The Given

CHAPTER TWO

The nightclub possessed the sultry warmth derived from quickened breaths and writhing bodies, along with the irresistible pulse of a rockabilly beat. Yet chills still shot along Kit’s limbs as she walked, keeping to the edges of the dark room while she squinted through stage light and smoke, searching for what she’d lost. There. A glimpse of a broad-shouldered man just before a handful of couples, swinging to surf guitar, obscured her view. Shifting, she spotted him again, wearing a Sinatra suit and a skinny tie, a tilted fedora and beneath that, if she wasn’t mistaken, a smile just for her.

Kit’s breath caught like it’d been snared. She dodged the sweaty limbs of a couple marrying their actions to Imelda May’s bluesy, rasping voice, which soared over the sound system and climbed into their bones. Kit’s heart tripped over itself as she took two more steps directly toward the man, almost a run. Then he closed the distance between them.

Kit recoiled. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Grif.

She missed him like rain. She was as parched as the cold, unyielding desert outside, longing for his voice or touch or anything to make her feel alive, or at least less desiccated. Hating herself for feeling that way, she turned to find a drink. Maybe one of the greasers would buy her a Pabst. She needed something that would go down easy and quickly.

The hand fell on her arm before she could move. The man in the fedora had caught up with her, and his fingertips trailed her wrist. His gaze was bright and playful in a face too youthful yet to be chiseled. His size was close, though. And a slow song was beginning. She might be able to close her eyes and pretend.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked, as she knew he would.

She gave him a gentle smile and wondered how he’d respond if she said, What I’d really like is to die.

Then she shook her head—both an answer and a way to empty her mind of the thought. Kit tried not to think too much these days. She didn’t like where her thoughts led. The man took it well, doffing his hat, offering up a rain check with a shrug, and returning to his crew in the club’s center. Kit smiled wistfully after him. What a life. Checking out Betties, rocking to Elvis, slamming back brew. Kit was not much older than the guy, only thirty, but she felt ancient.

She was wondering when and how that’d happened when she suddenly felt another pair of eyes on her. Searching the room, she found him. Dennis Carlisle. He stood out because, like her, he was the only other person who wasn’t moving. Light rocketed off the planes of his face, and though he otherwise fit in—dressed like a greaser in a white T and cuffed jeans, hair slicked and sideburns long—his rigid stance still reminded her of a police officer. His frown also reminded her that she’d broken his heart by not returning his calls, his texts.

And that, again, reminded her of Grif.

After another moment, Dennis shook his head and sighed. Then he turned away, and Kit just let him go.

“That’s it.” Another hand appeared, this one on the opposite arm, and way less gentle than the first. Kit spun like a top and found herself being dragged directly across the dance floor by Fleur Fontaine, her friend’s steps quick and light in a mermaid-tail dress that sparkled in the strobes. Kit actually stumbled in her vintage peep-toes, trying to keep up.

“What’s going on?” she said, as Fleur pulled her into the side bar. Velvet walls muted the MC’s voice from the other room, along with the upright bass that meant the start of a new set. Seated at a high-top table adorned with a flickering red-domed hurricane lamp were three other of Kit’s besties. Lil DeVille, Charis Cointreau, and Layla Love—new to their inner circle. All sported stage names, de rigueur in the rockabilly subculture where they lived and thrived. False identities . . . for true friends.

Yet she tilted her head as she looked at them now. Despite their smiles, Kit noted concern in their gazes, and that had nerves jumping in her belly. “What is this?”

“This,” Fleur said, depositing Kit dead center, “is an intervention.”

Layla slid a drink across the table. Not a Pabst but a gin fizz. It’d do. Kit picked it up. “What are we intervening . . . in?”

“Not we,” Fleur corrected, then waggled her finger to exclude Kit. “Us.”

Kit set down the drink and rose to leave.

“No.” That firm hand again, pushing her back to her red-cushioned seat. “Hear us out. We love you and if we don’t tell you this shit, who will?”

She placed her hand on her hip. “What shit?” Though she already knew.

“You’re in trouble, Kit-ster,” piped in Charis, eyebrows drawn low beneath Betty bangs. A bright yellow poppy pinned back one side of her dark hair. “You’ve stopped living.”

“I haven’t—”

“You used to laugh—” started Lil, whose own smile lines fanned out in winking flirtation from eyes that were always alight. Except for now, Kit noted.

