And, very much just like that, he left.
Gwen realized how close she’d gotten to the back of that battered jacket. She pushed herself away, wiped her hands off on her flimsy stretch jacket, and tucked her purse back into place. She pointed at the hotel. “I think you can make it, don’t you?”
“No problem,” he said, as dryly as a man could.
She stalked away, only belatedly realizing that she still didn’t sense the weapon on him—that she hadn’t even felt warning of James’s big honkin’ real-life sword for God’s sake. Only the same unbalanced push-and-pull that had been tugging at her since the moment she’d set eyes on the man behind her.
She almost didn’t hear him say, “Michael MacKenzie. Mac. Just so you know.”
She almost didn’t say back, “Gwen Badura. Gwen. Just so you know.” But she did, and she turned her head ever so slightly to say it over her shoulder, and she saw enough of him to catch the sudden alarm on his face—
A wall hit her. A wall with a linebacker’s touch and an expert grab at her bag and then she was slammed to the pavement, her fingers losing their grasp on the bag strap and her protest lost along with all the air in her lungs.
And Michael MacKenzie leaped in response, barreling past her to—
To double over with a cry of pain and frustration both, spilling down to the asphalt and already trying to claw his way back up. But it was Gwen who made it to her feet first—or at least, to her hands and knees. She crawled out of the cross street and over to Mac’s side just in time to see a startling vulnerability of expression.
Not in time to figure out what it meant.
And there, beside him, was the weapon she’d been so sure of—the one she’d suspected but couldn’t feel—and now the one she couldn’t imagine he’d ever had at all, at least not concealed. It was too big for that, a huge clip-blade Bowie with nowhere to hide. And it gleamed in the night, reflecting an unnatural clear blue-steel light.
Michael MacKenzie’s harsh, pained breathing faded into the background, becoming a thing that no longer tugged at her concern or her empathy.
The knife gleamed brighter.
It shone a beguiling thing of stunning beauty, full of danger and poison and power.
She watched as a hand reached for it—hovering, trembling...wanting—and realized it was her own.
Devin James slipped into the pickup and slammed the door. Not out of any particular pique, but simply because it was the only way the door would close at all.
“You know,” Natalie said, sitting against the passenger door with her knees drawn up, “now that you’ve, like, inherited Sawyer Compton’s entire estate, I bet you could afford a new truck.”
He scowled. “I like this one. It’s mine.” And other than the comfortable old furniture he’d dragged to Atrisco del Sur from his little stucco home—former home—not far from here, it was the only thing left that was, indeed, fully his.
Even if the damned door was sticky.
He grumbled.
“Didn’t go well?” Natalie asked. She had the detachment in her voice that meant she’d been doing exercises—the control grounding exercises they both did, were learning to do, to stave off the inevitable descent into depraved insanity that came with a demon blade.
He’d seen it on the face of the man who had jumped his brother in the night and died for it when Leo had wrenched away the blade; he’d seen it in Leo’s life and then on Leo’s face, as Leo had jumped Devin in the night...and Devin had ended up with the blade.
He didn’t know if the man he’d just encountered now walked the wild road or not. He only knew...
He shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“What does Anheriel say?”
“As little as possible,” Devin told her, darkly enough. But he passed a hand over where the blade resided in his pocket, innocuous and cool. Humbled by the experience with Compton’s blade, tamed by his new understanding of it, kept at bay by the new exercises...
Right. Who was he kidding? The thing was a bastard, a demon soul entangled with metal that wanted nothing more than redemption but actively sought only what its nature allowed—to corrupt those it bonded with.
He let go of a pent-up breath and took her hand, so casually proprietary, and pretended not to notice the little smile at the corner of her mouth—nothing that darkness could hide from him, not with the little perk of the night vision that came with the blade. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Anheriel is pretending to be above it all at the moment. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was afraid. Baitlia?”
“Baitlia’s not a primary blade,” she reminded him. “I rarely get the same big picture sense of things that you do. It’s more like a two-year-old. I want this and I want that.”
Devin snorted. “Right, if two-year-olds drink blood and crave killing.”
“Still,” she said. “What’s your sense of it?”
He shook his head again. “Hard to pin down. I wouldn’t say the guy was looking for trouble. I wouldn’t say he was running away from it, either. He looked beat to hell. And the girl with him...shell-shocked. She has no idea.” He gave Natalie a quick glance. “Did you feel...?”
“Something,” she admitted. “Was that him?”
He had to shrug; it made him irritable. “It was something. Whether it happened to him or because of him or by him...I have no idea.”
“Well, you’ve rattled his cage,” Natalie said, rubbing a thumb over Devin’s knuckles. “You’ve let him know you’re here and what you want. It’s his move now. Then we’ll know.”
Mac slapped his hand over the blade; it came to him, flaring bright enough to make Gwen wince away—and by the time she looked back, he’d palmed it back into a pocketknife.
Gwen blinked at the spot where the knife had been, no doubt still half-blind from the preternatural flash of its change. “Where—” she asked, and then, as if absorbing the impact of the past few moments all in one fell swoop, dismay crossed features that until now had been determined. “My purse! That rat bastard! He came out of nowhere!”
That he had. Out of nowhere on a dark night that so far held nothing but people striking out beyond all reason.
Mainly, people striking out at him.
No, not quite right. For once, they’d simply failed to fall back in the face of the threat he presented.
The tarry wave of hatred splashing through the night—now, that felt more personal.
“My purse!” Gwen said, her voice rising, and then she cursed a heartfelt word he doubted she ever said all that often at all. “My keys, my wallet! I’m not even checked in yet—”
Mac came to the conclusion that this would take a while. Wearier than he would have imagined only an hour earlier, he crawled to the curb and sat there, hands over his face. Assessing.
He was vulnerable now. Burning up with the blade’s attempt to absorb the energies that had struck at them both, battered by the scuffles he should have skimmed through with ease. “I can’t be here,” he said out loud, no plan or thought behind it. Just knowing what he needed. Sleep. A safe place. Healing, before weakness overtook him altogether.
“No?” she said, fuming and with no particular insight to his unfathomable personal world. “Then go! I can deal with this. I just need to call the credit card people and I need to get the car towed to get new locks on it and—and—”
Her expression shifted to horror as she realized she was crying. She spun away from him, pressing her hands over her eyes. “No, no, no!”