Page 10 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

She was in roaring, searing pain. It would have been writhing pain, but she couldn’t writhe. She was pinned down and just… waiting. It was the certainty that it would end that kept her from despair, but even that wasn’t much comfort through the moments of the day.

Finally, minute by minute, she felt the sun begin to set, felt the pressure and the pain ease off, and she forced herself up off of the floor, just to own the civility of humanity rather than the animal pain.

Tell was still gone.

She didn’t expect she would have missed him, even in the midst of everything, but the room was yet dark and there had been this vague hope that she had managed to fail to notice the door opening or Tell being brought back in.

The room was empty, by scent and by sound.

He’d said he was coming back.

He’d said he was coming back .

But he wasn’t here.

She was alone.

The lights came on and the door opened.

She nearly sprang at the man who came in.

One cup.

He set it down out at the edge of her range of motion as she snarled at him from against the wall.

“Won’t be much longer, now,” he said, looking her up and down, then nodding and leaving.

Tina crawled out to get it, sniffing it once, then settling back down against the wall with the cup in her lap.

She’d never been so hungry.

Texas.

Tell had hated Texas before he’d ever set foot there, and he hated it more, now.

He was far enough from the facility that he couldn’t see it anymore, but that was as far as he’d gotten before the sun had finally gotten so intense that he had to find shelter.

He could move through the first few hours of the day, under normal circumstances, but the sun was intense, here. He only got a few hours where he was functional, then he had to settle in and wait.

Tell wasn’t a warrior. He was barely even a fighter.

The reputation he had in certain circles was… deserved, but imprecise.

He was a snake.

Dangerous, angry, and difficult to lay hold of.

He would fight them again, if they managed to find him, and maybe they would take him and maybe they wouldn’t, but he’d gotten himself out.

The problem was that there was no way he could get Tina out, as well.

She didn’t have the strength and the power to do what he did, nor the reaction time necessary to defend herself from the weapons they had to bring to bear. Maybe he would have gone another hour before reaching his limit, if not for the dart they had managed to hit him with.

The facility was both intended to keep vampires in, as commodity stock, but also to keep attackers out, because finished vampire parts were too valuable to leave in an undefended warehouse.

Tell could slip out with speed and cunning and a good lot of luck, but he couldn’t break in, couldn’t make his way around and through the place to find Tina and get her out as well.

He’d known that the moment he’d hit the door and kept going.

Known that Tina’s only hope was his finishing the job for Keon and Keon sweeping through in a surge of retributive violence with Tell at its back, hoping to find her in the key moment between the two forces before they crushed her.

He hadn’t looked back.

It was surprising, still, how much it hurt him, but he hadn’t looked back.

He had a job to finish.

She never did throw it.

Wanted to.

But the pain from the sun all night… she couldn’t bear it again. She needed to feed, and she could tell by smell that this was viable blood. It would help.

And even as she knew that it was laced with things she couldn’t identify, she couldn’t put it away from herself.

She sipped it and she sipped it and by the end of the night, Tell still wasn’t back, and the cup was empty.

She was braced hard for the day, fearful of it, but if anything, it was worse than the day before.

It took Tell two days to make his way back to Nashville.

There was a lot of scrambling around that happened, undignified things that he wouldn’t recall in detail ever again, but he made it, first to the apartment, where he cleaned and dressed, regaining his normal appearance as best he could without a pair of solid feeds, then he went and stole a car that he used to drive himself out to Daryll’s house.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to find, at this point, and he was ready to fight or flee as required, but the house appeared peaceful enough, normal enough; they’d replaced the broken windows and the front door was new. Someone was in charge here and asserting order.

He sat in the driveway, watching for a moment, calculating, then the front door opened and Isabella looked out at him from the gold frame of indoor light.

Tell sighed, resigned, and got out of the car.

“You’ll want to have someone take that back where I got it,” he said as he approached. “Or disappear it entirely.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Isabella answered. “You’re alive.”

“Of course I’m alive,” Tell said. “Takes longer to make meat of me than that. How did things resolve, here?”

