The Taken

by Vicki Pettersson

  Grif froze mid-stretch.

  “Come on, Shaw,” Anne said with undisguised disgust. “You’re a Centurion. You can still sense death coming for others.”

  Grif shook his head. “I blocked it out.”

  He’d been working so hard to ignore his angelic side, to use the time left on the mud to clear his name, that he’d missed death coming for him.

  Yet Anne’s words jogged another memory from Chambers’s gala.

  “Didn’t you smell that?” he’d asked Kit after they’d walked away from Paul, but she’d waved the question away and Grif let it go. But he recognized it now. Paul had reeked of post-mortem plasma.

  “Use it or lose it,” Anne said, without sympathy.

  That must be why Grif hadn’t perceived the swirling mist, the sign of impending death he’d relied on most, though in retrospect even Paul’s voice had sounded tinny, the echo of the hourglass running out. “It was the same smell that was stalking Paul earlier tonight.”

  Anne merely continued gazing out the window. Grif joined her, staring until she was compelled to turn his way. Up close, the eyes roiled like an azure cyclone. “Why’d you interfere?”

  Now she sneered. “Because I know what you’re trying to forget. You’re not human, Shaw.”

  “So why help me, Anne? If I’m gone, Kit dies, and you’re back in the Everlast. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Glancing down at a rip in her silk blouse, Anne stroked the soft material with her fingertips, and frowned. “Katherine Craig will die anyway. But I can’t return to the Everlast unless you, the man who bound her to that fate, escort her there. She’s your Take, Shaw. And you’re mine.”

  And he couldn’t Take Kit if he’d already been shipped back to incubation to heal from the trauma of yet another death. So Anne needed him alive and near Kit, but they couldn’t order him to harm her . . . and couldn’t stop him from protecting her, either.

  “Of course . . . now you owe me.”

  Grif tilted his head. “Which means?”

  “If you were to speed things along, I wouldn’t forget the deed.” She tried on a smile, but it looked like a puzzle on her face, and Grif didn’t smile back.

  “You mean kill her myself so you’ll play nice with me in the Everlast.”

  “You’ve already killed her,” Anne said coolly. “You need merely to put her out of her misery.”

  Grif turned away, but Anne was there, too, and Grif hadn’t even seen her move. “Don’t walk away from me.”

  So he leaned against the thick bulletproof glass. “Were you trying to scare her at Chambers’s house?”

  Anne smiled, mouth unnaturally wide. The flesh she was so regrettably trapped in wasn’t a perfect fit. She wore it like a sweater that was too tight and so her expressions bulged in places they shouldn’t. “To death.”

  Grif began shaking his head. “No, I—”

  “Kill her!” Anne yelled, and she lashed out with her fist, not at Grif—no, she couldn’t do that—but at the barrier that’d protected Tony for the last fifty years. The glass wall fell in a shower of sharp drops, and Anne jerked away, as surprised as Grif by the outburst. More surprised at the blood welling in her palm. She jerked back at Grif’s touch, but when he held firm, she allowed him to take hold of her arm.

  “You catch bullets with your teeth,” he said quietly, “but you bleed when you break glass?”

  “It’s this flesh!” she cried, the sound of mourning doves in her voice. “It’s a handicap! I am dying in here, can’t you see?”

  Welcome to the club, Grif thought, releasing her arm. “That’s the human condition, Anne. As long as you’re alive, you’re dying.”

  Shooting him a squalling, blue-stained glare, Anne pinched together her wounds. The skin melded where it touched, and she massaged it like clay until it was once again smooth and the blood was wiped away. However, Tony’s fishbowl was a mess. He’s gonna be pissed, Grif thought, huffing as he looked around.

  “Nice job . . .” he began, but when he looked back at Anne’s face, a lone blue tear slid over her cheek, trailing wet stardust.

  “This is not my nature,” she said, her powerful voice a mere whimper, a child’s despair carved on her smooth, perfect features. “This is not my way.”

  Grif had never even heard of a Pure in need of comfort, much less seen one. But he understood.

