The Taken

“Who is that?” Grif asked, leaning forward, studying the blond hair, stocky build …

“None of your damned business, that’s who!” Sarge reappeared, and looked like he was going to come at Grif right through the screen. “You are not a P.I. anymore. You’re not even human! Yet you took anchor in a body still pulsing with life, and so that must mean you want the human experience again. Fine. You’re demoted, angel.”

Every instinct told Grif to remain quiet. “What’re you gonna do?” he said instead. “Confiscate my halo?”

Frank’s gaze narrowed. “Go back to the man outside.”

Grif looked at the cashier. He waved when he caught the man looking back.

“The other one,” Sarge snapped. “And take the map. You’re gonna need it.” And the security screen returned to normal.

Muttering to himself, Grif pocketed the Luckies and folded the map, and was halfway to the door before remembering the coffee. When he finally exited, the cashier looked over, scoffing when he saw the steaming cups, one in each hand.

“You’re really not from here.”

But he didn’t follow as Grif headed back around the side of the building, and Jimmy was right where he left him, seemingly passed out, though his head lifted when Grif stopped in front of him. “Here.”

But it was Sarge’s misty, marbled gaze staring out at him from the mortal flesh. Grif jolted, scalding his flesh with the coffee. “What are you doing? Is he … possessed?”

“It’s easy to control those who have no possession over themselves,” Sarge said. “Now look in his left coat pocket.”

Grif set down the cups. “Why?”

“I’m giving you a case.”

“Another Take?” Grif asked, withdrawing a file folder.

Jimmy’s expression altered, both hard and sympathetic all at once. “Not a Take. A case. You think you can do my job, Shaw? Make the decisions and sacrifices required of a Pure?”

What the hell had the Pure ever sacrificed? Grif thought, but Frank didn’t give him the chance to ask. “Open it. Find out more of exactly what it is we do.”

A black-and-white glossy stared up at him, a rap sheet stapled across from that, but he ignored the vital stats and studied the face. He recognized her immediately, of course. The pretty woman he’d seen from the motel window, though pretty wasn’t a word he’d use to describe her up close. Siren would work, and her baby blues were lit up as if she knew it, and it amused her.

Cherry-cream lips and sable-hued bangs stood out against pale skin, stark, even in black-and-white. A rose, blood-orange, he imagined, was tucked behind one ear. He glanced over at the name—Katherine Craig—then back at the photo.

“I don’t get it.”

Jimmy’s mouth moved. “What’s your job as a Centurion?”

Grif cleared his throat. “Secure the Take. Clean ’em up. Bring ’em home.”

Do it respectfully, he added silently. Okay, so he’d learned his lesson.

But Sarge wasn’t through yet. “And when do you meet your Takes, Shaw?”

“When they are most traumatized. Immediately after corporeal death.”

Every Centurion knew that, because that’s why they existed. They were the losers. The few murdered souls that incubation couldn’t cure. Still tethered to the Surface by memory and regret, they were pressed into assisting others to cross into the Everlast. The idea was that helping others would relieve their mental anguish. Then they, too, would be able to enter Paradise proper.

The bum gave him a tight smile. Grif blinked. For a moment he thought he saw fangs. “Not this one.”

“Sarge?”

Frank’s roiling liquid gaze suddenly looked shuttered. “You gotta watch this one, Griffin. See, you might be back on the Surface, back in flesh, but you’re not human. Take away a Centurion’s wings, and all they’re left with is an intimate acquaintance with death.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can still see death coming. It also means you’re gonna watch that woman die, and you’re going to feel the death as if it were your own.”

Grif froze. That’s what he was doing here?

“No.”

He began to shake his head. He might be a misfit in the celestial realm, but everyone knew the only thing keeping him sane was the protective layer of Everlast that lay between Paradise and the Surface. It was a balm, a numbing cream rubbed atop his sore soul. Flesh would scrub off that balm and expose him. Without it he’d wither.

But Sarge knew this better than anyone, so all Grif asked was, “Why?”

“Because you caused it, Shaw.” Now Frank didn’t look angry, vengeful, or cold. He just looked sad. “Katherine Craig is fated to die because of you.”