“You did. All the time,” cut in Fleur, no stranger to fun. None of Kit’s girls were. That’s why they were . . . well, Kit’s.

And now she was mute. She lowered her gaze. She already knew all this.

“You used to smile,” Charis pressed.

But now Kit cried even before she was awake.

She said nothing. She didn’t press back.

That seemed to embolden Fleur. “And you used to dance.”

But Kit couldn’t even imagine that anymore. Sometimes she had trouble just getting to her feet in the morning. Forget the dance floor.

“Talk to us, Kit,” said Layla. She was powdered and dyed into Monroe perfection, and Kit found herself thinking, But you’d never understand. You’re too perfect. Too whole. You’ve never been broken like this. “You used to talk to us.”

But Kit had run out of things to say. For the first time in her life she felt alone, solo in a world she’d once felt a part of, without even the desire for something, someone, more. She was a reporter who dealt in fact and had once believed that the truth really did set you free. But then she learned that the man she loved had a wife who was still alive, and he left Kit to go find her. It hadn’t set her free at all. Instead, it’d set her adrift . . . and now nothing really touched her anymore.

She closed her eyes and lifted her drink. “I know. I’m . . . pitiful. Mooning over a boy. I’m a fucking country song.”

“It’s okay, honey,” Fleur said, voice overly bright now that Kit had said something, anything. “We all know the tune.”

“Sure,” said Layla, edging so close her perfume threatened to clog Kit’s pores. “When I was with Joe I thought I was Eartha Kitt, all ‘C’est Si Bon.’ Then he met someone else and it turned out I was Tammy Wynette. ‘Stand by Your Man.’ ”

She made a gagging motion with her finger, and Kit almost smiled. They were trying so hard.

“Look,” Fleur said, folding her hands over Kit’s. “Griffin Shaw is just one man. One of millions who are just waiting out there for you to either moon over them or break their hearts. I bet there’s some greaser in the other room right now who would be willing to take you for a swing and heal that beautiful heart.”

Kit thought of Dennis, how patient he’d been with her, how he’d waited for her to turn her mind from Grif and finally choose him. That patience had eventually snuffed out, along with the expectation that lighted his gaze whenever he looked at Kit. He was right to turn his back on her. He knew that Kit’s heart was a seeping wound.

Kit thought about playing along just to end this uncomfortable conversation. She could flash her own dazzling smile—God knew she was good at hiding behind that—but these were her best friends, the girls who knew of her frailty and faults, and loved her anyway. If she didn’t share what she was feeling with them, who would ever really know her?

“Look,” she said, leaning over the table. The other four women did the same, closing rank in a tight huddle. “I used to think I understood the world at large just because I got paid to report it. I thought I could intuit a person’s motives by merely adjusting the focus of my critical lens. Zoom in close enough and any news story will reveal itself. I trusted my gut. I always sought and spoke the truth. And I believed that most people out there were like me, like you.” She gestured to them all. “Good people who treated others the way they want to be treated. Who wished strangers well and meant it. Who took joy in the simplest things . . .”

And these girls did. They understood the glory in one blade of grass, a singular sparrow’s song . . . a kiss truly meant and felt. If Kit could exist on such simple fuel—and do it after she’d endured the illness and death of one parent and the murder of the other—then other people out there must as well, right?

“And then Nic died.”

If someone took a picture of their tight huddle just then, they’d have been mistaken for pin-ups of the past. Sad ones. Every one of the women froze, a stillness Kit broke with the shake of her head. “And I realized that some people victimize others just because they can. They use their power to manipulate the young.”

Like Caleb Chambers had, until Grif and she had stopped him.

“Or feed a junkie’s addictions just to line their pockets with green.”

Like two warring drug lords had . . . until Grif and she had stopped them, too.

Or tear two people who loved each other apart, Kit thought. Just because they could.

She thought of the angel, the Pure, whom they hadn’t been able to stop at all.

“I thought that I could stop some of that. That I could make a difference.”

And perhaps it’d seemed obscene to God, and all His winged monsters in heaven. The so-called Pure. Because what did she get for trying to live her best life daily? For loving a man who suddenly appeared before her, and for wanting love in return?

“I was betrayed. I was abandoned. I was left worse than when He found me.”

