Deerhill

Chapter7.5 - Indigo

“Who was that woman? Molly, I think I remember her name was. Why is so you know a vampire?”

“Oh, the one you demolished?” Drew asked, his tone light despite how concerning the situation had been for Indigo. “She and Helia dated for a while, six months I think. She’s… fine, I guess. Different.”

“I take it they didn’t part on good terms?”

“Molly went with Helia to some military banquet,” Drew said, looking back outside. “They had this… agreement. Helia has been trying to slam her hand on the self-destruct button since I’ve known her. Molly could feed off of her whenever she wanted to, and Helia got to enjoy the high.”

Indigo’s stomach lurched, and she started to stand up before Drew’s eyes flicked back to her and held her steady. He looked horribly amused, and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She took a moment to debate what she would get out of running, and realized that there was nowhere to go. She was trapped there, with him. With his friends, and god knows what else. Nothing good ever came from non-hunters who kept relationships with monsters. The fact that they hadn’t run from Molly in the club meant that they still saw her as a friend, and not an immediate threat.

That was something Indigo wanted no part of. Leo being able to make people’s hands buzz as a party trick was one thing. Openly inviting vampires into where you lived? Indigo felt herself shiver. Slowly, she sat back down, and Drew let her settle before continuing with his story.

“They flew a little too close to the sun when they snuck off together in the middle of it and found an office,” Drew continued. “Helia didn’t close the door all the way, her mother went looking for her, and found her half dead on the floor because Molly ate a little too much off of her. She would have killed her, had Helia’s mom not intervened. But either way, how do you explain that? Secret Service got involved, all human parties involved were told a believable story, and everyone went home having chalked it up to some cult thing Helia had been caught up in.”

“Secret service? They let you know they were secret service?” Indigo asked, and Drew laughed. Logically she knew she should have been horrified and sympathetic of Helia’s assault, but it would have to wait until she got answers.

The Council of Realms was created to help smooth and operate monster-human business. It had multiple branches, none of which Indigo was familiar with. But she knew they existed. Only because of her mother, and not that she should have. It wasn’t any of her business, and she was happy to keep as far away from that sort of thing as possible. Margot had enough knowledge of them to call in a favor every now and then from a member, or skirt around and make things happen that would have otherwise caught the council’s attention.

If Indigo wasn’t even supposed to know about it, she had no idea why Drew knew. Or how. She had a sinking feeling in her stomach that he was much more than just the quiet boy he had been trying to pass himself off as. She wanted to kick herself for being so stupid. It was the same facade she pulled over herself to blend in, and she had fallen for his camouflage.

“Relax, Indigo,” he said, pushing towards her the leftovers of a cookie he had bought Helia to help mellow her drunken state. “Hear me out before you decide to push me over the side of the boat, yea? Take a breath.”

“Take a breath?” Indigo asked incredulously. “You know a dangerous amount for someone passing themselves off as a normal human.”

“Maybe I’m trying to live a life that wasn’t given to me by birth,” he said. “Just like you. I know what you are, Indigo. I’ve known it since we had breakfast together when we first met. You said you eat at a lot of diners. You like eggs, because they’re quick and easy. My mother’s go-to was beef jerky. You can stuff a piece behind your cheek and chew on it for hours. It eases the hunger pains, helps keep you going.”

“You’re a hunter,” Indigo concluded.

“Close,” he said. “Proxy. Or, my parents were.”

Indigo’s stomach twisted, and again she considered running. A proxy was a much bigger threat. Hunters were the DIYers of the monster hunter world, whereas proxies were expertly trained. Operators were members of a committee board for the council, whose job it was to ensure that monster-human interactions blended. They were stationed in and oversaw a specific region or ‘territory’ of land, and recruited proxies to help maintain it. Indigo wasn’t really sure what the specifics of their jobs included, just that Margot had taught her to stay far away from them. Hunters only took out threats. Proxies took out anything that made waves.

Drew must have seen the alarmed expression on her face grow, because he pushed the cookie closer to her, insisting that she take it. “My mother died on a job, my dad was granted retirement shortly after. We moved from Lousianna to here with the money he won from the legal settlement. They have rights. Some of them.” He reconsidered. “Sometimes. Anyway- that’s long behind us now. I’m not here to ruin your life.”

“You’re just here to let monsters run around and not do anything about it,” Indigo said.

“Can’t pull it out, can’t press it in,” Drew said. “Not much to do but accept that humans aren’t the only creatures that made their homes here. I know you’ve been raised to believe that they’re all bloodthirsty monsters, Indigo, but that’s not always true. There’s programs for them, rules, laws they have to abide by. There is an order of things.”

“Rock, paper, scissors. Office, vampire, human,” Indigo said. “Guess which one comes out and which one doesn’t.”

“Right, Helia,” Drew said, choosing to no longer engage Indigo’s skepticism. “It was a quick recovery, and physically she was just fine. Her parents didn’t talk to her for weeks, and when they finally did, it wasn’t pretty. Molly broke it off with her around the same time. And then came Jeremy, her prince charming from hell. He swooped in and scooped her off of her feet. Gave her a distraction, gave her warm arms to sink into while she dealt with the horrible emotional relapse of what had happened to her.”

“I pity her, really, I do. Helia’s heart has always been too big for her body, and she just can’t figure out where to put it. I think that in her situation, anyone would have done the same thing she did. I don’t know if you know this, but vampires release some sort of, I don’t know, venom, that makes you loopy. Hels said that it feels like you’re high, like you’re on opiods. Anyway, she was getting that fix a lot, and then suddenly she wasn’t.”

