Truthseeker

Six

“Time’s treating you well.” Lara could barely force a whisper, voice tightened by the feeling of her heart filling her throat and the sensation of air having fled her lungs. A rare phrase intruded on her thoughts: I don’t believe my ears. Nearly everyone said that, but Lara, stripped bare of the pretenses shared by polite society, had always found it awkward. Now, despite the talent David Kirwen had just named truthseeking, she was hard-pressed to trust the conviction in his voice. No one lived a hundred years and remained young, except in fairy tales.

She looked away, suddenly and intensely uncomfortable. Preposterous truth was one thing; she’d encountered it often enough. Truth that was simply impossible, though, was beyond her scope, and she had no idea what to say to a man who presented it to her.

Her peripheral vision caught David’s unhappy smile. “Do you believe in fairy tales, Lara?”

Lara jerked her gaze back to him, heart pounding. He hadn’t—couldn’t have—read her mind, but his question followed her thoughts so closely it seemed he had. She tightened her arms around herself and shook her head. “I don’t like fiction very much. I know about learning lessons through allegory, but … no.”

“It might be easier if you did. I—”

“Are you two down there necking?”

The question shattered David’s solemn expression, and they both looked toward Rachel’s apartment door to find Kelly peering down at them hopefully. “You’re not. How disappointing. Well, get up here and help us argue over what kind of pizza we’re ordering, then. Dickon wants anchovies. Rachel told him he’d have to have a pizza of his own in that case, but he seemed okay with that. So now we’re trying to figure out if everybody gets one of their own.” She disappeared inside, and Lara turned to David, who dropped his head in mild vexation.

“Maybe this discussion is better left for later.” He made as if to catch Lara’s hand, as if he’d pull her out of the hug she held herself in, but stopped before touching her. “Please. At least say you’ll let me explain myself.”

A tiny surge of disappointment caught her off guard and she frowned at her tightly held arms, feeling as though she’d somehow betrayed herself. All good sense told her to back away, to forget what he’d said and the unlikely truth in his words. No one lived for centuries, and no one would have any reason to search for someone like her.

Except, inconceivably, improbably, David Kirwen. “Dafydd ap Caerwyn,” she said aloud, though softly.

Hope flashed through his expression. “The name I was born to, somewhere a very long way from here. Lara, please. An hour’s time to explain, without anyone to interrupt. I beg you.”

“Oh, well.” Flighty laughter caught her chest and she threw a consulting glance upward. The stairwell lights offered no opinion, but she turned a nervous smile on Kirwen. Caerwyn, she reminded herself, and said, “If you’re begging, it would be unkind to refuse you.”

“Thank you.” He did catch her hand this time, and kissed her knuckles to send a bolt of shy excitement and curiosity through her. “After supper, perhaps. Thank you, Lara. Already I’m in your debt.”

Lara managed an uncertain smile. “In that case, you can buy my pizza.”

He didn’t, of course: it was Rachel and Sharon’s treat, in thanks for help with the move. Despite Kelly’s machinations, Lara sat across from David on the living room floor, more interested in watching than conversing. Kelly took it as a good sign and elbowed Lara more than once, making silly faces of encouragement. Lara smiled, but her attention was drawn time and again by the slender man regaling them all with tall tales of storm-chasing.

Mostly tall: there was enough basis in truth that she could tell when he veered into melodrama, though his description of their weather van being lifted up and spun around by a tornado had all the hallmarks of sincerity. It was more plausible than the idea that he’d been searching for her for a century.

More plausible, but no less genuine. Lara took refuge in eating a slice of pizza and trying to clear her whirling thoughts. Sherlock Holmes had said that when the impossible was eliminated, whatever remained, however implausible, must be the truth. It was one of very few axioms Lara liked, for no other reason than her own truthseeking sense proved it right so often, regardless of what others believed. And so Dafydd ap Caerwyn was over a century old, because not once in her entire life had her talent told her wrong in the face of a direct statement.

She just didn’t understand how. Curious impatience danced inside her, setting her heartbeat ajar. She took another piece of pizza, nibbling it to the crust and abandoning it as she came up with theories from fairy tales to Frankenstein, and rejected them. Divine touch, maybe: he was fair enough to be an angel, though an angel would hardly need a job. Lara laughed at herself, then snagged more pizza and shook her head as everyone glanced her way.

Kelly leaned over to whisper, “That’s your fourth piece. I’ve never seen you eat this much at once. He’s that discombobulating, huh?”

Lara blinked at the pizza slice, and at the remains of three others left on her paper plate. “Oh no. I won’t be able to fit in my pants tomorrow.”

“That’s all right.” Kelly nudged her again and dropped a wink. “He’ll fit just fine.”

“Kelly!”

Kelly cackled and sat up again to snag one of the last pieces of pizza herself. “You know what we forgot to order? Dessert. Where’s the nearest Baskin-Robbins?”

“A few blocks from here. We should walk over,” Rachel suggested. “Walk off some of the pizza. And then walk home to burn off the ice cream.”

“I’ve already walked off the pizza by climbing those stairs four hundred times,” Dickon muttered good-naturedly. “I’ll need a six-scoop sundae just to keep even.”

