Truthseeker

Thirty-One

Kelly braced herself, hands high on the steering wheel. “Should I rush it? A thousand pounds of metal ought to put it down for the count again, right?”

“You can’t. There are too many people.” Lara got out of the car without thinking and pulled Dafydd’s door open for him. Kelly let go an aggrieved yell and pushed her own door open, half standing in the driver’s well.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t know! Stay in the car!” Lara ran forward, whispering the brief exorcism she knew under her breath. It wouldn’t be enough, and she cursed herself for not having memorized a longer one in the days before Dafydd’s release.

He was at her side, stronger again now that he was no longer trapped in a vehicle and with the staff once again bright in his hand. Still pale, still fragile, but the sunrise did him the favor of lighting his golden eyes to fire. In that light there was no pretense of humanity about him, his hair too fine, his bone structure too delicate. Panic caught Lara under the breastbone and she hissed, “Dafydd, get back in the car! You can’t—”

“I can hardly allow you to face that thing on your own,” he said just as softly. “You have no weapons, no armor—”

“No way to protect you! Get back!”

The trooper had looked up as soon as their car doors opened and came striding toward them in the dawning light. “I’m going to have to ask you to get back into the car—” He broke off, gaping, and an orchestra crashed raw song through Lara’s mind. Too late; it was too late to hide Dafydd or herself, and if she had any doubt, it was belied by the trooper drawing his sidearm as he advanced on them. “Down on the ground, both of you!”

Lara put her hands in the air, slow actions that made her vividly aware how she was disobeying the trooper’s command. She poured conviction into her voice, steeling it with truth and willing the man to hear that truth. “Officer, that thing they hit, it’s dangerous and nobody’s equipped to stop it. You need to get everyone out of here now.”

He wavered, halting his approach but not retreating. “I said on the ground!”

“Get on the ground, Dafydd. Do it,” Lara snapped, when the Seelie prince hesitated. “He’s more likely to shoot you than me. You’re male.” And exotic, she wanted to add, though she suspected the trooper would use the word “weird” instead. The creature twitching on the car hood no doubt verged on too much strangeness already. She didn’t want to add to it, not when it could mean Dafydd’s life.

Dafydd, reluctantly, did as he was told, lying on his belly with his hands out, though he continued to clutch the staff defiantly. The trooper scowled at him, expression barely hiding fear, then leveled his weapon at Lara again. “Both of you!”

“I’m unarmed, Officer. I’m smaller than you, and I’m wearing high heels. I can’t possibly rush you. I’m no danger to you at all. You know I’m telling the truth.” Lara’s throat hurt from the effort of making the words true, so the officer couldn’t doubt them even when he wanted to. That was power, real power: she recognized it even as she struggled to command it. “None of us is a danger to you. That thing over there is, though.”

“That thing is dead!”

“No.” Lara spoke at the same time the ranger did, startling both herself and the officer, who shot a quick hard look toward the other official. The woman stood up, her mouth a thin grim line. “It’s badly injured, but not dead. I’m going to have to …” She stepped toward her truck.

Lara, barely audible even to herself, whispered, “Don’t.”

The thing—the nightwing, though it was far more massive than the little demons they’d encountered before—lashed out with a limb so flexible it could have been a tentacle. But no tentacle gleamed the way this did, like it was ridged with cartilage. It seized the ranger’s legs and yanked backward. She jerked to the earth, unable to catch herself, and Lara knew without seeing that the bones of her face were broken. One of the paramedics shouted and ran forward. Stupid, Lara thought, but she did it herself. She heard Dafydd scramble to his feet, and heard a shot fire, and then Kelly’s scream.

Nothing else could have taken her eyes from the nightwing. Lara spun, fear gutting her as she saw Kelly fall to the ground. A misstep brought Lara low, skirt tearing as she hit the asphalt, and another tentacle lashed out, snapping through the air where her torso had been an instant earlier.

Lightning shot out of the clear morning sky and severed the tentacle. It dropped on top of her and she screamed, struggling to throw it off as it writhed and twitched and then, terribly, began to contort. Wings stretched and split from its crackling shape, then claws, then burning eyes and a mouth full of dagger-sharp teeth. Whatever horror the nightwings had become, they weren’t confined to it: separated from the whole, they took on their old shapes again, and this one leapt at Lara.

