For the next two weeks, I comforted myself with the knowledge that whatever I felt, Indigo must too. After the night we met, Lyric took me to see a loud action movie and I drank sugary, fizzing soda, my fingers sticky with butter and popcorn, and when he kissed me, he tasted like salt and caramel. His kiss turned me drowsy and frayed, a ribbon held over an open flame.
A few days after that, I went to hear his show and his eyesclasped on mine.You’re my favorite blue, he sang, and I knew he sang to me. For me. Me, singular. Me, alone. The thought, which had felt so treacherous before, had been gentled, tamed by the coaxing pressure of Lyric’s soft mouth and softer kisses.
“I want you, Azure,” he whispered one night, and a need awoke within me.
Maybe he shouldn’t have said my name. Maybe the sound of it on foreign lips stirred my starling key to life and it flew to warn Indigo while I slept. Maybe that was the reason she returned early, for when I woke the next morning, I felt a shadow pass over me and I blinked to see Indigo standing at the foot of the bed. Her hair was greasy at the roots, the strands frizzed and sticking to a herringbone wool coat two sizes too big for her. She smiled with all her teeth when our eyes met.
“You’re home?” I said.
I waited for my heart to sag in relief. Instead, I felt a stab of irritation. I mourned the hours spent alone, or better yet, with Lyric.
“I hated being away from you,” said Indigo, drawing her arms around me, burying her warm face in my neck, and turning my irritation into shame. I was a fool. “Let’s go to the Otherworld. I can barely breathe when I’m away from it. I know it was difficult for you, too, I could feel it.”
But in this, she was wrong, and that truth was a blade cutting straight through my doubts. Indigo had once said that my fears were a test of some kind. What if she was wrong about that too?
Indigo hummed as I trailed after her in the cold. I tried to numb myself to the whip of the icy wind, convinced that if my teeth chattered, it meant that I deserved the pain. At the gated entrance, we took out our keys, and I held my breath as the gate swung open.
My eyes flicked over the stately turret, the harsh lines of the oak branches, the veins of ice and silver along the apple trees. The Otherworld I had known was transformed, but it was no longer wholly unfamiliar.
“It’s not destroyed,” I said.
If anything, it seemed refocused, reshaped by the light of a truth I had come to understand, the glow of which now revealed pieces I hadn’t noticed before—snowdrops glistening like tears, moon-pale winter pansies crowding a boulder, holly berries bright as blood spray. There was a solemnity to the place. Winter had woven a hymn, and I had been too distracted to hear it.
Indigo laughed. “Why would the Otherworld be destroyed?”
“Because... because I think you’re wrong about us,” I said. As each word left my mouth, I felt lighter. “Last time we were here, I thought something was wrong with me for thinking that maybe we’re not the same soul. But now Iknowthat’s true, and the Otherworld hasn’t collapsed. It’s still here. It’s still beautiful.”
Indigo did not move. A cloud passed over the sun, leaching the gold from her skin. She looked like a statue carved from granite and when she spoke, her voice came out graveled. “What are you saying, Azure?”
I reached for her hand and tried not to shudder at the cold of her. “Maybe we’re exiled fae sisters... maybe we’re made from the same moonlight, but we don’t have to share the same soul, Indigo—”
“Of course we do,” she said.
“But you didn’t feel it all week, did you?”
“What are you talking about? Feel what?”
“Him,” I said, and my hand went to my heart. Indigo’s gaze narrowed at the gesture. “Lyric. I met someone who wantsme.”
“Us,” Indigo corrected.
I shook my head. “No, Indigo. He noticedme. He even wrote a song for me. All week, I’ve been with him. Did you feel it?”
Indigo was unknowable to me in that moment, and this excited me. Who were we when not cleaved to each other? If the Otherworld was a wonder, imagine what we might discover within ourselves—the raw dreams arranging like constellations at the back of our skulls, satin arteries rushing blood to muscles not yet used. It was heady, this idea that I was not yet articulated into being.
“You’re certain he wants you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. I drew a deep breath, inhaling the perfume of snowdrops, the blood tang of winter, and the promise of crocuses in spring. “I want him too.”
Indigo lunged. I nearly raised my arms to do... what? I wasn’t even sure, but it didn’t matter. Her lunge was in fact a lean, and out of nowhere she kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were dry and chilled from the air and the pressure of her lips was brief, harsh.
I made myself smile. “What was that for?”
“For love,” she said quietly. “I’d do anything for us, Catskins.”
She fell silent for a few moments and then reached out and touched my face. If she saw me flinch at the nickname, it made no difference to her. For her, the name meant that I was something out of a story, and thus to be cherished. It didn’t matter that it was a story I hated.
“Why don’t you invite Lyric to the House? Show me how much he wants you, and you alone.”
