Page 9 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

Knew it was going to be every bit as undignified as she expected, but she walked out to the end of her chains, then knelt and lay flat, finding the cup with her fingers and bringing it in.

She sniffed it, just sating a curiosity, then she wound up and threw it as hard as she could against the opposite wall.

The night was very boring.

It didn’t mean that she sat there, feeling bored, as she anticipated what might happen next, but in the end, sitting there was all she did.

The blood took abnormally long to dry, on the opposite wall, which meant that it was anti-coagulated, among other things, but it did eventually pool and dry out.

And that was all that happened.

As dawn came, the lights turned out.

Tina backed herself against the wall as best she could, feeling as exposed as she ever had in her life, and she waited.

The man came in after dusk again, looking over at the wall without even a trace of curiosity, then set down a new cup and left.

Tina sniffed it again after he was gone, then threw this one, too.

The second night actually was boring.

The third evening, the door opened, and Tina settled herself to deliver the tirade she’d spent the last forty-eight hours formulating, then stopped short as a man staggered in, falling to the floor in front of her.

Another man, a big-bodied man with the air of someone who did this for a living, followed him in and dragged him by the shoulder to an opposite set of eye-bolts and chained him to the floor, then left.

“Tell?” Tina whispered.

He sighed.

“You’re alive,” he said without moving. “So there’s that.”

“What happened ?” Tina asked, and he lifted his head, shaking himself like a beaten dog, then forcing himself up with his palms.

“What part were you there for?” he asked. “By the time I got loose to go looking for you, you were gone.”

“I was outside…” she started, then looked at the ceiling. “Do I need to be careful?”

Tell shook his head, looking weary.

“No,” he said. “These are cook-and-kill boxes. This is what would have been there, at the house, before it was renovated.”

“I was outside with Leonard, turning him down, and then something just… hit us and dragged me away.”

“Like a truck, like a stick, or like a net?”

“There was a net,” Tina remembered. “But it started with a dart.”

“Mmm,” Tell said, finding his way up and over his knees so that he could sit. “The quiet stuff. You would have been one of the first, then.”

“There were trucks ?” Tina asked, and he nodded.

“Easy way to stop a vampire from doing something unexpected is to park a truck on him,” he said.

“Why?” Tina asked. “What happened?”

“Probably should have seen it coming,” Tell said, coughing pitifully for a moment, then shaking himself again. “I destabilized things. Triggered an attack. Last I knew, Daryll didn’t know who it was.”

“How long were you there after they took me?” Tina asked.

“This is the third night of the siege,” Tell said. “I was there until the middle of last night. Then they brought me here.”

“Where are we?” Tina asked.

“Don’t know,” Tell said. “Flew here, I know that much, but I lost some time in the middle. Not sure how long we were in the air or what our max altitude was.”

Tina hugged her arms.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“For processing,” Tell said simply. “When you’ve got a meat factory and you happen upon a herd of cattle you don’t have any intention of keeping, you turn them into food.”

“You…” Tina started, then put her head back against the wall. “They’re trying to get me to drink some stuff.”

Tell looked over his shoulder.

“Looks like you said no,” he answered.

“I did,” Tina said and he smiled.

“Is it over?” Tina asked. “Is it just… Is it all over, now?”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It’s grim, but it isn’t over. We fight, we look for an opportunity, and if it comes, we take it.”

She nodded.

“Can you pull these out?” she asked of the bolts.

“Very unlikely,” he said. “Under the best of circumstances. They beat me to make sure I didn’t have the reserves to attempt it.”

Tina sighed.

“I’ve pulled at them, but they don’t give to suggest that they’d loosen,” Tina said. “With time, I could probably fatigue them.”

“There have been a hundred vampires attached to them,” Tell said. “Maybe your persistence and optimism will succeed past them, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“So what else do we do?” Tina asked.

“Fight them,” Tell said. “They’ll leave us in stocks as much as they can, but they have to move us for various pieces of it, and every one of those is an opportunity.”

Tina nodded, feeling like Tell was quietly telling her that they were likely going to die.

It made her feel shaky and afraid in a way she hadn’t been, before. Even for the three days on her own, with nothing to do but sit with her thoughts, she hadn’t been anything but angry and defiant.

