He didn’t trust coincidence.
And he—he who had a demon blade that amplified and fed him emotions, that had its own wants and desires—he looked at this woman whose very presence spoke to him, and he knew better than to believe in what wasn’t real.
Even as the blade’s cruel healing snatched him up and crashed him back down into darkness.
* * *
Gwen flicked the light on and winced at the sight of herself in the mirror. All the usual—mouth a little too wide, upper lip a little unbalanced in its fullness, cheekbones a little broad in that heart-shaped face, all the undertones of red hair and faint copper freckles. Hair desperately out of control and her hair sticks locked in the car. Chinos and stretchy lightweight shirt travel-wrinkled and slept in.
She gave the bruised swelling at the corner of her eye a tentative prod and winced.
Right. Thrashing.
It had been an interesting awakening. An interesting night. All in all, bringing back memories she’d submerged so far as to nearly have forgotten.
I am eight years old, and my father comes home sick. There is blood. He won’t let me see, but then he falls into a strange, hot sleep and I look anyway.
I wish I hadn’t.
I am eight years old and I don’t know what to do for him, but I remember my mother soothing my forehead with a cool cloth, and I try that.
It seems to help.
It had helped this man, in the end. As difficult and miserable as it had been.
For both of them, thank you very much. Especially the not knowing, from moment to moment, if she was doing the right thing at all, or if she should call for help. Only those memories, as nonsensical as they were, had kept her from doing just that.
I am eight years old, and my father forbids me to call for help. He grabs my wrist and he spits the words at me, and then he falls back on the couch, barely conscious.
My wrist hurts for a week.
Not that she was afraid of Michael MacKenzie—not when she could have simply walked out, so unlike her young self. But that emphasis had made its mark nonetheless.
She finished poking at her face and gave it up. She had no makeup to cover the bruising, and it wasn’t worth fretting about otherwise. She washed her face, wiped down her arms and legs and torso, and grabbed her now-dry underwear.
In the bed, her accidental patient slept. Deeply and undisturbed, a natural sleep and with a nearly normal body temperature as close as she could tell. Oh, now and then he got restless, and once he even shifted in that particular way that let her know he was aroused.
Man in the morning. Something reassuring about that little piece of normal.
She dropped her summer-weight jacket over the chair so he’d know she was coming back and lifted the room key from the bedside table, slipping out to grab more than her share of the continental breakfast offerings in the lobby, far too aware that the single twenty tucked in her back pocket constituted the entirety of her current funds.
But when she tuned in and overheard the universal topic of conversation among the other hotel guests, she lost her appetite.
Phase of the moon...loonies were out last night...break-ins...muggings...something in the air...
And the ultrahassled desk clerk, reassuring people that this was all highly unusual, that they prided themselves on running a safe establishment, that they’d do what they could to assist.
Her first thought came with odd relief. It hadn’t been just her; it hadn’t been just Michael MacKenzie.
The second came with sick certainty—that the mugging hadn’t been the last of it for her, and she just hadn’t known it.
She dropped her half-full coffee cup into the trash and the croissant along with it, and she didn’t pretend she wasn’t rushing when she dashed out the door and down the row of parking spaces, looking for her dark little VW Bug.
The door stood slightly ajar.
She stopped, not quite within reach. Not wanting to be within reach. Really, really not wanting to look. Because truly, who would want a battered old soft-sided suitcase with zippers that had cable ties instead of pulls and a fair amount of duct tape holding it together? Who would want her travel-worn shirts and bras and undies and aurgh, her sanitary supplies?
“Hair sticks,” she moaned out loud. “Conditioner.”
Another few hours without either, and she’d have to make do with a paper bag.
But there was no point in guessing, so she looked.
Gone.
The suitcase, the little netbook case, the phone charger. The glove box contents were strewn over the passenger seat and foot well, and—was that a condom draped over the steering wheel? Limp and used? In her Volkswagen? Good God, had someone been on a dare?
With a quiet, firm nudge she pushed the door closed. No point in locking it. The open door had run down the battery; the interior lights were out.
Besides, she didn’t exactly have the keys anymore, did she?
She turned and left the car, ravaged as it was. She kept her steps firm and regular and her chin firm, too, if perhaps held a little too high. Convincing even herself. Through the lobby, past the elevator and to the stairs and up to the third-floor room she’d shared with a stranger.
A sick, raving stranger who had accidentally clocked her one during the night.
But there at the third-floor landing, she couldn’t quite continue. She lowered herself to the top step, propped her elbows on her knees, and hid her face in her hands. She tried to think logically—what she’d do now, how she’d replace her cash and her credit cards and her keys and her toothbrush; how she’d get the Bug to a garage. And there was identity theft to consider, the credit running up on her thankfully minimalistic cards—
And what had she been doing here anyway? If she’d wanted to lose everything, couldn’t she have gone to Vegas and had fun doing it? How the hell had she ended up in the stairwell outside the room of a guy she didn’t even know but had nursed through the night, maybe making all the wrong decisions after all?
The hell with logical.
