Page 1 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

There was a clipboard.

An honest-to-goodness clipboard.

And Tina got to follow Tell around and take notes on what he said, then point at other vampires and tell them what to do while he moved on.

If she could put aside the actual work they were doing, it was a lot of fun.

He had a sort of mania to him, all of the details that he wanted to track and all of the information he expected her to retain, and more than once she suspected that he’d been lying to her that this was something that either had never been done before or that everyone knew how to do it.

He knew too much, had too much background in what he expected to happen, and at the same time, the questions that he was trying to answer were interesting and they were going to take work to go after.

As he did more and more things, there in the lab, he would send Tina out to get things, down in the warehouse or finding someone who was supposed to know how to get it, and people started to take an interest in what he was doing, coming to lean inside the doorway and watch them work, or asking a few poignant questions about what he intended to try.

With these, Tell was a masterclass in giving them just enough information to know that he was doing something important , but without any clear clues on what .

He was cagey in a sense that he knew he needed to keep the secret, but openhanded as he tried to forge alliances and make people want to be around.

He wasn’t smiley and friendly. That would have been too transparent and too suspicious, but he had a way of suddenly looking someone in the face and saying something cryptic and just a tiny bit familiar that made them think that he thought they were clever and liked .

“You do that to me,” Tina said, one day as they were getting ready to leave the apartment.

“Mmm?” he asked. “We should make sure that you feed today. Been long enough that you’ve got to be feeling it, by now.”

She was. But he wasn’t going to squirrel out of it that easily.

“Suddenly being familiar and direct,” she said. “Like you see me and you know that there’s something important about me.”

He swung his head around the corner to look at her as she stood by the door.

“Do you think I’m deceiving you?” he asked.

“ Could you be?” Tina countered. “And would I ever know about it?”

“Slippery questions,” he said, closing the refrigerator and coming to where she could see him. “Questions of trust. They come up when you realize that everyone around you is working against you, or at least not with you. Dangerous questions.”

“You could lie to me,” Tina said, and he nodded.

“I could. Valid questions as to what purpose would have, if I’d been deceiving you this entire time. It’s a very long con, gaining your trust, and to what end? But, yes. It’s just a lever, built in and largely undefended.”

“Even for vampires,” Tina said.

“Sometimes especially for vampires,” Tell said.

“We rely on relationships to survive, quite literally. The ability to make people like us. Want us. They forget that I’m not a fountain, that they’re supposed to be pulling me, rather than me pulling them, but it’s the same string, the same lever.

If it makes you feel better, I can tell you what I’m going to do next.

I’m going to ask them for private favors, things that I think they can do that no one else can or will, things that expose me, just slightly, hint at what I’m up to, and make them think that I’m trusting them.

They’ll report back to their guys that I’m for sale, that they can turn me into an asset who will eventually turn over whatever it is I’m doing for them to use.

Meanwhile, the cozy pretend friendships Daryll has with his competitors will turn more and more sour as they think he’s getting an advantage against them through me.

The bigger a scene we create, the more of them we’re going to draw in. ”

“Hunter knows how to do this?” Tina asked, and Tell nodded.

“Perfected it at court over two hundred years,” he said. “Uses a different set of tools. He plays a fool, sometimes, or the cad, but just as effectively.”

“And Daryll can’t see it at a thousand yards?” Tina asked, and Tell snorted.

“There are people who see and adapt and win, and ones who just consistently lose. Likely Isabella knows some of what I’m doing, but she does her part differently, as well. She is a princess down to her very toes, and… that works a different way, again.”

“Like props in a story,” Tina said.

“There’s a reason all the stories have them,” Tell said. “Are you ready?”

“I suppose so,” Tina said. “Am I going to be like that? Fake personality built around what gets me what I want?”

“You think I’m fake?” Tell asked, playing at insulted.

“Of course I am. I lost track of my actual personality years ago. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.

I just know that I see the same strategies and tactics in humans every day.

Just less evolved. I think that… with some key changes around how you need to be vampiric to survive…

it’s likely that being a vampire just sets loose who you already were to go do it forever.

