Page 14 of Tell Me Why
“Nope,” she said. “Are you the bad guy in the stories youaren’ttelling me?”
He sighed.
“Many of them,” he said. “Some of them still haunt me. Some because I regret the things I did and some because someone else is still intent onmakingme regret them.”
She could see it.
That might have been the biggest problem.
For as well as she felt like she knew him, she could see the pale bloodthirst in him, the deep potential for violence. The willingness to do what was necessary in the face of reality. No. Not even with the excuse of reality. Sometimes, maybe even because there was nothing to stop him.
She didn’t like to imagine it out of him, cruelty and predatory glee, but it sat on him like it fit, and she had to look away, it disturbed her so much.
“Are you bothered because you believe me or because you don’t?” he asked, sounding unoffended.
“Because I do,” she said. “I want you to be the person I believe you are, and then I think about Hunter doing that kind of stuff, and it just gets worse and…”
“If it makes you feel any better, while your odds are decidedlyworsewith vampires than humans, humans are just ascapableof surprising you with an unexpected blackness intheir character,” he said. “And yet, you have friendships and relationships with them. That they’recapableof dark things, even that they haveproventhat that is a piece of who they are, you’re always acting in faith that they’re going to be close enough to the person you want and need them to be. Sometimes when they aren’t, you have to leave them behind or aside for a time, and when you come back to them again, they’re worth the risk of faith again. Even humans are never a guarantee that they will never be the darkness they have the capacity for.”
“That’s awfully bleak,” Tina said, and he laughed.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I thought it was rather hopeful. If youexpectthat people arecapableof terrible things, it’s always… Assuming that people are good means that they break your entire perception of them when they fail. I amnotgood, Tina. The things that you see in me arevictories. And even from great depths of depravity, I’ve seen men find a new self and become a new person. Anyone who believes that they are unmixed in their qualities is lying not only to everyone else but themselves as well.”
She shuddered, and he laughed again.
“I don’t tell you those stories because I don’t want you to see me that way,” he said. “But I warn you that they exist because I don’t want them to surprise you so badly that you can never see me likethisagain.”
“How will you find her?” Tina asked, pretending to herself that she was refocusing the conversation, but mostly just attempting to change the subject. She’d wanted to know, but it chilled her to hear it, anyway.
“She has access to a lot of the same private transit that Hunter does, but she’ll have to be more careful, using it, because Keon can easily track it.”
“That’s not an answer,” Tina said.
“The question is how he knows that she’shereand not in Italy or somewhere else in Europe,” Tell said. “She’s left him some clue, probably one he didn’t even tell Andrew about, and while I can’t guess whether she left it for him on purpose, that’s where I’ll start.”
“Italy?” Tina asked, and Tell nodded.
“Keon has had a stronghold in northern Italy for as long as I’ve been alive. Habits die hard, and at this point he seldom leaves, because he’s unaccustomed to it. Sometimes I’m remarkably grateful that I mostly came up with Hunter and Ginger, because otherwise I might have become much the same way.”
“With a penthouse at Viella and room service for all of your needs,” Tina said and he nodded.
“It’s certainly within the scope of my nature,” he agreed.
“I still don’t see how you’re going to track her,” Tina said.
“Try things until something works, without drawing any unwanted attention to the fact that I’m doing them,” Tell said easily, then glanced at her. “You look like her, though. Andrew was put off his guard by how much you look like her.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Tina asked.
“It’s something that may come in useful, or may be very inconvenient, before it’s all done,” Tell said. “We shall see.”
Tina spentthree nights doing invoices and business updates before Tell came to find her again.
“Need your eyes,” he said, coming to sit down next to her on the floor, glancing over the paperwork she had arrayed in front of her. It wasn’t her biggest project, by any stretch of the imagination, but a few of the cases had been properly complex,and she was going through them carefully, making sure that everything she’d done and written down was where she could find it again if she needed to.
“You know I’m just going to hide it all again when you’re done,” he said, and she nodded.
“I know,” she said. “But for one shining moment, it was perfect.”
