Authors: Vicki Pettersson
The Taken (28 page)
W
hat just happened?” Kit murmured sleepily. Her head was nestled in the crook of Grif’s left arm, but her gaze was tilted up, soft on the side of his face.
“Honey,” Grif replied, without opening his eyes. “If you don’t remember, there’s no sense in me repeating it.”
She slapped at him lazily. “I mean what just happened to put that frown between your brows. You look like a grumpy bear.”
Grif shook his head. “Just the opposite. This is the first time since I’ve been back on this mudflat that I haven’t woken up totally disoriented.” He did look at her now, brows drawn so low it was as if he was confused to find her there. “You’re like an anchor somehow. A steadying force as the rest of the world just spins.”
Kit smiled. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in a long while. And on the heels of an orgasm that’d shaken her inside and out, it was also the steadying force
she
needed to believe that maybe, just maybe, things might turn out all right yet.
Of course, that’s precisely when Grif had to open his mouth again. “I think we should leave. Get out of here. It’s not safe anymore.”
“Hmm . . .” Kit said, because it felt safe to her. “Think we can wait until morning?”
He was silent for a long time. “I think so. I don’t see anything . . . I mean, any reason why not.”
“Good,” Kit said, nestling in close. “Because we can’t follow our new lead until then anyway.”
“What lead?”
“The one I was going to tell you about right before you seduced me.”
“Oh. That one.”
Kit smiled into his chest.
“Wanna tell me now?”
No. She wanted to disappear under the covers and taste him some more. Yet Grif was going to need a couple of minutes to rest up for what she had in mind anyway, and truth was, so did she. So she gathered the sheet around her waist, and stood. “Be right back.”
But she wasn’t surprised to feel his eyes on her from the doorway as she strode through the house. I could get used to being looked at like that, she thought. To being looked
after
like that.
The thought worried her, so she pushed it aside and put a smile on her face as she returned to the bedroom, bag in hand. “I found something after leaving my former in-laws’ house. I didn’t want to go anywhere public, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. So I drove.”
The wide, empty streets of a Vegas night always calmed her. She could order events in her mind while driving, as if they, too, were on a map.
“It’s strange, but it’s the old landmarks, the ones with the most inconsequential memories—Laundromats and burger joints and theaters—streets I haven’t been down in years, stores I’ve never even been in, but have seen a million times . . .” She looked at him. “These calm me the most. They’ve outlasted . . . lives.”
Grif placed a hand on her arm when she swallowed hard. She gave him a watery smile. Yes, she could easily get used to this. “Anyway, I was driving by this pizzeria I used to go to with Paul—greasiest pie ever, I swear—and, of course, I was thinking of him, the good and the bad, when I remembered something else that was just plain strange.”
“What?”
“The night of Nic’s wake, when he stopped by to tell us about the gala. I was so irritated with him that I wasn’t listening to half of what he said, but I remember one thing. He said Chambers lavished his ‘woman’ with jewelry. But when we saw Anabelle Chambers at the gala—”
“She looked like a nun,” Grif said, sitting straighter in bed.
Kit nodded. “Same thing when I talked to her upstairs. There was no jewelry chest in sight, no perfume bottles. Nothing . . .”
“Fussy?” Grif provided, as she searched for the word.
“Pretty,” Kit corrected, and made a show of fluffing her hair. They shared a brief smile. “So I thought, what if the rumors are true? What if Chambers really has half a dozen wives, and what if one of them is pissed about it? I mean, it can’t be a good feeling to share your wedded husband with other women, right?”
“You think one of Caleb Chambers’s other wives anonymously gave you and Nicole that list in order to get back at him for, what, not being his favorite spouse?”
“It’s a theory,” she said, shrugging. “A woman scorned and all that.”
“Maybe it’s Anabelle,” he reasoned. “Maybe she found out about the parties and girls downstairs. She could tolerate him having his own personal harem, but not mistresses.”
“No,” Kit said, shaking her head after thinking about it for a moment. “You didn’t see her. I like the other wife scenario better.” She lifted a finger, holding off his scowl. “So I went to the office and got on dear Auntie Marin’s precious private computer.”
“The family archives?”
“The very same.” Kit smiled, seeing she had his interest. “Turns out the illustrious Chambers clan can trace their ancestry all the way back to Joseph Smith and his fancy spectacles.”
“His what?”
She waved his question away. “The point is, Mormons are fastidious about their family histories. One of their core tenets is that the dead can be baptized into the faith so that the whole family can exist together in the afterlife. Therefore they’re the best collectors in the world of all things genealogy. Good thing for us, too.”
Kit reached into her bag and pulled out a black-and-white photocopy of a girl with limp pigtails and a freckle-spattered nose. “Because otherwise we’d never get the chance to meet one of Caleb Chambers’s daughters.”
