Page 106 of Tell Me Why
He missed the moments when they would both look up from what they were doing and discuss it, spawning a new host of ideas and motivation to keep after it.
He poignantly didn’t like not being in control of what happened next, that he wasn’t actually the one driving and deciding the things that would matter when it came to whether or not Tina survived.
In a long life full of powerful people, it might make sense to think that you would eventually get over the instinct to try to control all of it, but Tell never had.
Neither had any of the other vampires he’d ever known, in point of fact, which was probably why they didn’t get along as consistently as they did.
The apartment was quiet, but it was better than Daryll’s house, because he didn’t have to look over his shoulder, here, and worry about who was going to see the wrong name on the wrong screen and figure out what he was up to.
He went to Daryll’s house at least once a night, following up with all of the pretend work that he was doing there, but he and Daryll had a grand fight one night, properly shouting at each other from the entryway, to give Tell an excuse to disengage from the lab. Daryll thought that he was coordinating spies from the apartment. Layer upon layer of pretend work.
It wouldn’t last much longer.
He had to get this done, or else… he just didn’t care anymore. Tina was running out of days, and if it got so late…
No.
No, he kept threatening that, but he didn’t actually believe it.
Hethreatenedthat he would just walk away, go back home, if this took so long that there wasn’t any hope anymore. Hide himself away in the penthouse and become even more sullen than he’d been before, turn everyone away and just wait for time to callous over everything and let it stop hurting.
Could take years.
What did he care?
He didn’t have anything waiting for him at the far side.
Other times, he threatened to go Moldovia on all of them, throw himself at the place with the full-minded intention of dying at it, just taking down as many people along the way as he could.
The fact that he had walked away from the stuff that had happened at Moldovia was… well, there was more to it than most people thought, but it was still a matter of pure, unadulterated luck.
He wouldn’t have luck like that again, so it would actually be a suicide mission, but what did he care? He didn’t have anything waiting for him at the far side.
And then there were the nights that he had his mind straight and steady and he knew that the path he was on was the right one, that he was managing the possibilities as best as he could. If Tina didn’t make it, he would grieve her as he had grieved all of his friends when they had died, and he would go on as he always had.
He could look back at Moldovia and understand things that he hadn’t been able to understand, back then. And while the feelings remained as impassioned as they had ever been, he did know what the other side looked like, and he knew that he was waiting forhimselfat the far side of all things.
He’d lost decades of himself to the black hole of not caring, lost that man in so many different ways he couldn’t count them all, but he’d always foundhimselfwaiting at the other side, and as much as Tina did mean to him, he wasn’t going to lose himself again.
Threats be damned, he wasn’t going to do it.
He mapped, he documented, he stayed up past sunrise, on the top floor of an apartment building in Nashville, Tennessee,where the live sunlight went streaking past him and he just ignored it.
Every single day mattered.
Twelve days.
Vampires were pale.
That was their nature.
But Tell’s complexion had gone frompaletograyover the past week, regardless of how often he fed. The sun was bleaching it out of him, quite literally, but he was done.
He went downstairs to let the driver take him to Daryll’s house, five hired-for-violence vampires in the car with him and ahead of him, as they had been every day since Perceval’s abduction.
How quaint that seemed, looking back.
Tell went into the house and back to Daryll’s office, but no one was there. There was to be a party, tonight, and the house was alive with activity, because business must go on, even where life doesn’t.
