Like a complete idiot.
At a stranger.
At first glance, he was all distracted grey eyes, a faint frown between dark brows, tension along high cheekbones and lean jaw and with a mouth that looked as though it was crafted to carry a wry smile. Glossy dark hair was as scruffed as the rest of him, his one shoulder carried slightly higher than the other, with his movement not quite even and yet still full of its own strength.
On second glance, she saw his torn jeans and the scruffy ribbed crew-neck shirt, the dust-smeared jacket with sporadic dark splatters and stains that could only be blood. But by second glance, he’d seen her.
In point of fact, he was trying to get past her in this limited space—if only she hadn’t stopped to fill the space between the oversize potted shrubs flanking the entry walk.
But she had.
He glanced at her, and his polite distraction vanished; everything in those grey eyes focused in on her—targeted her. His shoulders straightened; his tired posture transformed into something more alert. Something more powerful.
Her mouth went dry.
His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
She’d lived her life with the uncanny ability to see through people, to anticipate them. To ignore the jerks and beware the bullies and step slowly back from the crazies.
From him, she felt nothing.
No, not true. She felt that which she couldn’t unravel—only a discordant and tangled duality, a slow humming throb that both called to her and terrified her.
“Who—” he said.
“I don’t know you,” she snapped, suddenly breaking free of that spell. “I want you to stay back, please.” Blunt words, straight to the point. She’d learned that, too, over the years. To listen to the voice that whispered within her—and to act on it.
She wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t, wandering the highways on her walkabout. Amazing how much trouble her young self had gotten into, reacting to the sudden awareness of another’s bad intention.
So yeah, she knew where and when to draw the line.
He only frowned at her. “It’s been a long day. Whatever you’re up to...don’t do it where I have to deal with it.”
“Are you crazy?” she blurted, losing her sense of balance with her astonishment. “What are you even talking about?”
Tempting to think he was on drugs. Or off his meds. Or some combination thereof. But those eyes—even in this uneven illumination—were perfectly clear. Perfectly focused. Shadowed not by lighting but by expression and mood, and so pinned to her—
I’m not breathing.
No wonder her lungs ached.
Or that her voice sounded not quite so assertive when she said, “Please get out of my way.”
She’d been right. That mouth...born for a wry smile. He said, “As soon as you stop blocking the only way out.”
Oh, hell. She took a sharp and hasty step aside—clearing the path, leaving as much room between them as possible.
He took a moment—she wasn’t sure if she’d ever felt so looked at—and then he strode away—not so much as a glance back, that wry smile lingering. Whatever stiff effort she thought she’d seen in his movement, nothing of it remained.
Gwen touched the fine platinum rope chain that was always, always at her neck. Her fingers ran to the flat disk hanging beneath her shirt—the familiar shape of it a comfort, the habit of touching it so instilled that she rarely did it consciously. Her father’s gift.
Now, she found her fingers on it—through her shirt, closed her hand around it. Looking for...
She had no idea. But she thought maybe something had already found her.
* * *
Mac reached the parking lot on overdrive—made himself stop, feeling the aches of a beating and the burn of the unnatural healing pushed by the blade. Made himself breathe deeply—once, twice.
Not mine. The feelings aren’t mine.
But they were.
At least, some of them were. The part of him that responded to an abundance of red-glinting hair and copper freckles and wide, pale blue eyes; the part of him that tightened into awareness at fit curves beneath travel-wrinkled clothing, undeterred by her stark reaction to his presence.
Those feelings...they came very much from within.
She’d stood him down without blinking.
To some extent, without breathing—he’d taken her by surprise, no doubt about it. But nerve...
Oh, yeah. She had it.
She also radiated trouble like a beacon. There’d been no denying the way her presence had slapped at him—warned him.
And simultaneously beguiled him.
The blade had absorbed her like a sponge. Her shock at the first sight of him, her frisson of stark, startled response—her feelings, filtered through living metal with more subtlety, more layering...
The blade, Mac would have said, had a crush.
If such a thing were possible. But a true crush...that meant giving.
And the blade only knew to take.
Mac rubbed his chest just to the left of center...just a little lower than his heart. There, where the tattoo had appeared overnight. The night he’d thought he’d died, only to find that he hadn’t quite.
The night he’d changed from casually footloose—catching up with family here, visiting friends there, working a vague path along the way—to grimly driven from one place to another, never quite comfortable where he was or who he was.
Beneath the thin ribbed shirt, the tattoo’s complex design ran raised beneath his touch. No ordinary tattoo at that. He ran his fingers over it, not sure what he was looking for. Never sure what he was looking for.
But he thought, this time, maybe something had found him.
Chapter 2
Gwen should have gone right into that hotel and grabbed a room. Instead she found herself too shaken to handle the transaction. She stood at the double-door entry for a moment, and then turned on her heel, heading for the sidewalk.
Not the best part of town for a midnight stroll. But she’d spotted the all-night diner on the way in—a block away, well-lit—and her stomach had growled at the sight. At the moment it was still a little too clenched to countenance the thought of food, but that’s what the walk was for. A block of dark privacy to collect her thoughts.
