C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

Kelly chuckled and stepped back to the safety of the doorway. “Are you lying to me, Lara Jansen?”

Lara opened her mouth and shut it again, Kelly’s teasing jangling at her nerves. “Yes and no. If I had thought that far, I thought—”

“That you were going back to the Barrow-lands with David?”

“Yeah.” Truth, for once, wasn’t a comfort, drawing a note as discordant as lies under her skin. “And no, Kel. I can’t quite believe it’s been a year and a half. I can’t quite believe I won’t just get up and go to work in the morning. That my job’s not even there anymore, probably. It was just yesterday.”

“Wow,” Kelly breathed. “That must be really bizarre. Not believing, I mean. That must be like gravity stopped working.”

“Or like magic started.” Lara shook her head. “I have no idea how anybody lives with this level of uncertainty. I thought always knowing if something was true or false was hard, but this is worse. So beyond getting Dafydd out of jail, I just don’t know. I think they might need me, in Dafydd’s world, and I’m starting to think maybe there’s something I need to find here, in this one. And I don’t know what happens if I do. This is my home.” Lara sighed, pulling herself back from the larger scope of worries. “And this is a great apartment. It’d be a good place to move in to.”

“Plus that way I could leave as much stuff here as I wanted and just stop by to pick things up when I missed them,” Kelly said cheerfully.

Lara laughed. “But you’re only thinking of me, right?”

“I would never say that. You’d call me on the terrible lies in my voice.” Kelly reached for Lara’s elbow, pulling her back toward the door to hug her. “Look, it was just a thought, okay? You don’t have to make a decision right now. First things first. Get your weird-ass boyfriend out of jail, and we’ll figure out the next step after that.”

Lara grunted at the strength of Kelly’s hug and returned it just as hard. “Okay.”

“Ooh. I note she didn’t deny the ‘boyfriend’ part of that sentence.” Kelly waggled her eyebrows as Lara spluttered a protest, then pointed at the bed. “Get some sleep, Truthseeker. You’ve got an elf to rescue tomorrow.”

“I can’t do this.” Lara reached across the car—the same little blue Nissan she’d helped Kelly pick out barely a week ago in her memory and nearly a year and a half earlier in Kelly’s—and grasped Kelly’s wrist. “I can’t do this.”

Kelly pried Lara’s fingers off her wrist. “Your hands are freezing, Lara, jeez. And you have to do it, unless you want to let David rot in a jail cell for the rest of his life. How long do elves live, anyway?”

“Dafydd,” Lara whispered, correcting the hard American way Kelly said the name to the softer Seelie pronunciation. “They live forever.”

“Well, somebody’s going to notice if he lives forever in jail, so let’s go.”

“But look at them.”

Dozens of reporters crowded around the front door of Boston police headquarters. They were barred from entry by a couple of grumpy-looking cops, but mostly they didn’t appear to want to go inside. They were waiting, and Lara had a too-clear idea of what they were waiting for. “How could they even know I was here?”

Kelly’s eyebrows shifted upward. She killed the Nissan’s engine and took the keys out of the ignition before leaning on the steering wheel and pointing, with the keys, toward the crowd of cameramen and microphone-bearing press. “I can think of at least six different ways they found out. The woman you talked to in the park. The cabdriver. Either of them might have eventually recognized you from the news. And you said you called Cynthia. Or there’s Ruth, or me, or your mom. Hey!” She sat up, lifting her hands in a protestation of innocence. “I said I could think of six ways, not that they were all likely. I didn’t tell anybody, and I’m sure your mom didn’t, either. But Cynthia could’ve called the cops.”

“Cynthia didn’t believe it was me.”

“Doesn’t mean she didn’t call the cops and somebody didn’t make a note of it. Look, Lara, I told you. You’re a news story. You’re going to have to face these people eventually. Might as well get it over with.”

“Would you be this phlegmatic if you were in my shoes?”

“Of course not, but all I’ve got to do is have your back, sister. Come on.” Kelly cracked her door open and elbowed Lara to do the same. “It’s only forty feet. How bad can it be?”

Lara, climbing out of the car, shot her friend a despairing glance. “That’s one of those questions you should never ask.”

Kelly’s apology was lost beneath a triumphant, “There she is!” from within the midst of the press corps. Dozens of faces turned her way, and Lara squeaked with dismay, fumbling for the Nissan’s door handle. Kelly, much bolder, all but slid across the car’s hood to grab Lara’s hand and pull her forward as reporters surged toward them.

“They’re not as bad as a dark elf army,” Kelly whispered. “Come on, you can do it.”

It hit Lara like a gong, like she was the gong, her chest reverberating with a truth so obvious it became understatement, and then became funny. A day earlier she’d ridden into actual battle, albeit reluctantly. A mob of men and women armed with cameras and microphones was nothing, in that context. Chin lifted, she stepped ahead of Kelly, meeting a tide of bodies and questions with a sudden calm that felt like arrogance.

Even with newfound determination, there were simply too many reporters, all pressing close and shoving microphones or cameras into Lara’s face. Questions made the air thick, shouts hurting Lara’s ears, but she set her jaw and pushed forward.

And hit a wall, jostling bodies vying for position and creating a deadlock. Even the battlefield hadn’t been quite like this: there, though they wanted to hold a line, the soldiers had also wanted a chance at their enemy, and had let people slip and step through so they could fight.

They might well still be fighting, that same battle not yet ended, given the radical differences in time’s passage between her world and Dafydd’s. If she could get through, if she could obtain Dafydd’s release, they might yet be able to make a difference in his world; might yet stop that fight before it became a genocide. Chords sounded in her mind, thunderous sounds that made truth of the possibility.

But the reporters wouldn’t make a path.

Lara drew breath and focused the pounding music in her mind into her voice, turning it to an answer for the most-oft asked question: “I was not kidnapped!”

Power burst in it, opening a passage through the mob. Lara surged forward, driven by Kelly’s hands in the small of her back. She stumbled into the small empty space at the police station doors and turned to face the press corps with indignation boiling through her.

For a few astonished seconds, they gaped in silence. Kelly lurched to her side, and the officers who’d been manning the doors stepped up to flank them.

“They believed you,” Kelly whispered. “Keep talking.”

Lara wasn’t certain at all that they’d believed her, but they had let her through, and had gone quiet, which was enough. A distant part of her found that interesting: typically she would have been deeply concerned about the truth, that it be accepted, but not now. She stared from face to face in the crowd, and just as the power of her voice started to wear off, she spoke again.

“David Kirwen and I are friends. I know I’ve been missing for months, but that wasn’t by his design.” Technically true: Dafydd’s intention had been to bring her back very close to the time she’d left. The language could be used to play fine notes, a tuning Lara had never cared for. No one else would hear the dissonance in the words in quite the way she did, though she could see many of the reporters latching on to her careful phrasing. A new wave of questions inundated her before she could say anything else. Exasperation reached its breaking point and snapped.