Claimed by the Demon

Chapter 3

Think, Gwen Badura, she told herself. Think about what you’re doing.

Because here she was in front of the hotel room where the man named Michael MacKenzie, AKA Mac, slumped wearily against the wall. She routed through his pockets for the room key.

He didn’t look like trouble.

He barely looked conscious.

It didn’t mean he’d stay that way.

First a police report...then how many hours till I sleep? At a shelter. With lice.

Ugh.

“You’re doing the right thing,” she told herself. Out loud. Firmly. And then just shrugged when he gave her a bleary and questioning look, finally producing the card key. She took it from him, pushed it into the lock, and flicked the handle open.

Whew. The decorating theme du jour must have been garish.

But the bed was indeed huge. And there was a little fridge and an even smaller microwave, and the bathroom with its separate sink area didn’t greet her with any smells, drips, or puddles of untoward water.

Mac headed straight for the fridge. She closed the door behind them, far too aware of the absence of things—not throwing her purse on the bed, her overnighter beside the closet. At least she had the cheapo toothbrush the hotel had given her on the way in.

You’re doing the right thing.

And not just for her. She watched as he pulled a small plastic bottle from the fridge, broke the cap seal, and gulped it down. Some sort of protein drink, as best as she could read upside down.

Well, at least it wasn’t blood. The way things had gone this evening, wouldn’t it be just her luck to have hooked up with a vampire? And would it truly have been any less believable? “You don’t drink blood, do you?”

He startled, spilling the last of the drink down his chin, and looked at her. For an instant she thought she might have seen guilt as he wiped the back of his hand over his chin, but then he said, his voice gone hoarse with fatigue, “Do you just say whatever comes into your head, then?”

“Gets it out of the way,” Gwen said promptly. “Besides, the best defense is a good offense.”

Right. And she’d learned it early. If she was going to poke her nose into the gut feelings that so often drove her, it was easier to prod the situation right out into the open. That way she could see just what she had to deal with. “You didn’t say no, by the way. About drinking blood.”

He tossed the bottle into the minuscule wastebasket beside the fridge, practically filling it with that single item. “I don’t, no.”

While she was pondering that unexpected response, he peeled his jacket off and dropped it over the straight-backed chair beside the ubiquitous token desk. “Bed,” he said, gesturing at it. And then a nod at the closet. “Extra blanket, extra pillow. I’ll hang out on top of the sheets, if you’d like.”

Yeah, she’d like. She grabbed the items, then belatedly thought to say, “Hey, I should do that. I mean, I’ll sleep on top.”

She stopped herself, her back to him, feeling the warmth suffusing her face. “If you’re a gentleman,” she said, “you’ll pretend I didn’t say that.”

The noise he made might have been amusement. “Relax,” he said, albeit through a rustling noise. “Beautiful as you are, I have my own plans for the night.”

She whirled on him, bedding in hand, mouth open on words already lost.

“Sometimes I say what I think, too,” he told her. He regarded the bloodied shirt in his hand and tossed it toward the wastebasket.

“Um,” she said, over the top of the pillow. And stood there as he took his newly stripped torso over to the sink, not quite sure if she was stunned by the beauty of said torso, muscle strapped over muscle and tightly defining the form of him, or by the damage done to it.

Okay, maybe you can have your way with me after all.

But thankfully, she didn’t say it out loud this time.

And thankfully, it wasn’t in her nature to mean it if she did. No one-night stands on irresponsible road trips with men picked up in a diner for her. No, sirree.

She did, however, drop her armload onto the bed, and by then it was clear enough he intended to do nothing more than rinse his mouth, splash water onto his face and let the rest of him quietly finish bleeding on its own.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You need to clean that...those...” She waved in the general direction of the bruises and abrasions and— “Is that... Did you get stabbed?”

“Huh.” He twisted to look at his ribs beneath his arm. “Maybe. A little.”

She found herself speechless. Pointing at the cut and its oozing blood and the stains all over his skin, gesturing at the sink and the water, unable to fathom his reaction to the entire situation. Finally she grabbed the desk chair and dragged it into the bathroom, pointing at the wound.

“You,” she said. “You’re delirious. That’s what. Sit there. I’m going to see what’s what. If I had my purse I’d have Band-Aids, but I don’t suppose—”

“It’ll be okay,” he said, gently—surprisingly gentle at that, in spite of his bleariness. Reassuring, as if she had been the one who’d been hurt—beyond the sting of skinned palms that were truly hers to own. “Nothing here is that bad. I just need some sleep. You need some sleep. Things will look different tomorrow.”

