Including his daughter.
Wrong choice, Daddy.
“Gwen?”
Gwen sent her such a fierce and sudden look that Natalie took a step back. “Can you figure it out?” she asked. “What needs to be done?”
From her new distance, Natalie said, “You look like you already know.”
Gwen frowned. “Don’t get coy with me now. I’ve seen some...effects. They weren’t permanent. I need to do better.”
“It’s awake, you know,” Natalie told her, glancing at the slight ripple in Gwen’s shirt where the pendant fell. “Last night it wasn’t. What have you done?”
Gwen laughed, more loudly than she’d meant to. “What haven’t I done?” she said. She held out her hand, now bandaged in what was left of the stretchy pink first aid wrap. “I fed it blood, apparently. And I fed it—”
She couldn’t quite say it. But it seemed she didn’t need to.
“Ah,” Natalie said again. And then, thoughtfully, added, “Baitlia is aware of it in a way that it wasn’t before. And really doesn’t want me anywhere near it.”
“You can tell Baitlia that Demardel and I are no threat. I have no idea what I’m doing.” But I will.
Natalie lifted her head again. “There,” she said, and if she breathed a sigh of relief, her face had nonetheless found an expression that seemed bittersweet. “He’s made it, your unnamed one. For now. And he’s probably got a bit of a lull period to work with.” She glanced at Gwen. “The blades tend to lick their wounds quietly.”
Gwen jammed the folder in through the open Jeep window. “I still have questions—”
“As do I.”
“But they’ll have to wait. I’ve said what I’m going to say for now. Can you take the dog to the vet?”
“About that—”
“Yeah,” Gwen said, already heading for the door. “Questions. They have to wait. I still have your card. I’ll call you. The dog is this way.”
Natalie came right on her heels. “He won’t want me to see him—”
“Different room,” Gwen said, running now across that open space.
And of course then Natalie wanted to know what had happened to the dog and, upon seeing him, who the hell had done this thing. Of course she remembered what Gwen had said the evening before, the single throwaway line, the probe in the dark—kidnapping and torture and killing.
Gwen said only, “I’ll call you.” She held the door to the room open so Natalie could carry the dog out—his tail wagging nervously, his tongue looking for something to lick—handling his awkward weight with more ease than Gwen would have expected.
And Natalie turned back to say, “We need to know, Gwen. We need to be part of this.”
“Yada yada,” Gwen said, snapping the words. “Later.”
To her surprise, Natalie let it go. “Later,” she said. “Go be with him.”
Chapter 13
Mac sat on his knees, bent over cuffed hands, and felt the sullen retreat of the blade pounding through his body with every beat of his heart—a strong and wild pattern, settling to merely galloping. To mere trickles of feeling—concern and determination of an unfamiliar flavor, and turmoil with the taste of Gwen attached.
Not my turmoil. Not my concern.
And this time, it worked. As exhausted as he found himself, as much as the feelings danced around the edges, for now, the core of his soul was intact. All his.
The blade, he knew, would be back. And meanwhile it did what it had to in order to protect itself...it healed him. The burn of it spread through his body, dull and bearable and familiar. His wrists—small bones cracked, skin abraded raw—had already stopped bleeding.
The door cracked open, shifting the patterns of light in the room.
“Mac?” Gwen murmured it—not as if they might be overheard, but as if she suspected his head might pound just exactly as much as it did right now.
He looked up at her. “Hey,” he said, weary enough. And then, “Told you to run.”
She slipped inside. “I did run,” she said, with a distinctly haughty toss of her head—a deliberate gesture, and he felt the next line coming. “You didn’t say how far.”
He laughed, short and pained. “I think I probably walked right into that.”
“Mmm,” she agreed, coming over to crouch before him, swiping hair from above his eyes and rubbing some probably invisible smudge off his cheek; her hand lingered. “We need to go, huh? I bet that man felt every bit of what’s gone on here, from finding the dog to— Oh, my God, you broke the wall.”
He shrugged, lifting the cuffs up before her. “I broke the wall,” he agreed. Behind him, the U-bolt lay on the floor, the drywall in chunks and, beneath it, wood in splinters. “It’s why I had to win this one.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “You knew I was still here.”
“Every minute,” he said. “I couldn’t not know it.” The blade had made it clear—suffering dog, anguished Gwen...each a special kind of delight. “Didn’t leave me any choice, did it?”
“Well, there,” she said and gave him a satisfied look. “I did the right thing.”
He shook his head. “Gwen...it could have gone so wrong...”
“Didn’t,” she told him, firm and confident and not taking into account that her internal tremors of fear slipped right through the blade to him, a pathway grown polished in these past two days.
Not Gwen, he wanted to tell it. Leave her alone. Leave her private.
She lifted his hands, gentle with them, and ever so carefully inserted the handcuff key—first one wrist, then the other. She made no remark about the state of his wrists—or the fact that there, at the edges, they had already so obviously started to heal. But her vehemence when she threw the cuffs across the room was startling.
“We might need those,” Mac said.
“No,” she told him. “We won’t.”
And she meant it. The flat determination behind those words—he could have read it without the blade at all.
