Deb.
That’s what her shirt had said, clear and plain.
Her eyes had been a different story—shouting out mixed and shifting messages. Light brown eyes in a collection of interesting features—a nose with a bit of a bump, chin just a little bit square, and a sweet and cautious smile. But those light brown eyes had done their best to hide from him, as they always did—looking away when he came in, looking down, looking busy.
And then, finally, yesterday she’d been caught in conversation—and to judge by her expression, caught was the word for it.
Never mind what had happened next—the invading connection of the demon blade. What the hell? he thought, and not for the first time. What the everlasting bloody hell?
It had surprised him as much as her; it had snatched him up and very nearly carried him away. The feel of her, so very real; the sound of her, right there in his ear; the very scent of her–
Yeah, the ride home hadn’t been a comfortable one.
Not that Alex could blame her for her reaction—not for her previous reticence or her response to that startling moment. Any wise woman would run from what that cursed blade had made of him.
The blade sat in its favorite spot, its favorite form—the Sgian Dubh. Hidden not in his stocking like a proper Scottish knife, but tucked at the small of his back where it somehow never lost purchase. And while it could take any form it pleased, when it pleased, it usually stuck to the basics—the Sgian Dubh, a basket hilt-sword, a dirk... sometimes even a claymore, but only when it was showing off.
All Scottish. Alex had no idea why, not during the years since it had bonded to him, not through the times it had pushed him, prodded him, shoved him into danger... saved him from it. Just as he had no idea what had made the blade, or what had made it choose him.
He only knew for certain what it had done to him.
So did Deb at AutoStock, to judge by the look of her. And she had helped him in spite of it.
Yesterday morning, he’d pulled into this parking lot sicker than expected, full of the blade’s healing burn and too broken to fake it as he’d planned. Today he parked with only a fading tingle along his bones, a lingering stiffness in his muscles. He dismounted from his bike and stretched, glancing into the store to find her watching him through that big plate glass window.
She instantly looked away.
“Not this time,” he murmured, holding his gaze on her until she looked up and found him again, and her eyes widened—understanding the message. Yes, I’m here for you.
He flipped open the Magna’s saddlebag and removed the flowers he’d brought—spring snapdragons and daisies, with the tough winged stems and delicate flowers of sweet pea interspersed. Courtesy of his duplex neighbor, a young single mother who’d come to appreciate that his nighttime prowling, once frightening to her, did in fact help keep her safe.
Deb looked at the flowers... looked back to his face... looked at the flowers... and yes, looked away again.
He opened the door with a much closer approximation of his usual manner than the day before—but didn’t get any further.
The formerly neat store was a shambles, wiper fluid jugs scattered and broken across the floor, the rotating air freshener display tipped over and tiny lightbulbs scattered across the counter. The blade warmed at his back, pulling darkness into the edges of his thoughts.
And Deb’s reaction to his arrival—that was more than just dismay. Her clear olive complexion was pale, and her hair—normally pulled back in a tumble of a ponytail, the offside part dictated by a cowlick in that espresso-dark hair—disheveled.
Quietly, he set the flowers on the counter. “You okay?”
She said, “You need to leave now.”
“Oh, no,” he said, gently implacable. “I think here is exactly where I need to be.”
Her words came of desperation—and he saw it then, that she feared what he would only escalate whatever had happened. “You don’t understand—”
“More than you know.” Even if the blade hadn’t warned him—and whatever was happening, he suspected that was because she was here—safe—with him. And that the blade seemed, in fact, to have some sort of crush on her.
He had no doubt it was responsible for what had passed between them. No matter that it had never done anything of the sort before—although since the night Alex had found the blade in his hand and in his mind, it had driven him. From place to place, from deep night action to roadside rescues—looking for harm and hate and sorrow, hunting bullies and bad guys and evil. A vigilante, that blade—and glorying in the blood it drank along the way.
Not a thing of goodness. Just a thing that had found a way to get what it wanted.
He pushed the flowers in her direction. “These are for you, by the way. Thank you.”
Judging by the blush now on her high cheeks, her thoughts had matched his, going to that moment when the blade had connected them. Then her eyes widened and she spoke without thinking. “You don’t mean—that is, you mean... the cop... ”
He offered her the faintest of grins. “I mean the cop.”
