Claimed by the Demon

Chapter 15

Mac drove the circuit around Albuquerque with hands tense on the wheel—the burger leaden in a stomach that still demanded more, the impact of what he’d heard lying heavily upon him.

He’d been drawn here; he knew that much. Gwen had been drawn here. And now he faced not one but potentially two enemy adversarial camps that might have had a hand in it.

Except if Natalie was telling the truth, she hadn’t known about the pendant and still didn’t know much about it. Subdued as she was, Gwen had devoured her burrito, picking through the folder with fingers she kept licking clean. Defining what she could for him—the name of the thing, the purpose of it, the vague genesis of it. But she didn’t know, and Natalie apparently didn’t know, how to use it.

Or Natalie and Devin could simply be playing them and doing it more subtly than the man at the warehouse.

Not subtle at all, that one.

Go. The thought surfaced unbidden. Run. Just as Gwen had suggested. If they’d been drawn here, then maybe leaving here would be enough.

Except he didn’t believe it for a moment. And he wasn’t about to risk Gwen. Not when, as she had so aptly pointed out, it suddenly wasn’t about just him anymore. Him and the blade.

“Wow,” Gwen said. “Look how fast those clouds came up.”

He followed her glance out the windshield, north and west and up, and found towering late afternoon clouds tumbling high, white above, dramatic shadowing below. “We should have checked the weather.”

“Oh, but this area can surely use the rain.”

He couldn’t help a smile—mundane conversation, a Northeastern woman come west. “No doubt. But if I’d known we were about to hit the front edge of monsoon activity, I’d have found time to get us slickers today.”

“Huh,” she said. “Before the battle for sanity or after?”

“Before,” he said firmly, reaching for the bottled water propped between his thighs. “If it rains, you’ll see what I mean. What else do you have in those bags?”

She dug in, offering him the ketchup-smeared remains of boxed fries. As he pinched up a mouthful, she said, “Seems quiet.”

She wasn’t talking about the clouds. And when he answered, neither was he. “So far.” The blade, quiescent. The rolling waves of black despair and fury, abated.

So far.

They’d taken the highway up to veer west on Tramway, detoured south to Alameda and across the river to travel Coors south. The rush-hour traffic eased as they headed into the south valley area—not a coincidental choice.

According to the business card Gwen had been given, this was Devin James’s turf. And it was time to see how the air tasted here.

Gwen, peering at the map she’d pulled from his door pocket, realized it just as he approached the highway—the highway overpass within sight as he cut east over a narrow road, speed bumps and all, that spilled them out near the Isleta entrance ramp.

North on the highway, and their ninety-minute circuit would be completed in another fifteen, the clouds closing in dark and imminent above them.

“They’re here somewhere,” she said, looking out over the south valley from the raised highway. “Do you feel—”

“There’s something,” he told her. Not something he’d have been alert to before these past few days—nothing like the blade’s deep obsession with acquiring emotions. Just an underlying awareness as they fish-hooked around the south end of the valley. “You?”

She shook her head. “Maybe it would be there if...” She glanced at him, and he could have sworn that was a blush stealing in on those lightly freckled cheeks. “If you weren’t right here.”

He smiled to himself. Okay then. “Nice to have an impact,” he murmured.

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

At that he only cocked an eyebrow at her, until she heard her own words and laughed a sputtering sound. “Or do let it go to your head. But you’re on your own with that until we’re not driving around looking for trouble.”

“And not finding it.”

“Bad guys have to sleep, too,” Gwen said. “Maybe we can grab our stuff from the hotel.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d lived out of his vehicle. He nodded. “Hit and run.”

Although if that man—or even Natalie or Devin—had wanted to get to them through the hotel room, they’d had plenty of opportunity.

Then again, things changed.

Advancing with care at the hotel took longer than hauling down their stuff once they felt safe; checking out took a matter of moments. Mac stuffed the bill in his pocket and joined Gwen where he’d parked beside her little blob of a car, jumper cables at work. “Let’s head for the park.” He nodded in the direction of the little park to which he’d led them only the day before. “Maybe we can learn something from what’s left of the hot spot.”

