Claimed by the Demon

Chapter 14

Devin James stood balanced in the estate workout room, barefoot on the mat with isochronic meditation tones sounding in the background, thinking of nothing.

Most deliberately thinking of nothing. Just being. There, where the blade couldn’t reach him. A technique he hadn’t known a year ago, barely a season ago—but one of the many that now offered him peace from Anheriel, and a way to control its effects on him.

Even on a day like today.

The door burst open. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know it was Natalie, or that she was flustered.

“Oh,” she said, dismay coming through. “I’m sorry—I thought you were running on the treadmill.”

“Was,” he said, bouncing on his toes a few times before opening his eyes and reaching over to turn off the stereo. “Not a good day for it.”

“Anheriel,” she said. “As if I had to guess. I’ve been shut away in research and I can still feel it—the whole mess of it out there—through Baitlia.” She lowered the sheaf of papers she’d brought in with her—their disorder alone testified to her flustered nature—and came to him, both confident in her welcome and careful of her approach. Nothing too sudden, nothing other than serene.

Because Anheriel was in that dangerous, riled place, and even though she trusted Devin utterly with her safety, she forbore to put him in the position where he’d have to fight for it. And once up close, she gave him what she’d always given him...the focus of her intimate touch. The sensations that overrode even Anheriel.

And when he lifted his head from that deeply involving kiss, he grinned big. “Just what the doctor ordered.” Then he nodded down at her hand and her papers. “What’s up?”

“Oh!” she said, the dismay completely replaced by excitement. “What I found— There are only partial translations, although we might begin to have enough to set an expert on it, if we could find someone we trust. I think Compton was gleaning most of his information through his blade, frankly, but that’s one advantage to the wild road we can do without.” She turned to the weight bench, spreading the papers out as best she could. “Okay, so here’s Demardel.”

“That dog doing okay at the vet’s?” It was a sudden question, one he’d been careful about asking. Because earlier that day she’d gone to the warehouse not only without him, but without telling him.

Granted, he’d been quelling a little neighborhood set-to at the time, a fence-line argument gone bad between normally amiable people. But she’d obscured her contacts with the intruding blade wielder from the start.

No. Be fair. With the woman who now loved the intruding blade wielder. Or so Natalie had seen. Devin would pass his own judgments.

Exactly why she left you out of it.

And so his question about the dog was an apology of sorts.

She knew it, too. A hint of a smile tugged at her mouth. “He’ll be there a day or two, just to make sure there’s no infection—those wounds were dirty. He might limp when all is said and done. But he’s got a good chance.”

Devin cleared his throat, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Good thing you were there, then.”

“You do realize that if I kiss you again, we won’t get to this stuff at all?”

He eyed her mouth; he eyed the padded floor of the workout room and the lockable door. Ah, well. “Okay,” he said. “Demardel. The mystery medallion.”

She turned away from him, her movement resolute, and she, too, cleared her throat. “Right,” she said. “It’s not just a simple tool. Like the blades, it needs a wielder to act. So your average Joe Bladewielder can’t just stumble over it and put it to use. It takes the participation of that second person—and that person has to be awake to it. Because unlike the blades, it has no agenda of its own. It’ll sleep for centuries, if no one calls on it.”

“So for however long your friend Gwen has had the thing, wherever she got it...she may not have any idea.”

“She certainly knows now. She knows more than she’s saying, too. I practically watched her put the pieces together right in front of me, even when she wasn’t talking. And she’s bonded to it, too—she was fresh off it when I talked to her yesterday evening at the hotel. Bonded with blood and probably—well...call it emotion.” Right. Devin could read between those lines. She and her Joe Bladewielder had done the deed. Natalie eyed him, reading his expression and not giving him any space to comment. “She may have no idea how to use it, but she knows what she’s got, and she knows it on a deep level.”

Devin reached out to the sketch of it, propped haphazardly at the top of the bench’s weight stack. “And we don’t know how to use it, either.”

