Page 14 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

“I’m not going to call my father and ask him to mobilize to this scale based on a phone call,” she said. “We’re going to Italy.”

“Tonight,” Tell said.

“Would you prefer to wait for tomorrow?” Isabella asked.

“I haven’t left the continent in more than a hundred years,” Tell said.

“Doesn’t make much difference, then, today or tomorrow,” Isabella said with a quiet humor, and he glowered.

He looked back at Leonard.

“If she dies, I’m going to kill you,” he said.

“I’ll be under Keon’s protection,” Leonard said.

It was a vendetta spoken before the protection began, which meant that Tell had a window of opportunity to follow through on it, and everyone in the car knew it. Leonard was signaling that he was willing to go to Keon to plead for extra protection.

It would cost him, but he knew that Tell would do it, and his life was worth it to him.

“She is sturdy,” Isabella said. “It will take them the full time to prepare her.”

Tell didn’t answer.

He didn’t think that she was wrong, but he also suspected she wasn’t all that concerned about whatever bits of Tina he would be able to recover from the process.

It had been a long time since Isabella had looked at a human as the same as herself, even if she was the best of them, and a new vampire was perhaps less than a human to her.

This was about power, about control, about retaining her position at the very pointy top of the vampire social pyramid, and nothing was changing that.

Nothing ever did change.

So he didn’t try.

Tonight, he would get on a plane and fly to Italy.

That was enough for him to concern himself with for the time being.

When Hunter did one of these, he made a party plane out of it, if Tell’s understanding was correct. And he had no reason to believe otherwise.

The crossing with Isabella and Leonard was quiet.

They hadn’t taken the time or risked exposing themselves in ordering fountains.

Tell didn’t have the knowledge in his head to calculate, but he had guessed that they would stop for fuel somewhere on the coast, or in Portugal, but the world was indeed smaller than it had ever been before, and the plane that had been waiting for them at the Nashville airport took them directly to Rome.

It was mid-afternoon, by the time they arrived, and all of them had suffered badly on the back half of the flight, but no one complained out loud as Isabella’s force of will drove them forward without rest or respite.

A car met them at the airport and all three of them fed immediately, then lay quiet, as the car was designed, as they drove up out of Rome and to Keon’s estate about an hour away.

Castle Keon was up on top of a local promontory, and the little hamlet that supplied it trickled down toward the vineyards that Keon had put in more than two hundred years ago out of a sense of pretension and what might have been a fit of industry.

Why shouldn’t a vampire grow his own wine? It was Italy, after all.

Tell lay in the far back of the car, eyes closed, just maintaining the distance that he kept from reality during the depths of sunheat.

He’d long learned how to put himself away, to let the time slip past faster as it would, prepared as he had to be, but not actually there .

It wasn’t something you could teach, and he pitied Tina that she didn’t know how to do it, but he suspected she would learn faster than most.

She had a boldness to try that was more scarce than most people recognized.

They arrived at the estate, driving directly up into the castle, where staff saw to Isabella and escorted Tell and Leonard separately into the building. Tell was immediately more comfortable and finally able to think clearly enough to engage with what was going to happen next.

Keon would be at his rest through to dusk, but the days were stretched as far as they would go, here.

Keon wasn’t the type of man who would lay about simply because no one could tell him otherwise, and the house ran like the man ran himself.

There would be a fountain outside of the room, waiting for Tell to rise at dusk, and then there would be a formal meal for the guests and court who merited an invitation.

After that, Keon would begin the work of the day, usually audiences, and then seeing to the estate as much as was necessary.

He still wrote his correspondence by hand, last Tell knew, which absorbed a lot of his time, as well.

Tell anticipated that he would be slotted among the early audiences, but not invited to breakfast. He would be expected to keep to his room until Keon first saw him, after which he would be a guest of the house and allowed to wander as he saw fit, but knew there would be a servant assigned to follow him around under the pretense of seeing to his needs and keeping him out of trouble.