The girls thought she meant Grif, and all began babbling at once, trying to console her. Kit let them, because there was no explaining what she knew of the Everlast and of the Pure and of Griffin Shaw’s true nature. And she really didn’t know how to state that she’d very simply lost her faith—in the truth, in the world, and in God.

Kit had been holding her drink throughout the telling, but she put it down now, because even though it was wet, she knew it would taste dry. “I’m going home.”

“Wait. We’re sorry,” Fleur said, trying to pull her back to her seat. “We won’t talk about Griffin Shaw, or men at all. Just . . . stay.”

“Someday,” Kit promised, and folded her hands atop Fleur’s for a brief moment. She meant it, too. She was still optimistic enough to believe she’d feel better someday. “But not tonight.”

She simply didn’t feel like dancing.

She didn’t look back as she left the side lounge, returning to the main club, where a sole male crooner was singing over the heads of a crowd of couples. You could choke on the pheromones rising in that room, and the hope in it—the life and the joy—had Kit rushing to the front door, which a man dressed like a fifties bellhop held open with a smile. Only when the cold night air finally hit her heated cheeks did she dare take a breath, though she kept up her pace until she’d reached her vintage Duetto and opened the door.

Then a silence closed in around her, a too-heavy blanket that made her ears want to pop. She whirled, searching, sure someone was watching her—from the doorway of the club, from behind the building, from within the cars around her.

Nothing.

She gave the lot one more scan, then huffed, sending a white puff of air into the night before climbing in behind the steering wheel of her car. There was nothing out there, she thought, as the car rumbled to life. At least, not for her.

How’s the head, Shaw?”

Stars, the imagined kind, floated and swirled before Grif’s eyes in a pattern that made his stomach flip and churn. He bit back bile and groaned in annoyance. He recognized that voice. Tilting his head in the direction from which it’d sounded, Grif caught a burst of bright light between his slitted lids before everything went black and vision again slid away. Blinders.

The voice, Sarge’s, tsk-tsked. “The flesh. It’s just so weak.”

That steeled Grif’s resolve, and he managed to sit up straight. “Does God know you’re knocking His children around like this?”

“I never touched you, Shaw.”

“No, you just sent your pretty little lackey to do your dirty work.”

“So sorry to interrupt your life-in-progress. I know how busy you’ve been trying to find out who killed you.”

“Sarcasm is ugly on the Pure.”

“How do you know? You can’t even see me.”

“Because you attacked me, kidnapped me, and then put blinders on me.” Grif stood up, because he couldn’t just sit and take it, yet his legs swayed.

“I understand you’re upset.”

Upset? Scowling, Grif folded his arms. He’d ceased taking calls from his celestial superior after the Pure had used Kit’s goodness against her. Against them. He wasn’t upset. He was downright furious.

“Please, sit down,” Sarge said, his voice coming from Grif’s left this time.

“Or what?” Grif rounded on the voice, on the Pure angel who’d given him a second chance at life, and then went ahead and destroyed that, too. “You’ll smite me?”

It was hard to toss off a pointed look when he couldn’t see—he couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open—but he gave it a decent try. “You’re a created being who will never know what it is to be born or die. To live or love. You don’t understand a damned thing about how I feel.”

“But I do. At least, I do now.”

Grif neither knew what that meant, nor cared. He just wanted to figure out where he was so he could get out of there, but that wasn’t going to happen until Sarge willed it. So he located the hard surface he’d been propped against when he came to, some sort of giant wooden box, and plopped back down. “Where’s your mercenary little angel?”

“Mr. Naumes was starting the Fade, so Ms. Rockwell had to take him for processing before he washed out completely. She asked me to apologize for the shiner.”

Grif huffed. “No, she didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t,” Sarge admitted. “I didn’t realize when I asked for volunteers that she had her own reasons for offering to secure you.”

That’s because he hadn’t asked Grif, who knew firsthand how fiercely Kit and her friends covered for each other. Even, it seemed, in the Everlast.

“She’ll be punished.”

“Nah, don’t do that.” He had broken Kit Craig’s heart, after all, and he’d feel the same way if he were Nicole. “Let’s just get this over with. What do you want?”

At that, the blindness tore away, stinging like duct tape being ripped from the skin. Grif rubbed his eyes, blinked, and looked around. Wooden cargo boxes, stamped and stacked in neat piles, lined the sides of an oblong room. Everything from ceiling to floor was made entirely of wood. Planks, Grif realized, tapping his feet. The sound was more hollow than he expected, and he frowned as he spotted the netting strung from the low-hanging beams. Thick hemp ropes coiled along the walls, and along with the swaying, it put him in mind of a . . .

