The Given

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After Dennis left to get the car, Grif retraced his steps back to the tables where Larry and Eric waited. He thought about drugging them again, but decided against it when he looked into their gazes and saw the resignation there. They were defeated and knew it. All that was left was to bundle them up and roll them out.

Grif uncuffed the smaller Eric first, and then kept hold of Larry’s arm as he straightened and jerked his head to the door. That’s when he stumbled and swayed. It was a tossup as to who was more surprised, the men hemmed in by the tables or Grif, suddenly braced against them. He tried to shake his head of it, this fugue that hadn’t so much crept up on him as it had sprung in an unexpected attack.

The two men needed no more encouragement than that.

Grif had time to turn his head, though it was in the wrong direction and all he caught was a glimpse of Eric’s teeth—straight as railroad ties—before catching Larry’s knuckles as well. The blow caught him square, he didn’t even have time to back away, though his legs had already quit working in any case. They were ensnared in plasmic chains that only he could see, banded silver coils pulling tight, as if meant to tie him to the tracks. Two of the three tables toppled, pinning Grif to the ground, and then a chair thrown from overhead crashed into his skull.

A spear of light tore through his vision, either from the blow or the front door as Larry and Eric fled. All Grif saw after that were twilight grays rushing him as the blood in his borrowed flesh tingled, zinging through his limbs and pooling in his toes. The bar shimmered and lost its shape. Movement undulated from the corner of his eye, and Grif gasped as more plasma rushed him, a flood now.

Grif lost all control of his body then, his limbs shorting out like faulty electrical wires. His eyes were open, he was sure, yet they were also rolled far back into his battered skull. A thrumming reverberated around him, which he registered as his heartbeat, but even that knowledge couldn’t touch him. Plasma soaked into his pores, sizzled in his brain, and burrowed between the folds of his mind to separate past from present like playing cards divided into two different piles.

Then it began to burn. Flames roared to life in his skull with a searing crackle, a crescendo that whipped down to fill his chest. It was as if he were centered in a fire, burning like a dry log, and just when he thought he would die of the anguish, his body temperature plummeted, and his veins hardened in an arctic freeze. The abruptness stole his breath . . . and whisked him away where plasma could no longer reach him.

And then he was there. Feet planted firmly on the Surface, he glanced around and saw that he was no longer in the bar but on a garden path, standing in a night that was quiet but for the soft chirping of crickets and a woman’s tipsy laughter. He turned without willing it, as if a giant hand were swiveling him around on a platform.

When he stopped, Evie was beckoning to him and smiling as she reached for his hand. “Come on, Griffin.”

She pulled him forward. Into the past.

The horseshoe-shaped courtyard of the Marquis Hotel and Casino was exactly the same, and so were they; young and comfortably entwined as they headed to their bungalow. The room had been comped by Sal DiMartino, he remembered. A thank-you for saving his niece. This time, however, Grif was also burdened with the knowledge that he was about to die.

Though Grif had recovered this particular memory before, he’d never experienced it with such remarkable clarity. The surrounding foliage shimmered with the green of a storm-laden rain forest, while the path before him was bone-white, sparking beneath the full moon, but both fell flat compared to the blinding white-blond hair of the woman in front of him—the one he’d loved and lost and sought for the whole of the last fifty years.

“Evie,” he said breathlessly.

She turned to face him fully this time. She had rose-petal lips and a dress that matched, and the lacquer on her fingers glinted in the cold light. With the hindsight of a Centurion, Grif tried to stop himself from continuing his death march, but for all his angelic powers, he couldn’t change the past. Evie laughed and pulled him toward her, bumping his hip with hers and murmuring into his ear. He laughed just as he had the first time, though inside he was sobered with the dark knowledge that he would be dead within minutes.

Evie’s heels click-clacked over the bright path, each step a rocket going off in his mind. “I have plans for you, Griffin, my dear.” Her eyes glinted with promise, and their wedding bands tapped gently together. He remembered this, too, because it’d been the last time he’d felt this band on his finger. It would disappear before he took his final breath.

