Grif hoped so. Because if this didn’t work, he was killing the woman he loved.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kit knew what was happening. She knew despite being out of control of her body and her words and the thoughts that roiled over her own like crashing waves. Humans were dunked in baptism and could be reborn in life through water. Submersion should equal death for Scratch. Yet all she could think as she stared through the shallows at Grif was that four months ago this man couldn’t bear to let her die. Now he couldn’t let her live. Not, at least, with Scratch inside.
Scratch knew it, too. The fallen angel’s thoughts became her own.
The Eternal Forest awaits you, Katherine. I will wrap you in the roots of the fallen Tree of Life. I’ll tie knots around your soul. You’ll reside among the black, brittle arteries of rotted boughs, which will hold you firm while I savage you again and again.
Kit tried to hold her breath, to be strong and control what little she could—but Scratch was holding its breath, too. It thrashed to free itself from Grif’s hold, while the pressure of its rotted thoughts stewed inside her skull like a second brain.
When you’re dead, I’m going to make that Centurion watch as I carry you away. You’ll be Lost to him forever.
Fighting the instinct to thrash against Grif as well, Kit forced her limbs to still. No, the water is weakening you. And I’m still in control.
And she focused on Grif’s face, clearer now that the water was calming, studying her and willing her back. This was her body and life. That was her man. And she would prevail.
We’ll see about that.
And Scratch played a slipstream of her memories back to her, her life flashing like previews at the cinema. She watched her mother die again. She saw her father laid to rest. She felt the fogginess of her brain while seeking treatment for mental heath. She remembered a man racing from the shadows to save her life; the first time she’d ever seen Grif.
Bring it, you bastard, she thought, holding her breath. Because all of that made me who I am . . . and I’m strong.
Scratch’s growl scraped the inner walls of her skull, and she felt her eyes pulse with its anger. Above her, the water obscured Grif’s frown as he noted the change. His jaw clenched and she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders, and Kit’s vision dimmed again.
This time she saw memories that weren’t her own.
She saw Jeap, jumpy but excited as he cooked his first batch of krok. The surge of drugs whipping through his veins shot her forward in time and she saw Trey Brunk laughing with Jeannie Holmes as Tim Kovacs shot up and immediately fell flat on his face. Then Jeannie joined him, blood vessels burning.
They were the memories of everyone Scratch had possessed, Kit realized. It’d been in them, so it knew their thoughts and secrets, too.
Did you say secrets?
And suddenly Marin snapped into view. She was secreting away a file from Kit’s father’s study. Kit recognized the room, and then she recognized herself as the scene flashed forward. She was sleeping in her father’s nightshirt, as she had those six months after he’d died. Marin stroked her head and spoke aloud. “It’s for your own good.”
Scratch’s cutting laugh sliced the memory in two.
Secrets, it repeated . . . and then Kit saw Grif.
Here’s the memory he gave me in his tears. The exact emotion used to banish me from Brunk’s body. Isn’t it beautiful?
Scratch’s question was rhetorical, but Kit had to agree. There was absolute beauty in seeing pure joy in the face of the man you loved, especially as he made love to you. Kit had seen this look before, brief flashes where he forgot himself and his duty entirely. Pushing to his palms, the Grif of memory arched his head and neck backward, completely open to his lover, giving everything he could. Kit almost smiled . . . and then he said, “Evie.”
As she gasped, water filled Kit’s lungs in an instant. She shook her head and tried to push and cough it out, but all she could think was: Grif still makes love to Evie in his dreams.
Inside of her, still holding its breath, Scratch smiled.
In this world, Grif began to cry.
Kit was losing. The weakening of her limbs, the numbness that’d sunk into her chest, and now the slowing of her mind. She stared up at Grif and tried to get the image of him straining toward another woman out of her head, but to do that she’d have to simply release it. And to do that, she’d have to let go.
“Fight, Kit!” She heard his words just above the water, the scream ripping the insides of his throat.
