Claimed by the Demon

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