The Taken

Chapter Eighteen

Paul died before the cops even arrived. But the first police officer on the scene, Dennis, was an obvious friend, and he folded Kit into his body like he was the one with wings. He also told Kit what Grif couldn’t, that it was all going to be okay, and snapped at his partner, a Detective Hitchens, telling him to take a walk, though he glanced at Grif when he said it. Grif nodded once, then hung back as Dennis swung Kit around. She needed an old friend right now, not him. He’d let the officer get her settled, warm her up, and calm her down, then rejoin them later.

But the wail that Kit had let out upon seeing Paul’s mutilated body followed him as he disappeared back into the dark. It’d sounded brittle and ruined, like something had fractured inside of the woman. And while she might not yet be able to accept her ex-husband’s death, Grif knew she was already blaming herself for it.

I’ll take care of this. That’s what he’d told Kit before calling the cops… but he hadn’t fulfilled the promise yet, and he could at least try that. Because Paul’s death, he knew, lay on his shoulders, not Kit’s.

So, hugging the high property wall, he surveyed the white brick to see if there was an easy point of entry to return to the barn. His impromptu plan was to hop it and approach from the back. If Paul’s charming personality held true to form, his Centurion might still be arguing with him over his passage into the Everlast. It sometimes happened, even when the newly deceased wasn’t a total heel.

Grif found a delivery gate about a third of the way along the wall, but it was padlocked, and the lawn beyond it dark. Neither deterred Grif, and he crossed the sprawling estate in a silence so absolute even the horses couldn’t hear him. From this angle he could see what he’d missed before. A carriage house sat only yards away, white and pristine under the full moon. That’s where he’d drag a reluctant soul if he couldn’t convince it to leave before the police came. Some Centurions let the souls squat near their own remains while the police and medical examiners did their thing, but he’d found the medical jargon and black humor either depressed or angered the dead. So he liked to draw them away, if possible.

Yet his approach to the carriage house stalled when a throat was cleared directly behind him. It was the cop who’d been eyeing Kit and him from the patrol car, the one Dennis had called Hitchens.

“Going somewhere?” The steel-lined voice belied the thumbs tucked casually in his front pockets.

“I’m with Kit,” Grif tried, wondering if her friendship with Dennis extended to his partner.

Those thumbs twitched and Grif knew that it didn’t. “I know.”

Since Hitchens had the look of someone who wanted a chase, Grif joined the man on the darkened lawn, pulled out his Luckies, and let one flare in the dark.

Hitchens decided to chase anyway.

“We’ve been keeping tabs on that weirdo. She was present at the scene of a murder. Two, now.” He raised his dark brows like he expected Grif to elaborate. In the billiards room, with the candlestick…

“She wasn’t present here.”

“She is now.”

“Right.” Grif nodded, as if mulling that over. “Well, keep up the good work, Detective.”

Then he headed toward the barn.

“You can’t go in there,” Hitchens called after him.

Grif turned and looked at him like he was crazy. “Why would I want to go in there? There’s a dead body in there.”

But their voices would have driven away any Centurion in the carriage house, even if Paul had to be dragged kicking and cursing into the Everlast. On to Plan C. Slowly, staring into the bushes and night-shrouded trees, Grif headed to the rear of the barn, well clear of the chaos.

“What are you doing?” Hitchens wasn’t going to let up, which was fine. Grif hadn’t expected him to.

“Looking.”

“For?”

“Doves.”

“Doves?”

He spared the man a glance. “You know, little birdies? Feathered symbols of peace and purity.”

Hitchens’s expression soured further.

Grif almost smiled. “Mourning doves in particular, though a white one will do in a pinch.”

Hitchens placed his hands on his hips. “It’s the dead of night at the ass-end of winter.”

“I know,” Grif replied, and turned back to the nearby bushes. “Should make ’em very easy to spot.”

