Page 66 of Tell Me Why
“Well, at least there’s that. Do you have family?”
“Some,” Tina said, intentionally not volunteering more than that.
“Human friends?” Isabella asked.
“Some,” Tina said again. Isabella was watching her closely. Tina turned to lean against the dresser, facing her full-on now.
“What will they be like, in ten years’ time?” Isabella asked. “In twenty? In fifty, they’ll all be dead. You’re still… conditioned to the idea ofagingand of time being… narrow and small and precious.Timeisn’t precious. Life is, but time is not. There’s no easy way to learn how to deal with that. But you need to learn how to be patient. Rushing through things because time is working against you… It’s going to get you killed young, like so many others. You should learn how to goslowso that you’re sure that you actually win, in the end.”
Tina frowned, then shrugged.
“I’m picking an apartment, not a hotel room,” she said. “But I don’t plan on being here foryears. I have a life, and I have no intention of just walking away from it for that long.”
“Then you should go, now,” Isabella said. “Go live that life. I’ll… Daryll will probably try to find you, at first, and drag you back, but if you can disappear for a couple of weeks, he’ll get the idea that you aren’t a threat, you aren’t going to go straight back to Keon, and so long as Tell keeps uphisend of everything, you could probably go back and just live your life. But if you are going torushthis, you’re going to geteveryonekilled.”
Tellwasher life.
Not in a needy, existential way, but in the sense that they worked together, every day, and she would have to come up with an entirely new and different existence, if he was somewhere else.
On the other hand, Hunter was going to cause problems if she disappeared for more than, what, a month or so without explanation? And while those problems might not make their wayhere, when she did eventually get back… that’s where they’d be.
“I’ll think about it,” Tina said.
“About leaving?” Isabella asked.
“About… being slow,” Tina answered.
“All right,” Isabella said. “I don’t like losing. And I’mveryinvested, here. If I think that you are going to lose this fight for me… I will do what I need to do to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
It was a threat.
Tina wasn’t sure if it was amortalthreat, but it was a threat.
“Do you have other appointments?” Tina asked.
“Six,” Isabella answered, standing.
Tina nodded.
“Then we’d best keep moving.”
She didn’t knowwhat Tell wanted.
The apartments were all… nice. Most of them had giant walls of glass on at least one side that made Tina nervous, but the difference between siding and glass was mostly negligible when it came to the cover a room gave her from the sun, during the day, and she was resigning herself to sleeping in a coffin until they finally went home again.
She was officiallythatkind of vampire.
She needed to put in an application, and they wereout, so she just went with the first one they’d looked at. It was nice and there was a pool where it apparently wasn’t going to be a problem for her to go up and use it, any time of night.
That was as good a reason as any that she could come up with.
So they stopped on their way back to Daryll’s property and Isabella put down the deposit for the application and then added enough to that that the manager agreed they probably didn’t need to do afullapplication, so long as the credit check came back clean.
Isabella gave Tina an envelope with Tell’s handwriting on it, and Tina opened it to find the tax and routing numbers for the company, presumably, that had also rented the first house they’d stayed in.
So that went very easily, in the way of most vampire transactions Tina had been a part of, and they went back to the warehouse. The two men in the front of the car hadn’t spoken to them the entire night.
Tell was still in the lab, though it looked markedlymorelike a lab, now.
