The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(5)

Her lips skimmed mine. “Don’t look.”

She raised me up, and I stumbled after her. The floor changed beneath me, from smooth oak to the expensive pile of her wool carpet. Moments later, Indigo pulled my wrist, and I was falling, my back on the firm cushion of her couch. Silk rustled. Her warm legs fell to either side of my hips.

“Don’t look,” she repeated.

I stilled beneath her. The first time she said it felt like a reminder. The second time was different. A test.

In the tales, the moment Psyche glimpsed Eros in his true form, he left her. But that was what made it a tale worth telling . . . that there was light to be found in the dark.

“Don’t—” Indigo said.

I yanked off the blindfold and she startled. The city lights revealed her in sacred squares of gold—the delicate wing of her collarbone, a beauty mark on her sternum, her small, high breasts—as if this was all my mortal eyes were allowed.

“You looked,” she said, her voice more curious than wounded. “Why would you do that when you know it will only make a god leave?”

I tried to look into her eyes. She was backlit by the city, her face obscured in darkness like a hidden cosmos, a whole universe I longed to know.

“To prove that I am not afraid of being tested,” I said.

“Is that so?” asked Indigo. She settled more fully into my lap. My hands, which had braced her hips, climbed reverently up her waist to her breasts.

“Yes,” I said.

Her lips moved to my neck. “And what if that test kills you?”

“Then it kills me.”

I felt her smile against my skin, her teeth cool and slick.

“And what waits for us in the end? When you survive all my tests?” she asked. She rose then, guiding me to her. “Tell me. Now.”

“Bliss,” I said. “Bliss eternal.”

After that the city and all its glitter were lost to me. In that second, I knew I would love Indigo forever.

I didn’t know what it would cost me.



The next morning, Indigo took me to view her private collection. After a twenty-minute drive, her black car pulled up to a wrought-iron archway. On either side, ivy and wisteria choked the high stone walls. A large, grinning crescent moon dangled from the gate, as if Indigo had speared it from the sky and kept it like a trophy.

Half-hidden in the ivy, a rectangular iron plaque announced: le musée de la beauté perdue. The museum of lost beauty. We got out of the car, and I followed Indigo down a white-gravel driveway and into a small labyrinth where ivory seraphim rested their wings atop shoulder-high hedges.

At the end of the labyrinth appeared a large cottage. From outside it looked rusted and forgotten, its only purpose to prop up trellises of tea roses. Inside, it was sleek and modern, the gallery walls spotless so as not to detract from the encased fragments of manuscripts and the iron pedestals holding diorite miniatures of ancient scribes and priestesses. A pair of sliding-glass doors at the far end of the room blew a climate-controlled lullaby over a trove of rare books.

“This is what you wished to see,” said Indigo, leading me to a glass-topped table.

When I looked down, there was a single torn page from a grimoire. It was highly decorated, illustrated in gold leaf and lapis lazuli. There was nothing left of the spells but a crude depiction of the sun beside a handful of Aramaic characters. It was likely nothing more than a fifteenth-century copy of the Clavicula Salomonis, and a poor one at that.

“I’m told it once held a spell that let people cross time and space,” said Indigo, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

She wore a heavy sable coat, unseasonably warm for early November. Her red lips were a slash of blood.

“Why did you want to see this?” she asked.

“Sometimes I think I had a brother who left me for a different place,” I said, the words clumsy and raw, unused to being uttered aloud. “I’ve been trying to find a way to live in this world. Barring that, I was looking for a way to leave it.”

Indigo’s gaze held a certainty I wished to rest my life against. “And now?”

“And now I wish only to stay.”

Indigo smiled, though there was a split second where her face was blank. Haunted, even. I knew that look. She might smile at me, but she, too, had hunted this spell for a reason.

Who were you looking for? I wondered. What were you running from?

Indigo kissed me. I removed her coat and spread it on the floor beneath us. Soon, the sound of her sharp, panting breaths drove all other questions from my mind. I may have entered her world that day, but soon she became all of mine.

In Indigo’s realm, the days might begin with picnics in the Jardin des Rosiers and end on the prow of a gleaming boat in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. The evenings summoned private concerts and our nights were filled with games. In these games, we took turns at being monstrous or mortal, grotesque or godly.

But at least now, no matter what we were, we were never alone.



“I want to start something new with you,” Indigo said a few months later. We were lying in her bed watching the dusk erase the city skyline. “A new chapter. A new story. There will be no glancing at the pages that came before this one. Can you live with that?”

At that point, I had a vague understanding of Indigo’s life before we met. Her parents died when she was young, she was raised by an aunt she no longer spoke to—sad and strange, but stranger still was that she possessed a past at all.