Slowly, she withdrew her hand.
The young woman from the corner stifled a frustrated noise, oblivious to them all, and stomped out into the night.
The waitress left them alone.
He ate faster than she did...but she found she couldn’t finish the meal, and she set aside her fork even as he dropped his napkin on his plate and fished for his wallet. To her surprise, he also dropped a few worn bills at her plate. “An apology,” he said simply.
“That’s not—” she started, but she looked at his face, at the tired expression waiting behind his eyes, and she only shook her head—that’s not necessary combined with acquiescence.
The smile that took the corner of his mouth had nothing to do with wry. “Thanks.”
“Listen,” she said, not sure what was going to come next.
He didn’t wait for it. “Let me walk you back to the hotel.”
Not what she’d expected.
“I’d have to go widdershins around the block to avoid you,” she told him, which was apparently not what he’d expected because the smile grew into a quick grin, there and gone again, and a duck of his head she wouldn’t have guessed of him.
The waitress, scooping up the money, kept her own smile mostly hidden.
As if Mac would have let her walk the single block alone, with the unsettled air this city had tonight.
Whoever she was, and whatever tension had sprung instantly to life between them.
The first slap of her presence had faded to a trickle of warning and awareness, the blade warm in his pocket...silent but smug, and more interested in tasting her reactions than heeding the obvious trouble brewing at the back of the café.
As long as it didn’t spill over on him. Not again tonight.
She pulled her thin cotton jacket closed and fastened it with crossed arms, ducking out into a night gone past brisk and right into chill. She paused in the parking lot just long enough for him to catch up, just as aware of him as he was of her.
“Business?” he asked. “Or walkabout?”
She faltered, brows arching, a flash of startlement on that heart-shaped face. “Funny,” she said, “that you should put it that way. Walkabout.”
“It’s a familiar state of being,” he said, dry in a way he knew she couldn’t understand.
“Are you?” she asked and tucked back hair breaking free of restraint—a careless knot at the back of her head, the ends tumbling loose. “On walkabout?”
He rolled his shoulders, breaking free from the stiffness and pain; he could just about take a deep breath again. The blade burned its healing through him—making him pay, rewarding him with an impossibly swift recovery.
Then again, everything about the blade was impossible. From the way it chose its own shape to the way it invaded his mind to the way it healed him of everything from the worst of injuries to the common cold.
The way it whispered to him, pulling him into other peoples’ insanities.
Walkabout. He said, “Not this time. I’ve got work waiting.” In a week or two. Best he could do, working for a contractor friend of a friend from Colorado who had an assistant going on family leave.
“Temporarily at loose ends,” she deduced, moving out for the sidewalk—arms still crossed, shoulder bag tucked under her arm, a frisson of her tension coming through the blade to reach him. Not truly comfortable.
Nor should she be.
“It’s a decent hotel,” he told her, striking out beside her—out of the parking lot illumination and into a brief pool of shadow before the next streetlight. “But it’s on the edge when it comes to the neighborhood.”
She slanted him a look. “Do you do that often?”
Um.
“Do—” he asked—but didn’t finish the question, wincing slightly instead. Normally—when not distracted by the burn of broken ribs on the mend, the twist of muscles in recovery—he’d know better than to respond to unspoken concerns.
“I was just thinking that I’d gone one hotel too far north from the airport.”
“Body language,” he told her. “Has a lot to say.”
This time her look wasn’t slanting at all. It came straight on—a quick sweep of his form that held more than obvious appreciation. “You mean like, ‘Wow, did I get beat up today or what?’”
He stifled a snort. “That, too.”
“Aren’t you even going to say I shoulda seen the other guy?”
“Guys,” he told her, hesitating at the curb to make sure the approaching car wasn’t going to turn in front of them. “Check the news. We’ll see if they both made it.”
She modeled mock awe for him. “That’s much better than my line.” And then her brief levity faded. “Except...you aren’t kidding, are you?” And she moved a quiet step away.
He couldn’t help his irritation. “Their choice.”
But she’d stopped him, there in the brightest light of the next streetlight, and turned him directly into it—grasping his arm with a familiarity that seemed to surprise her as much as it did him. She stepped back to narrow her eyes, the light flashing off pale blue as she raked her gaze over him. “It is blood. And it’s not yours, is it? But you don’t have a weapon—”
She said it with such certainty that it took him aback, even as she cut herself short. She stepped back, releasing his arm. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. And I still need to check in.”
He thought about telling her how they’d had to search to find him a room, decided against it. Either they’d have something for her or they wouldn’t.
He thought about asking her name. Her number.
The knife spiked at him, a brief flare of warmth in his pocket. More of a weapon than she could ever imagine, both for and against him. —alert!—
No, he told it. Too tired, too hurting, too done for the day.
—alert!—
“Let’s get you back to the hotel, then,” he told her. And damned fast.
—alert! fear!—
But she was the one who stiffened, looking off across the street to the closed zapateria and beyond. “We’d better—”
The knife struck out at him—hungry, insistent. Mac faltered; he shook it off. He shook off her hand, too, as she tugged at him, alarmed and surprisingly assertive, telling him, “We have to go!”
In the darkness, a woman shrieked.
—yes yes yes!—
“You’re half a block from the hotel,” he told her. “Go.”
She bristled at the command in his voice—but he didn’t hang around for it. Across the empty traffic lanes, the knife prodding him on—lending strength, where he didn’t quite have any left of his own. Into the darkness beside the zapateria, his blade-borne sight leaving a stark outline of the barred windows and door, the alley clearly revealed before him.
The toughs from the diner. Of course. And the reluctant young man who’d been there first—and his girl, come to interfere with whatever trouble he’d gotten into and only turning the pack of them back on the couple. Harassing, a push, a shove, a hand twisting in the girl’s hair.
—stop them!—
And the blade would get what it always wanted—the experience of it, the emotion...the spilled blood, in a most literal way.
“They’re punks,” he told it—told himself. “No edges.”
The knife came out of his pocket and flashed in his grip, a sulky change to a sweeping wooden handle, a ball carved at the end, the glint of a blunt metal spike. Iroquois war club. Deadly if it had to be...persuasive in all ways.