Page 107 of Tell Me Why
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.