“Not yet.” She looked at the drawing, pensive around the eyes and mouth. “Our blades are about redemption, Devin. Demonic essence trapped in metal, searching for redemption. This...” She took a deep breath. “This medallion is about sacrifice. Whoever made it gave their life to it. Whoever uses it...” She flicked her gaze to his. “There’s a price.”

He got it. Right away, he got it. “She has no idea. Even if she figures out how to use it, she doesn’t know there are consequences.”

“And we don’t know what they are. Perhaps to one trained, they’re nominal—just like we’re figuring out how to balance the blades. But to someone who has no idea—”

Frustration settled over him. “You were right all along. I should have handled him differently. We’d be together on this if I had. Dammit, now we’re ten kinds of screwed up here.”

She didn’t offer him platitudes. “Maybe twenty.” At his sharp glance, she teased another of the papers free from the spread. A glance told him little—a copy of notes in several languages, old pen-and-ink sketches of a blade in several phases. Scimitar, khanjar, jambiya...everything a flavor of the Middle East. “This is a blade with enough of a reputation to gain its own documentation.”

When he looked surprised, she added, “I’m beginning to think they’re all documented, somewhere—I just haven’t found it yet. But there are enough allusions...” She shook her head. “Anyway, this one’s apparently made a name for itself, going through wielders one after the other—even supposedly destroying one of the other blades. And then it fell off the scene, to the tune of a lot of speculation.”

“And you think it’s back.”

“What I think,” she said, straightening to stare down at the sketches, “is that it never left. So do some other people, but I suppose that’s beside the point. What I wonder—” She looked at him with some hesitation, the words not quite forming.

“Just say it,” he advised her.

She made a face, closing and then flexing her hands. Natalie, bringing herself to bear. “I’m reading between the lines of these notes, but...I think it found a wielder that matched its nature. I think they’re in on it together, creating the circumstances that feed them. And I think they’ve been doing it for a very long time.”

He looked at the sketches; he looked at her. “Define,” he said, “very long time.”

She met his gaze. “Lifetimes.”

Mac prowled the tiny room inside the diner—fighting the blade’s restlessness, far too aware of the exit that wasn’t here. Just a confined little space with a watercooler, the tiniest of tables with a battered metal chair, and a cot crammed up against the wall.

Gwen pointed at it. “There,” she said. “You.”

“We can’t stay here.” The restlessness pushed those words out, the blade hungering for more action, for a better taste of blood—for that which their enigmatic captor had offered him.

But not hungering hard—at least not for now. For now, it understood that Mac would do as he needed to maintain control. For now, it offered a grudging—very grudging—respect.

“Right,” Gwen said, hands on her hips and a smear of ketchup on her shirt. “Sure, then, let’s go. Because hey, I don’t need the chance to talk to you, or to reassure myself that you’re okay, or to make clever plans, or even to be smart about where we go next. And you clearly don’t need a chance to sleep off the whole demon blade hangover thing.”

It stopped him short; he sent her a startled look.

“Oh, please,” she said, tipping over to annoyance. “You’re a furnace.”

He ducked his head. Okay then. He might have a possessed blade and a mission and a life pretty much hanging in the balance, but Gwen had a temper—and he was pretty sure this round went to her. The burn of the healing went to his bones.

“An hour,” she said. “Ninety minutes. We can’t just rush out there, triggering off chaos wherever we go while that man looks for us. We have to talk.”

There was truth to that. “We do,” he said.

“I need to know that you’re okay, for starters,” she said—and then, before he could say anything, gestured impatiently. “No, no...I mean, obviously not, right? But...relatively speaking.”

“It’s under control,” he said, and meant it. Although, of course he had to add, “I don’t know for how long,” if he was going to be truthful.

“Longer if you take a moment than if you don’t,” she pointed out.

“Hey,” he told her. “You already won that one.”

She tilted her head slightly, looking pleased. “Did I?” she said. “Well, good for me. Let’s not waste it.” She gestured at the cot.

“You—”

“Get real. I had plenty of sleep last night.” That, he knew, was a lie—the strain of the past several days showed in her face, the faint bruised look around her eyes and the pallor beneath her scattered freckles. Even her bright pink hand bandage had begun to fray around the edges. “Besides, you need it worse.”