Gwen dropped her forehead to her knees and started to cry. Good, hard, earnest sobs. The pain of disturbed memories, the violation of not one but two robberies, the loss of her things, the suddenly surrealistic sensation that she didn’t even know who she was any longer, never mind where she was.
The door slammed open behind her; she startled wildly, flattening up against the wall and smacking her head on the metal handrail. Michael MacKenzie stood in the doorway, looking both disoriented and fierce—until he saw her, at which point his expression flickered to the kind of man panic that meant, Oh, God, she’s crying. What do I do?
She flapped her hand in a useless gesture, hunting for explanation—and instead burst into a sad wail: “Hair sticks!”
She wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d turned and run in the opposite direction. But instead—barefoot, shirtless, tattooed, and sporting only half the injuries he’d displayed the evening before, he sat down beside her, tucked her in under his arm and pulled her close. And then he kissed the top of her head, and that was the end of that; she burst into tears all over again.
“You—you—you,” she said, never getting further than that word.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
So she cried a little more, and then she sniffled mightily, and she muttered, “I’d go get a tissue, but they’ve probably been stolen.”
Wisely, he said nothing; just stroked her hair—her horrible hair—and squeezed her shoulder.
But she must have been thinking again, because she narrowed eyes that felt distinctly puffy, pulling back to aim that stare at him. “How did you find me? I was quiet.”
Surprise crossed his face. “I—” He shook his head. “I must have heard you.”
But she was sure she’d seen a flinch. Some truth he didn’t want to face any more than she wanted hers. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.” And eased away from him.
Gotta give it to him. He wasn’
t slow to turn the tables. “What about your father?”
She blinked. “I— What?”
“Last night. You said—”
Offense. Best defense. Now. “You mean, when you were thrashing?” She pointed at her face. “Thrashing.”
He did his own double take, absorbing the implication of her new bruise. When he spoke, his voice sounded forced. “So it would seem. You said—”
No. That had been a mistake. A long day, a dark night, and words that had slipped out. “I don’t want to talk about my father.”
“Funny,” he said. “Because I really do.”
“Really? I want to talk about how everything was going just fine until I met you, and now suddenly I’m out my purse, everything that was in my car, and apparently every bit of good sense I ever possessed!”
He drew breath as though he’d come right back at her, but at the last moment he didn’t—instead, frowning...trying to work out the meaning behind her words.
It maybe wasn’t fair to use shorthand against a man who’d been so very sick so very recently and who, for all his absurd recovery, still looked very much battered.
In a heroic sort of—
Oh, my God. Stop that.
Coming to conclusions—and the right conclusions at that—he said, “Hair sticks?”
She nodded. “From my car. Which was broken into. Along with a whole lot of other people’s, it seems, not to mention various muggings and a lot of disgruntlement overheard in the lobby over the free breakfast. You should get down there, by the way. It won’t last forever.”
He stood, on his feet faster than she’d ever expected of him—pacing away and back again on the limited landing area, moments during which she paid too much attention to the way his jeans settled over his hips.
Note to self: ogling does not count as “stopping that.”
Shock. It was the emotional shock. Surely. Her hand closed over the pendant, as if she would possibly, after all these years, receive some sort of divine guidance from it. Some voice from her father’s past, before he became what he became.
Michael MacKenzie held his hand out. “We can’t talk about this here.”
Right. Because it was so much safer in the room.
But she took his hand, and she stood and brushed herself off, and she dabbed the last bit of moisture from beneath her eyes, and then she followed him back to the room.
Where he stopped, a vulnerable chagrin coloring his expression—mingled with that same wry self-awareness. Barefooted, bare-chested, and staring at the door lock. “This,” he said, “could be a bad moment.”
Gwen’s laugh was a little watery, but held a smile nonetheless. She held the key between two fingers, turning it back and forth in the hall light. His relief made her smile bigger, and he stood aside so she could unlock the door and lead the way.
But she didn’t fail to notice the truth of it all. He’d heard her, he said.
He’d heard her, as impossible as it was, and he’d come to her—without regard to shoes, shirt, or even the key to get back in.
He’d just come.
For her.
Chapter 4
Mac grabbed another protein drink. It wasn’t nearly enough to fuel a body being force-healed from layers of assaults, but it would assuage the immediate gnawing in his belly. And then, while Gwen pressed a washcloth to her face as if she could hide the bright shine of lingering tears and the strong pink of high emotion, he grabbed a quick shower, brushing his teeth in the spray.
He came out to discover her doing the same at the sink and set himself to pacing the room—driven by the blade’s restlessness, driven by the picture he was forming of the previous night and knowing that this surge of energy would be all too brief. The burning in his blood told him as much—told him the damage had gone deep, that the blade still worked on him.
That the toll had yet to be completely paid.
He had to get a handle on the situation before he lost these moments.
He found himself drawn to the window—pulling back the privacy drapes, letting the light wash over his face...letting his eyes adjust.
Plenty of chaos below. Broken glass in the parking lot. A police car—no, two of them—parked skewed across the lines, and people milling around. Gesturing. Upset.
Gwen was right. More right than she knew.
