Page 11 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

“Are you ready to be serious?” Tell asked, looking over his shoulder. “Actually come at this as not just a business, but as an enterprise ?”

“I want revenge,” Daryll said. “They came into my house, took my people, killed some of them. I want them to regret it forever.”

Tell lifted his chin.

“Are you ready to be something new, then?” he asked. “I can show you how to do it, but you have to be willing . There’s no way I can help you if all you want from me is a little bit of technical knowledge and my social contacts.”

Daryll hesitated.

“I’ve come from nothing more than once,” he said. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t like you.”

“Does a king have to like his general?” Tell asked. “You just have to acknowledge that I’m the best option you’ve got and work with me. I’m not asking you to wear my friendship bracelet.”

“What’s that?” Daryll asked, and Tell shook his head.

“I’m going to go get my belongings from the apartment,” he said, pulling the door open. “You have that long to tell me whether you intend to get serious.”

“Wait,” Daryll said. “Wait. I’m ready.”

Tell nodded and closed the door.

“Good,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

The drink helped some.

Not enough.

Not nearly enough.

She needed a hard feed off of a healthy fountain, and even that wouldn’t be enough, but the drinks…

After two days of them, they came and took her out of the room.

Two vampires, early evening while Tina was still delirious with sun.

She didn’t remember much of what happened, but it was further into the building with slightly less sun exposure, and that was good.

Needles and creams and something they’d force-fed her.

She didn’t think that vampires actually digested much of what they ate, but it was possible for them to get drunk off of just hard liquor, so there was some absorbance going on.

She was broken and helpless.

She was trying to make herself believe that it was a ploy, something that she was allowing to happen to convince them that they didn’t have to work so hard to contain her, but she feared that it was the truth, and that when her moment came, she was going to be too weak and too vacant to act on it, or perhaps even notice it.

She was afraid.

Tell had said that he would be back.

Maybe that would be the thing that finally fixed it. Maybe she didn’t have to find her moment because he would be back and… maybe he would just walk her out that door.

She was tired for a sleep that was never going to come.

Time slipped.

“I need a computer,” Tell said. “A good one, brand new. One that none of you or your people have touched before.”

“For what?” Daryll asked, picking up his glass of bourbon and sipping at it. Amazing how quickly the man got his bravado back.

“I need to be able to do research on the people who are here and who they might be working for without them realizing that I’m doing it, and that means making sure that none of them are able to put tracking software onto the computer I’m using.”

Daryll wrinkled his nose.

“All just a little too high-tech for my taste,” he said. “I prefer to look a man in the eye, shake his hand, sign the paper, then stab him in the back, if you know what I mean.”

“I do know what you mean,” Tell said. “But being an absolute Luddite is no excuse for failure. If you know what I mean.”

Daryll grunted and shifted in his seat.

“Why does it matter to you, who goes with who?” he asked.

“You have spies here,” Tell said. “That doesn’t bother you?”

Daryll crossed his arms, pursing his lips dramatically for a moment.

“I think you and I are seeing things differently,” he said. “Show me a vampire who doesn’t have all kinds of mixed allegiances, and I’ll show you one who isn’t worth the cost of feeding.”

“Daryll,” Tell said. “That was actually insightful.”

“Oh, high praise from Caesar,” Daryll mocked.

“Do you have spies with them ?” Tell asked.

“Not my way,” Daryll said. Tell knew for a fact that the man was born and raised in Bucharest, but he sounded every inch like he had family ties to the Hatfield clan.

If Tell were the type to be impressed by such things, he would have been.

“I don’t care what they’re up to. Just what I’m doing and that I’m doing it better than they are. ”

Tell closed his eyes with put-on dismay and sighed at Daryll.

“Do you think that maybe knowing that they were about to launch an attack on the house, here, would have been useful?”

“Maybe,” Daryll said without actually agreeing with him at all. “But then I’ve got to manage spies and think about whose side they’re actually on , and…” He shrugged. “I’m good at business . That’s what I’m doing here.”

In point of fact, Daryll was not good at business, but he had enough people who had simultaneously decided to use him as rube that he was making a good showing of it, to the point that Tell had to wonder if there wasn’t some kind of backwards truth to it.

