C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

“Here’s our man.” Relief swept Dickon’s voice. He broke away from the uncomfortable huddle to pound Dafydd on the back. “Good to see you in something other than an orange jumpsuit, man.”

“It’s good to be in something else. I’d have never admitted it in prison, but they chafe.” Dafydd wrinkled his nose delicately, earning a laugh as Dickon released him to the rest of the group.

His mortal glamour slipped and slid in Lara’s vision, but she jolted forward to catch him in a hard hug. His arms, at least, felt safe and strong around her, and his breath stirred her hair as he murmured, “Thank you.”

She mumbled “You’re welcome” into his shoulder. “Thank God. I don’t know what I would’ve done if that judge hadn’t agreed to release you.” She knew she should let him go, make some effort to smooth things over with Washington, but she remained still, trying to convince herself everything would be all right now.

“You’d have told her the truth.” Kelly sounded wry. “And then she would’ve locked you in a looney bin. David, I owe you an apology.”

“Not at all.” Dafydd released Lara to shake first Kelly’s then Gretchen’s hands. “The circumstances were impossible.”

“They still are.” Distortion crawled across Officer Cooper’s face and darkened his eyes. “I want the straight answer.”

“To hell with you, man,” Dickon said with more conviction than humor. “How about me? Am I ever gonna hear something other than Lara’s delusions?” He added, “Sorry,” perfunctorily, and Lara ghosted a smile.

“No, you’re not. And Dafydd will explain—” She broke off to wait on his approval, then continued at his nod: “But not here, okay, Dickon?”

“You mean not in front of the cops?” Washington’s jaw rolled aggressively enough that Dickon stepped forward, pitting himself against the detective. They reminded Lara of gladiators, determined to end—or maybe bring on—a confrontation at any cost. “Right now I don’t care if it’s on the record or off, Miss Jansen. I just want answers.”

Dafydd exhaled loudly. “At the very least I think we should extract ourselves from these surrounds before arguing about it. Perhaps if we retired somewhere more private?”

“Well, we can’t take the elevator down to the parking garage,” Kelly said. “There are about a million—” She broke off, looked at Lara, and said, “About twenty reporters waiting around it. Is there a way we can sneak out without being seen?”

Her no-nonsense tone coupled with the effort to be literal sparked Lara’s amusement. Washington, looking both irritated and accepting, gestured them toward a hall. “I can walk you out the same way they brought Kirwen in.”

“I’ll use the public elevator,” Gretchen said unexpectedly. “The press know who I am. They’ll be happy to get a statement from me, if they can’t have one from Lara and Dafydd.” She embraced Lara, gave Dafydd a brief smile, and hurried toward the elevators.

Dafydd watched her go, then turned to Lara with a bemused expression. “I’d hardly think I deserved that from her.”

Lara shrugged and took his hand. “I told her the truth. She believed me. So she has no reason to blame you for anything.”

“Even so,” Dafydd murmured, then nodded as Washington gestured impatiently down the hall.

Silence fell over the little group as they hurried for the cavernous concrete lot beneath the court building. Half a dozen police cars were parked in the area they entered, and Washington slowed before reaching the floor-to-ceiling fence that barricaded the police area off from the rest of the lot. “I don’t suppose this is private enough for your little discussion.”

“Sorry.” Lara glanced upward at the security cameras. “I’d rather not be someplace where there’s surveillance.”

Exasperation flashed over Washington’s features. Lara imagined he thought her paranoid, but Dafydd’s safety was worth that. Cooper, trailing along behind, muttered “Give me a break” as Washington waved a keycard at the gates and they began rattling open.

“We’ll go back to my place,” Kelly said. “I’ll get my car, and, I don’t know, Reg, can you take a police vehicle? There’s not enough room in the Nissan.”

“We’ll manage. Go on.” He waved at the doors.

Dafydd, at Lara’s side, stiffened. She turned a worried glance on him as warning widened his eyes and caught an alarmed sound in his throat.

And then it was too late, as concrete walls and massive pillars rended with magic that let nightwings pour through the gaps.

“Down! Down! Down!” Lara tackled Kelly, laying her out on the concrete. Kelly screamed, more surprise than fear, and Lara rolled off her, reaching for Dickon’s hip. “Get down!”

She suspected it was instinct rather than her orders that made him duck as winged blackness shrieked and flew at his head, but the effect was the same. Lara grabbed a fistful of his shirt and let her body become deadweight, dragging him further down. “Keep Kelly safe! Don’t fight them!” The command and confidence in her voice were alien to her, but Dickon responded, flattening himself above Kelly, whose eyes rounded with outrage as Lara scrambled to her feet.

For an instant she saw everything as though it had been flash-frozen, an indelible image stamped in her mind. The glamour that made Dafydd appear human was gone, and a scattering of objects lay around his feet: loose change, his belt, a ring. No doubt his earrings lay somewhere on the concrete, too small to see as lightning shattered from his fingertips and threw the garage into stark relief. Against that inversion, gunfire flashed repeatedly.

Nightwings squealed, ripped apart by lightning, thrown back by bullets. It seemed ludicrous that human weapons could damage the nightmare creatures, but Lara was glad they did; glad that Washington, whose eyes were as round as Kelly’s, had the nerve to stand his ground and fire into the seething blackness over and over again. She glanced around wildly for Rich Cooper and found him at the open gate, his own duty weapon flashing gunshots into the mass of nightwings.

Some kind of distortion altered the appearance of the nightwings. A shadow, a ghost, nothing more: if Lara looked straight on she couldn’t see the wrongness at all. A part of her was ready to look away, so she might pretend the nightwings hadn’t followed them at all.

But fury bubbled up: fury that they had been followed, fury that her friends were in danger, fury that someone was trying to kill her to hide the truth of an investigation she’d promised to see through to its end. That anger wouldn’t let her look away, not even to study their ruined shapes—though with monsters scattering around them, anywhere she did look let their broken forms tease at the corners of her eyes.

Lightning and gunfire erupted again, reminding her sharply that she had a weapon of her own to use. She flung her hands up, as dramatic a gesture as Dafydd used, and threw familiar words at the nightwings: “I exorcise thee, unholy spirit, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!”

The black-winged creatures nearest to her flinched, then surged forward, swarming her. Kelly screamed again as Lara went down beneath a rush of nightwings, too astonished for fear. She knew nothing about fighting: it was an instinct for survival that straight-armed a fist into one of the monster’s throats. That had more effect than the exorcism had. The thing fell back, clawing and coughing as if it were a mortal beast instead of a magical horror.

“Your world!” Dafydd bellowed, and light blew through the words, illuminating their meaning to far beyond their simple content.