What she didn’t notice—not until his hand twitched subtly tighter around hers—was the growing tension in him. As they headed first toward the airport, and then west on a wide but lightly traveled feeder road and past a school and an imposingly severe Homeland Security building, he withdrew from the amiable version of himself he’d shown her at the hotel and back into the man she’d very first seen.
The hunter.
On the prowl.
“Where—” she started, somewhat warily, then cut herself short when he hesitated at a corner, closing his eyes, lifting his face...
Hunting.
Her free hand crept up to her father’s pendant, hidden as it was beneath the T-shirt. A comforting and familiar weight...somehow grown new and strange again as she realized what she’d done and how often she’d done it since meeting this man less than a day earlier.
He said, “This is getting bigger than I thought it would,” and took his eyes off his inner hunt long enough to glance at her. “I need to know you’ll listen to me, if necessary.”
“Could you be any more cryptic? And what will you do if I say no? Turn around and go back to the hotel?”
Something flared in his eyes, across his face. For an instant, she felt fear. Not just fear, but that same overwhelming surrealistic sense that this wasn’t real. It was too strange, too inexplicable altogether. But when he answered, it was merely to give her the truth she’d already sensed, the strain of it evident in his voice. “No,” he said. “It’s too late for that.”
And she thought, Don’t be an ass, Gwen. Just because she was disgruntled and out of sorts and wanted her world to make sense again didn’t mean it was fair or even smart to make things harder than they had to be.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “I’m really, really confused and I really wish I knew what was going on, but I’ll try to do what makes sense.”
A glimmer of humor crossed his face, if ever so briefly. “That’s the best I’m going to get, I think.”
“Take it and run,” she advised dryly—and found herself surprised when he squeezed her hand and moved on. Just as if they’d known each other for years.
Her bemusement didn’t last long. A park came into sight to the west of them, green and thriving. And in the background, the peculiar and specific kind of noise that Gwen associated with chanting...with protests.
“How?” she asked him, struck by the understanding of it. That he’d indeed been hunting. That, somehow, from the hotel where they could see or hear none of this, he’d led them to this place of disturbance.
Just as the night before, he’d run straight for trouble. And not for the first time that night, not to judge by his appearance.
“How?” she said again, and this time it was a demand as she set her heels to the cement and stopped him short.
Not that he couldn’t have dragged her on. But she had a sense of him now. She didn’t think he’d do that.
And he didn’t.
But she could clearly see the conflict in him—the way something had crept inside to haunt him, tugging at him—creating a strain in his eyes, a tension in his jaw and neck and shoulders.
“It’s what I do,” he said, and the look he turned on her frightened her more than anything about the past twenty-four hours. Full of the hunter’s intensity, full of words he didn’t quite seem to be able to say. “It’s why I don’t have a home. It’s what happened last night. It’s what you wanted to see.”
She didn’t notice the sunny day, or the warmth on her exposed skin, or the pleasant sensation of muscles loosening up with the walk. She found herself whispering, “Be careful.”
It struck him in a way she hadn’t expected—but he shook it off, and he went on.
She expected him to slow as they got closer, to take in the situation...to figure it out. Maybe he already had it figured out. It made little sense to her—a motley gathering of drab figures, each of which held signs on sticks: propped against their legs, attached to their torsos. They spread out along the edge of the park entry corner to which Mac had brought them, shouting incoherent slogans in an uncoordinated fashion.
Inside the park sat a pleasant cluster of trees and a fountain, a statue of a child and a burro not far away amid a clever surround of native desert stone and plantings. There, another, smaller group of people appeared to ignore the protestors completely.
Between the two, a bored cop sat on his motorcycle.
And then she felt it. The instinct that had been part of her for so long that she never questioned it, never doubted it. The self-righteous little group, working off their frenzy of entitled superiority, their chanting grown louder, more discordant. And there—that man in the baggy brown trousers and faded zip-front shirt. Intent. “Mac,” she said, uneasy—glancing at the bored cop, thinking surely this ragtag little band of negativity wouldn’t start anything with such supervision.
Mac gave her a glance of surprise. “Zip-front guy?”
She nodded tightly. “What’s going on here?”
“Near as I can tell,” Mac said, squinting at the quiet party in the park, “it’s a pagan thing. And some other people protesting the pagan thing.”
“How—”
But he gave her a ghost of that grin and nodded at the long, narrow parking lot that ran along what looked to her like a giant concrete ditch. They weren’t far from it, or from the protesters, and he’d eased their pace. “Bumper sticker.”
She smacked his arm. Just as if they’d been together for years. He only grinned bigger—even if the moment didn’t last. His expression abruptly faded; she saw the reason immediately. One of the quiet party, dressed in earth-child-casual and sandals much like hers, breaking away from his group to approach the chanters. Oh. That is so not a good idea.
And maybe he knew it. But he came anyway, exchanging a few words with the cop—who seemed equally skeptical but who then just watched as the man went on. Ordinary man, a bit dumpy around the middle, a bit thin on top...
Full of courage.
“I’d like to invite you to join us,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the chanting. “This is a day when we’ve chosen to give back to the Earth, even modestly, by picking up trash along the perimeter of the park and feasting here. Surely your own beliefs teach you to honor—”
“Sinner!” cried a woman, shrill and sudden, as if she’d startled even herself. “Sinner!”
“You’ll rot in hell!” shouted a man.
“You pervert our world!”
“Okay then,” the man said, barely audible as Gwen strained for his words, aware that they weren’t far away at all now, having turned to head along the concrete ditch—Mac’s doing, leading the way with his shoulders set. She slowed, dragging subtly against him, her hand still captured by his and now attempting to do the capturing.
And then her instinctive warning system spiked and she gasped, knowing the zip-shirt guy had reached his tipping point. She startled, too, when Mac whirled on her—
No, not on her—on the crowd. And she saw in his eyes the exact moment they each realized it—that the other had known, had felt it—and then the protesters broke. They dropped their signs and flung their banners and transformed from motley dull curiosities to vicious sheep, led by the flashpoint in a zip-front shirt. Fists became weapons, sign sticks became bludgeons—
A woman from the pagan group screamed; the man who’d played envoy flung dignity aside and bolted for it. The cop shouted, suddenly no longer bored. And Mac pulled his hand free of Gwen’s and gave her a verbal shove. “Stay here!”