Wet, and more than a little see-through.
She thought she’d just stay here behind him. And maybe he read her mind, or maybe she just distracted him, for he did what she thought he would never have done without her interference...he turned his back on the men, blocking her from their view...protecting her.
She knew instantly from their faces—it had been a mistake. “No!” cried one of them. “You do not turn your back—” his movement created a strange punctuation in emphasis “—on...us.”
Mac shoved her—shoved her hard. He ducked and threw himself to the side as she went down with a cry, skinning palms and shooting pain through her injured hand; the baseball bat slammed down on the table with the resounding clang of weighted metal against wood. Gwen twisted wildly, scrabbling away even as she tried to orient—untangling the visuals of three men in the eerie post-storm glitter of water and oblique new sunlight.
Two men with bats.
No. Mac with the Iroquois war club, meeting the man’s next blow with swift power—sending the bat flying, slipping away from the slashing knife, whirling around to slam the man in the ribs with a blow that had to be pulled, its potential metered into just enough so the man ended up on the ground not far from Gwen.
Not far at all.
He pressed against the ground, lifting his head...finding her. She didn’t need the warning cry of old instincts—and she didn’t need Mac’s help. She popped him one, right in the nose, and when he fell back on his shoulder, she lashed out with her sandaled toes pointed and fierce.
By the time she scrambled to her feet, he had one hand over his nose and one over his crotch, and the flare of warning had faded to nothing but adrenaline aftermath.
She found his knife not far away; she acquired it.
When she stood, brushing herself off—a futile gesture for one who was now covered in sandy clay mud and wetness—she realized she’d closed Mac out entirely. And when she looked at him, she realized what a mistake that had been.
Or maybe not. She probably wouldn’t have been able to function at all had she not kept to herself.
Because now the club was a saber, sweeping and sharp with the faintly unearthly sheen of light running along its edge. And now the single man still upright stood frozen, his irrational anger—a mob mentality gone so badly wrong with only two mob members—now utterly dissipated in the face of Mac’s own lost sanity.
Not to mention the sword.
If the man ran, he’d die. If he blinked, he’d die. If he didn’t run...
Maybe he’d die then, too.
Gwen didn’t dare even say Mac’s name. Not so much as a soothing sound. Not the way he trembled on the edge of explosive violence.
In desperation, she returned to the calm.
Oh, it wasn’t easy—not with her own adrenaline reaction zinging along her nerves. But she’d found it before—a subtle, budding confidence in not just the pendant, but also in the way her life was coming together. The way some things suddenly had meaning. What she’d experienced as a child, what she’d grown to in the aftermath. How the wound from her father’s blade had left its indelible impression, the gift of warning she had taken half a lifetime to master.
So from the inside out, she touched him. Just a whisper. But a confident whisper, growing with the understanding of what she could do.
His awareness came in the merest shift of his shoulder; the blade’s awareness came in a slap of annoyance. Gwen stiffened—found herself offended as much as hurt by it. Screw you. You can’t have him.
She went back for more. Just enough to let him regain his own grasp of himself—buffering, calming. The blade snapped at her again, a sharp sting of retribution; she pushed past it, lifting her gaze to that of the man who stood frozen in wise fear before them. “You know,” she said, “we really were happy to share.” She hadn’t expected to see the flicker of acknowledgment on his face—or the regret.
She dared to rest her hand on Mac’s back. “I think it’s safe. Go while you can.”
The man didn’t hesitate. First things first—he squirted out of range, squelching audibly; only then did he circle around for his friend. By then Gwen could feel Mac breathing more deeply under her hand; she dared to do more than touch him, rubbing a gentle circle over his back.
The man scooped up their baseball gloves—the bat was a lost cause, deeply dented even at a glance—and pulled his friend up, that latter still trying to choose between stanching his nosebleed and comforting his privates. The man caught Gwen’s eye, and he was, suddenly, what she’d seen upon their arrival—a well-presented guy out for a session of fielding balls in the park with his friend. “Resentment builds,” he said, “but you didn’t deserve... I don’t know—”
Gwen shook her head. “It was on the wind,” she said, the only one of the two of them who knew the near-literal truth of it. “It’s in the city. We fought it together, in a way.” And then she made a face, a wince, and said, “I hope I didn’t break his nose.”
“Better that,” the man said, “than the other.”
Gwen couldn’t argue with that.
Or with the deep release of a breath that Mac let go as they left, easing back his ready stance. He looked down at his hand; the blade settled into the Barstow—still flipped open, keen and wicked and gleaming. “That was too close.”
“In all ways,” Gwen told him, seeing the self-retribution dark in his eyes. “They made their choice, too. What if you hadn’t had the blade? How do you think things would have gone for us, your basic average couple sheltering from the rain?”
He cast a startled look at her, still easing down from his alert—she knew that, too, from the faint echo of the blade’s turmoil. “Chivalry compels me to mention that you could never be basic average.”
How silly was it to feel a little leap of pleasure at those words, here in the middle of what must now be the world’s most hostile park, hair and clothes still dripping and the driving culprit of a storm still lumbering along the shoulders of the Sandias?
“Ooh,” she said. “I have to stop everything and preen for a moment.” But not too much of a moment. She glanced across the landscaping to the parking lot, a narrow strip edged by a curving cemented arroyo on the far side. The Jeep sat gleaming next to her little Bug. “I really think I’d like to call—”
He made a strange sound, a kick-in-the-gut noise. She didn’t have to ask why; she felt it. Even as she grabbed at him, slowing his descent to the concrete, she understood exactly where that slashing pain came from and why.
The blade, having its temper tantrum. It had wanted blood and fear; they’d stopped it. And now Mac was pale and stricken, his mouth tight—yet shaking his head. “It’ll pass,” he said, barely managing the words. “It’ll— Damn—”
“Stupid blade!” Gwen found herself in a fury. “Worse than a two-year-old!” She glared down at it. “I’d kick you if I could!”
And couldn’t she?
Until now, when she’d reached out, it had been to Mac. Her desire to protect him and the unconscious results, then her deliberate attempts to soothe him, to offer him just enough space that he could catch his own emotional and physical breath.
This time, she didn’t go for Mac. She looked for something other. Blindly groping, no idea what she was looking for other than what it wasn’t. She slipped into that head space quickly enough to be frightening, successfully enough so she didn’t have time to think about it. She found herself in Mac’s muffled pain, slicing claws of temper and retribution...human pain and human struggle and the deep, rich presence underlying the very essence of the man beside her.