”We already met one of Chambers’s daughters.”
“Yes. But this is his eldest. Ms.
Bridget
Chambers,” Kit said and waited. Even recovering from a bump on the noggin, it didn’t take long. “Yep. That Bridget.”
Grif took the photo and studied it closer.
“Use your imagination. Erase the freckles and bleach the hair into chopped layers. Then drop a veil of distrust over that schoolgirl gaze.”
“Bridget Moore.”
“Funny,” Kit said, curling into his side. “But she didn’t mention the family connection when I was getting my nails done.”
“Seems neither of them want to.” Grif absently placed a palm on her thigh. “So what leads a nice Mormon girl into the world’s oldest profession?”
“Maybe an early influence,” Kit said in a way that suggested probability rather than possibility. “Maybe Daddy.”
“I can see the man running hookers. But his own daughter?”
“He didn’t exactly appear to be overly solicitous of women,” Kit replied wryly. “And Bridget was clearly afraid, though that could have been because of Schmidt.”
“So you think Bridget sent the list. It was the lure, Schmidt the catch.”
Lips pursed, Kit shook her head. “No. It’s her father. He’s family, so it’s more personal.”
Grif nodded after another moment. “So now we have our connection between Chambers and street hookers.”
“But still no clear evidence linking him to the Wayfarer.”
Grif’s hand returned to her head, stroking her hair before fisting around it, tugging so her head was forced back. “You’re right. Tomorrow.”
“So we’re not leaving tonight?” She grinned to show she wasn’t afraid, and voluntarily opened to him further. His eyes flared with heat, and he tightened his grip while his other hand traced her collarbone.
“There’s something you and I still need to discuss.”
“Discuss, is it?”
“It’s about your attitude problem.” He trailed his index finger down her cheek.
“Oh, that’s right. I’m . . . what was the word?”
“Cavalier.”
“Right.” She smiled as his palms moved lower. “About sex.”
“And danger.”
She lifted her hips. “Am I in danger now?”
He accepted the invitation. “Absolutely.”
Who’s cavalier now, she thought, smiling as his mouth found hers.
Whereas there’d been no thought before, just movement and need, Kit honed in on this moment, noting his gentleness with the precision of her reporter’s mind. It was almost as if he’d been a line drawing before—a very good, complicated one—but still sketched in black and white, single dimension, and as untouchable as a painting on the wall. But now, with his touch and desire funneling into her, he was a riot of color. The boldest thing she never knew she wanted.
Wanting, needing, to drop deeper into his warm flesh and raw strength, and away from the horrors of the entire week, Kit shifted closer. His heart beat strong as she slid her palm across his chest, and she noted that his earlier solemnity was gone. Whatever haunted him had been shut out of this room. Here there was just the two of them. Just life, not death. Strength, not weakness.
Hope, and none of the despair that lay outside this home and this moment and these arms. And then, just as her eyes were slipping shut, she saw his wings flare. She gasped, blinked, and they were gone. Who’s crazy now? she thought, relaxing again.
“I feel like I’m underwater. Not drowning, but immersed.” Biting her lip, she recalled what Tony had said about his home. “Submerged in this old fishbowl.”
“Everyone needs a fishbowl.” And, gaze fastened on her mouth, breath steady, Grif took them deeper. Warmer, wetter, one eight-limbed creature instead of two separate beings. Kit wrapped her limbs around him, and when he entered her again, driving deep, she gasped, then gave a little laugh. “Wings,” she said, on a rasping breath.
“Brains,” he said, chuckling, too.
And then, aligned in the unblemished moment, despite all those that lay so imperfectly outside of it, they rolled, comfortable in each other’s skin, if not their own. Together, Kit thought. And, joined, they were perfect in their deformities.
G
rif was wrong. Danger didn’t lay in his arms, but in Kit’s dreams.
She heard the voices raised in argument in the kitchen, and thought for a moment she was really awake. But no, Grif’s voice rattled like pebbles in a tin can, and the other curled around syllables like wind, a rise and fall that held a threat of fury.
“What did you think would happen, Shaw? One night in a mortal woman’s arms is supposed to erase fifty years in the Everlast?” A laugh, the wind gaining force before dying down again. Kit froze. She recognized it. The woman from the Chambers estate. The one who’d handed her the Bible and told her to go home.
“You might have your precious free will while walking this mudflat in human flesh, but you’re still a creature of the Everlast, just like me.”
Kit edged closer, and peered around the corner to find Grif with his back to her, staring out the small window over the kitchen sink. “What does that mean?”
The woman paced behind him, circling like a wolf. “It means that every day, at four-ten in the morning, you will return to your exact state of death—that clothing, that watch, the loaded gun at your ankle. Four bullets. And, of course, the photo of that pretty little wife tucked deep into your wallet.”
