Claimed by the Demon hn-169 Read online

  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.

  And for the second time that night, he put himself into the middle of it. Dispensing with the small talk, forgetting the rational...just blowing through them so the kid in trouble could grab his girl and run.

  Until the blade suddenly spasmed and wailed and sung of hate—the same putrid swamp of it that had nearly claimed them at the edge of the desert. The gang descended upon him. Mac swung out wildly, blindly—connecting with flesh, driving them back, sending gun and blade and chain clattering away.

  Until the black pit of hatred rose up for the second time that night and took down man and blade both.

  On his knees, but not for long. Mac could run, too.

  But he ran just as blindly, slamming into one wall, then two, then the corner of a building, grabbing for purchase as he swung around to find himself—

  Wherever the hell he was.

  Whatever the hell had just happened.

  The hatred lifted, leaving him with leaden limbs and heaving lungs that couldn’t catch enough air. His ribs shot through with pain, molten bones both liquid and brittle.

  The knife returned in a smear of movement, tucking itself away in the palm of his hand, a shaken retreat. Still hungry—still without the victory it craved.

  They weren’t coming after him. He’d dealt too many of his own blows; he’d left them too confused—at least for the moment.

  They’d carry a grudge, all right.

  He straightened, one steadying hand against the building—but swore and instantly bent over again. This time, he moved more slowly—pushing away from the whitewashed cinder block, moving carefully...keeping the knife to hand.

  Twice. Twice in one night. The swamping hatred, the confrontations so quickly escalating out of control.

  He knew, now, why he’d been drawn to Albuquerque. He just didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it.

  * * *

  Run. I should be running.

  Right back to the hotel. Everything in her screamed it.

  But Gwen found herself still there when he emerged from the darkness on the other side of the street, six lanes of empty pavement between them.

  She saw right away the difference in him. Not so much in what he did as what he didn’t project—the confidence, the strength...a certain grim intensity. All missing. And although she was so certain, now, that he was armed—and that he’d had a willingness to act that felt natural in his world and terrifying in hers—she nonetheless caught no sense of it. Not now, not before.

  Just the same instantly compelling response that had riveted her outside the hotel.

  Yeah, I should’ve run.

  I should have gone to Vegas.

  And then he faltered in midcrossing, and she forgot all that and sprinted from the curb to meet him, slipping beneath one shoulder to take the burden of unfamiliar bone and muscle.

  The heat of him shocked her. “You’re burning up!”

  In response, his eyes rolled back; his knees buckled.

  “Oh, no no no,” she said, knowing she couldn’t keep them both upright. “Middle of the street, mister! Move on!”

  He muttered a breathless curse, put one foot in front of the other and, as far as she could tell, made it to the curb on determination alone.

  She tried to make his landing a soft one.

  He rubbed his hands over his face—fresh blood on those hands, dark under the streetlight. “It shouldn’t have...” he said. “It wasn’t...” He blinked, a deliberate thing, and looked at his hands. “This isn’t...”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get the idea.” Gwen huffed out an impatient breath. Stupid, stupid, to have gotten in the middle of this.

  Then again, what else was she here for? To get in the middle of something, it seemed. And she wouldn’t know what until she’d done it.

  “You’re screwed,” she told him. “You have a temperature up in the something-fierce range, plus whatever else happened out there. You want to go to a clinic?”

  “God, no,” he said, as emphatic as anything he’d said yet—maybe even said with a little bit of outright panic.

  She laughed. “How to tame the beast,” she said and sat down on the curb beside him, his warmth radiating against her. Maybe if he had a moment, he could walk to the hotel. Or intelligibly tell her what he did need. And then she could go check in, and—

  “What is it about you?” he asked, surprising her. She jerked her gaze around, finding the dark grey of his eyes. Not guarded, as they’d been in the diner. Not wary, as they’d been outside the hotel. Looking right at her as if he could look through her. He took her hand, twined his fingers through hers, and examined the arrangement as if it could tell him something. “Doesn’t make any sense. You.”

  She shivered. Inexplicable impulses and gut feelings, every decision she’d made since she’d seen him outside that hotel...since she’d walked away from her Vegas vacation at that. No, it didn’t make any sense at all.

  And she’d learned better. She had a lifetime of understanding that true intention rarely showed on the surface. She knew how to protect herself.

  Or she should.

  She gathered her wits and gently disentangled her hand. “I make perfect sense,” she said. “And I’m not the one who almost fainted in the middle of the road. But I am the one who doesn’t have a room yet. So let’s go back to the hotel. If you need help, we’ll get it there. If you don’t, you don’t.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath; a certain startled awareness crossed his features, an expression made sharper in the shadows. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Let’s get you back to the hotel.”

  Amusement rippled through her as she stood. Suddenly he was all Mister I’m back i
n charge, was he? Well, that was fine, too. “What was that all about, anyway?” she asked, holding out a hand to help pull him up from the curb.

  Whether from pride or wariness, she wasn’t sure, but he hesitated before taking it. “Hazing gone wrong.” Back on his feet, he loomed more than she’d expected. Gwen Badura was no tiny figure of a woman, and he hadn’t struck her as a particularly large man...but there it was. Looming.

  She resisted the impulse to brush the street dirt from his particularly fine posterior.

  He frowned, striking out beside her; the hotel loomed darkly a block away. “It wasn’t that serious—didn’t have to be. I don’t know what—” He stopped short, dropping entirely back into the man he’d been before he’d run off into the darkness—the same man who had faced her at the hotel entrance. The wary one. The utterly prepared one.

  She didn’t at first see why—not until a dark figure emerged from the shadows of the hotel lot landscaping. Then she stopped short on a gasp—one that turned into a squeak as her erstwhile escort snagged her arm and jerked her back, putting himself in front of her.

  You must be kidding.

  The newcomer stood in clear challenge mode, legs braced, chin tipped at an arrogant angle.

  He held a sword.

  You. Must. Be. Kidding. Gwen’s fingers clamped down on the back of her guy’s jacket, knowing it was hardly helpful. Hide. Yes, I will gladly hide. Right here behind you.

  The sword glimmered in the light—no, not in the light. More as if it had light of its own, rolling liquid along the lines of steel. “My name is Devin James,” he said. “This is my turf. My city. Whatever you’re doing, it had better stop.”

  And Gwen’s guy muttered eloquently, “What...the...fuck?”

  “That’s telling him,” she said, not a little desperately.

  “It’s my city,” James repeated. “I can feel what you’ve done here tonight. No one died, which means you get another chance. But I’m watching.”

  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!”

  “My room,” he said. “King bed. Huge. You stay on your side. I’ll stay on mine.”

  It had made sense in his head. From the look on her face as she spun back around, he wasn’t sure it had made sense out loud.

  “You must be kidding,” she said. “Do I know you? Do I know anything about you?” She threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, right, I do. I know you carry an effing big knife that suddenly isn’t anywhere to be seen! I know you dive into random street fights! I know you were bloody when I met you and you’re bloodier now!” She gave the hotel a determined look, her mouth pressed tight in thought. “I bet they’d let me use the phone. I bet the cops would take me to a YMCA. Or something.”