Bracing himself for the response did no good. He was dimly aware of his head thumping against the carpet, his body seizing—Compton, frustrated, kicking him—demanding battle. Craving it. Natalie’s cry of protest in the background, weak and filtered by veils of reality.
A temper tantrum, held by an entity with power and bitter resentment, acted out on his body. Flailing away at his thoughts, his being...his very awareness of self. It was someone else choking for breath, someone else spitting blood, someone else clawing at the expensive silk carpet with one hand and clutching a preternaturally sharp blade in the other.
Just enough presence of mind left to ask...
What do you want?
Silence. Startled cessation.
And then a flood.
It didn’t want to be in the Triad. It didn’t want to be with Compton. It hadn’t seemed to have cared if Leo lived or died, but now Devin wasn’t even sure of that, now knowing how much Compton had interfered with Leo...how much he’d incited the blade, had turned Leo against his own nature.
And then, in a whisper...an answer. Direct and clear in his mind.
Redemption.
He didn’t understand. Denied it.
Death, he told it, snarling back. You want death. You want me to find it for you. You want to corrupt my soul until I do. That’s what you’ve always wanted.
The punishing pain was more of a caress, as the blade measured such things. A wash of dull coals, welling up from within, sweeping past the worst of the injuries...stopping the blood. And the words, again, very clear.
I change you. Or you change me.
His breath caught on sudden understanding.
Redemption.
A bully of a blade, captured up in itself...nuances he didn’t yet understand, origins he didn’t yet understand...
Waiting for someone to change it for the better, instead of being changed themselves—for the worse.
Even possible?
Faint and haughty negation.
The blade thought not.
But there was a first step. There was the human resisting being changed.
Devin clung to persistence, to the faint and familiar signs of healing, the blade exhausted, the human exhausted but at least not dying. He gathered his will and he gathered his words and he punched through that final fog. Tell me your name.
Silence from within. Only the sound of Natalie’s soft, uneven breathing, her faint gasp of pain. Of Compton, hovering, growling with frustration...wanting his fierce, climactic fight, wanting the blade’s ownership sunk deep.
Of Devin’s own harsh breath, his heart hammering out a galloping and unsteady beat, the rush of it through his body.
Until, finally...
Anheriel.
Relief made him as weak as the pain had done. A foothold...a chance.
Because he now knew enough. He knew what the blade wanted. He knew neither of them wanted Compton to prevail. Neither wanted Devin to die. He could work with that—
And the blade, whispering in his mind. I am what I am.
Threat without malice. Threat as fact. Threat as reality.
But someone had him, if not by the throat, by the front of his shirt, there at the base of his throat—lifting him, a gust of rude breath against the side of his face, no little amount of spittle with the vehemence of it. “Fight, damn you! I expected more from you than this! Or do you truly want to hear her agony before she dies? Before you die?”
And the blade in his hand, warming, changing...the little brass knuckle knife. Perfect. He slammed a blow into the side of Compton’s face, heard the crack of bone—thumped back down to the floor as Compton shouted in surprise and fell away.
First things first. He wrenched himself to his side, rolled up from there—hands and knee, one leg dragging, over to Natalie. Seeing that even the fear and adrenaline wasn’t keeping away shock—skin gone pale, a fine sheen of sweat dampening the tendrils of hair at her temple, the rest of it fallen loose from its clip, highlights as bright as ever beneath the skylight.
“Triad,” he said. “Gotta stop him, sweetheart. Even this blade knows better.”
“I know,” she said, without any sound behind it—reaching out just long enough to brush him with the ends of her fingers before her hand fell.
God, he wanted to gather her up and kiss the tremble out of those lips and the fear out of those eyes. He wanted—
Compton cursed behind him. Devin closed his eyes; he turned away. And he barely made it to his feet before Compton staggered back to his own, the elegant lines of his face distorted.
Devin’s saber had returned. He looked at Compton, gave him a grim little smile, and said, “Anheriel.”
Compton took a sharp breath. Through his teeth, he said, “Congratulations. I hadn’t expected that much of you.”
“Get over it. I haven’t joined you on the dark side of the force. And Anheriel doesn’t want to, either.”
“Anheriel,” Compton breathed. He smiled. “Anheriel won’t have a choice.”
Just as Natalie had never had a choice. Nor Leo. Nor all those others who died in the alleys.
Devin found the strength. He stole it from the blade, he stole it from himself. He closed in on Compton with speed and sparks and flashing light—found Compton, too, had reverted his blade to something long and sweeping, heavier, bearing a wicked trailing point and a sharp swage. A blade that would only need to bite deeply once to finish this fight.
But a slower blade.
And Compton bled.
And Compton tired.
If Devin felt his own energy bleeding away, his good leg growing leaden and his bad stuttering beneath him, he also felt the fire of Anheriel behind him. And Natalie—pulling herself straighter, managing to crouch against the wall—getting out of his way; she was behind him, too.
Swift blows, a parry barely there in time, a beat against Compton’s blade and a quick faltering bind and that broad, heavier sweep reached out to tap him, nicking out flesh from his arm.
