Claimed by the Demon

her, letting it ease the humming burn of the blade. “The cops are riled—they’re traveling in groups. Watching their backs. They see it, too.”

“It’s all about the hate,” she said. “People hating other people because of their skin or their religion or their preferences or their politics—”

“Or their first language.” He’d stopped a beat-down on a young immigrant during the evening. It had taken only a glance to communicate with the young man across the language barrier, but the hate group couldn’t hear a word he’d said.

“Hating,” Natalie said. “Little eruptions of it from people who have been nurturing it inside.”

“Hating,” he agreed.

“And you think the new wielder is doing it?”

That took him by surprise. “I... What? That guy?” He thought back to what he’d seen, what he’d felt. Unsettled, unfocused...a guy who’d been into something and had let it get the best of him. One who’d been in the nexus of the evening’s incidents.

One who’d needed to be warned.

“He’s involved,” Devin told her.

“Mmm.”

Mmm was never good.

“You disagree?”

She didn’t answer right away. She held him; she breathed with him. Long enough so he started to consider the way they fit together, and that was never good—not if he had thinking to do.

Finally, she said, “You didn’t say she loved him.”

“What?” So much for the thinking.

“The woman who was with him. She loves him.” She tipped her head back to look up at him. “She has some understanding of what’s happening, but not enough. She sees the blades—even when Baitlia was silent, she saw it for what it was. Having her with him...this could change things.”

She ran her hand down his back, and her expression grew more thoughtful. “He needs help, there’s no doubt. But, dammit, Devin, they’ve labeled us enemies. They think we’re in league with whatever’s going on here —and something is. Someone messed with them today. I think someone was killed, too, but if there was a blade involved—”

Right. Body and blood devoured. Just a missing persons report waiting to happen.

Okay. So they had a trust problem when it would have been convenient to start on neutral ground with this intruder. He sighed, annoyed at the situation in general. Worried about it, too. He could walk this city all night, but he couldn’t be everywhere. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time. The guy’s a walking trouble magnet, and he’s about to go over.”

She nodded. “I think he probably is. But we have to fix this. If what’s happening out there isn’t about him—if he’s just gotten caught up in the middle—then there’s something else going on. And I think it’s big.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, kissing the top of her head. “It’s big.”

Chapter 11

Mac woke to tangled sheets and tangled limbs and tangled thoughts.

Tangled, but all his own.

His arms still throbbed beneath their pink wrappings; the pendant pressed into his skin beneath a stiff layer of duct tape. Pink cyborg warrior. No burn, no blade-given healing.

The tangle of limbs was mostly Gwen, delightful soft skin pressed against his in every possible way.

“Healthy,” he murmured into her ear, “but not safe.” And loved her awake to prove it, watching sleepy confusion warm to a languid sensuality, her hands reaching and then clutching—that particular surprised and husky noise he’d learned to wring from her. Once, and then he buried himself in her and did it all over again, greedy with the scent of her, the sound of her, the gift of her.

While it lasted.

He left her catching her breath and made the shower quick and careful. Even then the water in the wake of the night’s activities shifted the duct tape—shifted the pendant—enough so a warning slice of retribution doubled him over beneath the pounding water.

Oh, yeah. He straightened, slow to pull himself back together. Much better to choose his own time and place.

He opened the bathroom door wearing nothing more than a pair of briefs, and ran right into Gwen. She burst into laughter as she pushed past him to close the door on his heels, trailing the sheet she wore.

“Laughter,” he told the door, “is not the appropriate response to seeing me naked.”

“Not naked enough,” she told him, muffled by the door. “Go away. I’m busy.”

Fair enough. He pulled a protein drink from the fridge, a fresh pair of jeans from his giant duffel, and downed one while climbing into the other. The knife found its way into his front pocket, and he pulled a plain heather T-shirt over his head, careful of his arms. He left his wrists to the open air—bruised, swollen and weeping—and his duct-tape arm torque peeking out from beneath his sleeve.

As he sat on the end of the bed to pull on a pair of socks, he eyed the discarded handcuffs—lying there, right next to the key—and inevitably, he scooped them up.

He didn’t know who he’d be when the blade came back. That was the hard truth of it.

Gwen popped out of the bathroom long enough to grab her newly acquired toiletries and disappear again. By the time she came out for good, still draped in the sheet and heading for her suitcase, Mac had a pretty good idea what they’d be doing next.

Not what they wanted to be doing, he was sure.

“We need to go back to that warehouse,” he told her.

That stopped her short, clothes gathered in her hand, sheet slipping and blue eyes narrowing. “I think some words just mistakenly came out of your mouth.”

He grinned. “Nice try. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

Spark showed in those eyes, faint freckles on pale gleaming skin and the red in her hair glinting with its dampness. “Damned right I don’t want to. But I don’t want you to, either. We need to figure out what’s going on, but surely there are other options.”

He lifted a shoulder. “Wander the city and follow the hate? We already know it’s out there and where it’s coming from. I need to know more about the warehouse guy. I need to know if he’s working with other blades.” Such as the man who’d accosted them near the hotel, his words blunt: This is my turf.

“That’s it?” she asked. “Not interested in who that woman was, or why he took her, or why he killed her?”

“She was no one,” Mac said harshly. “She was everyone. It doesn’t matter to him. He took her for the same reason he offered her to me—for his blade to feed on. And if I’m going to stop him, I’ve got to know more about him.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “And you think he’ll have left some honkin’ big clue for us to find? As opposed to, say...a guard of some sort?”

“I think he underestimates us.” Mac looked right at her. “I think he underestimates you. We wouldn’t be here now if he hadn’t.”

“Bullshit,” she said, but her flush looked pleased. “If I hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t have hung around talking to him. You who can see in the dark, you with your ill-mannered blade. You’d have taken out those guys and gone for him. Or you wouldn’t have left the diner parking lot in the first place.”

There was something to that.

“Doesn’t change anything,” Mac said. “You got us out of what it was.” He touched the duct tape on his arm, pushing cold, lumpy metal beneath it against his skin. “I don’t think he knows about this, either. Maybe he gets some sense of it—I did—or maybe not. But if he’d truly known, then he wouldn’t have let us go.”