The Taken (38 page)

Authors: Vicki Pettersson

BOOK: The Taken

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Glancing behind him, making sure Kit hadn’t followed, he approached a wheelchair-bound man who had his back to the dispersing crowd as he gazed out over the expansive green cemetery.

“Joe?” Grif said, coming to a stop at the man’s side. “Joe Pascuzzi?”

The man looked up, eyes thick with cataracts that made his gaze a blurry, diluted blue, but it was Joe all right. Beneath the wispy hair and paper-thin skin was the man Grif had known fifty years earlier—an associate of the DiMartino family, as made as a man could get.

“Who are you?” Joe asked, a frown rearranging his wrinkles into new patterns. “Are you my nurse? Where’s my nurse?”

Grif’s hopes plummeted. Joe’s eyesight wasn’t the only thing that’d gone.

“Never mind, old buddy,” Grif said, though Joe had never been that. He turned away. “Have a good day.”

“That you, Shaw?”

Grif froze. The voice had changed, the cadence and timbre stronger than before, and those watery eyes were suddenly fixed on him.

Grif knelt in front of him, and stared. “Sarge?”

“Who the hell else?” Joe’s lips curled up as he stared down a passing woman. She hurried quickly on, as if she knew who Joe was . . . or used to be. “Think she’s got a cigar?”

Grif shook his head. “First the bum, then the baby, now the old guy . . . what are you doing?”

Not-Joe glared back. “And you call yourself a detective? I can manipulate the very old and very young. People with a tenuous grasp on reality. Those closer to the Everlast than life.”

“But Anas—”

“Yeah, I saw what happened to Anas. I ain’t donning flesh just to bring your sorry ass back from this mudflat.”

Grif shrugged. “She didn’t find it so bad. Not in the end, anyway.”

“That’s right. And Anas was there on God’s authority. Obviously, He already knew how it was going to go down with her . . . and you. His ways are mysterious.”

“So I’ve heard,” Grif muttered darkly.

Joe’s expression hardened at that. “Hey, my job is just to deliver a message. The Host has conferred.”

“And?”

“And it’s unanimous. We have the death we needed on record. It’s not the one we thought we’d get, but considering the good that will result from both Chambers and Schmidt being gone, the scales are again balanced.”

“Which means?”

The milky blue eyes watched him carefully. “Katherine Craig may live.”

Relief flooded Grif so hard and fast, he swayed. He had saved her? He hadn’t killed her after all?

Sarge gave him time to digest that, then said, “We’d still like you to come back, though.”

“That an order?” Grif asked, though from Sarge’s—or Joe’s—responding scowl, he knew it wasn’t. Grif was still wearing flesh. Which, as Anas told him, meant he still possessed the gift of free will.

“I thought you might ask that,” Sarge replied sourly, “and I already brought it up to the others.”

That meant the Seraphim, Cherubim, and the Thrones. All in the first triad of Creation, higher even than the Archangels.

“And?”

“I explained to them all about your nightmares. About Evie. About the girl, too.” Joe’s eyes cut sideways, and Grif knew he was looking at Kit. “I also explained that you now possess some of Anas’s immortality. Have you noticed your headaches are gone? Your breath comes easily? Your senses are stronger than they were the first time you were here?”

Grif had, though he thought it was just because he’d once again acclimated to flesh and the Surface.

Sarge shook his, Joe’s, head. “She transferred Pure energy to you. She won’t say how . . .” Leaning back, he frowned. “In fact, she’s having a hard time saying much of anything right now—but it’s as clear as a rainbow’s promise. Purity lives in you, Grif.”

Grif shook his head. “But that’s . . .”

“Unnatural.”

Grif was going to say “impossible,” but the disgust in the Pure’s voice rendered him silent. Sarge then sighed, Joe’s thin chest falling concave. “What it means, Shaw, is that you can stay without the pain caused by cramming your soul into flesh and lungs that don’t fit, even without a limit to your mortal years. You are something . . . new. You’re an angelic human.”

“So I can remain on the Surface? For as long as I want?”

“On one condition.” He gripped the sides of the chair and leaned forward. “You have to help us in return. You got celestial power, so that means you’re still a Centurion. You come when we call. You don’t argue and you don’t hesitate. We can use you for . . . special circumstances.”

“How special?” Grif asked, wary now.

“Some souls get lost. Some are so wounded they flee their Centurion guides and hide.”

Grif recalled hearing of the Lost back in Incubation but he’d never encountered one as a Centurion. No one he knew had.

“Let’s just say we may have . . . use for someone like us on Earth,” Sarge said cryptically before clearing his throat. “Maybe you can treat your Takes a little better now that you remember what it’s like to live as well as die.”

Grif nodded once. Point taken.

“In return, you may use your time on the mud as you please. Just . . . be careful what you ask for.”

That was fine. Grif didn’t want much. Just Kit. To still learn who killed Evie.

Who killed Griffin Shaw.

