“Gwen!” Mac cried—but no, he’d told her to go, he’d pushed her with everything she had. She wouldn’t stop now.
Still, she jerked around—just for an instant. Just before her foot hit that first step on a steep wet concrete slope.
She went down with a startled cry; it turned terrified as she plunged out of sight, and then it cut short with a splash, barely audible over the rushing water.
Mac saved his breath on a curse, bolting forward—a lurching, awkward run that took him to the edge only just before Rafe made it there, both of them stricken. But if Mac was wild with it, Rafe quickly turned to cold fury—watching the dark rush of water, foam and rapids and debris churning along faster than the average man could run.
I’m not average. For the moment, Mac forgot he was on one-and-a-half legs and forgot he stood beside the man he was sworn to stop. “Gwen!” he shouted out over that roiling water, a deep notch of concrete draining straight to the Rio Grande. “Gwen!”
But he heard nothing in response...not so much as a distant cry. Deep within, a jerk of thought slapped up against him. Rafe. Right here beside me.
The man he had to stop. The one from whom he’d thought to save Gwen, at the cost of his own body.
He hadn’t done that—hadn’t kept her safe at all. But he damned sure wouldn’t let it be for nothing.
As if Rafe hadn’t figured that out.
Even as Mac turned on him, the man’s blade sliced air, aiming to cut him through. Mac stumbled back—fell as the leg went out yet again, but rolled more nimbly this time, barely off his feet and up again, Keska striking out in a cutting sheen of metal—coming back at Rafe fast enough so the older man swore and slapped at the blade, a clumsy move.
Oh, yeah, it’s been a while. For how many lifetimes had the man been living by proxy, sucking down the emotions of others—evoking what he wanted, manipulating the results, watching the agony and sorrow of his own making and then profiting from it? Never putting himself out there, never facing direct retribution.
But Rafe struck back, a flurry of blows—his form strengthening, his movements growing more fine and subtle, his blade slowly straightening to match the sweep of Mac’s saber.
Not long enough, apparently.
And Rafe wasn’t already winded...wasn’t already bleeding...wasn’t already exhausted from days of battling an unknown foe along with his blade.
He smiled with grim satisfaction as Mac missed a parry from low to high guard, his blade skipping along the outer edge of Keska to nick Mac’s arm, then flicking down to slash shallowly across his thigh while Keska chased its shadow, not quite there in time.
“Lifetimes,” Rafe reminded him as they stood apart, Mac panting and stung, his thigh burning deeply and his heart still shouting after Gwen, “which you cannot defeat.” He raised his blade-sword, a ceremonial gesture, and spoke to it, reveling in the moment. “You may take them now.”
Oh, no. No, no, no. That was the whole point. It was why Mac had refused to be parted from the shackles of his own blade, why Gwen had let him go—why she had fled to protect the pendant. Because you don’t get to win.
But the man’s dark blade was right there. And it knew how to spew hatred, up close and personal. It knew how to ooze through to Mac’s soul, flooding in through the blade to swamp them both, looking for the slightest echo from within Mac.
And Keska gave way.
Mac staggered back as the blade’s connection snapped shut, leaving him only what he was: a man sorely tried, sorely wounded, with dead dull metal in hand.
Keska!
In response, only the merest flicker through their bond. Not a blade separated, not a blade destroyed...but a blade overwhelmed. A blade in complete retreat.
Mac sucked in a deep, ragged breath, taking a two-handed grip on a sword not meant for it—braced and waiting even as he reeled. Rafe might have taken him down right then—that moment, with a long sweep of slashing metal that Mac could no longer evade.
But no. Rafe stopped. He took the deepest of breaths—satisfaction of the most profound nature, nostrils flared and standing with proud arrogance, the storm’s pounding flicker of light the perfect backdrop.
And through the thick, pounding nature of horror, Mac felt it. A feather-light touch, no more than a whisper. Keska. Be strong.
More than that, Rafe felt it. He stepped back, jerking around—looking for it. I see you...I taste you...Halgos...you are known.
