wrapped carafes of Madeira and sherry Manzanilla, and carted all of it to the Otherworld.
“Do we toast to anything?” I asked.
“We can toast to the gods?” Indigo said, pensively swirling her glass the way people did in movies. “I guess... that way they know we’re ready to see them? All the old rites talk about getting to the point where your soul wants to loosen from your bones, and you’re this... walking threshold of madness and divinity. That’s the only way you can behold the gods.”
We drank.
I didn’t mind the taste at first. It was a burnt sweetness on the tongue, syrupy too. It was cold outside, and I liked how the drink warmed me.
Indigo poured more. She poured so much the stars spun overhead. I could hear the selkies in the stream laughing at how ridiculous we looked when we danced. We had dressed ourselves from older times so we might look familiar to the old gods. Indigo wove apple blossoms in our hair and tied bedsheets around our bodies. They untied and fell off as the night went on, taking our humanness with them.
Was that what the old stories had meant? To shed what made us human? Would I now grow a mandible? Would the skin on my back slough off and reveal a pair of wet, black wings tightly furledagainst my spine? All night, I touched my back, my fingers uselessly searching for a soft bulge of feathers beneath my shoulder blades.
My last sight was of Indigo standing on the roof of our turret. I lay on my back, sides aching from laughter. Indigo’s shoulders were shaking, her head bent as she sobbed. The twigs in her hair stood up at odd ends. In the moonlight, she looked horned.
I didn’t know who she was speaking to: A god? The moon? There was no difference to us that night.
“You’re wrong. It’s not supposed to end like that,” said Indigo, dragging in a deep breath. “I would never do that. I would never hurt her—”
Something—I could not be sure what—made me start laughing again. I laughed and laughed until eventually the world went dark.
The next day, I woke in Indigo’s bed and couldn’t speak. We were so tired we couldn’t get up for school. I didn’t even remember moving from the turret to the House. When Tati checked on us, she snorted. I wanted to be glad for that sound. She had been so silent lately. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed. Even so, the pitch of her voice sent a thousand beetles crawling inside my skull and I made myself even smaller under the covers.
“Rough night?” asked Tati. I could hear the grin in her voice.
