It was both surprising and unsurprising that he took her seriously. She couldn't help but smile a little, and she nodded. “Yeah, I'm definitely serious. I want to help you guys out, especially since you've been so short-handed recently. I'm sure it'll be a struggle to get Brandon to take it seriously, but whatever, if you tell him rationally that I'm tough and a good shot, he won't be able to turn you down.” At least, that was what she told herself. She fully expected to be rebuffed.
The way he put that made her feel like impressing her was what was important to him. She couldn't help but break out into a grin. “I'll keep that in mind,” she told him in a soft, somewhat coy voice. It was important to her, impressing him, so to know that impressing her was important to him, too? Yeah, it was a good feeling. “For what it's worth though, I'm thoroughly impressed. Not that that means I want you to stop trying or anything,” she added as an an afterthought with a little grin.
Was it her choice? “Kind of,” she explained. That was the long and the short of it. She'd told them that they could stay as long as they wanted to. She just didn't expect them to want to stay this long. She wasn't going to push them out—they were all the blood family she had right now, aside from EJ, after all—but calling it her choice was sort of a stretch. “I told them to stay as long as they wanted.” And they weren't really taking advantage.
Rae nodded her head. “David bought heavily into that stuff.” It was still hard, using his name in the past tense. But she knew, more or less, that he was gone and it was hopeless to pretend that he wasn't. “When we were on Liberty Island, we went on a ghost hunt to the top of the Statue of Liberty,” she said with a little chuckle, sadness evident in her tone. “He and I, since Elliot was busy in the infirmary. He knew pretty much whatever there was to know about ghosts and stuff... but I mostly just humored him. I believe in an afterlife, but... not, like... angels and demons and spirits and whatever,” she told him with a small smile.
“He is,” Rae nodded. After Elliot passed away, she and Kris spent some time together. Kris, aside from Evan anyway, was among Elliot's closest friends. “When he was working for that Marler guy, he didn't even know what he was doing, you know? They didn't let him look at anything. But to everyone else, all that matters is that he was there when it happened. They don't care about the reality of it.”
Raising an eyebrow, Rae shook her head no. “What woman in her right mind would want to not be spoiled?” she asked him in faux incredulity. “Besides, as far as I go, it's just part of the Rae Alghren friend experience,” she told him. “The people I care about get doted on endlessly. It's just how I work. So to you, I say get used to it.” Said without any sign of bite.
He asked her if she could get a headshot and she glanced over at the infected in the distance with a nod. “Yeah, definitely,” she told him, pulling the rifle from her back and waving him back into the building. “I'm going to take a shot from this window, and when it's out, we go back to the door and make a run for the truck.” A simple plan, and an efficient one.
The shot wasn't perfect, but it did the job. She hit the waker in the temple, and it wouldn't have died, had the impact not knocked it off the building it was standing on. But it had and the thing was dead, and that was what was important. Rae looked at him as she gathered the things that she'd picked up and nodded for the door. “Let's go!” she said.