Taming the Demon (5 page)

He levered himself into the car, the injured arm tucked to his side, hot and heavy and useless. No longer bleeding but still gaping, still burning with the unnatural attention the blade gave it. He didn’t have much longer to get it stitched.

He realized, suddenly, that she’d started the car with the press of a button, and waited—for how long, he didn’t know—for his direction. And he knew it because she took a deep breath and said, “Okay, then. Where’s this
place
of yours? I’ll take you there.”

“My truck—”

She laughed. Truly amused, a light sound of sunlight and briefly open heart. She tucked her hair behind her ear—ash-brown and blond, curls left unruly with the night’s dousing and faintly olive-toned skin devoid of makeup but blushing up nicely on her neck when she realized his regard. “I’m not taking you to your truck. You can’t possibly think you’re safe to drive. Toes or no toes.”

He wanted to scowl and demand and take the wheel himself.

Problem was, she was right.

Not to mention, she was still, indeed, fighting back. Her own way.

He muttered a curse. “Enrique’s,” he said. “It’s off Isleta. South of that giant spray-foam roadrunner.” He raised a challenging eyebrow. “In an alley.”

“I’ve been in alleys before last night,” she said. “No doubt I’ll be alleys again. And I’ve always thought that’s got to be the biggest roadrunner
ever.
”

“Not,” he murmured, conceding that particular skirmish, “as big as the freakish pecan outside that Tularosa pecan farm.”

“They had to put the Roswell UFO somewhere,” she told him, backing silently out of the short driveway. “So, dress it up as a giant pecan and stick it outside Tularosa.”

Okay, he couldn’t help it. To be sitting in this silent-running car with a uniquely beautiful stranger in the wake of a uniquely horrifying night, cracking wise about the giant pecan...

As if there was no such thing as a demon blade. As if his life wasn’t set along an irrevocable path of destruction, as possessed as he was. As if this were a normal morning on a normal crunchy-cold Albuquerque January morning. He let down his guard, just for that instant, and laughed.

It startled her, then wrung a wry smile from her—not that it lasted long. As she navigated the quick series of turns that took her back out to University, she slanted him a look. “I wasn’t sure, last night, what you would do. With me, I mean. After what I saw.”

He shifted his arm, a careful grip on his elbow, and snorted in disbelief. “Because maybe I’d go to all that trouble to save you just to kill you?” Soft fleece brushed hot skin.

She hesitated at a stop sign, long enough to look him straight on. Eyes bluer than his own, a little darker. Arching brows that held the perfect quirk of the cynic—but behind it, he saw wariness. “Who knows?” she said. “I still have no idea why you went to all that trouble at all. You could have done what everyone else would have done—grabbed a phone and kept your distance.”

“Maybe I don’t have a cell phone.”

She didn’t dignify that with a response. He kept his own silence, wishing for the luxury of painkillers and not even knowing what the blade would do with them. It tended to soak such things up for its own—or spit them back at him.

And even if he’d had a handy phone in that parking lot, the blade wouldn’t have let him use it.

The blade wanted things done its own way.

“Question is,” she said, “what do you do now?”

“Question is,” he said right back, “why did you come back? Why didn’t you just go call for help?”

She responded without hesitation. “Maybe I no longer had a cell phone.”

He laughed. It held none of the easy humor of the earlier moment. But appreciation for her ability to bite back—yeah. For sure. So many people ran from what they saw in him. And they’d never truly even
seen
it. Not like she had.

“Besides,” she said, “you know as well as I do that by the time I found a working public phone—”

He looked away from the cheekbones, from the slight flush there; from the wide and sculpted mouth and the particular way it formed her words. “Yeah,” he said, thinking about the impending reinforcements of the night before. “Probably.”

She held her silence a few long moments, navigating the Prius. Then she said, “You’re good at that. Evasion.”

This time he looked away—haunted, for that moment, by a glimpse of what it would be like to simply
tell
someone. And then he said, “Yeah. I am.”

Chapter 5

E
nrique saw him coming. Sometimes Devin thought the man could smell the blood, holed up in that little office and surrounded by the thick scents of sweat and muscle rub and the peculiar eau de gym mat.

