Page 71 of Tell Me Why
“Okay,” he said.
“But I do need to know whatthey’resupposed to think I’m doing,” Tina said. “I’m not just your tiny mascot who follows you around with pom-poms.”
“Nor are we together,” Tell said. “I think I would use you as my assistant, if you’re willing.”
Tina frowned at him.
“What is it you think you’vebeendoing?” she asked, and he smiled.
“It’s settled, then,” he said.
“Let’s get to work.”
There was a clipboard.
An honest-to-goodness clipboard.
And Tina got to follow Tell around and take notes on what he said, then point at other vampires and tell them what to do while he moved on.
If she could put aside the actualworkthey were doing, it was a lot of fun.
He had a sort of mania to him, all of the details that he wanted to track and all of the information he expected her to retain, and more than once she suspected that he’d been lying to her that this was something that either had never been done before or that everyone knew how to do it. He knew too much, had too much background in what he expected to happen, and at the same time, the questions that he was trying to answer were interesting and they were going to take work to go after.
As he did more and more things, there in the lab, he would send Tina out to get things, down in the warehouse or finding someone who was supposed to know how to get it, and peoplestarted to take an interest in what he was doing, coming to lean inside the doorway and watch them work, or asking a few poignant questions about what he intended to try.
With these, Tell was a masterclass in giving them just enough information to know that he was doing somethingimportant, but without any clear clues onwhat. He was cagey in a sense that heknewhe needed to keep the secret, but openhanded as he tried to forge alliances and make peoplewantto be around.
He wasn’t smiley and friendly. That would have been too transparent and too suspicious, but he had a way of suddenly looking someone in the face and saying something cryptic and just a tiny bit familiar that made them think that he thought they werecleverandliked.
“You do that to me,” Tina said, one day as they were getting ready to leave the apartment.
“Mmm?” he asked. “We should make sure that you feed today. Been long enough that you’ve got to be feeling it, by now.”
She was. But he wasn’t going to squirrel out of it that easily.
“Suddenly being familiar and direct,” she said. “Like you see me and you know that there’s something important about me.”
He swung his head around the corner to look at her as she stood by the door.
“Do you think I’m deceiving you?” he asked.
“Couldyou be?” Tina countered. “And would I ever know about it?”
“Slippery questions,” he said, closing the refrigerator and coming to where she could see him. “Questions of trust. They come up when you realize that everyone around you is working against you, or at least notwithyou. Dangerous questions.”
“You could lie to me,” Tina said, and he nodded.
“I could. Valid questions as to whatpurposewould have, if I’d been deceiving you this entire time. It’s averylong con,gaining your trust, and to what end? But, yes. It’s just a lever, built in and largely undefended.”
“Even for vampires,” Tina said.
“Sometimes especially for vampires,” Tell said. “We rely on relationships to survive, quite literally. The ability to make people like us. Want us. They forget that I’m not a fountain, that they’re supposed to bepullingme, rather than me pulling them, but it’s the same string, the same lever. If it makes you feel better, I can tell you what I’m going to do next. I’m going to ask them for private favors, things that I think they can do that no one else can or will, things that expose me, just slightly, hint at what I’m up to, and make them think that I’m trusting them. They’ll report back to their guys that I’m for sale, that they can turn me into an asset who will eventually turn over whatever it is I’m doing forthemto use. Meanwhile, the cozy pretend friendships Daryll has with his competitors will turn more and more sour as they think he’s getting an advantage against them through me. The bigger ascenewe create, the more of them we’re going to draw in.”
“Hunter knows how to do this?” Tina asked, and Tell nodded.
“Perfected it at court over two hundred years,” he said. “Uses a different set of tools. He plays a fool, sometimes, or the cad, but just as effectively.”
“And Daryll can’t see it at a thousand yards?” Tina asked, and Tell snorted.
