The Given

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Grif and Zicaro had done the majority of the digging, so it only took another ten minutes to finish the job. Yet Kit and Grif did not pull a doll with diamond eyes from that grave. It was wrapped inside a rug that bulged in irregular places while a remnant of material—structured cotton and felt—lay decayed on top. It was still recognizable as a once-fine fedora, and Kit lay her hand over Grif’s as they both gazed down upon it.

The visual steeled them for what they did next. Propping Evie inside the grave, they refilled the hole so that she was facing the city where she’d plotted and schemed and caused so much destruction. When they were finished, Kit and Grif sat down on the blackened earth, side by side, wrapped in Evie’s warm fur as they waited for her to come back around.

“Justin and Zicaro forced me up the hillside,” Kit explained, huddling close. “But when they saw that there was no place to hide me, they returned me to the car. They didn’t want the sight of me to give you any hope.”

They hadn’t wanted Grif to fight.

“Fifteen minutes. That’s how long it took to get my feet free of the zip ties. I’d done it before, there was a tutorial on the Internet and I thought, you never know. It might come in handy one day. I hadn’t anticipated how nerves could counteract your efforts, though, so while I got my feet free there was no time to work the hands. You and Barbara . . . Evie, had already arrived.”

She’d followed three criminals up a dark hillside because of Grif. “You never stop fighting, do you?”

She lifted her head and looked at him square. “Not when it comes to a regal love.”

Grif kissed her forehead, leaving his lips there for a moment, finding it warm. “I wouldn’t have known about her, or this,” he finally said, and nodded at his grave, “if it weren’t for you.”

She inclined her head modestly. “Well, like you said. I’m a fighter.”

But he didn’t laugh. “And don’t ever stop, Kit. The way you’re looking at me now, keep that. Keep the fire in your gut, too. Keep asking all those blasted questions . . .”

Chirp, chirp, chirp. That’s what his girl sounded like, cheerful and enthusiastic, trilling her way through life.

“Hey,” she said, suddenly taking his face in her hands. “I know what you’re saying, but I don’t want to do any of that without you. Got it?”

He nodded yes. And thought, But do it anyway.

A moan from in front of them disrupted the moment.

“Good news,” Kit said, a false note of cheer lifting her voice. “We found your doll.”

Evie groaned, head rolling to the side, eyes fighting to focus now that she was the one spotlighted in the night. She likely had a concussion . . . not that they cared.

“The bad news is . . . we buried it again.”

Grif shrugged when his wife’s unfocused gaze finally snagged on his. There was nothing of the woman he’d loved in that look . . . but it wasn’t because she’d changed in the last fifty years. Grif had been the one to project the love he felt, the passion, onto her. Even knowing she’d played Sal DiMartino the same way, he still felt stupid. Yet he also knew that, if given the chance to live again, he’d love the very same way. He’d lay it out there and simply hope that the same great and aching passion would return to him if he just gave enough.

But for a woman like Evie? It was never enough.

“What are you planning?” she finally asked.

“Well, we know how long and hard you’ve been searching for those diamonds,” Kit said, huddled close to him. “How many lives they’ve cost, how many lies you’ve told. So we decided they really should be yours.”

Evie’s eyes actually burned. Buried to her shoulders in a grave of her making, and she still had the audacity to hope.

Maybe Kit had hit her harder than he’d thought.

“That’s why we buried you with them,” Kit finished, extinguishing that greedy light.

“Stretch out fully,” Grif added, sickened by the hate that sprung up in Evie’s face. “You might even be able to touch them with your toes.”

Evie just lifted her head from its sandstone pillow and wriggled her shoulders, managing to loosen a couple of rocks. Kit’s hands fisted themselves at her side, and Grif knew she wanted to reach down and firm them back in place. Reaching over, he took her hand in his instead, and had the greater satisfaction of seeing Evie’s eyes narrow.

“Griffin—” Evie began.

“Don’t talk,” he said in a low voice, and somewhere on the jagged sweep of the Black Mountains, a lone coyote howled. As chilling as that was, it was still preferable to this woman’s voice. Grif had heard enough of her lies to last two lifetimes.

Standing, Kit made a show of dusting herself off. “We packed the gravel loosely, so you can get out if you want. You can run and hide like you’ve been doing the whole of your fraudulent life.”

“But you won’t have time to dig out the diamonds as well,” Grif said, pushing to his feet. The sky spun overhead.

Kit linked her arm in his, righting him in place, back on the Surface. “That’s right. An anonymous call citing some serious tomfoolery on this mountainside will be placed to Metro as soon as we get down that hill. Of course, you could just sit there and wait for the authorities to find you surrounded by the bodies of two criminals.”

They had, in fact, already recovered Kit’s cell phone and put in a call to Metro. Any minute now and they’d see blue and red strobes flashing up the mountainside. They’d find Evie . . . along with Zicaro and Justin and the diamonds . . . and everything else that’d been long buried in that warped carpeting.

Grif held the flashlight beam steady on Evie while Kit gathered the weapons Justin and Zicaro had carried up the mountainside. Evie was already fighting her way out of that hole.

“Ready?” Kit returned to Grif’s side, and together they turned away.

The cry came after only a few steps. “Griffin! Baby, you’re not going to just leave me here like this, are you?”