No coincidence at all.
But what it meant, he didn’t yet understand. Only that he now had a very good idea why the blade had brought him here. The blade that thrived on high feeling and righteous death and other people’s pain. The blade that used him to gain these things even as he used it to stop them.
But he didn’t know why Gwen was here. And he didn’t know why she was here. With him.
He did know what the blade thought of it. What the blade wanted.
They aren’t my feelings. Aren’t who I am.
Was it?
She came out of the bathroom and stood uncertainly in the middle of the room.
Uncertainly. Not like her.
As if I’d know.
But he did. The hesitation in her movement, the way she’d so briefly held her breath, her hands jammed into the pockets of that snug thin stretch thing passing for a jacket. She’d done what she could with her hair, coiling it in a knot and wrapping her hair band around it, but it was clearly out of control, gleaming subtly red in the morning light.
He said, “Your father.”
Her lower lip—round and full—firmed. “No.”
He stepped away from the window, taking advantage of the uncertainty while he had it—fighting the impulse to restore her confidence instead. “It’s no coincidence. You know it. I know it. I need to know why.”
“I need a lot of things,” she told him. “I’m guessing I won’t get them.”
“It’s not about me,” he said, his temper taking an edge. The blade warmed happily in his pocket, sipping up both conflict and promise. “It’s bigger than that.”
Her eyes narrowed; he thrilled to the spirit behind it and just as quickly doubted himself as the knife hummed in response. My feelings?
She knew none of it; she said, “Think much of yourself?”
He crossed the room in three long strides; she held her ground, lifting her gaze to his even as he crowded close—rude, deliberate. He jabbed a finger toward the window. “I think nothing of myself,” he told her, feeling the truth of that; feeling the burn as it rose in him. “But I can see. Can you?”
“Maybe more than you think,” she muttered, and it was then that she looked away. “Look,” she said. “I’m here. I’m following my nose. That’s all. Okay?”
He gave her the darkest of looks. “It would be okay if I believed that was all there is to it.”
She regained some asperity. “What there is to it,” she said, “is that I’ve been robbed every which way but loose, and I have to go take care of that. If you don’t mind.”
Right. Yes. Of course.
Time to remember how people lived in the world when there wasn’t a demon blade involved.
He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, rolling his head. Releasing tension. “Listen,” he said. “I need to finish sleeping this off.” He didn’t define this; he suspected that after the previous night, he didn’t have to. “There’s no telling how long it’ll take to get your finances sorted out, and I could use a favor.”
She crossed her arms, not hiding her suspicion, and waited.
“Food,” he said. “More of those workout drinks. Something microwaveable.” As her face cleared with understanding, he added, “Necessities for you in exchange.”
“I—” she said, protest in that single syllable...until she closed her mouth and looked away, then back again. “I can pay my own way.”
He suddenly felt unutterably weary. Burning. “Please. Just...please.”
Her surprise showed. “Oh,” she said, disarmed. “Oh. Okay then. I mean...you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.” But at her skeptical ex
pression, he smiled wryly. “I will be fine.” A day of rest—full, deep rest—and he could start tracking down what he’d felt in this place so far—the origins, the areas of deeper feeling, lingering traces. He’d sort out the undercurrents of this place; he’d figure out what was going on.
And he’d figure out how she was part of it.
* * *
Gwen found something disconcerting about filing reports—the car break-in, the mugging—with someone else’s wallet tucked away in her jacket.
The good thing—could there possibly be a good thing?—about the situation was that on this day, she was just one of many. Resulting in perhaps the oddest thing of all: no one saw anything strange about the siege of incredibly bad and possibly not coincidental luck she’d apparently had painted on her back the evening before.
Get out of Albuquerque. Just get out.
She could have done it. A bus ticket home, just like that. She’d pay more for rekeying the damned car than it was probably worth anyway.
But she didn’t go to the bus station, and she couldn’t quite have said why she hadn’t.
Maybe it was the way he’d said please. Maybe it had been the look on his face as he’d burst into the stairwell first thing that morning, ready to do battle when he could barely stand. Ready to lend a shoulder when battle hadn’t been necessary.
Anyway. He’d asked her to bring back some food. She could do that much. She flexed her lightly skinned palms and went to work.
She stopped in an internet café and quickly searched up the contact information for her credit cards and her bank. The first thing she bought with Michael MacKenzie’s money—Mac...you’ve got your fingers in his wallet, so call him Mac—was a disposable cell. From that she called the credit card companies, already heading for the bus stop.
The closest store wasn’t far from the hotel; she walked back from there, soaking up the Albuquerque valley heat on a crispy dry spring day in a marginal neighborhood of real-life people, the city’s tall buildings and fancy business district looming off to the west. Colors, sun bright even through new sunglasses, a constant stream of traffic and people.
How long could a single day be?
Amazing to discover it was still barely noon as she dragged herself back to the hotel. Laden with the reusable cloth grocery bags she’d picked up along with the groceries—and basic toiletries, and underwear, and a few basic Ts and sport shorts—she hesitated in the lobby.
Claimed by the Demon (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 5
