Page 72 of Tell Me Why
“There are people who see and adapt and win, and ones who just consistently lose. Likely Isabella knows some of what I’m doing, but she does her part differently, as well. She is a princess down to her very toes, and… that works a different way, again.”
“Like props in a story,” Tina said.
“There’s a reason all the stories have them,” Tell said. “Are you ready?”
“I suppose so,” Tina said. “Am I going to be like that? Fake personality built around what gets me what I want?”
“You think I’m fake?” Tell asked, playing at insulted. “Of course I am. I lost track of my actual personality years ago. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. I just know that I see the same strategies and tactics in humans every day. Just less evolved. I think that… with some key changes around how youneedto be vampiric to survive… it’s likely that being a vampire just sets loose who you already were to go do it forever. The worst of it grows the easiest, but it’s all there.”
“That’s… not really reassuring,” Tina said, and he shrugged.
“They don’t ask us what we want to be when we grow up,” he said. “Used to be, you just assumed, based on who your dad was. Not that far off, for us.”
“I’m going to turn out just like you?” Tina teased and he snorted, pushing the button for the elevator.
“Whatever we share in common, it was there before you met me,” he said. “I take no credit or blame for any of it.”
Tina laughed, then he put his arm out, across her body, pushing her back and slightly behind him.
Tina jostled out of the way of his arm, glowering at him for a moment then closing her eyes to focus on what she could hear and smell.
The slight shift of a foot on the floor of the elevator as it came up to them.
She opened her eyes.
Tina went through what they’d been talking about, trying to remember if any of it had been something that gave away important secrets, but she didn’t think it had.
The doors opened, and a man with a thick black beard and shaved head lifted his face to look at them.
“Daryll wants to talk to you,” he said.
“Funny thing,” Tell said, not moving. “That’s where we would have gone, anyway. I don’t know you.”
The man smiled mirthlessly.
“The thing about a man like you is that you never know what you’re going to get up to on your way to where you’re supposed to be,” he said. “So I’m here to make sure that youcome directly.”
“We have men downstairs who are assigned to drive us,” Tell said. “You aren’t one of them.”
“No, I’m more important,” he said. “And I’ve given them the day off.”
Tell sighed.
“If you’re going to lie, you need to come up with a lie that’s at least superficially plausible,” he said, sounding tired. “Otherwise, just use the threat. You think that you can beat me. Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. More importantly, you think that you can hurt her more than I’m willing to stomach before I’d be able to stop you. There, I suspect you’re right. Now. Without knowing where it is you intend us to actuallygo, I can’t make a reasoned decision whether to fight you, flee by any possible means, or simply comply. Which means that you’re going to find that I fight you, one way or another. Are your terms truly so dire?”
Tina was the hostage.
Again.
Great.
The shaved man narrowed his eyes once at her, then looked at Tell.
“I’m here representing a man who has interest in your skills,” he said. “And he’d like to discuss the terms under which you would transfer them from Daryll to him.”
Tell heaved an exaggerated, exasperated sigh.
“See?” he asked. “You could havestartedfrom there, and we would have gone into a business conversation on much better footing. Was that so hard?”