“This is our night, Griffin,” she said, just as she had the first time. “All your attention of late has been on the DiMartino case, but now it’s over. We won.”

“I think the real winners are the DiMartinos,” Grif said, yet he still glowed with her praise. He was pleased to have solved the case, and proud to have delivered Mary Margaret DiMartino into her mother’s waiting arms.

“Oh, sure,” Evie said, as the intricate brick face of their bungalow came into view. “The Salernos won’t be bothering them for some time . . . but I don’t want to talk about the Salernos or the DiMartinos anymore. Tonight belongs to us.”

“You smell like lilacs,” Grif murmured, when she tucked her head beneath his chin, cuddling in tight as he shoved the key into the lock.

“And soon I’m going to smell like you.” She tilted her head up to kiss him as the door swung open, and they pushed into the room blindly. All over again—despite the passing of fifty years—he was hungry for her mouth, her tapered neck, those limbs, which twined and tangled with his own. They wrapped around his body, and he drove her up against the wall. He was thinking of taking her here, like this, hard like she sometimes liked it, and he didn’t think she’d mind. Not given the way her hands were pulling him tightly against her sweet, smooth curves.

He was just wondering if he’d had too much to drink, and worrying that he might somehow be a disappointment to her, when a footstep fell behind him. He turned in time to catch a shadowed movement, a sliding darkness in the shape of a man; fast, certain . . . not a shadow at all.

Evie was yanked from him, and suddenly it was his back against the wall. He pushed off, instinctively trying to create space between him and their attacker, but made a sound he didn’t recognize when white heat pierced the center of his body. Glancing down, he spotted the handle of a butcher’s knife protruding from his belly. He wondered briefly how it got there, and then looked up into dark eyes that were too wide, and a face that was too young, with cheeks still carrying the whisper of baby fat.

“Tommy?” Grif said, and then glanced back down at the knife, trying to put two and two together.

“You hurt my baby sister, you son of a bitch,” Tommy DiMartino said, and for the first time Grif saw what he was holding, waving, in his other hand. A child’s doll with strangely sparkling eyes.

I want Cissy. Please, Mr. Shaw. I need my Cissy. My doll.

We’ll get your doll, baby. But for now, you have to be quiet.

“You can’t do what you did and expect to get away with it,” Tommy said, and Grif found himself thinking, You’re right. I should have found Mary Margaret’s doll for her.

Too late now. He looked over to find Evie standing just out of arm’s reach, arms up in surrender, mouth open as she stared not at Grif’s face but at his belly. Wincing, Grif looked down again as his stomach began to burn. The blade wobbled as he stumbled back, which he found disturbing. It looked all wrong just protruding there.

“This isn’t mine,” he slurred dumbly, feeling something rising inside of him, like a tidal wave shoving upward through his body, and catching in his throat. He had the fleeting thought that he might just drown in his own body, and, panicking, pulled the blade from his belly so that all that choking warmth immediately fell, pooling over his wrists.

It’s not blood, he thought, head going light. It couldn’t be blood. It was just more of those moving shadows.

Grif looked up again to find that Tommy’s face had gone white. He stuttered this time, but still waved the doll at Grif, like it was some sort of talisman, fending him off. Its odd eyes sparkled, winking at Grif, even in the dark. “You fucking deserve it, you kiddie-molester. You—”

I need to get that doll for Mary Margaret, Grif thought, lunging for it. After all, he’d promised. But Tommy jerked back, holding on to it tight, and suddenly Grif’s wrists were covered in blood. Evie screamed, and Tommy roared, and it reminded Grif of his army days—stepping into the ring in the summer heat, the men chanting his name as he faced some other pugilist, hand-to-hand, as men should. One-two, one-two-three-four.

The flurry of jabs and hooks automatically came back to him, and with a final mean uppercut Grif snapped back to find a Tommy-shaped outline lying stark against the white marble floor. His black driving gloves were still wrapped around Mary Margaret’s Cissy doll.

A doll, Grif realized, blinking, with diamonds for eyes.