“What—” he started.
“We have to go,” she told him. “Away from here.”
“The dog—”
“Took care of it.” She drew him to his feet.
“How—”
“We have to go.”
And she was right. He pulled himself together beyond the burning, the pounding, the fatigue, and aimed himself for the door, presenting his words with careful dignity. “You drive.”
She laughed, and he hid a grin, and for that briefest of moments, everything seemed just fine.
* * *
The blade was back, all right. Gwen could see the effects of it, bold and brash in the late morning light. The horrors of the damage already healing, the edges of the raw skin now merely pink and the swelling visibly diminished. Mac sat in the Jeep with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and regularly—but not, she thought, asleep.
All the same, she didn’t consult him when she reached the hotel...and kept on driving. Not far. It was time to ask for help, real help. And from someone who didn’t have an acquisitional interest in them—not in Mac’s unnamed blade or a pendant called Demardel.
A pendant that had increasingly made its presence known. Nothing overt or demanding, just...awareness. She knew of Mac’s blade. She even felt the petulant and defeated mood of it. She felt, too, the faint awareness of something behind them, to the south. Natalie. And probably the man named Devin.
But most unsettling, she could feel the malevolence crawling over the city, settling into the nooks and crannies of the place. Not active at the moment, but laying down connections in a conquering layer. A broadcast system of control and hate.
That man didn’t just drink it in. He made it. And the things he’d said—about his immense age, about the nature of his bargain...
She knew enough about Mac’s blade to guess. A wild guess, maybe, but one that felt right to her. That this blade had overcome its human partner. That together, the man and his bloodthirsty blade had met in a mutual q
uest for vicarious pain that they’d functioned so symbiotically, so perfectly...enough to create a creature of heinous power and destruction.
She hoped they wouldn’t find out that she was right.
A block past the hotel, she turned into the diner parking lot, glancing inside to see, with some relief, that the same waitress worked the early lunch crowd as had served them twice before. She did a quick clothes check and found herself dusty but otherwise presentable. Then she put her quick-talking mouth into gear and pushed through the door.
* * *
“Are you in trouble?” the woman asked, her wary gaze flicking through the plate-glass window to check the Jeep, as if she could see trouble smeared across the windshield.
“No,” Gwen said. “I mean, maybe. I mean, we’re trying to stay out of it.”
Oh. Wow. Way to go, fast-talking mouth.
She took a deep breath, moved to the far end of the counter where the customers would have to work harder to overhear and started again. She had, after all, only requested advice about the nearest place to hang out, to rest. A nice secluded park, a quiet church...she wasn’t picky, although she didn’t know if the blade might be. But the waitress had taken one look at her and jumped to conclusions.
It was only dust. Or so she’d thought. She made a little self-deprecating face and said, “I must look bad, huh?”
“You’ve been crying,” the woman said. “And there’s blood on your face.”
Gwen’s expression shot straight to exasperation. “I should have checked in the rearview mirror. Dammit.”
Oddly enough, this little piece of honesty seemed to relax the woman. Gwen barged ahead while she thought she had a chance. “Look, you’ve seen the news, right? All the stupid mean stuff going on out there right now?”
Anger crossed her face. “My son’s arm is broken.”
To judge by the warning now easing in through Demardel, it wasn’t the only trouble this woman would see. “Okay, the thing is, my friend and I—you know, the one who was here with me yesterday?” Gwen waited for the slight nod of recognition as the woman peered out through sun-and dust-glazed glass and then through the windshield, where Mac sat with his eyes closed and his head tipped back. “We’ve run into some of it, too. And we think someone might be, you know, deliberately pushing it, and we’re trying to figure that out.” That was one way to look at it. “And we’ve had a really bad day, and my friend needs...well, he needs rest. And we can’t go back to the hotel right now, so I’m just looking for a park or something—a quiet place with shade. I thought maybe you might know—” She stopped talking, seeing the look on the woman’s face and unable to read it. Either she was about to—
Intent. Utensil turned weapon. Temper rising.
Gwen spun around to the small dining area, found the man immediately—beefy, lots of neck, bullet-headed...black T-shirt in size enormous, long and baggy black shorts. And glaring with dark-eyed intensity at the oblivious tech-infested teen sitting across from him with some sort of unpleasantly beeping game gadget. Not just glaring, but clutching a fork in his meaty hand like a weapon and halfway out of his seat.
“Hey!” she snapped, not even thinking about it. “My brother the cop is meeting me here for lunch, so if you want to start something, do it somewhere else!”
Startled, he glanced at her—and then gave her the finger. His girlfriend—sturdy, dressed in tight clothes that would have been snug on Gwen’s smaller frame—stood up and turned around. “Bitch,” she said. “Did I hear you talking to my boyfriend?”
“Dammit,” Gwen muttered, and the woman behind the counter met her glance with alarmed understanding. Right here, right now. Someone was deliberately pushing it, all right. The feel of it washed through her, as dull as it had ever been for her, and yet somehow not touching her.
Demardel.
She faced the girlfriend squarely. She might have lifted her chin, but it wasn’t deliberate—or, probably, smart. “Brother,” she said evenly. “Cop.”