“After eating an entire pizza?” David asked both politely and incredulously. Dickon flopped the lid of his empty box closed, assuming a catlike expression of disinterested innocence.

“Maybe you could bring me something back.” Lara carefully didn’t look at David, but her pulse jumped to an alarming pace. Sour notes jangled beneath her skin, though what she said was technically true: “I thought I might start cleaning. Your landlord is due pretty early in the morning, isn’t he?”

“Oh, God, you’ll make us look bad.” Rachel made a face. “Come with us, we’ll all clean later.”

“No, it’s a good idea,” David volunteered. “I’ll stay and help Lara. We’ll get a head start and you can bring us back an ice-cream cake. That won’t melt on the walk home.”

A little silence broke over the room as Rachel and Sharon exchanged looks that clearly said oooOOOooh. Together, and with obvious deliberate speed, they herded Kelly and Dickon out the door, leaving Lara with David and a few slices of abandoned pizza.

“Well.” Nervous excitement made Lara draw her knees up and loop her arms around them. It was ridiculous to be nervous or excited: it wasn’t as though she’d never been alone with a man before. Her job, in fact, required hours of that, and often the men in question were less dressed than Dafydd ap Caerwyn was at the moment.

On the other hand, none of them had ever claimed to have been searching for her at all, much less for decades on end. A little nervous excitement was justified. Lara tugged her knees closer to her chest and tried for a smile. “That wasn’t quite as subtle as I hoped.”

David laughed. “I’m afraid subtlety isn’t a word I’d use to describe your friends. Is that something you like about them?”

“It is. They usually say what they think. It’s its own kind of awkward sometimes, but at least I don’t constantly feel like I’m battered by lies.” Lara thinned her lips, fighting the impulse to leap up and run after her friends. Instead she swallowed hard and murmured, “I’d very much like an explanation, David. Dafydd.”

He smiled and got to his feet. “You have a good ear. You say my name well. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it.”

“A hundred years?” Lara tried for lightness and achieved tension, almost anger.

He heard it, and hesitated at the kitchen counter’s edge. “In fact, yes, although I know you must be trying to figure out how I’m mocking you. I’m not, Lara. Not at all.” He methodically emptied his pockets as he spoke—a palmful of change, a pocketknife, a set of keys—and put them all on the counter. Then he unfastened his belt, shooting Lara a sudden brilliant grin as he did so. “Don’t be alarmed.”

He set it aside, coiled neatly beside his other belongings, before his hands danced over his torso and upward, fingertips finally touching his left earlobe. His hair, Lara realized, was worn slightly too long, just enough shagginess to be sexy, covering the tops of his ears. A little bit rock star rather than the clean-clipped cut she’d so much expected in a weatherman that she hadn’t seen how he really wore it. He removed two discreet earrings, put them on the table, then tapped a fingertip against it, looking himself over as Lara watched in bemused interest.

“Usually we’d discuss what you’re looking for in clothing before I’d ask you to disrobe, Mr. Kirwen.” Humor infused her statement, one of the times Lara felt comfortable with teasing: every word she spoke was absolutely true.

“You won’t need your tape measure for this, I think. It’s the metal,” David said, explanation truthful, if not enlightening. “It holds the glamour in place, but it traps me, as well. It can’t be undone while it touches me.”

“Glamour? Undone?” Useless questions, parroted back. Lara pressed her lips together, waiting till she trusted herself not to echo him before she took another breath to speak and ask for clarification. Even as she drew breath, though, David turned back to her, and, as if the world snapped into focus, Lara saw through to the truth of what he’d hidden beneath his glamour.

Almost nothing about him was changed, yet everything was. The nearly pretty lines of his face sharpened and came into aquiline relief. His eyes, far more amber than brown, tilted more profoundly than any man of his pale complexion’s might be expected to; that complexion, fair before, was porcelain now, making the sandy gold of his hair richer and darker by comparison. Certainty tightened in Lara’s belly, that the too-long cut of his hair was deliberate so it hid the tops of his ears. Dizziness swept over her, preventing her from darting forward to examine his ear tips. It seemed as if it would be an unbearable intimacy. As if stripping himself to bare essentials that were literally beyond human were not already an intimacy that caught Lara with equal parts fascination and uncertainty.

Fascination and uncertainty, but no fear, and its absence seemed peculiar. A man—not a man; whatever he was—should have raised alarm inside her, not a slow release of tension, as if the changes that had been wrought explained a wrongness she hadn’t been able to define.

His form, through the shoulder, the waist, the hip, was subtly different, ever so slightly more slender. His height seemed more dramatic for the narrowness of him, though he was no taller than he’d been a moment earlier. The clothes he wore, which had looked good on him moments earlier, now hung poorly on his frame, as if they had been made for a bulkier brother. Glamour stripped away, Lara could barely believe she’d been unable to see it before. He would never again be able to hide beneath his glamour, not with her.

She coughed on a question, unable to put the right words together. David smiled, and when he spoke his voice was lighter, filled with the music of tenor bells.

“My name is Dafydd ap Caerwyn. I am a prince of the Seelie court in the Barrow-lands, and I know you for a truthseeker because my people have legends of them. My brother has been murdered, Lara, and I need your help to find his killer.”