Truthseeker

Seven

Blood rushed through her ears, the sound of surf crashing in time to her pulse. “Seelie, what does Seelie mean? Elf? Are you an elf? You look like an elf, you’re …” Nearly human. Nearly, yet he could never be mistaken for human, not like this, not with the indescribably ethereal aspect she now saw.

“Elf would do, though it has connotations in American culture that would make my people cringe. We aren’t small woodland sprites, though we are a people of the forests.” He spoke as he might to a wary animal: soft, calm, reassuring, as if the steady song of his voice was more important than the words.

Lara clung to them regardless, like they might be a lifeline back to a reality she hadn’t intended to leave. She said, “No,” hoarsely, and meant it as an agreement. “You’re like the elves in the Tolkien books.”

Astonishment turned his eyes to pure gold. “I thought you didn’t like fairy tales. You’ve read those?”

“Of course not.” Lara backed away until she reached a wall to lean against for support. To put her back against, like she could keep surprises from creeping up on her that way. “But I saw the film trailers.”

“Ah.” A smile flashed across his face, and Lara thought the images from the films were entirely wrong: those elves had seemed so solemn, where Dafydd’s rapid-changing expressions held the capacity for undiluted joy. “More like them,” he agreed. “More than the big-eyed, big-haired creatures with oversized swords that litter video games and cartoons, at least.”

“And you’re …” Words failed her again and she stood speechless against the wall before seizing deliberation in order to stave off panic: “I don’t understand.”

Dafydd took a step forward, then unexpectedly knelt, as if doing so was all that stopped him from chasing her across the room. His voice became something like a song, accent coloring it and turning the words liquid. “Truth will seek the hardest path, measures that must mend the past, spoken in a child’s word, changes that will break the world.” Wry apology colored the third line, and the song, if not the accent, left his voice as he added, “Only my people would consider a woman in her twenties to be a child. Forgive us that. Our life spans are measured in centuries and millennia, not days and years.”

“Dafydd.” Lara had used the variant before, but David was easier to remember, easier to say, than the slight softening that Dafydd required. But the man, the creature, kneeling before her was by no means a mere David. Nor would he ever be again, she thought: like the glamour, once undone, she would always think of him as Dafydd.

Only after she spoke did she realize she said his name as if it offered answers. Her heart spasmed again, making an ache of tightness in her chest, but loosening her throat. “The beginning. You need to start at the beginning.”

“There was a murder,” Dafydd said without hesitation. “And that, among my people, is not done. A poet and prophet charged me with finding a truthseeker to hunt the killer with. I have been half-exiled ever since, unable to return home without the truth at my side.”

Lara’s laugh cramped in her throat. “With the truth at your side? I can tell if people are lying to me. That doesn’t make me a-an archetype.”

“No.” The negative was an agreement, but Dafydd’s eyes were intense on hers. “But only because you’re not at the height of your skills. Legend claims that a truthseeker in the grasp of her full power strips away all falsehood around her and lays bare the hearts and souls of everything that surrounds her.”

Horror washed over her. “I don’t want that. People are uncomfortable with me already. They’d hate me. Find someone else.”

“There is no one else.” Dafydd got to his feet again, slowly this time, as if she might startle and run. “There hasn’t been a truthseeker among my people in aeons. I came to your world hoping I might find a half-blood child who bore the gift.”

Lara pressed against the wall, cowardice far greater than curiosity. “I’m not—”

“You aren’t,” Dafydd agreed quickly, before she had time to struggle through the rest of the words. “Your gift is purely human. Almost,” he said with a brief smile. “You could almost be part Seelie, from your figure and form. But there’s a touch of something to the courts that—” He hesitated over the word, then made a pattern of rain with his fingers, indicating himself. “Glows.”

Lara nodded jaggedly. With his glamour stripped away, an alien warmth cast gold through his presence. In another man she would call it charisma, but in Dafydd ap Caerwyn it was somehow more: as if his very breath could draw her in. She lacked that, and knew it as clearly as she knew her own name. “Then how can I …?”

“Be a truthseeker? Your people have magic, Lara.” David’s smile went sad. “Not much, and not often, but it’s always been there. You know the stories of your great wizards. Merlin,” he offered, and Lara nodded again. “Or those with the second sight.”

