Page 17 of Tell Me Why
“There are tools for weakening us, for controlling us. There are threats that work. It takes time and energy to become truly elusive, and even then, if someone is willing to use overwhelming force against you, you cannot withstand it on your own. You shouldn’t look at Keon with triviality.”
He turned back to his computer and Tina sat the laptop down on the floor next to her as she crossed her legs and then her arms, watching him.
“You have too many secrets,” she said, and he snorted.
“I’m not sure how to help you, there,” he answered.
“I can’t tell what’s you being protective and what’s you hiding things out of guilt and what’s you hiding things not because they’re hiding but because your entire life is made out of closets piled full of skeletons.”
“Mostly the last one,” he said easily. “I don’t care for dwelling on the past any more than is necessary to move forward.”
“Right,” Tina said. “Says the professional broody one.”
“It’s an archetype,” he said. “Not my fault that I’m particularly good at it.”
“Why do you continue to hide all of the thingsaboutbeing a vampire?” she asked. “Aren’t those, at least, my right to know? You wouldn’t even teach me how to turn someone until it was specifically relevant, and you keep referring to these vague ‘ways’ and ‘weaknesses’ and the like, but you never reallyteachme any of them, or what to do about them.”
“I have better things to do with my time and energy. Like balance eggs on top of my head,” he said, still maddeningly distant.
Tina sighed at him, and he laughed without looking at her.
“You know what an iron maiden is?” he asked.
“Yes,” Tina said, mistrusting where this was going.
“How about a pear of anguish?” he asked.
It rang a bell.
“Um,” she said. “Maybe?”
“Both myths,” he said. “Salacious stories invented later to paint the middle ages as barbarian.”
“Really?” she asked, and he nodded without looking at her.
“The things that vampires have invented and done in the same time, though, are much worse. Victims who cannot die of routine physical damage, so long as they’re kept fed. Preparations administered via fountain to weaken or incapacitate you. We are very difficult to kill, but the knowledge of how it is done has been cultivated over the known memory of vampire-kind. Unless and until you need to beableto do these things, that knowledge will die with me, what pieces of it I have, because it is, in its deepest truth, barbaric. If you are taken, there is very little that that knowledge gains you, and I’m willing to take the risk that perhaps you will not be able to kill a vampire at moment of need, as small as it is, for you to not be a carrier of the things I have seen and I have known.”
This took her aback more than she’d been prepared for.
He looked at her.
“We live in civilization, and while your expectation thatknowing thingsis always positive is understandable, it assumes that all knowledge deserves to survive. It doesn’t. Please, just take my word for it. It doesn’t.”
Tina considered this.
“I could ask Ginger,” she said. He gave her a mirthless but kind smile, returning to his work.
“I won’t stop you,” he said. “If it’s worth that much to know it. But I don’t want to be the one who teaches it.”
Tina couldn’t find fault with that.
“What cities do you want me to be looking in?” she asked, and he nodded, taking a stack of scrap pages - old research that hadn’t panned out, cut up into squares - and handing them over.
“These are what I have,” he said.
“You really think that I’m going to find her?” Tina asked.
“I think that you’re giving me fertile ground to go hunting in, the second we know what’s going on,” he answered.