Typical trainer, Enrique. Tough on his guys, all heart beneath, running his little boxing gym for the love of it and, yeah, to give the kids a place where someone would kick their asses if they crossed the line and slap their backs when they tried to walk it. Knew how to drive a man on, knew when to back off...

Knew how to put his guys back together.

And, when a dazed younger Devin had wandered in, hunting a safe place to blow off steam, he’d seen some of what lay beneath the James brothers. Not everything, because only a handful of people still alive knew everything—or thought they did. Enrique had respected it, directed it...accepted it. And gained enough trust to become a confidant when the blade took Leo...and then changed him.

Now he came out of the little office with its plain plywood walls and jammed his fists on his hips, paperwork and all, to give Devin the little I-see-you lift of his chin. “Aiee,
hijo,
” he said. “What have you done now?”

Devin stood a little taller. “Brought company, Rick.” Not that he hadn’t felt her move just a little bit closer in wary acknowledgment of all the testosterone in the air—fists against leather, bodies thumping down to the mats, flesh smacking flesh.

Enrique lifted one hand to make a little circling motion at Devin’s arm. “And again?”

Devin glanced at the sweatshirt, found faint seepage through gray material. “Damn,” he said. “Made that one easy for you.” Not that Enrique and his highly tuned eye would miss even the slightest guarding of any injury, but...it was all part of the dance.

Enrique grunted. He’d been a featherweight as a fighter, and nothing in the years had changed that—still spare, still fast. And he’d gotten out young—he still had his ears, his brow and his lightning wit. His nose had taken a few good licks along the way—but not, as he made clear with a glance at Natalie, his good taste.

He didn’t linger there. “Now you tell me no doctors, no antibiotics, no worry...” His hand spun out the familiar litany of words. “Just sew, Enrique. Am I right?” He glanced again at Natalie. “Above all, no police. Does she know?”

“Are you protecting me?” Natalie said, surprise in that realization as she glanced from Enrique to Devin and back again. “From what?”

“From not knowing.” Impervious to the annoyance, Enrique jerked his head at the office, leading the way—a bowlegged walk with a hitch.

Devin hesitated, glancing at Natalie. Ever hidden beneath that peacoat, but never striking him as a person of physical substance and now...even less so. Now looking as though she might have hit her limit. “You might want to stay here.”

The skin went tight around her eyes, the corners of her mouth—she gave the gym denizens a meaningful glance.

“They’re good guys,” Devin told her.

“They’re average,” Enrique grunted. “But they won’t bother one of Devin’s.”

Yeah, that was the right thing to say.
One of Devin’s.
He expected the flash of annoyance; he wasn’t disappointed.

“You want a rolled magazine to bite on?” Enrique suggested with some bite of his own, rummaging through a drawer that had squeaked on the way open.

“Girlie magazine?” Devin asked, winking at Natalie, watching her eyes widen slightly. “Or some boxing rag that your guys have been pawing through?”

She shook her head at him, beyond words. This whole thing, beyond words...

He offered up a wry grin, a one-shouldered shrug, and followed Enrique into the office.

* * *

Natalie didn’t linger long at the door.

Long enough to see a broad expanse of shoulder, the harsh overhead light tracing strength she hadn’t truly noticed the evening before. She’d half expected additional tattoos, but his skin was patterned only by the shape of bone and muscle as he sat on the desk, presenting her with a clean profile—jaw stubborn, nose strong, eyes that flashed from brooding to carefree and back again too quickly for Natalie to find her balance with either. Quiet, at the moment. Patient...an air of resignation.

Beside him sat a pile of bandages and a few matter-of-fact bottles, clear and brown plastic. When Enrique came back into view, Natalie barely had time to register what he was doing before he slopped the contents onto a rough cloth and began scrubbing.

She closed her eyes; she turned her head away. She wasn’t fast enough to miss the tension that suddenly shot through Devin’s back or the pain on his face, eyes closed and jaw clenched and mouth tight with defiance of it.

She didn’t stay by the door.

