“Neither did I.”
“That’s different,” she protested. “With you it was...it was...” Way to paint yourself into a corner, Gwen.
“Love at first sight?” To give him credit, that dark humor came gently.
She lifted her chin. “Not in the least. You scared me. But you...you caught me, too. Maybe,” she added, resting the burrito on top of the bag from which it had come, her appetite momentarily gone, “that’s what scared me.”
He snorted. “Or maybe you were just smart.”
“Look,” she said. “Maybe they’re not totally safe. But they’re not that man, either. If we have to choose between the two—”
The look he sent her held a fierce defiance she hadn’t expected. “Who says we have to choose at all?”
She sat back in the seat, momentarily and unexpectedly silenced as he balanced his burger on his lap and shoved the Jeep into gear. Who says?
Except in her heart, she knew the grim truth of it. Natalie and Devin, they belonged here. They had resources. They were positioned to deal with this situation. And that man...he didn’t seem to belong here, but hell, yes, he had resources. And power.
She and Mac had a vehicle, a few suitcases, and a compromised hotel room. Mac’s blade had made him wanted...and Gwen’s pendant would make her wanted. And neither of them truly knew what to do with what they had.
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 sa
id 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.”
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