That, he knew, was no lie at all. He eyed the cot—its knit throw, its narrow stretched canvas—and Gwen laughed, if just a little bit. “Nice try,” she said. “Too small for both of us, I’m pretty sure.”

“C’mere,” he said, and didn’t have to reach far in this tiny room. Her uncertainty showed as he pulled her close, but as before, he simply held her—maybe a little too tightly, maybe with a bit too much intensity—and after a moment she returned it, stroking his back in an unconscious gesture.

Then he pulled back, took her face between his hands and kissed the hell out of her.

“Wha—” she said when she drew back, looking as dazed as he felt.

He still managed to say, “Something to remember, going into this.”

“I had plenty to remember already, if you want to know.” She touched her mouth with her fingertips, sent him a thoughtful look. “Although I suppose there can never be too much of that particular good thing.”

“My sentiments exactly,” he said, and took himself over to the cot.

She touched the pendant, where she’d habitually tucked it beneath her shirt. “We really need to talk,” she said, and then clearly had no intention of telling him just what that meant—pointing at the cot instead, and waiting as he lowered himself down, hunting sleep.

—want and need and demand and blood and pain and PUNISH PUNISH—

“Shh.” A voice in his ear, a hand on his face. Lips on his mouth. “Shh. Sleep.”

He slept.

Mac woke with Gwen’s hand draped over his chest and her cheek on his hand. Even as he took the first deep breath of waking, she lifted her head.

“Hey,” she said, revealing the seam of the cot imprinted on her face.

“Hey,” he said and lifted her wrist to check her watch. His, it seemed, had been a casualty of the past few days. It probably lay in pieces on the hotel floor.

“Not all that long,” she told him. “Ninety minutes. Feel better?”

“Better,” he affirmed. And he did. The blade had calmed, leaving him with nothing but a trickle of feeling—an awareness of the unrest in the city without the unceasing demand to be part of it, to imbibe of it.

“Good.” She climbed to her feet, a weariness in her movement. The cot wasn’t quite jammed against the wall; she swung her leg over it and sat on his thighs. No seduction there...just the comfort factor of their bodies in contact. He pushed up on his elbows to regard her, brow raised; listening. She placed a thoughtful hand flat on his stomach and made a face. “Here’s a thing you need to know—I did that—there, in the diner. When things were about to go really bad. I stopped that.”

He hadn’t expected that. Hell, no.

She read his expression easily enough. “I mean, what I did was make the feeling go away. That man’s bad mojo, or however he spreads his nastiness. Or maybe I put a double-rainbow force field around the place. Something. You know I’m just making this stuff up as I go.” She touched the pendant again.

“You... That?” He nodded at it. The blade knew of its presence...rested in silent resentment of it.

She nodded. “It’s changed these past couple of days. Maybe it was being with you...maybe it was the blood it soaked up. As if metal could actually do that, right? Maybe I woke it up by pitting it against your blade. I have no idea.” But her features had gone pensive...words not quite said. “The point is, I did it. Or it did it. And that means it might be useful again.” She took a deep breath, looked right at him. “I really need to know more.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking at the pendant outlined beneath her shirt. And, “Yeah,” again. “But don’t ask me how to find out. Or when we’ll have the time to do it.”

“Maybe we should run,” she suggested. “Get out of here, away from that man. Figure out what’s going on.” She hesitated, then added, “Together, I mean.”

He couldn’t help the grin. “Liking the sound of that,” he told her.

She watched him a moment longer, then shook her head. “But you don’t think so.”

He could wonder when she’d learned to read him so well...but he didn’t. Several days or a lifetime—it didn’t matter. They’d already been revealed to one another, whether they’d meant to or not. So it wasn’t hard to look up at her and say, “He’d find us.” And then, more seriously, “Gwen, I don’t know how it’ll go with me. I don’t know if I can hold out, and I need to deal with him while I still can.”

