The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2) - By Vicki Pettersson
Chapter One
It wasn’t a dream, of that he was sure. First, the only thing Griffin Shaw dreamed of was the night he’d died, fifty years earlier. Second, the only person he dreamed of was the woman who’d died with him, and whom he’d been searching for ever since.
Third, and perhaps most important, Grif damned well didn’t dream of hairy, oversize angels with heads that shone like eight-balls, and chips on their shoulders as wide as their wings.
No, this was vision, Grif thought, as he slipped his suspenders up over his shoulders, and padded barefoot through the dark ranch house. This was the same source material of Moses and the Apostles, and it was also the message he’d been warned was coming. His job now was to search out the herald.
Dropping into the sunken living room, he gave a gentle probe with his celestial eyesight, searching for a floating shimmer of silvery plasma or some other sign of angelic presence, but no one, no thing, waited for him there. All he saw were Kit’s possessions, plentiful but not hoarded, and despite the circumstances, it made him smile. Katherine Craig—modern-day girl reporter, rockabilly chick, and the sole woman on earth, or the Everlast, able to convince Griffin Shaw that life was still worth living—only gathered items around her that had personal meaning, exceptional value, and spoke of an era long gone.
His era.
Grif couldn’t much see the point in preserving what was never perfect to begin with, but there was no telling Kit that. She might be a twenty-first-century woman through and through, but she lived a rockabilly lifestyle, which meant she was retro to the core.
Spotting no sign of Pure presence in her shockingly pink kitchen, Grif headed back through the dark living room, and into the short, squat foyer. He could enter and exit any earthly property without restriction—even outside of prophetic vision—so ignoring the blinking alarm, he simply opened the door, stepped through . . . and was promptly struck in the head by a newspaper.
A youthful cackle sounded in the street. “Little piker,” Grif muttered, bending to reach for the unlikely missile.
Paperboys don’t deliver in the middle of the night.
He froze at the thought, and then his gaze landed on the headline. Suddenly he was running in the street.
“Hey!” Grif called after the teen. “Hey!”
Vision or not, the boy clearly hadn’t thought Grif would follow. Surprise had the kid glancing back, then overcorrecting when his bag swung from his shoulder. Another loud cry sounded in the street, this one less amused, as he then catapulted across the handlebars and performed a perfect header into the corner stop sign.
Sighing, Grif tucked the paper under his arm.
The tightly clipped grass was crisp and soft beneath Grif’s bare feet—the sensory acuity was another sign that this was a vision and not a dream—but summer’s shadow reached up from the base of the blades, its fingers still warm. It was early June, and though some nights still went cool, the long grasses and potted plants were beginning to yellow beneath the desert sun’s unforgiving gaze. Evergreens—the matured pines and fountaining grasses studding the yard’s perimeter—would pretend not to care, but unlike mortals, Grif could hear the cries of the nonindigenous plants. To a being both angelic and human, it sounded like the weak final gasps of someone expiring from dehydration. Some life-forms, he decided, were not meant for the desert.
Just as some weren’t meant for the Surface.
“What’s the big idea?” Grif asked, without preamble, holding the paper out in front of the unconscious teen.
The kid’s eyelids flipped open, but nothing human swirled in the wide gaze of black granite. The voice rumbled like far-off thunder. “What? It’s a great headline. And it’s what got you bounced back to this mudflat, isn’t it?”
Grif grunted. Of course it would be Frank. Short for Saint Francis, of the Cherubim tribe, he was the Pure in charge of all the Centurions—the angels who’d once been human. Frank appeared to each Centurion in the Everlast via the form they most associated with authority. For Grif, that was a sergeant in a detectives’ bullpen, a guise meant to put him at ease, though he wasn’t comforted. Grif was crummy with authority.
He flipped the paper over again, and the question that greeted him every morning, and was the last to leave him at night, blared from the top of the page: WHO KILLED GRIFFIN SHAW?
But that was all he understood. The text below that was a mixture of Sanskrit and Seraphian—angel-ese—which, despite his Centurion status, he didn’t read. Glancing at his sarge, who still stared up at him through the teen’s sidelong smirk, Grif resisted the urge to give him a little kick. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that the answer to this question wasn’t on these pages. It wasn’t even Sarge’s fault. He didn’t provide answers, only guidance.
“Little late for visiting hours,” Grif finally said, offering him a hand.