“Psychic hotlines,” Lara said, and he shook his head.

“What would it feel like to you, if you took phone calls and money to tell people if something was true?” A shudder coursed over Lara’s skin and David nodded. “Most psychics, real ones of any power, feel similarly. One of the prices of the magic. Come with me, Lara.” He offered his hand, a smooth movement full of grace. “Help me find the man who killed my brother.”

“You’re cra—” Lara looked away, jaw clenched. You’re crazy. A very normal response, perhaps even a true one, but not something she was often inclined to say. “You are crazy,” she whispered after a moment. “You might be an elf, but you’d have to be a deluded elf to think a woman who’s known you for a few days would …”

“Would cast all to the wind to help a stranger? Would you not, Lara? Do you not?”

“No! Not … not like this. I don’t solve murders. I don’t hunt down criminals. I just help a little where I can, Dafydd. And how do you even know that?” Anger burned away discomfort, Lara’s cheeks heating. “I just go to open addiction meetings, to try to help people face their problems a little more truthfully, that’s all. How do you know that?”

“I’m a snoop.” Dafydd got to his feet, but stepped back to the counter, putting greater distance between them. “Kelly’s comment about you knowing the truth intrigued me, Lara. I’ve been looking for you for so long. So I—”

“You followed me?”

Half-apologetic guilt slid across his features, still easy to read despite his changed aspect. “I followed you and I had Natalie look up what she could online. You have a degree in psychology. It made me think yes, perhaps you were what I was looking for. Does it help you understand people who see the world so differently than you do? I hope so. But I needed to know, Lara. I needed to know if you were a truthseeker. I’m sorry, but I’m running out of time.”

A band of pain sprang up across Lara’s forehead, throbbing in time with her pulse. She sank down to the floor, eyes closed and fingertips pressed against the thin skin of her temples. “What does that mean?”

“There are limits to the power that brings me here. If I tarry beyond one hundred of your years, the door will close. I’ll be unable to open it again from this side, except perhaps at great personal cost. So I either return home with you—with one such as yourself—now, or I remain an exile here forever.”

“Now?” Lara looked up sharply, trying to ignore the ripple of lights that followed when she opened her eyes. “What do you mean by ‘now’?”

“I have a few days, perhaps a week. Within the scope of a century, the need is immediate. Will you come with me?”

“No! Go, get out of here!” Lara shoved to her feet, headache intensifying with the strength of her emotion. “I don’t understand any of this and I don’t want to!”

“I wouldn’t ask if I had any other choice.” Infuriating truth rang through Dafydd’s quiet words, but he retreated, wafting a hand over his belongings on the kitchen counter. “I’ll go,” he said after a moment, quietly. His form shifted as he spoke, glimmers of change blunting the bones of his cheeks, the length of his fingers, the fineness of his form. They were lies, the things he pulled on over his elfin shape, and they danced and shimmered, making him hard to look at now that Lara knew the truth. She closed her eyes, and waited until his footsteps faded before she looked again. Waited, in fact, until all that was left were his words, echoing in her mind.

“I’m not difficult to find if you should change your mind. I hope that you do. You are my only chance, Lara Jansen. I am lost without you.”

She was still sitting against the wall, head cradled in her arms as she tried not to think, when the others returned. Laughter preceded them, filling the stairwell and offering enough warning that she might have gotten to her feet, straightened her clothes, and greeted them with a smile.

With a lie.

It was the thing done in society, by polite people eager to keep others comfortable. Lara knew it, could do it if she had to, but with Dafydd’s absence it seemed even more absurd than such rituals normally did. She could offer no easy explanation for why he’d left, and so to let her friends find her worn down was as simple an answer as she might find.

Rachel broke into raucus song—for they are jolly good fellows!—as she bumped the door open, all four of them trying to crowd through at once. Laughter and singing fell away as Lara lifted her head, wincing at the overhead lights’ brightness.

Kelly gave Dickon an accusing, angry look and thrust an ice-cream cake box into Sharon’s hands. Dickon protested, “What’d I do?” and the other two women turned half-suspicious, half-apologetic expressions on him as Kelly ran to Lara’s side.