Kit’s hand tightened on his when she felt him pause, but he just squeezed it as he half turned, facing his past one last time. The outline of Evie’s skull was all that was visible beneath the moon, and for a moment he was able to project her youthful visage upon that frame, but then he realized that no, this was what had always been there. This blank slate of darkness, an emptiness living inside of her that couldn’t be filled, even with the entirety of a good man’s heart.

“Hold on,” he told Kit.

“But—”

He cupped her warm cheek, pressed his lips to hers. Then he turned and walked slowly back to Evie. Bending low, he leaned so close that all he could see were those deep chocolate eyes he’d once so loved. Then he whispered so that Kit wouldn’t hear. “You’d better hurry, Evie. It’ll be here soon.”

“It’ll—?” But she heard it then. The scrabbling of paws slipping over loose rock. The pant of a desert animal’s hot breath.

“They don’t usually attack humans, but these guys are hungry.” Neither of them blinked. “You know what it is to be hungry, don’t you?”

Grif returned to Kit then, who only glanced at him quizzically. Then they headed directly back down the hillside, clinging to each other to keep from falling. Even though Evie, buried up to her shoulders, was the only other person on that mountainside, Grif still felt eyes trained upon them. It was a feral night. Even the breeze felt hostile. Then a yelp punctuated the frigid wind, and Kit jolted, but it quickly became a disconnected sound. It could have even been imagined. Grif pulled her forward.

They’d just reached level ground when a scream finally did arch high on the air, spinning into the wild night. Kit stopped Grif, gripping his biceps. Her head whipped back up the hillside, where a coyote could be heard calling to others, and she gasped in understanding. “You knew.”

“She reeked of plasma” was all Grif said, and turned his back on the hillside and headed to Kit’s car.

Kit helped Grif into the passenger’s seat, and then immediately started the car, cranking the heat high and angling the vents toward Grif. His teeth were chattering even though she’d draped Evie’s fur atop him, and his fingers were stiff with cold. Maybe it was just the pale aspect of the moon, but he also seemed unnaturally white. Eyes shut, his mouth was slightly ajar as his head lolled against the headrest.

In just over twenty-four hours, he will be dead.

Kit shoved Sarge’s voice from her mind and the car into reverse. “I’m going to get you to the hospital, Grif. I think you’re . . .” She didn’t say “dying.” “Seriously injured.”

But his hand stopped her from shifting into gear, his touch weak but insistent. “What time is it?”

Tears sprung to her eyes. “Do not ask me that!”

“After four, then.” Grif nodded to himself. “Please, put the top down.”

Kit protested again, but he silenced her by pressing his index finger firmly against her lips. “I just want to see the stars.”

She couldn’t keep the strangled sound from escaping her throat, but she shifted back into park, and worked to lower the soft top on the Duetto. The cold, greedy fingers of the mountain air shifted over her, but Grif was huddled low in his seat, the heater shoving them back out again. Kit killed the headlights, and the black void above them married with the mountain to erase the entire world. It felt like being cupped in a giant onyx palm.

“There they are,” Grif said, his voice gone reedy and thin. Kit looked in the same direction that he was staring, but saw nothing.

“They?”

“Her Centurion. He’s just there . . .” Grif pointed off into the distance, but his arm fell after only a moment. Then his head swiveled and he smiled at something—someone—on the other side of Kit.

They.

“No!” Kit shouted it in the direction he was staring, then shifted so that she was on her knees in her seat and leaning over Grif. Grabbing his face, she forced him to look at her. “No,” she told him, too.

“I’m dying, Kit.”

“No,” she said, slipping his fedora off his head, and pulling him into her arms. He needed comfort right now, that was all, and she could give it. She could. “It just feels that way.”

He whispered his next words, one per breath. “You sound so certain.”

“I am,” Kit said, and fiercely kissed his forehead. She was shocked to find it ice-cold. “Sarge owes me a miracle. He told me so himself.”

It wasn’t exactly true. What the Pure had said was that he would owe her. In a perfect world.

“And you think I’m your miracle?” Grif tilted his head up and gazed into her eyes. The light from the dash glinted off the severe angles of his face, making him look like he’d just stepped from the screen of an old black-and-white movie. Like he belonged somewhere in the past.

“Of course you are.” They both ignored the way her voice cracked. “I knew it the minute I saw you. You appeared in my bedroom, fedora drawn low and fists raised high, and even while you were in the midst of saving my life I said to myself, that’s the guy for me. I want him, and no other. And it’s been that way ever since. We were fated, don’t you see, Grif? Bound together long before we knew it.”

She cut off with a shake of her head, realizing she’d begun speaking in the past tense. No.

“Maybe you’re right.” He made an effort to shrug. “Only time will tell.”

That’s when Kit began to pray. “No, Grif. No. You tell whoever is standing on the other side of this car that we’re not done!”

She choked back a sob, and glanced at her watch over his shoulder. Four-oh-eight. He turned his head into her neck, his breath warm, yet somehow cold, on her skin. “Just hold me.”

“Hold me back,” she hissed in return, and, to her surprise, he did. As her hot tears streaked over his too-cold face, he clung to her like he was rallying.

His whisper, tinged faintly with licorice, sent icy chills up her spine. “We really are a great team, aren’t we?”

“The best,” she whispered back, and, bending her head, wrapped herself around him and held on tight. The coconut of his pomade tickled her nose. The muscles beneath his suit bunched up, squeezing her back before slowly going lax.

And at precisely 4:10 in the morning, fifty-one years to the day of his first death, Griffin Shaw—Kit’s partner and lover and Centurion—died in her arms.