But she winced, then, as the sounds of a break room vending machine under attack reached the front of the store.
Ah.
He reached for the hilt of the Sgian Dubh, unsheathing. It warmed further in his grip, reshaping—flashing a glimmer of blue lightning even in daylight. Deb frowned slightly, clearly not sure if she’d seen what she thought she’d seen—and by the time Alex brought the thing down against his thigh, the blade had rearranged itself into a stout collapsible baton.
The blade’s way of showing off. Not quite Scottish at that.
“Stay here,” he told her, not heeding the harsh edge to his voice, or the note of command he had no right to give. He didn’t care.
“You don’t understand,” she said, more fervently than before. She did an end-run around the stubby L-shape of the counter and put herself in his way. “You need to go. He’s here because of—” And then she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.
He got it anyway. “Because of me.” He shouldn’t have been surprised—he was. He shouldn’t have felt the fury of it, after the number of times he’d dealt with just this—he did. He shouldn’t have felt the weight of it, adding to what already lived on his shoulders.
He did.
“You need to go.” She lowered her voice—wincing as the vending machine crashed to the floor in the break room. “Someone’s looking for you—saw you here the other day. This guy wants the receipt from your purchase—the address.”
Of course he did.
She said, her voice even lower, “He’s just trying to intimidate me. If you go, nothing will come of it.”
“Because you don’t intimidate easily,” he said, filling in those blanks.
Something flashed in her eyes. “I intimidate at the drop of a hat,” she told him, unexpectedly harsh. “But I’ll get over it.” Her gaze raked over him, growing more uncertain as it hesitated where his eyebrow had split, but now showed only a faint gap in the hair. “Don’t even think about it. I saw what you looked like yesterday.”
“I got over it,” he said, deliberately echoing her words.
“If you go,” she repeated desperately, “nothing will come of it.”
Another vending machine crashed to the floor—the soda machine, to judge by the tremendous bounce and rattle of cans.
Deb flinched at the sound, and Alex’s temper snapped. “Something has already come of it,” he growled at her, and the blade latched onto his intent, warming to his hand in its baton form... full of guile and thirst. Leaving her protest in his wake, he headed for the break room.
~o0o~
Deb should have stayed where she was. She should have called the cops, she should have called her manager from his lunch run. She should have done a lot of things.
She surely knew better than to follow on the heels on the man named Alex Donnally—a man with violence in his eye and violence written on his body—even if it had, astonishingly, somehow almost healed from the bruises and cuts she’d spotted yesterday.
She found Alex in the break room with the baton held low, his shoulders filling the doorway. He didn’t give the corn-fed tough guy in the room a chance to respond to his presence. He said, low and hard, “If you touch her, you’re dead.”
A derisive snort met his words, and a midwestern Ohio drawl. “Like the other night? When we took you down? We could have killed you then.”
“If you could have, you would have,” Alex said, no particular concern in his words. “I’m telling you this—you don’t touch her. If you and your boys feel the need to teach me a lesson, you come to me.”
“This is your lesson,” the guy said, and kicked something inside the room—a chair, Deb thought, flinching back against the wall. It was easy to picture the scene—beefy ex-football player grown into a town tough, his light brown hair shorn close, his features crude, and his expression full of the bully. “You stay out of our business, or we’ll get into yours.”
“My business,” Alex said, “is to stop your business. Or I can stop you. Either way.”
Who were they? What business? Surely she hadn’t ended up in the middle of a turf war...
Another snort from the bully. “We can take care of this right now.”
“Your choice,” Alex said, and he went into motion. The guy shouted; metal clattered to the floor. A chair, plastic and metal, bounced off the wall and rebounded into those on the floor, a clash and skitter that momentarily overrode the impact of flesh on flesh—swift, precise blows, the thwack of the baton—a cry of pain and a moment of cessation, with nothing but heavy breathing she somehow knew didn’t come from Alex.
“The other night,” Alex said, “you had some luck. It won’t happen again. The other night, I didn’t kill anyone. I wouldn’t count on that happening again, either.”
Just as she’d seen, barely hidden in him at all. Violence in his eye, violence written on his body.