“It’s not really a ship,” Sarge said from somewhere behind him. “We’re still in Vegas. Treasure Island, to be exact. It was Rockwell’s idea. We needed someplace central but quiet—though the next pirate show is in an hour, so we should make this quick.”

A pirate show. Grif shook his head. “The Rat Pack would be appalled at the—”

But Sarge stepped into view just then, and Grif’s words cut off in a sharp gasp.

The angel’s once-great arms had shrunken down to a quarter of their former size, and were now spindly, as frail as kindling. His wings were as bald in spots as his head, as if he’d picked and worried those feathers out of place. The remaining plumes had lost their glossy black sheen and lay flat against each other in dull, uneven rows. His skin, once as dark as those onyx wings, was ashy and sagged in all the wrong places, and his frame was more of a reminder of strength than the threat of it.

Sarge’s face had altered the most. His sunken eyes resembled craters and his mouth had collapsed in a permanent frown. Even his nose appeared diminished, great furrows etched from the corner of each nostril down to his mouth. The vertical striations repeated along his cheekbones, fleshy landslides carved into his skin from his eyelids all the way to his chin. Like melted wax, these new features had hardened into a grotesque mask. Only his gaze, mist swirling over shining black marbles, remained the same.

“What the hell happened to you?” Grif whispered, as Sarge drew closer. Sarge was a real angel. He was Pure spirit created from the same worldstuff as Paradise itself. Angels couldn’t die, because they’d never lived, and they couldn’t be injured for the same reason.

So what had happened to Frank?

“Are you even still an angel?” Grif blurted.

“Don’t be stupid,” Sarge snapped back, which actually calmed Grif a bit. Sarge might look different on the outside, but at least he still had the same haughty demeanor.

“Sorry, it’s just that you look . . .” Grif hesitated.

“Say it. I already read it in your mind.”

Grif hated that, so he crossed his arms and did say it. “Puny.”

Sarge’s misshapen jaw clenched, but he leaned against a crate marked EXPLOSIVES and nodded. “I am . . . much diminished.”

“I don’t get it. What happened?” Grif asked again.

“You happened, Shaw,” the new Sarge said, folding his hands in his robe and regarding Grif with that surging gaze. “You and Katherine Craig.”

Grif tried not to look as gut-punched as he felt. Six months. That’s how long since his own name had been coupled with Kit’s. It was also the last time Sarge had appeared on the Surface. Appeared, more important, to Kit, who was sitting vigil over a friend’s deathbed. Angels could possess the bodies of those nearer to death than life—the very old or the very young, the sickly and the dying—even those with bodies weakened with drink or drugs.

Angelic possession usually healed or otherwise improved the life of the host body, but Sarge’s reasons for appearing in Dennis Carlisle’s body hadn’t been altruistic. Dennis, a cop, had taken a bullet meant for Kit, and using Dennis’s body, Sarge had told Kit that her friend would die if she didn’t do exactly what he wanted.

So Kit did. She told Grif—the man she loved, the one she’d saved just as thoroughly as he’d saved her—that Evelyn Shaw was still alive. And Grif—who’d been looking for any sign of his wife for the past fifty years—had left. And Dennis had lived.

“I believed I was doing God’s will,” Sarge said now, following Grif’s thoughts into the past.

“You tricked her.” Bitterness sat like ash on Grif’s tongue. This was really why he hadn’t talked to Sarge—or any of the Pure—for the last six months. Not for his sake. He knew how to be an island. He’d do fine alone. But Kit . . .

“You used her emotions and her natural goodness against her. The finest woman I’ve ever met, one of the people you were created to support and protect, and you manipulated everything that was good in her. You knew she’d do anything to see that Dennis lived.”

Including give up Grif.

“Yes,” Sarge said simply. “And my actions brought you both pain.”

Now Grif opened his eyes. His fists clenched as he stared at the Pure, his biceps twitching. Unfortunately, even in his weakened state, Sarge would see a blow coming. And, of course, he already knew Grif’s thoughts. So, instead, Grif said, “And since when do you care about that?”

