Page 29 of Tell Me Why
“Because she’d kill Andrew before he ever got close enough to deliver it,” Tell said. “Isabella won’t kill me.”
“But what haveIgot to do with anything?” Tina asked, and Tell shook his head.
“I let myself get somewhat distracted with the difficulty of finding her, and I haven’t come to any satisfying theories ofwhyyet,” he said. “And in part, I am resigned that this is as it was always going to be, that Keon intentionally did not give me enough information to find those answers. But Isabella will have them, and… we need to be ready for things to go in a large number of unexpected directions, from there.”
Tina sat down at a bar stool and sipped her coffee some more.
“I will never complain out loud that I am bored with you,” she said. “Have you thought about going straight to Daryll through his businesses, rather than playing this game-of-parties?”
“Not until I’ve spoken to Isabella,” he said, shaking his head. “It could be he’s the mark.”
“And you’re onherside in all of this,” Tina said. “Unless you find out something different?”
He considered that for a long time before he finally answered.
“She helped me,” he said. “And she’s been sympathetic, since. Hunter once suggested that she’d baited me into a trap of fealty to Keon, that it was basically a medieval game of good-cop-bad-cop, but I don’t believe that. She’s been many things, in the time that I’ve known her, but if you asked me who I trusted more than her, blindfolded and in the dark, that’s a short list of names.”
“Okay,” Tina said. “Then I do, too.”
He looked at her through his eyebrows, then went to put the mug in the sink and turned to look at her again.
“I’ve asked you, before, to take an adversarial position to me, just to make sure that I’m not missing important things with my presuppositions. But, here, I appreciate it. We need to becautious, assume as little as possible, but until Isabella proves otherwise, she’s the closest thing we have to a friend.”
“Was there something between you?” Tina asked, and he shook his head.
“No. Never was. That’s true, no matter how you ask it.”
“And I’m not her replacement?” Tina asked. She wasn’t certain where the thought came from, but it had been kind of lingering just outside of her direct thoughts for a while, when she finally asked out loud. He shook his head.
“Hadn’t thought about her in thirty years or more, when I met you,” he said. “I’ll allow that it’s uncanny, how consistent my taste in… a certain kind of woman is, but you and she have nothing to do with each other but coincidence and whatever subconscious patterning I have for my friends.”
Tina nodded.
“Okay. Then… more bars.”
He nodded.
“We dropped fountains from back home here. They didn’t know who we were, but they do talk to each other, even where they don’t gossip to the vampires. They saw my train cars, and they’ll be… creating a stir for whatever extravagant events we might hold, here. By tonight, we might start getting fountains approaching us because they recognize us for who and what we are and know that there’s a chance that we are the unnamed out-of-town vampires.”
“And do we let that happen?” Tina asked, and Tell nodded.
“We want them here. We want to create enough of a ripple in the social environment that Isabella finds it and figures it out, which is not an insubstantial effort.”
“All right,” Tina said.
Tell still looked preoccupied, but they finished their little vampiric breakfast and left, going to a bar that was much more familiar to Tina, by culture, and then another one that was allfunny blue and green lights and girls in fluffy costumes and boots. It was at the latter that they met a full table of fountains with their three sponsoring vampires, and they spent four hours drinking and letting the fountains do the work of bringing people in to meet Tell - Oscar - and Tina. The vampires were older and less needy than the ones from the previous night, and at the same time more socially demonstrative, buying drinks for everyone and calling for music, flirting with the waitresses and laughing too loud.
Tell seemed relaxed and in his element, even as the blue lights strobed unnaturally on his face and the waitresses tried to tickle him with their feather tops. Tina felt prickly and defensive, as a girlfriend character, and she glared when the waitresses all got up on top of the tables to dance to a particular song, three of them coming to dance on the large table the vampires shared, flipping their skirts around and pretending to be scandalous.
Real Tina actually found it quite tacky, but the rest of the table - save reservedOscar- loved it, and the vampire man, Andromedus, handed out excessive tips as the waitresses used the seat of his chair to climb back down again.
At the end of the night, Tell stood and murmured into a fountain’s ear, then took her by two fingers and led her away toward a back hallway where the restrooms were.
“You must be famished,” Andromedus said to Tina. “Please, take your pick. A courtesy for a new friend.”
In truth, the previous day’s sunlight had bleached her clean, and shewasprecisely famished, but she remembered what Tell had said and shook her head.
“Not interested,” she said simply, choosing to forgo a polite token or an explanation.