“Going through withdrawals, a breakup, and a fight with your parents will make you seek comfort anywhere you can get it,” Indigo said. “I’m starting to get the whole Jeremy thing. But why let her stay with him? You obviously don’t approve.”

“What are we supposed to do?” He asked. “She’s an adult.”

Indigo reached over and rested her fingertips on the cookie wrapper, dragging it to the edge of the table so that she could pick it up easier. Drew watched her slow, deliberate movement, and had the decency to not change his expression. She considered his statement for a long time, watching her fingers as she tore off chunks of the cookie and stuck them on her tongue, one by one. The sweetness made her nausea from drinking so much worse, but it was more comforting than she had expected.

Indigo had been an adult for four years now last November, and she had never experienced someone letting her ruin her own life. Her mother would have her head if she made the choices Helia made, and Danica was already crowding and overbearing towards her well-being. “What are we supposed to do, she’s an adult” was the biggest cop-out she’d ever heard.

Although, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it would be nice to be left alone, to learn to figure things out the hard way, and still have support when everything comes crashing down. There were a few lessons Indigo wished she had been allowed to learn on her own terms, instead of having been expected to know how to navigate them blindly. She’d done a lot of unsavory things to survive. She’d turned a lot of tricks in order to eat, or sleep somewhere warm. Just once, maybe it would have been nice to be able to do those things on her own terms.

“My mother’s dead too,” she said. “She also died on a job.”

“I’m sorry,” Drew said, and grief squeezed her ribs flat into her lungs. “We can talk about it, if you’d like. I can talk about my mom, you can talk about yours?”

Indigo shook her head after a moment's consideration, the memory of her mother’s lifeless body propped up against a tree too sharp in her mind. “Not yet. I’m not ready yet.”

“I understand,” Drew said. “It took me finding Leo to be able to talk about my mom. I’m here, when you’re ready. When you want to talk about her.”

“Thank you,” Indigo said, her voice leaving her mouth in a whisper.

Drew gave her a nod, and a smile, and then looked back out the window. The space between them shifted and wobbled into something…different. The tense, awkward silence that they usually tried to fill during the rare times they had been left alone together dissipated, and Drew’s presence gave Indigo a strange sense of comfort. He was quiet, but not cold, like she had previously thought. This silence was something he had crafted and built up from years of screaming and fighting until his throat and fingertips were raw. He was safe, so he was quiet. And he was extending that privilege to Indigo.

All at once she felt the need to share something with him, and drew in a breath that split her wide open. “I have a little sister,” she said, her voice somewhere between a gag and a whisper. Drew looked at her, patient while she found the rest of her sentence. “I’d like to talk about her.”

“Okay,” he said, giving her a gentle smile. “Tell me about your sister.”

“Her name is Ducky,” Indigo said, counting off the small things that were safe. The small pieces of information that she could share, that were true between states and roads and motel rooms. The pieces that proved she was real. “She’s given every bug she’s killed a funeral. She likes orange juice, and pop music, and those frozen yogurt popsicles that don’t really taste like anything but dairy. And I left her, before I came here. I didn’t even tell her our mom died. I just put her in the car, ignored her questions and pleas for answers for five hundred miles, and called our uncle on a payphone when I stopped to get gas. And then I left her in Idaho.”

“What’s your uncle like?” Drew asked, just as Indigo was about to unravel.

It was enough of a shift that she was able to pull herself back together. She didn’t really know her uncle and his husband very well, just that Margot had made it clear that should anything happen to her, they were where Indigo needed to take Ducky. She just knew that her mother trusted them, and Indigo trusted her mother.

“I only met him a couple of times,” Indigo said honestly. “He’s, tall. He lives with his husband, they have a golden retriever. They own a ranch.”

“Is that where you learned to bull ride like that?” Drew asked, a teasing edge to his voice, and it was enough to get a sewn together smile from Indigo.

“No,” she said. “We had a family friend who owned a ranch, actually. I wanted to be a cowboy.”

Drew laughed, bright and warm and full. “Well, you impressed me and Leo. You impressed Helia.”

“Helia seems easily impressed,” Indigo said, and Drew shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

The two of them sat in silence for the remaining few minutes of the trip, until Leo and Helia rejoined them at the table as the boat docked. Indigo had almost forgotten that they’d gone up to sit outside, but Leo’s voice was full of light as he greeted them again. He peppered kisses on Drew’s face, making Drew laugh and push him away, then turned to look at Indigo.

“Indigo like the color, hows about you spend the night with us?” He invited her.

Indigo’s immediate reaction was to decline his offer, but her words faltered and died in her mouth before they could escape and cut her night short. As uncomfortable as she was with the idea of sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, with people she had known for a very short amount of time, she couldn’t help but feel hung up on her and Drew’s earlier conversation. Maybe it would be nice to be left alone, to learn to figure things out the hard way, and still have support when everything comes crashing down. Danica was just a call away, and Leo’s home was not a dingy, cheap motel room. It had good locks, and warm bodies, and the chance at friendship.

“Okay,” she said. “That sounds good. I’d like that.”

“Wonderful,” he said, passing Helia off to Drew so that he could loop his arm around Indigo instead. Together they walked down the ferry ramp, and Indigo stuck close to his side as the chill of the night air hit her.