Taming the Demon (4 page)

Chapter 4

N
atalie startled back, a few stumbling steps—and she ran for it. Right up against the door set at the back corner of the kitchen, fumbling at the dead bolt lock there—and taking long enough at it to have second thoughts.

Don’t even consider it. Just do the smart thing.

But this wasn’t a case of weighing what someone else wanted against what was best for her. He hadn’t, in fact,
asked
her to do a thing. He’d only asked her
not
to call the police.

Everything else, her choice.

She recalled with fearful clarity the decisive sanity of him as he’d stalked out of the darkness to take on two armed men with a pocket knife.
Sword. No, pocket knife.

What he’d
done
was insane, maybe.

But he hadn’t been drugged.
Wasn’t
drugged. So maybe there was no point trying to understand. Maybe she should simply respond to a man in pain.

She eased out toward the living room.

* * *

The blade scratched along the outside edges of Devin’s mind, gusting flames through his thoughts and his body and setting his arm purely to fire. He lost himself to that, flinging himself down the short hall and back again, a mindless creature with only a faint, frightened awareness
. It’s never been like this before.

Devin no longer wondered if his transformation would happen—if it would be necessary.

Because it was happening now. Tonight. A first breakthrough between what he was and what he would become.

It was easy enough to remember when his brother, Leo, had started down this road. When his forays with the blade had become less about protecting those who needed it and more about the power rush.

Neither of them had realized what they’d stumbled over, that first night—two brothers out walking, both still in school, both nothing but average smart-ass adolescent boys, lives so damned simple, goals so damned short-term. Avoiding schoolwork, fishing the Rio Grande, out-hiking the Sandia mountain bears and earning enough money for that old junker sports car. And oh, yeah. Girls. Leo with his first worshipful steady, Devin still a painful virgin but not planning on staying that way one moment longer than necessary.

It turned out it wasn’t the Sandia wilderness bears they had to worry about, coming off the strenuous La Luz trail at the northeast edge of Albuquerque, two cocky teens out later than they should have been.

The man who’d jumped them...

Hadn’t been sane. Hadn’t been hard to defeat. And if Devin hadn’t understood it then, he understood it now—that the blade had taken that man down the wild road, and he had, finally, desperately, chosen his own way out.

And when it was over, Leo stood with the blade in his hand, and then the world changed.

Leo had fumbled through every step of it—learning that the blade would draw him into trouble—that it demanded it. That it was happy to slake on the blood of those who needed justice.

The brothers, however, had made their own rules. About intervening, about which moments to choose. Leo had controlled the blade.

Until suddenly he hadn’t. Until those he gathered around him had dark hearts, and Devin’s voice got lost in the manly posturing and chest-beating and hunting, Leo’s expression wild and haunted and never quite present.

One day Leo had gone for innocent blood—God, the luck of it, for that damned punk to come bouncing off the two of them in that dark alley—and when Devin had tried to stop him, Leo had gone for him.

But Devin had known the blade, too. And he had known Leo.

Even if that hadn’t really been Leo any longer.

Brother dead in the alley...brother gone to the hungry blade.
The slap of metal against flesh as the blade came to him, claiming him...bonding with him.

“Stop,”
she said, a voice so distant to his awareness that it barely echoed through to him—a hand on his arm. A curse.
Damn, you’re hot.
A hand withdrawn...in retreat.

But more words, murmured, as she returned—and this time slapped wet, cold material over his shoulders. The towel, dripping heavily.

Cooling. Barely breaking through, but—

There. A moment of reality. Her hand on his arm, her hand at his face. Her voice, fully realized. “Better?”

He nodded, if barely. Flames curled instantly around his thoughts, reclaiming him.

“No!” she said, and tugged the towel tighter against the back of his neck, all pale blue eyes and curving mouth, chin set stubbornly. “I saw you in there! Don’t leave—”

He grabbed her hands—fine bone and slender fingers, soft skin...a reality to counter his own. But fear flickered in her eyes and he drew a ragged breath and released her, this woman who knew nothing of him. “I won’t hurt you,” he said—said again?—voice rough in his throat.