Devin blew sweat from his upper lip. Anheriel—
But the blade, as much as it fought for them, still sought his weak points. Twisted against him, turning him. Yearning for the wild animalistic retribution it had brought out in Leo, those years ago—
Bringing in the fog.
Devin snarled against it, battering Compton back—and the blade surged within him.
I am what I am.
The blade’s nature. As if it could stop itself no more than he could.
“Devin,” Natalie whispered, seeing it. “Oh, God, Devin, fight it!”
But for that, he needed Natalie. And he was losing Natalie. Even in this moment, even as she tried to stay out of his way—
His hand drooped—knuckles clenching white, the fog closing in.
“Devin!” Natalie cried, a thin sound.
I am what I am—
And Compton smiled within that ruined face, streaming blood from a dozen deep wounds, tattered and worn and—
Victorious.
He smiled, and he lifted his blade, and he came on.
“My choice!” Natalie cried.
Her hand coming around his waist from behind, that electrifying touch, crystal clear.
Spreading its clarity...fingers firm against his skin, sliding up to rest on his ribs—coming up from beneath his sword arm from behind, reaching out—
Snapping reality back in place, her hand over his on the blade as he raised it, lifting it—a high guard position to slip beneath Compton’s strike as they stepped aside together, thrusting out with the saber—
Parting muscle, cleaving bone...
Stopping a beating heart.
Stopping the world.
Compton’s blades wailed in denial—grieving, howling banshee mad in the strident, rising voice of anguished metal, circling the room to clash and echo and intertwine—
And slap them down.
* * *
Natalie hadn’t expected to open her eyes at all.
But open her eyes she did.
For a long moment, she did nothing more than that—sorting out the tangle of Devin’s arm beneath her, the sprawl of his body beside her—the sound of his confused groan in her ears.
Alive.
As she was, somehow, alive. Her wound throbbed with an increasing intensity—a burn, and a sudden twitch that made her gasp.
And then, like that, it eased. She found herself breathing again. She found herself thinking again.
She found herself with the urge to close her grip around the cool, textured handle resting loosely within her fingers, and frowned.
That wasn’t right.
She didn’t have Devin’s knife.
She found herself belly-down on the intricate Persian carpet, looking at her own hand where it lay before her face, resting across an unfamiliar knife—strong, straight spine joining directly to the handle of polished antler, no thumb rise over the flat top guard, the long drop quillon brushing her forefinger. Five inches of blade, a drop point and Damascus steel...
Brazilian knife. Hard-working knife for hard-working llama and alpaca herders.
How?
And her belly burned from the inside out, hot whiskey flames firing her mind, and she knew.
“Oh, no,” she said, panic rising as she pushed herself away from the floor and yet somehow couldn’t bring herself to let go of the knife even as she recoiled. “No, no, no. Not me. Please not me—”
Baitlia.
Compton’s blade.
Devin groaned, a heartfelt sound, and followed it with a curse—extricating the hand on which she’d been lying, grunting as he sorted himself out...panting there on his back, a regular if pained rhythm.
And then his breath caught, and she knew he’d seen. Knew he understood. “Natalie—”
“Please not me!” she repeated, holding the blade out...looking at it, feeling some nameless urge...unable to understand at all.
“Compton,” Devin said gently. “It wants...Compton.”
To absorb him, just as Devin’s blade had absorbed every sign of the men in the parking lot.
“That’s just sick!” She glanced at Compton’s crumpled form, so very near, so very dead; she wanted to fling the blade away. Don’t even touch me, blade!
She didn’t.
Instead, she sobbed—half a sob, a choked sound. “It belonged to him, and now it would feed on— Oh, God.”
“It never belonged to him,” Devin said. “Not in that way. And...” he hesitated, spoke with new assurance. “It is what it is.”
She yanked Devin’s red shirt from her waistband, pulling the soft material up until it cleared the gaping wound in her belly.
Gaping, but not bleeding.
And above it, the edge of a brand-new tattoo—more than a tattoo, really. Slightly raised whorls of a sinuous design that might have been Celtic, might have been a Middle-Eastern glyph—and wasn’t truly either. Just like Devin’s.
She couldn’t help the noise that escaped her—panic and horror and understanding.
“Natalie.” He moved up close behind her, his arm encircling her—a comfortable enclosure, resting over one shoulder, brushing her collarbone...drawing her back to him. “This is us. We can do this.”
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “My choice,” she said, and laughed, low and bitter. “No one to blame but myself.”
He pressed his lips against her neck. “We know more than we did. Look around—we know how to learn more. We can do this.” He eased his hand down her arm, to her wrist—led it, unresisting, to place the blade by Compton. “Let it recharge. It’ll be easier if you do.”
She did, then, finally drop the blade, leaning back against him. “My choice,” she whispered.
Chapter 23
Natalie pushed the legal papers across Devin’s kitchen bar counter, riddled as they were with terms and phrases that only a lawyer could parse.
Didn’t matter. She’d gotten the gist of it. She’d understood it as it was explained by Compton’s lawyer; she’d understood it as the bone-deep awareness of Compton’s history trickled in through Baitlia.
Demon blade.
