But in control. Who he was, and not who the blade was.
For now.
And if he still needed rest, if he needed recovery—he damned well didn’t show it.
“Put your toys away,” he told them. “Leave this place while you can. Don’t forget to leave a tip.”
The man pointed at Mac’s empty hands with a jutting chin. “You got nothing.”
“He doesn’t need to have anything!” the waitress said, her voice both angry and shaking. “I want you to leave! For years you’ve gotten good food here, and now you think you can do this? You are no longer welcome!”
Gwen sucked in a breath with a new onslaught of warning, a jangle of nerves and anger swirling together with the flow of imposed feeling. Her ears warned her; her eyes warned her. Cocky male voices, careless steps—and there they were in the doorway, crowding it—taking the space, and taking in the situation. The rest of the local bullies had arrived—and just that fast, had taken sides.
The girlfriend smiled at Gwen, a smile reeking of nastiness and satisfaction that made words unnecessary.
Mac moved. He snagged Gwen by the waist and hoisted her up to the counter, shoving aside a napkin holder and industrial sugar shaker. She released the bat to him and swung over to the other side of the counter, where there was a red alarm button attached to...
Nothing.
The woman caught her eye, shook her head...shrugged.
Not that the cops weren’t already a hundred percent occupied on this day in this town.
Or that Mac needed them.
The bat in one hand, the blade in the other—suddenly it turned saber, fast enough so Gwen had missed it and the assembled young toughs didn’t at first understand. Not the usual thing, a sword. And they’d been busy, pulling out stout switchblades...pulling out a gun.
The waitress ducked behind the counter and tried to drag Gwen down with her—but Gwen clawed her way back up, looking around for a weapon, any weapon.
Mac said, “You leave now, or someone dies.”
They snorted. Riding their overload of confidence and driven by somebody else’s goals without even knowing it. Someone else’s keen lust for violence and hatred. “Yeah,” one of them said. “You.”
Gwen couldn’t help it; the words burst out. “You don’t even know what this is about!”
“Don’t have to.” Only one of them said it, but they all meant it. And then one of them pointed at Mac, eyes narrowed in an exaggerated expression. “You,” he said. “I know you. You got in our way the other night.”
“I did more than that,” Mac said, and Gwen had no idea how his voice kept that even tone, matter-of-fact while at the same time so full of meaning. Of promise. “You know damned well I can do it again.”
“Naw,” said the guy who spoke for them all, the one with the gun. “You can’t swing that thing in here. You’re goin’ down.”
The blade must have agreed. A glimmering runnel of light and the Bowie knife replaced the sword, but Mac struck out with the short bat first—lightning fast, a one-handed sweep, crowding them and making it clear that the tight space worked against them as much as him.
“This is crazy,” Gwen muttered, disbelief overflowing. “This is crazy!”
Not that anyone heard her. With the girlfriend crying shrill encouragement, the guys piled on. Tried to pile on. One staggered back retching; another flung himself out of the way of the Bowie and tangled with a chair. On the bat’s backswing, Mac slapped out the shin of the top-heavy guy who’d started it all and someone’s knife went flying. Blood splashed and bodies collided and Mac stood in the center of it all, back to the counter, his movement swift and precise and economical, too fast to follow.
“Shoot him!” the girlfriend shrieked, crouched beside her felled boyfriend, whose olive complexion had gone stark-white. “Shoot him!”
Gwen saw it too well—that the guy with the gun suddenly remembered he had it, and at the same time realized that he and his friends would not win this fight. She saw his glance at the weapon—his gangsta-style hold as he brought it to bear. She scrambled back up onto the counter—on her knees, snatching up the heavy sugar shaker. The guy didn’t even see it coming—a glancing blow off his shoulder, enough to jerk his body and his aim, his finger closing down on the trigger so the gun discharged.
The waitress screamed; Gwen ducked, so stupid and futile when the bullet was already buried in the wall behind her.
The cook, she thought, was long gone—fled, and smart to go.
It bought moments only—the guy cursed at her, dodged another of his friends as he came staggering back, and aimed the gun—
Gwen flung the napkin holder, a flimsy metal contraption that flew apart in midair and rained cheap white squares down on them all.
Mac’s blade sliced through the air, cleaving paper in two without disturbing its passage...leaving blood in its wake. Nothing more than surface wounds so far, nothing uncontrolled. Nothing fatal. Controlled.
And now the gun pointed at Gwen.
“Gwen!” Mac shouted—ducking one set of reaching arms but missing the next as the boyfriend lurched up from the floor, latching around Mac in a beefy human noose, clamping his arms to his side; the bat fell away.
Gwen threw herself flat on the counter as the gun went off again, and she met Mac’s eyes in the doing of it—met his despair.
He was going to have to kill someone. Not just wound, not just discourage, but kill. Gwen rolled aside just enough to grab the ketchup bottle and fling it at the guy with the gun. As he ducked, she grabbed the pendant.
“Do something!” she told it, not caring how crazy that was or that she had no idea what the thing really did or how to do it in the first place. Only knowing that as before, she wanted it. Wanted these men cut off from the hatred and the driving force that man had imposed on them all.
