Page 23 of Tell Me Why
He shook his head and turned away.
“Old memories,” he said. “Shadows tucked away in boxes and buried in cement many decades ago. I want to be rid of Keon, and I will do this, if it finally cuts this last tie, and then I will go home and never think of him again.”
“It cost you that much for him to come and wipe out a group of rogue vampires that were slaughtering villages?” Tina asked, and he nodded.
“It would have been much simpler if it had been what I thought at the time, but I was young and… fast. And I didn’t realize that Sibylle had important friends. Ones that would be willing to avenge her, if she died. And… maybe I didn’t expect her todie. The lives of vampires have hardly been sacred to us, at any point, but there is a sense of… history to them that you lose, when one of them goes, and I thought that Keon would…” He shook his head, going to look in the fridge again, then sit down at the kitchen table and look up at the light for a moment. “I think I hoped he wouldconvinceher that it was unacceptable, what she was doing, and she shouldn’t do it anymore. But he killed her, not knowing who she was, and it cost him a lot more than he’d planned, and he’s been recouping that cost from me, ever since.”
“And you think that this will be enough to end it?” Tina asked, and Tell nodded, rubbing his face once, then standing again.
“I do,” he said, his voice normal, not so distant anymore. “But we have work to do, if we are going to find her and be able tospeakwith her before she tries to kill us.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Tina asked.
He smiled.
“We’re going clubbing.”
They puttheir baggage down in a pair of rooms in the basement, then Tell locked the door that went down to the basement and they left the house.
“They left a car,” Tina observed, and Tell laughed, tripping lightly down the stairs.
“We need to work on your situational awareness,” he said. “Three cars up on the top of the drive, only two engines left.”
“That’s what I have you for,” Tina answered, getting into the car and re-settling the seat to how she liked it. Tell wrinkled his nose, pulling information about the driver from the smell of him - he’d been a husky man who was probably familiar with violence - then started the engine.
“You know where we’re going?” Tina asked as they started back down the drive.
He nodded.
“There are three clubs here and two bars where vampires and fountains go that aren’tspecificallyfae. We’ll go to two of those tonight and the rest tomorrow, and see how many phone numbers we turn up with. At twenty, we start making calls and setting up a party at the house.”
“This is detective work,” Tina said. “Going to bars and hosting parties.”
“Always has been, actually,” Tell said.
She grinned and put her head back against the headrest.
“You poor, overworked man,” she said, and he laughed.
“It’s not as simple as it sounds,” he said. “We are going places where vampires frequent. They’ll know that we’re there and we’ll know that they’re there, and that’s part of the point, but we don’twant it to get out thatweare there. I’ll be going by Oscar. I think you’re fine with Tina, because very few people know who you are, this far from home. Youcannotcall me Tell, you can’t tell anyone where we’re from, and you shouldn’t hint that this is anything other than an adventurous journey to the middle of the country just to see what’s there.” He looked over at her. “For the purpose of the time being, we will be… together. Vampires won’t care if we’re married or not, but a man and a woman traveling together… it makes things muchsimplerif we are comfortably together and not interested in any other liaisons.”
Tina nodded slowly.
“I’ve got no problem with that,” she said. “As long as you don’t expect me to bedemonstrativeabout it.”
He smiled.
“I hardly expect that will be an issue. There’s no expectation of fidelity in the context of fountains, and at places like this, they won’t expect us to be romanticallyattachedso much as politically aligned. If you were inappropriately demonstrative toward me at the wrong moment, we would basically write off the whole enterprise and go home again, because we’d drawmuchtoo much attention.”
“No pressure, then,” she said.
He glanced at her again.
“It’s not going to be simple or predictable,” he said. “You should anticipate that. We are selling ourselves as tourists of a style that you have neveractuallybeen, nor would you everbe. You would go to a place with intentions and an itinerary, even as a vampire. These are individuals who are simply here for a new angle on self-indulgence, the ones that we want the vampire community to believe we are, until I start getting a better idea where Isabella might be.”
“Do we ever get to the point that we justask?” Tina asked, and he shook his head.
“No. Expressing specific interest flags us as… involved in something, no matter what it might be, and it starts to ring the wrong bells, draw the wrong attention. If we do thisperfectly, she’ll figure out who I am and what I’m here for before we ever get the first piece of information about her and her enterprise, and she’ll come to us.”