“What happened? What did he do? Are you okay? Where is he?”

“I’m …” Fine was inadequate; fine had variable definitions. “I’m not hurt, Kel. A migraine came on all of a sudden.”

“Oh.” Kelly thumped down on her butt. “Did David go to get medicine? God, you scared me there, Lara. I thought he’d hit you or something.”

“David would never—!” Dickon’s voice shot up in outrage and the women who weren’t Lara hissed shhhs at him as Lara winced again. Dickon muttered, “Well, he wouldn’t,” sullenly, and Lara pulled a pained smile into place.

“I imagine you’re right. It’s nothing like that.”

“Here, I always carry migraine medicine.” Sharon handed the ice-cream cake off to Dickon and dug into her purse. “Why don’t you call David and tell him to come on back, we’ll save some cake for him.”

“Yeah, all right.” Dickon put the cake on the counter and Sharon offered Lara medicine and a plastic cup of water, asking, “Do you think you’ll want cake?” beneath the sound of his call.

“Maybe a little piece.” Lara took the tablets and watched Dickon over the edge of the cup as she drained it. His eyebrows crinkled into a frown, but he nodded, shrugged, and hung up to say, “David thinks he won’t come back since he’s already on his way out. He offered to pay for the cake.”

“Well that’s silly.” Sharon stalked toward Dickon, a hand extended. “Give me the pho—Oh, he’s already hung up? Well, for God’s sake, what are we going to do with an entire cake?”

“Eat ourselves sick,” Rachel suggested. “There’s no such thing as too much ice-cream cake, a statement I will regret making about half an hour from now. We can all manage a fifth, right?”

“Well, give Dickon a third and we can split the rest among the girls. Lara’s not going to want to eat an entire fifth of a cake.”

“I already ate an entire sundae and you think I can eat a third of an ice-cream cake, too?”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Kelly asked under their good-natured arguing. “You look awful, Lar.”

“My head hurts. The medicine will help.” Lara leaned against Kelly as her friend settled down beside her. The racket of discussion over portion sizes, of disappointment at David’s abrupt departure, of concern about Lara’s headache, washed over her as thankfully ordinary commentary. Dafydd’s image still lingered, elfin form too bright and uncontained to make sense within the context of a very human kitchen filled with entirely human bickering. “Kelly, do you ever wish fairy tales came true?”

Kelly shifted like she was trying to get a good look at Lara, who was too close to be seen. “That must be a doozy of a headache if it’s sending you on flights of fancy. What do you mean, like dragons and princesses and heroes? Yeah, I guess, except I’d kind of like to be the one who fights the dragon.”

Laughter escaped Lara’s lips in a release of tension and pain. “And woe betide the dragon. I just wondered.”

“You never just wonder anything. What?” Kelly nudged her. “Suddenly believing in love at first sight, are we?”

“No. No,” Lara repeated a little less certainly. Curiosity and attraction didn’t equate to friendship, much less love. Intrigue was the only word that came close to describing her feelings toward Dafydd ap Caerwyn. Her anger and fear had faded into something manageable while she’d waited for the others to return. Bewilderment still rang through her, but it was underscored by the talent and curse that defined her life: she was bewildered, yes, but she didn’t disbelieve. She had not, as someone else might have, convinced herself that what she’d seen hadn’t been real.

For a moment she felt painfully distant from other people, even Kelly, warm at her side. Most people would, she imagined, be able to explain away Dafydd’s transformation as some kind of trick, but it had sent such a song of truth through her that she couldn’t doubt it even if she’d wanted to.

And now, with the initial shock fading, she wasn’t certain she wanted to doubt it at all. He was something extraordinary, beyond the bounds of possibility and yet existing within it. She, of all people, had been given the ability to see that. A small, incredulous smile crept across her face, and Kelly snorted triumphantly. “Told you. Love at first sight.”

“I thought he was a liar at first sight,” Lara reminded her, and gratefully accepted a plate of melting ice-cream cake from Sharon. The cold made her headache recede a little, exhaustion following in its path. Her head lolled before she finished the slice, and Kelly rescued the plate as it slid toward the floor.

“Okay,” Rachel said firmly. “Dickon, would you mind driving Lara home? She obviously needs rest, and we still have work to do here.”