“My purse,” she muttered, “will still be stolen.” But she reached for the hotel washcloth—which would surely never be the same after this—and ran the hot water, ripping the teeny bar of soap free from its wrapping.

He hesitated another moment, just looking at her—enough so she stopped what she was doing to look back, finding herself rooted there. Just long enough to realize what the expression on his face meant—that he did find her beautiful, that he did want her, and that his hand, rising, was going to curl around the back of her head and twine through her hair and—

She blinked. He closed his eyes, clenched his fist; let it drop back to his side.

She remembered to breathe.

He didn’t, thank God, mutter some lame apology that would draw even more attention to the moment. He grabbed the chair and flipped it around, sitting backward on it to rest his arms along the top.

Gwen stuck a hand under the water, found it blistering, and jerked away. How long had that moment lasted, anyway? She added cold, filled the sink, and soaked the washcloth.

And then she knew better than to pretend that it didn’t affect her to touch him—not his beauty, not his pain. She started with the spots that didn’t look too bad and moved carefully to the abrasions, washing off dried blood to reveal the truth of what lay beneath, discovering the strange little twist of a tattoo over his heart and keeping the washcloth as warm and soothing as possible. “Sorry,” she murmured when he twitched, and “This is a bad one,” and “Face, please.”

He lifted it for her, the full light on the cuts and bruises, displaying remarkably little swelling aside from one puffy eye and the corner of his mouth.

Not that he made it easy. Oh, no. He watched her.

Her heart beat just a little faster, and she tipped a finger under his chin to examine her work. Right. Stormy grey-blue eyes, no longer hiding in shadow and no longer hiding weariness of the deepest kind—or even the expression that still smoldered from when he’d almost—almost—touched her. She eyed the cut of his mouth, unexpectedly sweet in repose and just begging for another gentle brush of the washcloth...or her thumb.

What the hell is wrong with me? She closed her eyes and turned away, her hand settling on her necklace and clenching it, if ever so briefly, tight in her fist. “You’re right,” she said. “Except for that, you know, maybe a little stab wound, nothing there is too bad. It’s just that there’s so much of it.”

“It’ll be okay,” he said, but his voice had faded, and when she turned back she found the connection between them had faded, too, and his eyes were half-closed. He shook himself, reached for a hand towel, and pushed away from the chair. “I’ve got to sleep. Make yourself at home. You won’t bother me.”

He only staggered a little on the way to the bed. There he put down the towel to protect the bedspread from his short but gaping cut and its trickling blood, flopped on top of it, flung a forearm over his eyes and, to all appearances, fell instantly asleep.

Gwen stood beside the bed, caught in the surrealism of it all.

A stranger’s hotel room.

A beautiful stranger she could hardly stop herself from touching even as he stretched out asleep, completely unaware of her.

Apparently trusting her.

Or not having any choice in the matter, from the looks of him.

She held her hands out under the light of the sink area...his blood stained them; her own blood stained them. Not the smartest thing she could have done.

She cleaned up, replacing the chair, wringing out the stained washcloth and neatly hanging it, wiping down the sink counter. She pondered her hands; she pondered the shower, sending a glance at her erstwhile host.

He slept on. He hadn’t moved so much as a muscle twitch. She approached him, her hand hovering over his shoulder. Strong, well-formed bones beneath working muscle and gleaming skin.

Heat radiated back at her.

She shook her head—and, glancing at the blanket she’d dumped, decided against spreading it over him just yet.

Instead she headed for the shower. Not without trepidation—she’d wash her underwear and hang it to dry, but it would leave her commando in her slacks. And the hotel shampoo? No way was it going to do well by her hair. No comb, no leave-in conditioner...

She settled on a good sponge bath and felt much the better for it, the commando situation notwithstanding.

When she came out of the bathroom, he hadn’t moved.

Slowly, she sank down by the side of the bed, resting her chin on the mattress, her arms folded in front of her. From here, she could watch him breathe.

She could make sure he was in fact doing it.

Absurd, the comfort that gave her.

Her hand crept to the pendant at her neck. He’d noticed it, she was sure. Inevitably, he’d ask about it. Everyone did. So obviously old, so obviously heavy with metal and meaning.