Grif’s newfound breath deserted him, but his mind fired fast.

My best friend is waiting outside …

The siren in the car. The way she’d looked up at him in a way no woman had in over fifty years: as if really seeing him. And the blond man who’d pocketed the Moleskine.

Whatever Nicole Rockwell had written in it was going to lead the man directly to Katherine Craig.

Grif tossed the folder to the ground. “I won’t do it.”

Jimmy’s expression, and Frank’s darker one beneath it, didn’t alter. “You’re going to bring that poor girl’s soul home, Shaw. You’re going to see that she gets safely to incubation where she can heal from her death, and the grief over a life and family she’ll never have.”

“No.”

“You will do this so that she damned well doesn’t end up like you. And, Grif? You’re going to do it nicely.” The bum’s nostrils flared, his stare tumultuous and bright. “Keep the map until you get your bearings. You’ve been navigating by the constellations for so long now that the streets mean nothing. Now, go.”

Grif closed his eyes, and the same loneliness that’d run him under when he sank through Nicole’s body wracked him again. Lowering his head, he shook it side to side. “I still remember things I shouldn’t. And the memories will be stronger if I stay on the Surface. Humanity … hurts.”

Silence reigned for so long Grif could almost believe Frank was reconsidering. But when he looked up, the bum’s gaze was bleary, confused, and pinned on the coffee cup next to him. “What the hell is this? Where’s the sauce, man?”

Grif bent, pocketed the folder, and turned to leave. But, just in case, he paused to mutter, “You forgot my damned hat.”

“You forgot my damned beer!” Jimmy replied, but Grif was already walking. He was just out of the drunk’s view when he spotted it coming fast, like a soundless comet or a falling black star. It dropped directly to his side, sending a small puff of dust into the air, causing Grif to cough.

Yeah, yeah, Grif thought, bending down. It’s all dust. We’re all dust. I get it.

But he didn’t give Sarge the satisfaction of looking back or up, and he didn’t give thanks. Instead he dusted off his fedora, settled it atop his head, and kept walking.

Somewhere out there was a woman with powerful blue eyes, a secretive smile, and curves that made him want to cry. A woman he was going to have to face in both this world and the next. A woman fated to die because of him.

Again.

Kit shouldn’t have been surprised at the sun’s ascendance in the sky, or by downtown’s early-morning bustle. Yet she stood at the bottom of the concrete stairway outside the station, shoulders slumped and limbs heavy, as astonished by the urban landscape as she’d be in a foreign country. It was startling that these people had dressed this morning—or not, in the case of the vagrant sprawled to her left—and bewildering that they could now think of coffee, or gambling, or work.

And what the hell was there to laugh about, Kit wondered, anger flashing as a passing woman threw back her blond, perfectly coiffed head—neck white and pristine and unmarked by a butcher’s knife—loosing an inappropriate amount of joy into the world. Kit wanted to grab the sleeve of the blonde’s suit jacket, or maybe a handful of that carefully styled hair, and say, “My best friend was murdered last night. Why the hell are you still alive?”

Why am I? she thought, tears welling.

Why was anyone?

Kit realized she was causing a scene, looking rumpled, dazed, and literally shaking in the sidewalk’s center. Swallowing hard, she wiped her eyes with her cardigan before beginning the long walk to the police lot where she’d parked the night before.

It was still wintry this early in February, but Kit didn’t hurry. Her steps were as measured and precise as an army recruit’s. She even halted stiffly beneath the bald tubing of an old neon sign to stare into a refurbished café where lawyers and D.A.s and those who made their living off of other people’s vices were talking shop and swapping stories. Blue pendant lamps glowed like crystal jellyfish, and the scent of fresh bread and baking sugar rushed out to envelop her when the door was thrown wide.

Kit frowned and stared. The café didn’t look inviting to her. Instead, it looked too hot, like a nuclear reactor. Like it would consume and destroy every bit of life that entered there.

Or maybe she was just projecting.

