by C. E. Murphy
BY C.E. MURPHY
Truthseeker
THE INHERITORS’ CYCLE
The Queens Bastard
The Pretender’s Crown
THE WALKER PAPERS
Urban Shaman
Thunderbird Falls
Coyote Dreams
Walking Dead
Demon Hunts
THE NEGOTIATOR TRILOGY
Heart of Stone
House of Cards
Hands of Flame
WITH MERCEDES LACKEY AND TANITH LEE
Winter Moon
For Jai
who gave me the idea
Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
About the Author
Copyright
One
“—once upon a time, not so long ago, driven by a little old lady I know personally. She drove it to the store weekly, that’s it, so its four thousand miles are gentle ones, ladies. It’s six years old, but it has all the extras. You won’t find a better deal here or anywhere else. Now, I know the sticker price is eighteen five and you’re not looking to spend quite that much.” The salesman leaned out from beneath his umbrella to get a better look at the deep V of Kelly Richards’s T-shirt, and smiled. “It’s cutting my own throat, but I think I can knock it down to seventeen flat. It’s a bargain, ladies, a real bargain.”
“Lara?” Kelly folded her arms beneath her breasts.
For a moment Lara found herself studying her friend’s cleavage, too, if less avidly than the salesman had. Kelly had a lifetime’s experience in using her assets to distract and command, whereas Lara’s own figure had been described as a pirate’s treasure: a sunken chest. Clinical curiosity made her wonder what it would be like to take control of a situation just by inhaling deeply.
“Earth to Lara, hello?” Kelly snapped her fingers under Lara’s nose. “Are you in there?”
“Of course I am.” Lara glanced at the yellow Mazda Miata the salesman hawked, but it was his quick patter that she concentrated on. The easy flow of words meant to distract and impress in the same way Kelly’s T-shirt was—though Kelly had perhaps gone too far in her distraction techniques. She hadn’t worn a coat, despite it being cold with a promise of serious rain. The salesman’s gaze kept wandering to her chest. Lara shook her head, smiling. “He’s lying.”
Offense flew across the man’s face and he clapped a hand over his heart. “How could I lie to two such lovely ladies as yourselves? But all right, all right, maybe a Miata isn’t your style. Something with a little more kick to it, maybe something that makes a real impression when you pull up? I’ve got a Ford four-fifty over here, it gets thirty miles to the gallon—”
He broke off again as Lara and Kelly both turned incredulous looks on him. “All right, all right, maybe twenty-five in the city. But I can see discerning women like yourselves want better gas mileage than that. I’ve got just the thing for you. This way, please.” He strode down the lot, Kelly at his side and Lara trailing behind, staying just close enough to overhear his routine. Kelly cast regular glances at her, and Lara shook her head each time.
Finally, exasperated, Kelly pointed at a ten-year-old Nissan with a four-thousand-dollar price tag. “What about that one?”
A spatter of rain hit the salesman’s umbrella and rolled off in a pathetic dribble that matched his expression. “Decent gas mileage, but the engine was overhauled by an amateur.”
“How’s it run?”
He muttered, “Fine,” and Lara nodded.
Kelly’s smile lit up. “I’ll take it.”
Forty minutes later the Nissan sat outside a diner, Kelly whimpering with each raindrop that spattered against her new car. Her lunch, virtually untouched, no longer steamed with heat, and Lara waved her own half-eaten burger at Kelly’s cooling french fries. “If you’re bringing me out to the best diner lunch in Boston you might as well eat. Or is this a special new diet where you only inhale the scent of food?”
Kelly tore herself from the view to waggle a finger at Lara. “Technically, the Deluxe is in Watertown, not Boston.”
Lara laughed. “Okay, fine. The best diner in the greater Boston area. You don’t like it when I’m pedantic with you. How come you can do it to me?”
“Because you do it all the time. I’m just getting my own back. Anyway, lunch is for you, not me.”
“So it’s a new diet. One where you’ve given up eating?”
“Well, no, it’s just, you know. I don’t know how you can eat as much as you do and stay so slim.” Kelly finally picked up her own burger, having been distracted from the car.
“Some of us get Mae West figures, others get fast metabolisms. Want to trade?”
Kelly glanced past her burger into the V of her own T-shirt. “Nah, I guess not. But thanks for coming along. You always know when salesmen are lying.”
“Kelly, anybody who sells used cars is lying. You don’t need me along to tell you that.” Lara squished her burger until bacon and cheese oozed out of the bun, then sank her teeth into it with a blissful sigh.
“Yeah, but you also know when they’re telling the truth.”
