Page 17 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

“Tell,” Ginger said, her tone changed. “I can’t sedate her, I can’t anesthetize her.

Painkillers would kill her, at the doses that I would have to give her, for them to work.

If I do this, it’s going to be dry. It’s just going to be a lot of pain, and if it’s for no purpose…

I’ll do it. I want to do it. I want to see what they’re up to.

I’m keeping everything. But you’re the one who needs to say that it’s not worth it if it isn’t.

If you’re going to regret it because it was just more torture. ”

Tell’s eyes didn’t move.

“Is this real?” Tina asked, and Tell nodded.

“It is.”

She couldn’t trust him.

He’d lied to her before.

So many times.

Told her so many things.

His hair wasn’t snakes anymore.

He was lying better.

It didn’t matter.

If he wasn’t real, what she said to him didn’t change what was going to happen next. If he was, she had this moment to choose what became of her.

She knew.

She understood, a moment of lucid hallucination, that this was her mind preparing her for the fact that they were about to butcher her.

Maybe it would be easier if she said yes. If she agreed to it.

Maybe she had to say yes before it would work , and she needed to say no. She needed to fight. She needed to find the knife and stab him in the face with it and try to get out.

Again.

She had to fight.

That was what he’d told her.

She should say no.

Fight.

But he was right there.

And his face was beginning to stretch again, and the purple box was shrinking and expanding, and if Tina was ever going to walk again, it would be on someone else’s feet.

Maybe.

Maybe she could just…

His eyes were steady.

Close.

He smelled of himself.

It was far away and confused, and losing reality by the moment.

She wasn’t going to be here much longer, and if here was real…

The pain wasn’t what she was afraid of.

“Do it,” she whispered, and he nodded back.

“Fight for me,” he answered.

“How long?” she heard Tell asked.

“Darling, no one has ever gone this direction before,” Ginger answered. “She is her own standard.”

“She needs to feed,” Tell said.

“A fountain won’t let her get close,” Ginger said. “Even a well-compensated one. It’s visceral, like being around a rabid animal. They’ll know there’s something wrong with her, and she’s got nothing going for her.”

“Then we order in,” Tell said.

“It won’t do any good until I’m done,” Ginger answered.

“She’s not healing,” Tell said.

“I see that dear. Hand me the suture thread, there. Yes. No. Yes. That one.”

Ginger was still working, apparently.

Or Tina was nearing finished with being butchered.

One or the other.

She had no idea how much time was passing, nor whether the fact that she was in immense pain was a good thing or a bad thing.

What she did know was that she was sound.

Strangely enough, even with all of the delirium and a complete lack of confidence in what was reality and what was not, she simply knew that she wasn’t going to slip away.

If they killed her, it was going to be abrupt, unexpected, but if this was real…

She was going to endure and she was going to be here when it was done.

“You in there?” Tell asked.

“I’m here,” Tina answered.

“When this is over, I’m not going to let you look at all of the stuff Ginger took out of you,” he said. “But it’s a lot.”

“I was here for it,” Tina said. “I know.”

Both times, in point of fact.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Green and tiger,” Tina answered.

“Is that metaphor or psychosis?”

“You pick,” she said.

“You aren’t healing,” he said. “Your organs, a lot of them weren’t functional anymore. Ginger took them out. She said they’d… jellied.”

“I was here,” Tina said.

“So you have to regrow a lot of stuff,” he said. “And your incision isn’t healing yet.”

“You want me to think harder?” Tina asked, and she heard him laugh.

“I need you to pull it together,” he said. “I’ve called Tony. If anyone is going to let you feed as you are, it’s him. But you need to walk and talk like a person, at least. Better if you feel more like a vampire.”

Eyes.

Room.

It wasn’t purple.

She had IV drips going into both arms, and a big tube going into her stomach that Ginger had sewn into place. There were drain tubes with pink-red-brown fluid going out.

She desperately needed to feed.

That was her blood, effectively, dead and dying, thinned from the liquid chemicals Ginger had been filling her with to try to counteract some of the more potent things Tina had had in her flesh when she’d first gotten here.

It was going to take time to repair everything, to flush everything.

But she needed blood.

She looked at Tell.

“I can’t promise,” she said.

“You look more like a zombie than a vampire,” he said. “She says you can’t digest dead blood, not even if it’s still warm. That’s what we’ll try next if this doesn’t work, but they changed you. You need the strongest energy you can get.”