  “Come here,” he said, holding out his arm. When she only looked at it, he moved to her side, and drew her close. Anne stiffened, then suddenly slumped. It was the first human empathy she’d ever known. Grif guided her to the half-moon sofa, settled her back with a chenille throw across her lap, and a pillow tucked behind her neck. Telling her to wait, he raided Tony’s beloved wine rack, choosing the bottle the old guy had pointed out as his favorite, one he’d been saving for decades.

  “It’s for a good cause,” Grif muttered apologetically, pulling the cork from the bottle. Only the best for a Pure. Yet he hesitated in handing the glass to her. “You said you couldn’t bear all five senses at the same time. Your eyesight is back . . .”

  “My touch is gone,” she said, running her fingertips along the chenille, and then back up to the rip in her silk. Fingering the material, she looked genuinely sad. “I never knew a material thing could be as soft and cool as the wind.”

  Blinking, she lifted her gaze to Grif’s, and nodded as she accepted the glass. Holding it on her lap, she said, “My sense of touch was acute when I arrived, but then it just went blank. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t feel things anymore, it was like they didn’t even exist. That’s when the colors flooded in.”

  Anne leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Now I know why a rainbow is a gift. Oh, and the glorious dimension of everyday objects. I spent this entire morning studying a single rose.” She raised her head, and the blue depths of her eyes were wide with the memory of her first rose. “Did you know that life thrums through the veins of every petal? It’s so alive that humans try to wear its secrets.”

  Grif lowered himself to the lounger across from Anne, and shook his head. He hadn’t known any of that.

  “But the touch is gone. Textures mean nothing to me anymore.” She stared wonderingly at her palm, then said as if to herself, “And somehow . . . they mean more than before.”

  “Because you can’t unknow your life’s experiences,” Grif said. This was his area of expertise.

  She looked at Grif. “I must go home.”

  Sighing, Grif leaned back in his lounger, then held up his glass. Staring at Anne through the dark cranberry stain, he said, “Do you know why people drink this? I mean, wine instead of beer or scotch or vodka? Or anything else?”

  “I do not know why one would drink at all.”

  Nodding once, he continued, “It’s because wine tells a story. If a bottle is properly stored, and this one was, you will taste a juice that is changed only in age. The rest remains the same as when it was bottled. All the choices the winemaker made in picking the grapes, and blending them, and storing them are in the bottle. You taste the fruit, but you also taste the wood of the cask as if it were a living thing—and, of course, it once was. You taste the storm that hit right before the grapes were picked, and whether it cooled them too quickly. You taste the earth . . . the way it was fed, when it was watered, and if it was healthy.

  “All these things come together in a simple bottle, and when you drink it, a climate and a man you never knew, and a bit of mud you never actually stepped foot on, reveal themselves to you. It’s the personal history of the world recorded in a bottle. This one is the record of the year Tony was born.” He jerked his head. “Taste it.”

  It was fascinating, watching a Pure experience sensation for the first time. She tried to hide the foreign emotions, but there was no controlling her surprise when the first drop of wine hit her lips. As her eyes fluttered shut and her throat hummed, Grif could almost follow its path as it rolled down her tongue, igniting the sweet and sour taste buds, before sliding i
nto her throat, disappearing in a mysterious heat of knowledge in her belly’s core.

  “Now that’s a story,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast when her eyes finally refocused.

  For a moment, Anne didn’t move at all. Then, just as he spied more blue tears filling her eyes with liquid stardust, she opened her mouth and screamed. A raven’s rabid screech ripped the air, accompanied by bared teeth and bulging eyes. The cry blew through the room, elongating until there should have been a hesitation. Yet the moment when any man would have to draw breath passed, and the weight behind the spine-scraping pitch only increased. Lifting, the tonsil-ripping howl reached another crescendo, then snapped like a band into a numbing silence. Feeling a pressure grow above him, Grif looked up.

  Lightning cracked through the ceiling to arrow between him and Anne. For an eye’s blink, Grif caught the origins of the unnatural fire bolt. Through the rooftop, past ozone and sky, a grainy membrane lay ripped like skin. A tangle of color rested behind that—the rainbow God unfurled onto the Surface, bunched up like ribbon in a box. Anne’s cry ripped the seams of God’s promise, allowing an even briefer view of what lay on its other side.