She hesitated as she opened her car door, about to slide in. “I really wonder if we shouldn’t call Natalie. No one else here can help us.”

He set his jaw—as much at the anxiety trickling in from her as at the suggestion itself. She thought to hide from him, but couldn’t hide from the blade...and he didn’t know how he felt about that.

People should, he thought, be allowed their private thoughts and feelings. Even if it benefited him to know them.

Her eyes widened with dismay; her hand went to the pendant. “You’re a lot angrier than you look.”

He laughed, utterly without humor. “Looks like we’re in the same boat,” he said. “Is it just me, or—”

“You,” she said. “Through the blade, I think. Just like—” She stopped short, biting her lip.

“Just like outside the diner.” Yeah. Damned intense. “That’s what we’ll do at the park, I think.”

“What?”

He laughed again, this time with true amusement. “That, too, eventually—but no, not in the park. No, I mean this.” He gestured between the pendant and the pocket that held the blade. “We need to understand what’s happening there. We need to be able to limit it. If one of us gets in trouble, the other one of us has to be able to function.”

“Trouble,” she said. “Right. Not much chance of that, is there?”

But wherever trouble had hidden this late afternoon, it wasn’t at the park beneath the threatening rain, thunder now rumbling in the background. A few skateboarders were on their way through; bikers swooped along the walkways while scant pedestrians shared the fast-cooling air. Just a typical park clearing out before dinner time and rain.

“It might not storm,” Gwen said, looking over at the clouds. “The hotel clerk said sometimes it just circles around the city.”

“The hotel clerk was angling for a look at your excellent ass while you gathered your things from the floor,” Mac pointed out. “Not that I’m keeping track.”

She shot him a look that might have been amusement or exasperation. “You getting anything from this place? They were right over there.”

Mac wandered through the pampered grass, trailing his hand along the picnic table, searching for any visible sign of what had happened here the day before. In the silence of everything but the rising storm gusts and the rustle of leaves, he gave her a rueful look and did that which until now he’d been avoiding.

There was more than one way to run.

He let the blade in.

He did more than that. He went looking for it. Not deep or hard—a mere crack in the wall he’d placed between them.

He barely heard Gwen’s gasp through the rush of thunder in his mind, the fierce resentment and craving that curled through his body, wrapping around his bones. It would ease, he told himself, standing stiff and impaled by it...making himself believe.

“Mac—” Her protest held concern—her first inkling of what it was they both asked of him here. Her inward panic and floundering adjustment bounced back at him through whatever had grown between the blade and pendant.

“Now,” he told her, his eyes still closed against it all, “would be a good time to see if you can shut it down.”

Her fingers found his on the tabletop—the lightest of touches, full of acknowledgment and I’m here.

Slowly, his sense of her floundering receded; her panic turned into an underlying determination...and then diminished. Not gone, but...not crashing into him any longer.

The blade, too, receded, its tsunami of resentment easing back to what had become normal between them, while some part of him numbed itself to the consistency of that background noise.

He took a deep breath, rotating his shoulders.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded, not yet opening his eyes—because now he had work to do. But he murmured, “That was good, what you did. The calm, before you stepped back. Remember that feeling.”

That feeling nudged against him, a little caress of calm; he turned his hand palm-up and gently captured her fingers—as much in warning as in response. Because yeah...now he was going hunting.

Loosed with his intent behind it, the blade swept out to scour the park. Hunger hunger hunting free!

And Mac swept out with it.

Gwen shivered and looked up at the sky—the wind gusting up high, lightning strobing, thunder hard on its heels. “Mac,” she said, and not for the first time.

But he just stood there, swaying slightly—his eyes shut, his face closed, his attention turned inward.

She could feel it, in a strained and distant way—the intensity of the blade’s hunt, Mac’s willingness to go along with it.

Saving his effort for a more critical juncture, she thought.