Isabella came in and closed the door behind her.

“They all want to know whether or not we’re shutting down,” she said, glancing at Tell and then sitting down in the other chair next to him.

Tonight, they matched.

Tell still wasn’t sure what the arrangement between Isabella and Daryll was, if she was playing advisor or wife or both, but she was putting a lot of time into getting the house back into functional order again, because big, lavish parties were central to Daryll’s business strategy.

“No,” Daryll said. “Going ahead with all of it, and no one is going to stop me.”

“They’re leaving,” Isabella said. “They don’t say anything about it, but one at a time, they’re leaving because they don’t think we can hold the house against another attack.”

“Who’s gone?” Tell asked quietly, and Isabella shrugged.

“Vern and Peter and Grant, today,” she said. “More yesterday.”

Tell nodded.

The spies would leave in clusters, as their masters decided that Daryll was no longer interesting, and the ones who weren’t spies at all would leave because they didn’t see any profit in being here, any longer, and if Tell could figure out which were which…

it was just another natural sorting mechanism to work with.

He was getting close.

He needed to go look for common threads among the vampires that he knew were together, see if he could trace them back to a common location or relationships that were shared to point him at the ring-masters running them, and then he could start looking for the places where those men - and potentially women - were running their businesses.

He was getting close.

He was running out of days , because once he delivered that information to Isabella, it had to go back to Keon, who would have to organize the attacks on the facilities, and depending on how motivated he was, Tell’s window for getting Tina back may have been closed without having ever opened, but the sense of time pressure was inexorable, and Daryll was getting fat and happy with his vision of the future, again, regardless of how fast Tell was trying to push him into more dynamic action.

“Leonard came back, tonight,” Isabella said as an afterthought.

Tell tried not to react to that, but he wondered what it meant.

Leonard had been outside with Tina and would have been one of the first taken.

“Oscar, here, thinks that I ought to be running an army of spies ,” Daryll mocked, and Isabella turned her elegant head to look at him.

“Of course you ought to,” she said. “You can’t know what oversights and missed ideas you have until you see what everyone else is doing.”

“You really think I ought to be a spymaster?” Daryll said, and Isabella shook her head.

“No, you’re much too invested in the business as it’s running, right now. I think Oscar should do it.”

Tell lifted his head.

Just nothing about it, he couldn’t prevent it.

“What?” he asked.

Isabella nodded.

“We all agree that this is within his skillset, do we not?” she asked.

Daryll frowned dramatically, then shrugged.

“I suppose so,” he said. He looked at Tell. “You think you can get it set up?”

Tell blinked at Isabella, who raised her eyebrows.

“Yes,” Tell said. “I just need to know where I’m sending them and to who.”

The corners of her mouth turned up.

Bingo.

Tell went back to the apartment by himself. He begged off as needing to go find a feed and get himself situated again, but the truth was that he was exhausted and needed to sit and actually think in a cool quiet by himself for a time before he attempted to do anything else.

Daryll had handed over to them a list of every player in the trade.

And their headquarters, as far as he was aware.

He didn’t know where production was happening - and that would be part of what Tell needed to get, but it was a massive step in the right direction.

Just massive.

Somehow, Isabella hadn’t been able to get this information out of Daryll before now, and now Daryll just wrote it all down and handed it to Tell.

The man was shaken.

More than even Tell would have read off of him.

Isabella had known, and she’d pounced. She’d known that Daryll would view himself as a terrible spymaster, and he wouldn’t let her dirty her hands at it, either, but Tell?

Tell was an underworld creature, as far as Daryll was concerned, and sneaky enough that spy work just seemed like a natural fit.

In fairness, it was entirely accurate, just not the way Daryll was going to anticipate.

Tell sat in the kitchen with a cup of yogurt between his hands, just staring.

There were a thousand possible paths and they shifted before him like a rug made of snakes. By the end of today, he would pluck one of them and that would be his choice, but for now, he let all of them just exist .

There was a tapping noise, and Tell frowned, shifting and trying to figure out what he had just heard.

It repeated.

It was.

It was the window.

He walked across the living room and looked out to find Isabella.

Hanging from the upper sill of the window.

Tell tipped his head to the side to look at her, and she glowered at him.