Chapter 738: Extraordinary People, Ordinary Love
"How do you fit into all of that? Is he doing that because of what he’s become, or is it because he’s found his way to you?" Isabell asked, sighing in relief as she felt tension melting away from her body as Heila worked. The potion she’d been given at the beginning might have blocked the pain, but that didn’t mean that her body had healed. Now, however, bit by bit, she felt even aches and pains that had troubled her for several years starting to loosen and fade away.
"I love him," Heila said, without a moment of hesitation. "Not just because he fed on me either," she added quickly. "But he began to change long before I was even born. I just," Heila started to say before pausing again and wrestling with how forthcoming she should be.
Ashlynn had told her not to hold back secrets, but this wasn’t just her secret to share. Still, she firmly believed that Isabell would find her way into the coven one day, and even if she didn’t, she felt like Isabell could be trusted. After all, she was a woman who could stand up to a witch’s fury because she cared about Ashlynn, and that bought her more than a little bit of trust from all of the members of Ashlynn’s coven.
"A witch’s blood has power," Heila said after a brief hesitation. "Lady Nyrielle has been more, alive, I suppose, since she began to feed on Lady Ashlynn. It’s the same with Ignatious, though not as much. Since he fed on me, we’ve formed a sort of connection, and I’ve been able to help him heal the scars in his heart."
"I’ve seen what lies at the center of his heart, and he’s felt what’s at the core of mine. I think it scares him a little bit, to feel so close to someone so quickly. I don’t think he’s ready to call it love yet, but that doesn’t matter to me," she said, pausing as her eyes were momentarily distant and her face heated yet again.
"Father insists that he court me properly for at least a year," Heila said with a light laugh. "Mother says she doesn’t care how long the courtship lasts, as long as she gets an invitation to the wedding."
"That sounds... very normal," Isabell said in a surprised tone. If she set aside the matter of ’feeding’ on the person you loved and the power of a witch’s blood, it sounded like a very ordinary relationship. In fact, Isabell had been the one in her relationship who was slower to say she loved Casques, but he’d been patient with her, telling her that he would wait until she was ready to say the words. "Honestly, I didn’t expect something so normal from a vampire and a witch."
"Lady Ashlynn and Lady Nyrielle aren’t that different, you know," Heila said, meeting Isabell’s grey-eyed gaze for a moment and pausing her work. "They’re so very strong and they fight so hard. They carry so much weight on their shoulders. But at the end of the day, the things Lady Ashlynn talks about the most are the times she’s gone dancing with Lady Nyrielle, or the dinners they share on her terrace. Even for people like us, with all of the power that we have, the things we desire the most are still very ordinary kinds of happiness."
"Is that your way of telling me that becoming a witch wouldn’t change me?" Isabell said lightly. "That I could still go back to my Casques and continue life as though nothing had changed?"