Mac gave her a startled glance. She had no idea what she’d done—she could barely feel the swamping effect in the first place—but done it she had. He quite suddenly broke free, and the boyfriend’s equally sudden bafflement turned to green and horrified pain as Mac instantly jammed an elbow in the guy’s gut and followed it through with a hammer strike to the groin using the butt end of the Bowie.
Just that fast, he scooped up the bat and backed up against the counter, his breathing coming fast now and with a faint tremor in his shoulders that might have been weakness or might have been a struggle for control.
The guy with the gun looked down at it and then at his friends—a couple of them on the floor, the others bleeding from shallow wounds and staggering, trying to pretend they weren’t.
And then he took a step away.
Not, Gwen thought, that he wasn’t perfectly willing to follow through on such intent as he’d had. Only that it needed to be his own intent, and now it suddenly wasn’t.
The waitress stood, her face paled, her lips thinned. “This was neutral ground,” she told them. “For years, you were all welcome here.” She pointed at the door—her hand shaking but resolute. “Not any longer.”
The guy with the gun regarded her with a chastised expression that Gwen wouldn’t have expected. “You calling the cops?”
She drew herself up, looking around her place—a snowstorm of napkins, a teenager still in petrified hiding, blood splattered everywhere and young men shuffling themselves back together. “Not if you go. Now.”
He looked as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Gwen didn’t blame him. What did he know about that man and his machinations? In the end he jerked his chin at the door, and the guys headed for it.
“Wait,” Gwen heard herself say. The waitress shot her an incredulous look; the guy with the gun did much the same. “You should know. There’s something out there...and it’s using you. It had a hand in this.” She didn’t have to hear him to understand the what the effing kind of crazy lady are you in his expression. “I know, I know,” she said. “But look back over the things you’ve done these past few
days. Ask yourself if they were your things to do. And if not, then make the decision not to get pushed around by the thing we’re fighting.”
“You crazy, bitch,” he said—but the scowl he wore wasn’t for her; it was for the truth in her words.
Gwen released a pent-up breath. Yeah. Crazy. Maybe so.
But not so crazy she was just going to lie here on this counter now that they’d gone. She pushed back up to her knees. “Mac?” she asked, looking at his back and unable to tell what his silence meant. “Are you all—”
That was all she got out before he threw the bat away and turned on her, the blade slamming flat-handed to the counter as his hands clamped around her waist and shook her ever so slightly. “What...” he said, looking up at her with grey-blue eyes gone stormy and undefinable anguish on his face. “What did you think—” a little shake there “—you were doing?”
Her face went hot, looking at that accusation and pain. “Saving your ass!” she cried. “And I did a good job, too!”
But she was startled past words when he jerked her in close, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight—his head against her chest, his breathing jerky...and the heat of his body telling her all that she had to know about his remaining need to heal and rest. He’d faked his way through that scene. All of it.
After a speechless moment, she rested her hands on his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” And stayed that way a moment.
When he pulled back, he lifted her off the counter as if that had been his intent all along, setting her gently on her feet. She looked at the waitress and said, “I’ll help clean this place up. But we really do need a place to lie low a few hours.” A place that our warehouse friend doesn’t already know about. “A church or a community center...it doesn’t have to be private, as long as it’s public enough so we’re lost in it.”
“You saved that boy,” the woman said. At Gwen’s surprise, she shook her head. “No, no, I know that boy, and he would have mouthed off to Amado, and Amado had the look of a killer just then.” She raised her voice slightly. “Isn’t that right, Hector?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The teen slunk into view, a skinny kid all elbows and tennis shoes.
“Go home now,” she said. “And you stay home until something gets better out there, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am!” The kid ran for it, skirting fallen chairs, stools, and blood-smeared tile.
“And you,” the woman said, looking at Gwen—and then, for a long time, at Mac.
The blade, Gwen noticed, was gone.
“You,” the woman repeated. “There’s a room in the back. You stay there until he looks better. Then, whatever you’re after...you had better find it.”
“I—” Gwen started—wanting to protest, feeling the guilt of what they’d wrought here in this pleasant little neighborhood diner. Feeling the worry of what their presence might do.
But that man didn’t know where they were. He’d no doubt broadcast his hatred widely, causing fights all along the way. She doubted he cared about collateral damage. Or if he did, it wasn’t in the same way she did.
And they needed the time. The space.
The woman must have seen it on her face. “Now flip that Closed sign and help me get a start on this.”
Gwen said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Chapter 14
Devin James stood balanced in the estate workout room, barefoot on the mat with isochronic meditation tones sounding in the background, thinking of nothing.
Most deliberately thinking of nothing. Just being. There, where the blade couldn’t reach him. A technique he hadn’t known a year ago, barely a season ago—but one of the many that now offered him peace from Anheriel, and a way to control its effects on him.
Even on a day like today.
The door burst open. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know it was Natalie, or that she was flustered.
“Oh,” she said, dismay coming through. “I’m sorry—I thought you were running on the treadmill.”
“Was,” he said, bouncing on his toes a few times before opening his eyes and reaching over to turn off the stereo. “Not a good day for it.”