“Halgos,” Mac said in the wonderment of it—the hope of it, glimmering through the overriding swamp of heavy, pounding despair and darkness. Demardel?
He didn’t have time to think about it. Rafe whirled, came crashing down on him with metal and fury and no small spark of blooming fear. “It,” he said each word distinct and growing in emphasis. “Won’t. Work.”
Mac staggered back away from him. Rafe’s final remaining man abandoned his sorely wounded comrades to snap foolishly around the edges of the fight and Mac pivoted to him with blade extended, driving him away and bringing the point back into guard just in time to keep Rafe from plunging at him. Metal clashed; Keska sparked back to life. —halgos— it murmured, intrigued. —keska. be strong. strong—!
Halgos, said the trickle from outside them all, growing stronger. I see you. I can deny you.
“No,” Rafe said, a harsh whisper from between clenched teeth. “No one can take what we have! And you’ll die trying!” He pressed a quick flurry of attacks and Keska surged to meet him, offering Mac a renewed strength and quickness for which he would later pay.
Halgos. You may NOT.
And all the hatred fell away. The deep inner attack, the imposed hatred wrapped around keen fear wrapped around gibbering insanities. It fell away and it left Mac clear and sharp, reflecting only Keska’s normal trickling mutter of satisfactions—and with those, he was well able to deal.
Suddenly it was Mac pressing the attack. Suddenly it was Mac pushing the older man back.
Suddenly it was Mac, having quietly closed the distance between them, moving just inside Rafe’s guard without notice, allowing small hits to embolden Rafe into taking the bigger strike. It would have impaled Mac through the heart had he let it, giving Keska no time to heal him at all.
But he didn’t; he lured the strike in and he parried it away. And suddenly it was Mac, the sword buried deeply in his side and grating on ribs—stuck there, for the merest instant—while Mac returned the favor. A clean strike, up beneath the breastbone, up through the heart...right on through as they both fell heavily to the ground.
And it was Gwen, soaked and dripping all over, who yanked Rafe aside without regard to his dead and glazing eyes, and who yanked out the blade Halgos—and who threw herself down on Mac. And then—in the nicest possible way—she said, “That was the worst plan ever,” before she planted her hands at the side of his face and kissed him senseless.
* * *
Violence lingered in Gwen’s thoughts. Clashing images of fear and peril, the bruising grip of water—the slam of her body up against the inexplicable lip of concrete to which she had clung. The water tugging viciously at her—tearing away her sandals, stretching her shirt.
But she’d latched on, pounded by sensation—the noise, the cold, the battering pain—and she’d nonetheless sent her focus elsewhere. Reaching out. Not to Mac, but to the blade in Rafe’s hands. Halgos.
She hadn’t been strong enough to sunder them apart; she hadn’t known enough. But she’d sure as hell distracted them. And she’d frightened Rafe...and it had been enough.
She just hadn’t known if it had been in time for Mac. And she hadn’t known if she’d survive to find out—not until an unfamiliar form slid down to join her, hauling her away from the outflow pipe against which she’d lodged and boosting her out of the concrete arroyo with impersonal hands placed by necessity in personal places.
Disoriented, uncoordinated and staggering, she nonetheless found Rafe dead and toppled over Mac, hating the very touch of that heinous blade
as she flung it away—then finding Mac and that dark wry grin...kissing him.
But he wasn’t so much kissing her back any longer. And while she’d forgotten to feel the soaking cold, Mac was the one who now shivered.
“Hey,” she said, running her hands over him. Dark blood stained his pants, his shirt, now his chin. “Hey.” She groped to find Keska—not quite retreated to its neutral pocketknife form, but lingering as the frontier trade blade, all glimmering Damascus-like metal. It lay on the ground behind her, exactly where she’d so recently shoved Rafe’s body.
Where Rafe no longer lay. Nothing. Nada.
No body. No body parts.
She sucked in a breath. He’d been dead—she’d been so sure he was dead! But she’d heard nothing, seen nothing...
And he wasn’t there.
“Mac,” she said—only a whisper because could he even hear her? She’d never felt quite so alone, kneeling on the asphalt beside one shivering, wounded and unconscious man.