But still. The first drops of rain splattered against her, huge and startling and bringing out instant goose bumps. A glance around the park told her they were alone, other than a couple now hurrying for their car. Gwen eyed her own car with a certain wistfulness. “Mac.”

He made a noise deep in his throat. Not a particularly responsive one.

The scattered drops turned steady; Gwen hunched to receive them. Definitely too far away, those cars. She eyed the nearest overhead shelter, measuring the distance. “Mac,” she said, raising her voice above wind and rumble. “It’s raining.”

And the skies opened up. Water fell upon them as if poured from a bucket; Gwen gasped in shock and outrage. This wasn’t rain! This was inundation! “Mac!”

His eyes opened suddenly, gratifyingly wide in startled surprise. They were instantly soaked to the skin, his T-shirt clinging and his hair dripping. His mouth formed a curse—she couldn’t hear it—and he grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the shelter.

When he stopped beneath it, she ran right into him and then stayed there for warmth, oh-so-grateful when he put his arms around her. Whatever either of them might have said was lost in the battering sound of rain against the metal shelter roof, and she didn’t even try. She shivered, and she thought of his earlier remarks about the monsoon, and she decided even the most encompassing slicker wouldn’t have kept out this rain.

He didn’t shiver. If anything, he had warmth enough for them both, and the realization of it made her glance up at him, understanding. The blade had seen his chilled condition as it would any kind of hurt or illness, and had addressed it.

Okay, demon blade. For this, you get points.

But only until his eyes flared briefly wide, just enough warning so she didn’t fall when he abruptly jerked her around behind him. Not that she didn’t stumble, her soaked pant legs grabbing at one another, her feet squishing in her sport sandals. So disorienting, the rain slamming the roof overhead, the lightning flashing strobe imprints against her vision.

It took her a moment to realize they were no longer alone.

Two young men stood at the edge of the shelter, dripping and panting and still regaining their balance—but already sneering. Only then did Gwen realize that in the middle of this sensory pounding, her instincts had gone into overdrive—even if the only evident weapon was a baseball bat. She grabbed for Mac’s shoulder, a warning—and realized he already knew.

Of course he knew. He’d shoved her back, hadn’t he? And now he stood like some wild thing, braced for action, water dripping off his hair and clothes and the blade—the Bowie—in his hand, a reverse grip held low. A flush of the blade’s delight trickled through to her, shocking her with its beguiling nature.

All that had been warm suddenly turned cold.

This? This was what he had to fight from within?

The two men sorted themselves out, breath and physical composure regained. Hair cut short slicked down dark; olive skin gleamed wetly. Their clothes were neat and well-fitted and on any other day, in any other moment, she would have given them both a second glance of appreciation. But what she saw in their eyes...

It wasn’t sanity.

That’s not fair. It’s quiet out there!

And it was. It still was. But inciting hatred had been sweeping over this city for days, and in these men, it seemed to have lodged.

The rain slacked a notch—enough for raised voices and loud conversation. One of the men stepped forward, hefting his bat. “What? You don’t want to share your shelter with us?”

Mac’s words came steadier than she ever would have believed, knowing what raged inside him. “The shelter is for everyone. The baseball bat doesn’t need to come any closer.”

“Why?” asked the man. “Are you one of those? The people who think every Latino should go home even when our families founded this city? You look like one of those.”

“Dammit,” Gwen said, very much in spite of herself as she realized what the second man, his eyes glittering in silence, held in his hand now that he’d tossed his ball glove aside, “Does everyone in this city carry a knife?”

“The shelter,” Mac repeated, voice carrying over the rain with a grim determination that told Gwen he was clinging to control, “is for everyone.”

She reeled, caught up in the blade’s despotism—and then grabbed on to the sudden, grounding realization. Opportunity.

They’d needed practice. She’d needed practice. She needed to know if she could block this out, and if she could control the flow of it, and if she could reach back to him in return, even through this. More than just a moment of calm, but a domination of what tried to engulf her.