Then Evie screamed again, and Grif felt his skull pop open like a can. He dropped and suddenly found himself face-to-face with Tommy’s unblinking gaze. Evie fell between them with a grunt and a thud, her cheek landing in a puddle of blood. Grif realized it was where he had been standing when he’d pulled the blade from his gut. And now she was lying in it, eyes fastened on his, shock forcing those chocolate irises wide with horror and tears. “Damn it. Griffin, no . . .”

She reached for him and he tried to do the same, and he finally felt her fingertips curl again around his left hand. Squeezing tight, she tried to pull him close. “Griffin,” she said, and his name echoed in his brain like a train rattling on its tracks.

“Griffin.” The rattling intensified, pushing apart the sides of his skull. Keep your head together, he thought, then convulsed with the black humor.

Grif’s life poured out over the floor.

“Griffin, dear,” she repeated, one last time, clinging fast to his numbing fingertips. “Why do you . . . ?”

But another voice filled his head just then, overwhelming the rattling and Evie and the past. “Dude. Dude!”

Hold on, he thought, reaching for Evie. Yet the voice ripped through him, clean as a butcher’s blade through the belly, cleaving the past from the present. His eyes rolled back around and he found himself nose-to-nose with the bartender, who was peering into his face with too-wide eyes. He ignored the man and pushed to his knees, and though he already knew it was futile, his gaze shifted to the ring finger of his left hand. There was nothing there.

“Where?” he rasped to the bartender.

The man didn’t have to be asked twice. “Out the front,” he replied, offering Grif a hand.

Grif accepted the help up, and when he was steadied, said, “Go tell Dennis they’re gone.”

The bartender just nodded—knowing questions could wait—and Grif staggered to the front door. He whipped it open and had to shield his eyes from the burn of the harsh daylight. When they’d finally acclimated, he realized he was leaning against the bar’s unlikely guard—a tiki god the circumference of a redwood, with a carved mouth large enough to swallow Grif whole. He pushed away from it to scan the lot at the same time that the telltale creak of wood sounded over his shoulder.

“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing his pounding head.

“What’s wrong, Shaw?” The sound, wood straining against its own grain, slivered through the late-afternoon air. “Can’t take a dose of your own medicine?”

Sighing, Grif turned to face the twelve-foot tiki god. The surface of the whittled face had already shifted to take on Sarge’s features, though the wood was carved in the wrecked mien of his most recent visage, the face ruined by emotion. Grif briefly wondered if Sarge’s old face was gone for good.

“How much do you know?” Grif asked, rocking back on his heels.

“When it comes to those in my charge, I know all.”

“Know, but don’t tell,” Grif scoffed, and put his hand on the door. He’d had enough of this creature’s games. “I’m going back inside.”

“But don’t you want to ask your question first?”

Grif glanced back at the hunk of wood.

“The one that’s worrying you beneath that sore knot on your head.”

He meant how did Larry, a mere human, manage to hit him? Why had he grown dizzy? How could he have not seen it coming?

Because Grif had been looking for the man to strike. Looking . . . and yet unable to stop it.

“How you been feeling lately, Shaw?”

“Fine.” But other than the flash of heat that then swerved into a biting cold—the agony of the newly returned memory—he was hardly feeling a thing at all. Yeah, he was trying to keep his feelings for Kit at bay, but it was more than that. He actually felt drained. Numbness had been pressing at his skull from the moment he’d awoken today.

A creaking sound, as Sarge gave the tiki equivalent of a shrug. “That’ll change soon. In another day you’ll start having problems with your five senses, one at a time at first, but they’ll all worsen.”

“Why?”

“The prophecy, Shaw.”

The prophecy.

Reunite with your true love before the anniversary of your death . . . or all is Lost.

That was it. Reunite with the woman he loved. Do it before the anniversary of his death . . . or be whisked back to the Everlast for his mind to be stripped down so he wouldn’t even know himself.

“You can’t keep ignoring it.” And the carved holes where Sarge’s eyes should have been pulsed with pity. “You’re weakening, Shaw. Your celestial strength is fleeing you. Nobody in the Everlast expected you to still be here a full year after your return.”

“So they were wrong.”

