Page 18 of Tell Me Why
That seemed reasonable.
“And you’re quite certain she’s going to be having parties rather than just ordering in?” Tina asked.
“You haven’t met her,” Tell said, and Tina nodded, unfolding to stand and going back to her own computer.
“And just to have said it,” Tell said without looking over the edge of his computer. “I strongly and categorically discourageanyunnecessary familiarity with Ginger. For any reason.”
Tina snorted.
“Message received,” she answered.
At a week,Tina was starting to plot the migratory patterns of fountains, for something to do to keep her brain engaged as she looked at more and more pictures.
She’d wandered out of parties and into other social spaces, coffee shops and parks and sporting events, identifying fountains and the groups that they ran with, linking from one to the next. They tended to always be where vampireswere, so she wasn’t wasting her time - she justified - but they certainly didn’tsocializewith the vampires outside of the proscribed feeding times.
“How many fountains become vampires?” Tina asked absently as she worked late one night, as dawn was beginning to press down on her.
“Very few,” Tell answered.
“I would think that they’d all be desperate to get themselves turned,” she said, voicing an earlier impression that really wasn’t supported by the pictures she was looking at.
“Not really,” Tell said. “They like the money and the chemicals, but I think that a fountain who sits with you all day so that you can feed knows as well as anyone what the costs look like, without having actuallydoneit. There are ones who go from… the party ones that you’re looking at… into long-term companions, but as they get older, it gets harder for them to recover from consistent feeds. They’re also just…” His eyes came up from his laptop, measuring her. “They’re lessvital. Even if a vampire has a friendship with a human from a long-term relationship like that, they tend to feed less and just keep them around. The younger ones are better feeds.”
“They don’t want the immortality?” she asked.
“They think they do,” Tell said. “And they flirt with it. The idea of beingselectis hard to walk away from, for many of them, I think.Chosen. But between us not wanting to have to put up with them for a hundred years and what they’ve seen and what they know… it’s pretty rare.”
“It didn’t occur to me how little of their lives they spend around us,” Tine said, and she heard him laugh gently as he went back to what he was doing.
“You want to watch a movie?” he asked. “I’m tired, and I’m not getting any closer.”
“You brought mehome,” she said. “The women you feed off of, they’re here for a night, and then… you don’t even haveregulars.”
“Habits are weakness unless they’re there for a purpose,” he said, closing his laptop.
She looked at him sardonically and he grinned.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I thought that she would have left breadcrumbs, at least unwittingly, but the country is too big to just hope to luck into her. I’m going to have to go back to Keon and verify why he thinks she’s here. Possible it’s a hunch and he’s wasting our time.”
“You don’t believe that,” Tina said, and he shrugged, sliding the laptop under the couch and weaving his fingers behind his head in a stretch.
“I like to think I’m not so proud as to admit I’m wrong and pursue another strategy when the one isn’t working.”
“So if it isn’t working, let’s try something else,” Tina said, and his eyebrows went up like that was what he’d just said. “How is she getting along? Is it allcash? Where did she get that many dollars? Most rental places won’ttakecash because they want the line of credit as insurance against damage. Did she go to property that she didn’t have torent? Has she arranged tobuysomething through a third party? What third parties would she trust well enough to work with?”
Tell narrowed his eyes at her.
“You’ve been doing this all of fourteen seconds,” he said, getting out his laptop. “How dare you?”
She grinned.
“What did I hit on?” she asked.
“Daryll,” he said.
“Daryll,” she echoed, and he nodded.
“I’ve been looking for her identities and the paths she would have laundered them to keep them away from Keon, but I heard a rumor about seventy or eighty years ago that she’d had an affair with a vampire named Daryll… andhimI know. Quite well.”