Her fingers flexed against his stomach, as if she could hold on to him with pure will; she looked away, blinking. But if her eyes grew shiny, her determination didn’t fade. “I know,” she said. “But it was a nice dream.” She looked down at him from her perfect viewpoint. “I see that some part of you liked it, too.”

“Honey,” he said, “your sexy ass is sitting on my thighs. I can’t even imagine the time when that wouldn’t get my attention.”

She tossed her head. “I’ll remember that.” And then she clambered off. “Let’s go then. Do our thing. Whatever it is.”

“Circle the city,” he said promptly. Standard approach tactics. And now that he knew what he was looking for, he sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot to stand, all in one motion. “Triangulate in on him. It’s time for us to call the shots.”

It’s time for us to call the shots.

More than that. It was time for Gwen to come clean—to let him know what she’d learned about the pendant...and how she’d learned it. She even opened her mouth to do it—but she could sense his restlessness, and his concern for the diner.

They’d been in one place for too long.

They emerged through the kitchen—closed down—and into the diner, now straightened and shining, as the waitress did a final wipe of the tables. She stopped to regard Mac and to nod to herself. “Better,” she said.

“Better,” Mac agreed. “Let me leave a donation to help pay for the damages.”

She scoffed. “Did you make those boys crazy?”

He dropped a handful of bills on the counter. “It made me crazy to see that they had Gwen cornered like that. I could have handled it differently.”

Not likely. Not that it would have mattered, with that man spreading his hatred. But Gwen stepped between them, providing distraction. “I’m Gwen,” she said. “And really, it’s all my fault. I’ve had good luck with that line before, but the way things are around here right now...”

“Gala,” said the woman, introducing herself in return. “Will you really try to do something about...this?” Her face said it all—that she couldn’t understand what they faced, and she couldn’t understand how they could do anything about it.

Then again, she didn’t have the image in her head of two men with gleaming blades engaged in battle, impossibly swift and able. Gwen wished she didn’t, either—even if her imagination had provided it wholesale.

Her imagination had plenty to work with on that score.

Mac merely said, “We’re going to do our best.”

Gala’s lips thinned. “Well, then, you’ll need food. And we had plenty of it waiting on the grill. I packed some up for you.” She looked at Mac askance. “I saw the way you eat.”

Mac’s stomach gave an angry growl, and he had the grace to look embarrassed. “You’ve been kind.”

“If you can do this thing, there will never be a way to repay you. And there’s no point in doing it hungry.”

So they headed for the Jeep laden with takeout and with Gwen’s hand already curling into a bag to appropriate French fries. “Yea verily,” she said. “Carbohydrates, the food of heroes.” She glanced at him. “We are the heroes, right?”

“If you gotta pick a side,” Mac said, checking all four tires before pulling the driver’s door open. Just in case.

“I definitely choose the hero side,” Gwen said, settling into the seat and arranging the food—between her feet, on her lap. “But honestly, I don’t see why innocent bystander isn’t one of the options.”

“In this game?” Mac shook his head, shoving the keys into the ignition and cranking up the air-conditioning. “I don’t think that’s an entirely safe place to be.” He glanced at her. “And I don’t think your father left you that option.”

“I doubt he knew.” Gwen found her chin lifting and had no idea in defiance of what.

Except in the next moment, she did. In defiance of self. All her mixed feelings, all her years of outrunning and outtalking herself. I am nine years old, and my life has changed forever... “With someone else, it might have gone differently.”

“Of that I have no doubt.” And then his gaze caught at the center console cup holder, and she knew instantly what had surprised him there.

“I put your cell on the charger,” she said, shifting a bag aside to see it there, tipped casually into the cup holder. “It was getting— Oh.”

Because that wasn’t what had caught his attention at all. Or maybe at first, but the bright message indicator on the phone display had caught it more. He reached for the phone. “I’ve got a week before work starts. No one even knows I’m in town.”

Gwen’s hand froze in the act of untangling another long fry.

Someone knew she was in town. Someone who’d taken a call from her on that phone. “Wait!”

He’d flipped the phone open to frown at the displayed number; now he transferred his gaze to hers, a silent question.