She knew that story by heart.

I am nine years old, and something is wrong with my father. My daddy. My mommy is dead and has been for years. Daddy changed on the night she died. He always carries a knife; he won’t let me see it. He acts like he knows how to use it, but my daddy is a briefcase man with a briefcase job.

He was. Now he is something else. Someone else.

He presses a pendant into my hand, cold and heavy, incised with symbols so worn I can’t read them.

Not that I could anyway. I don’t know this language. I don’t think anyone does.

The pendant means nothing to me. I only want my daddy to be who he was: with his shaven cheeks, smelling of aftershave and giving warm hugs when he comes home from the office.

This man is scratchy-faced and smells of stale drink and something sharp and unfamiliar; this man has hard new muscles and keeps strange hours.

This man sometimes burns like the hottest fever, and sleeps like the dead.

Gwen’s hand tightened around the pendant. She straightened, and this time, when she reached out to Mac’s shoulder, she let her fingers rest on the heat of that smooth, gleaming skin.

He slept like the dead.

Mac slept deep and hard and hot.

But the blade didn’t sleep at all.

The blade wanted...and the blade feared.

It tugged at him, taking him to its own unfulfilled hunger, the need to taste, the need to drink. Blood and emotions both—and both denied to it this day, lost to the hatred and to the resounding, staggering weakness of its human partner.

So many blows absorbed. So much healing to do.

It healed with a vicious touch.

And beneath its needs ran a sweeter song, moments of connection, moments of near-connection—a soft touch not quite complete, an undercurrent of certainty.

Mac woke gasping in the darkness.

Except it was no longer darkness to him; there was no way to shut out the night, not any longer. And so he saw her, sitting beside the bed, glorious hair spilling around her shoulders, neat teeth biting her lower lip...concern in her eyes. “Hey,” she said, her voice much more matter of fact than those eyes, if softer than usual.

He meant to respond, but a great wrenching shudder took him, ice twisting through his spine, heat washing over his skin. His teeth chattered; words stuck in his throat as a gravelly moan.

“Hey,” she said again, reaching over to the bedside table and the ice bucket to pull out the soiled washcloth, wring it out, and draw it over his bare shoulder, his chest...along his collarbone and up his neck. Goose bumps sprang out over his skin as it tightened in response; fast on the heels of that, another twisting shudder pressed his head back into the pillow and sent his hands reaching for...reaching for...

Something.

One hand found hers, clamped down tight.

“I know,” she said, and, one-handed, she refreshed the washcloth. “I’m sorry. But you’ve got to cool down. You were...” She hesitated. “Thrashing.”

He could believe it. He could feel it. The grip of the blade, deeper than it had ever gone. Filling him with whispers of its want and need, feeding him tidbits that soaked into his consciousness without understanding. The wild road. Take it. Use it. Crave it.

“This will help,” she said, less than certainly. “Not that I...I mean, there’s no infection anywhere. You look...you look great.”

Yes. Healing. Hot fiery brands of healing, marking the worst spots. The others, already fading beyond notice.

The next spasm took him, pushed out a groan from between clenched teeth and left him shivering and fractured; she gasped from the grip of his hand around hers. The washcloth felt like ice on his neck, along his side. Was ice. He tried to twist away but didn’t have the coordination for it.

“I know,” she said, and her voice held a note of pleading. “I’m sorry. But unless I call an ambulance—” His grunt of alarm, slicing through increasingly shattered thoughts, stopped her short. “I didn’t think so. Then this is what we’ve got. My father—” She hesitated, then seemed to decide it wouldn’t matter now. “It helped my father. Sometimes.”

And left so many words unspoken, even as fire and ice twined together to rake along his bones.

She knew something. She knew. Here, the woman who’d found him in the midst of their random journeys, who’d piqued the interest of the blade, who’d roused feelings in him long overwhelmed by that same blade.

Coincidence.

He didn’t trust coincidence.

And he—he who had a demon blade that amplified and fed him emotions, that had its own wants and desires—he looked at this woman whose very presence spoke to him, and he knew better than to believe in what wasn’t real.

Even as the blade’s cruel healing snatched him up and crashed him back down into darkness.

