Truthseeker

“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 i

“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 thi

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.”

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 co

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.”