Page 109 of Tell Me Why
“If she dies, I’m going to kill you,” he said.
“I’ll be under Keon’s protection,” Leonard said.
It was a vendetta spoken before the protection began, which meant that Tell had a window of opportunity to follow through on it, and everyone in the car knew it. Leonard was signaling that he was willing to go to Keon to plead for extra protection.
It would cost him, but he knew that Tell would do it, and his life was worth it to him.
“She is sturdy,” Isabella said. “It will take them the full time to prepare her.”
Tell didn’t answer.
He didn’t think that she was wrong, but he also suspected she wasn’t all that concerned about whatever bits of Tina he would be able to recover from the process. It had been a long time since Isabella had looked at a human as the same as herself, even if she was the best of them, and a new vampire was perhapslessthan a human to her.
This was about power, about control, about retaining her position at the very pointy top of the vampire social pyramid, and nothing was changing that.
Nothing everdidchange.
So he didn’t try.
Tonight, he would get on a plane and fly to Italy.
That was enough for him to concern himself with for the time being.
When Hunter didone of these, he made a party plane out of it, if Tell’s understanding was correct. And he had no reason to believe otherwise.
The crossing with Isabella and Leonard was quiet. They hadn’t taken the time or risked exposing themselves in ordering fountains. Tell didn’t have the knowledge in his head to calculate, but he had guessed that they would stop for fuel somewhere on the coast, or in Portugal, but the world was indeed smaller than it had ever been before, and the plane that had been waiting for them at the Nashville airport took them directly to Rome. It was mid-afternoon, by the time they arrived, and all of them had suffered badly on the back half of the flight, but no one complained out loud as Isabella’s force of will drove them forward without rest or respite.
A car met them at the airport and all three of them fed immediately, then lay quiet, as the car was designed, as they drove up out of Rome and to Keon’s estate about an hour away.
Castle Keon was up on top of a local promontory, and the little hamlet that supplied it trickled down toward the vineyards that Keon had put in more than two hundred years ago out of a sense of pretension and what might have been a fit of industry.
Whyshouldn’ta vampire grow his own wine? It was Italy, after all.
Tell lay in the far back of the car, eyes closed, just maintaining thedistancethat he kept from reality during the depths of sunheat. He’d long learned how to put himself away, to let the time slip past faster as it would, prepared as he had to be, but not actuallythere. It wasn’t something you could teach, and he pitied Tina that she didn’t know how to do it, but he suspected she would learn faster than most.
She had a boldness totrythat was more scarce than most people recognized.
They arrived at the estate, driving directly up into the castle, where staff saw to Isabella and escorted Tell and Leonard separately into the building. Tell was immediately more comfortable and finally able to think clearly enough to engage with what was going to happen next.
Keon would be at his rest through to dusk, but the days were stretched as far as they would go, here. Keon wasn’t the type of man who would lay about simply because no one could tell him otherwise, and the house ran like the man ran himself. There would be a fountain outside of the room, waiting for Tell to rise at dusk, and then there would be a formal meal for the guests and court who merited an invitation. After that, Keon would begin the work of the day, usually audiences, and then seeing to the estate as much as was necessary. He still wrote his correspondence by hand, last Tell knew, which absorbed a lot of his time, as well.
Tell anticipated that he would be slotted among the early audiences, but not invited to breakfast. He would be expected to keep to his room until Keon first saw him, after which he would be a guest of the house and allowed to wander as he saw fit, but knew there would be a servant assigned to follow him around under the pretense of seeing to his needs and keeping him out of trouble.
These weren’t rules that Tell normally observed strictly, but he would today, if only because he wanted to be certain that he was where Isabella could find him when Keon was ready to see him.
Because he wanted no more delay than was absolutely necessary in putting together Keon’s strike forces and getting them moved against the processing facilities. The moment he was sure it was actually going to happen, he was going to find himself a plane and ship himself to Texas, by whatever means necessary.
He would be there when Keon’s forces set in on Silix’s facility, and if Tina was there to find and rescue, Tell would be there before either one side or the other executed her for being unprofitable.
He knew it, clearly in his mind, that Keon would not put in the effort to resuscitate the vampires who were started through the conversion process. He might even take the ones who were close and get them finished somewhere else. He wasn’t altruistic. As far as Keon was concerned, the word only served a purpose through contrast.
But the ones who had days left on their processing would just be culled. Possible that they would cull every vampire, every sentientcreature, on the property, to limit the number of stories that could or would get out. Easiest to win a war of perception when you provided the only one.
Tell had to be there the minute they went in, and he would have to be sharp to be sure that he was there when they got to Tina, in case they culled as they went to prevent escapes and having to hunt down strays after they took the facility.
It was a breathtakingly thin margin, but it was what he had.
He’d known it the moment he’d left, and every minute since.