Maybe of what tried to engulf him.

Poor hubris, to aim so high when she had no experience, no practice—when years of dealing with the blade had given Mac both, and he still now faltered before it.

But he was tired, and she wasn’t. He was worn, and she was fresh.

She hadn’t yet learned what she couldn’t do, and sometimes that made all the difference.

Being able to concentrate...that was another thing altogether.

“Yes,” the man was saying, as the rain—so strong and sudden—retreated just as abruptly. “We think you should go home.”

Mac hesitated there—looking nothing but ominous, even as Gwen felt the common sense of Mac versus the bloodthirst of the blade. The emotion thirst.

Given time, she thought he would win.

She didn’t think they had time.

She gathered her calm.

“Okay,” she said, interrupting the confrontation. “We will. We’re leaving now.”

“No,” the second man said, gesturing with the knife. “You don’t understand. All the way home.”

“Mac,” Gwen said, low enough to make it private. “Let’s just go. They won’t follow us. There’s nothing active here.”

When he hesitated, she knew it didn’t come from him. That the blade pushed him.

So she pushed back. Just a little. Just enough to let him know she was doing it—the calm. The confidence in him. A quiet, centered feeling that she took from within herself, finding it there amid her own growing confidence, and spread to him.

Not to mention a little common sense. “These guys aren’t the ones we want.”

He blinked. For a moment, the turmoil roiled even more loudly within him, the bare nuances of it reaching through to her—and then it quietly gave way before her. He shook his head. “No. They aren’t.” He eased back a step, looking out on the park—glistening grass and landscaping, instant puddles everywhere, water still trickling off leaves and the shelter roof to create a symphony of soft percussions. To the east of the city, the Sandia Mountains dominated the skyline—and the dark clouds still dominated the Sandias.

“Whatever was here yesterday,” she said, “it’s long gone. That man is sleeping, or eating, or watching the news.”

He nodded, flipping the blade up to catch it—a closed Barstow pocketknife all over again. To the men—to their scowls and barely restrained anger—he said, “It’s all yours, fellows.”

Gwen let her breath out, resting her hand on his back, soaked pink bandage and all. Feeling the tension still living there under soaked cotton—and realizing anew how wet she was, too. She glanced down at herself; it might have been a mistake.

Wet, and more than a little see-through.

She thought she’d just stay here behind him. And maybe he read her mind, or maybe she just distracted him, for he did what she thought he would never have done without her interference...he turned his back on the men, blocking her from their view...protecting her.

She knew instantly from their faces—it had been a mistake. “No!” cried one of them. “You do not turn your back—” his movement created a strange punctuation in emphasis “—on...us.”

Mac shoved her—shoved her hard. He ducked and threw himself to the side as she went down with a cry, skinning palms and shooting pain through her injured hand; the baseball bat slammed down on the table with the resounding clang of weighted metal against wood. Gwen twisted wildly, scrabbling away even as she tried to orient—untangling the visuals of three men in the eerie post-storm glitter of water and oblique new sunlight.

Two men with bats.

No. Mac with the Iroquois war club, meeting the man’s next blow with swift power—sending the bat flying, slipping away from the slashing knife, whirling around to slam the man in the ribs with a blow that had to be pulled, its potential metered into just enough so the man ended up on the ground not far from Gwen.

Not far at all.

He pressed against the ground, lifting his head...finding her. She didn’t need the warning cry of old instincts—and she didn’t need Mac’s help. She popped him one, right in the nose, and when he fell back on his shoulder, she lashed out with her sandaled toes pointed and fierce.

By the time she scrambled to her feet, he had one hand over his nose and one over his crotch, and the flare of warning had faded to nothing but adrenaline aftermath.

She found his knife not far away; she acquired it.

When she stood, brushing herself off—a futile gesture for one who was now covered in sandy clay mud and wetness—she realized she’d closed Mac out entirely. And when she looked at him, she realized what a mistake that had been.

Or maybe not. She probably wouldn’t have been able to function at all had she not kept to herself.