Okay, so he was just messing with the guy now. Yet Guardians didn’t exactly play it straight, either. Most of the angels in that tribe appeared to their assigned mortal soul in the form of those sweet, winged messengers of peace, thus most people couldn’t spot the celestial heralds if one dropped a turd on their heads. Grif, though, knew how to look. If a Guardian had been here, then Paul Raggio’s death had been preventable. If not, that meant it was long predestined that he would die today, and Grif wouldn’t be held accountable.

So he worked his way across the lawn, the individual blades still illuminated by the remaining angelic strength in his cornea. He scoured the ragweed and underbrush while Hitchens followed a short distance behind. “See one yet?”

“Nope,” Grif said, ignoring the man’s scorn.

“And what does that mean, Sherlock?”

Grif turned so abruptly he actually startled the man, who’d gotten too close. Hitchens took a large step back, covering the uncertainty in the gesture by placing his hands on his hips. Grif, though, stepped forward and stared him straight in the eye. “It means the heavens are closed. It means the angels have abandoned mortals to our folly. It means Raggio doesn’t get a fast pass through the Pearly Gates.”

“That right?” Hitchens gave an indulgent smile. “Well, I doubt that’s where the guy was headed anyway.”

Grif lifted a brow. “What makes you say that?”

Something slithered behind Hitchens’s gaze, but was gone before Grif could name it. “People who die with their bowels falling from their bodies usually aren’t Boy Scouts,” Hitchens said, watching Grif carefully. He shouldn’t have told Grif that, but he was after a reaction. And something more. “Besides, the kid was a lawyer. He’s probably already taking briefs for the damned.”

Grif gave the surrounding darkness a final visual sweep. “Nah. There is no hell. Mortals who have proven themselves unfit for Paradise have to join the Third.”

“The Third?” Hitchens asked, mouth immediately turning down.

“That’s the percentage of the angelic host who followed Lucifer in mutiny against God.”

Hitchens’s lost swagger turned into outright contempt. “What are you? The resident Jesus freak?”

Grif told himself to stop talking. He should return to Kit and try to console her. He should save his voice for someone with the capacity to listen. But there was something dark and small about this man. Something combustible that lived inside him, like it was just waiting for a match. If Grif could warn him away from that fire, help him avoid whatever mental ember that would send his life down a destructive path, then it might help right the wrongs Grif himself had already set into motion. Sarge might still say he was meddling where he shouldn’t be, but it wasn’t as if that condescending old angel was doing much to make the world a better place.

In other words, Grif had to try.

“The Third are still alive, active, and angry. They’re like invisible rabid wolves. They inhabit a vast forest as dark as the earth’s core. That’s where blighted souls are sent when they leave this stinking mudflat.

“But the Third doesn’t just wander the eternal forest like the souls of the damned. No, instead they are the forest. They move like a gust through the trees, like old leaves lifting from the decomposing floor. They place themselves at strategic points in the woodland. The damned can’t ever gain their bearings, much less navigate the place. It’s said that if a soul were to reach the other side of the eternal forest, they’d be able to find their way into the Everlast… and, of course, the Third-the fallen angels-can’t allow that.”

Hitchens was captivated despite himself. Outside of soft porn and Monday night football, it was probably the first time he’d allowed himself to be carried away by someone else’s narrative. “But they’re angels,” he protested. “God made them to protect mankind.”

The man’s interest, and engagement, gave Grif hope.

“And they violated their angelic nature by turning against God. If you’re against God, you certainly harbor no love for his most beloved creatures.” Grif looked up in the sky and the blades that had once supported his wings shuddered. “Remember, angels are not God’s children. They’re not Chosen. They’re not made in His image. They’re just winged monsters who are there to serve Him.”

Hitchens stared at Grif for a long moment, then shook his head. “Let me see if I got this straight. All the assholes who should have taken a tumble into a fiery pit are instead walking around in a forest with fairies jumping out from behind the trees?”