But maybe letting go was another way of fighting. Maybe knowing when to release something was what life was really about.
Lifting one arm, Kit felt for the stubble of Grif’s jaw, then let her hand drop. Grif’s tears fell with it, hitting the water like liquid mercury. More fell, and there they congealed. Kit knew it was the emotion in them that made them visible. Emotion he felt for her. So she watched the quicksilver tears spread like oil over the water, thinning into a film over the surface. The last thing she would ever see in this world would be Grif, tinted in silver and shining. The last thing she would know was that he cried for her, too.
She liked that. And hated it. And so Kit cried as well, and her tears were cobalt-blue.
They rose to mingle with Grif’s, tangling like magnetic alloys, then fusing. They formed a new element in a color Kit didn’t have a name for, and she thought, That’s a beautiful way to go. Knowing your love has created something new.
Suddenly she realized Scratch had gone still inside of her. That was important, she thought. It meant something, somehow. But it was too late to figure out what. So Kit just inhaled, sucking in pool water and sorrow-tinted tears of silver and blue. And when the color she couldn’t name touched her lips?
Scratch screamed and took flight.
Grif didn’t know what had happened, not at first. One moment he was watching Kit die, Scratch’s victorious gaze burning like luminous coals, and the next she’d been launched from the pool as if from a catapult. Now she was on her knees, coughing and sputtering, hacking up the drink and the bile that came from being possessed by a member of the Third.
“I’m sorry, baby . . . be okay . . . I’m so sorry . . .” Grif was babbling, arms wrapped tightly around her, crying as her body convulsed and shuddered. Minutes dragged on, punctuated by sirens and yelling and the neighborhood coming back to life, but the attention was on the other side of the street. Nobody even turned their way.
Exhausted, Kit finally slumped and Grif pulled her onto his lap, stroking her hair from her face, and rocking her like a child. She stayed that way for a while, then finally tilted her head his way. “Our tears taste like a spring wind in flight. Our love is the flavor of a sunbeam biting cloud.”
“Wait. You— you saw that?” He hadn’t known she could.
“Scratch saw it,” she replied, dropping her head back to his shoulder. “And I saw what it saw. Everything.”
Grif didn’t know what “everything” entailed, and didn’t care just now. She was back, safe in his arms, and Scratch was finally—and truly—gone.
“The building . . .” she said.
He looked back. Little Havana was an inferno. “The krokodil is burning.”
Then she stiffened in his arms, and Grif glanced down in time to catch the exact moment her eyes settled on Dennis. Reaching for him, she slid from Grif’s embrace. “The whole damned world is burning.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Baptista’s crew, who had indeed introduced krokodil to their own neighborhood, nearly blew Naked City away. The combustibles inside Little Havana burned through the night, but in the end, the place ended up looking pretty much the same. Meanwhile, Yulyia Kolyadenko died as she lived. Hard. Eyes open, and ever looking forward.
And Dennis was in a medically induced coma.
Unlike Jeannie Holmes, he had a room of his own: private, secure, and well-monitored. Kit brought her computer, setting up vigil just as she had with M
arin. She thought having something to do would keep her mind off her friend’s fight for life, but her search through the family archives for more information on her father’s death suddenly seemed less important than it had only days earlier. The past was gone.
And the people she loved kept on dying.
“Please. Be okay,” Kit whispered, staring at Dennis’s impossibly still body. It was her incessant prayer. The words ran together in a river of supplication.
Grif had remained with her through the long, uncertain night as the doctors operated on Dennis, though she knew he believed her friend was already doomed. Yet for the first time since they’d met, Kit didn’t care what Grif thought. After all, she’d read his thoughts involving a woman whose loss was his life’s greatest sorrow—after Scratch had revealed Grif to her more thoroughly than he’d ever opened himself—and Kit didn’t care if he remained with her or not.
Knowing all of this, Grif stayed. He remained still, and mostly silent throughout the night, perched near the window of the impersonal room like the Dark Knight overlooking Gotham. But angels weren’t superheroes, Kit thought, keeping her back to him. For all the help they provided, those might as well be feather dusters on their backs.