Besides, she was safer than most in this darkness. She’d know if anyone around was considering mayhem, thanks to her strange unwelcome legacy.
Her father’s pendant shifted with her long strides; she rotated the chain, wondering that she noticed it at all. It had been so much a part of her for so many years...never aging, never wearing, shedding soap, shampoo and sweat as readily as it did the tarnishing air.
I am nine years old, and my father gave me a pendant...and then tried to kill me for it.
But tonight her skin tingled slightly beneath it, and she briefly cupped her hand over it. “Behave,” she murmured.
She couldn’t remember when she’d started talking to it. When she’d been a girl and her father had nearly killed her before he disappeared, leaving only this behind? Or somewhere along the way? She only knew that it gave her strange comfort.
She smiled, no matter how briefly. For here she was, a dark city block from where she’d started—breathing deeply of the night air and feeling calm again. With food waiting before her. Just as planned.
Her stomach growled again. Right on cue.
The place looked used but clean, and the food smelled wonderful. A young couple in the far booth played a constant game of touch-and-flirt, mutually afflicted with bad tattoos and poor personal hygiene. A ragged man pushed a coffee cup around his little table, giving her no more than a desultory glance. The midnight clientele.
Including her hungry, travel-worn self.
Gwen grabbed a seat at the counter, snagged a plastic-encased menu, and flipped it open to a picture of the best breakfast burrito she’d ever seen—here in the state that claimed to have invented them. As the waitress approached, she pu
shed the menu away with her finger on the picture. “And decaf.”
Nice to be decisive. In this, at least.
The man with the coffee made a juicy throat-clearing noise, threw change on the table and left. As the door closed, several young men slipped in; the flirting couple drew back from one another to greet them.
Gwen sighed, fingers straying to the pendant.
She knew. She always knew. It had taken time to learn the hard lesson of when to react, when to stay silent, when to run away.
It had taken too long, actually. An emergency room visit or two.
But once upon a time her father had tried to kill her. Once upon a time, he’d nearly succeeded. And when she’d healed, tender young muscle and bone knitting back together, she’d discovered that now, she always knew.
They had weapons. They had intent.
She must have tensed. The waitress, a Hispanic woman with wiry grey at her temples and a tired smile at her eyes, flipped over her coffee cup, filled it and said, so casually, “Whatever they’re up to, they won’t do it in here.” And then a half shrug. “Mostly that crew is just figuring out how to grow up.”
They looked plenty grown up to Gwen.
“Thanks,” she said, picking up the coffee cup...meaning the reassurance. Extra tip for you.
But when the door opened again, she fumbled the cup, nearly dropping it. High cheekbones, strong jaw, scruffy dark hair, body by lean and mean. Her eyes widened, deer in the headlights—already off balance from her awareness of the weapons and the intent right here in the small diner behind her. Not subtle, Gwen.
Not subtle at all.
And that mouth, made to carry a wry smile, proved once again its proficiency at just that. “Not,” he told her from just inside the door, “following you.” His gaze flicked briefly to the young men in the background, noticing them—the low but intense conversation between them, the young woman impatient and defiant.
In this light, she could see the blue in his grey eyes, the exact cast of his mouth, the confidence in his movement. Up went his eyebrows—a bit of a natural brood in them—and he asked, “Okay?”
Belatedly, she realized the courtesy he offered: If you’re not comfortable with my presence, I’ll leave.
“Um, fine,” she said. “Eat, drink...whatever.”
The waitress appeared with her breakfast burrito, plunking down both ketchup and salsa, and slid the plate neatly into place before Gwen. No mean feat, considering that whereas she had ignored the young men from the get-go, now her gaze never left the man who had just entered.
She, too, had her own sense of things.
Dangerous things.
The man nodded at her plate as he sat beside her at the counter. “That looks good. And juice, if you have it.”
The waitress nodded, scribbled on her order pad and stuck the sheet on the counter behind her, a wall-cutout through which Gwen had gotten occasional glimpses of a cook. At the far table, voices rose in crude discord, then abruptly cut off. The young men trooped out, clomping for effect—leaving the couple at their table. No more touch-and-flirt...now it was an argument, swift and low.
“Don’t do it,” Gwen murmured.
But she could feel it. Before the young woman’s face closed in frustration and fear, before the young man pushed away from the table with a scrape of chair. She could feel it, and she winced and turned her back more completely.
Only to find Mac watching. Not only watching, but aware.
She’d reacted before the young man had moved.
Get over it, she thought at him. That was something else she’d outgrown—the need to explain herself. Herself or her travel-wrinkled clothes or her footloose, late-night arrival here.
Or even what it was about this man that made it hard to breathe.
She dug into the burrito. Deliberately.
Besides, if anyone should be answering questions...
He was more than scruffy, here in the café lighting. He was downright messed up—beyond the worse-for-wear jacket and the obvious stiffness of utterly sore ribs. A confusing road map of injuries marked his face, his hands—abrasions across his knuckles, one hand swollen throughout. Fresh blood but older cuts. Bruising fading to yellow in some spots but starkly purpled in others. The careful way he took a first bite of his newly delivered food.