She looked at her liberated hands, and then reached again for his. “Okay,” she said. “Hang on to me, then.”

Too late, though, with the fire licking around his thoughts, curling up to consume them. “Too late,” he said out loud, and gave himself up to it, a mindless thing flinging himself down the hall and back again, down the hall and back again, outrunning that which he carried inside.

But he no longer walked alone.

* * *

Natalie woke with a crick in her neck and an ache in her ribs. When she dislodged the lumpy pillow beneath her, she found bruises and little shooting paybacks of pain laced throughout her body, her hands sore and scraped.

Because...right. The night before. The strange, strange night before. Hard to believe it had happened at all.

Hard to believe it was still happening.

Because the pillow in her hand wasn’t hers. The couch on which she’d folded her body wasn’t hers. Her eyes snapped open, confirming it; the ceiling over her head wasn’t the least bit hers.

The rest of the house settled in silence—an early morning kind of silence, when the rest of the world hadn’t quite woken yet, either, and the cold blanketed the ground—a January cold, forever promising desert snow and never quite delivering it. The furnace kicked on, but Natalie knew better than to hope for any true heat. She’d turned the thermostat down on an inspiration, and when it seemed to help, that’s where it had stayed.

Not that she’d ever understood what held Devin James in its grip. Then again, she’d stopped understanding why she stayed, too. She just made sure it was a choice, each and every moment.

Carefully, heeding her stiffened body, she sat. And winced anew—this time at what she could see of the hallway wall, smeared with endless layers of watery blood—the result of one man’s endless, staggering, wet journey down the hallway with a wound that should have killed him but somehow bled less and less as the night passed.

No sign of him now.

Natalie eased her feet to the floor and stood, stretching out the stiffness. Here, where she’d been dragged. Here, where she’d fallen. She had no recollection of falling asleep—or of pushing off the loafers she now found and slipped on.
Where is he?

She peered down the hall, finding the back half just as gory as the front...looking around and realizing that the home, as small as it was, as simply appointed as it was, had been tended in every detail.

This paint was fresh; the simple carpet had bounce beneath her feet. The windows were tight against the morning wind; the kitchen gleamed with updated appliances and fixtures, modern Southwest touches here and there. The house might be smack in the middle of an older neighborhood of less-than-modest homes, but behind the security door and dead bolts it was downright cozy.

Natalie shivered. Well. Maybe if she turned the heat back up.

A noise from the bedroom interrupted the current surreality and replaced it with a reminder of the previous. Cautiously—feeling like an intruder, and at the same time worried that she’d somehow fallen asleep at the worst possible time and now Devin James lay in a pool of his own blood—she peeked into the bedroom.

It was the largest room in the small house, made airy by huge south windows and a French door opening to a covered side porch, and filled with unassuming masculine things. A pair of running shoes, sweats thrown over the back of a chair, heavy furniture of solid old wood, a bed large enough for a man of height and substance to sprawl over.

And there, finally. Against the wall in a muddle, a smear of blood tracing the downward slide and on his skin...
goose bumps.
Across his arms, across his chest. A paled face, his eyelids looking bruised—and believe it or not, that was even a shiver. After a night of burning up, he finally shivered in this cold like any normal man.

Natalie swept a thin down comforter from the bed and dropped it around his shoulders. “You look better,” she said.

“Do I?” He frowned. “I’m not sure I... Who are...?”

“From last night,” she said. “It was dark, mostly. You saved me in the—”

He jerked his head, a single impatient movement. “I remember. I meant...
who?
”

An actual introduction. “Natalie Chambers,” she said, and automatically held out her hand—only for an instant, before she gave it a how-stupid-are-you look and withdrew it. “Mr. James.”

“Devin,” he said, and frowned. “My wallet. That’s how you found this place.”

“Your wallet,” she agreed. “And now that we’re communicating—look, I don’t understand what happened last night and I’m not sure I want to. But your arm... Let me take you somewhere.”