These weren’t rules that Tell normally observed strictly, but he would today, if only because he wanted to be certain that he was where Isabella could find him when Keon was ready to see him.

Because he wanted no more delay than was absolutely necessary in putting together Keon’s strike forces and getting them moved against the processing facilities.

The moment he was sure it was actually going to happen, he was going to find himself a plane and ship himself to Texas, by whatever means necessary.

He would be there when Keon’s forces set in on Silix’s facility, and if Tina was there to find and rescue, Tell would be there before either one side or the other executed her for being unprofitable.

He knew it, clearly in his mind, that Keon would not put in the effort to resuscitate the vampires who were started through the conversion process.

He might even take the ones who were close and get them finished somewhere else.

He wasn’t altruistic. As far as Keon was concerned, the word only served a purpose through contrast.

But the ones who had days left on their processing would just be culled. Possible that they would cull every vampire, every sentient creature , on the property, to limit the number of stories that could or would get out. Easiest to win a war of perception when you provided the only one.

Tell had to be there the minute they went in, and he would have to be sharp to be sure that he was there when they got to Tina, in case they culled as they went to prevent escapes and having to hunt down strays after they took the facility.

It was a breathtakingly thin margin, but it was what he had.

He’d known it the moment he’d left, and every minute since.

It was abnormal for him to sit in dread of anything. Life was long, very long, and if it wasn’t exciting from time to time, it really wasn’t even worth looking forward to. The risk was what made the potential of another century or two of existence even bearable.

But Tell knew what was going to happen next, and he lay on the bed in the opulent, underground stone room, one that smelled of wine and dust and roses, and he dreaded.

He had to get out.

He would be on a plane to Texas, perhaps as soon as tonight.

He was going to be there, and he wasn’t going to let them take him in here again.

He’d found his exit once and he would find it again.

It didn’t matter what it cost.

He was getting out again and he was getting to Tina.

They were testing her.

Her entire existence was delirious, just a question of variation in light and pain, one of degree, but she had moments, bright, brilliant flashes, in which she could see the things around her clearly, and the patterns that she could assemble - if she could resist questioning and picking them back apart when she was delirious - were starting to understand the purpose of what they were doing.

The analogy of the egg stuck with her.

She was hiding herself away, further and further, day by day.

The pain mattered less and less because she just wasn’t really here for it.

But the parts of her that she was hiding were less and less capable of doing anything about what was going on.

She had had moments when she’d fought them, before, but she couldn’t imagine doing that, now.

She could see what was going on, but she was kept and held, helpless and directionless, and she had a sense that her moment was slipping away from her.

At the beginning, she had kept track of days, but then she’d counted a couple of days twice and missed a couple and she had no idea, now. She’d abandoned the attempt and was just tracking her reservoir of strength and agency.

When those ran out, she was cooked and done, and they would dismember her for strange vampires to eat as an indulgence.

If she was going to fight them, if she was going to get out , it had to be soon. She didn’t have enough self left to do it for much longer.

Tell had said he was going to come back.

Where had he gone?

What had happened to him?

Where was Tell?

He heard the fountain arrive and stand outside of his door.

It was like a vampiric alarm clock, a sign that he was intended to rise and prepare for the night, now.

He did as he was bidden.

He showered and dressed from the armoire in the room, clothing that was different from what he normally wore, but mostly in question of quality rather than fundamental style.

There were details here that would matter to Keon and Tell saw to them carefully, coming as the supplicant for the first time in a long time.

He fed, then settled in to wait through the breakfast hour.

There was a knock on the door, and he went to open it, unsurprised to find Isabella there from the sound of her footsteps, but not having any idea why she would be here.

“Come,” she said. “Quickly. I have arranged a special audience.”

He followed her down the hallway and through to the main room of Castle Keon, one that had remained nearly untouched by time through the centuries. Feudalism had suited Keon just fine.

They held banquets and dances on the stone floor here, as well as show-fights and executions.