The girlfriend looked around the diner. “Don’t see no brother.”
By now the teen had lifted his head from the game, realized what he’d gotten in the middle of, and froze. The beefy guy slapped the game from his hand to clatter across the tile floor, and that’s when Gwen realized her mistake.
Too late.
These two had already been brimming with anger and resentment. Like the church group in the park, the young tough at the gas station...these two had been cruising for a target, and the hatred had found them willing hosts.
“Not in this diner!” the woman behind the counter ordered them, but her voice had gone thin behind its determination. “I have an alarm button back here and if you don’t leave, I’ll hit it!”
“Plenty of time before the cops get here,” the girlfriend said, and her fleshy features took a briefly inhuman cast—pure meanness incarnate.
With quiet and economical motion, the waitress placed a baseball bat on the counter. It sat there for only a single meaningful moment before Gwen grabbed it up—finding it short, stout and weighted at the end.
The girl brought out a switchblade. The guy looked plenty comfortable with his fork and his muscles.
And that gut instinct of hers cried danger. The teen slid quietly under the table, an impressively Dali-esque move.
“Dammit,” Gwen said again. “I didn’t know they even made switchblades that big.”
The couple marinated in the waves of hatred even as they stayed outside of her—a surge of everything cruel and mean and frightening, and a thing that had twice taken Mac down already. She didn’t dare glance for the Jeep as she retreated a step. Didn’t dare hope the woman had meant it about that alarm button. And she wondered if she turned tail and ran, just how far she’d get.
Because she didn’t think this was coincidence. She thought that man—that man—had realized his failure. Mac had come back, battled the fight he was expected to lose, and walked away in control. She thought that man had lost his patience, and she thought he meant to flush them out and take them down.
Or just plain take them down.
“Brother!” she said, and heard her own desperation. “Cop!”
But they came for her anyway, and she took a better grip on the bat—thinking of the absurdities that came with batting advice. Stay loose. Hit beyond the ball.
Adding one of her own: Make the first one count.
She’d go for the guy, not the switchblade. He could kill her with or without the knife. Yep, that was the plan, and because he was beefy and top-heavy, she’d go for the knee—because he didn’t have to be out, he only had to be on the floor and— Oh, my God what am I even thinking?
They stopped, pure surprise on twin expressions.
Gwen felt it, then—the odd trill of acknowledgment from Demardel, the sensation of space in use behind. “That had better be you,” she said, and wasn’t at all surprised when her voice came out shaky.
“He’s no cop.” The girlfriend managed to make that sound mean, too.
“I’m not her brother, either.”
But oh, he sounded dangerous—that confidence coupled with the certainty of what he could and would do. Had done. The waitress saw it, reacting to him as she had not before, as he moved up beside Gwen.
Narrow diner, bottleneck at the counter—the troublemakers were trapped, though they didn’t seem to know it.
Mac knew it. Gwen saw it on his face—worn in comparison to the night she’d met him, but honed by it. Lean and tight and fit, muscled in a way that showed through the fit of his shirt and the power of his stance. The healing abrasions on his arms, the lingering bruises on his face—they were the injuries of a man who had been where these two now only thought about going.
But in control. Who he was, and not who the blade was.
For now.
And if he still needed rest, if he needed recovery—he damned well didn’t show it.
“Put your toys away,” he told them. “Leave this place while you can
. Don’t forget to leave a tip.”
The man pointed at Mac’s empty hands with a jutting chin. “You got nothing.”
“He doesn’t need to have anything!” the waitress said, her voice both angry and shaking. “I want you to leave! For years you’ve gotten good food here, and now you think you can do this? You are no longer welcome!”
Gwen sucked in a breath with a new onslaught of warning, a jangle of nerves and anger swirling together with the flow of imposed feeling. Her ears warned her; her eyes warned her. Cocky male voices, careless steps—and there they were in the doorway, crowding it—taking the space, and taking in the situation. The rest of the local bullies had arrived—and just that fast, had taken sides.
The girlfriend smiled at Gwen, a smile reeking of nastiness and satisfaction that made words unnecessary.
Mac moved. He snagged Gwen by the waist and hoisted her up to the counter, shoving aside a napkin holder and industrial sugar shaker. She released the bat to him and swung over to the other side of the counter, where there was a red alarm button attached to...
Nothing.
The woman caught her eye, shook her head...shrugged.
Not that the cops weren’t already a hundred percent occupied on this day in this town.
Or that Mac needed them.
The bat in one hand, the blade in the other—suddenly it turned saber, fast enough so Gwen had missed it and the assembled young toughs didn’t at first understand. Not the usual thing, a sword. And they’d been busy, pulling out stout switchblades...pulling out a gun.
The waitress ducked behind the counter and tried to drag Gwen down with her—but Gwen clawed her way back up, looking around for a weapon, any weapon.
Mac said, “You leave now, or someone dies.”
They snorted. Riding their overload of confidence and driven by somebody else’s goals without even knowing it. Someone else’s keen lust for violence and hatred. “Yeah,” one of them said. “You.”
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