Truthseeker

“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 mille

“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 begi

“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 ru

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.