Chapter 120 The Tour

Chapter 120 The Garden

POV: Carly

Isabel found her the next morning.

She had been expecting it.

After what Victor had told Niko and what Niko had told her, she had spent the rest of Tuesday waiting for Isabel to make a move and had gone to bed on Tuesday night when no move came and had woken on Wednesday morning with the specific alertness of someone whose instincts were telling them today was the day.

She had been right.

She was in the rose garden at nine, having gone out after breakfast with her grimoire and the stated intention of doing some reading in the cold morning air, which was something she actually did at school often enough that it was not a performance. She had settled on the stone bench at the center of the garden where the geometric beds converged and had opened the grimoire and had read exactly one page.

Then she heard the door from the garden wing open.

Isabel crossed the terrace and came down the steps with the specific unhurried certainty of someone who had walked this garden ten thousand times and owned every stone of it. She was dressed in a deep green that looked deliberate against the grey of the morning and her strawberry blonde hair was down, which Carly had not seen before.

She looked more like Reba this way.

She looked, more uncomfortably, like someone Carly could have liked in a different configuration.

"May I join you." Isabel said.

She had not phrased it as a question in the way that left room for no.

"Of course." Carly said.

Isabel sat on the other end of the bench and looked at the dormant garden with the expression of someone who was seeing the version of it that existed in their memory rather than the winter version in front of them.

"This garden was here when we built the house." She said. "Not in this form. Much wilder then. I've been working on it for two hundred years."

Carly looked at the geometric beds. "It shows."

"The roses are extraordinary in June." Isabel said. "I hope you have the chance to see them." She paused just long enough. "Sometime."

Carly kept her face neutral.

She was listening for the architecture of the conversation. Where it was going and how it was being built. She had learned to do this from watching her mother over a lifetime of conversations that said one thing and meant several others and she was applying everything she knew.

"I want to apologize." Isabel said.

Carly looked at her.

"For the banquet." Isabel said. "Showing up like that. I knew it would be a shock for Nik. I told myself the benefit outweighed the disruption." She looked at her hands. "I'm not certain that was true."

"Why did you come." Carly asked.

Isabel looked at the garden. "Because I had been trying to find a way to reach him for four years and nothing I had tried had worked. And when Reba told me he was going to be at the banquet I thought." She stopped. "I thought if I could just see him. If he could just see that I was there. That might be something."

"Was it." Carly said.

"I don't know yet." Isabel said. Honestly, she thought. The first honest thing.

Carly looked at the rose beds.

"You know about the covenant." Carly said.

A pause. Small but there.

"Yes." Isabel said.

"You've known for a long time." Carly said.

"Yes." Isabel said.

"And you know what has been happening to me because of the imbalance." Carly said.

Another pause. Longer this time.

"I became aware of it." Isabel said carefully. "Some years ago."

Carly turned to look at her directly. "How many years."

Isabel met her gaze. She had the same quality Niko had of not looking away when something landed directly. Whatever else she was, she was not a coward about being seen.

"Seven." She said.

Carly kept her expression still.

Seven years ago she had been eleven. The power had been beginning then, the early edges of it, the first signs that she was going to be something more than standard. She thought about the seven years between eleven and now and what had been building in her quietly all that time.

She breathed.

"What do you want." She said. "From this week. From me specifically."

Isabel looked at her hands again.

"I want my family intact." She said. "I want Nik back in this house even occasionally. I want the covenant restored because this town and everyone in it depends on the founding bloodlines maintaining it and I have been watching the balance degrade for four years and I am afraid of what happens when it breaks entirely." She paused. "And I believe there is a way to do all of those things simultaneously."

"By binding the bloodlines." Carly said.

The quality of Isabel's stillness changed.

She looked at Carly with an expression that was recalibrating quickly.

"He told you." She said.

"We don't keep things from each other." Carly said.

Something moved through Isabel's face. Frustration, yes. But underneath it something more genuine. Something that looked, surprisingly, like relief.

"Of course he did." She said quietly. Almost to herself.

She looked at the garden.

"I owe you an honest conversation." Isabel said. "Not the version I was going to offer you gradually over the course of the week. The real one."

"Yes." Carly said. "You do."

Isabel exhaled.

She turned on the bench to face Carly more fully.