Because now the club was a saber, sweeping and sharp with the faintly unearthly sheen of light running along its edge. And now the single man still upright stood frozen, his irrational anger—a mob mentality gone so badly wrong with only two mob members—now utterly dissipated in the face of Mac’s own lost sanity.

Not to mention the sword.

If the man ran, he’d die. If he blinked, he’d die. If he didn’t run...

Maybe he’d die then, too.

Gwen didn’t dare even say Mac’s name. Not so much as a soothing sound. Not the way he trembled on the edge of explosive violence.

In desperation, she returned to the calm.

Oh, it wasn’t easy—not with her own adrenaline reaction zinging along her nerves. But she’d found it before—a subtle, budding confidence in not just the pendant, but also in the way her life was coming together. The way some things suddenly had meaning. What she’d experienced as a child, what she’d grown to in the aftermath. How the wound from her father’s blade had left its indelible impression, the gift of warning she had taken half a lifetime to master.

So from the inside out, she touched him. Just a whisper. But a confident whisper, growing with the understanding of what she could do.

His awareness came in the merest shift of his shoulder; the blade’s awareness came in a slap of annoyance. Gwen stiffened—found herself offended as much as hurt by it. Screw you. You can’t have him.

She went back for more. Just enough to let him regain his own grasp of himself—buffering, calming. The blade snapped at her again, a sharp sting of retribution; she pushed past it, lifting her gaze to that of the man who stood frozen in wise fear before them. “You know,” she said, “we really were happy to share.” She hadn’t expected to see the flicker of acknowledgment on his face—or the regret.

She dared to rest her hand on Mac’s back. “I think it’s safe. Go while you can.”

The man didn’t hesitate. First things first—he squirted out of range, squelching audibly; only then did he circle around for his friend. By then Gwen could feel Mac breathing more deeply under her hand; she dared to do more than touch him, rubbing a gentle circle over his back.

The man scooped up their baseball gloves—the bat was a lost cause, deeply dented even at a glance—and pulled his friend up, that latter still trying to choose between stanching his nosebleed and comforting his privates. The man caught Gwen’s eye, and he was, suddenly, what she’d seen upon their arrival—a well-presented guy out for a session of fielding balls in the park with his friend. “Resentment builds,” he said, “but you didn’t deserve... I don’t know—”

Gwen shook her head. “It was on the wind,” she said, the only one of the two of them who knew the near-literal truth of it. “It’s in the city. We fought it together, in a way.” And then she made a face, a wince, and said, “I hope I didn’t break his nose.”

“Better that,” the man said, “than the other.”

Gwen couldn’t argue with that.

Or with the deep release of a breath that Mac let go as they left, easing back his ready stance. He looked down at his hand; the blade settled into the Barstow—still flipped open, keen and wicked and gleaming. “That was too close.”

“In all ways,” Gwen told him, seeing the self-retribution dark in his eyes. “They made their choice, too. What if you hadn’t had the blade? How do you think things would have gone for us, your basic average couple sheltering from the rain?”

He cast a startled look at her, still easing down from his alert—she knew that, too, from the faint echo of the blade’s turmoil. “Chivalry compels me to mention that you could never be basic average.”

How silly was it to feel a little leap of pleasure at those words, here in the middle of what must now be the world’s most hostile park, hair and clothes still dripping and the driving culprit of a storm still lumbering along the shoulders of the Sandias?

“Ooh,” she said. “I have to stop everything and preen for a moment.” But not too much of a moment. She glanced across the landscaping to the parking lot, a narrow strip edged by a curving cemented arroyo on the far side. The Jeep sat gleaming next to her little Bug. “I really think I’d like to call—”

He made a strange sound, a kick-in-the-gut noise. She didn’t have to ask why; she felt it. Even as she grabbed at him, slowing his descent to the concrete, she understood exactly where that slashing pain came from and why.

