Kit stared, and after a moment she let out a long exhale. “Jeez, Grif. The things you say.”
But Grif wasn’t done. He slipped his hand around the back of her head, fingers twining in her hair. He steadied her there. “Please. Don’t give up on me. Not yet.”
Because Grif didn’t care what Sarge said. He had found a place to settle. And he was looking right at her.
In response, Kit rose. “Come with me.”
“Where?” he asked, as she began backing up, his hand firmly clenched in hers.
She smiled. “To the bedroom, Mr. Shaw.”
His own smile began to grow. “And why would that be, Ms. Craig?”
“Because I need comforting.” Her seriousness was feigned, as was her drawn brow. “I need you to go on and on about how everything’s going to be all right and . . . ,” she said, unable to keep the smile away any longer, “if I recall correctly, the only time you really talk is in the bedroom.”
He snorted. “And if I recall right, it’s the only time you don’t.”
“Well,” she said, tugging him into the house. “No reason why we can’t both get what we want. We’re partners, after all.”
But as his suspenders fell away, and his shirt followed, he reached for Kit thinking he didn’t want to talk at all. He wanted to disappear in this moment, drawing it out so that it was expansive and still, and let the past and future lie where they would.
Maybe it was their time apart, more than any since they’d first come together. Or maybe it was the sense of danger hedging them in on every side. Whatever it was, Kit’s need to disappear alone with Grif was fierce. She wanted to go someplace only the two of them could go, not take him or be led, but make their way together. Like a pilgrimage, she thought. A hand-in-hand journey to commemorate the miracle that they were together at all.
The thought gave Kit pause, and she drew back to look at Grif. “I wish I could see it all the way you do.”
“See what?” His gaze slipped over her face without finding purchase. He was looming over her in bed, but having trouble keeping his eyes focused.
“You know. God, heaven—”
“No one sees God.” Shifting, he pulled, and Kit rolled onto his chest so that they were eye-to-eye. Using his wide, warm palms, he stroked her hair from her face. “And you’d be in trouble if you could see it like me.”
“You mean dead, right?”
“I mean murdered,” he said, and sighed into her hair. “Besides, I’m glad you can’t. I don’t want you broken.”
“Oh, Grif.” Kit slid a hand through his hair, thumb playing lightly atop his cheek. “You’re not broken. You simply care, which is healthy. If anything, you care too much.”
Grif huffed.
“You do. That’s why you hung on to memories of Evie and of your life together through five whole decades. It’s why you’re still searching for her killer. And it’s why you saved my life, a total stranger from another time and place, when you could have just let me die.”
“Coulda, but here you are,” he said, running his hand along her arm, eyes suddenly dark with different memories.
“Yes, and so are you, and that’s no mistake.” No matter what had gone on with him and another woman in the past, no matter what memories were stirred by finding Mary Margaret and questioning Ray DiMartino about the past, she truly believed Grif and she were meant to be together, here. Now.
Lifting one naked shoulder, she put on a wide-eyed expression. “Fact is, I’m so blown away by the miracle of us, together, that I don’t even mind how tortured and stubborn and conflicted you are.”
“Stop,” he said drily. “You’re exciting me.”
She slipped a hand behind his neck. “Because you’re also powerful and complicated and honest and good. That’s not broken. That’s human. That’s . . . hot.”
His gaze clouded again. “It is?”
A corner of Kit’s mouth lifted as heat moved in her belly. Sliding atop him, she brought their faces closer. “Super-hot. My man has wings. And a nice, big . . .” She dropped a kiss to his lips, and whispered, “Halo.”
Grif flipped her suddenly, his physical power flaring with his own need, and stoking Kit’s. The heat in her belly rose into her chest, and her nipples tightened as Grif’s irises grew wide. “You got it all wrong, cupcake. You make me sound like a saint, and I ain’t no saint.”
Slowly, Kit slid her tongue along her teeth. “Prove it.”
His gaze fixed on her wide bottom lip. “I did. Lost my place in the Everlast for you. Got booted back down to this forsaken mudflat, still on the celestial time clock but with the limitations of the flesh.”