Lara shrugged her eyebrows, grateful her mouth was full. Kelly was right, the correctness—the truthfulness—of her statement hummed under Lara’s skin like a hive full of bees. She couldn’t remember a time when lies didn’t strike discordant notes. As barely more than an infant, Lara had heartily mistrusted her mother until Gretchen Jansen had learned to explain that Santa and the Tooth Fairy, among others, were simply stories that people told. Her mother’s patient explanations had eventually allowed her to understand the idea of popular legends, but the truth-sensing ability had become even more awkward when her father died. There were no comforting lies to be shared with a child who was fundamentally incapable of accepting “Daddy’s gone away for a while” as basic truth.
Since then—she’d been seven—she had understood it would be easier if she could instantly know when she was being lied to. It had never worked that way, though as she’d aged she’d learned to discern more and more about the probable truth. The Miata had almost certainly never belonged to a granny, and its four thousand miles were probably the result of someone tinkering with the odometer. But unless the salesman said so directly, she wouldn’t know. Worse, she couldn’t tell the difference between a truth based on misinformation or a genuine truth: if someone believed what he was telling her, it read as true.
As peculiar talents went, it was good for getting her out of jury duty—a frustrating perk, as she thought serving on a jury might be
interesting—and not a great deal else.
“Hey. Hey, wake up.” Kelly reached across the table to thump Lara’s forearm. “Look, it’s that guy from the news. The weatherman. Why don’t you go ask him if he’s single?” She nodded out the window, where a slender blond man in a long coat hurried past Kelly’s Nissan, his shoulders hunched against bursts of rain. A cameraman followed, looking irate. “Poor guy, he predicted sunshine today.”
“Oh. Is that why you’re wearing a T-shirt? I thought you were just trying to keep the car salesman off his game.”
“Merely a side benefit. No, I’d have brought a coat if I’d known it was going to be this nasty. Wow, there’s a job that’d suck for you, huh? What if you had to predict the weather and kept getting it wrong? You’d give yourself the heebie-jeebies.”
Lara, watching the weatherman cross the street, shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’d be predicting on the best data I had, so it might be okay.”
“Best data.” Kelly snorted. “How many times have I watched the news and the weatherperson said it was snowing when it was raining, or when the prediction was windy when it was as calm as a crypt?”
“Calm as a crypt.” Lara took her attention off the street and made a face at her friend. “Who says things like that? I don’t know if you watch too much Addams Family or if you’re just planning a career as an undertaker.”
“I’m planning a career as a rich young widow,” Kelly said archly. “See, if you were really a good friend you’d have already found me a rich old man to marry.”
“Most of my clients aren’t old.”
“But they’re rich, right?” Kelly’s eyes brightened. “They have to be, to afford their spiffy custom suits.”
Lara wrinkled her nose and put on a haughty accent. “Please. We at Lord Matthew’s Tailor Shop prefer the term ‘bespoke’ to ‘custom made.’”
“That’s because you at Lord Matthew’s are a bunch of Europhile snobs,” Kelly said cheerfully, and Lara laughed.
“Steve’s got three hundred years of tradition to live up to. Give him a break.”
“Oh yes.” Now Kelly put on the accent, sniffing disdainfully. “Steven Taylor, eighth in a line of tailors beholden to a Lord Matthew, whose name became so synonymous with quality that even during his lifetime men were referred to ‘Lord Matthew’s tailor’ rather than the Newbury Street Tailor Shop. That’s your party line, isn’t it?” she said in a normal voice. “You have to admit it sounds snooty.”
“It is snooty. But I love it. The way everything fits together flawlessly, it’s like a true thing made real.”
“A true thing made real. And you think I say weird things.”
Lara grinned. “Someday I’ll make your wedding dress and you’ll understand why it’s so fantastic. No patterns, just your body shape and your every whim conceded to. Except if you try to make a disastrous fashion choice, in which case I’ll politely ignore you and make something suitable. At least I could do that with you. We’ve had clients with no taste at all. A couple of them were even famous.”
“Fortune five hundred famous?”
“More like movie star famous.”
Kelly brightened again. “Now, see, if I were even the tiniest bit interested in sewing, I would so make you get me a job. Intimately fitting clothes to movie stars. I want your life.”
“No, you don’t,” Lara said with perfect confidence.
Kelly squashed her lips in mock irritation. “Shush. You’re not supposed to call me on things like that and you know it. People say things like that, Lar.”
“I know. But you don’t mean it.” If Lara’s high school yearbook had had a category for least likely to develop a sense of humor, her teenage self would have been pictured there. It wasn’t that she lacked one, but even as an adult, the line between teasing and telling lies was a thin one to her sense of truthfulness. She frequently had to stop and consider what she’d been told, investigate it for irony before responding. At the shop, her fellow tailors had such passion and joy for their creations they rarely joked about it; Lara’s underdeveloped sense of humor fit in well there.
Outside, in the real world, she was grateful for people like Kelly, who had recognized Lara’s ability on her own and wasn’t bothered by it. Building friendships without the polite gloss of white lies was difficult. People simply didn’t tell one another the truth all the time, or even often. When Kelly had protested that they did, Lara had arched an eyebrow and asked, “How often do you say ‘fine’ when someone asks you how you’re doing?” Kelly had shut her mouth on further objections and rarely argued with Lara on matters of truthfulness again.
