But just leaving him to die was wrong, Kit thought, rubbing at her chest, just over her heart, which felt swollen and ached. If he were her son or brother or loved one, Kit would want someone to help him, and she was the only one with this information.
And, like Jeap, she had a choice.
She left the paper with Jeap’s information where it was, because Grif would need it upon waking, and exited through the front door, since the alarm was already silenced. Outside, her thoughts sounded loud and dangerous in her mind, a stark contrast to the predawn stillness of the house. Intuition told her this wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had, and she also knew she’d be in for it when Grif woke to find her gone.
He has wings, Kit thought defiantly, starting her car and slipping from the driveway as quietly as she could. He was using them to flit around looking for his old, dead wife, and his old, probably dead killers. So he could just use them to reach Jeap at his appointed time of death, too.
However, Kit was determined to get there well before that.
Traffic was steady as she raced toward North Las Vegas, adjacent to Las Vegas proper, but far from the lights strung like jewels along the neck of its more famous cousin. She had to cross the main drag to get there, but it was almost five A.M., the night close to fading, and even the world’s most sleepless city was taking a small breather before the morning joggers and buffet crowd brought it crawling back to life. Still, neon and LED lights burned the sky, giving it false heat and an irregular throbbing pulse.
Kit had never been to Jeap Yang’s neighborhood before but found it easily, using her navigation app. Yet she frowned as she wheeled her classic Duetto into a subdivision pitted with dying lawns. Yellowing newspapers littered the crumbling driveways, and bright orange stickers lay like pockmarks on empty windows and locked doors. The overt urban decay suddenly made her mission feel all the more futile.
Boomtown turned doomtown, Kit thought, sighing. It’d happened all over the valley in recent years. In the beginning, there’d been degrees of separation between the people she knew and those who’d lost their homes. Yet, before long, Kit’s newspaper had been forced to rotate the phrases “financial crisis,” “housing bust,” and “bailouts and recession.”
The hopeful FOR SALE signs never made it into neighborhoods like these. Here, people just left their homes to the banks and the squatters . . . which was probably how Jeap Yang had ended up here. She pulled in front of a house that was unstitched at the seams, though it couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen years old. Silencing the car, Kit stared up at the second level and shivered. She’d been in a similar position four months earlier, staring up at a room where her best friend had just been killed, and where she’d first seen Grif.
This was different, Kit thought, forcing herself from the car before she had a chance to overthink it. This time she was here to save someone from death. This time she knew about the Everlast and Centurions. And although Jeap’s predestined death was traumatic, he wasn’t the victim of a homicide, so surely Kit was in no danger by simply trying to help him.
All she needed to do was knock on the door before Jeap’s final, fatal hit—or so she thought. Her scant knowledge of drugs came from television dramas and the cold facts of black-and-white newsprint. She didn’t know the difference between blow, hash, heroin, or whipit. Sure, she had vices. Smoking was one of them. Her stubborn appearance at a foreclosed and abandoned home in the predawn hours against the wishes of her angelic boyfriend was probably another.
As she climbed the stairs leading to a truncated porch, Kit’s fingers trailed the pebbled wall while she searched for life within the darkened window. She was surprised to find the window curtained, and was wondering if she should just try the door, when a voice boomed behind her.
“Yo, princess.”
Whirling, she found the drive empty and silent, but she finally spotted a man with a dark-eyed squint leaning against a lamppost across the street. He was barefoot and shirtless, and the door to the house behind him was wide-open.
“You got business up there?” he called, jerking his head at the top floor. She wanted to tell him to hush, she didn’t want to alert Jeap or any of the other neighbors, but the man kept talking. “Cuz you look like a nice girl and I can tell you. Ain’t nothing nice waiting for you on the other side of that door.”
Kit let out a slow sigh, and stepped to the edge of the porch. “I’m here to save a man,” she replied, sotto voce.
“Man want to be saved?” the guy called, still too loud.
Kit frowned. What did that have to do with anything? “Doesn’t everyone?”