He shifted, pressing his back against the wall, and lifted his arm to get a look at the wound. “Stitches,” he said, which seemed to her to be the least of it. No one’s flesh should gape so casually unattended. “I can...” He frowned, and his gaze wandered, eyes clear in the morning light.

“Hey,” she said.

He tried. He took a sharp breath, pulled himself back. “I need to...”

She raised a hand to prod him—but something about the tension in his body stopped her. This wasn’t last night, when he was so beside himself that she could push him for a response. Now he was just enough
here
to show her some of what he’d been in that parking lot. So she crouched beside him, abruptly, and she said shortly, “Count your toes, then.”

And cringed. Not words she’d thought about ahead of time.

He looked back to her, for the moment refocused...honest bafflement.

“Your toes,” she said, wincing just a little. She hadn’t really meant to say that. “When you start to lose it like that. I don’t know what’s going on, but...you can hang on to the real things. And what’s more real than toes?”

“Count,” he said. “My toes.”

“Not just like that. Think of them when you do it. What does each one look like and what is it feeling at that moment, separate of the other toes. Not just a lump of toe-things on the end of your foot, but—” She stopped herself, briefly hid her face behind her hands and stood. “Never mind. Listen, I work for a man named Sawyer Compton. Maybe you’ve heard of him. I was on the clock last night when—” No, she wasn’t going to say she got lost, because she hadn’t. She’d gone to the address the architect had given her on the phone. “Anyway, thanks. And Mr. Compton would like to say thank you, as well—though he’s asked me to make sure you get help as you need it, first.”

“Toes,” he said, sounding a little surprised this time—and looking down at his bare feet. “What the hell.”

“Stitches,” she said, patiently. “Or
something.
”

He got, quite suddenly, to his feet. “Something,” he agreed, and reached for the hoodie draped with the sweatpants, not bothering with a shirt beneath. “You should go.”

Absurdly, hurt twinged in her chest. “But—”

“You
should,
” he said. “But my truck is still where I found you, and I need a ride. So if you could...” He trailed off again, hand on the hoodie zipper—and she was about to give him a verbal nudge when his eyes widened slightly and he took another of those sharp, sudden breaths, and looked directly at her. “Toes,” he said, and grinned, and thus transformed himself.

Natalie stared—and then she took a hasty step back, in case he hadn’t already seen the blush suffusing her features from inside and out. She straightened her shoulders. “Is it the hospital, then? Maybe the urgent-care clinic on Rio Bravo?”

He shook his head, a decisive motion. Not the man who had stalked out of the darkness and not the man who had spent the night trapped in some agonizing reaction she still didn’t understand. “I’ve got a place,” he said. “But my truck is still on Broadway.”

“Mr. Compton—”

“I do what I do,” he said, interrupting her without any apparent regret, a glimmer of that hard exterior back in play. “I don’t need to talk to your boss about it.”

One look at his mouth gone from rakish grin to hard line, his eyes regarding her with flat decision behind them, and she decided...
not now.

It didn’t mean
not later.

* * *

Devin almost remembered the sand-colored hybrid sitting in his driveway. He definitely remembered the blood-soaked blanket he found in the foot well of the passenger side; he tossed it to the side of his house and said, “I’ll replace that.”

“No,” she said faintly, watching him as if she’d forgotten about the blanket altogether and now wished it hadn’t been sitting in her car all night. “Please don’t think twice about it.”

Interesting woman. So polite, so carefully and quietly spoken. And yet the night before, she’d had that grit behind her. She’d fought back; she’d acted with a certain quick efficiency that spoke of habits ingrained. Old or current, he didn’t know.

And she’d stayed with him. Not that he’d wanted it, with his mind and body searing against the growing influence of the blade. But she’d done it, and she’d fought back then, too—against things she didn’t even understand.

She still fought back. Still trying to reconcile the situation in which she found herself, emotions just barely peeking out and then sublimating again. Trying to find the right steps on a path for which no one could have prepared her.