Page 100 of Tell Me Why
“Do you have spieswith 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 thatmaybeknowing 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 managespiesand think about whose side they’re actuallyon, and…” He shrugged. “I’m good atbusiness. That’s what I’mdoinghere.”
In point of fact, Daryll wasnotgood 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 ofdays, 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 ofspies,” 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 thinkIought 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.