He continued to stare up at her and, seeing she was serious, began to laugh. When Kit didn’t move, he bent over and laughed harder. Then he turned back to his home, which stood out because its lawn was still green, the structure still well-tended, and he disappeared inside. Sighing, Kit put the laughing man out of her mind and turned as well.
What was the etiquette, she wondered, when knocking on the door of someone fated to die?
Since she was likely the first person to ever wonder that, she went with her gut and gave the door a timid tap. Nothing happened, so she knocked more loudly, then, when the home remained silent, wished for Grif’s celestial ability to unlock doors with the wave of a hand. Edging to the window, she tried peering inside instead. As threadbare as the curtains were, they still obscured what they were meant to. No light or movement could be seen within.
Drawing away, she bit her lip, then smiled to herself.
“You’re being stupid, Kitty-Cat,” she said, using Grif’s pet name for her to both chide and comfort herself, though she knew he certainly wouldn’t use it on her now. But, according to him, she was already disobeying celestial law, so what was earthly law compared to that? And what did that matter when weighed against a man’s life? If the wrong way of doing something was the only way, then was it really wrong?
The man from across the street popped his head back out of his home as she walked back down the stairs and reached her car’s trunk. “I forgot something,” she told him before he could speak, and hoisted a Maglite over her shoulder for her best Rosie the Riveter pose before heading back upstairs.
“Day-um, girl,” the man called after her, though he didn’t follow. Everyone, she thought smugly, respected Rosie.
Squared with the door once again, she gave knocking one final try. When there was still no answer, she shrugged, dropped her bag, then held her arms straight out from her body and whacked at the window’s edge.
It wasn’t as straightforward as it looked in the movies.
The blow made a striking thwack, vibrating up her arms, but did little else. A chuckle from behind turned into an insincere cough as she shot a glare over her shoulder at her amused audience of one. Early birds, she thought, turning back around. So annoying.
Pivoting, she used her wrists, elbows, and shoulders in tandem to whip the flashlight forward. This time a crack instantly splintered up the pane. Encouraged, Kit channeled her frustration, fear, and the swivel of her not-inconsiderable hips into the head of the flashlight.
Glass shattered gloriously, a tinkling destruction that made Kit wince and give thanks at the same time. Avoiding the jagged glass, Kit used the flashlight to push the dingy curtain aside, and peered into the still, soundless room. Smoke residue lingered in the air, a metallic reek like nothing Kit had ever scented before. Musty sweat hung heavy, too, and Kit spotted a lumpy mattress dropped mid-floor.
Wrinkling her nose, Kit searched for movement. “Hello?”
Her voice disappeared into the room, as if sucked into a black hole.
“See anything worth saving, sweetheart?” the man called from behind.
Kit didn’t answer, but took comfort in his presence. It reassured her that there was life outside of this stale cavern.
The window was too far from the door to unlock it from outside, and too high to risk climbing through without serious injury from the glass. So, liftin
g the Maglite again, she began hammering at the lock. If Grif’s report said that Jeap was in this home, then he was there.
Surprisingly, the knob gave way more easily than the glass, and she was pushing the door open a moment later. The toxic smoke and stranger’s sweat enveloped her in an unwanted embrace, but otherwise, the stillness of the room made Kit think of Halloween and haunted mansions and rooms meant to startle. That was pretend, though, frightful experiences manufactured to emphasize the fact that you were alive. Whatever awaited her on the other side of this threshold, she knew instinctively, held true horror.
Picking up her purse, she stepped inside anyway.
The man outside stopped laughing.
Kit shuddered as the silence enveloped her, but continued edging into the home. If air could blister, this air would be rife with boils. Yet, the front room itself was less frightening than surprising. It looked much like her dad’s old tool shed. Kit eyed the cans of paint thinner in the corner with confusion, gaze canvassing the household cleaners—none of which appeared to have ever been used on this room—and paused when she spotted the lighter fluid. Had Jeap and his friends been building something in here? Repainting the walls? Re-varnishing furniture?