"The binding of bloodlines is not what it might sound like." She said. "It is not a compulsion. It is not a trap. It is a covenant renewal that requires the voluntary participation of a representative from each founding bloodline." She paused. "A witch from the McPherson line and a vampire from the Monroeson line committing to the covenant jointly. Not to each other. To the covenant."

Carly looked at her.

"That's it." She said. "That's all it requires."

"In its simplest form." Isabel said. "Yes."

"Then why." Carly said carefully. "Did you feel the need to arrange this week the way you did. The adjoining rooms. Facilitating my being here. If the request is as simple as you're describing, why not just ask?"

Isabel was quiet for a moment.

"Because the last time I asked something of Nik directly he left and didn't come back for four years." She said. "I have been trying to find a way to ask him things without asking them directly ever since." She looked at Carly. "Which I recognize is not a functional strategy."

Carly held her gaze.

She believed that part.

She was not sure she believed all the surrounding parts yet. She was going to need to think about what she had heard and lay it against what she already knew and decide what the picture looked like when all of it was present.

"I'm not going to make any decisions this week." Carly said. "About the covenant or the binding or anything else. I came here for Freida's wedding and to be with Niko and that is what this week is." She held Isabel's gaze steadily. "After the week is over and we are back at school and I have had time to think about it properly, I will consider what you've told me. That is what I can offer you."

Isabel looked at her.

The recalibration was happening again. Something in Isabel's expression settling into something she had not been expecting to find.

"That is fair." She said.

"It is." Carly said.

They sat in the garden together for another moment. The cold morning sitting around them. The dormant roses between them.

"He is different." Isabel said. Not to Carly exactly. To the garden. "Than he was."

"I know." Carly said.

"You did that." Isabel said.

"He did that." Carly said. "I was just nearby."

Isabel looked at her sideways.

Something in her expression that was not quite a smile but was in the same neighborhood.

"You are very much a McPherson." She said.

Carly did not know if that was a compliment and decided it did not need to be.

She looked at the rose beds.

She thought about June and extraordinary roses and the specific possibility of being here to see them.

She thought about together and what it meant when you actually meant it.

She picked up her grimoire.

"Thank you for the honest conversation." She said. "Eventually."

Isabel made a sound that was, unexpectedly, a genuine laugh.

Small and brief and real.

Carly filed it away.

She went back to reading.

POV: Isabel

She stayed in the garden after Carly went back inside.

She sat on the stone bench in the cold morning air and looked at the dormant rose beds and thought about everything that had just happened and what it told her about the shape of the weeks ahead.

She had planned this conversation for months.

She had planned it carefully and had run through numerous versions of it and had known from the beginning that the plan depended on controlling the information and the timing and the specific sequence in which things were revealed.

Victor had told Niko.

She should have anticipated that. She had underestimated, again, the specific way Victor chose to operate when he had decided something. He did not announce his decisions. He simply made them and the people around him found out by encountering the results.

She was not angry at him.

She was not angry at Niko for telling Carly.

She was not, she realized, angry at any of it.

The conversation she had just had was not the one she had planned. It was better than the one she had planned. She had expected to have to manage it, to navigate carefully around the things Carly did not yet know, to guide her toward the conclusion through a sequence of smaller steps.

Instead the girl had sat across from her and named every piece of it with the specific clarity of someone who had already done the work of understanding and was ready to talk about what she actually knew.

She was not manipulable.

Isabel had understood that at the banquet, when Carly had shaken her hand and held her gaze and navigated the conversation with the composed ease of someone forty years older. She had filed it then as a quality to account for.

She was accounting for it now.

She thought about what Carly had said.

He did that. I was just nearby.

She pressed her lips together.

She had spent four years being furious at the absence and frightened of what it meant for the covenant and grieving the version of her son she had not been able to reach. She had spent four years planning and arranging and trying to engineer a path back in.

She had not spent much time considering what Nik had been doing while she was doing all of that.

She looked at the house.

She thought about the light she had seen in the studio at four in the morning.

She thought about a girl in a grey sweater crossing the lawn toward it before the day was properly up.

She thought about her son's face at dinner when Carly had answered Victor's question.

She had not seen that expression on his face before. Not in this house, not in any of the years she had been his mother. That specific quality of being known by someone and having them choose to stay anyway.

She had hoped for it for him.

She had stopped expecting it.

She looked at the dormant roses.

She was going to have to do this differently than she had planned.

She was going to have to ask instead of arrange.

She was not certain she knew how to do that.

But she was going to have to learn.