Page 46 of Tell Me Why
Some of it heady and some of it subtle, some just the scent of healthy earth conversing with delicate plants, but as Tina actually took a moment to appreciate it, she found more and more. There were flowers, mostly white and blue, that stood out in the moonlight like they had spotlights, and frogs chirruped and croaked as they walked.
“We get fireflies,” Isabella said. “You’re too late for them tonight, but you ought to come out on another evening and sit with them.”
They came to a fountain in a stone courtyard at the center of the garden and Isabella sat down on a bench facing the water feature, watching it thoughtfully for a moment.
“There are no places on the property where you can speak freely, but this is one of the most unguarded,” Isabella said. “Daryll would kill anyone he found spying on us, out here.”
“Are youwithhim?” Tina asked.
“No,” Isabella said. “Not like you suggest.”
“But you aren’tnotwith him,” Tell said, coming to sit next to her.
Isabella looked at him.
“You know nothing is simple and clean-cut like that,” she said.
“She wants to know if you love him,” Tell said. “If that is what could drive you into conflict like this, being with abadman. And a stupid one. Love forgives all manner of idiocy. But I know. I want to know howdeepyou are with him.”
“I have no interest in discussing it,” Isabella said. “With you or with anyone else.”
Tell considered that for a moment, then turned to face the fountain.
Isabella looked at Tina.
“Nothing is what you think,” she said. “Neither so simple nor so clean. When you are as old as we are, everyone is a hopeless tangle of loyalty and ambition and history.”
“I’ve not found that,” Tina said.
Hunter was loyal to very few.
Defiantly so.
And she’d thought that it was because he was just protecting himself from new relationships and new pain, but maybe it was to avoid ending uphere, where everyone you knew was bad and probably working against you, somehow or another.
Ginger was… arbitrarily loyal as she saw fit, like a magic 8 ball. It wasn’t tangled at all, as far as Tina could see, but it would keep her from havingconflictof loyalty, if she shattered everyassumptionof loyalty at every convenient opportunity.
And Tell.
Tell was justaloneas far as he could get himself to be, deep and old friendship with Hunter almost irrelevant to his actual life, but… it wasn’t just stoic and bored andaloof.
It was independent.
Free.
Oh, it changed everything.
How shesaweverything.
Tell had told her that being around her made him more human, made himfeelmore like a human and less like a vampire, and she’d thought that that cold and callousness was what he was talking about, but it was more subtle than that. It was the pieces that feltimmuneandimpassionate, not theseparatenessthat had shifted in him.
She couldn’t have seen it but by contrast.
“You are very young,” Isabella said. “And you won’t make it to very old, if you spend your time with him and never learn anything, but maybe you’ll have a life worth living, in the meantime.”
“I resemble that,” Tell muttered, and Isabella smiled with a cool, tired humor.
“Have you everbeento Europa?” Isabella asked.