But no, the only furniture she spotted was an entertainment unit, chipped and wobbly, the top two drawers missing so that darkness loomed inside like eyeless sockets. The walls were yellowed and pocked even in the pale, intruding light, as if the harsh, acidic scent had burrowed into and peeled away the plaster. Kit covered her nose, her every sense curling inward, but continued forward.
Cigarette butts and errant syringes lay littered among potato-chip bags and fast-food containers. Dirty Tupperware was stacked against the walls, and shattered glass winked darkly along the baseboards. Kit’s gaze finally fell on something familiar and innocuous: a black backpack slouched against the mattress. She reached for it, thinking it might hold some form of identification, and that’s when she saw the foot.
Kit’s gasp pulled in a lungful of the putrid air, and she immediately began to cough. The foot didn’t move. Backing toward the dresser, she again held the Maglite like a weapon, but this time she aimed the beam and switched it on. The powerful light flooded the room, giving stark definition to the foot, and the subsequent body sprawled on the floor.
It was definitely Jeap Yang, Kit thought, swallowing hard and advancing slowly, though he remained unmoving. His face was slack and oddly gray, the features the same as those in the photo, though the shock of black hair had been recently, and badly, shorn. His clothing was nondescript—a stained white T-shirt and torn black jeans—though he could have been wearing neon and Kit wouldn’t have noticed.
His body was in ruins.
Bruises littered his flesh, like someone had beaten it from the inside out. His right arm, splayed wide on the grimy carpet, boasted blackened veins beneath graying flesh. His wrist looked worse, scaly and green like he was some sort of reptile. Beside him lay a syringe clogged up with a sticky, yellowed gunk.
“J— Jeap?”
Her voice was low and sunken, the blistered air burning it from her lips. She licked them and tried again. “Jeap? Are you . . . ?”
Okay? Stupid question.
Still alive? A thoughtless one, if he was . . . and she was growing less sure of that by the second.
This is too big for me, Kit decided, pulling out her phone to call 9-1-1. Yet panic and nerves made her fumble it, and it cracked against a glass jar before landing next to Jeap’s arm. Surprisingly, this sound registered with Jeap, and he startled, twitched once, and moaned.
The scaly flesh on his splayed wrist fell away to reveal infected muscle, and bone glistening with pus.
The severance must have been as painful as it looked, because Jeap’s eyes shot wide. His throat moved, expelling a heartbreaking and tattered cry that rolled from him like a foghorn disappearing into an endless night. He lifted his left hand as if to cover his own mouth, but his voice cracked, and he grimaced painfully. Kit gasped, too, because that forearm was already stripped of flesh from elbow to wrist, the bone almost shiny amid the black, necrotic ruins.
“God.” Kit lunged for her phone, careful not to touch Jeap’s body as he began to shake. She punched at the numbers almost blindly, cursing when she misdialed. Jeap continued convulsing, body spasming like it was in nuclear meltdown. He looks at war with himself, she thought, staring as the tremors in his body alternated between sharp twitches and wild jerks. She’d have pulled a blanket around him, except there was no blanket, and she didn’t dare touch him anyway. His whole body was an open wound.
No way had he done this to himself, she decided, and dialed again as his agonized cries roiled around her. Someone must have taken a knife to him, then left him to bleed out in this sad little room. And the drugs were clearly for the pain. Kit would damned well take drugs if her flesh was hanging from her bone in strips.
Then her phone went dead.
“Shit,” she hissed. She shouldn’t have unplugged it earlier in the night. It was useless now. She’d have to leave Jeap alone again just to call for help. Ignoring the smells from his seeping body, she moved to his side and bent. She wanted to reassure him first, let him know that he wasn’t alone, and that she’d return. Yet she paused before touching his shoulder, not so sure the bruised gray skin wouldn’t fall away as well. Instead she lay a hand on his oily, matted hair. Jeap immediately arched his back, his eyes, so wild the whites showed, rolling her way.
He looked at her, then through her, then slumped.