“Badly,” Isabella said, turning aside to let him past. “Daryll knows you’re here and he wants to talk to you.”

Tell nodded. It was hardly a surprise. It was a big part of why he’d gone to get dressed before he came here. Appearance had a lot to do with finding an upper hand in power struggles like the one between him and Daryll.

The interior of the house was less-recovered than the exterior. The furniture, what there was, showed signs of the fight that had taken place here, room by room, over the course of two and a half days.

There had been werewolves involved on both sides, and it still smelled of dog, too.

It was hard for vampires to get werewolves to do what they wanted them to, but if the directive was to go kill other vampires, there was often a dollar amount that would make that work out.

Room by room.

Someone had gone through and spackled the bullet holes in the walls, but the floor still had the pock-marks that would be more difficult to patch, and Tell suspected that Isabella would just bring in a discreet contractor to replace them wholesale.

Daryll’s office had been one of the last holdouts, when Tell had gone down, and it, too, had a new door on it. Beefier than the last one.

Isabella opened it and looked across at Daryll at his desk, then let Tell in and closed the door back with a very solid thunk as it slotted into the frame.

She did not come in.

That was not a particularly good sign.

Tell went to sit in one of the chairs, taking in the office.

They’d breeched it. The desk had survived, but nothing else of the prized furnishing in here was the same. There was a barstool in one corner; that was how dire things had gotten for seating in the aftermath of the attack.

“You survived,” Daryll said.

“I could say the same to you,” Tell answered.

“Very little thanks to you,” Daryll said.

“I’m not a mercenary,” Tell said. “Never represented myself as one.”

“After all the big bad stories about you,” Daryll said. “You cowered and fled.”

Tell looked Daryll in the face without moving.

“I’m bored with the posturing,” he said.

“Your house nearly fell because you overestimated your ability to contain information and overestimated your standing within the community. I could have just… left… but I came back because I want to see what you’re going to do about it.

Are you going to learn from it and advance, or are you going to lash out and beclown yourself while they make advances at your expense? ”

“Says the one who ran away,” Daryll sneered.

“Daryll, they took me,” Tell said, exasperated. “I broke out and I came back . Are we going to punish them or are you going to whine and play the victim? Are you ready to actually act like you belong with these people?”

Baiting Daryll was just too easy.

Maybe he should have been playing the game more carefully, but Tell had a heat of anger in him that was uncharacteristically difficult to control, and kicking around Daryll felt like it might help.

“They came because of you,” Daryll said. “Because you came waltzing in here and changed everything.”

Tell lifted one eyebrow.

“It’s like you can’t even see the wall coming,” he said.

“If you want power and if you want control , if you want stature , you have to take risks that are going to bring you above everyone else. I presumed that you had enough awareness of what your enemies were doing that you would see something like this coming , but apparently I was wrong and you need more hand-holding.”

“You are nothing ,” Daryll said. “Some… man … off on his own, can’t do nothing on his own. How dare you walk into my house and think you can talk to me like that?”

“I find that having doors that aren’t broken in does a lot in keeping out that type,” Tell said. “I reiterate. What are you going to do about it? Are you ready to finally get serious about this?”

“Ought to kill you for talking to me like that,” Daryll said. “Send you off with my boys and smile that I’m never going to see you again.”

Tell sighed and stood.

“This was supposed to be an entertainment,” he said. “They took Tina. This has cost me more than you could ever reimburse. And now you’re a laughingstock for all of the people that I was supposed to go sell to, once we got the product stabilized and ready. Did Aleksander and Henning even survive?”

“Went back to work tonight,” Daryll said. “They’re going to respect me.”

Tell shrugged.

“Saying it extra loud doesn’t make it any more likely,” he said.

“If you want respect, you have to demand it in a way that they don’t have a choice.

You have to do things they can’t stop, be someone that they can’t avoid.

” Tell looked around the office. “I see a man cowering in a hole. I’m going home. ”

“You can’t just walk out,” Daryll said. “We had an agreement.”

Tell went to put his hand on the doorknob, a little late. He’d expected Daryll to take longer than that to actually protest to his leaving.