Its claws scraped asphalt as she rolled, eyes wide and searching for weapons. There was nothing: no rocks, no branches, the modern highway system too tidy to present her with a chance for survival. The nightwing pounced a second time and she flipped onto her back, catching its throat as she’d done with one of its brothers what seemed like a lifetime ago now, back in the Barrow-lands. The useless exorcism rose to her lips and was drowned beneath a shriek as the monster caught her forearm in clawed feet and raked upward, leaving deep scores in her skin. Powered by a sudden rush of pain, she flung the thing away and scrambled to her feet, determined to kick it to death if she could do nothing else.

Instead, Kelly Richards appeared above it, and rained death with a dozen sharp blows from a crowbar.

For an instant she and Lara stood facing each other, Kelly’s face alight with triumph in the gold light of sunrise. Her friend was beautiful, Lara thought suddenly, beautiful with violence, beautiful like a Valkyrie, full of passion and strength. With her hair spilling around her shoulders and a bloody crowbar in her hands, she made a convincing modern warrior woman. For an instant outside of time and thought, seeing her seize the opportunity to become someone so extraordinary was wonderful and even fun.

Then she threw Lara the crowbar and ran like hell for the car as the trooper shouted, “Put down your weapon! Put the weapon—put the weapon down!”

Lara, incensed, shouted, “Shoot the goddamned monster!” and threw herself toward the amalgamated nightwing, crowbar raised like a sword.

Some part of her recognized that she herself had become a warrior in the past few days. There was no other answer for the boldness that drove her to charge the massive creature enveloping the car that had struck it. She was armed with a crowbar and passion, nothing more, but the pairing proved formidable: a tentacle wrapped around the bar and she swung like a pro hitter, smashing the glittering black thing against the wrecked car’s door. Ichor splattered and the damaged piece fell away, beginning its terrible transformation into a nightwing, into a component piece.

Lara bashed it ruthlessly, turning it to spattered goo before it became what it had been, and swung again as another tentacle lashed at her. The thing was formless, shapeless, creating of itself what was necessary to attack, and she couldn’t imagine how the ranger or the officer had thought it an animal at all. Unless—and it seemed possible—it had held some near-earth shape as it hunted, simply so it wouldn’t draw attention to itself. That need was gone now: Lara and Dafydd were its prey, and the law enforcement agents and paramedics were nothing more than collateral damage.

The trooper was still torn between his enemies, clearly wanting to choose Dafydd as the comprehensible one, but too afraid of the conglomerated nightwings to ignore them. A black mass slid up behind him, threatening to end his dilemma permanently. Lara screamed and Dafydd lifted his hands, the staff held high in one and his other palm forward.

Power surged from the staff. Lightning arced around the trooper and exploded into the roiling creature of darkness. The trooper fired wildly, terrified by the lightning, then realized he hadn’t been hit. He whipped around as nightwings erupted from the section of monster Dafydd attacked, and chose his side: gunfire blazed repeatedly, every shot counting as bullets buried themselves in the monster.

Dafydd dropped to one knee, visibly fading, even with the staff’s support. Lara’s heart caught. There was no time, not to fight the creature the way they’d been doing. The Seelie prince would die before they triumphed, and bitterly, they would likely not triumph at all should he die. For an instant that held her in place, staring fearfully at Dafydd, and then the nightwing came again in a surge of darkness and rage.

She didn’t think it out clearly; didn’t think it out at all, in truth, and truth was her talent, so she ought to heed it. She was surrounded, like the nightwing wanted her drawn in, and so in a spate of madness she dove forward, taking the fight to it. The truth could build a way of its own. Lara had followed such paths three times now, those stark roads of white light and irresistible power.

There had to be a spark of that brilliance buried somewhere in the nightwings’ makeup: they were creatures of dark, perhaps, but dark couldn’t exist without the light.

That thought wobbled fearfully, bringing with it the image of a starlit sky, brilliant diamonds scattered through velvet night. She could imagine each of those diamonds winking out, leaving nothing but darkness behind. Terror squeezed her chest, leaving her hands clammy. There was no telling what lay in the dark, no way to protect herself when the world was only black. Perhaps it was light that couldn’t exist without dark.