In that moment, something flared, twin flames of white-hot fury located directly behind Hitchens. Grif took an involuntary step back, but stopped there. Anne wouldn’t confront him with Hitchens present. Still, he corrected: “Angels. Not fairies.”

Flame erupted in Anne’s gaze as she shot him another fiery warning, but then the glasses went back on, and she melded again with the night.

“And they don’t jump out at them,” he continued, eyes fixed on the place he’d last seen her. The itching between his shoulder blades now thrummed. He felt his wings like phantom limbs and knew it was because the Pure was near. “They ambush them. They ride herd. And every time they catch a soul, they do to it whatever that soul did to earn their spot in the forest.”

Anne growled, a sound too broad and loud for the human ear, though the horses in the barn behind them began whinnying in unison. A crack sounded, hooves on wood, and a half dozen others followed, along with alarmed shouts and a particularly sharp cry. Hitchens glanced over nervously. At least that spooked him.

“They torture those souls that way again and again. They do it endlessly. They do it for lifetimes.”

A whip of wind slapped him, and he stumbled back as the Pure rocketed straight into the air, but Grif already knew Pures hated it when mortals discussed them, their world, and their true natures. He’d been prepared. However, Hitchens had not.

Offering a hand, he helped up the now visibly shaken detective.

“Don’t know about you,” Grif said, shoving his hands into his pockets, “but I think I’d rather burn.”

And, shooting the wide-eyed man one last smile, he headed back across the lawn.

Hitchens’s voice rang out a second later. “You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”

“Not as sick as you,” Grif muttered, knowing as only someone with a healthy dose of celestial eyesight could, that he’d flat-out wasted his breath.

By the time Grif returned to her side, Kit had mostly composed herself. Dennis had the unpleasant task of informing next-of-kin as to Paul’s death, and since she had once been his next-of-kin, she convinced Dennis to bring her along. Though relations between Paul’s parents and her had iced over after the divorce, they still exchanged Christmas cards and the occasional phone call. It would help, Kit thought, for her to be there.

Either that, or they’d blame her entirely.

God knew she blamed herself.

Grif knew that, too. He rejoined her side in that stealth way he had, though Kit knew the moment he arrived. Her world warmed a bit with his presence, but Kit wrapped her arms around herself anyway, and looked out into the darkness. Right now her world was operating at a few degrees below the arctic chill.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he tried, as she knew he would. She continued to stare into the unyielding night.

“You keep saying that.”

“Dennis said it, too.”

She gave him a look that was more wry and despondent than any she’d worn since her father’s death. “It’s his job to say that.”

“As a cop?”

“As a friend.”

Grif studied her face, those expressive brows drawing now, and even though he didn’t move, she felt as though he inched closer. “I’m a friend.”

“Thought you were an angel?” she shot back before she could stop herself. She held up a hand immediately. She didn’t want to injure anyone else. She certainly didn’t want to argue. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

No. Kit shook her head. “Look, I know that you’ve been there and done that as a P.I., but I’ve spent my entire adult life investigating these sort of stories as well. Sordid tales about murder. Stories that invite people into lives they’d never lead, or want to. But they weren’t just stories.” She shook her head, and slumped against the cool wood of the white ranch fence.

“When I was sixteen I had to read the headline blaring the news of my dad’s murder over the front page of my own newspaper. When I was twelve my mother’s obit took up a whole page inside. They were more than just stories then, and the same goes for all the bylines since. Same goes for now.” She looked directly up, and though close, Grif’s expression was blurred by her tears. “But I think I’ve started something here that I can’t stop. And I have a bad feeling about how this story is going to end.”

“No, Kit,” he replied lowly. “As long as you’re alive, it can be stopped.”

“But they’re not alive.” Kit wiped at her eyes. “It’s too late for Nic and Paul.”

“It’s too late because someone else decided to play God.” His gaze didn’t waver from her face as another emergency vehicle edged by the already crowded entrance. “It’s much easier to destroy a life than it is to live one.”

