Page 97 of Tell Me Why
He hadn’t looked back.
It was surprising, still, how much it hurt him, but he hadn’t looked back.
He had a job to finish.
She never did throw it.
Wanted to.
But the pain from the sun all night… she couldn’t bear it again. She needed to feed, and she could tell by smell that this was viable blood. It would help.
And even as she knew that it was laced with things she couldn’t identify, she couldn’t put it away from herself.
She sipped it and she sipped it and by the end of the night, Tell still wasn’t back, and the cup was empty.
She was braced hard for the day, fearful of it, but if anything, it was worse than the day before.
It tookTell two days to make his way back to Nashville. There was a lot of scrambling around that happened, undignified things that he wouldn’t recall in detail ever again, but he made it, first to the apartment, where he cleaned and dressed, regaining his normal appearance as best he could without a pair of solid feeds, then he went and stole a car that he used to drive himself out to Daryll’s house.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to find, at this point, and he was ready to fight or flee as required, but the house appeared peaceful enough, normal enough; they’d replaced the broken windows and the front door was new. Someone was in charge here and asserting order.
He sat in the driveway, watching for a moment, calculating, then the front door opened and Isabella looked out at him from the gold frame of indoor light.
Tell sighed, resigned, and got out of the car.
“You’ll want to have someone take that back where I got it,” he said as he approached. “Or disappear it entirely.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Isabella answered. “You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive,” Tell said. “Takes longer to make meat of me than that. How did things resolve, here?”
“Badly,” Isabella said, turning aside to let him past. “Daryll knows you’re here and he wants to talk to you.”
Tell nodded. It was hardly a surprise. It was a big part of why he’d gone to get dressed before he came here. Appearance had a lot to do with finding an upper hand in power struggles like the one between him and Daryll.
The interior of the house was less-recovered than the exterior. The furniture, what there was, showed signs of the fight that had taken place here, room by room, over the course of two and a half days.
There had been werewolves involved on both sides, and it still smelled of dog, too.
It was hard for vampires to get werewolves to do what they wanted them to, but if the directive was to go killothervampires, there was often a dollar amount that would make that work out.
Room by room.
Someone had gone through and spackled the bullet holes in the walls, but the floor still had the pock-marks that would be more difficult to patch, and Tell suspected that Isabella would just bring in a discreet contractor to replace them wholesale.
Daryll’s office had been one of the last holdouts, when Tell had gone down, and it, too, had a new door on it. Beefier than the last one.
Isabella opened it and looked across at Daryll at his desk, then let Tell in and closed the door back with a very solid thunk as it slotted into the frame.
She did not come in.
That was not a particularly good sign.
Tell went to sit in one of the chairs, taking in the office.
They’d breeched it. The desk had survived, but nothing else of the prized furnishing in here was the same. There was a barstool in one corner; that was how dire things had gotten for seating in the aftermath of the attack.
“You survived,” Daryll said.