“Anheriel,” she said. “As if I had to guess. I’ve been shut away in research and I can still feel it—the whole mess of it out there—through Baitlia.” She lowered the sheaf of papers she’d brought in with her—their disorder alone testified to her flustered nature—and came to him, both confident in her welcome and careful of her approach. Nothing too sudden, nothing other than serene.
Because Anheriel was in that dangerous, riled place, and even though she trusted Devin utterly with her safety, she forbore to put him in the position where he’d have to fight for it. And once up close, she gave him what she’d always given him...the focus of her intimate touch. The sensations that overrode even Anheriel.
And when he lifted his head from that deeply involving kiss, he grinned big. “Just what the doctor ordered.” Then he nodded down at her hand and her papers. “What’s up?”
“Oh!” she said, the dismay completely replaced by excitement. “What I found— There are only partial translations, although we might begin to have enough to set an expert on it, if we could find someone we trust. I think Compton was gleaning most of his information through his blade, frankly, but that’s one advantage to the wild road we can do without.” She turned to the weight bench, spreading the papers out as best she could. “Okay, so here’s Demardel.”
“That dog doing okay at the vet’s?” It was a sudden question, one he’d been careful about asking. Because earlier that day she’d gone to the warehouse not only without him, but without telling him.
Granted, he’d been quelling a little neighborhood set-to at the time, a fence-line argument gone bad between normally amiable people. But she’d obscured her contacts with the intruding blade wielder from the start.
No. Be fair. With the woman who now loved the intruding blade wielder. Or so Natalie had seen. Devin would pass his own judgments.
Exactly why she left you out of it.
And so his question about the dog was an apology of sorts.
She knew it, too. A hint of a smile tugged at her mouth. “He’ll be there a day or two, just to make sure there’s no infection—those wounds were dirty. He might limp when all is said and done. But he’s got a good chance.”
Devin cleared his throat, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Good thing you were there, then.”
“You do realize that if I kiss you again, we won’t get to this stuff at all?”
He eyed her mouth; he eyed the padded floor of the workout room and the lockable door. Ah, well. “Okay,” he said. “Demardel. The mystery medallion.”
She turned away from him, her movement resolute, and she, too, cleared her throat. “Right,” she said. “It’s not just a simple tool. Like the blades, it needs a wielder to act. So your average Joe Bladewielder can’t just stumble over it and put it to use. It takes the participation of that second person—and that person has to be awake to it. Because unlike the blades, it has no agenda of its own. It’ll sleep for centuries, if no one calls on it.”
“So for however long your friend Gwen has had the thing, wherever she got it...she may not have any idea.”
“She certainly knows now. She knows more than she’s saying, too. I practically watched her put the pieces together right in front of me, even when she wasn’t talking. And she’s bonded to it, too—she was fresh off it when I talked to her yesterday evening at the hotel. Bonded with blood and probably—well...call it emotion.” Right. Devin could read between those lines. She and her Joe Bladewielder had done the deed. Natalie eyed him, reading his expression and not giving him any space to comment. “She may have no idea how to use it, but she knows what she’s got, and she knows it on a deep level.”
Devin reached out to the sketch of it, propped haphazardly at the top of the bench’s weight stack. “And we don’t know how to use it, either.”
>
“Not yet.” She looked at the drawing, pensive around the eyes and mouth. “Our blades are about redemption, Devin. Demonic essence trapped in metal, searching for redemption. This...” She took a deep breath. “This medallion is about sacrifice. Whoever made it gave their life to it. Whoever uses it...” She flicked her gaze to his. “There’s a price.”
He got it. Right away, he got it. “She has no idea. Even if she figures out how to use it, she doesn’t know there are consequences.”
“And we don’t know what they are. Perhaps to one trained, they’re nominal—just like we’re figuring out how to balance the blades. But to someone who has no idea—”
Frustration settled over him. “You were right all along. I should have handled him differently. We’d be together on this if I had. Dammit, now we’re ten kinds of screwed up here.”
She didn’t offer him platitudes. “Maybe twenty.” At his sharp glance, she teased another of the papers free from the spread. A glance told him little—a copy of notes in several languages, old pen-and-ink sketches of a blade in several phases. Scimitar, khanjar, jambiya...everything a flavor of the Middle East. “This is a blade with enough of a reputation to gain its own documentation.”
When he looked surprised, she added, “I’m beginning to think they’re all documented, somewhere—I just haven’t found it yet. But there are enough allusions...” She shook her head. “Anyway, this one’s apparently made a name for itself, going through wielders one after the other—even supposedly destroying one of the other blades. And then it fell off the scene, to the tune of a lot of speculation.”
“And you think it’s back.”
“What I think,” she said, straightening to stare down at the sketches, “is that it never left. So do some other people, but I suppose that’s beside the point. What I wonder—” She looked at him with some hesitation, the words not quite forming.
“Just say it,” he advised her.
She made a face, closing and then flexing her hands. Natalie, bringing herself to bear. “I’m reading between the lines of these notes, but...I think it found a wielder that matched its nature. I think they’re in on it together, creating the circumstances that feed them. And I think they’ve been doing it for a very long time.”
Claimed by the Demon (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 16