Because even though Grif had been gutted, whacked over the head, and buried so deep no one had ever found his bones, what Frank had done to him and Kit was even worse. It was the cruelest thing he’d ever known, and looking at the Pure, he had to wonder if God didn’t feel the same.

“Since I was punished,” Sarge confirmed.

Considering all the ways God doled out punishments—floods and famines, pestilence and disease—Grif almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

“He do that?” Grif jerked his head at Frank’s shorn wings. They’d once soared in beautiful black arches from shoulders that reminded Grif of rocks. Gold-tipped, they’d glinted even in full dark. Now they sprawled in spikes from ashy shoulders that were withered and hunched.

“No. I clipped those myself.”

Like a monk who voluntarily lashed himself until his back seeped with blood, clipping one’s own wings was significant in a way that Grif would likely never understand. It was the most visible aspect of angelic power, and an obvious lessening of status and strength. More than that, the shearing appeared to have changed something on the inside of Frank. Ghosts moved behind his marbleized gaze. Something heavier than gravity turned his mouth low.

Something vital, Grif thought, something Pure, had been lost.

“My job,” Sarge began quietly, “has always been to see that the souls in my care, the Centurions, work through the pain of their own deaths, forget their mortal lives and loves and regrets, and move on to the safety and absolution of God’s presence. I’ve always been able to fulfill my duty. Until you.”

Grif shifted uncomfortably, but Sarge continued.

“I should have known you were different. Your recollection of your life in the fifties was more acute than those possessed by other Centurions. Most have memories like line drawings, scratched in dull pencil, erased and rubbed over a dozen times. But yours burst like hothouse flowers in full bloom. Still, I thought it would be okay. You remembered that you’d been murdered, but you didn’t recall how. I should have told you then that your wife still lived.”

“Yes. You should have.”

Sarge shrugged one shoulder. “It’s not our way to reveal All. We’re concerned with moving souls into Paradise, that’s it. Forcing you to don flesh again and return to the Surface—making you feel the pain of living and dying all over again—was supposed to be a punishment for assisting Nicole Rockwell.”

Grif rubbed the knot on his skull where Nicole had knocked him out. No good deed went unpunished.

“Never did I think that you’d use the free will that comes with being human to try to save those you were only supposed to Take. You should have heard the uproar from the Host when the time for Katherine Craig’s death came and went, and she still lived.”

Grif could only imagine . . . though he still couldn’t bring himself to care. Kit had been alone in her bedroom when two men had broken into her house. Grif had hesitated, he’d watched the plasma swirl about her naked ankles as her attackers closed in, but in the end he couldn’t just sit by and watch her die.

Sarge nodded, following his thoughts. “And then you fell in love. We decided that if we couldn’t force you from the Surface, we could at least use you to find lost souls. Those who hid from their guides. Those who fell prey to the Fallen.”

Grif shuddered. He didn’t even want to think about the ghastly, distorted, and truly evil fallen angels.

“You have to understand,” Sarge was saying, “nobody had ever possessed both angelic power and free will at the same time. You were the first. An angelic human.”

“I was a tool to be used until you didn’t need me anymore.”

Sarge lowered his swirling gaze. “Like I said, my job is to see that all the souls in my care move on to God’s presence.”

And he didn’t care how that got done.

“I was returning to the Everlast when he struck.” Sarge pursed his lips at the memory, his legs loose as he rocked with the ship. “I had just left Dennis Carlisle’s body, and I was so pleased with myself, thinking that you’d find your wife easily and quickly now that Ms. Craig was out of the picture. I was so sure that she was the one standing in the way of your progress. He caught me just as I reached the Gates of the South Wind.”

“Who? God?”

Sarge huffed, a bitter laugh. “Even I haven’t seen His face yet. No, it was Donel. A Seraph.”

The highest of the celestial tribes.

“God uses the Seraphim to settle things . . . in-house, if you will.”

“I thought the archangels were his heavies?”

Sarge shook his head. “Too unpredictable. They’re fanged and untouchable and full of righteousness. Plus, you can’t look them directly in the face.”

“That would make it hard to have a good heart-to-heart.”

Sarge tried to smile, but the grin wobbled on his face. It looked like the action pained him. “Anyway, Donel said he had a message from God. So he grabbed me by my robe and told me to open my mouth.”

“Your mouth?” Grif tilted his head. “Why not your ears?”