That thought twisted, too, turning her inner vision to nothing but blazing, pure light. It was as meaningless as the blackness: no contrast, no shadows, no color, only brilliant pain that matched the fear of darkness.

They wound together, pain and fear twining to make a world of shadows and color. Gold painted the edges of her vision, reminder of the sunrise. As if it were a guide, that soft shade made her grasp that pain and fear were part of the truth that might destroy the nightwings. She was reluctant to embrace them, but the music pounding in her ears soured as she shied away. Jaw tight, she nodded acceptance, and felt her limbs go thick and numb as ugly emotion rooted inside her. They weren’t comfortable, she realized abruptly, but they were necessary. Without pain, without fear, humans had little way to gauge danger; personal experience could be too deadly a cost. Somehow that made them easier to endure, and they lost a degree of their paralyzing power.

Suddenly bold, Lara thrust crescendos, pieces of who she was, of the magic she commanded, out of herself, like they were a weapon themselves. Music rushed out of her, throwing a challenge to the dark Seelie creatures that had crossed into her world.

The world roared back, an entity of its own, alive.

Put that way, into simple and obvious terms, it rang with such truth that Lara blushed to have never noticed it before. Of course it was alive; it supported all the things that lived. But she had never imagined it to have a voice of its own, a presence and a power that threatened to overwhelm everything that she was.

It was the sound of earthquakes and waterfalls, thunder so profound she felt, more than heard, it. If it had music, it was lost to her. She staggered under its weight, then dropped to her knees and put her hands against the asphalt, trying to gather support from the same ground that threatened to drag her under.

Pain reached a crescendo, then drained away as the world searched and found her magic, the thing that had garnered its unfathomable attention. For a brief eternity Lara felt she was a mote under a microscope, turned and twisted for examination. Urgency fled as the earth’s vibrations reached into her marrow, shaking it loose. It seemed to her that she belonged where she was, all but mindless, a single beacon of song and light so small as to be obliterated by the earth-storm all around her. Her sense of self was lost, a speck in the maelstrom of life, and she drifted forever.

Forever, a speck that was still Lara Jansen whispered, forever is a very long time, to immortals.

And the world, in so much as it could, laughed. Ease and recognition rolled through thunder, not reducing her awe, but at least making it a more comfortable thing to hold inside her. She belonged to this world; her strange magic was born of it, and it accepted her, though welcome was still far removed. Satisfied, it released its hold on her. Lara, trembling, bent all the way to the ground and rested her forehead there in thankful relief.

As it retreated from her awareness, she caught a glimpse of music so old, so vast, that she understood she had been on the edge of a chord for all the time she’d been in communion with the planet. It belonged to a song so impossibly huge she could barely grasp that it was played at all, and she knew with a sudden, aching breathlessness that the very earth itself was no more than a single instrument in an orchestra spanning the stars.

Her hands made claws, trying to snatch the endless concerto back; trying to reach beyond the earth to grasp the melody of the moon, the sun, the planets.

It was cold, the space between notes. Cold and endless, with no promise of warmth or forgiveness. The moon, dead world that it was, had a refrain of its own, but it was lost to her, lost long before she could understand it, long before she reached so far as the music of the sun. Through despair she wondered if that was perhaps for the best: surely any fraction of sound she could capture from a star would incinerate her, and yet she would have taken the risk if she could have stretched so far.

She fell back inside herself, bereft of the solar system’s song; bereft of everything but the thin tune that was her own sense of truth, and which now seemed puny in the face of what she’d seen. She turned blind eyes toward the sky, aware of the heat of tears on her cheeks, and saw nothing, only felt the loss of a symphony she would never be large enough to hear. That, that was a truth of terrible proportion, and it cut her apart, releasing all the music inside her. Notes shattered outward, their edges like knives, and they lanced the darkness around her.

It came apart with a scream, with a hundred screams, as nightwings were torn asunder from one another. Lara caught her breath, a single tiny retraction of the power flooding from her.

The nightwings saw it as weakness, and struck.