Claimed by the Demon

The woman caught her eye, shook her head...shrugged.

Not that the cops weren’t already a hundred percent occupied on this day in this town.

Or that Mac needed them.

The bat in one hand, the blade in the other—suddenly it turned saber, fast enough so Gwen had missed it and the assembled young toughs didn’t at first understand. Not the usual thing, a sword. And they’d been busy, pulling out stout switchblades...pulling out a gun.

The waitress ducked behind the counter and tried to drag Gwen down with her—but Gwen clawed her way back up, looking around for a weapon, any weapon.

Mac said, “You leave now, or someone dies.”

They snorted. Riding their overload of confidence and driven by somebody else’s goals without even knowing it. Someone else’s keen lust for violence and hatred. “Yeah,” one of them said. “You.”

Gwen couldn’t help it; the words burst out. “You don’t even know what this is about!”

“Don’t have to.” Only one of them said it, but they all meant it. And then one of them pointed at Mac, eyes narrowed in an exaggerated expression. “You,” he said. “I know you. You got in our way the other night.”

“I did more than that,” Mac said, and Gwen had no idea how his voice kept that even tone, matter-of-fact while at the same time so full of meaning. Of promise. “You know damned well I can do it again.”

“Naw,” said the guy who spoke for them all, the one with the gun. “You can’t swing that thing in here. You’re goin’ down.”

The blade must have agreed. A glimmering runnel of light and the Bowie knife replaced the sword, but Mac struck out with the short bat first—lightning fast, a one-handed sweep, crowding them and making it clear that the tight space worked against them as much as him.

“This is crazy,” Gwen muttered, disbelief overflowing. “This is crazy!”

Not that anyone heard her. With the girlfriend crying shrill encouragement, the guys piled on. Tried to pile on. One staggered back retching; another flung himself out of the way of the Bowie and tangled with a chair. On the bat’s backswing, Mac slapped out the shin of the top-heavy guy who’d started it all and someone’s knife went flying. Blood splashed and bodies collided and Mac stood in the center of it all, back to the counter, his movement swift and precise and economical, too fast to follow.

“Shoot him!” the girlfriend shrieked, crouched beside her felled boyfriend, whose olive complexion had gone stark-white. “Shoot him!”

Gwen saw it too well—that the guy with the gun suddenly remembered he had it, and at the same time realized that he and his friends would not win this fight. She saw his glance at the weapon—his gangsta-style hold as he brought it to bear. She scrambled back up onto the counter—on her knees, snatching up the heavy sugar shaker. The guy didn’t even see it coming—a glancing blow off his shoulder, enough to jerk his body and his aim, his finger closing down on the trigger so the gun discharged.

The waitress screamed; Gwen ducked, so stupid and futile when the bullet was already buried in the wall behind her.

The cook, she thought, was long gone—fled, and smart to go.

It bought moments only—the guy cursed at her, dodged another of his friends as he came staggering back, and aimed the gun—

Gwen flung the napkin holder, a flimsy metal contraption that flew apart in midair and rained cheap white squares down on them all.

Mac’s blade sliced through the air, cleaving paper in two without disturbing its passage...leaving blood in its wake. Nothing more than surface wounds so far, nothing uncontrolled. Nothing fatal. Controlled.

And now the gun pointed at Gwen.

“Gwen!” Mac shouted—ducking one set of reaching arms but missing the next as the boyfriend lurched up from the floor, latching around Mac in a beefy human noose, clamping his arms to his side; the bat fell away.

Gwen threw herself flat on the counter as the gun went off again, and she met Mac’s eyes in the doing of it—met his despair.

He was going to have to kill someone. Not just wound, not just discourage, but kill. Gwen rolled aside just enough to grab the ketchup bottle and fling it at the guy with the gun. As he ducked, she grabbed the pendant.

“Do something!” she told it, not caring how crazy that was or that she had no idea what the thing really did or how to do it in the first place. Only knowing that as before, she wanted it. Wanted these men cut off from the hatred and the driving force that man had imposed on them all.

Mac gave her a startled glance. She had no idea what she’d done—she could barely feel the swamping effect in the first place—but done it she had. He quite suddenly broke free, and the boyfriend’s equally sudden bafflement turned to green and horrified pain as Mac instantly jammed an elbow in the guy’s gut and followed it through with a hammer strike to the groin using the butt end of the Bowie.

Just that fast, he scooped up the bat and backed up against the counter, his breathing coming fast now and with a faint tremor in his shoulders that might have been weakness or might have been a struggle for control.

The guy with the gun looked down at it and then at his friends—a couple of them on the floor, the others bleeding from shallow wounds and staggering, trying to pretend they weren’t.

And then he took a step away.

Not, Gwen thought, that he wasn’t perfectly willing to follow through on such intent as he’d had. Only that it needed to be his own intent, and now it suddenly wasn’t.

The waitress stood, her face paled, her lips thinned. “This was neutral ground,” she told them. “For years, you were all welcome here.” She pointed at the door—her hand shaking but resolute. “Not any longer.”

The guy with the gun regarded her with a chastised expression that Gwen wouldn’t have expected. “You calling the cops?”

She drew herself up, looking around her place—a snowstorm of napkins, a teenager still in petrified hiding, blood splattered everywhere and young men shuffling themselves back together. “Not if you go. Now.”

He looked as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Gwen didn’t blame him. What did he know about that man and his machinations? In the end he jerked his chin at the door, and the guys headed for it.

“Wait,” Gwen heard herself say. The waitress shot her an incredulous look; the guy with the gun did much the same. “You should know. There’s something out there...and it’s using you. It had a hand in this.” She didn’t have to hear him to understand the what the effing kind of crazy lady are you in his expression. “I know, I know,” she said. “But look back over the things you’ve done these past few days. Ask yourself if they were your things to do. And if not, then make the decision not to get pushed around by the thing we’re fighting.”

“You crazy, bitch,” he said—but the scowl he wore wasn’t for her; it was for the truth in her words.

Gwen released a pent-up breath. Yeah. Crazy. Maybe so.

But not so crazy she was just going to lie here on this counter now that they’d gone. She pushed back up to her knees. “Mac?” she asked, looking at his back and unable to tell what his silence meant. “Are you all—”

That was all she got out before he threw the bat away and turned on her, the blade slamming flat-handed to the counter as his hands clamped around her waist and shook her ever so slightly. “What...” he said, looking up at her with grey-blue eyes gone stormy and undefinable anguish on his face. “What did you think—” a little shake there “—you were doing?”

Her face went hot, looking at that accusation and pain. “Saving your ass!” she cried. “And I did a good job, too!”

But she was startled past words when he jerked her in close, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight—his head against her chest, his breathing jerky...and the heat of his body telling her all that she had to know about his remaining need to heal and rest. He’d faked his way through that scene. All of it.

After a speechless moment, she rested her hands on his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” And stayed that way a moment.

When he pulled back, he lifted her off the counter as if that had been his intent all along, setting her gently on her feet. She looked at the waitress and said, “I’ll help clean this place up. But we really do need a place to lie