Tell was broken.

And if it broke Tell, Tina had no hope of surviving.

She would fight.

Certainly she would fight.

But if there was no chance of winning?

It was a potential she hadn’t considered, before.

He looked toward the door.

“They know that we are dangerous,” he said. “They know that they have to handle us carefully and with force. But they can’t be sharp every moment. And they can’t anticipate us in our complexity.”

“How many people get away?” Tina asked, and he shook his head.

“I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,” he said, closing his eyes and settling lower as he sat. “They say it’s like cracking an egg. They literally and figuratively soften you on the inside until they come to harvest it.”

That was… horrific.

“Twenty-two days,” Tina said. “Starting from when I got here? Or from when I cave and drink the stuff they bring in to me?”

“I don’t know,” Tell said. He opened his eyes then rubbed his face once, briskly. “Conserve energy. Be quiet, still, waiting. Then be prepared to fight explosively and with violence for as long as you need to, to get out.”

“Okay,” Tina said. “I understand.”

He nodded.

“We may not survive this,” he said. “But there’s still a path. Don’t despair. Despair will make you miss it.”

Around midnight, the cup appeared again, the man bringing in a pair of them and leaving one each there at the far edges of what Tell and Tina could reach.

Tell ignored his.

Tina went and got hers, smelled it, then threw it against a new wall.

Tell just sat with his legs crossed and his elbows resting on his knees, his eyes closed and his posture slack.

Tina respected, even admired, that he could do that, but she couldn’t.

She didn’t pace, but mostly only because her feet didn’t have that kind of range.

She fidgeted and considered, she occasionally said something to Tell, which he would answer but without giving her any energy back, for conversation.

He didn’t scold her - she suspected he knew that she was doing her best - but he was conserving himself, and she knew that he was probably right to.

If he was going to have to fight their way out for her, she appreciated him being strong enough to do it.

The sun came, and where it hadn’t been that bad, before, today it bothered Tina a lot more. She was losing energy.

She never heard Tell lay down, but they were still cycling the lights, so she wouldn’t have been able to see him, even if she’d been watching. When she sat up the next evening, he was exactly where he’d been the entire night before, still slack in a loose, feline kind of way, still waiting.

The door opened, and Tina looked over, expecting the man with the drink cups, but it was four men with gear like they were about to handle a mad dog.

Tell stood.

Tina stood.

They ignored Tina completely.

Tell waited, passive, as they wired and chained him from a distance, then one of them disabled the shackles on his ankles.

Tell looked over at Tina.

“I’ll be back,” he hissed. “I will. I’ll be back.”

An hour passed.

Two.

Three.

Tina felt tremors in her arms as she tried not to be afraid, tried not to imagine what they might be doing to him, for all that time. Interrogation or simply chemical preparation?

She had little doubt it would be painful; how could something of either nature not be?, but she knew that Tell would hold up to it.

The way they’d shackled him.

She hadn’t anticipated the thoroughness of it.

There was no good way to fight it.

There was no good way to walk in it.

Was Tell wrong? That there really wasn’t any opportunity there for escape because they were much too vigilant and thorough to allow for it?

It had to be possible , to incapacitate the human body such that it could not rouse a legitimate offense.

Taking people prisoner was kind of an art form worldwide, and had been for centuries, or longer. It wasn’t as though they didn’t know the tools that a man would use to exact an escape.

Had Tell been telling her a beautiful lie to keep her spirits up, knowing that there wasn’t anything they could actually do , in hopes that someone externally would come and rescue her?

No.

No, she could out-think this.

Even if it wasn’t possible , she wasn’t going to succumb to despair and spend the last two weeks of her life feeling sorry for herself and like death was inevitable.

She would watch.

She would learn.

She would find a weakness if it was there, and she would take her moment when it came.

Yes, there was scant little to watch, but it meant she was going to have to be all the more clever to learn it.

So she would.

She was going to beat them.

She wasn’t going to lose.

The sun came again.

Tell hadn’t returned yet, and Tina was more uncomfortable than she had been the first night in Nashville, where she had all but been able to see the sun through the patio doors of the walk-out basement.

No.

Uncomfortable didn’t begin to capture it.