Hurrying the rest of the way to her car, she slammed the door on the sounds of downtown Vegas, and locked herself in the cocoon-like silence. The familiar squeak and scent of leather wrapped around her like a sumptuous throw. The perfume that’d been her latest flea market find, and that she’d been wearing the night before, tickled her nose. Slumping, Kit let her head fall. She should go straight home and sleep, but she didn’t dare start the car with her hands still shaking. Besides, sleep meant closing her eyes, and even blinking was a nightmare. She’d rather cling to the raw numbness of her fatigue. She preferred her overheated anger at the world.

Swallowing hard, she dialed Paul’s number to see if he’d done any work on the list she’d given him in the station. He didn’t answer, no surprise, but it made her want to gore something with her red fingertips. Forget that it was not yet seven and there was nothing he could have done in three predawn hours. Forget, too, that he’d never been available when Kit needed him, anyway.

But Nicole had. Kit glanced at the metaphorical elephant in the car, Nic’s camera, lying lens-up on the passenger’s seat, its wide, alien gaze locked on her. Nic loved that camera like Kit loved the Duetto, so much that her predominant memory of Nicole was in a one-eyed squint, shoulders hunched as she held the camera to her eye.

“With my shots and your smarts, we’re sure to hit the major wires,” she’d said, pointing the camera up at the room where she’d die within the hour.

“Sure you don’t want me in there with you?” Kit asked, staring at the window.

“The girl was insistent. She wants me alone.”

“I could hide under the bed.”

Nicole raised her brows. “And where’s the first place you’d look? Besides, I’d blow any trust I’d built once you climbed out from beneath a stained mattress with old jizz caked on your kneecaps.”

Kit made a face. “Get me a Brillo pad. I need to scrub that image from my brain.”

“Well, do it from within this George Jetson cockpit. I’ll text you and have you come up when the girl and I have established a rapport. Until then … smile. I’m about to take the photo for your byline.”

Nicole snapped a few shots of Kit in profile, the motel sagging like a battered woman in the background, then smiled as she studied the images. “God, I’m good.”

She was. She could see everything through her lens. So well, Kit thought, that sometimes she was utterly blind without it.

Kit slid her key in the ignition. She should go home. There was nothing outside the safety of this car but more bright sky and oblivious people and futile anger. But how was she to be alone with this grief? It wasn’t that she wanted someone’s shoulder to cry on—her sadness was heavy enough to knock two people over—but it’d be nice to see someone who’d known Nic alive and well, and who’d also feel the loss now that she was no longer either of those things.

So despite the wrinkles in her dress, the bedraggled ends of her hair, and the shadows haunting her eyes, Kit went to work. She would crack soon, she felt it like an animal sensed an impending earthquake, and would have to be home by then. But not yet. Not now. Her grief still hadn’t entered the nuclear reactor’s core. But she knew from previous experience—her mother’s death, her father’s—that when it did, the world as she knew it would be flattened, every particle in her life rearranged, her personal universe blown away.

If only there was a way to take a photo of that.

CHAPTER FOUR

The graveyard-shift waitress in the roadside café was bleary-eyed and slow. The short-order cook was uninspired, and more interested in the activity going on outside the attached motel where Rockwell had died. And the vinyl booth was ripped in so many places it was impossible to sit comfortably. But the coffee was hot, melting the last of Grif’s cosmic thaw, though he wouldn’t have wished the runny eggs and burned toast for anyone’s first meal back on the Surface—or their last.

Yet it didn’t matter much to Grif. He couldn’t taste it. The Everlast must have somehow flash-fried his senses. He couldn’t feel the fork in his hand, either—not the way he should, at least. His eyesight was clearer, but after the Technicolor wonder of the Everlast, it was small comfort. Yet his nose worked well enough that he was thankful not to be in Jimmy’s trash pile any longer, so he supposed that was something.

But his hearing was hollow and tinny, probably about right for an eighty-four-year-old man.

You’re not human.

No shit, he thought, moving his shoulders. The blades still ached where Anas had ripped the wings from his back.

Yet when he finally looked up from his empty plate, the headache dogging him was gone, and he almost felt a part of the world. So, belching lightly, he got down to the business of locating Ms. Craig.

The map alone didn’t help; Sarge had been right about that. But a journey was rarely a straight shot from point A to point B. It was the landmarks and details that made all the difference. The bent street sign and the shifty-eyed man leaning against it. The car parked in the wrong direction on a residential street.

