Claimed by the Demon

head cocked back.

“Mmm,” he said, not considering his response for very long. “Because I want to.”

She gave him a squinty look that should have made him think twice.

Instead, he said, quite seriously, “Because now I know what’s real.” And then he turned away from her, hands jammed into his back pockets.

Somewhere on that tightly muscled body, he’d hidden a Bowie knife.

Right.

He said, “Talk to me, Gwen. What is that thing? Where did you get it?”

The sudden chill down her back had nothing to do with the final slurp of crushed ice she’d just taken.

He looked back over his shoulder, an oblique and mostly hidden gaze. “Because I think that’s how we’ve ended up in this together. You and me and whatever’s going on here.”

She didn’t answer; couldn’t. Not just like that. She walked the stretch of open grass to the nearest trash container, tossed the cup away...and then just stood there.

I am nine years old, and my daddy just tried to kill me.

He didn’t mean it. It wasn’t really him at all. Not with that wild look in his eye, the pure insanity etched across his face.

He wants the pendant. The one he gave me and told me to care for, always. But even as he wants it, he doesn’t.

Or else, something in him doesn’t.

I am locked in the bathroom, bleeding. I have never seen so much blood. I have never seen the tender skin of my stomach cut so deeply. I have never seen anything cut so deeply.

Even through the worst of it, I never thought my daddy would hurt me.

He slams against the door. “I’m sorry, baby!” he cries and sounds like he means it. “I’m so sorry! I thought I could do this!” And slams against the door again. “Run, baby, run! Please run!”

And I am small enough to slip through the window, blood and all. But I am old enough to tell the neighbors that my daddy isn’t home, that I fell on glass.

And I am young enough to cry the whole time.

I never see my daddy again.

“Gwen.” Mac’s voice, but he hadn’t come any closer. He waited in the shade, giving her the option to return.

Still cold from the inside out, she did. Slowly. And returned to him—coming around front to face him square but lifting her chin to warn him off when he would have lightly touched her arm.

She didn’t want to be touched just now.

“I probably can’t even tell you what you want to know,” she said. “But then, I’m not sure, am I? Just how what fits together with what? Because what have you told me?” One more defiant attempt to pretend it all didn’t matter, that her past had nothing to do with this present. “Anyway, it could be coincidence, couldn’t it? We both got restless feet, we both ended up here. Travelers stay at a hotel—that’s what it’s for. Is it such a mystery that we ran into each other?”

He only regarded her with a steady gaze. Not an unkind gaze...far from it. And I wish I wasn’t doing this, but I am. And I will.

She heard it loud enough, unspoken or not, and blew out an impatient breath. “You know, I can tell when people are trouble. But it didn’t work with you. I don’t get that. If anyone has the potential to cause trouble—”

“But not to you,” he said. “Never to you. Not like you mean.”

She blinked. Damn, he was right. With anyone else, everyone else, she never knew. Could be chance, could be intent, could be collateral damage. But whatever he was up to, he’d made sure she was safe. Whatever his intent elsewhere, his intent toward her had been not only benign, but protective.

“Oh,” she said, her voice coming out smaller than usual. “Well.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know what the pendant is.” She took it out from beneath her shirt, pulled the chain over her head, and held it out to him. Ancient metal, crude stamped design, indecipherable runelike markings.

He drew himself up, nearly stepped back—but visibly stopped himself. And then gave a rueful shake of his head. “Not right now.”

“Like my father,” she said, just a touch of bitterness. “You want it, but you can’t stand it.”

He looked as if he might say something but didn’t quite. It left her room to continue. “My father gave me the pendant. He was strange about it, but at that point...he was strange about everything. He told me to protect it, to always keep it. He didn’t tell me why. And then later he tried to kill me to get it back.” She found her hand on her stomach, tracing the thin white line of the scar that slanted from just inside her hip bone up and over her neat little innie. On second thought, she pulled the new T-shirt up and the elastic waist of the sport shorts down—just enough to reveal the scar. She didn’t miss the grim look on Mac’s face. “Yeah,” she said. “He tried to warn me, even as he did it. I didn’t believe him. Lucky for me I was a slippery little thing, or that would have been the end of it.”

After a moment, Mac cleared his throat. “That’s all? He didn’t tell you anything about it?”

She shook her head. “Keep it always. Protect it. I think...” And she did, pausing to consider those confusing days, the times her father tried to talk to her and seemed to get tangled in his thoughts—to struggle with himself, as if it was a fight to say the words at all. “I think he tried to. He was just too far gone.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why.”

He wanted to reach for her—she saw it all too clearly. He wanted to hold her. But that wouldn’t make it better or different, and now...

Now she needed to pretend she was past all that. “Anyway,” she said, shrugging again, “after that night...after I got away and healed up and they found his car and no one ever saw him again—not completely in that order—things were different with me. I had this...” She looked at her hands, at the pendant; brought them in against her chest to close her eyes and think of the feel of it. The deep unease, the sharp stutter of warning that told her when someone was out for trouble. The schoolyard bully, the soccer team mean girls, the high school toughs. At first just when the trouble was aimed for her...but later, so fine-tuned that she could see it coming regardless.

She looked straight at him. “I’d had the pendant for...what, two years before that night? But it was after that night that I turned into a human trouble detector. And boy, did I get into trouble until I figured out how to deal with it.” She wrinkled her nose at him, commentary on days gone by. “It is just so not a good idea to go pointing fingers at people before they’ve even done anything. Suddenly you’re the one who’s causing trouble, so the good guys blame you for that—and then the bad guys blame you for spoiling their fun.”

He grinned, that mouth that was made for it, a sudden thing that surprised her with its genuine nature. “No wonder you’ve got that fast-talking mouth,” he said, but there was understanding behind it. Understanding and...affection.

She gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “That’s not fair. Do you know how long it took me to figure out where that came from?”

The smile turned somewhat rueful. “Let’s just say I’ve had reason to think about it.”

“Yeah,” she said, not letting up on the glare. “Let’s just.”

But it didn’t inspire him to any grand revelations, so she gave up and dropped it, throwing her hands up in a loose gesture of finality. “So that’s it. I’m a freak of nature trouble-detector, and I don’t have any answers about the pendant. What happened back there...” She struggled with saying it and pushed through in a rush. “What happened is that I’ve worn that thing so long and my dad gave it to me and I was so frightened for you that I just grabbed it like a little kid and wished on it.” A little girl wishing for her father, more like it. The one she had once known, and not what he’d become. “So there. All is confessed. In a pretty one-sided way, I might add.”

He winced a little at that, but didn’t look away. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I just...” He blew out air, jammed his hands into his back pockets again. “I have to think.” Then he gave her a sidelong glance, a deliberate thing from beneath a half-turned brow. “And eat. I have to eat. Man cannot live on crushed ice alone.”