Kit dismissed those epic sacrifices with a nonchalant shrug. “So prove it again.”
So he drove himself into her in one smooth, warm thrust. Kit cried out with surprise even as she opened to him—she always opened to him and even so it was still never enough. Somewhere above her, Grif chuckled and muttered a belated reminder not to take anyone’s name in vain, but then her legs were fastened around his waist, and he was the one who forgot to watch his language.
Kit could almost see the moment it happened, the dropping away of fifty years’ worth of regret and worry. His shoulders dropped, his palms grew firmer. His mouth pressed harder and his eyes narrowed—on her, like he didn’t want to miss a thing—but remained open. Kit smiled against his lips and lifted her knees, opening more. They rolled and breathed into each other’s mouths and sweated and strained because they were here and alone, and they were alive.
Glorious, Kit thought, watching as he rose above her again, palms braced on each side of her head.
Yet glory meant something different to someone who was both angelic and human. He had the flesh and mind of a mortal man, but he was still a celestial creature and when he was exultant, when he gave thanks and paid reverence and took pleasure in something, it showed.
Kit remained fused to him, but momentarily put her own pleasure aside, knowing it would happen, waiting for it, watching. She slid her hands to his back, wanting to know the very moment he let go. She splayed her fingertips over the slight protrusions she felt there, and a shudder quaked through his body. Then, without warning, he arched.
“Let me see,” she begged. “I want to see.”
And so he lowered his head and kissed her so that the stark sizzle of ozone and iron flooded her mouth, and the entire cosmos flashed behind her eyelids. He shuddered again, causing an even deeper thrust, and though Kit cried out, he kept his mouth molded atop hers. The four seasons blew through her, starting with the crisp kiss of spring, and by the time autumn swept through her blood, she saw them: billowing black feathers raining over his back in two muscled arcs.
It was only in her mind’s corner, a brief mental flash, but the soaring wings dripped with the dew of the Everlast, black as ebony and sharp as spears, the feathers overtaking Kit’s vision before she was forced to breathe. Yet in that brief moment, Kit saw Grif as he really was, his mortal and angelic natures entwined like knotted roots, both at the forefront, both subsumed, and both, together, awesome.
Then her lungs filled, and the wings disappeared, but Kit didn’t care. She held to the image in her mind, embellished it even, because this man, whole and healthy—not broken—belonged solely to her.
Grif’s movements altered, growing liquid and smooth, like he was both melting her and shaping her anew. She felt golden inside, warm and divine, and she silently gave thanks for everything that’d allowed them to find each other, both good and bad. Because of Grif, and the raw miracle of him in her life, Kit was closer to God.
He set a new pace, both faster and more intense. That stray lock of hair she loved fell over his forehead, just above his closed eyes, and he stretched above her as he disappeared into the ritual of his thrust. Kit gripped him low, held tight, and timed it so that her release came at the same time as his. They had their lovers’ rhythm. They would forever know what it was to be one.
“That must be wha
t paradise is like, right?” she whispered minutes later, breath still ragged.
Grif, who’d dropped atop her in a heady tumble of dead weight, lifted himself to his elbows and cupped her head in one hand. Tucked in close, his chin stubble scratching at her cheek, he shook his head. “I don’t know anything this good, Kit. Not in any world.”
And then, still together, they slept.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nobody could control their dreams. That was Grif’s defense, what he told himself when he fell asleep inside Kit, but woke again a half a century earlier, walking hand in hand with his wife. Though the evening was studded with stardust, a material visible only to a Centurion’s naked eye, Grif knew this night. Gripping Evie’s hand tightly, he recognized the bite of winter’s sharp edge, how it’d been too late for birdsong, and too cold for crickets, though something else had been stirring in the shadows.
Why hadn’t he seen it the first time, he wondered, squinting at the towering silhouettes of the Marquis’s imported foliage. The layers of greenery, gone black this late, made it even cooler, and Evie shivered beside him. It looked like a desert oasis, and was meant to. The guests in the resort’s bungalows wanted to feel secluded and special and alone.
