Page 83 of Tell Me Why
A fountain at the fountain.
Was he teasing her? Was he telling her a joke?
She wasn’t sure.
He nodded once, sharply, then turned to go on, and Tina watched after him for a moment, then started for the kitchen.
Tea.
Coffee.
Fountains.
She organized the provisions and went back to the front sitting room - parlor? foyer? was there another, more southern term for it? - and distributed everything, making sure to leave all of the fountains but the last there with the vampires. It was her intention to retrieve the last of the leftover fountains and go outside to meet Leonard, but at the end of the day, they were sentient human beings with memories and the ability to speak, and she didn’t want to fall for them being a mechanism that Daryll used to spy on the people working for him by treating them like bovine livestock, if that was indeed the intent. And she didn’t like having one of them follow along behind her as she walked, even when shewasn’ttrying to be discreet about it.
Leonard wasn’t at the front room anymore, any more than she had expected him to be, but she followed him by trace scent down into the warehouse. She still wasn’t technically supposed to be down here, but if they caught her, she’d left a book in the car intentionally to give herself an excuse, and they came through here every evening and morning as their escort dutifully kept them from being absconded with again.
She wasn’tgreatat this, and Leonard was one of the more curious and industrious of the spies, which meant he didn’t spend his whole night sitting up with the rest of them, waiting for Daryll to do something interesting; his scent was natively everywhere, but Tina caught the scent of one of the women who was more normally only upstairs, and followed the paired scentto the end of the hallway, listening hard and reminding herself that she had absolutely no pressing need to breathe as she squatted, trying to figure out where the sound of voices might be coming from so that she could find something to keep between herself and them.
It was there, the voices, but the warehouse was too big and echoing for her to be able to hear words clearly.
But that was Leonard’s timbre, and Tina recognized Venus’s voice as well.
She peeked, finding Leonard standing against a wall to her far left, arms folded and legs crossed as Venus spoke to him.
There weren’t many women involved in Daryll’s business. Tina hadn’t figured out what it took for them to break into it, whether it was age or just aggression, but they were all aggressive, and she had a strong idea that they were also some of the oldest vampires there. Some of the most cynical among them, as well.
There was nothing between her and them.
She didn’t want Leonard to know that she’d seen him with Venus, so she slipped away from the corner, going back up the stairs and finding the fountain, then going to wait in the main room. She couldn’t see when they came upstairs, but she hoped that Venus would come back to the main room again, even if Leonard didn’t, and she could ditch the fountain again and go see what he did next.
She was supposed to be out at the fountain out front.
She looked at the young fountain man, standing there with his vacant gaze, and she wondered if he was drugged.
Or if this was a performance, a command performance, and he was a perfectly normal human being, outside of these walls.
She wanted to talk to him.
To try to pry him out of whatever it was that was making him this way, toprovethat there was a personality, asoulin there, but that wasn’t the objective.
She let him alone.
Venus went past, but she didn’t stop walking, headed toward the kitchens and the big salon where the bulk of the parties tended to locate themselves.
Tina rose and followed her, making it as far as the front door, but Venus didn’t stop, and Tina didn’t know where Leonard was, so she went out.
He was sitting on the fountain.
He must have gone out through the warehouse and around to here. Tina put on a bright face, glancing back at the fountain.
“I’m late,” she called. “Sorry. Got some of the orders mixed up.”
“No rush,” Leonard answered, watching the moon as it set. It was nearly a full moon; dawn would be here soon enough that Tina was already starting to get uncomfortable.
She pretended like it wasn’t true.
He looked back at her again as she got close, and she motioned to the young man.