“But you’re not a stone, Shaw. You’re not meant to last on the Surface forever. Like all living things, you have an expiration date. Yours happens to be the fifty-first anniversary of the day you died. That’s why the date was referenced in your prophecy. As soon as you’ve reached the exact date and time of your return . . . you’ll start the Fade.”

“Even though I’m wearing flesh?” Grif’s heart thudded so hard in his chest that he heard it in his ears. The Fade only occurred after death. So . . . “I’m dying?”

“As soon as you’re born,” Sarge said, as annoyingly cryptic as ever. Then the giant head tilted. “However, in your case it’s not the flesh that’s deteriorating. It’s your angelic side. After all, you know as well as I do, Pures were never meant for this world.”

Grif focused, did a mental countdown. “But that’s only one more day.”

Sarge shrugged again. The wood groaned. “If you haven’t satisfied the prophecy by that time, you never will.”

So he’d just Fade away instead. His body would weaken until he caught back up to Zicaro and everyone else from his first life. Only he wouldn’t take fifty years to get there. He’d manage it in a single day.

“And then back to the Everlast,” Grif muttered. “A full Centurion once again.”

Sarge barked out a laugh, and it sounded like bushes rattling. “After all the trouble you’ve caused? No. The Host won’t allow that. What would keep you from just repeating your mistakes?”

“So another wash through the forgetful chamber,” Grif muttered.

“That’s right. Back to incubation.” The tiki mouth re-formed into a wide grin, but Grif had a feeling Sarge was watching him carefully. “And this time they’re going to recycle your soul.”

Grif froze. “No.”

No way. He didn’t want to come back to this blasted mudflat as another person entirely. He wasn’t perfect, and not remotely a good angel, he knew that. But at least the memories in his head were his own, as were his thoughts and feelings. This was his life.

“Your time left on the Surface can now be counted in hours” was all Sarge said. “I’d use it wisely if I were you.”

But to do what? Help Kit find out who killed her father fourteen years earlier? Find out who killed Barbara? Or try to find Evie?

But then he thought of leaving Kit again, forever this time, and closed his eyes as everything else dropped away. These were all epic questions, and the last had consumed him for half a century, yet what would it matter if he ever solved them or not?

Without Kit, he wondered, what the hell was the point?

“Now you’re asking the right question,” Sarge said approvingly, but when Grif opened his eyes, the great wooden gaze had gone flat again, and the tiki god was once more a mere statue.

Kit drove blindly, hands shaking on the slim mahogany steering wheel, eyes too wide in the rearview mirror. She didn’t know where Grif was, and had no way to get a hold of him, so she veered toward Marin’s town house and the only family she had left. Panic was growing inside of her, pushing at the edges of her psyche and threatening to attack. She had to get somewhere where she felt protected and safe.

She was still shaking as she knocked on Marin’s door, one arm clutched about her middle. When Marin answered, she took one look at Kit and pulled her inside her home, into her arms. Amelia strode into view behind her, and there might as well have been an audible click as the woman’s professional mask slid over her face. She took hold of Kit’s arm and led her into the kitchen. She must, Kit decided, look worse than she’d thought.

“Sit here,” Amelia ordered, already pushing Kit onto a high-backed stool. “I’ll get my bag.”

She left soundlessly and returned the same way. She must have kept her doctor’s bag close, and Kit thought about how nice it must be to always be ready for an emergency. The thought surprised a laugh from her, and she smothered the sound with one hand. Marin looked panicked.

So Amelia was the one who asked, “What happened?” as she pulled Kit’s hand away to treat it first. Kit stared down in surprise. Where had the blood come from? She didn’t remember cutting it.

“Katherine!” Her aunt’s voice, strong and familiar, snapped her back to the present, and she was suddenly directly in front of Kit, blocking Amelia’s ministrations and cupping Kit’s cheeks. “Tell us what happened.”

Pretend you’re pitching a story, Kit thought, closing her eyes. Like you’re angling for a lead at the paper. Make it good.

So, leaving out the part about seeing her best friend outfitted in wings and stardust, Kit told them about going to see Ray at the club, emphasizing that it was a public space, open at the time, and that she’d felt relatively safe given their previous encounters.