The blade, having its temper tantrum. It had wanted blood and fear; they’d stopped it. And now Mac was pale and stricken, his mouth tight—yet shaking his head. “It’ll pass,” he said, barely managing the words. “It’ll— Damn—”

“Stupid blade!” Gwen found herself in a fury. “Worse than a two-year-old!” She glared down at it. “I’d kick you if I could!”

And couldn’t she?

Until now, when she’d reached out, it had been to Mac. Her desire to protect him and the unconscious results, then her deliberate attempts to soothe him, to offer him just enough space that he could catch his own emotional and physical breath.

This time, she didn’t go for Mac. She looked for something other. Blindly groping, no idea what she was looking for other than what it wasn’t. She slipped into that head space quickly enough to be frightening, successfully enough so she didn’t have time to think about it. She found herself in Mac’s muffled pain, slicing claws of temper and retribution...human pain and human struggle and the deep, rich presence underlying the very essence of the man beside her.

But there. Oh, there. The stench of super-heated metal and acrid charcoal and singed flesh. That wasn’t Mac. Or human.

I see you, she told it. And, on impulse, Who are you? What’s your name?

Learning Demardel’s name had changed things for her. If this blade had a name...maybe it would change things for Mac.

But the blade lashed out at her, filled with fury and...fear. The strike raked through Mac on its way to her, twisting the rich essence she’d only just found and wrenching a cry from him.

Me. I did that. I’m doing that to him!

She fled from it. Found herself clutching him, found him clutching her back, both of them panting and astonished.

And the blade fled, too. Shocked and quiet. Not as before, when the pendant had shut it down, but simply hiding.

For the moment.

Mac, his eyes still wide and wary, said, “What the hell did you do?”

She shook her head, suddenly overwhelmed by it all.

I am nine years old, and my life will never be the same...

My father had a demon blade. He found this pendant. He gave it to me for safekeeping so he could finish his hunting—for those who killed my mother, for those like her. But he waited too long, and he was about to lose his fight with the blade, so he came after it...and me.

He wounded me. He left me with the pendant and a healed-in sixth sense about those who would hurt me. Or hurt others. And now the pendant has brought me to this place, this time, this man...

I am twenty-seven years old, and my life will never be the same.

Mac rolled to his knees, to his feet. “What?” he demanded.

“I want to call them,” Gwen blurted, climbing to her feet beside him. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes my father made. I want to know what’s going on!”

She didn’t have to define who she meant. Mac bit back his snap of a response, a visible effort. He closed his eyes and took a breath and she couldn’t help but be amazed even at that, that he could think at all.

But in the end, he shook his head.

“Don’t you understand?” She barely stopped herself from shouting it at him. “I felt it! I scared it! If Natalie’s found any more information, maybe it’s enough. Maybe I can free you from this thing!”

Free us from this thing.

But she didn’t say it out loud, because it felt presumptuous. Three days of absurd intensity, of an astonishing physical connection and sexual release—maybe that was all it would ever be. She could free herself simply by walking away.

Except she’d felt that deep essence, and she’d tasted that rich, solid, amazing presence that made the core of him.

She knew what stood before her, and what it meant to her.

Mac, however, was not in mind-reading mode. Mac only shook his head. “This blade is the only chance we have to stop that man.”

That man. It had started as something of a joke, to refer to him that way. Now it was second nature, and suddenly so startingly unreal. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not. We don’t have to do this by ourselves. My father tried to do it by himself, and look where it got him! Look where it got me!”

He astonished her with the instant fierce tenderness of his response—stepping in to hold her close and tight, to sweep her up, two damp, hurting people under storm-racked skies. She was just as surprised at how tightly she returned the embrace.

“Where it got you,” he murmured into her ear, “is right here. And I’d have been lost days ago without you.”

She rebelled against that, stiffening in his arms. “Don’t say that. It’s not true. You’re stronger than that. I’ve felt it.”

“Stronger,” he agreed. “But tired. And I had no idea it would react like that.” He pulled back, touched his forehead to hers, and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “Now I do. And you’re right. I can’t do it alone. So make your call.”