But in the remembering, Grif knew he and Evie weren’t alone. They bumped hips as before, laughing and stumbling along the faux-stone path, giddy with the cocktails they’d consumed while gambling away the desert night. It was 1960, and they were in Las Vegas with a purseful of gaming chips and a room at the city’s hottest resort, the Marquis.
What on earth was there to worry about?
Yet even as Grif smiled at Evie’s drunken giggle, he cringed inside. These were his memories, after all, come alive in a dream, and ever since his return to the Surface, the nightmares detailing the way his first life ended had increased in clarity and severity. In this one, Evelyn Shaw—fifty years dead, yet dear to him still—was about to be attacked. She would scream. He would never see it coming.
Which meant Grif was about to be murdered, too.
He was wearing his favorite gray flannel suit, along with his Stacey Adams wingtips, and, of course, his fedora. They’d been celebrating that night, though for the life and death of him, he couldn’t now remember why.
Evie wore heels and a dark cherry wiggle dress that caused her naked neck and milky face to glow as if lit from within. Her eyebrows were arrowed perfection, and white-blond hair lay obediently coifed around a gently pointed chin. Eyes of deep-set chocolate glowed as moonlight caught her knowing glance at him.
“I have plans for you, Griffin, my dear,” she said, walking backward, holding both his hands in hers, her smile filled with promise. The fingertips of her right hand toyed with the wedding band on his left. Noting it jarred his consciousness. He hadn’t felt the weight of that ring in so damned long. But then he lifted his gaze to Evie’s, she smiled, and he slipped again into the past. “Just you wait.”
But there’d be no more plans for either of them, just as there was no time to wait. He spotted the bungalow door, and, knowing exactly what lay beyond it, his heart began a mad scramble in his chest. Grif glanced up at the stars in the sky, the gateway to the Everlast, and prayed for a different outcome this time.
The night stared back, coldly indifferent.
Swallowing hard, Grif wondered if he’d have to relive being Taken, too. That first trip had been like journeying through an icy, open nerve, the Universe dense with dark matter and cosmic soot that pressed against the burning stars. Knowing that passage was once again only minutes away made Grif’s chest ache with loneliness. And that made him think of Kit.
“What?” Evie snapped, halting before the bungalow’s closed door, and turning on him as if he’d spoken aloud.
“Nothing,” Grif said, in the dream and the past, though it’d all somehow shifted. This was wrong, he thought, swallowing hard. He hadn’t said this the first time. He hadn’t been thinking of any woman but Evie.
She hadn’t looked at him like he had committed a crime.
“I just miss you. I miss spending time with you.”
That soothed her enough that her response was once again melodious, a sweet dulcet tone that reminded him of spring. “We’ve both been busy lately. All your attention has been on that DiMartino case. But not tonight . . .”
Evie’s was the voice of a breeze, Grif thought. A coy lull and tug that slipped smoothly into his groin, reminding him of whiskey and ice and the flare of a match. Not chirpy birds in the springtime, or flirtatious and incessant chattering. No, that was Kit . . .
“Who the fuck is Kit?” Evie demanded suddenly, and there was nothing coy or breezy about her voice now. Placing one hand on her hip, the other on the doorknob, she stood like a sentry between him and fate.
What was happening here? Grif wondered, blinking fast. Yet, on the heels of the thought, he already knew. This was no dream. In the same way Sarge had visited him as a paperboy, this was mythic . . . it was vision.
Don’t fight it, he told himself. But how could he not, even knowing better? He didn’t want to die again. He certainly wouldn’t stand aside and let Evie be felled right next to him. No, this time he would fight.
But what the hell was he fighting against, he wondered, twisting to look behind him. Because this wasn’t the way it’d happened the first time. Something was off, he thought, though he spotted nothing. Something was wrong.