The intricate brick face on the Strip-side bungalow where he’d died.

Yeah, details he remembered.

Fortunately, the waitress wasn’t so comatose that she couldn’t point out the diner’s location, south of Sunrise Mountain just off of Boulder Highway. Outside the window, self-storage units rose like tombstones from each side of the street, and trailer parks squatted behind those. So he knew where he was but still not where he was going.

Vegas’s streets hadn’t changed that much, he thought, squinting at the black-and-white grid. Though there were certainly more of them. And the place sprawled like it could go on forever. He remembered a time when the Boys tried to pay their entertainers in real estate. The talent had laughed and held out their hand for hard coin instead. Who, they said, would want to own land in this glorified litter box?

But according to this map, people did, and there was only one reason Grif could figure the population would sprawl all the way from the Sheep Mountains to the Black: to get away from other people.

The infamous Las Vegas Strip was clearly marked and the major streets leading from it jumped out at him like old friends at a surprise party—Trop, Flamingo, Sahara—but that wouldn’t help him find one lone woman.

So he put the map aside for now and pulled out the folder Sarge had left him.

There, still stapled inside was the Polaroid of Katherine Craig. His case. Before Grif could flip the thing over, his gaze caught on the whites of her teeth, a single dimple, and crinkles around smoky eyes. It took a moment before he could shake off the image and focus on the page behind it. Once he did, he found the information he sought.

Katherine Craig, age 29, born in Las Vegas to Shirley and Martin Craig, both deceased. Mother was a homemaker, died of cancer when Katherine was 12. Father was a police officer, killed on-duty while responding to a robbery when she was 16.

So one parent passed directly through the Gates, Grif thought, sipping at his cooling coffee. The other was dumped into incubation a few years later. Shirley Craig would definitely be waiting in Paradise, though her husband might still be in the Tube, depending on how long it took to get over the trauma of his death. Katherine was going to end up doing time there as well, so it was entirely plausible that if she healed quickly and her father did not, they’d emerge at the same time.

“Some family reunion,” Grif muttered, and kept reading.

Marital status, divorced from one Paul Raggio. Schooling, private and then UNLV. Occupation: interned in the Sterling Hotel’s advertising department, demoted for insubordination. Moved to guest services, same hotel, but fired a month later for insulting a guest. Has since worked as a reporter for her family-owned newspaper, the Las Vegas Tribune. A business constantly on the edge of bankruptcy.

So the girl was a native Las Vegan, had a mouth and possibly a temper on her, and a documented history of getting herself in touchy situations. Yet even as Grif thought it, he knew he was projecting. It was easier on him to believe that she and Nicole Rockwell had forged a head-on with death, but Sarge had made it clear Craig’s twisted fate was Grif’s doing. Besides—mouth, temper, and occupation aside—no one deserved murder.

So there you have it, Grif thought, leaning back. A nosy divorcee who lost both her parents young, and was destined to die in the same city she was born. Those were the facts, and facts were bricks Grif could lay side by side and atop one another until a pattern emerged and a wall was built. Intelligence and instinct were mortar binding it all together, and with enough of both, he would insulate himself from the emotion that was useless in good detective work.

It would be debilitating to someone who could see death coming.

Facts were a damn sight better than a good sense of direction, Grif thought, and—feeling like he had a big enough wall built up now—he went ahead and flipped the photo back over.

Why the hell was she smiling like that? he wondered, his newfound breath lost to the visual kidney punch. Her mouth was blown so wide that the soft insides showed at the corners, like another grin was building in there. As if her laughter tumbled. Like joy was a living thing.

You caused it, Shaw. Katherine Craig is fated to die because of you.

He looked away, gazing out the window at where Craig had been parked, her tiny foreign car dark, her wide-eyed face white, as she stared up at the window where her friend had just died. Directly at him, he remembered.

“More coffee?”

Grif nodded at the waitress, silent. He couldn’t taste it but he needed the warmth.

Yet the coffee didn’t ground him this time, and it sloshed onto the Formica as he tried to lift it. It was hot enough to burn his new flesh, and should have caused him to hiss, but he didn’t. The waitress noticed it, too. He looked back at her and noted a faint silvery outline to her silhouette.

