Page 13 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

He needed Tina, strangely enough, to keep things straight and do the rest of the legwork as Tell cracked open the harder pieces of work, figuring out the financial relationships that pointed at larger centers of industry, the way that money came and went from buyers and distinguishing suppliers from buyers and the logistics that connected each of them to the processing facility.

He would set Tina to work on a location and she would come back with video footage and a list of names and faces. He could do all of that, but she saved him so much time, doing it.

He was on his own, and he hadn’t done this on his own for long enough that it felt like re-learning it.

He missed the moments when they would both look up from what they were doing and discuss it, spawning a new host of ideas and motivation to keep after it.

He poignantly didn’t like not being in control of what happened next, that he wasn’t actually the one driving and deciding the things that would matter when it came to whether or not Tina survived.

In a long life full of powerful people, it might make sense to think that you would eventually get over the instinct to try to control all of it, but Tell never had.

Neither had any of the other vampires he’d ever known, in point of fact, which was probably why they didn’t get along as consistently as they did.

The apartment was quiet, but it was better than Daryll’s house, because he didn’t have to look over his shoulder, here, and worry about who was going to see the wrong name on the wrong screen and figure out what he was up to.

He went to Daryll’s house at least once a night, following up with all of the pretend work that he was doing there, but he and Daryll had a grand fight one night, properly shouting at each other from the entryway, to give Tell an excuse to disengage from the lab.

Daryll thought that he was coordinating spies from the apartment. Layer upon layer of pretend work.

It wouldn’t last much longer.

He had to get this done, or else… he just didn’t care anymore. Tina was running out of days, and if it got so late…

No.

No, he kept threatening that, but he didn’t actually believe it.

He threatened that he would just walk away, go back home, if this took so long that there wasn’t any hope anymore. Hide himself away in the penthouse and become even more sullen than he’d been before, turn everyone away and just wait for time to callous over everything and let it stop hurting.

Could take years.

What did he care?

He didn’t have anything waiting for him at the far side.

Other times, he threatened to go Moldovia on all of them, throw himself at the place with the full-minded intention of dying at it, just taking down as many people along the way as he could.

The fact that he had walked away from the stuff that had happened at Moldovia was… well, there was more to it than most people thought, but it was still a matter of pure, unadulterated luck.

He wouldn’t have luck like that again, so it would actually be a suicide mission, but what did he care? He didn’t have anything waiting for him at the far side.

And then there were the nights that he had his mind straight and steady and he knew that the path he was on was the right one, that he was managing the possibilities as best as he could.

If Tina didn’t make it, he would grieve her as he had grieved all of his friends when they had died, and he would go on as he always had.

He could look back at Moldovia and understand things that he hadn’t been able to understand, back then. And while the feelings remained as impassioned as they had ever been, he did know what the other side looked like, and he knew that he was waiting for himself at the far side of all things.

He’d lost decades of himself to the black hole of not caring, lost that man in so many different ways he couldn’t count them all, but he’d always found himself waiting at the other side, and as much as Tina did mean to him, he wasn’t going to lose himself again.

Threats be damned, he wasn’t going to do it.

He mapped, he documented, he stayed up past sunrise, on the top floor of an apartment building in Nashville, Tennessee, where the live sunlight went streaking past him and he just ignored it.

Every single day mattered.

Twelve days.

Vampires were pale.

That was their nature.

But Tell’s complexion had gone from pale to gray over the past week, regardless of how often he fed. The sun was bleaching it out of him, quite literally, but he was done.

He went downstairs to let the driver take him to Daryll’s house, five hired-for-violence vampires in the car with him and ahead of him, as they had been every day since Perceval’s abduction.

How quaint that seemed, looking back.

Tell went into the house and back to Daryll’s office, but no one was there. There was to be a party, tonight, and the house was alive with activity, because business must go on, even where life doesn’t.

Leonard looked up as Tell went into the front room where the drones lived, and Tell jerked his chin at the man.

“Where’s Crissy?” he asked.

“Out back, patio,” Leonard answered, standing to walk out with him.