“Because messages from God are not something you hear. They’re something you feel.” Sarge swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple moved like a boulder in his throat. “He made me feel it all, Shaw. Everything you’re still angry about. The manipulation and the pain. The cruelty in the way I drove you and Kit apart. As Pures, we are not allowed to help mortals—it intrudes upon their free will. But we’re not allowed to hurt them for the very same reason.”

The thought of it, all that pain and longing and heartache hitting someone all at once, made Grif sag on his feet. And he’d never heard of a Pure feeling true emotion before. After all, they, too, were tools—created for a specific purpose. Life lessons, and the weight of them, were not gifts that God bestowed on mere tools.

Yet not a day went by that Grif, too, didn’t feel the pain caused by Frank’s actions. Who was he to question how God dealt with His creations? So he crossed his arms.

“You want me to say it, don’t you?” Sarge said, and his face contorted in a wry, pained smile.

“Why not?” Grif said. “After all, confession is good for the soul.”

Pures didn’t have souls, but Sarge confessed anyway.

“I could have told you at any point that your wife was still alive, but I guarded that information and used it against you instead.” The words poured from him like they’d been building inside of him all these months. He nearly shouted, as if thrusting the confession at Grif would relieve him of its weight. “I also knew Kit loved you so much that she would insist that you return to that first love. It hurt you both. I hurt you both, and I feel your pain even now.” He paused, then offered Grif another wry smile. “And yes, I feel that, too.”

“What?”

“That.” Sarge lifted a hand, finger shaking with palsy as he pointed at Grif. “The agony of not having seen Ms. Craig in six long months.”

Grif looked away. There was agony, yes. It was sewn across his heart, stitched there in Kit’s initials . . . therefore he rarely bothered anymore about his heart. But the rest of Sarge’s statement wasn’t quite true. He had seen Kit, though she didn’t know it. He’d used his ability to enter and exit buildings undetected to watch her while she slept. He needed to see for himself that she was okay, something that would be easier on them both if she wasn’t awake.

Yet there was torment in that as well. He’d only visited her three times, but on the third he’d been compelled to let her know he was there. She should know he was thinking of her, he’d reasoned. That despite their separation, the need for it, he would always be there.

So he plucked a feather from his wing and left it on the pillow next to her, watching her breath stir the individual vanes, remembering the way it’d once felt on his neck and chest and mouth.

Kit must have remembered, too, because the next time he came to watch her sleep, he found that she’d left him something as well.

The note read:

This isn’t Twilight, and I’m not your Bella. If I catch you stalking me again I’ll pray so hard that your boss in the Everlast will have no choice but to listen. God knows that feathered beast owes me.

Funny how the dearest memories could evoke the exact opposite reaction in people.

“I didn’t know,” Sarge said softly, reading the memory.

No, how could he? He was a created being, not a birthed one. He had the power and intelligence and expanse of the Universe at his disposal, but he was also soulless.

Sometimes, like six months ago, that made him a monster.

“I didn’t know,” Sarge repeated, voice cracking this time, “that love in the heart was as indispensable as breath in the chest.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Grif muttered, feeling his own chest seize up, the stitches coming undone.

“I didn’t know,” Sarge said again, “that I was digging out that poor woman’s heart with a dull knife.”

“Stop talking!” Grif’s voice bounced off the hollowed planks overhead and thundered along the ones at his feet. Sarge actually cringed; he truly believed Kit’s pain was his own fault, yet even after all he’d done, Grif knew better. He was the one who’d returned to the Surface, broken the rules, and fallen in love with one woman while still searching for another. With one foot in the present and the other stuck firmly in the past, it was Grif who had broken Kit Craig’s heart.

And true agony was in having to live with that.

I want to die,” Kit said, only two months earlier.

“No,” Grif whispered, but his hiding place swallowed the word, smothering it in shadows. Despite her written warning to stop stalking her, to go away, he still followed. He’d always follow. And now, despite his aversion to tears, he was crying, too.

She was folded up in the fetal position, her good friend Fleur curled around her as if she was all that was holding her together. Kit’s entire covey of girlfriends was unabashed in their friendship, clinging to each other in a way that men never did, and these two alternated their tears, though only Kit sobbed. Grif had followed her to Fleur’s home, because she hadn’t been spending much time at her own mid-century ranch home. There were, he knew, too many memories of the two of them there together.