“I’m going to help you,” she told him, but he didn’t move at all. “Jeap?”
Stillness sank into the room, blanketing even the noises of the street outside. The laughing man, she realized, was gone.
Wiping her greasy palm on her capris, Kit kept her eyes on the shallow movement of Jeap’s chest, as if that could somehow keep him alive. She was just about to rise, when his eyes shifted, first one and then the other. She had a fleeting thought—the muscles in those, too, must have come untethered—but then his eyebrows drew low, and the irises shrank to pinpricks, resembling nothing so much as black, four-pointed stars.
“Jeap? C— can you see me?”
“Yes,” he answered, in a whisper that crawled up her arms like a spider. “It’s so peculiar. You’re so . . . bright. A right deva, you are.”
Kit shivered. “Diva?” she said, and the word caused his lids to flare in surprise, the strange starry gaze pinned on her face. Yet he immediately squinted, cringing from her, and Kit held up a hand. “Hey, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help.”
One star-specked eye carefully edged her way again, independent of the other. It must be some sort of side effect from the drug, she thought, before he managed to croak, “You can see me? And hear me?”
Kit leaned closer to reassure him. “Of course.”
“Then maybe you are a deva.”
She shook her head, not following him at all. “I’m going to—”
“D-E-V-A,” he spelled, cutting her off, a cracking sound accompanying every letter, like vocal cords snapping. “Deva means ‘God,’ but is also close to the word ‘devil,’ and both have the same root as ‘divinity.’ I’m very into roots.”
“Roots?”
“You know, vines, trees, forests . . . roots.” Jeap’s head rolled away, but jerked back suddenly, like it was being held in place. Fixed, Kit thought, on her. The second eyeball followed a moment later. Bile swirled in Kit’s belly.
“I wonder,” Jeap said in that snapping tone, “if I can see and hear you . . . can I touch you, too?”
They both froze at the thought, and Kit—in a voice that was also unlike her own—said, “You’re not Jeap Yang, are you?”
The mouth twitched, a serpent’s smile, and Kit pushed back just as Jeap’s body catapulted toward hers. A pained cry escaped the throat, but it was immediately smothered by a howl that was wind-washed and somehow Arctic-cold. Dead leaves fluttered through the walls of the
house, and dried boughs cracked against the windows, though there was not one damned tree or leaf or branch in the room.
But there was a rotting arm reaching for her, and Kit threw her phone at Jeap’s body as she backpedaled.
Yet she’d forgotten about the glass jars. She tripped, ankle rolling in her wedges, and the image of stray needles lacing the floor flashed through her mind. “No—”
She braced herself for the fall, and for the decaying body already collapsing atop hers.
Strong hands caught her at the waist, spinning her around. She cried out, but it was drowned out by another that squalled like a winter wind. The loosening of a thousand simultaneously unsheathed blades ripped the air behind her, and a thunderous crack sounded, like an old oak snapping at its base. Jeap’s body had hit the barrier of knives as Grif flexed his shoulder blades, and his protective wingspan thrust Jeap—and whatever was in him—away. Kit had found her balance by then, but Grif—her man, her angel—continued to hold her tight.
Kit couldn’t see his wings with her mortal vision, but his arms alone were comforting. Kit scented bar soap, powder detergent, and strong and healthy flesh. The slight whiff of licorice that always tinged his breath rolled over her as he soothed her with a quick murmur, and she tilted her head up, catching the coconut of his pomade as well. The scents, the warm and steady hands—the flaring, martial wings—centered her.
“What are you?” she heard, the question wind-whipped from behind the shielding wings. “Because you’re not Pure.”
Bristling, Grif’s feathers clinked like knives. Kit still couldn’t see them, but she could hear them as he half-turned. “Depends on who you ask.”
“Are you Fallen?” The wind and chaos in the voice had died down to a cool whisper, but boughs still crackled in the question.
“More like busted,” Grif answered.
Kit stared up at Grif, confused. Was he actually engaging with this . . . that . . . thing?
The Lost Page 3