On impulse, she shoved Keska into Mac’s cold hand, forcibly wrapping his fingers around it. She chafed his arms—quite suddenly feeling her own sodden clothes and her own very close call with death. “Keska,” she said, out loud and concentrating hard, “you better do something here. If he—”
Okay, maybe out loud hadn’t been the best idea, because she suddenly choked on the words. She swallowed against the big knot in her throat and tried again. “If he dies, things aren’t going to turn out well for you. You can’t take me, and I’ll make damned sure you don’t get a chance at anyone else.”
Maybe, just maybe, the blade glimmered slightly in response.
Squishing footsteps came up behind her; water splatted the asphalt, merging with the spreading puddle of water and blood. “Hell, that poor bastard.” The voice was unfamiliar, and a little rough with swallowed water.
Surreptitiously, Gwen reached for Keska—not knowing if the blade would allow her to use it at all.
But the man just laughed. “Who just pulled you away from an outflow pipe and boosted your ass out of that arroyo?”
“I have no idea,” Gwen said, closing her hand around Mac’s with Keska, finding it warm again. “But I’d really like it if you weren’t close enough to drip on me.”
He laughed again, short but amused, and moved to the other side of Mac, his hands low and away from his body in a gesture of peace. “Devin James,” he said. “I think you were expecting me.”
It fired her up all over again. “Damned right we were! ‘We can help,’ Natalie kept saying. Well, where the hell were you?”
“Caught in traffic,” he said easily and cocked his head slightly, looking at her with enough scrutiny that she finally made a face at him. He nodded slightly. “Natalie was right about you two. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner. Let’s say I was...distracted.” His dark expression left no doubt about his meaning. That man.
“Rafe!” Gwen moved closer to Mac—protective again, and realizing that the warmth had spread to his chest and shoulder...that he no longer shivered. That his face, an odd, pale cast in the parking lot light, no longer looked quite as ghostly pale. Go, Keska, go! “He was here. I swear he was dead. And his blade—”
Devin’s amiable expression fell away, and Gwen found herself suddenly looking at the same man who’d first accosted them in the street, dark and dangerous. “If I’d been a little faster...” He shook his head. “The blade is gone—one of Rafe’s people. He and another guy took the van. There’s a third one over there, looking pretty dead.”
“But Rafe—” She looked again to the spot where she’d shoved him, so close that she’d surely have seen if he’d...
Surely.
Devin grinned, a quick and generous thing, all the more startling for the contrast of his dark demeanor. “The blades clean up after themselves.” He nodded down at Mac, whose clothes seemed notably drier, whose bleeding had stopped. “It’s how they fuel themselves.”
She made a face. “How gruesomely convenient.”
“Nothing about the blades comes without a touch of darkness,” Devin said, absently enough so the words hit home even harder than they were probably meant to. What they’d done to Mac...what wielders like Devin and Natalie lived with every day...
What Mac would live with every day...
Unless he chose not to.
Her hand went to the pendant.
Devin’s eyes narrowed. “I’d really like to know what happened down there.” He flicked a gesture out, encompassing the rushing channel of water behind her. “You only had a few more moments of hanging on left—and you weren’t even trying to get out. People who take those arroyos lightly tend to die.”
She frowned at him. “Like I even know what a concrete arroyo is? In the dark?”
Mac made a deeply disgruntled and incoherent sound of protest. To Gwen, it was a sound of beauty. “Mac!” she said, pressing her hand against his shoulder. His eyes flickered, didn’t open. No, not quite yet.
Not that Devin was done with her. “And then there’s what happened up here—there’s no way your guy beat out that man with that blade—he’s been one foot from the wild road for days. And I know what it looks like to commune with one of these things. I know how damned dangerous it is, too—for everyone!”
Her temper flashed. “I did what I had to, and it worked, didn’t it? And even if Rafe’s little minion got away with the blade, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. We can find him. I know that blade now—I can find him.”
“Ah,” Devin said, brows raised. He appraised her for another long moment. “Demardel chose well.” And, looking down, he gave Mac a gentle nudge with his toe. “You, too, fella. Though I’m guessing it’ll be a while before you realize it.” He reached down, offering his hand to Gwen. “Come on. Let’s get you both somewhere warm.”