She understood, these weeks after Compton’s death, that the estate belonged to Devin now.
Typical of Compton’s dark humor, she was beginning to understand. Build humanitarian efforts in those places where he’d acquired blades. Give his wealth not to some distant relative, but to the very man who’d killed him. Mocking humor.
And they’d learned something else, too: the lawyer knew. About the blades, about the gist of what had happened in that private little study. Although the disposition of the estate had been a long-standing arrangement, Compton had left his lawyer a letter with Devin’s name. In case.
Too bad he hadn’t left a body.
And that was something else they’d learned about his lawyer. He was a man who could arrange things. Bribes, a predeceased John Doe playing the role of Sawyer Compton, now declared dead of natural causes—a body ready for cremation; ashes to be buried beneath a stone with Compton’s name. All done before they’d even known the terms of the will. While they still huddled together at Devin’s small home, healing and holding, and letting the rest of the world wonder what had happened.
Not a man they particularly trusted.
Natalie spread her hand out over the papers, shaking her head. In the little living room, Devin’s television muttered away over an old Western; he lay sprawled on the couch, his eyes half closed. Or probably closed now. It was, she’d learned, the one way he shut out the murmur of his own blade. Not enough, in the long run—not even enough any longer—but a habit in which he still retreated when he had something to absorb.
And ohh, there was plenty of that.
The estate...now Devin’s. Not that it wouldn’t take a while to straighten things out—a time during which the brutish security teams had been dismissed, Jimena had been assured of her position, and Devin had gone through Natalie’s little home, clearing it of invasive hidden cameras.
She still didn’t feel welcome there. Small Devin’s home might be, but...
It held two of them. For now.
Besides, she had a lot to learn about wielding a blade.
It sat small and warm in her pocket, a sheathed Spanish blade: antler-handled, a short palm knife with a straight spine and an upswept curve—meant for rabbit-skinning, and all around utilitarian.
Maybe one of these days she’d get used to knowing so much about any given knife at a glance, and more than that when she took it in hand. Or maybe she’d get used to the idea that she quite suddenly had a tattoo over her heart, curving over the swell of her breast...both beautiful and horrifying.
Baitlia.
She glanced at Devin, found him still sleeping—or not—his sock-clad foot twitching slightly where it hung over the end of the couch. Self-consciously—forever self-conscious about this—she lifted the hem of her soft cotton sweater, pushing down slightly on the waistband of casual slacks.
It was still there. The healing scar of the wound that should have killed her, only a week or so earlier.
She tested it, stretching her arms overhead, twisting from side to side. Only a twinge. She couldn’t help a guilty glance at Devin—he’d been so deeply battered, so embattled with his blade...the healing hadn’t been clean. He’d finally returned to Enrique’s for careful weights and treadmill work, but Enrique would have to find another sparring crash test dummy for a while.
She smiled. Enrique, irascible and still without any clear notion of how to use a cell phone, but back at the gym.
For the moment, Natalie didn’t see the kitchen or the papers. She didn’t see Devin dozing out in the other room, trusting her...his foot twitching and his breathing just slightly uneven, as if in response to those things going through his subconscious mind.
She sa
w him as he’d been, two days after Compton’s death, bringing Enrique home—but stopping at the gym first, of course. Just to check on it.
Enrique had looked terrible, barely able to stand straight enough to walk, his face swollen and misshapen—but his eye sharp between bouts of fatigue.
Devin had looked little better. Limping, still coughing...weight and muscle lost in the process of healing. But fiercely protective of Enrique—enough so the young men at the gym quickly faded back as Devin settled Enrique behind his desk. Just a visit...just long enough to see that all was well, and then straight home to bed, where his teenage grandniece would be spending half days with him until he healed.
Natalie herself was still tender, still tentative...still dazed by her new association with Baitlia.
None of them had been expecting Ajay Dudek. Leo’s old friend, and Natalie’s former fiancé. The man Compton had used in his quest for the blade—and the man who’d been happy to comply for what he’d hoped to gain.
“Nat,” he’d said.
And Enrique had narrowed his eyes and reached for a certain desk drawer, and Devin had straightened his shoulders no matter the cost, taking a step that put him between Ajay and the other two.
Ajay had shaken his head. He looked older than Natalie expected—his features, instead of maturing into definition, had thickened at his neck, his nose; added flesh to his cheeks. His broken hand had been swaddled in casting. “No, no,” he’d said. “I’m not Compton’s any longer.”
“What makes you the hell think I care?” Devin growled.
Ajay lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I came here knowing you might kill me. That you could. And that no one would ever be the wiser.” He gave Devin’s hand a meaningful glance, where it had slipped into his vest pocket. Anheriel.
“Then why come at all?” The growl hadn’t left Devin’s voice—the glower hadn’t left his eyes. Natalie put a hand on the small of his back—quietly, from behind. Being with him. Letting him know she was all right.
Ajay shifted back a step. “Because I need to know whether or not you’re coming after me. Now, later...whenever. And if I run, is it going to make a difference.”
Enrique suggested kindly, “I think you just kill him now, hijo. Put him out of that misery.”
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