“You were obviously mistaken about that,” Marin snapped, the bite back in her tone, criticism crowding out her worry. She was recovering more quickly than Kit, and that pissed Kit off. She wouldn’t have had to go to Ray, or ask about the past, if Marin had been straight with her last night. “Why would you want to meet with him at all?”

“Because of you,” Kit answered coolly, and was pleased when Marin gaped. “I asked you about the old feud between the DiMartinos and the Salernos last night. You told me that some things were better left buried. That’s how I knew exactly where to look.”

Marin’s lips thinned as she ran a hand over her head, causing her hair to stick up in spikes.

“He killed my father, Marin,” Kit said, before her aunt could speak. Holding out her left palm so that Amelia could clean it, she studied her aunt’s reaction. Had she known that all along and not told Kit? “Ray DiMartino said that the police were called to his father’s house fourteen years ago on a day that a woman named Gina Alessi showed up. There was talk of a map leading to stolen jewels. Jewels that had been missing since 1960. When one of those officers, my father, left with Gina, Ray followed.”

Marin had stilled in place, and now only her mouth moved. “He said that?”

Who’da thought I’d be using the same gun on you fourteen whole years after I killed your father?

Kit shuddered. “Right before he tried to kill me with the exact same gun.”

And Kit didn’t feel any different, or better, for having solved the mystery. Maybe it was still the shock, but she had no sense of peace to replace the wonder that’d always driven her. “Did you know?” she asked Marin, her voice low as she wondered something new. “Did you know that Dad was killed by the son of Vegas’s most notorious mobster?”

“No.”

“But you know why he died. You know what was in those papers he gave you.” Kit angled her head, giving her aunt time to do the right thing, but after just staring back at her, silence stretching for so long that even Amelia’s practiced hands took on a tentative touch, Marin only gritted her teeth.

“I don’t want to lose you, too.”

“But, Marin,” Kit said coldly. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen next.”

And she leaped from the barstool, snatching her keys from the counter as she yanked away from Amelia. She only paused at the kitchen’s threshold long enough to spare Marin one hard backward glance, and was gratified to see that it was now her aunt who was white-faced and too-still. “The truth, Marin. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“And are you willing to die for it?”

“I’m willing to live for it,” Kit retorted, swinging back around and down the entryway. Her point was already made, but she slammed the door behind her anyway, and hurried down the trio of steps that led to the drive. She was so focused, so furious, that she hadn’t realized Amelia had followed until a hand touched her shoulder.

“It’s just me,” the woman said, holding up her palms and taking a step back. She didn’t know Kit, and maybe Marin hadn’t yet told her that Kit wouldn’t hurt a fly.

No, she thought, heart collapsing in on itself. Not a fly . . . just the mob-rat that had killed her father.

“She loves you so much,” Amelia tried, tucking a soft wisp of blond hair behind one ear. “She’s only trying to protect you.”

Kit knew that. She huffed and climbed behind the wheel of her car anyway.

“I’ll try to talk to her for you,” Amelia said.

That surprised Kit so much that she almost flooded her engine. “You will?”

Amelia nodded. “I understand why you’re upset . . . and she does, too. No promises, though.”

No, they both knew Marin was too stubborn for promises. Kit nodded once. “Thanks. And for the medical care, too.”

“The blood on your face was just . . . spatter.” Amelia blew out a breath. “I didn’t get to the scrapes on your knees, though. You’ll need to take care of them when you get home.”

Kit drove by rote, looking neither left nor right, and not glancing down until she hit the first stoplight. It was only then that she felt the burn in her skinned knees, as if viewing the injuries was what made them exist. There was one cut that was more than a mere scrape, though she could butterfly it easily enough with only a Band-Aid.

But maybe she’d leave it. She had escaped near-death, after all. There should be a reminder of it. Fleur had made her get a tattoo to announce her return to the world after heartache, but maybe surviving near-death required more. Maybe blood and scars were what cemented your refusal to leave it at all. Glancing away from her injuries, Kit drove on.