Tina closed her eyes.

Sat up.

“Then I’ll have to be me,” she said.

The room swam and spun.

Tell took the IVs out, then offered her his arm to steady her.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She scrunched her face, trying to force life to course through flesh that she hadn’t even considered her own, until recently.

“I’m not getting any more or less ready,” she said. “Is he coming here?”

Tell laughed.

“Absolutely not. We’re meeting him. Out to the car, okay?”

Tina leaned on him harder, considering the distance.

It was Ginger’s house, she recognized it now, though she hadn’t spent much time down in the basement.

She had to go up the stairs, out the door, and to the driveway.

It was a trivial distance, under most circumstances, but now it felt like an athletic feat on the back of a weeks-long head cold.

“You need to get things moving through you again,” Tell said gently as she slid to her feet. “It’s probably going to take more surgeries to get stuff out that is going to take longer than it’s worth to recover. Better to start from nothing.”

Tina opened her mouth to speak, then looked at him and frowned.

“What must a real doctor think, looking at you?” she asked. “You keep trying to heal the whole time he’s trying to perform surgery?”

“Try to avoid it as we can,” he said with humor. “You have walking?”

She tried to hold on to his arms more tightly, but there was no more strength to give.

“Tony will help me,” she said, and Tell nodded.

“I know,” he said. “But we’re not going to discuss him any further. Yes?”

Oh.

Yeah.

There were secrets, there.

She nodded.

Tell cinched up his grip on her, lifting her arm higher and getting an arm around her ribs as she tried to remember whose feet she was wearing.

She looked down at her toes.

“I had shoes, before,” she said. “Cute ones.”

“Not when I found you,” Tell said.

She looked at him.

“You came back,” she said, and he nodded.

“Always.”

She drew a breath, finding her lungs were full of sludge that needed to be coughed out.

That could wait.

Lungs were just for dramatic purposes, after all.

“You’ve got this,” he said. “But you need to do it.”

She’d sat up, but at this point she couldn’t remember how she’d done it. Everything inside of her did feel stiff and jellied, unresponsive and foreign.

“They’ve made meat of me,” she said.

“They tried,” Tell said. “Fight it.”

She scrunched her face again, then looked at her arms, flexing her fingers, feeling the tendons slide in her wrists, the backs of her arms going tight as she made fists.

She hadn’t taken an anatomy class. Her father had wanted her to, but she’d been a bit squeamish at the idea, and her class load was where she wanted it to be, at the time.

She had some background knowledge from working on Tell, ideas of what the pictures looked like, what she’d been able to make out in the scans, but she felt, now, that being able to go through, muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon, she could have worked it out.

That would have been the best way.

Instead, she made it up as she went, starting at the wrist on her right hand and working up her arm, through her shoulder, her neck, across and down the other arm.

Her feet were still foreign.

Tell was patient.

She started at the right wrist again, flexing through her back, now, and around to her abs, testing at the incision there, the organs both inside her ribcage and without.

There were gaps, unexpected voids that should have been supporting muscle, and there were…

things she couldn’t figure out just by touch, by squeeze.

That was all she had was squeeze and pull, but slowly things slid, gumming up behind her as she worked, such that by the time she had her ankles worked loose, her wrist felt distant again, but the second sweep went faster than the first.

Unfortunately, it also exhausted her, and the pain from open surgery that she’d been successfully ignoring for… who even knew how long at this point… became much more intense and personal.

“What is it?” Tell asked as she looked at her stomach, a bit astounded at how much that hurt.

“Ouch,” she answered, and his eyebrows went up.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’d assumed that your nervous system was out of commission, for as little as you’d been reacting.”

“ Ouch ,” Tina said.

“Let’s get you moving,” Tell said. “This is probably a very good sign, but… you need blood now .”

She nodded.

It hadn’t occurred to her until that instant, but she was ravenous. Ravenous enough to try to bite her own arm, or Tell. She blinked at him, and he gave her an odd, amused look, then laughed.

“You bite me, I will fold you in half and put you in the trunk,” he said.

She nodded.

“Good point,” she said, letting him help her up the stairs and out to the driveway.

Tell’s sexy little sports car was sitting there, and Tina smiled at it, like looking at a happy picture of someone else’s life.

“Ginger had someone bring it over,” he said. “Not going to be the gentlest ride, though.”

“Don’t care,” Tina breathed, and he nodded.

“All right.”