“You leave her out of this,” Grif said lowly.
The woman smiled, and Kit saw fangs. “You can strip it all off again in the next minute—you can put on a top hat and tap until your feet fall off for all I care—but everything will be back twenty-four hours later. Same as when you died. Same as what happened just now.”
Grif said nothing.
“You can’t escape it, Shaw. And, no matter what you told yourself while burying your flesh in that female, you will never unknow being dead.”
“Are you done?” Grif asked, voice tight.
“I won’t be done until I’m home again,” the woman said, echoing what she’d told Kit at Chambers’s estate. Kit frowned.
And the woman turned with blue smoke swirling in her eyes. “Oh. Hello, dear.”
Kit jolted awake. “Jesus,” she said, placing one hand over her thumping heart, the other automatically searching for Grif in the bed. But he wasn’t there.
Biting her lip, Kit wrapped the sheet around her body, and slowly stood. It was just a dream, she told herself. Her mind’s way of trying to make sense of everything that’d happened in the past few days.
But she headed straight to the kitchen anyway.
He was leaning over the kitchen sink, arms splayed wide, head down, and yes, fully clothed. He must not have heard her come in, because he jolted when she wrapped her arms around his body.
“Shh,” she said, as he’d done with her, but he shivered despite her warmth, and didn’t press back into the embrace.
“Want to hear something amazing?” Kit said, trying anyway. Her voice was only a little strained, but she forced it lower, huskier, like it’d been when she cried out in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t let one bad dream sully all that had come before it. “It’s something I forgot in the chaos of the last few days. Especially last night after . . . you know.
“When I first saw you, when you saved me from Schmidt. You zigzagged from the shadows, and for a moment I imagined I saw . . . well, wings. They were black, like an onyx river falling from your shoulders. They flare like rising smoke, right? And dissipate the same way at the tips?”
Now Grif did turn. “How did you know that?”
One corner of her mouth had lifted with the telling, but now it fell.
Shit.
She thought indulging his angel story would make him laugh and bring them closer. Instead, though he’d joked about it during their night together, he was again serious. Dead serious. “I don’t
know
anything. I told you, I was just seeing things.”
But his expression had grown far off. “Because you were so close to death. Because you were supposed to die.”
Kit retreated a step, pulling the sheet tighter around her. “Well, that’s what angels do, right?” Kit tried again, with a forced laugh. “Protect the innocent from a wrong, untimely death. Knowing that, knowing you did just that for me, I feel . . . different this morning. Like I might just get through this, you know?”
Grif met her gaze, and for a moment he looked like he was going to touch her. But then he turned away, and there was no danger of them touching at all. Not looking at her, he said, “We made a mistake.”
Kit’s pulse jumped in her chest. “No, we didn’t.”
“You slept with me because I fit in with your rockabilly lifestyle.”
“No, that’s why I was first attracted to you. I slept with you because . . . because . . .”
“Because?”
Because you said I was beautiful and strong. Because you said you saw my soul, and because I’ve always believed that life requires
being known by another soul.
She refocused her gaze on Grif. “Because I’m an idiot.”
Grif looked down, and shuffled a foot against the peeling linoleum floor.
“What are you doing?” Kit’s low, husky lover’s voice was gone.
“I need to tell you why I’m really here, Kit. I
am
a Centurion. I really am an angel. I meet murdered souls in the moments after their death.”
Wrapping her arms tightly around her body, she jerked her head. “Don’t do this. You know my best friend was just murdered. And my ex-husband.”
“Nicole was my Take, Kit. I was the one who was supposed to see her home.”
The dream-woman’s voice popped into Kit’s mind again.
I won’t be done until I’m home again.
“Stop it,” Kit hissed lowly. “This isn’t funny.”
But then the thought of Nicole and Grif caught hold, and the blood drained from Kit’s face. “You were there,” she whispered. “I saw you in the window. I . . . I saw your hat!”
She saw him consider lying, but Kit knew what she’d seen. Like Tony himself had told her, she knew what she knew. It had been Grif.
“Yes,” he finally said, voice clipped and hard.
“You killed her.” She backed up, knocking into the kitchen table.
“No.” Grif took a step forward.
She held out a hand, like that could keep him from coming near. “I saw you up there. I saw your silhouette!
You were there
.”
He shrugged impatiently, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I already told you that. But I didn’t kill her.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why should I believe you?”
“I saved you, didn’t I?”
It was a good point, and Kit tilted her head. “Did you talk to her?”
“Nicole?” Grif nodded, but Kit waited for more. “She said you were supposed to go to a bonfire last weekend. And some bar of beauty.”
The Beauty Bar. All her girlfriends met there once a month. Tears blurred Kit’s vision, and she hastily wiped them away. “Why are you doing this?”