Kit laughed bitterly at that. “You don’t have to tell me. Every time I create something good in my life, someone else comes along and sideswipes it.” She sniffed. “Maybe it’s a sign.”

“Don’t say that.”

She sounded bitter and hopeless, a combination she found repulsive in others and intolerable in herself. But tonight, with her ex-husband’s blood so thick in the air that the horses couldn’t settle, she found it fit like a vintage glove.

“Kit.” Grif spoke more softly than she’d ever heard him speak before, like she’d break if he raised his voice. “God gave us this life, and one of its cornerstones and greatest gifts is free will. Unfortunately some people use that gift to harm others.”

Kit gave a half-laugh and straightened. “Yeah? So where was my mother’s free will? Because the last time I saw her she was a bag of bones gagging on her own saliva. She weighed so little her body seemed hollow, and she couldn’t breathe without the help of a machine.

“Mankind didn’t do that, Grif. A murderer didn’t do it. God did it. He set her up, and then he sideswiped her just to watch her fall.” Steeling her jaw, she lifted her chin. “So as far as I can see? People are just following in His footsteps. Guess we really are made in His image after all.”

Then she whirled, and strode away. Eyes were on her as she walked to the far fence, and not just Grif’s and Dennis’s. She cut her gaze left as she leaned again against the cool wood, and saw that awful Hitchens eyeing her like she was his next meal. Ignoring him, she looked back into the empty pasture and wondered what she was really upset about.

The words about her mother had surprised even her. Of course, she wasn’t foolish enough to think she’d recovered from that loss. But she’d survived it, then lived with it, and thought she was doing well… at least until recently.

Now her life was under attack, and she was shocked to find how fragile everything she’d built really was. She was dumbfounded, too, to find that while people were being ripped from her life like paper dolls from a chain, she longed to be the one who’d be gone first.

I, she thought on a pitiful half-laugh, want my mommy.

Yet all she had was herself.

Then Grif rejoined her side. Kit shot him an annoyed glance. Even when he was trying to be sweet, she thought, he was damned contrary. Tucking her arms around her body again, she turned to him. “Not exactly the Kit Craig you’re used to, is it? Don’t worry. The dark mood only hits when someone close to me dies. It’ll pass soon. Until the next time, that is.”

This time his hand closed over her arm when she tried to turn away. With the mere pulse of those fingertips-tensile, she thought, fighter’s hands-he drew her back. But what kept her there was the bruised intensity of his gaze.

Grif cleared his throat. “I don’t have a lot of friends. Those I once counted as close are long gone, but I was never an easy man to know. I was a loner as a kid. I played only in my mind. I chose individual sports over team. That’s how I got into boxing.”

Grif gave his head a little shake, like he hadn’t meant for all of that to spill out. “Anyway, I made sure anyone had to work hard to get to know me. As if my friendship and company is some great gift, right?” He chuckled for them both, but Kit was listening now, and caught the self-consciousness in the way he moved his shoulders.

“Anyway, it’s no coincidence that I married the one woman who did work to get to know me. I mean, when someone looks past the rubble of all your faults, digging to find the good in you, it’s… appreciated.” Grif squinted into the empty meadow. “I asked her once why she didn’t just leave when I was surly or distant or, you know. Too talkative.”

Kit huffed. Was there anyone less talkative than this man? “What’d she say?”

He shrugged, and the accompanying self-consciousness this time was sweet. “She liked my way. She said there was magic in how I moved around the world, my every action so tightly controlled that when I finally did relax-when I turned that energy in her direction-it was like being spotlit.”

He paused a moment before his small smile shifted to a frown. “She also said I was like a lone island that would be there long after the buildings and monuments other men had built turned to dust. She thought it was a compliment, but how could she know? It’s all dust.”

Kit pursed her lips. “I’m sorry… is this your pep talk?”

