“This will help,” she said, less than certainly. “Not that I...I mean, there’s no infection anywhere. You look...you look great.”
Yes. Healing. Hot fiery brands of healing, marking the worst spots. The others, already fading beyond notice.
The next spasm took him, pushed out a groan from between clenched teeth and left him shivering and fractured; she gasped from the grip of his hand around hers. The washcloth felt like ice on his neck, along his side. Was ice. He tried to twist away but didn’t have the coordination for it.
“I know,” she said, and her voice held a note of pleading. “I’m sorry. But unless I call an ambulance—” His grunt of alarm, slicing through increasingly shattered thoughts, stopped her short. “I didn’t think so. Then this is what we’ve got. My father—” She hesitated, then seemed to decide it wouldn’t matter now. “It helped my father. Sometimes.”
And left so many words unspoken, even as fire and ice twined together to rake along his bones.
She knew something. She knew. Here, the woman who’d found him in the midst of their random journeys, who’d piqued the interest of the blade, who’d roused feelings in him long overwhelmed by that same blade.
Coincidence.
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.