Indigo (For The Love of Purple #1) - Audrey Faye

Chapter One

“One day Blue is going to stab Indigo with a fork.” —Violet, age 11.

INDIGO

“Are you on a bender?” Violet sounds amused. I can hear Blue in the background, fixing something drippy or crooked or broken and giving Violet's empath a dose of solid while she's at it.

I grin at my cell phone in its cradle on my dash, even though neither of them can see it. “More or less.” Not the kind of bender with alcohol and memory lapses. I don't do those. I never have. My life is weird enough without adding in that kind of chaos.

Violet would tell you I'm a teensy bit of a control freak when I get moody. She's nice that way. Blue doesn't bother with words. She just entirely ignores my moods. My eight-year-old self had some issues, but she picked herself two really excellent best friends. “How’s it going with the client from hell?”

Violet makes soothing, non-committal noises. Blue snorts in the background, which answers my question more succinctly. Clearly the client is still being an asshat. Too many of them mistake Violet’s ethereal outsides for being a pushover.

“Do you need us to send you anything?” That’s Blue, taking care of business. She’s a Capricorn. She likes to build things that last, including really great friendships. Which means making sure that her friends never leave home without snacks and fully inflated bike tires, or the grown-up equivalents.

I smile again, but this time I keep my eyes on the road. This stretch is a little bendy, and my cell phone doesn’t actually need me to look at it when I talk. A habit that’s been strangely hard to learn. The three of us make eye contact, always. Violet needs it from us. We don’t feel entirely real to her otherwise.

Which I get. I have a hard time connecting with people without knowing their sun and moon signs at a bare minimum, and preferably a quick look at their whole chart.

“We’ll have a big breakfast when you get home.” I can feel Violet’s smile in her words—and the weird loading on the word at the end of her sentence. Vancouver hasn’t felt like home to her for a while. She needs out, and frankly, so does Blue. She could use some distance from the guy who discarded her like yesterday’s newspaper.

Capricorns don’t deal well with that.

I scan my surroundings. Trees as far as I can see. Pretty, but not the cabin in the woods that my last look at our charts thought I saw for the three of us. “Food sounds good. Don’t let Blue cook.”

Blue snorts again. Violet laughs, which is what I was going for. “She only burned the bacon once.”

Bacon is holy. Burning the last six pieces on a holiday weekend when we couldn’t get any more is the kind of thing that shakes the foundations of even thirty-five-year friendships. “She burnt it so badly that even Lao Tsu wouldn’t eat it.” Which is bad—Violet’s neighbor’s dog eats anything.

Tapping sounds, and then a voice further away from the phone than before. “Hang on. I have to go hold something for Blue. She’s fixing my faucet.”

I grin. Nailed that one.

Violet says something that I can’t quite hear. Then Blue does. The easy, familiar murmurs of friendship. I wave in the general direction of my phone screen. “Catch you later, faucet gurus.”

A grunt from Blue. Violet chuckles. “Stay safe out there. Call us when you figure out where you’re going.”

I rarely know until I get there, but they know that. “Will do. Love you. Indigo out.”

I hum happily as the call disconnects. Touching base with home and heartstrings has soothed my Cancer moon, and now my Sagittarius sun can have her way with me. She needs to roam, and she doesn’t usually give me a lot of warning. I just find myself heading for the nearest airport or train station or empty stretch of road.

This time it was the ferry terminal.

I reach into the bag of trail mix that lives in my car for exactly this reason, but my nose wrinkles at the first handful. I sigh and drop it back in the bag. Not what my belly wants, and it can be picky when I’m on one of my rambles. To a Sagittarius, food matters, and the right food is treasure and sacred ground and delicious orgasm, sometimes all at once.

Which means I need to find somewhere decent to eat.

I peer out my window at the trees. I tried to convince my inner