Claimed by the Demon

known we were about to hit the front edge of monsoon activity, I’d have found time to get us slickers today.”

“Huh,” she said. “Before the battle for sanity or after?”

“Before,” he said firmly, reaching for the bottled water propped between his thighs. “If it rains, you’ll see what I mean. What else do you have in those bags?”

She dug in, offering him the ketchup-smeared remains of boxed fries. As he pinched up a mouthful, she said, “Seems quiet.”

She wasn’t talking about the clouds. And when he answered, neither was he. “So far.” The blade, quiescent. The rolling waves of black despair and fury, abated.

So far.

They’d taken the highway up to veer west on Tramway, detoured south to Alameda and across the river to travel Coors south. The rush-hour traffic eased as they headed into the south valley area—not a coincidental choice.

According to the business card Gwen had been given, this was Devin James’s turf. And it was time to see how the air tasted here.

Gwen, peering at the map she’d pulled from his door pocket, realized it just as he approached the highway—the highway overpass within sight as he cut east over a narrow road, speed bumps and all, that spilled them out near the Isleta entrance ramp.

North on the highway, and their ninety-minute circuit would be completed in another fifteen, the clouds closing in dark and imminent above them.

“They’re here somewhere,” she said, looking out over the south valley from the raised highway. “Do you feel—”

“There’s something,” he told her. Not something he’d have been alert to before these past few days— nothing like the blade’s deep obsession with acquiring emotions. Just an underlying awareness as they fish-hooked around the south end of the valley. “You?”

She shook her head. “Maybe it would be there if...” She glanced at him, and he could have sworn that was a blush stealing in on those lightly freckled cheeks. “If you weren’t right here.”

He smiled to himself. Okay then. “Nice to have an impact,” he murmured.

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

At that he only cocked an eyebrow at her, until she heard her own words and laughed a sputtering sound. “Or do let it go to your head. But you’re on your own with that until we’re not driving around looking for trouble.”

“And not finding it.”

“Bad guys have to sleep, too,” Gwen said. “Maybe we can grab our stuff from the hotel.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d lived out of his vehicle. He nodded. “Hit and run.”

Although if that man—or even Natalie or Devin—had wanted to get to them through the hotel room, they’d had plenty of opportunity.

Then again, things changed.

Advancing with care at the hotel took longer than hauling down their stuff once they felt safe; checking out took a matter of moments. Mac stuffed the bill in his pocket and joined Gwen where he’d parked beside her little blob of a car, jumper cables at work. “Let’s head for the park.” He nodded in the direction of the little park to which he’d led them only the day before. “Maybe we can learn something from what’s left of the hot spot.”

She hesitated as she opened her car door, about to slide in. “I really wonder if we shouldn’t call Natalie. No one else here can help us.”

He set his jaw—as much at the anxiety trickling in from her as at the suggestion itself. She thought to hide from him, but couldn’t hide from the blade...and he didn’t know how he felt about that.

People should, he thought, be allowed their private thoughts and feelings. Even if it benefited him to know them.

Her eyes widened with dismay; her hand went to the pendant. “You’re a lot angrier than you look.”

He laughed, utterly without humor. “Looks like we’re in the same boat,” he said. “Is it just me, or—”

“You,” she said. “Through the blade, I think. Just like—” She stopped short, biting her lip.

“Just like outside the diner.” Yeah. Damned intense. “That’s what we’ll do at the park, I think.”

“What?”

He laughed again, this time with true amusement. “That, too, eventually—but no, not in the park. No, I mean this.” He gestured between the pendant and the pocket that held the blade. “We need to understand what’s happening there. We need to be able to limit it. If one of us gets in trouble, the other one of us has to be able to function.”

“Trouble,” she said. “Right. Not much chance of that, is there?”

But wherever trouble had hidden this late afternoon, it wasn’t at the park beneath the threatening rain, thunder now rumbling in the background. A few skateboarders were on their way through; bikers swooped along the walkways while scant pedestrians shared the fast-cooling air. Just a typical park clearing out before dinner time and rain.

“It might not storm,” Gwen said, looking over at the clouds. “The hotel clerk said sometimes it just circles around the city.”

“The hotel clerk was angling for a look at your excellent ass while you gathered your things from the floor,” Mac pointed out. “Not that I’m keeping track.”

She shot him a look that might have been amusement or exasperation. “You getting anything from this place? They were right over there.”

Mac wandered through the pampered grass, trailing his hand along the picnic table, searching for any visible sign of what had happened here the day before. In the silence of everything but the rising storm gusts and the rustle of leaves, he gave her a rueful look and did that which until now he’d been avoiding.

There was more than one way to run.

He let the blade in.

He did more than that. He went looking for it. Not deep or hard—a mere crack in the wall he’d placed between them.

He barely heard Gwen’s gasp through the rush of thunder in his mind, the fierce resentment and craving that curled through his body, wrapping around his bones. It would ease, he told himself, standing stiff and impaled by it...making himself believe.

“Mac—” Her protest held concern—her first inkling of what it was they both asked of him here. Her inward panic and floundering adjustment bounced back at him through whatever had grown between the blade and pendant.

“Now,” he told her, his eyes still closed against it all, “would be a good time to see if you can shut it down.”

Her fingers found his on the tabletop—the lightest of touches, full of acknowledgment and I’m here.

Slowly, his sense of her floundering receded; her panic turned into an underlying determination...and then diminished. Not gone, but...not crashing into him any longer.

The blade, too, receded, its tsunami of resentment easing back to what had become normal between them, while some part of him numbed itself to the consistency of that background noise.

He took a deep breath, rotating his shoulders.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded, not yet opening his eyes—because now he had work to do. But he murmured, “That was good, what you did. The calm, before you stepped back. Remember that feeling.”

That feeling nudged against him, a little caress of calm; he turned his hand palm-up and gently captured her fingers—as much in warning as in response. Because yeah...now he was going hunting.

Loosed with his intent behind it, the blade swept out to scour the park. Hunger hunger hunting free!

And Mac swept out with it.