After all, no matter what Enrique thought, she wasn’t one of
Devin’s.
She wasn’t one of
anybody’s.
But she did still work for Sawyer Compton. “I’m going to make a local call,” she told Enrique, happy enough when he didn’t break his concentration to do more than grunt a response. “I see the phone.”

Sitting on a bar-height table beside a tattered phone book and most of the morning paper, it was an old-style phone with a rotary dial and the phone cord tangled in so many knots it wasn’t functionally more than six inches long. Half the men in the gym stopped working out to watch her stride for it...but they also left her alone.

One of Devin’s. Right. She could well believe that no one here would mess with Devin James. Maybe he threw a mean punch, maybe not. But he had that white hot flash of a mutable blade, and just because Natalie hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask about it—to say the words out loud—didn’t mean she hadn’t seen what she’d seen.

Echoes of memory and fear...

She pushed away distractions, focusing on the battered phone and Compton’s private number.

“Natalie,” he said, recognizing her voice immediately. “Are you coming? Is
he
coming?”

She hadn’t realized the intensity of his interest. “I’m working on it,” she said, aware of his disappointment. Not just in the circumstances, but in her. “He’s finally getting some care,” she told him. “And he’s a little reclusive.”

“I imagine he is,” Compton said, an edge to his voice.

“Is there something I should know?” Natalie asked. She couldn’t help but glance over at that open doorway, even though from this angle she could see nothing. Compton might have a personal assistant, but he remained his own primary resource—and he’d had plenty of time to dig around in Devin James’s background.

“Nothing to worry about,” Compton said, in such a perfunctory tone that Natalie relaxed. Classic Compton. Whatever he had in mind, concerns about her safety were so far off his radar that it hadn’t even occurred to him to mention it.

She might eventually find out what that was; she might not.

Compton’s voice went short. “Keep working on him. I’ll expect to see you both here as soon as possible.” And he hung up.

Natalie replaced the handset in the cradle with the faintest of smiles. Last night, Compton had been worried and solicitous—and she hadn’t known what to do with that man.
This
man, she knew. And she knew how to do her job.

She flipped through the insubstantial paper, scanning the headlines.

If anyone had noticed the activity the night before, they hadn’t called it in. Or if they’d called it in, the police hadn’t put it out on their blotter or the paper hadn’t cared. Under other circumstances, she might have suspected Compton’s hand—he’d never said anything, but she’d long ago noticed his ability to squelch certain stories. But he hadn’t had nearly enough advance time to work on this one.

The bad guys might turn up on someone’s missing persons list...but they weren’t going to turn up, not literally. Natalie’s hand crept to her pocket, where Tattoo Head’s license waited. She didn’t know who the others were, but...

This family, if there was one, deserved some closure. Somehow.

Like with the skip tracer in Compton’s contact files.

She set the newspaper aside and returned to the office, peeked in...went unnoticed.

“Should I even bother to say you should be taking medicine for this wound?” Enrique was saying, tying a complicated knot and snipping the suture ends. A sheen of sweat covered Devin’s back; he didn’t appear to be listening. “I guess we see if now your luck runs out. This is a bad one,
hijo.
”

“Yeah,” Devin muttered, barely audible at that. Lips not moving, jaw tight. He sighed as Enrique blotted his arm with the antiseptic-soaked cloth—a rough cloth, but a surprisingly careful touch. “It’ll do. Thanks, Rick. I owe you.”

Enrique snorted as he gathered the suturing supplies, but his expression—concealed from Devin as he turned away to the cabinet from which they’d come—hardly matched. Plenty of worry there. A long-term worry, Natalie thought. “You watch it, then. For the swelling, the redness. And you left a lot of blood somewhere last night,
hijo
—I can see it in your color. So stay away from the streets a night or two. That’s what you owe me.”

“Ahh, Rick,” Devin said, and flashed a sudden and unrepentant grin. “Gotta roam. You know that.”

“I know your brother said the same, once, and he and those boys—” Enrique’s lips thinned; he replaced the bottles where they belonged, tossed suture packets...set the dirty cloth aside.

To judge by the look on Devin’s face, this was an old conversation, and not a welcome one. He met it with resignation. “They were hardly boys.”