“Forget Griffin Shaw,” Fleur told Kit, smoothing Kit’s hair from her face, the flaming dice of her shoulder tattoo flaring with the motion.

“I don’t want to forget him.”

“Why?” Fleur and Grif whispered at the same time.

Kit stilled and looked up at her friend. Her face, usually powdered perfection, was naked today, almost translucent, and it only added to her air of vulnerability. Her eyes, swollen like storm clouds, were rimmed in angry red and swimming with tears. “Because if I forget that I loved him then it would be like it never happened. And that would mean that it didn’t really matter or that I never really lived it. And it did. I did.”

“You torture yourself.”

“No . . . I just don’t know how to get over him.”

“That’s because there’s no getting over a love like that.” Fleur cupped Kit’s face between lacquered fingers, and bent down until they were touching foreheads. “You just move on anyway.”

“But I can barely lift my head.” Kit’s voice cracked, and Grif’s heart went with it. “I know it makes me needy and really stupid to hold on to a man who doesn’t want me, but I can’t stop thinking of him. I close my eyes and he’s there. I wake and it’s worse. There’s no name for this . . . for this heartache.”

“Sure there is,” Fleur answered, her smile bittersweet as they both fell still. “It’s called life.”

Kit didn’t answer, making Grif wonder if that meant that she agreed or she didn’t. Finally, Fleur shifted. “Come on, we can’t hole up here forever. Let’s get dolled up and go out. We’ll call up some greasers with a hot rod. Go drink rum from a tiki mug. We’ll raise some hell and get tattoos.”

“A tattoo?” Kit sniffled, then tilted her head. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“Something to mark the occasion,” Fleur declared. “Kit Craig’s return to the real world!”

Grif could have kissed the woman for that.

But Kit shook her head. “No. Not that. But something to mark that I’m different. That I’ve changed not in spite of Griffin Shaw, but because he was here.”

“Oh, come on, Kit. You can do better than that.”

Suddenly Grif no longer wanted to kiss her.

“Get some ink as a badge of honor. You survived Griffin Shaw and now you’re ready to start a new life. One without him in it.”

Was she? Staring at Kit, not blinking, Grif realized he was holding his breath.

“Maybe,” Kit said, biting her bottom lip. Then, after a long moment, she frowned. “But only under one condition.”

“What?”

Kit pushed into a sitting position and leveled her friend with a hard stare. “I don’t want anything with damned wings.”

Your knowledge does nothing for me,” Grif told Frank now, his whisper harsh enough to scratch his throat. Suddenly he didn’t feel sorry for the Pure. He damned well should feel it all.

“I know,” Frank whispered, and his eyes were shining with tears, too. It was novel, and it was shocking. It was as unnatural to see a Pure feeling human emotion as it would be to hear a dog meow.

And all Grif could think was, Good.

“Then what do you want?” Because it wasn’t just to reminisce about old times.

“I have a message from the Host.”

Grif closed his eyes. The entire legion of angels. Every order in the hierarchy of Pures, from Seraphim to Rulers to Guardians.

“Your refusal to carry out the will of God as outlined in the agreement formed as a condition of your return to the Surface has angered them.”

“Well. That’s a mouthful,” Grif said at last, flashing again on Kit’s heart-wrenching sorrow. “So what are they taking from me now?”

His wings, he hoped. There was little else left.

The voice struck, clapping like thunder behind him. “We’re not taking, Griffin Shaw. This time we’re giving.”

Whirling, Grif cringed, immediately shielding himself with his arms against the light that flared before him. If Sarge had radiated with light, this being was light. The image that burned itself beneath his eyelids had wings of flame, tips dripping with lava, and a burned-out double negative of blackened holes where eyes should be.

A Seraph. The power emanating from it was unfiltered, raw as a lightning bolt and as sharply static on the tongue. Angels, unmasked, were awesome in the original sense of the word, and reverence, like survival instinct, forced Grif to his knees. He felt his next breath, heated from the flame, shaky in his chest.

I am God’s child, he thought, over and again, trying not to be overwhelmed.

The Seraph knew he was glorious, created of the first triad and the highest order. His mighty wings arched across half the room, rippling with muscle. Sarge, who was of the Cherubim tribe, shielded his true nature by taking on the aspect deemed most familiar by the mortal souls who viewed him. Yet this angel, and the four flared behind him in an offensive phalanx, didn’t bother. That, more than anything, told Grif he was in trouble.