“Answer me, Griffin,” Evie said. She was the only one to call him by his full name, and though he’d told her before that it bothered him, he didn’t say so now. Her voice was sharp, with a note of prim pique in it, which always meant trouble. It caused his gaze to slide away from the lone footprint he’d spotted embedded in the mud next to the door.
“I don’t know,” he finally lied, and tried to place an arm around her shoulders like he always had. But Evie jerked away.
“Cold,” she said, shuddering at his touch. “Why is everything suddenly so cold?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
Evie turned her pinpricked gaze on him. “Don’t know much, do you?”
“Baby,” he tried, but she shifted out of reach. He recognized the tilt of her chin as plainly as he recognized her dress. Evie would not be soothed.
“So are you enjoying your second life?”
She knew about that? Grif swallowed hard. “Come on, Evie—”
She lifted that sweet, stubborn chin. “Yeah, you’re enjoying it. I can see you, you know.”
Grif thought about that for a moment. Vision was a form of communication with the Everlast and those in it . . . but it wasn’t a way to reach the dead. This, Grif thought, wasn’t real. “No, you can’t.”
She stared, crimson lips thinning even further. “That’s true,” she finally said. “But I know what you’re doing. You . . . and that other woman.”
“It’s been fifty years,” Grif said, holding out his palms. “And you’re dead.”
“You’re dead,” she snapped.
Gesturing wildly, Grif finally snapped back. “Yeah, and I’m trying to find out why! I went back for us!”
“You went back for you!” she said, eyes narrowed to pins as she took in his face, forehead to stubbled chin. Then her hard gaze centered on his. “You think you’re going to feel less guilty once you learn who did this? You think it’s going to stop all the regret you feel for letting me bleed out on a cold marble floor? Letting me die while you did nothing?”
“I was ambushed!”
“You were my husband!” she said, voice cracking, tiny hands curled into fists. The diamond he hadn’t been able to afford, but had given her anyway, winked against her white knuckles. “You were supposed to protect me!”
Yes. Love and protect, for better or for worse. ’Til death parted them . . . and it had.
Seeing Grif’s argument deflate, Evie straightened. She was like a lock-jawed terrier when she got like this, and wouldn’t let up until she’d shaken the life out of her target, even i
f it meant wearying herself and all those around her. Grif wondered how he could have ever forgotten that.
But Evie had a right to be angry. He hadn’t protected her in the way he’d promised. So he just squared up and let fifty years of pent-up fury hit him dead-on.
“You’re alive while I’m still dead,” she said, melodious voice taking on an underlying scratch, like she was a record instead of the real thing. “Do you know what it feels like knowing that you’re sleeping with another woman, heating her bed with your stolen flesh, warming her on the inside while I lie bone-cold in my grave?”
She grabbed at him then, not the loving embrace he’d come to yearn for but a grip on his throat that pulsed like a second death. Grif gasped as the chill from her fingers entered his chest, numbing his lungs and hobbling his breathing. Yet the rage remained in Evie’s eyes, and her ruby lips curled in an ugly snarl. “Do you want to see how cold I really am, Grif? Because I can show you.”
“No . . .” His mouth formed the word, but her touch had worked its frigid magic and no sound emerged. He clawed at his neck with his free hand, tried swallowing, but the effort only made him gag. Glancing back at the stars above, he prayed the vision away.
But it didn’t work, and when Grif looked back at Evie, he cried out in the long-forgotten night. His wife’s white-blond curls had lost all their softness and now lay flat and lank against the white gleam of her skull. There was no flesh on her face, no lashes or lids, no red lips to hide her wide skeletal grimace. He stared at the basic framework of the woman he loved, but it was an abstract shell of black shadows and white bone, and the previously clingy sheath now bagged around her body.
The brain still worked behind those hollow orbs, though. It both held his gaze and kept her fingertips tensile and tight. The look said that he hadn’t been able to protect her, so she was going to protect herself . . . even from him.
Leaning in with a slow, considered glide, Evie looked for a moment like she would drop a fleshless kiss upon his lips. “You did this to me,” she said, her breathless whisper bloated with the rotting blame of fifty long years.
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