Page 112 of Tell Me Why
Tell left.
Going west wasa double-or-nothing compared to going east. Going west, you could stay in shadow for the whole trip, or you could be in sun for twenty hours straight. Tell was able to leave early enough that the entire trip was very comfortable, with a pair of companion fountains that he didn’t remotely need. He and Hunter had long had a philosophy that if there was blood to drink, you might as well drink it and enjoy it, but he didn’t have the spirit for it, tonight, and he left the two women to their own entertainment as he crossed the ocean for the second time in thirty hours.
It used to be that the blessed Atlantic was a three-month buffer between himself and the pompous snakes in Europe, but any more it was twelve hours in the belly of a rumbling tin can, little more than separated him from New York or Chicago.
It was all uncomfortably tight, and he was craving his penthouse at Viella more than he could have possibly anticipated, the fortress of it that kept out even the local city better than the world kept out Europe.
He was tired.
Ancient, dry, bone tired.
By the time he landed in San Antonio, going to use his own credit card to rent a car that would take him out into the desert where Silix had set up his fortress, the fury that had been boiling and flowing, keeping him moving to this point, was nearly depleted.
It was too late.
Keon had had mercy, given him an opportunity to rethink his request. This far into the process, there wasn’t much person leftinside the vampire body. Tell had worked as fast as he’d known how to, but he was going back to a creature that wouldn’t have any of her traits. Maybe he would keep her as a pet. Maybe he would dispatch her himself so that she wouldn’t have to live like that.
He hadn’t felt his age this badly in a long time.
It was strange that he feltexactlyas old at four hundred as he had at one hundred and fifty.
Old like he had lived past his window.
Old like there was nothing that mattered.
Old like he wanted to shake a cane at the jet planes and curse them for being all modern and useful.
Old like he missed a world he couldn’t even picture anymore.
But they gave him car keys for a rental and smiled brightly, flirting with him reflexively, and he smiled back.
The hunger.
The hunger was what kept him going, decade after decade.
That he wouldenjoy, evennow, taking her out behind a bush and never even lay fang to her, but to raise her blood to boiling because hecould.
The day that he lost that, he would officially be the walking dead.
He took the keys and he drove.
He was once again Tell.
Oscar was gone, and he didn’t know if or when he wouldbethat again.
Hunter changed names like he changed jackets. He would have one that he favored for a time, then something new and fresh would appeal to him and he would forget the old one.
Tell had been Tell for as long as he had been a vampire, near as mattered, and he had seldom taken on new identities, even as they had been pragmatically useful. Oscar was one that he had toted along with him, though, from continent to continent,a dull man who thought too much of himself and had absolutely everything in common with Tell and absolutely nothing in common with him.
Tell was himself again, completely, now, not hiding. If Silix was watching for him, so be it. Tell was accustomed to living a quiet life, to seeing without being seen, to people not knowing his face unless he wanted them to. But he didn’t often hide who he was, his movements, from people who knew how to track such things in an increasingly digitized and surveilled world.
The fae weren’t interested in asecondunseen world, and vampires were slow to adopt such strategies as they intuitively felt like a passing fad that would abandon you at the worst possible moment, but men like Keon, like Silix, even like Isabella had a sense that you used the tools that were there to use. You just didn’t develop yourself to rely on them.
Because they absolutelywouldbetray you at the worst possible moment and in the least anticipated way.
Before too long, he was going to have to adapt himself to the new reality, that there was something watching him everywhere he went and there was always a way for that knowledge - where he was, who he was, what he was doing - to be used against him, but for a little while longer, he was going to pretend that it didn’t matter.
That he was Tell, not Oscar, and he was the predator and not the prey.