“Dickon?” Kelly objected. “Lara came with me!”

“I know, but I’ve known you for three years and Dickon for six hours, so you’re the one I’m going to make stay and help us scrub the house. If that’s okay, Dickon?”

“Take a pretty girl home or spend the rest of the night up to my elbows in soapy water. Hm. Hard choice. Wait, no it isn’t.” Dickon offered Lara a hand. “Let’s go before they change their minds. Your steed awaits.”

“Steed?”

“I drive a Bronco.”

“How environmentally irresponsible of you.” Lara clapped a hand over her mouth. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Dickon laughed. “Call ’em like you see ’em, don’t you? G’night, ladies. I’ll give you a call soon, huh, Kelly?”

Kelly dimpled. “Yeah, okay. Drive safe, Lara’s my best friend.” She hugged them both, and Lara, before she was sent out the door, mumbled apologies for not helping clean.

“You get migraines often?” Dickon asked sympathetically as they left. “My sister gets them sometimes. Usually after too much dark chocolate or red wine.”

“No, not often. I think mine are stress-related.”

“David stressed you out, huh? He does that to people, but usually only the ones who listen to his weather forecasts.” Dickon winked and helped Lara into his truck, then put her address into a sat-nav device so she could close her eyes against the streetlights and not worry about giving directions. “So is Kelly seeing anybody?”

Lara chuckled. “Yeah, I think so. Big guy. Works for the news station. Only I don’t know if he knows it yet.”

“Oh. Oh! Hey, cool. What’s she in to?”

“Kelly’s the adventure-vacation type. The bigger the experience, the better.” Lara peeled one eye open, glanced at Dickon, and bit her tongue on a wisecrack. He saw the whole byplay and laughed aloud, filling the cab with sound.

“Good thing for me I’m big, then, eh? And you look so sweet and innocent, Miz Jansen. So maybe not so much flowers as, I donno, a bouquet of ice picks and crampons, to impress her?”

“Flowers probably wouldn’t go amiss.” Lara closed her eyes again, smiling. “Thanks for driving me home.”

“No problem. Can I ask something?”

Lara, under her breath, said, “Can is a question of ability,” and more clearly said, “Go ahead.”

“David didn’t leave to get you migraine medicine, did he? He sounded surprised when I said Sharon had some.”

“I never said he did.”

“Yeah, you—” Silence broke for a moment before Dickon cursed in surprise. “You didn’t. Kelly did. So what happened? I thought you two were kind of getting along. Although with David I don’t know, it’s hard to tell about him and women.”

An unexpected pang caught Lara in the chest. “Why? Does he have a lot of girlfriends?”

“No, he’s never got any, he’s just unfailingly polite and charming to every woman he meets. Between that and the way he dresses and, well, you should see him jumping over puddles. He looks like a goddamned fairy, and I mean like the winged kind you see on little girls’ notebooks, not gay. Just kind of goes up and leaping like gravity doesn’t mean much. So maybe he is, I can’t tell.”

“Is?” Lara asked, bemused. “Is gay, or is a fairy?”

“Either, take your pick.” Dickon grinned. “Nah, he’s not gay. We’ve been working together for five years, and he doesn’t keep that much under his hat. I think I’d know.”

“Well, then.” Lara tipped her head against the window, watching through half-lidded eyes as streetlights and other cars whisked by. “He must be a fairy. Does he have any family?”

“He mentions a brother sometimes. I’ve never met him. I get the idea they don’t see each other a lot, maybe because they’re on opposite sides of the ocean. David came over here years ago, s’why you only hear the accent if he really turns it on.” Dickon pulled onto Lara’s street and squinted through the windshield at the apartment buildings rising up around them. “So how come he left early?”

“It’s the last building before the corner. He made a shocking proposal,” Lara added after a moment. “And then he left so I could think about it.”

“No shit?” Dickon pulled up in front of Lara’s building and rolled his window down as she climbed out of the truck. “What’d he do, ask you to run away with him?”

“Something like that.”

Dickon whistled. “I didn’t know he had it in him. So what do you think? Gonna run away with him and leave us all in the dust?”

Lara shook her head, waving as he pulled away again. “Truth is, I haven’t decided yet.”