“It might be...” she said. “I mean, the other night...I needed to think.”

Wow. That tongue of hers sure had lost its glib.

“Listen,” she said, desperate as understanding flickered across his features. He went still, waiting. “I went out for a walk. After we... You fell asleep. And I needed a little space. And she found me there.”

“She,” Mac said, “who?”

“Natalie!” Gwen blurted. “She was watching the hotel. She’s with the man who dumped on us that first evening. His name is Devin. They have blades—”

“Like mine?” he said, every bit of him going hard and dangerous. “All these years, and suddenly those things are everywhere?”

“She said they could help you! Us. And her blade has a name, Mac. She said she had some sort of truce with it, or control over it, or—I don’t know. Something. And she saw my pendant, because when she came to the—” oh, that was so not how she’d meant to tell him this, but now the word was in her mouth, even if it immediately trailed away “—warehouse...”

He took it in—understanding immediately that she’d seen Natalie not once but twice—and immediately putting the rest of it together. Natalie’s message on the phone, his number harvested when Gwen had called her to the warehouse.

Nothing to do now but get it all out. She’d done what she’d thought was right, hadn’t she? Done the only thing she could think of at the time? “I was terrified at the warehouse,” she said. “I thought you were going to kill yourself. Or that the blade would kill you. So yes, I called her, and she came. And dammit, she made me wait outside, just like you said.”

“What I said,” he told her—softly, dangerously “—was to run.”

“She’s got some sort of research mojo, because she’d looked up my pendant. And listen to me, Mac—it all makes sense. It’s supposed to be able to sever the connection between blade and wielder.”

He did listen, thoughtful even in his anger. “We’ve seen that. We’ve also seen the price.”

“That’s because I don’t know what I’m doing!” Gwen said. “And besides, it’s different now. It’s...awake. It has a name, she says—it has a history.” She reached blindly under the seat, groping for the folder she’d jammed there just to have a place to put it. The food bags rustled, obstructing her efforts, but finally she pulled it out and thrust it at him. “And I haven’t been keeping this from you, not any of it. You’ve been out of it or sleeping it off or fighting or—”

“Yeah,” he said tightly, taking the folder. “I get the picture.”

“Mac,” she said, her hand lingering in place even emptied—wanting to reach for him and feeling the emotional barriers he’d flung up. “She said they could help. She didn’t ask anything of me. She took the dog to the vet. She helped me deal with what was happening to you. And you know she could have taken control of things while you were chained inside that warehouse.”

“So did you, when you called her,” he said, flipping through the pages—not long enough to absorb anything, but long enough to see the veracity of the materials within. “What were you even thinking?”

Ohh, that just crossed the line. “I was thinking,” she told him, “that you were going to die, and that I didn’t want it to happen! I was thinking that I had this pendant coming alive and no idea what to do about it! I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t need to know—she wasn’t real happy about that, either—but what I did tell her was mine to tell. Are you hearing me, Michael MacKenzie? This isn’t just about you. Some parts of it maybe aren’t about you at all!”

As if she’d expected him to back off. But she hadn’t expected him to reach for her—to stop, pull his hand back and fist it at his thigh. To say, “If she’d taken you, Gwen Badura, it damned well would have been about me.”

Her mouth hadn’t expected it, either, already bursting out with, “Just because you—”

And then, “Oh.” She looked at his fist, white-knuckled as it was; she looked up to his face and his eyes gone dark and his gaze latched on to hers. What he’d said, what he’d meant...how deeply he’d meant it. “Oh.”

And then, because he still seemed caught there in the very agony of the thought, she said, “Kiss me, dammit!”

Oh, yeah. Right there across the middle console, quick enough to startle her—he grabbed her shoulders and kissed her right to instant flashpoint, hard and not a little bit rough and just exactly what she wanted, a growl stirring in his throat.

She startled as the sweet tension curled fast through her body, thrumming into an unexpected echo—she jerked with it, a surprised little cry trapped between them. Mac stiffened, his hands tightening on her shoulders—and when he drew back from her, his eyes had gone huge and wild, his control tipping and his breath hard and fast.