Looking away, Sarge inhaled deeply as he considered his surroundings. “Look at the trees, Grif. Look at this beautiful day. Look at the gorgeous woman staring at you right now like you’re responsible for it all.”

Grif did, and the day was immediately more beautiful because Kit was in it. Smiling hesitantly, she gave him a small wave, and his heart leaped at the thought of endless days with her in them. He smiled back.

“You know,” Sarge said, watching them. “People treasure the moments in their lives because they know those times will soon be gone. A normal person like that girl over there focuses on the present because even if she doesn’t acknowledge it, death still looms in her future.”

But not for Grif. He was still angelic, and that made him different. Still, he was being given his long-awaited chance for justice. And though the Everlast had the Forest and the Third to exact punishment for such crimes, he couldn’t just let it go.

“Don’t be surprised to discover there are worse things to despair of than one’s final days. You’re out of sync with the natural world now. That will bring its own set of problems.”

“No,” Grif said immediately. “No, I’m fine with immortality.”

Sarge gave a tight smile. “I didn’t say you were immortal. I just said that you will live on until you, or someone else with free will, decides differently.”

“So don’t go throwing myself into oncoming bullets.”

“Don’t lose sight of why you’re here,” Sarge corrected gravely. “When there’s time for everything, there’s value in nothing.”

But what did Sarge know, anyway? He’d never been born, or even worn flesh. He’d never experienced senses or death. Grif looked away. He’d also never had Kit Craig, girl reporter and newshound and rockabilly weirdo love
him
with a heart that was as vast as the Everlast. And that was purer than anything that lived in Grif.

“Yeah, well maybe I deserve this,” he finally said, and perhaps that was why the day suddenly looked so beautiful. “She’s the memories I don’t have. She’s the world I never knew.”

She was the part of him he hadn’t been able to access on his own. The part that had been Taken.

He turned back to the Sarge. “Can you understand?”

But Joe’s brows were drawn low, and his mouth hung slightly open as he stared past Grif’s shoulder. “Bring me my goddamned breakfast. I want some cantaloupe.”

Grif sighed. It didn’t matter. Even were Sarge still there, Grif doubted there’d be any understanding. So he patted Joe on the shoulder, and returned to the one thing in the world that did make sense.

Glancing up from where she sat alone, beneath an old oak, Kit dropped the dandelions she’d been fashioning into a halo. “Find an old friend?”

“Don’t know if I’d call him that,” Grif said, offering her a hand up.

She took it, then linked her arm in his once she was standing, as if they’d been walking like that for years. “What were you two chatting about?”

“Life. Death.” Grif shrugged. “Small stuff like that.”

“Oh, sure.” Kit laughed, but didn’t press.

Halting suddenly, Grif shoved his hands into his pockets. “Got a question for you, Craig. How ’bout walking this world with me for a while?”

Kit lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, but it couldn’t shield her smile. “Why, I think that’d suit me just fine, Mr. Shaw.”

Grif leaned over so that the brim of his fedora took the place of her shielding hand, and kissed her long and hard, until a passing matron grumpily cleared her throat. Pulling away, Kit sighed contentedly. “My mind is spinning.”

“ ’Course it is,” he said, pulling her again toward the parking lot.

“I mean my world has been upended, too.”

“Nah. Just clarified,” he said, but his mind was spinning as well. “And so has mine.”

“So we still make a pretty good team, huh?” She raised her voice as they reached her car and split. She’d left the top down in deference to the day, so caught his playful shrug.

“When we’re not swinging at each other.”

“Ah, well,” she said, climbing in. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Always gotta be fun with you, Craig?” he asked, as they pulled from the cemetery lot.

“It certainly helps.”

And Grif just smiled as they rocketed away, because she was right. It did.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes out to
Burlesque Beauty, Tattooed Cutie,
ChaCha Velour, for educating me on the exciting and addictive world of rockabilly culture. My Facebook friend Sharon Bond answered newswoman questions, and Kristin Grammas not only told me what a decaying body smells like, she offered to take me on a ride-along to show me one
in situ
. Gee, thanks, Kristin. Pamela Patchet and Joy Maiorana read early versions of the manuscript, and their astute comments and suggestions ended up making me look smarter—always appreciated. Miriam Kriss was a singular force in helping shape this new series from proposal to rewrites, and Diana Gill, as ever, championed it the whole way. My heartfelt thanks to you all.

About the Author

The
New York Times
bestselling author of the Sign of the Zodiac series—and former showgirl—V
ICKI
P
ETTERSSON
was born, raised, and still lives in Sin City, where a backyard view of the Strip regularly inspires her to set down her martini and write.

www.vickipettersson.com

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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Books by Vicki Pettersson

T
HE
S
IGN OF THE
Z
ODIAC SERIES

The Scent of Shadows

The Taste of Night

The Touch of Twilight

City of Souls

Cheat the Grave

The Neon Graveyard

Credits

Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

Cover illustration by Larry Rostant

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE TAKEN
. Copyright © 2012 by Vicki Pettersson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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