Claimed by the Demon

if he could look through her. He took her hand, twined his fingers through hers, and examined the arrangement as if it could tell him something. “Doesn’t make any sense. You.”

She shivered. Inexplicable impulses and gut feelings, every decision she’d made since she’d seen him outside that hotel...since she’d walked away from her Vegas vacation at that. No, it didn’t make any sense at all.

And she’d learned better. She had a lifetime of understanding that true intention rarely showed on the surface. She knew how to protect herself.

Or she should.

She gathered her wits and gently disentangled her hand. “I make perfect sense,” she said. “And I’m not the one who almost fainted in the middle of the road. But I am the one who doesn’t have a room yet. So let’s go back to the hotel. If you need help, we’ll get it there. If you don’t, you don’t.”

He sucked in a sharp breath; a certain startled awareness crossed his features, an expression made sharper in the shadows. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Let’s get you back to the hotel.”

Amusement rippled through her as she stood. Suddenly he was all Mister I’m back in charge, was he? Well, that was fine, too. “What was that all about, anyway?” she asked, holding out a hand to help pull him up from the curb.

Whether from pride or wariness, she wasn’t sure, but he hesitated before taking it. “Hazing gone wrong.” Back on his feet, he loomed more than she’d expected. Gwen Badura was no tiny figure of a woman, and he hadn’t struck her as a particularly large man...but there it was. Looming.

She resisted the impulse to brush the street dirt from his particularly fine posterior.

He frowned, striking out beside her; the hotel loomed darkly a block away. “It wasn’t that serious—didn’t have to be. I don’t know what—” He stopped short, dropping entirely back into the man he’d been before he’d run off into the darkness—the same man who had faced her at the hotel entrance. The wary one. The utterly prepared one.

She didn’t at first see why—not until a dark figure emerged from the shadows of the hotel lot landscaping. Then she stopped short on a gasp—one that turned into a squeak as her erstwhile escort snagged her arm and jerked her back, putting himself in front of her.

You must be kidding.

The newcomer stood in clear challenge mode, legs braced, chin tipped at an arrogant angle.

He held a sword.

You. Must. Be. Kidding. Gwen’s fingers clamped down on the back of her guy’s jacket, knowing it was hardly helpful. Hide. Yes, I will gladly hide. Right here behind you.

The sword glimmered in the light—no, not in the light. More as if it had light of its own, rolling liquid along the lines of steel. “My name is Devin James,” he said. “This is my turf. My city. Whatever you’re doing, it had better stop.”

And Gwen’s guy muttered eloquently, “What...the...fuck?”

“That’s telling him,” she said, not a little desperately.

“It’s my city,” James repeated. “I can feel what you’ve done here tonight. No one died, which means you get another chance. But I’m watching.”

And, very much just like that, he left.

Gwen realized how close she’d gotten to the back of that battered jacket. She pushed herself away, wiped her hands off on her flimsy stretch jacket, and tucked her purse back into place. She pointed at the hotel. “I think you can make it, don’t you?”

“No problem,” he said, as dryly as a man could.

She stalked away, only belatedly realizing that she still didn’t sense the weapon on him—that she hadn’t even felt warning of James’s big honkin’ real-life sword for God’s sake. Only the same unbalanced push-and-pull that had been tugging at her since the moment she’d set eyes on the man behind her.

She almost didn’t hear him say, “Michael MacKenzie. Mac. Just so you know.”

She almost didn’t say back, “Gwen Badura. Gwen. Just so you know.” But she did, and she turned her head ever so slightly to say it over her shoulder, and she saw enough of him to catch the sudden alarm on his face—

A wall hit her. A wall with a linebacker’s touch and an expert grab at her bag and then she was slammed to the pavement, her fingers losing their grasp on the bag strap and her protest lost along with all the air in her lungs.

And Michael MacKenzie leaped in response, barreling past her to—

To double over with a cry of pain and frustration both, spilling down to the asphalt and already trying to claw his way back up. But it was Gwen who made it to her feet first—or at least, to her hands and knees. She crawled out of the cross street and over to Mac’s side just in time to see a startling vulnerability of expression.

Not in time to figure out what it meant.

And there, beside him, was the weapon she’d been so sure of—the one she’d suspected but couldn’t feel— and now the one she couldn’t imagine he’d ever had at all, at least not concealed. It was too big for that, a huge clip-blade Bowie with nowhere to hide. And it gleamed in the night, reflecting an unnatural clear blue-steel light.

Michael MacKenzie’s harsh, pained breathing faded into the background, becoming a thing that no longer tugged at her concern or her empathy.

The knife gleamed brighter.

It shone a beguiling thing of stunning beauty, full of danger and poison and power.

She watched as a hand reached for it—hovering, trembling...wanting—and realized it was her own.

* * *

Devin James slipped into the pickup and slammed the door. Not out of any particular pique, but simply because it was the only way the door would close at all.

“You know,” Natalie said, sitting against the passenger door with her knees drawn up, “now that you’ve, like, inherited Sawyer Compton’s entire estate, I bet you could afford a new truck.”

He scowled. “I like this one. It’s mine.” And other than the comfortable old furniture he’d dragged to Atrisco del Sur from his little stucco home—former home—not far from here, it was the only thing left that was, indeed, fully his.

Even if the damned door was sticky.

He grumbled.

“Didn’t go well?” Natalie asked. She had the detachment in her voice that meant she’d been doing exercises—the control grounding exercises they both did, were learning to do, to stave off the inevitable descent into depraved insanity that came with a demon blade.

He’d seen it on the face of the man who had jumped his brother in the night and died for it when Leo had wrenched away the blade; he’d seen it in Leo’s life and then on Leo’s face, as Leo had jumped Devin in the night...and Devin had ended up with the blade.

He didn’t know if the man he’d just encountered now walked the wild road or not. He only knew...

He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“What does Anheriel say?”

“As little as possible,” Devin told her, darkly enough. But he passed a hand over where the blade resided in his pocket, innocuous and cool. Humbled by the experience with Compton’s blade, tamed by his new understanding of it, kept at bay by the new exercises...

Right. Who was he kidding? The thing was a bastard, a demon soul entangled with metal that wanted nothing more than redemption but actively sought only what its nature allowed—to corrupt those it bonded with.

He let go of a pent-up breath and took her hand, so casually proprietary, and pretended not to notice the little smile at the corner of her mouth—nothing that darkness could hide from him, not with the little perk of the