Of course he caught her looking.
Without thinking, she gestured, reaching toward the freshest of the blood, a trickle from just inside his hairline, an unspoken you’ve got a little—
His polite disengagement vanished. His hand flashed out to snatch hers, a block and parry and grab, trapping her just tightly enough to verge on pain—stopping short of the follow-through that would have twisted tendon and bone.
She gasped, fought the impulse to yank away. Realized in surprise that she hadn’t seen it coming. And voiced, nonsensically, the final piece of the gesture, a single strangled word. “...Blood.”
His mouth twitched; the muscles of his jaw worked. Gently, deliberately, he released her hand. “It’s been an interesting evening,” he said, and it seemed to be meant to cover all of the moment’s circumstances. The bruises, the blood and the grab.
Slowly, she withdrew her hand.
The young woman from the corner stifled a frustrated noise, oblivious to them all, and stomped out into the night.
The waitress left them alone.
He ate faster than she did...but she found she couldn’t finish the meal, and she set aside her fork even as he dropped his napkin on his plate and fished for his wallet. To her surprise, he also dropped a few worn bills at her plate. “An apology,” he said simply.
“That’s not—” she started, but she looked at his face, at the tired expression waiting behind his eyes, and she only shook her head—that’s not necessary combined with acquiescence.
The smile that took the corner of his mouth had nothing to do with wry. “Thanks.”
“Listen,” she said, not sure what was going to come next.
He didn’t wait for it. “Let me walk you back to the hotel.”
Not what she’d expected.
“I’d have to go widdershins around the block to avoid you,” she told him, which was apparently not what he’d expected because the smile grew into a quick grin, there and gone again, and a duck of his head she wouldn’t have guessed of him.
The waitress, scooping up the money, kept her own smile mostly hidden.
* * *
As if Mac would have let her walk the single block alone, with the unsettled air this city had tonight.
Whoever she was, and whatever tension had sprung instantly to life between them.
The first slap of her presence had faded to a trickle of warning and awareness, the blade warm in his pocket...silent but smug, and more interested in tasting her reactions than heeding the obvious trouble brewing at the back of the café.
As long as it didn’t spill over on him. Not again tonight.
She pulled her thin cotton jacket closed and fastened it with crossed arms, ducking out into a night gone past brisk and right into chill. She paused in the parking lot just long enough for him to catch up, just as aware of him as he was of her.
“Business?” he asked. “Or walkabout?”
She faltered, brows arching, a flash of startlement on that heart-shaped face. “Funny,” she said, “that you should put it that way. Walkabout.”
“It’s a familiar state of being,” he said, dry in a way he knew she couldn’t understand.
“Are you?” she asked and tucked back hair breaking free of restraint—a careless knot at the back of her head, the ends tumbling loose. “On walkabout?”
He rolled his shoulders, breaking free from the stiffness and pain; he could just about take a deep breath again. The blade burned its healing through him—making him pay, rewarding him with an impossibly swift recovery.
Then again, everything about the blade was impossible. From the way it chose its own shape to the way it invaded his
mind to the way it healed him of everything from the worst of injuries to the common cold.
The way it whispered to him, pulling him into other peoples’ insanities.
Walkabout. He said, “Not this time. I’ve got work waiting.” In a week or two. Best he could do, working for a contractor friend of a friend from Colorado who had an assistant going on family leave.
“Temporarily at loose ends,” she deduced, moving out for the sidewalk—arms still crossed, shoulder bag tucked under her arm, a frisson of her tension coming through the blade to reach him. Not truly comfortable.
Nor should she be.
“It’s a decent hotel,” he told her, striking out beside her—out of the parking lot illumination and into a brief pool of shadow before the next streetlight. “But it’s on the edge when it comes to the neighborhood.”
She slanted him a look. “Do you do that often?”
Um.
“Do—” he asked—but didn’t finish the question, wincing slightly instead. Normally—when not distracted by the burn of broken ribs on the mend, the twist of muscles in recovery—he’d know better than to respond to unspoken concerns.
“I was just thinking that I’d gone one hotel too far north from the airport.”
“Body language,” he told her. “Has a lot to say.”
This time her look wasn’t slanting at all. It came straight on—a quick sweep of his form that held more than obvious appreciation. “You mean like, ‘Wow, did I get beat up today or what?’”
He stifled a snort. “That, too.”
“Aren’t you even going to say I shoulda seen the other guy?”
“Guys,” he told her, hesitating at the curb to make sure the approaching car wasn’t going to turn in front of them. “Check the news. We’ll see if they both made it.”
She modeled mock awe for him. “That’s much better than my line.” And then her brief levity faded. “Except...you aren’t kidding, are you?” And she moved a quiet step away.
He couldn’t help his irritation. “Their choice.”
But she’d stopped him, there in the brightest light of the next streetlight, and turned him directly into it—grasping his arm with a familiarity that seemed to surprise her as much as it did him. She stepped back to narrow her eyes, the light flashing off pale blue as she raked her gaze over him. “It is blood. And it’s not yours, is it? But you don’t have a weapon—”
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