Gwen flicked the light on and winced at the sight of herself in the mirror. All the usual—mouth a little too wide, upper lip a little unbalanced in its fullness, cheekbones a little broad in that heart-shaped face, all the undertones of red hair and faint copper freckles. Hair desperately out of control and her hair sticks locked in the car. Chinos and stretchy lightweight shirt travel-wrinkled and slept in.

She gave the bruised swelling at the corner of her eye a tentative prod and winced.

Right. Thrashing.

It had been an interesting awakening. An interesting night. All in all, bringing back memories she’d submerged so far as to nearly have forgotten.

I am eight years old, and my father comes home sick. There is blood. He won’t let me see, but then he falls into a strange, hot sleep and I look anyway.

I wish I hadn’t.

I am eight years old and I don’t know what to do for him, but I remember my mother soothing my forehead with a cool cloth, and I try that.

It seems to help.

It had helped this man, in the end. As difficult and miserable as it had been.

For both of them, thank you very much. Especially the not knowing, from moment to moment, if she was doing the right thing at all, or if she should call for help. Only those memories, as nonsensical as they were, had kept her from doing just that.

I am eight years old, and my father forbids me to call for help. He grabs my wrist and he spits the words at me, and then he falls back on the couch, barely conscious.

My wrist hurts for a week.

Not that she was afraid of Michael MacKenzie—not when she could have simply walked out, so unlike her young self. But that emphasis had made its mark nonetheless.

She finished poking at her face and gave it up. She had no makeup to cover the bruising, and it wasn’t worth fretting about otherwise. She washed her face, wiped down her arms and legs and torso, and grabbed her now-dry underwear.

In the bed, her accidental patient slept. Deeply and undisturbed, a natural sleep and with a nearly normal body temperature as close as she could tell. Oh, now and then he got restless, and once he even shifted in that particular way that let her know he was aroused.

Man in the morning. Something reassuring about that little piece of normal.

She dropped her summer-weight jacket over the chair so he’d know she was coming back and lifted the room key from the bedside table, slipping out to grab more than her share of the continental breakfast offerings in the lobby, far too aware that the single twenty tucked in her back pocket constituted the entirety of her current funds.

But when she tuned in and overheard the universal topic of conversation among the other hotel guests, she lost her appetite.

Phase of the moon...loonies were out last night...break-ins...muggings...something in the air...

And the ultrahassled desk clerk, reassuring people that this was all highly unusual, that they prided themselves on running a safe establishment, that they’d do what they could to assist.

Her first thought came with odd relief. It hadn’t been just her; it hadn’t been just Michael MacKenzie.

The second came with sick certainty—that the mugging hadn’t been the last of it for her, and she just hadn’t known it.

She dropped her half-full coffee cup into the trash and the croissant along with it, and she didn’t pretend she wasn’t rushing when she dashed out the door and down the row of parking spaces, looking for her dark little VW Bug.

The door stood slightly ajar.

She stopped, not quite within reach. Not wanting to be within reach. Really, really not wanting to look. Because truly, who would want a battered old soft-sided suitcase with zippers that had cable ties instead of pulls and a fair amount of duct tape holding it together? Who would want her travel-worn shirts and bras and undies and aurgh, her sanitary supplies?

“Hair sticks,” she moaned out loud. “Conditioner.”

Another few hours without either, and she’d have to make do with a paper bag.

But there was no point in guessing, so she looked.

Gone.

The suitcase, the little netbook case, the phone charger. The glove box contents were strewn over the passenger seat and foot well, and—was that a condom draped over the steering wheel? Limp and used? In her Volkswagen? Good God, had someone been on a dare?

With a quiet, firm nudge she pushed the door closed. No point in locking it. The open door had run down the battery; the interior lights were out.

Besides, she didn’t exactly have the keys anymore, did she?

She turned and left the car, ravaged as it was. She kept her steps firm and regular and her chin firm, too, if perhaps held a little too high. Convincing even herself. Through the lobby, past the elevator and to the stairs and up to the third-floor room she’d shared with a stranger.

A sick, raving stranger who had accidentally clocked her one during the night.

But there at the third-floor landing, she couldn’t quite continue. She lowered herself to the top step, propped her elbows on her knees, and hid her face in her hands. She tried to think logically—what she’d do now, how she’d replace her cash and her credit cards and her keys and her toothbrush; how she’d get the Bug to a garage. And there was identity theft to consider, the credit running up on her thankfully minimalistic cards—

And what had she been doing here anyway? If she’d wanted to lose everything, couldn’t she have gone to Vegas and had fun doing it? How the hell had she ended up in the stairwell outside the room of a guy she didn’t even know but had nursed through the night, maybe making all the wrong decisions after all?