Enrique glanced back at him. “So you say. I say a man acts like a man. Back then, if your brother had acted as a man...he would not be dead now. And you—this
diablo
—”

Definite weariness on Devin’s face—pain of an entirely different sort. He briefly squeezed his eyes closed. “I didn’t have any choice.”

Enrique closed the cabinet door and put his back to it, crossing his arms over his thin chest in scowling belligerence. “No choice at all. Exactly my point. No brother does that to another.” And when Devin jerked his head up to look at Enrique, expression stricken, Enrique shook his head. “You see?
That
is what I mean. It’s not what you did to him,
hijo.
It is what he did to you.”

Natalie held her breath, suddenly aware that she was eavesdropping on something more raw, more profound, than she’d ever expected or intended—and that she really, really didn’t want to get caught. Her lungs burned in the silence; she allowed herself a shallow draught of air as the two men locked gazes—Enrique’s dark, perceptive eye, unflinching—and Devin’s grayed blue layered with more than pain. Grief and guilt.

Devin looked away first.

Enrique turned from him without a word, yanking open a low cabinet drawer and rummaging therein—coming up with a hack-sleeved heather-gray T-shirt. He balled it up and threw it at Devin without looking. “Cover yourself,” he said. “Be a gentleman with your friend.”

Devin caught the shirt one-handed. “She—” he started, and then stopped, shaking his head. “Just someone I ran into last night,” he said. “When things got messy. I didn’t—” He frowned, jamming his head through the shirt and then one arm, and following more gingerly with the next. “I don’t—” He shook his head. “It’s no big deal. She’s dropping me off at my truck. Just seemed best to get this over with, before it started scarring up at the ends.”

“The proud flesh.” Enrique nodded. “Not much to do with it once that starts. We learned that with Leo fast enough.”

And if she still wanted no part of this conversation, Natalie nonetheless found herself drawn in. Enough to hear Enrique say, as he reached to jerk down the back of the shirt—brusque, even, but somehow with the echoes of the gesture a father might use with his son— “It’s good that it’s no big deal. She seems like a nice young woman. Best you don’t mess with her life.”

Devin looked away.
“Dammit.”

Enrique’s expression softened for the first time since this conversation had started. “That’s the way of it,
hijo
. With what you carry.”

“Yeah,” Devin said. Now he just looked tired. He picked up his sweatshirt and pushed off the desk to his feet. “Thanks, Rick. I’ll be careful.”

He headed for the door so limber, so fast—Natalie found herself caught flat-footed. Only one thing to do—take a quick step forward, almost colliding with him as he yanked the door the rest of the way open and headed out.

“Oh, hey!” she said, doing a quick two-step back again. “You’re done?”
And look, it’s happening again.
How long had it been since she had fallen so easily into lying?

Years.

Enrique was right. She was a nice young woman now. And she didn’t need Devin James messing with her life.

* * *

Devin had almost forgotten she was there. Forgotten
about
her, no. Forgotten her presence the night before...

Far from it.

And this morning. If anything of this past day reigned crystal clear in his mind, it was the moment this morning when the blade tried to curl back through his mind and she’d brought him back. Given him that silly little trick.
Count your toes....

And if anything reigned crystal clear in his mind, it was that every time she’d touched him—all through the fiery tumult of the night—he’d found just that instant of respite, of focus.

It hadn’t been enough, of course. Nothing was enough—nothing
could
be enough, if the blade had finally broken through his boundaries of self.

But it was more than he’d had before.

“You okay?” she asked him, looking up into his face—direct and unabashed. “Your color isn’t—”

Enrique snorted. “Every time,” he said. “Sits through the stitching like a man, walks out the door and—”

“Once,”
Devin said sharply. “Just
once.
And I—”

Natalie’s interruption came with haste. “Now,” she said, with some purpose, “will you come with me to see Mr. Compton?”

For a moment, he didn’t know what she was talking about. A blink, a frown...a quick search of her features and the determination there. His gaze slid down her cheekbones, came to rest on her mouth...lingered there, while his thoughts blurred around the edges.