Gwen shivered and looked up at the sky—the wind gusting up high, lightning strobing, thunder hard on its heels. “Mac,” she said, and not for the first time.
But he just stood there, swaying slightly—his eyes shut, his face closed, his attention turned inward.
She could feel it, in a strained and distant way—the intensity of the blade’s hunt, Mac’s willingness to go along with it.
Saving his effort for a more critical juncture, she thought.
But still. The first drops of rain splattered against her, huge and startling and bringing out instant goose bumps. A glance around the park told her they were alone, other than a couple now hurrying for their car. Gwen eyed her own car with a certain wistfulness. “Mac.”
He made a noise deep in his throat. Not a particularly responsive one.
The scattered drops turned steady; Gwen hunched to receive them. Definitely too far away, those cars. She eyed the nearest overhead shelter, measuring the distance. “Mac,” she said, raising her voice above wind and rumble. “It’s raining.”
And the skies opened up. Water fell upon them as if poured from a bucket; Gwen gasped in shock and outrage. This wasn’t rain! This was inundation! “Mac!”
His eyes opened suddenly, gratifyingly wide in startled surprise. They were instantly soaked to the skin, his T-shirt clinging and his hair dripping. His mouth formed a curse—she couldn’t hear it—and he grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the shelter.
When he stopped beneath it, she ran right into him and then stayed there for warmth, oh-so-grateful when he put his arms around her. Whatever either of them might have said was lost in the battering sound of rain against the metal shelter roof, and she didn’t even try. She shivered, and she thought of his earlier remarks about the monsoon, and she decided even the most encompassing slicker wouldn’t have kept out this rain.
He didn’t shiver. If anything, he had warmth enough for them both, and the realization of it made her glance up at him, understanding. The blade had seen his chilled condition as it would any kind of hurt or illness, and had addressed it.
Okay, demon blade. For this, you get points.
But only until his eyes flared briefly wide, just enough warning so she didn’t fall when he abruptly jerked her around behind him. Not that she didn’t stumble, her soaked pant legs grabbing at one another, her feet squishing in her sport sandals. So disorienting, the rain slamming the roof overhead, the lightning flashing strobe imprints against her vision.
It took her a moment to realize they were no longer alone.
Two young men stood at the edge of the shelter, dripping and panting and still regaining their balance—but already sneering. Only then did Gwen realize that in the middle of this sensory pounding, her instincts had gone into overdrive—even if the only evident weapon was a baseball bat. She grabbed for Mac’s shoulder, a warning—and realized he already knew.
Of course he knew. He’d shoved her back, hadn’t he? And now he stood like some wild thing, braced for action, water dripping off his hair and clothes and the blade—the Bowie—in his hand, a reverse grip held low. A flush of the blade’s delight trickled through to her, shocking her with its beguiling nature.
All that had been warm suddenly turned cold.
This? This was what he had to fight from within?
The two men sorted themselves out, breath and physical composure regained. Hair cut short slicked down dark; olive skin gleamed wetly. Their clothes were neat and well-fitted and on any other day, in any other moment, she would have given them both a second glance of appreciation. But what she saw in their eyes...
It wasn’t sanity.
That’s not fair. It’s quiet out there!
And it was. It still was. But inciting hatred had been sweeping over this city for days, and in these men, it seemed to have lodged.
The rain slacked a notch—enough for raised voices and loud conversation. One of the men stepped forward, hefting his bat. “What? You don’t want to share your shelter with us?”
Mac’s words came steadier than she ever would have believed, knowing what raged inside him. “The shelter is for everyone. The baseball bat doesn’t need to come any closer.”
“Why?” asked the man. “Are you one of those? The people who think every Latino should go home even when our families founded this city? You look like one of those.”
“Dammit,” Gwen said, very much in spite of herself as she realized what the second man, his eyes glittering in silence, held in his hand now that he’d tossed his ball glove aside, “Does everyone in this city carry a knife?”
“The shelter,” Mac repeated, voice carrying over the rain with a grim determination that told Gwen he was clinging to control, “is for everyone.”
She reeled, caught up in the blade’s despotism—and then grabbed on to the sudden, grounding realization. Opportunity.
They’d needed practice. She’d needed practice. She needed to know if she could block this out, and if she could control the flow of it, and if she could reach back to him in return, even through this. More than just a moment of calm, but a domination of what tried to engulf her.
Maybe of what tried to engulf him.
Poor hubris, to aim so high when she had no experience, no practice—when years of dealing with the blade had given Mac both, and he still now faltered before it.
But he was tired, and she wasn’t. He was worn, and she was fresh.
She hadn’t yet learned what she couldn’t do, and sometimes that made all the difference.
Being able to concentrate...that was another thing altogether.
“Yes,” the man was saying, as the rain—so strong and sudden—retreated just as abruptly. “We think you should go home.”
Mac hesitated there—looking nothing but ominous, even as Gwen felt the common sense of Mac versus the bloodthirst of the blade. The emotion thirst.
Given time, she thought he would win.
She didn’t think they had time.
She gathered her calm.
“Okay,” she said, interrupting the confrontation. “We will. We’re leaving now.”
“No,” the second man said, gesturing with the knife. “You don’t understand. All the way home.”
“Mac,” Gwen said, low enough to make it private. “Let’s just go. They won’t follow us. There’s nothing active here.”
When he hesitated, she knew it didn’t come from him. That the blade pushed him.
So she pushed back. Just a little. Just enough to let him know she was doing it—the calm. The confidence in him. A quiet, centered feeling that she took from within herself, finding it there amid her own growing confidence, and spread to him.
Not to mention a little common sense. “These guys aren’t the ones we want.”
He blinked. For a moment, the turmoil roiled even more loudly within him, the bare nuances of it reaching through to her—and then it quietly gave way before her. He shook his head. “No. They aren’t.” He eased back a step, looking out on the park—glistening grass and landscaping, instant puddles everywhere, water still trickling off leaves and the shelter roof to create a symphony of soft percussions. To the east of the city, the Sandia Mountains dominated the skyline—and the dark clouds still dominated the Sandias.
“Whatever was here yesterday,” she said, “it’s long gone. That man is sleeping, or eating, or watching the news.”
He nodded, flipping the blade up to catch it—a closed Barstow pocketknife all over again. To the men—to their scowls and barely restrained anger—he said, “It’s all yours, fellows.”
Gwen let her breath out, resting her hand on his back, soaked pink bandage and all. Feeling the tension still living there under soaked cotton—and realizing anew how wet she was, too. She glanced down at herself; it might have been a mistake.