“Okay, I don’t want your job. I want to hang out with you and meet the rich people you make clothes for,” Kelly admitted. “Is that more accurate?”
Lara laughed. “Much. The trouble with that is most of them never even see me, Kelly. I’d have a hard time introducing you to somebody when I’m effectively invisible.”
“I don’t understand that. They’re the dressmaker’s dummies. How can they not see the dressmaker?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lara assured her. “I don’t need to be noticed.”
“No?” Kelly cast a glance out the window. “Not even by him?”
Lara followed her gaze to where the weatherman, hair blown askew, shouted enthusiastically into a microphone as rain splashed over him. He was vividly handsome, with angular cheekbones and a pointed jaw, and a well-shaped mouth currently stretched in a rueful grin. His eyes were crinkled against the weather, features animated as he spoke. “Nah. Not that I’d say no …”
Kelly clapped her hands together. “Finish your burger. Come on, hurry up.”
Lara picked up the sandwich and bit in, an automatic response to the command, then furled her eyebrows. “What’s the hurry?”
“Look at him, Lar. He’s a pretty-boy TV star, but that coat, those pants.” She tsked, shaking her head, eyes wide with dismay. “The man needs a makeover to reach his full potential, and I know just the woman to give him one.”
“You?”
Kelly gave an enthusiastic pah! of dismissal. “I like my men broad enough to fill doorways. Not that Mr. Weatherman doesn’t have great shoulders, but my mighty thighs would crush those slender hips. I’m going to introduce you.” She dropped a twenty on the table and caught Lara’s wrist, tugging her up.
“Kelly! I’m not done eating! And you don’t even know him!”
“Everybody knows him,” Kelly insisted. “He’s David Kirwen, Channel Four News weatherman, and they’re shutting down filming. It’s now or never. I’ll buy you another burger. Come on, Lara. This is why you never meet guys. You never take any risks. Live a little!” She pulled Lara toward the door, ignoring her protests, and stepped out into the wind-driven rain, T-shirt soaking in a few seconds.
Lara muttered “He’ll notice you, anyway,” and earned a second dismissive sound from her friend.
“Huge tracts of land aren’t everyone’s fancy. Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr. Kirwen? My friend here wanted to talk to you about your wardrobe!”
“For heaven’s sake.” Lara spoke the protest under her breath as Kirwen turned to face them, amusement writ large across his face, animating thin lips and brown eyes into pure sensual charm. “I didn’t,” she said to him in embarrassment. “I mean, your trench coat is really well made. The stitches must be oiled, the way water’s beading and rolling off. But really, I didn’t want to talk to you. I’m sorry. My friend is—” She ran out of words, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. The weatherman was dressed for the pelting rain; Lara, in a T-shirt and jeans—her coat was in Kelly’s Nissan—was not.
“An enabler,” Kelly offered. “This is Lara Jansen. She’s a tailor, a bespoke tailor, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but—”
“I’m only a journeyman,” Lara mumbled, but Kelly went on heedless.
“—it’s custom tailoring, not even a pattern, I can’t remember how it all works, but anyway, Lara
can tell you about it, and she thinks you’re cute and well dressed—”
“Kelly!”
“A tailor who thinks I’m well dressed. I’m flattered, Miss Jansen. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He turned a megawatt smile on Lara, evidently unaware of its power. Bells chimed beneath her skin, ringing in the truth inherent in his statement, and Lara put her hand out automatically to meet his as he said, “I’m David Kirwen.”
Pure tones shattered into discord.
Two
The hairs on Lara’s neck stood against the rain and wind. The tones of truth rang with uncertainty, tremors lifting goose bumps on her skin. Her knowledge was usually an instant thing, one pure tone or a flat one, but the sound of David Kirwen’s name went on and on, searching for a final note to settle on. They began to clear, shivering toward agreement, but even as purity took over, a dissonance remained. Lara felt her smile go fixed, felt her hand go icy in Kirwen’s, and saw that he noticed it. Some of the light went out of his own smile and he retrieved his hand from her cold grip. “I’d hate to keep you out on an afternoon like this one. Thank you for saying hello.”
“Lara and I,” Kelly said briskly, “were going to stop for a cup of coffee down the street. Would you like to join us?”
Kirwen turned a slow, regretful smile on the invitation, looking at Kelly but leaving the sensation and weight of his gaze on Lara. There was a trace of apology in it, something more meaningful than the polite, obligatory refusal of, “I think perhaps I’d better not. Maybe another time, Miss …?”
“Richards,” Lara supplied. “Kelly Richards. We need to get going, Kel.”
“But—”
“Now, Kelly.” Lara pinched a smile toward Kirwen, wrapped her hand around Kelly’s biceps, and tugged her toward the newly purchased Nissan up the street.