Deb crept closer, getting an angle on the room as Alex shifted aside, leaving the tough guy a path to the back exit. Alex said, “I know you don’t believe me yet. But you will.” And then, so casually, he crouched beside a spatter of blood—a glimpse of the tough guy told that tale. Mouth bleeding, hairline streaming blood, one wrist clutched in the other hand.
Instead of a baton, Alex now held out a knife. A little hand knife, antler for the hilt and a shimmery temper line along the spine—the details more visible from here than they ought to be. And though the guy stiffened, Alex only laid the blade of the knife flat against the spattered blood, even as more of it trickled down the tough’s face and soaked into his shirt.
Deb frowned, baffled.
But when Alex lifted the knife, the blood was gone.
Gone.
“It wants more,” Alex said, his voice gone soft and deadly. “If you catch my drift. So you go back to your guys and decide if this is really something you want to do—or if maybe it’s time to get out of the prescription street drug business.”
The tough gathered himself. “That knife,” he said, spitting blood in a defiant gesture, “won’t stop a bullet.”
“Not if there’s anyone left who can still fire a gun,” Alex agreed. He stood up—stood back, while the tough guy straightened and, glancing warily behind at every step, found the exit. Took it.
Alex tucked the knife away at the small of his back, leaving only a diminutive curve of antler above his waistband. He straightened the chairs, pushing them against the wall to make the toppled vending machines more accessible—paying no apparent attention to Deb as she stood outside the door, stiffly clenching her fists at her sides.
When he turned to her, it was with an expression both resigned and rueful. He didn’t say anything, coming up to the door—just stood there, his gaze roaming her face—hesitating at the scar in her brow, the barely crooked path of her nose, the subtle misalignment of her jaw that made her lower lip faintly more prominent than her upper.
She couldn’t begin to hide her response to him... or her apprehension.
The look on his face said he knew what she’d seen, and how she’d reacted to it. He reached out, slowly enough to make it all right, resting his knuckles against her chin and his thumb against the soft fullness of her lower lip, there where the misalignment was just barely evident. “I understand,” he told her—standing taller than she’d expected, leaning just close enough so she thought—her body thought—he might just kiss her. And her body, ever so slightly, shifted up to meet him.
But he only said it again—somehow both apology and promise. “I understand.”
And his thumb trailed away, and his touch disappeared to leave her chin bereft, and he left.
Deb touched the tingling spot on her lip. For the first time in a long time, she understood nothing of herself at all.
~o0o~
On the checkout counter, she found a business card. Just a number. Not even a name. On the back, it said If you need me.
She intended no such thing.
Too late.
The next day, she came back from the stock room with a box of fancy new super-chamois to shelve, and she found a daisy on the counter.
Sharp dark eyes, sharp jaw and lean, mean bad-boy carriage...
She tried not to think of the memories that couldn’t possibly be hers, the lingering sensations and the yearning for more.
The day after that, she found a small cluster of delicate purple-blue snapdragons sitting on a local newspaper. It lay folded to a police blotter page, which held a description of a bust from the day before. A big one for this family farm town: a local cluster of young men caught dealing prescription drugs to farm town high-schoolers. They’d been caught on an anonymous tip—almost as if they’d been set up, said an unnamed source from within the police station. Except for several of the toughest members, who had simply disappeared.
Deb pondered that for a few moments—and pondered the message. You’re safe.
But...
Violence written in his eye; violence written on his body...
The sight of a knife that drank blood.
She shivered. And she didn’t think those missing men would be found.
And then she touched the flower. Gently. Absorbing the contrasts of the man... trying to reconcile them.
As if her body didn’t already know.
Except when she flipped the weekly paper out to lie flat, she forgot about the flower. She simply stared in dismay.
For there she was, in living black-and-white—a picture she hadn’t even known had been taken. In it, her manager stood before the checkout counter with arms crossed in a proud defiance, the chaos of the vandalism scattered in the background... and Deb, perfectly placed amongst it, a slender figure in profile reaching to straighten a display.
She recalled the reporter’s interest, coming in after the cops who’d taken the report had left. She’d still been dazed—and she’d had no idea the reporter had included her in the token defiant victim shots, small-town vandalism making the front page.
A day of violence. A day of flowers. A day of revelation and exposure.
Flowers on the first day. Flowers and news on the second.
And on the third, her ex-boyfriend found her.