Epilogue
Mac stumbled at the threshold of the little casita and caught himself on the doorjamb.
“Hey,” Gwen said, catching up under his shoulder—fitting nicely there. “No hurry. Let’s not have any more fainting.”
“Passing out,” Mac said through gritted teeth. “And seriously, at the park? That was more of a trying-not-to-die thing.”
“Yes, dear,” Gwen said, slipping through the door to pat the back of the couch not far from it. Nothing was terribly far from anything in this small guesthouse on the former Sawyer estate—and it was theirs to use for as long as they needed.
Or wanted.
Mac growled at her cheerfully patent disbelief. “Bring it on,” he said, leaving the security of the doorway to swoop in and lift her up.
She clung to him in self-defense, legs wrapping around him and expression full of alarm. “Mac—Mac—I give, I give! There was no fainting! Just put me down before—”
Wisely, she didn’t say the words you fall down.
Wisely, Mac wasted no time getting to the kitchen, where he set her delectable bottom down on the counter. He didn’t mention that his vision had greyed or that he couldn’t quite hear clearly or that his thigh had seized up.
Keska had done its job these past few days. Week. Whatever. Having Gwen by his side hadn’t hurt—napping with him, forcing the estate cook’s good food on him at every opportunity, holding his hand when she thought he was asleep and murmuring truly naughty things in his ear when she thought he was awake.
But in the end, nothing took the place of time...and he still needed it.
His new employer—thinking he’d been in a car accident during that mysterious rash of trouble in the city—had regretfully replaced him; Devin had already hired him on and then immediately put him on sick leave.
When he was on his feet, he’d start by protecting the city alongside Devin. But as they peeled back the layers of Demardel, he and Gwen would also have a new mission—using Keska and Demardel. Find the others. Those unknown blade wielders out there, lost and alone and still trying to make it on their own.
Before they turned into Rafe. Or Sawyer Compton. Or the thing
Mac had almost become.
Because Natalie was right—she and Devin had the unique resources to help them all. They had a powerful primary blade; they had Compton’s library.
And now they had Demardel.
They’d already started teaching Mac the exercises that would give him more control over the blade than he’d ever dreamed possible.
Gwen’s eyes had narrowed; her legs locked tightly around his hips, jerking him close and to attention. “You can’t fool me,” she said. “And no, I am not cheating.” Not peeking through the connection they’d forged. “This,” she told him, sending him a rush of sensation, “would be cheating.”
He jerked again. And swore.
She laughed. “I practiced that.”
“Prove it,” he suggested, though it didn’t come out with the confident demand he’d planned. Too breathless for that. And his eyes were too close to rolling back in his head.
“Mmm. I don’t know if I should.” Her hands rested at his jeans snap, fiddling slightly.
He narrowed his eyes at her flowery skort and decided they’d be no impediment at all. And then, when his cell phone rang, he said fiercely, “Ignore it.”
“Men,” she told him. “Can’t you multitask? Besides, I emailed this number to Sandy this morning. You know, my friend? Who went to Vegas? When I didn’t? And who probably just found out I’m not coming back to work?” She fished the phone from his pocket, flipped it open...and slipped a smooth, wicked hand down the front of his jeans. “I’ll keep it short.”
Not that he could answer. Not that he could do anything other than clutch the counter. He barely heard her say, “Hey, Sandy. How was—yeah, yeah, okay. What happens in Vegas...” Jeans unsnapped, hand stroking around his clenched butt cheek and back again. Mac made a noise. Couldn’t help but make a noise. “What? I didn’t hear anything...and no, I’m really not coming back. I got a better offer on my walkabout.” There, her hand—just right. And he’d found the buttons on her shirt, and she laughed again, more breathlessly this time, and at the feel of her in his hands he made a rough, low noise and Gwen said, “Hey—yeah—I really gotta go. I’ll email, okay? I’ll be back to pack up my stuff, so...yeah...what?”
Claimed by the Demon (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 22
