“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.
To her surprise, Natalie let it go. “Later,” she said. “Go be with him.”
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.
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
“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.
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—”
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,
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.
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
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 quest 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.”
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,