Finally, near dawn, Grif stepped in front of her, obscuring her view and forcing her gaze up. “You’ve been staring at the same thing for hours.”
“It’s not a thing,” she replied coolly. “He’s a person.”
His jaw clenched. “I meant the computer screen.”
She knew that. But picking a fight gave her a place to put her anger and guilt and, yes, sadness. Because deep down she knew she could sit next to Dennis’s sickbed and pray for a miracle, yet if God decided to pull the plug, then Dennis could be Grif’s very next Take. Scratch might be gone, but no matter how many evils were banished from the world, it seemed there was always some new horror ready to break your heart.
“I’m going for coffee,” Grif finally said, running a hand over his face. “Want to come?”
Kit’s eyes burned from being trained on Dennis the whole of the night, but she shook her head. As long as he was here, so was she. She waited until Grif’s hand was on the door before blurting out the only question she had left for him, the one woven like a black thread between the prayers looping in her mind. “Could you have done it to her?”
Silence was his answer. Maybe he didn’t know what she was asking. Maybe, she thought, as she turned to face him, he didn’t want to. Eyeing Grif coolly across Dennis’s body, she clarified. “Could you have done that to Evie? Held her under water while she struggled for life? Watched her drown?”
He squinted, thinking about it, and finally nodded, giving her the truth—and her newest heartbreak. “Of course. Anything to save her.”
Neither answer, yes or no, would have been right, but Kit still felt gut-punched. Anything. She turned back around, thinking, I’m tired of competing with the past. Grif wavered where he was, she felt him on the edge of saying more, but what more was there? He loved her, yes. But he still loved Evelyn Shaw, too. Kit knew that for a fact.
The door opened, and closed. Bowing her head, Kit almost sobbed. Yet the door swung right back open, and Kit straightened immediately. It was yet another doctor. She slumped.
“Well, that looks like a good way to pass the time.” The doctor smiled, and pointed at Kit’s forgotten computer. DR. MARKHAM was embroidered on his crisp white jacket, and there was a burning bunny pin on the left lapel. Whatever that meant. “Video games are a good escape. It’s nice to disappear into another world for a bit.”
Kit didn’t bother telling him the Ms. Pac-Man ticking across her computer screen was her screensaver. Somewhere in the night she’d lost her capacity for small talk.
“So how’s our patient doing?”
Kit had been sitting in the room for almost eighteen hours, and hadn’t seen this man once. Edging away from the bed, she stood to give him room. “You tell me.”
Dr. Markham used a penlight to check Dennis’s pupils. “It’s hard to say with a GSW. It’s an open brain injury, and there’s been some hemorrhaging, but only time will tell.”
But, Kit wanted to ask, would he be able to foxtrot and drink rum from tiki mugs and flirt like James Dean . . . or not?
“Is he your brother?”
“No. I was there when he was shot,” she said, explaining why Dennis’s family, and the department, had pulled strings for her. They wouldn’t arrive until the next day, and they didn’t want him alone.
“Boyfriend?” Dr. Markham pressed.
Kit shook her head. “Just a friend.”
“That’s good,” Dr. Markham said, but before she could ask what was good about it, he bent over Dennis’s chest, talking with his back to her. “You have to understand that Mr. Carlisle has experienced one of the most severe brain traumas possible. He may never think or speak normally again. Frankly, it’d be a miracle if he even wakes.”
He was scribbling on his chart, so he missed Kit’s wince, but flipped the chart shut a moment later and tucked it under his arm. “There’s nothing more to do now but wait.”
That was the extent of his medical care.
He smiled. “Guess I’ll go grab a late dinner.”
Kit looked at him. “It’s six A.M.”
“I’m just kidding.”
Kit didn’t smile.
“I am off my shift soon, though.” He hung the clipboard on the peg at the end of the bed. “Maybe you’d like to take a little bedside break. Let me buy you a coffee?”