Tell wanted to get rid of him, but didn’t immediately find a good way to do it.

Isabella was giving direction to a fleet of caterers and decorators. Tell would have normally waited to speak to her at opportunity, but he was too tired for that level of tact.

“I have it,” he said quietly to her from behind, and she turned to look at him. He nodded, and she shooed everyone away.

She stared him in the eye, and he waited.

“It’s done?” she asked, and he nodded.

Nine of them, varying degrees of power and success in the industry, but a complete listing of everyone he thought was doing a real trade in it.

Where they lived, where they worked, where they kept the bulk of their trusted officers, and where their processing facilities were.

Many of them had regional processing, because it made it easier to scale supply to demand.

Everything was written on a piece of legal paper which was tucked in against his wrist.

Literally up his sleeve, because he didn’t want it to get away from him unwittingly.

She looked around, then nodded once.

“Well,” she said. “Come.”

She set off along the back lawn into the darkness, and Tell followed, turning his face slightly away from the house as they went, trying to keep the light off his skin.

He was in a lightweight black suit, tonight, and the dark of his hair would keep dispassionate eyes from noticing movement, so long as his skin wasn’t visible.

There were footsteps behind them.

Tell turned, prepared to dismantle whoever was following, the way he had the night at the oak tree, but Isabella caught his elbow.

“No,” she said as Leonard caught up with them.

“What?” Tell asked, and she shook her head.

“Not here,” she said. “He comes with us.”

He frowned, trying to figure out what her play, here, was. A lesser vampire, he would wonder if she’d understood him correctly at all, but not Isabella.

She knew exactly what Tell was here trying to tell her, and she was… bringing along one of Silix’s acolytes.

Hostage?

Silix wasn’t known for his sentiment in the best of times, and in the midst of a power war, he’d sacrifice… well, anything to make sure that he won.

Torture?

That was plausible, the idea that Isabella would use someone like Leonard to verify Tell’s information, but this was the simplest of the data sets that Tell was providing; he literally already knew where the processing facility was.

Could draw it from memory at request.

And Leonard appeared to be volunteering, no less.

No, Tell had no immediate ideas why Leonard was following them and Isabella approved, but he was all in at this point and he went along with it. He could deal with Leonard later almost as easily as he could deal with him now.

They went down toward the garage, when she turned abruptly right and away from the hill and the facility. She came to a camouflage tarp and pulled it off of a small black sedan, getting in.

Tell looked across the car at Leonard, who ducked and got in without comment.

Still no clue.

Tell got in the front seat next to Isabella, checking to ensure that Leonard didn’t have any obvious weapons with him in the back, and she started the engine, rolling slowly across the grass and then picking up speed as the tires hit gravel.

“He’s a triple agent,” Isabella said. “He’s been working for me for six weeks, now, with a promise that if he helped me finish this, I would take him back to my father’s court with me.”

Tell stared out the windshield.

“You knew he worked for Silix,” Tell said.

“I did,” Isabella said.

“And you knew he was going to call in the strike on the house,” he said.

“Calculated risk,” Isabella said. “I told him to do it.”

Tell felt cold.

Colder than normal, even.

He hadn’t seen it at all.

“I tried to save her,” Isabella said. “If he could get her off the premises under the colors of recruiting her for Silix, at least they wouldn’t take her.”

“I misunderstood her completely,” Leonard said. “I never had a chance, did I?”

Tell looked back at him.

“You knew who I was,” he said, and Leonard nodded.

“What I told her was true. We’ve met before, but I was truly nobody, back then.”

Tell narrowed his eyes.

“And you thought you could turn her against me by trying to make her a part of the institution,” he said

“Like I said, I misunderstood her. I didn’t realize that you were working with Her Lady.”

Tell looked sideways at Isabella, who remained stoic.

“I didn’t want the two of you tipping off anyone that I had support here,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about him because I wasn’t certain I could rely on him until I actually did.”

“Calling in Silix to take Tina,” Tell said, and Isabella shrugged.

“He did his job. I’ll live up to my promise.”

“Where are we going?” Tell asked.