Page 105 of Tell Me Why
“That’s what we do, boy,” Tell answered. “Their lives are short as humans and shorter as vampires. No one ever mentions that upfront, though, do they?”
“No,” Leonard said, sounding glum.
“No,” Tell agreed. “Now, you should go back out there and start acting like they expect you to, or else your life is going to end up being rather short, as well.”
Leonard shot him a sharp look, and Tell lifted a shoulder just a fraction as he settled in at the podium he’d set up for himself.
Aleksander was around here somewhere. Henning had gone back home.
Tell was going to have to pretend to bring in another technician and hunt down Henning to pretend kill him.
Neither man knew anything interesting.
Tell had hired them because they were aspirational idiots who liked to use big words and lord over the people around them in their academic certainty, and it made them absolutely harmless, but he had to pretend like all of this was in earnest for a little while longer.
Which meant a fake search party, to start.
“I tried to get her away from you,” Leonard said from the doorway.
Tell didn’t look.
Pretend-Tell didn’t care.
Real Tell heard the admission there, that Leonard had tried tosaveher, but he’d been too late.
Poor boy.
He was too soft for this line of business, but Silix wasn’t going to care about that. He would choose clever-but-soft every time, because you could harden the soft, but you could never sharpen the dull.
Life was going to be hard for Leonard.
Tell didn’t really feel sorry for him.
It already was hard for Tina, and that was Leonard’s fault.
Maybe Tell would kill him on the way out, just for good measure.
Maybe.
He wouldn’t.
Not really.
But it felt nice to think about, on a night like this.
On a night like this.
The days were ticking.
Tell was feeding once a day and getting up and going down well outside of his normal hours of operation. He was set on his path.
He had considered trying to reach out to Hunter or to Ginger, knowing that Hunter would help and suspecting that Ginger would try, but he didn’t want anyone to know what was happening, and less contact with the outside world protected the secrets inside of it better. More, he was certain that Keon would have more readily available resources to storm the facility in Texas, where Ginger was more of a nuke-it-from-space kind of girl. Hunter would just be in the way. This wasn’t what hedid.
He needed Tina, strangely enough, to keep things straight and do the rest of the legwork as Tell cracked open the harder pieces of work, figuring out the financial relationships that pointed at larger centers of industry, the way that money came and went from buyers and distinguishing suppliers from buyers and the logistics that connected each of them to the processing facility.
He would set Tina to work on a location and she would come back with video footage and a list of names and faces. He could do all of that, but she saved him so much time, doing it.
He was on his own, and he hadn’tdonethis on his own for long enough that it felt like re-learning it.
