“Circle the city,” he said promptly. Standard approach tactics. And now that he knew what he was looking for, he sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot to stand, all in one motion. “Triangulate in on him. It’s time for us to call the shots.”
It’s time for us to call the shots.
More than that. It was time for Gwen to come clean—to let him know what she’d learned about the pendant...and how she’d learned it. She even opened her mouth to do it—but she could sense his restlessness, and his concern for the diner.
They’d been in one place for too long.
They emerged through the kitchen—closed down—and into the diner, now straightened and shining, as the waitress did a final wipe of the tables. She stopped to regard Mac and to nod to herself. “Better,” she said.
“Better,” Mac agreed. “Let me leave a donation to help pay for the damages.”
She scoffed. “Did you make those boys crazy?”
He dropped a handful of bills on the counter. “It made me crazy to see that they had Gwen cornered like that. I could have handled it differently.”
Not likely. Not that it would have mattered, with that man spreading his hatred. But Gwen stepped between them, providing distraction. “I’m Gwen,” she said. “And really, it’s all my fault. I’ve had good luck with that line before, but the way things are around here right now...”
“Gala,” said the woman, introducing herself in return. “Will you really try to do something about...this?” Her face said it all—that she couldn’t understand what they faced, and she couldn’t understand how they could do anything about it.
Then again, she didn’t have the image in her head of two men with gleaming blades engaged in battle, impossibly swift and able. Gwen wished she didn’t, either—even if her imagination had provided it wholesale.
Her imagination had plenty to work with on that score.
Mac merely said, “We’re going to do our best.”
Gala’s lips thinned. “Well, then, you’ll need food. And we had plenty of it waiting on the grill. I packed some up for you.” She looked at Mac askance. “I saw the way you eat.”
Mac’s stomach gave an angry growl, and he had the grace to look embarrassed. “You’ve been kind.”
“If you can do this thing, there will never be a way to repay you. And there’s no point in doing it hungry.”
So they headed for the Jeep laden with takeout and with Gwen’s hand already curling into a bag to appropriate French fries. “Yea verily,” she said. “Carbohydrates, the food of heroes.” She glanced at him. “We are the heroes, right?”
“If you gotta pick a side,” Mac said, checking all four tires before pulling the driver’s door open. Just in case.
“I definitely choose the hero side,” Gwen said, settling into the seat and arranging the food—between her feet, on her lap. “But honestly, I don’t see why innocent bystander isn’t one of the options.”
“In this game?” Mac shook his head, shoving the keys into the ignition and cranking up the air-conditioning. “I don’t think that’s an entirely safe place to be.” He glanced at her. “And I don’t think your father left you that option.”
“I doubt he knew.” Gwen found her chin lifting and had no idea in defiance of what.
Except in the next moment, she did. In defiance of self. All her mixed feelings, all her years of outrunning and outtalking herself. I am nine years old, and my life has changed forever... “With someone else, it might have gone differently.”
“Of that I have no doubt.” And then his gaze caught at the center console cup holder, and she knew instantly what had surprised him there.
“I put your cell on the charger,” she said, shifting a bag aside to see it there, tipped casually into the cup holder. “It was getting— Oh.”
Because that wasn’t what had caught his attention at all. Or maybe at first, but the bright message indicator on the phone display had caught it more. He reached for the phone. “I’ve got a week before work starts. No one even knows I’m in town.”
Gwen’s hand froze in the act of untangling another long fry.
Someone knew she was in town. Someone who’d taken a call from her on that phone. “Wait!”
He’d flipped the phone open to frown at the displayed number; now he transferred his gaze to hers, a silent question.
“It might be...” she said. “I mean, the other night...I needed to think.”
Wow. That tongue of hers sure had lost its glib.
“Listen,” she said, desperate as understanding flickered across his features. He went still, waiting. “I went out for a walk. After we... You fell asleep. And I needed a little space. And she found me there.”
“She,” Mac said, “who?”
“Natalie!” Gwen blurted. “She was watching the hotel. She’s with the man who dumped on us that first evening. His name is Devin. They have blades—”
“Like mine?” he said, every bit of him going hard and dangerous. “All these years, and suddenly those things are everywhere?”
“She said they could help you! Us. And her blade has a name, Mac. She said she had some sort of truce with it, or control over it, or—I don’t know. Something. And she saw my pendant, because when she came to the—” oh, that was so not how she’d meant to tell him this, but now the word was in her mouth, even if it immediately trailed away “—warehouse...”
He took it in—understanding immediately that she’d seen Natalie not once but twice—and immediately putting the rest of it together. Natalie’s message on the phone, his number harvested when Gwen had called her to the warehouse.
Nothing to do now but get it all out. She’d done what she’d thought was right, hadn’t she? Done the only thing she could think of at the time? “I was terrified at the warehouse,” she said. “I thought you were going to kill yourself. Or that the blade would kill you. So yes, I called her, and she came. And dammit, she made me wait outside, just like you said.”
“What I said,” he told her—softly, dangerously “—was to run.”
“She’s got some sort of research mojo, because she’d looked up my pendant. And listen to me, Mac—it all makes sense. It’s supposed to be able to sever the connection between blade and wielder.”
He did listen, thoughtful even in his anger. “We’ve seen that. We’ve also seen the price.”
“That’s because I don’t know what I’m doing!” Gwen said. “And besides, it’s different now. It’s...awake. It has a name, she says—it has a history.” She reached blindly under the seat, groping for the folder she’d jammed there just to have a place to put it. The food bags rustled, obstructing her efforts, but finally she pulled it out and thrust it at him. “And I haven’t been keeping this from you, not any of it. You’ve been out of it or sleeping it off or fighting or—”
“Yeah,” he said tightly, taking the folder. “I get the picture.”
“Mac,” she said, her hand lingering in place even emptied—wanting to reach for him and feeling the emotional barriers he’d flung up. “She said they could help. She didn’t ask anything of me. She took the dog to the vet. She helped me deal with what was happening to you. And you know she could have taken control of things while you were chained inside that warehouse.”
“So did you, when you called her,” he said, flipping through the pages—not long enough to absorb anything, but long enough to see the veracity of the materials within. “What were you even thinking?”
Ohh, that just crossed the line. “I was thinking,” she told him, “that you were going to die, and that I didn’t want it to happen! I was thinking that I had this pendant coming alive and no idea what to do about it! I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t need to know—she wasn’t real happy about that, either—but what I did tell her was mine to tell. Are you hearing me, Michael MacKenzie? This isn’t just about you. Some parts of it maybe aren’t about you at all!”