“It’s me,” I said.
The cloth molded to her face as she sucked in her breath. In, out, in, out. Like she didn’t quite believe me.
“I saw it all wrong,” she said, her voice shattered and high-pitched.
“Where’s Indigo?” I asked. My eyes searched the empty hallways. I thought I caught a flash of white near Tati’s room. When I blinked, it was gone.
Tati whimpered as the long, black cloth slid to the floor. I saw bits of bone, skin engorged and purple, hanks of hair flopping across the exposed musculature of a cheek. Tati’s once-brown eyes were now milky, roving in red sockets. She opened her mouth, but this time I screamed for her.
And the House screamed with me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Bridegroom
This is why fairy tales are dangerous: their words sneak into your veins and travel into the chambers of your heart, where they whisper of your exceptionalism. They say:Ah, but remember the boy who walked into the woods and came out a king? Oh, but what of the girl who was kicked and slept in ashes? Remember the man who was only kind and so life bent around the shape of his smile?
But we are not exceptional.
When Indigo caught me outside Hippolyta’s room, I thought of all the wives who preceded the famous Scheherazade, the many women who wed a bloodthirsty sultan known to kill his brides. Here is how the fairy tale leaves you disfigured. You think death will not touch you as it did the others. You lie down in that blood-soaked bed and forget the noose will caress your neck by dawn. You look your wife in the eye knowing full well that she is a stranger to you, knowing that by now she must have guessed you have rummaged through her secrets, but when she lays her hand on your cheek, you turn your face so that you might kiss her palm.
Where have you been wandering, my darling?
Behind me, the machines in Hippolyta’s room continued to scream. Indigo’s smile did not waver.
“I got lost.”
Indigo closed her lips over her teeth, though the grin remained.
“Well, it’s a good thing you weren’t hurt,” she said. Her hand left my cheek and solemnly searched my face—my eyelashes, the angle of my jaw, the knobs of my knuckles that she used to kiss in the afternoons. I was being committed to memory.
The density Indigo had once placed in my existence was dissolving. I could feel myself ceasing to matter to her, my own skin flickering translucent, her eyes hardly registering my gaze.
“I would hate for something to happen to you, my love,” she said.
I was beginning to understand that it was dangerous not to matter to Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada—and tucked behind my fear was the humiliating realization that I cared for her more than she did for me.
“I believe you,” I lied.
We were silent for a moment as I braced for her questions. I had told her I would be at a library on the mainland, and yet here I was. But Indigo did not ask. Perhaps she did not see the point.
“My aunt has one last request,” she said. “She would like us to eat under this roof while it is still hers. We will have a feast to honor her life in the formal dining room.”
I noticed she did not use its proper name—Camera Secretum.
There was a flash, there and gone, in her gaze. Like hunger. Or sorrow. I couldn’t tell.
“A last meal, a final farewell,” she said, and her fingers skimmed my hand.
When Indigo touched me, I was reminded of all the times she had put her fingers to my pulse or kept vigil over me in the night. I could not always see her in the dark, but whatever form she took—maiden or monstrous—had not mattered to me then.
Now at her touch, I became aware of two things: The first was that whatever she had done to Azure, she meant to do to me. I was sure that when she spoke of a final farewell, it was not meant for Hippolyta. Thus, there were only a handful of hours left for me to uphold my end of the bargain.
The second realization was that I did not know who or what Indigo was, and yet I loved her anyway.
Perhaps this marks the place in the story where I should have raced down the stairs and out of the House of Dreams. But like all the fair-of-face fools before me, I did not. Sometimes you are lured not by the promise of safety but the safety of knowing that here lies a sure thing.
Here is a path, and on it you may find riches and wonders and certain death. You will never have to return to the other side where riches are scant and wonders are stingy. There, death is hidden, but here, death wears a face that you love. Here, you can be certain that death loves you, too, in its own fashion.