Kit’s fleeting instinct was to wish for Grif, but no . . . she could handle this one herself. “Are you asking me out over my friend’s sickbed?”
“He won’t know the difference.” Dr. Markham added a nonchalant shrug to his handsome smile. Behind him, Dennis’s heart monitor continued its steady beat.
“Sure, he would,” Kit said, in time to the beat.
The doctor tilted his head. “How?”
“Because every time you have a drink with an asshole, an angel loses his wings.”
The smile, the invitation, and the doctor disappeared. “Ring the nurses’ station if you need anything.”
“Imperious bastard,” Kit said, still glaring as the door clicked shut.
“Yes. That one has a serious God complex,” said a voice next to her.
Kit whirled to find Dennis’s eyes open wide, but there was no relief for Kit in the look. The blue depths swirled with liquid marble.
“No!” Kit said, leaping to her feet. The computer wobbled on the bedside stand, but she pushed it all away. “No,” she said again.
“Oh, but I think I know a God complex when I see it.” Dennis’s face lifted, but it wasn’t her friend’s lopsided, heartfelt smile.
“Get out of there,” Kit spat, grabbing Dennis by his shoulders, surprising them both. She gave him a shake. “Get out!”
“Relax, kid. Every life is improved by that which is Pure.”
Not my life, Kit thought, and the expression across from her altered, as if whatever was inside Dennis heard the thought.
She tilted her head. “Who are you?”
“I’m Saint Francis of the Cherubim tribe, the first Pure to ever experience mortality as a part of God’s divine will. But you can call me Frank.”
The familiar name calmed Kit somewhat. “You mean . . . Sarge?”
“In the flesh.”
Kit crossed her arms. “That’s not funny.”
“Admit it, Katherine. You’ve wanted to know more of the Everlast since you first learned of it. So here I am.”
It was true. Ever since she’d seen Grif’s wings flare from his shoulders in a rising wave of black smoke, and tasted forever in his kiss, she’d wanted to know more. She looked continuously for signs that angels walked among the living. She could admit now, under that roiling, marbled gaze, that she even searched for signs that she was favored. After all, she thought, staring back at the Pure, who didn’t want to be one of the Chosen?
“I like you, Craig. You’re what we in the Everlast like to call a Blender,” Frank said, the swirl in his monochromatic gaze slowing to match his tone. “You might as well mix your faiths in a cocktail shaker. You bend dogmas to suit you instead of bending yourself to fit a dogma. You believe in God and angels, but you also believe in Satan and demons and ghosts and spirits and astrology and witchcraft and the evil eye and dousing. A Blender could say their Hail Marys on the weekend, then consult the Ouija board during the week, with equal faith in both.”
“I’ve never played with an Ouija board.”
“I know. Out of the same openness of faith.” He paused. “Dennis is a Blender, too. That’s why you can both so easily mix eras, combining your love for the past with the demands of modern-day life.”
Kit brightened a bit at his use of the present tense. Surely he wouldn’t use it if Dennis were destined to die?
“Griffin Shaw, on the other hand, was an Apostate.” His mouth curled, the word a bitter pill on his tongue. “They believe only in what they can see and touch. The hard-core ones actively work to disprove the existence of God and angels and anything that is divine. The irony is that Apostates are actually closer to the angels than anyone. They’re the ones who’ve already been touched by a miracle or a near-death experience. Yet it was so traumatic that not only do they not remember it, they harden their hearts to anything remotely mystical.”
“Grif is a Centurion,” she said, sticking up for him out of habit.
Frank huffed. “And he still doesn’t believe in miracles. I ask you, who else has ever had a second chance in the earthly realm? Who do you know that is both angelic and Chosen? Griffin Shaw is one of the greatest miracles there is, yet he doesn’t believe in himself.”
“I believe in him.”
“Why? He doesn’t believe in you.” He held up a hand at her indrawn breath. “No, don’t get mad. You’re the girl who seeks out the truth at any cost, are you not? You value it above all else?”
The Lost Page 29