Plasma. He knew what it was, though it was usually gone by the time he arrived for his Takes. This was a shimmering thread, but growing dark at the edges.

You can still see death coming.

So blunted mortal senses, but a celestial sense for death.

“You need to get that mole checked,” he said before she could comment on his burn. “It’s not too late, but it will be in another year.”

The waitress’s eyes widened, but he said nothing more, and she scurried away. Sarge was probably stomping around the Everlast, muttering about sensitivity. So what. Those were the facts. Facts were bricks. Now she could do something about it.

Grif, however, needed more facts, more bricks between him and this … this …

Woman. Katherine.

Case.

Straightening, Grif flipped past the rap sheet until he came to the last page of the report, hoping to find an address … which he did. Right across the top of her autopsy report, dated two days from now. She would die at home, he saw, but most people did. Although they didn’t usually die from multiple stab wounds—she’d suffer thirty-two in all. He shouldn’t be surprised. Murderers were like superstitious ballplayers. They rarely deviated from a play that had worked well before.

Grif hadn’t looked too closely at the placement of Rockwell’s wounds, but the coroner’s notes showed Craig’s deepest, deadliest cuts would be precise and controlled, no breaks in the incisions, no hesitation on the killer’s part as he stole her life. So Craig’s murderer wasn’t just skilled with a knife, he’d probably killed even before Rockwell. Could he be ex-military? A hired killer? A butcher?

You are not a P.I. anymore. You’re not even human!

Grif gave Sarge’s voice a mental shove and kept reading, saw that there were no lacerations on the finger or hands, meaning Craig would succumb easily to attack. So maybe it’ll be fast then, Grif thought, then caught himself. How pansy was it that he didn’t know if he wanted that more for her or for himself?

Facts, Grif thought, as he started to sweat. He needed bricks. Reason and instinct. Mortar. He needed a wall if he was going to get through this.

I need the Everlast, he thought desperately, reaching for his coffee. But as he lifted the cup, one last word on the autopsy report caught his attention, and the cosmic freeze he’d felt when relearning how to breathe wrapped its cold fingers around his throat again.

Rape.

So not like Nicole Rockwell, after all.

The grease and coffee rebelled in his new stomach, and Grif bumped the table as he rose. Throwing too many bills onto the tabletop, he then stumbled out into the crisp, bright morning, the last of Katherine Craig’s life. He immediately turned his gaze directly into the fiery sun. How?

How did Sarge expect him to do this? How was he supposed to watch a killer, a rapist, come to this smiling woman’s home, and do nothing to stop it?

Take away a Centurion’s wings, and all they’re left with is an intimate acquaintance with death.

“I can’t,” he said aloud, earning a look from a bleary-eyed woman just stepping from her room. Not a hint of plasma around her, he noted, panicking.

How the hell was this supposed to help him heal, he wondered, as a crow cawed above him. Grif covered his ears, wincing. The animal was circling for the kill. Grif’s death senses caught that.

“Where’s your infamous mercy?” he rasped, stumbling out of the lot and onto Boulder Highway, away from the crow, the half-dressed woman now watching him suspiciously … toward another who wouldn’t see him at all. And still, there was no answer from on high.

In this question, it seemed, there never was.

Craig.”

Kit hadn’t been in her office more than five minutes before her doorway fell dark. Her boss’s tone had Kit glancing up with guilt, but Marin Wilson returned her pale-faced stare with eyes that were grim as well as sharp. Studying Kit’s atypically rumpled appearance, she allowed silence to sit between them before gesturing to her office with a jerk of her head.

Kit sighed and stood, ignoring the stares from the main press room, Marin’s wake a defensive wall between her and their unspoken questions. When they reached Marin’s office, Kit shut the door behind her without being asked, took a seat, and waited.

Marin dropped into an ergonomic chair on the other side of a desk so loaded with papers it belonged on Hoarders. She ran a hand through short, spiky hair, newly silver, a side effect of chemo. She didn’t care. Marin disdained pretense of any kind. She’d rather apply pressure than lipstick, and found Kit and Nicole’s love for fashion so bewildering she often studied them like they were exotic animals at the zoo.