Claimed by the Demon

around the city, from the highway to the big north loop around the reservation end of the city and feeder streets back south again. Not many people on the roads, easing toward midnight—now was the time to do it.

Mac tossed his map in through the open passenger window—under this moon, his blade-given vision had no trouble following its detailed streets—and pushed off the hood. The sooner he did the circuit, the sooner he could crash at the little hotel just off the airport cluster.

The sooner he could figure out what had brought him here and how hard it might try to kill him.

He stretched, rotating his shoulders...breathing deeply before he slipped in behind the wheel. Quiet, hearing his own breathing in the darkness, perched on the south-side berm with his nose full of sharp, dry dust and the fading scent of sun-warmed cactus.

The slam of the Jeep door rang loud in the night; the engine was only a secondary insult. He rocked the gear stick into place, nursed the clutch past its chronic initial sticking point and headed out to drive the city.

The blade sat quiescent on the passenger seat, half-covered by the map and an empty pretzel bag. The passenger foot well was crammed with his smaller duffel and netbook case and a jacket stuffed beside a carelessly jammed shave kit. The cargo area had been done on auto-pack—the sleeping bag, the air pad, the big duffel, a gallon of water, the cooler...all of it and more, everything in its place. Everything always ready to go.

Especially Mac.

He drove into and around the city. At first, he felt little of it through the blade—just a smothering kind of darkness, trickling in only because the knife was thirsty enough to bother. Going past the hospital, that was a biggie. And there—a hotel, close to the highway and hosting some sort of convention.

Nothing worth lingering over. The knife—an inexplicable impossibility of living metal and unrelenting demand, literally thrust upon him in the dark—had its standards.

It wanted the good stuff. The intensities of grief and fury and fear and love. It found the violence of the night and drove him there—where he’d end up in the middle of it, battered by echoes of outside feelings and usually battered by fists and pipes and the occasional bullet.

A few years ago, before he’d seen how miraculously the blade could heal him, he would have worried more about those dangers. Now, at thirty-six, he knew more about pain and miracles than he’d ever thought possible.

Now, he just worried about his sanity.

* * *

He drove the vast curve north of the city, past the gas station beyond the overpass. It was the only visible building in this unsettled area, just outside the Sandia Pueblo reservation bordering the north side of the city and past the dark lumps of somnolence that, after a double take, he identified as bison.

He might have hesitated there, slowing to enjoy the grin of it—but the knife—

It spiked into action, flinging out alert-beware-fear.

Fear, racing along his spine and the back of his legs; fear, sending his pulse into overdrive.

Grim experience kept his foot from punching the accelerator in reflexive flight; it allowed him to push away everything but the merest thread of feeling—not mine—to pretend he didn’t feel it at all, even as he heard the rasp of his own sudden breath.

To pretend.

Instead of giving in to it, he followed it.

And then he saw them—also dark lumps at the side of the road. One stopped compact pickup truck, three figures, struggling—no. One figure struggling and two attacking.

Beating.

He skidded the Jeep right to the edge of the shoulder, close enough to sling gravel on the grappling figures, and reached for the blade without looking—knowing it would find his hand just as much as he found his grip on it.

Whatever form it chose.

It had favorites; it had surprises. Tonight, a familiar feel—square handle of cool wood—and he knew the rest of it without even looking. Dark maple, brass pins, a five-inch blade of moderate width with a wicked clip point, polished metal showing a residual scale that wasn’t Damascus but looked it.

The Colonial expedition trade knife. The one that meant no bluster, no nonsense...all confidence. Deal with the situation.

Two men standing, one on the ground. Mac got a glimpse of bloodied face and desperation, broad features and a strong nose. A man weathered and worn and, from the surge of new fear coming in through the blade, figuring the odds just got worse.

Of the two men standing, one held a wallet; the other held a worn satchel.

Oh, the blade wanted to scare them, too.

Mac stuffed the feeling deep. That’s not what he was about. It wouldn’t ever be what he was about.

—yes yes yes—

No, dammit!

“Find your own,” one of the men said, yanking money from the wallet and tossing the worn leather at his victim. “We’re not done here.”

“Yeah, you are,” Mac said. “Once you put that money back. And add what’s in your pockets while you’re at it.”

The blade gave him their every intimate flicker of reaction. Their annoyance—and then, with their exchanged glance, the cruel glee of two bullies with a new victim.

They’re not my feelings. Not who I am.

Those first days after the blade had attached itself to him, he’d almost lost himself in the flood of invading sensation—and woe to the man he’d been, trying to calm a bar fight that had spilled out into the night. But once he’d realized the impossible connection to the blade, the truth of it...

Not my feelings.

All the same, the flickers gave him warning—telling him that this wasn’t about the money. Their faces—and their body language—gave him warning, too. Young, buff, tightly shorn, they had amateur tattoos and a certain fervent glint of expression. One white, one Latino—but their features didn’t really matter. Their faces were filled with hate.

“Gotta knife, boys,” he said, in case they hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t remember, sometimes, how much he’d been able to see in the darkness before the blade had found him. “Gotta helluva left hook. And you need to return this gentleman’s money.”

The older man looked up from the ground in disbelief—the blade sucked that up, too—and moved away by inches as he groped for the emptied wallet.

“And his gear,” Mac added, nodding at the ragged satchel.

The young man holding the satchel threw it at his victim without looking. “This,” he said, grinning at Mac, “is more like it.”

He’d been bored, beating on the Pueblo man. Now he saw opportunity for more savage satisfaction.

The blade told Mac as much.

But Mac needed no warning. Not after so many confrontations like this one. The young men gave themselves away with a glance, a shift of weight, a sneer of lip. They rushed him without finesse, without training or style.

Bullies too used to their own strength and so highly aware of their own balls.

—hurt them scare them do it do it—

“I don’t think so,” Mac muttered—but he stayed quick with the blade, ducking, whirling, slashing lightly down an arm, jabbing sharp and fast into the back of the hand that snagged him on the other side. It was only a warning: This is what I can do.

Faster than anyone ought to be, the blade sharper, the moves more precise.

This is what I will do.

They cried out almost as one; they turned in fury. They had nothing but fists and boots, weapons for use on the weak.

—fear fear leap of hope ESCAPE!—