Grif shrugged.

“That’s it? You’re done?”

“Pretty much.”

Kit was suddenly furious. “Then what’s the point? Why bother living or loving at all? Why set yourself up for inevitable heartache?”

Grif didn’t even change his expression. “Because it’s still worth it.”

Worth it to watch everyone around you die? she wondered, screaming inwardly. Worth it to know you could be next-no telling when or how? Worth it when some asshole could take the gift of free will and turn it into a weapon, a curse?

“You’re wrong,” she said, furiously wiping a rogue tear from her cheek. “I’m beginning to think it doesn’t matter at all.”

Then Grif put a hand to her cheek, and the magic he’d referred to before stole the breath from her body. “It always matters, Kit. Didn’t you tell me that?”

“But-”

His fingers stroked her cheeks. “Trust me. Even if you die today, and never step foot on this mudflat again, love always matters.”

She shook her head until his palm dropped away, then immediately wished it back. God, she thought, tears filling her eyes. She didn’t want to want him and she damned well didn’t want it to matter. “I don’t think you understand, Grif. People drop from my life like flies. And I don’t know if I’m just used to it by now or just fucking stupid, but I’ve kept spinning my stories, working hard to live deliberately-in print, in the way I dress, in the actions I take, all the way down to the damned car I drive-like doing all that would give me a say in the whole process. But I don’t have a say in anything, do I?”

He swallowed hard, and she knew she was right. Even the man who pretended to be an angel couldn’t deny that. No one had any say in their fate at all.

This time she was the one to lay a frigid palm over his. “If God wants to smite you dead, He can. If a murdering cop wants to sneak into your home, he can, too. I mean, if you-Griffin Shaw-wanted me dead,” she shook her head, “there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do to stop it.”

“But I don’t want you dead,” he said, in a low, fierce voice. “I don’t.”

Yet there was little he could do about it if someone else did. She let her hand drop away. “Maybe you should just go, Grif. Two people have been murdered in the span of one week. My gut tells me it’s precisely because of their proximity to me.”

“I’ve been closer to you than anyone else this whole week,” he countered hotly. “And my gut tells me that’s exactly what’s keeping me safe.”

“That’s a very strange thing to say.”

He shrugged. “That’s my way.”

And, despite it all, she liked his way, too. But she couldn’t say that now. Dennis was walking toward her, which meant she’d soon be standing before Paul’s parents. If she wasn’t strong, their grief would mow her down. “I know I’m not supposed to care about this. Paul was an asshole throughout our marriage. He was an asshole to you. He was an asshole tonight. But no one deserves murder. And…”

When she only shook her head, mouth still open, Grif finished for her. “And you loved him, once.”

She nodded. So maybe Grif was right. Maybe love-even an old, discarded one-did always matter.

“Ready, Kit?” Dennis said, joining her side.

Nodding, she leaned into his embrace and let him wheel her away. Yet they hadn’t taken three steps before Grif’s gravelly voice rang out behind her, louder than she’d ever heard it before. Loud enough that even Hitchens turned and looked, all the way from across the lot.

“I’m not going anywhere, Katherine Craig. I’ll spend every waking hour of this life helping you find out who’s really responsible for these deaths. ’Cuz it’s not you. It isn’t even Paul Raggio’s fault, no matter what else he’s done.”

Kit put a hand on Dennis’s shoulder, asking him to wait. “Do you think Chambers is responsible for this?” she said lowly, when she was again square with Grif.

“What part of this case have we touched that doesn’t have his name on it?”

Kit dragged her fingers through her hair. “And yet he remains untouchable.”

“Nobody’s untouchable.”

She considered that for a moment, then lifted her hand to his stubbled cheek. It had the island of a man swallowing hard. She gave him a small smile. “You remember that, Griffin Shaw.”

Because even though keeping him near had Kit questioning her own mental health, for some reason he, too, very much mattered.