  Paradise.

  Grif’s cry joined Anne’s at the sight, and he reached up toward the wonder, both everything and an abyss. Every element of the universe was mashed together in undulating effervescence; flame burning behind frost, velvety clouds roiling over gold sheets of evaporating water, peaceful pockets of darkness, inflamed and full, like bulging black hearts. Grif listed toward it like a sailor toward the siren’s call. Yearning rose in his chest like a wave, followed by an ache that crashed in to lay him flat.

  All of his losses—his life, Evelyn’s, the unknown future of their doomed past—they all reached from inside to choke him. Yet the beauty above spoke to him, as if only to him, and his mouth opened to form a reply from his heart. Across from him, Anne was speaking in tongues. Even with tortured minds and broken spirits, even bound to the Surface, they ached for God’s presence. It would be like being drawn back into the womb. It would be rest. It was the only real redemption there was.

  It took Grif longer to recover from the sight of Paradise than it did from the attack. But it left Anne even worse off than before. After she’d stopped screaming—mending the rainbow, sealing the membrane, stitching the sky, raising the roof—the beautiful chaos disappeared, and the world was normal once more. But Anne was curled around herself and looking about blankly, wide-eyed at the room, as if she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there.

  Then, azure eyes blazing mad, she said, “Kill her.”

  “No.”

  A bolt shot into Grif so quickly he was smoldering before he realized her fiery wings had flared. Now he was the one forced into the fetal position, but she didn’t allow him to remain there, curled around his burning belly. A long arm forced his gaze up and the dusty scent that had stalked Paul, as well as tonight’s attacker, blew into his lungs as Anne hissed.

  “Then I leave you both to your fates.”

  And she hit him so hard his mortal senses fractured, and darkness spun to claim him, and the blue-eyed Pure was instantly gone.

  Chapter Twenty

  Your love should have saved me.”

  “I know.”

  It was that old dream, Evie and Grif in the ’fifty-six, racing through the bleak Mojave, except that this time they weren’t. Evie wasn’t there, the car was missing, and there wasn’t even a sense of space, much less the expansive desert around him. Grif was alone, and the surrounding darkness was matched only by the nothingness in his heart.

  “You weren’t strong enough to save me.” The sweet voice turned into a hiss.

  He answered as he always did, his words reverberating into the void. “I don’t have to be strong. I’m dead.”

  “Not anymore,” Evie’s not-voice returned, altering the script. “Better wise up, tough guy, or you’ll have to feel it all over again. I told you to keep your head down, but no. Look where it got you, wearing skin again. And look where it got me.”

  Grif squinted, searching for her. “Where, Evie? Where did it get you?”

  “Same place as you, Griffin,” she shot back, tone as glittering and hard as a gem. “In the dark. Alone. In this cold place where no one comes, no one sees me. No one cares.”

  “Evie, I’m trying to get to you. I want to help. But I need to know where you are.”

  “That’s rich, Griffin.” A bitter chuckle rose up to choke him. “Because you don’t even know where you are.”

  And Grif tumbled out of the darkness, rearing into wakefulness in time to see a woman’s approaching shadow. His first thought was, Evie, but he knew her body like his own, and this wasn’t it. Anne, he realized, as a room began to take shape around the approaching form. He could label the objects—couch, table, light—but the names were devoid of meaning, attached to shapes his spinning thoughts couldn’t hold. Fear reared as the woman reached his side, and he fell back, trying to escape.

  “Grif.” Kit touched his arm. The room flipped, and suddenly he knew which way was up. His greedy gasp for air was what told him he’d forgotten to breathe, and he tried to make up for the lack by sucking in great gulps of air. Meanwhile Kit perched next to him, palms cool on his face and neck.

  “It was another nightmare, sweetie,” she said, treating him more gently than he had any right to be treated. Swinging his feet to the floor, he braced them there like that would anchor him firmly in this time and place, but the movement had Kit’s hands sliding away, and the darkness threatened the edges of his vision again.

