The Changeling's Fate

Nine: The Reveal

Nine the Reveal

"I can explain everything."

For a split second in the aftermath of Robin's pronouncement I'm struck dumb by a deepening sense of unreality. Explain what? So much about the past few days has been beyond comprehension and I'm not sure what he's referring to. He can explain unnerving tendency to show up wherever I am – including in my locked hotel room? He can explain Liza's disappearance? Judy's murder? All of it? None?

Intense green eyes closely scrutinize my face, and Robin shifts on the bed, perhaps sensing my sudden weariness. "Have a seat," he gestures to the armchair next the window, "you need to understand what's going on before making any decisions, and it will take a while to go through everything."

"I'm fine here, thanks." I'm not stupid, and I wasn't eager to give up my position of relative safety by the exit.

"Suit yourself." He shrugs, and a freak wind rises along the breezeway, blowing shut the once-open door and startling me. "Where to start, where to start. . ." Robin muses, idly twisting a ring on his finger, gaze pointed in my direction, although I'm under the impression he's looking through me rather than at me.

"Right, like ripping off a band-aid then." Settling some internal debate, he claps his hands together and grants me a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. "Alex," He draws my name out slowly, "Your caretaker was murdered. What you saw was real. Your life is in danger. And all of this, all the things in your life that have whispered you don't belong here, all of it, is occurring because you're not human." He glances up at me expectantly, as casually and confidently as if he had just invited me out for coffee and couldn't even envision being turned down.

With any other person, at any other time in my life, I would have brushed off his words as the ravings of a lunatic and walked right out the door. I was still sorely tempted. But Robin had already proven to be aware of things for which there was no rational explanation of him knowing. Things like Todd. Like where I would be at any given moment. Like Judy.

I wasn't ready to take Robin's statements at face value, but I wasn't ready to dismiss him out of hand either. That didn't mean I wasn't concerned about his mental stability. "Okay," I begin, adopting the placating tone one might use with a rabid dog. "Judy was murdered. . . and it's because I'm not human. What am I, then? And who murdered her?"

"You don't believe me." His mouth is set in a firm line. His eyes are still flat.

"I didn't say that." The temperature in the room seems to drop a few degrees, and my heart races, my instincts screaming Danger!

"You didn't have to. Here," he rises from the bed, moving towards me with long, confident strides and extends a hand for me to grab. "I can prove it to you." His tone brooks no argument.

Instinctively, I press further into the door and attempt to deflect his approach. "You haven't even told me what you're trying to prove."

Robin stops just a few steps away, hand still outstretched and close enough to grab if I reached for it. He sighs. "You are not human, Alex. You are Fae. A changeling. But you shouldn't be. You were never meant to end up, here, in the Human realm. We stopped the practice of swapping human chidren with Fae nearly two hundred years ago. It's likely that your caretaker, and possibly your friend, were murdered because of who you are and how you ended up here."

As Robin starts his explanation, I slowly feel backwards with my right hand, searching for the doorknob, desperate to keep Robin from noticing anything was amiss. The dramatic, life-changing nature of the statements Robin has made are the kind you expect to hear delivered with earnest, gasping breaths by Hollywood actors on the big screen. But Robin delivers them deadpan. Unsmiling, emotionless, and entirely without emphasis or inflection. The effect is chilling and the decision to leave is made for me. When my fingers finally tighten around the polished silver doorknob I give the thing a hard twist and push myself backwards, ready to tumble into the breezeway and flee down to the safety of my car.