The blade. The pendant. It had to be.

She opened her mouth to ask—but he only shook his head, cutting her off. And when he could speak, it was only to say, “I don’t know. I don’t— God, Gwen. I don’t know.”

Gwen sat heavily against the seat back, just a bit of an uncomfortable squirm there. “I wonder,” she said, finding her own breath again, “if that hotel room is safe yet.”

A hint of his wry amusement returned. “I wonder if we would survive it, regardless.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “But what a way to go...”

And then she sighed, straightened the bag on her lap and peeked within it. “Smashed burger, anyone?”

“Anything,” he said, fishing for the phone. “I’m hungry enough to—” His gaze caught hers. She stopped breathing again, and he let slip that little twist of his mouth. “Eat anything,” he said, finishing the words.

In practical desperation, she shoved a hamburger—indeed somewhat worse for the wear—in his direction. And then when he reached for it, she caught his wrist—just for a moment, passing her eyes over the fading bruises, the healing skin. She shook her head but didn’t say anything.

Besides, she was hungry, too. She fished a wrapped burrito out of the bag and spread a napkin in her lap. “Because,” she said, feeling absurdly fussy, “I hardly have any clothes left to spare at this point, do I?”

He flipped the phone open again, hitting the voice mail, thumbing in his password and activating the speaker. In moments, a woman’s voice issued from the phone—he glanced at her, as neutrally as she imagined he could make it.

She nodded. Yes. Natalie.

“Gwen, listen. I’m digging up some information on the other blade involved. Believe it or not, I really didn’t need you to tell me there’s someone else involved, and that you’re tangled with him—and it’s not good. It’s a strong blade, and there are indications that it’s created a bond of unusual properties. This man has been building his resources for longer than any one lifetime. Gwen, if he learns about you, he’ll stop at nothing to get what you have. I really wish you would—”

And something interrupted her, or the voice mail system cut her off, but it didn’t matter.

“She wanted me to go there.” Gwen shifted her weight to pull the business card out of her pocket and display it to him. “She keeps saying they can help—”

Mac took the card from her fingers, dropped it onto the drink holder console, and put the phone on top of it. “That man offered to help, too. He offered all sorts of things. They all have their own reasons, Gwen. You heard what she said—he’ll stop at nothing to get what you have. Do you know this woman well enough to be sure she’s not exactly the same?”

Gwen sucked in a breath.

She didn’t, did she?

She remembered the look on Natalie’s face when she’d let it slip that she’d used the pendant, however awkwardly—that she’d wrung Mac a temporary separation from it. And then she remembered the quiet manner in which the woman drove away afterward, knowing Gwen hadn’t told her everything, knowing Gwen had the pendant and that she had Mac. She let the breath out again. “I’ve got uh-oh alarms. She didn’t set any of them off.”

“Neither did I.”

“That’s different,” she protested. “With you it was...it was...” Way to paint yourself into a corner, Gwen.

“Love at first sight?” To give him credit, that dark humor came gently.

She lifted her chin. “Not in the least. You scared me. But you...you caught me, too. Maybe,” she added, resting the burrito on top of the bag from which it had come, her appetite momentarily gone, “that’s what scared me.”

He snorted. “Or maybe you were just smart.”

“Look,” she said. “Maybe they’re not totally safe. But they’re not that man, either. If we have to choose between the two—”

The look he sent her held a fierce defiance she hadn’t expected. “Who says we have to choose at all?”

She sat back in the seat, momentarily and unexpectedly silenced as he balanced his burger on his lap and shoved the Jeep into gear. Who says?

Except in her heart, she knew the grim truth of it. Natalie and Devin, they belonged here. They had resources. They were positioned to deal with this situation. And that man...he didn’t seem to belong here, but hell, yes, he had resources. And power.

She and Mac had a vehicle, a few suitcases, and a compromised hotel room. Mac’s blade had made him wanted...and Gwen’s pendant would make her wanted. And neither of them truly knew what to do with what they had.