  Growling, Grif punched the couch. “Damn it! Why can’t I locate myself on this rock?”

  “Shh,” Kit soothed, and reached for him again. Her palm against his forehead had the room stilling. The other lay supportively at his back. “You bumped your head. You’re not making sense.”

  But despite the bump and the fading dream, everything suddenly made perfect sense. Schmidt knew where he and Kit were staying. Anne, crazed with the need to return to the Everlast, had attacked. People were still dying.

  And it was all his fault.

  “Where’s Tony?” he asked, just before he noticed the glass wall was once again erect, as thick and indestructible as before. A sidelong sweep of the foyer told him that was cleaned of blood splatter and wreckage, too. The red eye of the alarm showed it was engaged. No wonder Kit was so relaxed. Anne had cleaned up before she left.

  How thoughtful of her.

  “Haven’t seen him,” Kit said, handing Grif a glass of water. He accepted it with a murmur of thanks.

  “Yeah, he has a reputation for disappearing when things get rough,” he said, sipping.

  “So, what happened?” Kit asked, propping herself on the coffee table in front of him. He wished she was closer, then immediately wished that thought away. “One of his old cronies come by and try to shake you down?”

  He almost told her. She’d met Anne, so she might believe him. Then again, she might not, and he didn’t want her open expression to close to him. And it would, the moment he said the word “angel.”

  “How are you?” he asked instead.

  “Oh . . .” She deflated a bit, like lifting his spirits was the only thing keeping her up. Circles rode undercurrent beneath her eyes, and her shoulders sagged as she nodded. “I’ve been better. Paul’s parents were kind, though. I think they were too shocked to blame me for his death, though I don’t doubt that’s coming. His mother blamed me for a lot of things.”

  “The divorce?”

  “The marriage,” she answered wryly, then shrugged. “For now she needed a shoulder to lean on.”

  And Kit had given it, Grif saw, even knowing it would take something from her.

  And because of that, Grif reached out slowly and took her chin in a light grip, fingertips sliding over her jawline. Kit froze, caught by the intensity of his stare. Then she finally shuddered. “Grif—”

  But he took her mouth, and her, by surpr
ise. What surprised him was how gentle the kiss was, and that he suddenly wanted it so much. Yet if her touch had grounded him before, it unraveled him now. All the senses he’d tried to bury flared like fireworks. She was so warm, so soft. So alive.

  But Kit pulled away. “Didn’t we try this one before?”

  “Not exactly this,” he replied, pulling her atop him.

  “I’m not sure we should.” But she wanted to. He could feel it in the press of her thighs. He could even scent her, female and musky, warm like the earth.

  “But you want me.” For the first time in fifty years, someone had a need for him. He ran his finger along her bottom lip, and Kit swallowed hard. “I want you, too. And do you know why?”

  She shivered as his calloused hands roamed lower, then shook her head.

  “Because the taste of you sits round and ripe on my tongue. It’s like a promise.” He tasted again, eliciting a moan.

  “Your touch,” he said, lifting his hips. “It ripples through me. Makes me realize how long I’ve been still.”

  His eyes moved to her cleavage, down the length of her, gaze caressing her curves.

  “And just the sight of you—”

  “I’m a mess.”

  “Shh . . .” He placed a hand over her mouth, hard enough to hush her but loose enough to play. When he felt her protest drain from her, he slid his hand to the back of her neck. “I swear, this face is carved in marble somewhere. In Italy or Greece or somewhere goddesses once roamed.”

  “Jesus, Grif . . .”

  “But none of that’s why I really want you.” He stilled, and she did, too. “All this rockabilly stuff . . . you wear it like armor. I get that. It protects you. But you’re strong in your own way, and you don’t need any of it. Fact, I think I’d prefer you in nothing at all.”

  And he let go of his fear, his need for control, the distance he was trying to keep between him and his humanity and, pulling her into his embrace, finally allowed his full angelic sense to flood him again.

  He saw her with his Centurion gaze, a white halo circling her body, with lavender hooks spearing in as she looked at him. “Your soul is magnificent,” he gasped.