The realization brought forth an abrupt dimming of the blistering light. Grif removed his hand from his eyes and caught sight of a veil being dropped between them as he straightened from his prone position. It was a see-through scrim, likely sewn from starlight and dark matter, and it would keep any of the Seraph’s errant rays from attacking Grif. The Seraphim could never truly hide what they really were.

Monsters, Grif thought, lifting his chin.

Though the Seraph had to have heard the thought, he gave one short nod, and Grif stood. With his glory dimmed, the angel was youthful in appearance, with long, dark hair shining and thick and skin as smooth as a polished opal. Yet he was alien in his perfection. But for mankind, all of God’s creatures were.

“What are you giving, then?” Grif said, still blinking.

“More than you deserve, but less than you would like,” answered the Seraph, his voice like a rushing river. “Though that always seems to be the case with your kind.”

“Donel,” Sarge reprimanded. A stone in that river.

“Don’t you presume to correct me!” Donel’s head whipped Sarge’s way, rapids roaring in his throat. “One look at the two of us and it’s clear exactly where righteousness lies!”

Protectiveness welled inside of Grif, and he shifted to shield the Pure behind him with his own body. He and Sarge weren’t always on the same side of the playing field, but he had more history and fondness for this angel than any other.

There was no way to look directly into the faces of angels if they didn’t will it, and even with the veil between them, it wasn’t easy to face Donel full-on. After only a glance that felt like looking into the full sun, Grif wondered if the Pure wanted him to see the contempt that lived among the burned-out embers of that celestial gaze.

After a long moment, Donel held out an arm to the side, palm upright. The limb extended longer than it should have, with fingers that did the same. One of the Pures behind him handed over a scroll. Grif’s heart thumped. An official decree. Holding it straight out before him, Donel unrolled it, then began speaking in tongues.

Grif understood none of it, though he recognized the pattern of jumbled sounds, intonations, and pitches. The heralds trumpeted it regularly in the Everlast, and he’d once asked Sarge what it meant.

“It’s the angelic anthem. It’s a call to arms, a war cry for the Pure.”

“What does it say?” Grif had asked.

“It begins with an introduction to the angelic orders. ‘We are Pure spirit, the mighty who dwell in and of Paradise, we are the Orders charged with dispensing God’s divine Will . . .”

Grif stopped listening after that. To him it was just posturing and posing and politics. All it meant was that the Host was throwing its weight around. Again. The Pure could do whatever they wanted in the Everlast. For now, he breathed a little more deeply and relaxed enough to tuck his hands into his suit pockets. Next up would be a formality, a recitation similar to the Miranda rights, and that, too, mattered little to Grif. As far as he could tell, he was already eternally under arrest. So he tuned out until he once again recognized the English language.

“Griffin Shaw,” Donel said, lifting his voice so the syllables sluiced. “You have been found guilty of violating the conditions of your unprecedented return to the Surface, and failing to actively pursue your true purpose on earth. Therefore, it has been decided after much deliberation that there is no other recourse but to invoke the sacred act of prophecy . . .”

Donel, eyes like banked coals, paused long enough to look up and gauge Grif’s reaction. Apparently the way Grif’s knees automatically weakened was satisfactory.

“. . . hereby ordering you to fulfill additional conditions as outlined by the Host,” he continued. “These shall commence directly upon utterance.”

Hell, Grif thought. That’s not prophecy. That was an ultimatum. And it was just like the Host. A bunch of winged monsters with nothing better to do than micromanage God’s Chosen.

“That’s right,” Donel hissed, breath roiling as he made no attempt to pretend he wasn’t reading Grif’s mind. “And make no mistake, we will strip down every memory you hold dear and dissolve them in the waters of incubation before allowing you to cause any more harm.”

Grif froze, and not only out of fear. No way, he thought, swallowing hard. Forgetting himself and his past wasn’t an option. He’d come too far. “I don’t understand. What did I do?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Donel said in a voice that made clear that he both did . . . and relished telling Grif. He glanced at Sarge. Grif did the same, a look that told him nothing and everything at once. Because Sarge’s eyes were downcast, his wings dragging on the floor. Grif turned back around, and the Seraph brightened, literally.

“Why, Griffin Shaw,” he said, smile beatific. “You killed Katherine Craig.”