Page 113 of Tell Me Why
He was tired.
Texas was the kind of state that reminded you what tiredfeltlike. Hot and dry and unending, like the life of the average vampire, he drove mile after mile, waiting for the destination to arrive in front of him.
He didn’t know if Tina was still alive.
She should have been, but if Silix had figured out that she mattered, or if she’d abandoned hope early… it was possible atthis stage that she’d been finally processed today, even. It was typically done under high sun.
He had a decent idea where he was going, by a mile-marker sense, but he abandoned the car at the first mile marker he had clocked on his way out and he set off on foot toward the facility, and from here it would be guesswork and relying on his memory of the landscape.
Which was hideously repetitive.
He tried working off of scent, but it had been too long, and it was apparent that this was not the route that Silix’s people used to get into the facility; they would have a local road system, but Tell had been intentionally avoiding it as he had escaped, the first time. He had the address and a map on his computer, but he had neither with him, here and now. He had no phone, nothing but a credit card and a driver’s license that would get him from place to place.
And what he could remember.
He had perhaps an hour before dawn, and he wondered if he was being foolhardy, coming out here on his own like this, determined to beat Keon’s men to the facility so that they couldn’t possibly go in without him.
He was either going to have to luck into some kind of man-made structure just randomly sitting out here - unlikely - or sleep in the shade of a rock with nothing more than that to keep the sun off of him.
Even for Tell, that was not going to leave him in fighting shape, tomorrow.
He’d gone this way because he wasn’t there to fight.
He just needed to be therethe very first minuteto make sure that he got to Tina at the same time as Keon’s fighting force, and not later.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe if they were very distracting, he might go try to find her on his own, because once he got there, he was certain he could find his way to her cell, but… better to be there and exhausted than show up fresh and late.
He would stay down-wind of them, like the old days, if he got close enough to lay eyes on the facility before dawn, but at the rate things were going, now, he didn’t expect it.
He found an upcrop of stone that would give him shade through a decent fraction of the day to come and he resigned himself to it, sitting rather than laying so that he didn’t get any more mud and dust on his clothes than he had to. He braced his shoulders where they would stay without extra force and he waited.
It would be draining, but he would be ready by the time the sun had finished setting.
No matter what happened, after that, he owed Tina that much.
It waslike waking from stone.
He breathed.
He listened.
He chose to move.
Found his feet and straightened, a mind that controlled the body without regard to the body’s capability.
He knew the direction of the sun from when he had started away from the facility, and he followed the same line, hoping that he was following the right line closely enough to find the facility again.
Dusk was getting closer, and he sped up, feeling gaunt but with a deep, stony reservoir of fury and determination that hadn’t yet let him down.
The sun was down far enough that Keon’s men would have started their mobilization. He’d badly misjudged the distance or the direction and put himself out of position for the fight.
Or.
He crested a shallow ridge and found himself looking down at the utilitarian parking lot of the exact facility he’d been seeking, as though he’d intended to walk up to it at just this moment.