The hell with logical.

Gwen dropped her forehead to her knees and started to cry. Good, hard, earnest sobs. The pain of disturbed memories, the violation of not one but two robberies, the loss of her things, the suddenly surrealistic sensation that she didn’t even know who she was any longer, never mind where she was.

The door slammed open behind her; she startled wildly, flattening up against the wall and smacking her head on the metal handrail. Michael MacKenzie stood in the doorway, looking both disoriented and fierce—until he saw her, at which point his expression flickered to the kind of man panic that meant, Oh, God, she’s crying. What do I do?

She flapped her hand in a useless gesture, hunting for explanation—and instead burst into a sad wail: “Hair sticks!”

She wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d turned and run in the opposite direction. But instead—barefoot, shirtless, tattooed, and sporting only half the injuries he’d displayed the evening before, he sat down beside her, tucked her in under his arm and pulled her close. And then he kissed the top of her head, and that was the end of that; she burst into tears all over again.

“You—you—you,” she said, never getting further than that word.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

So she cried a little more, and then she sniffled mightily, and she muttered, “I’d go get a tissue, but they’ve probably been stolen.”

Wisely, he said nothing; just stroked her hair—her horrible hair—and squeezed her shoulder.

But she must have been thinking again, because she narrowed eyes that felt distinctly puffy, pulling back to aim that stare at him. “How did you find me? I was quiet.”

Surprise crossed his face. “I—” He shook his head. “I must have heard you.”

But she was sure she’d seen a flinch. Some truth he didn’t want to face any more than she wanted hers. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.” And eased away from him.

Gotta give it to him. He wasn’t slow to turn the tables. “What about your father?”

She blinked. “I— What?”

“Last night. You said—”

Offense. Best defense. Now. “You mean, when you were thrashing?” She pointed at her face. “Thrashing.”

He did his own double take, absorbing the implication of her new bruise. When he spoke, his voice sounded forced. “So it would seem. You said—”

No. That had been a mistake. A long day, a dark night, and words that had slipped out. “I don’t want to talk about my father.”

“Funny,” he said. “Because I really do.”

“Really? I want to talk about how everything was going just fine until I met you, and now suddenly I’m out my purse, everything that was in my car, and apparently every bit of good sense I ever possessed!”

He drew breath as though he’d come right back at her, but at the last moment he didn’t—instead, frowning...trying to work out the meaning behind her words.

It maybe wasn’t fair to use shorthand against a man who’d been so very sick so very recently and who, for all his absurd recovery, still looked very much battered.

In a heroic sort of—

Oh, my God. Stop that.

Coming to conclusions—and the right conclusions at that—he said, “Hair sticks?”

She nodded. “From my car. Which was broken into. Along with a whole lot of other people’s, it seems, not to mention various muggings and a lot of disgruntlement overheard in the lobby over the free breakfast. You should get down there, by the way. It won’t last forever.”

He stood, on his feet faster than she’d ever expected of him—pacing away and back again on the limited landing area, moments during which she paid too much attention to the way his jeans settled over his hips.

Note to self: ogling does not count as “stopping that.”

Shock. It was the emotional shock. Surely. Her hand closed over the pendant, as if she would possibly, after all these years, receive some sort of divine guidance from it. Some voice from her father’s past, before he became what he became.

Michael MacKenzie held his hand out. “We can’t talk about this here.”

Right. Because it was so much safer in the room.

But she took his hand, and she stood and brushed herself off, and she dabbed the last bit of moisture from beneath her eyes, and then she followed him back to the room.

Where he stopped, a vulnerable chagrin coloring his expression—mingled with that same wry self-awareness. Barefooted, bare-chested, and staring at the door lock. “This,” he said, “could be a bad moment.”

Gwen’s laugh was a little watery, but held a smile nonetheless. She held the key between two fingers, turning it back and forth in the hall light. His relief made her smile bigger, and he stood aside so she could unlock the door and lead the way.

But she didn’t fail to notice the truth of it all. He’d heard her, he said.

He’d heard her, as impossible as it was, and he’d come to her—without regard to shoes, shirt, or even the key to get back in.

He’d just come.

For her.