The worst of it grows the easiest, but it’s all there. ”

“That’s… not really reassuring,” Tina said, and he shrugged.

“They don’t ask us what we want to be when we grow up,” he said. “Used to be, you just assumed, based on who your dad was. Not that far off, for us.”

“I’m going to turn out just like you?” Tina teased and he snorted, pushing the button for the elevator.

“Whatever we share in common, it was there before you met me,” he said. “I take no credit or blame for any of it.”

Tina laughed, then he put his arm out, across her body, pushing her back and slightly behind him.

Tina jostled out of the way of his arm, glowering at him for a moment then closing her eyes to focus on what she could hear and smell.

The slight shift of a foot on the floor of the elevator as it came up to them.

She opened her eyes.

Tina went through what they’d been talking about, trying to remember if any of it had been something that gave away important secrets, but she didn’t think it had.

The doors opened, and a man with a thick black beard and shaved head lifted his face to look at them.

“Daryll wants to talk to you,” he said.

“Funny thing,” Tell said, not moving. “That’s where we would have gone, anyway. I don’t know you.”

The man smiled mirthlessly.

“The thing about a man like you is that you never know what you’re going to get up to on your way to where you’re supposed to be,” he said. “So I’m here to make sure that you come directly .”

“We have men downstairs who are assigned to drive us,” Tell said. “You aren’t one of them.”

“No, I’m more important,” he said. “And I’ve given them the day off.”

Tell sighed.

“If you’re going to lie, you need to come up with a lie that’s at least superficially plausible,” he said, sounding tired.

“Otherwise, just use the threat. You think that you can beat me. Maybe you can and maybe you can’t.

More importantly, you think that you can hurt her more than I’m willing to stomach before I’d be able to stop you.

There, I suspect you’re right. Now. Without knowing where it is you intend us to actually go , I can’t make a reasoned decision whether to fight you, flee by any possible means, or simply comply.

Which means that you’re going to find that I fight you, one way or another. Are your terms truly so dire?”

Tina was the hostage.

Again.

Great.

The shaved man narrowed his eyes once at her, then looked at Tell.

“I’m here representing a man who has interest in your skills,” he said. “And he’d like to discuss the terms under which you would transfer them from Daryll to him.”

Tell heaved an exaggerated, exasperated sigh.

“See?” he asked. “You could have started from there, and we would have gone into a business conversation on much better footing. Was that so hard?”

The man stepped to the side, indicating that they ought to join him on the elevator.

“Are you going to give me any cover for dealing with Daryll?” Tell asked as he moved onto the elevator, boxing subtly to keep Tina behind him and his own body between her and the bearded man.

“You’ll think of something,” the man said.

“I assume the two men downstairs aren’t dead ,” Tell said. “If you’ve killed them, you’ve made this entire thing much more difficult.”

“Not dead,” the man said. “Just not going to be doing anything about it, for a while.”

The lack of anything with which he said it was a bit sickening.

“I have research and contacts at the building that I need to be able to recover,” Tell said. “If you burn my bridge back in hopes that it makes me more likely to work for your master, you’ve made a miscalculation.”

“I just follow orders,” the man said.

“Ah, the mindless type,” Tell said. “I admire that. Certainly a top end to what you can do with your life, but never having to think? I can’t begin to imagine what that would be like.”

The man grunted, a settling noise, and they waited for the elevator doors to open.

“Car’s outside,” the man said, stepping out of the liftbox and standing to block them from going straight toward the lobby. “You run, I’ll get a knife through her ribs before she hits the door, and then she won’t be walking, much less running.”

Tina could run with a knife wound. Heck, she could climb with multiple gunshot wounds. It implied something, and she was pretty certain that Tell saw it.

“I’m telling you that treating this like a simple business transaction is going to get you much more of what you want,” Tell said, sounding bored. “Threats just make me that much less likely to want to work with you and your master.”

“Except that he isn’t the thinky-thinky type,” Tina said, and the man’s head twitched.

She was pretty sure he was okay with Tell making fun of him, but he’d drawn the line at Tina teasing him. The corner of Tell’s mouth twitched up; permission.