“I can tell when death is coming from someone,” he said, pressing on with his crazy, horrible story. “I can smell it like a hound scents blood in the air. I can see the plasma of world matter, of fate, gathering in the moments before death, marking the end of that soul’s Surface time.”
“Like Paul?” she asked, one brow lifted in challenge.
But Grif continued to lie. “Yes.”
A harsh laugh ripped from her chest. “So you knew he was going to die? And you did nothing?” She shook her head. “What kind of angel is that, Grif? What kind of
person
is that?”
“It was fated,” he replied quickly, defensive. “There was no stopping it. Besides, he wasn’t my Take. I was with you.”
Kit thought for a moment, tried another angle. “All right. What about Marin?”
Grif didn’t even blink. “She’s got a stew of drugs inside of her that’ll probably have her outliving all of us.”
Oh, he was good. Lying with such a straight, sincere face.
“She’ll be happy to hear it.” Kit crossed her arms. “So what are you doing here, Grif? You don’t want me, that’s obvious—”
“Kit—”
“So who’s your next so-called Take?” She made finger quotes in the air, and nearly lost her sheet. She grabbed it, angry, and spun to leave . . . but froze. Stilling, looking at him, she asked, “Who
is
your next Take, Grif?”
Clearing his throat, he held out his hands. “Look, I screwed up. I did something I shouldn’t. I helped Nicole extend her life by minutes after she was already dead. She circled Schmidt’s name in your notebook, and that changed everything. Schmidt found it, and that’s why he’s after you. I let that happen. I . . . killed you.”
“I’m right here.”
“But you’re not supposed to be.”
“You saved me,” she pointed out. That had to mean something.
“I only prolonged the inevitable.”
“What? No . . .” She looked around the kitchen like it was the moon, frowning and shaking her head, then zeroed back in on him. “Bullshit.”
“What?” Grif drew back.
“I call bullshit on your black-winged angelic ass, that’s what.” Securing the sheet, she placed her hands on her hips, advanced on him like she was the one who was dangerous. “You’re just scared. You allowed yourself to feel something for me that you hadn’t felt in a long time, and it spooked you. You’re . . . chickenshit.”
“I’m in love with another woman!” he roared, causing her to flinch. “The woman you’re researching. Evie . . . Evelyn Shaw. She was my wife. They . . . they killed her. Right after they killed me.”
“You have had a total psychotic break with reality,” Kit said evenly.
“Really?” Grif used his anger as a counterpunch. “You’re the one who said you saw wings on my back. Tell that to your shrink.”
“They were shadows, I know. Don’t change the subject.” Don’t remind her of what she thought she saw during their lovemaking. It’d be just her luck if
crazy
was catching.
“So you
don’t
believe me?”
“I don’t even care!” she yelled, and then pulled at her hair in a way that probably made her look crazy. Grabbing at the sheet, she yelled, “All I know is that you’ve been there for me in the biggest shitstorm of my life, and there have been quite a few, Shaw! But you’ve stuck with me and helped me and we just made love for an entire day, and there’s something real between us and don’t tell me you didn’t feel it, too!”
Breathing hard, he opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Yeah, he’d felt it all. She took it as a concession, and moved close, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Look, I understand about losing someone. There’s no real getting over it. No one can replace a mother or a father or take a wife’s place in your heart. Those places forever belong to those you first loved. But you can carve out new places for new people. Love
matters
. It’s greater even than your Everlast.”
“The Everlast you don’t believe in.”
Kit crossed her arms. “Honestly Grif? I don’t care if you play the harp and shit stardust. But even if I did believe you, and you
were
a legitimate blast from the past, your Evie is long gone.”
“Not to me.”
She shook her head. “This is not cheating.”
He flinched like he’d been slapped, and Kit knew that of all the thoughts roiling in his mind, that was the one he hadn’t allowed to bubble up. “I am here because I want to know who killed me and my wife. That’s all.”
“You need to move on, Grif.”
Turning his back, he pressed his palms against the tiled countertop. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What wouldn’t I understand?”
“You don’t just dispose of love, Kit. Not this kind.”
Sucker-punched, Kit was silent for a long moment, then let out a gutted exhalation. “Wow. That hurt even more than hearing that I’m destined to die.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, turning to her. But of course he had. “Look, this is the only thing I’ve cared about for the last fifty years. And she’s the only woman I cared about before that. If pain can go on throughout lifetimes, then love can, too. When I get this information, when I find out what happened to Evie, and where she ended up, then and only then will I move on.”
But Kit was done talking, listening,
understanding
. “Jeez, Grif. The way you talk about her you’d think she was the fucking angel.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“You’re a dick.”
“I told you that.”
“Not that kind of dick.”