Sarge accepted the help, and when they locked grips, the teen’s skin was grave-cold. Summer or not, the kid would be frosted over when his displaced consciousness returned to his flesh. Grif would have felt bad about that, except that angelic possession generally left the host body with a little something extra, too—something that would benefit that individual for the rest of their mortal life. The kid’s throwing arm, for instance, might suddenly turn him into the next Mickey Mantle. Or new parts of the brain, previously inaccessible, might light up like mental landing strips in his mind, making him the next Einstein. But none of that was Grif’s concern.
“What’s wrong, Shaw?” Sarge said, sensing his impatience. “I told you I’d be coming. Or am I disturbing something back in that warm, wide bed?”
Grif drew back, eyes narrowing. “That bed, and what goes on in it, is none of your business.”
A look that was too knowing for the young face overtook the teen’s features. “It’s no wonder you got no incentive to leave this mudflat.”
“That’s not why I’m here and you know it,” Grif said, jaw clenching.
Yet the knowing look remained, and silence stretched between them. “Got a smoke?”
Grif scoffed. “I can’t be seen giving the paperboy a cigar.”
“That’s why I came to you in a vision,” Sarge said, and the marble eyes swirled faster. “Besides, I know you have one. I can smell it on you.”
Grif did. He’d gone through the motions of putting one in his pocket as he dressed. That was the trick with visions. If you went along with them, believed and acted as though they were real, they’d reveal their secrets. If you fought them, they’d turn on you like a cornered rattler.
So Grif pulled it from his pocket, watched the swirling eyes widen, and even lit the stick for Frank. The first hit of nicotine took, and bliss gradually replaced judgment. Even angels had their vices. Then Grif asked, “What’s with the paperboy guise?”
“It’s not a guise. I’m actually in possession of your paperboy.”
Grif was surprised. The kid looked healthy, at least in the vision. Usually only the very old, very young, or mentally incapacitated were susceptible to Pure possession.
“He’s a sleepwalker,” Frank supplied, closing his eyes as he inhaled again. “And I needed him to make a delivery.”
Grif glanced down at the paper in his hands, and knew the real one would be waiting on the doorstep when he truly awoke. “So what do you want?”
“Same thing God wants, Shaw,” Frank answered, and it was true. As powerful as the Pure were, they had no will outside that of God’s. “I want you to come Home.”
Grif just jerked his head. “We agreed I get to stay until I find out who killed me.”
“It’s been four months,” Sarge said, eyes still closed.
“Yes, and I’ve been working on it nonstop.”
The marble gaze found his again through the smoke.
Grif raised his chin. “Fifty years is a long time. Leads dry up. The case is cold.”
“So what makes you think it can ever be solved?”
Why did he think he could solve the mystery of who’d killed him fifty years earlier? Because he wasn’t leaving this mudflat again until he did, that’s why.
“I got an appointment with a woman. Today,” he told Sarge. “I think she’ll be able to help me.”
Sarge tucked one arm beneath the other, propping it up, another gesture that was too old for the young body’s knobby limbs. “And then what?”
“Then I follow the answers until they lead me to the killer.” Or killers . . . because in the brief flashes of memory that Sarge and Company hadn’t been able to wipe out, he’d seen that the man who’d attacked him that fateful night hadn’t been working alone. There’d been two of them, and they’d taken his life.
They’d murdered his wife.
“I mean what happens after that?” Sarge pressed, absently scratching the boy’s bony rib cage. “After you solve your life’s, and afterlife’s, greatest mystery?”
Grif couldn’t even begin to guess. He hadn’t been granted wings and the status of angelic helper because he was special. Being a Centurion had been pressed upon him because he was broken, unable to forget his mortal years, move past the pain of being murdered, and release the guilt of having allowed his dear Evie to be killed while standing right next to him. Assisting other newly murdered souls into the Everlast was only meant to help him move on.
But so far Grif hadn’t moved forward . . . he’d moved back, the first man ever to do so. The first, he knew, to be both angelic and human.
“You should just return now,” Sarge said, likely reading his mind.
“Working on it,” Grif muttered, tapping out a smoke of his own.
“So maybe that’ll help,” Sarge said, jerking his head at Grif’s paper. Then his expression turned sly. “Open it.”
Holding his stick between his lips, Grif unfolded the paper again. This time he ignored the headline blaring the news of his death, as well as the black-and-white photo of him and Evie splayed beneath it, and opened it to the middle. “That’s not the sports page.”
Instead, it was a dossier on an individual named Jeap Yang, born only nineteen years earlier and due to die five hours from now. Yet it didn’t say how. Lowering the paperwork, Grif slipped the cigarette from his lips. “Is it a Take or a case?”
Because there was a difference. If it was a Take, Grif arrived just after the mortal soul passed from the physical body—same as he had in his role as a Centurion. However, a case required the escorting angel to arrive just before corporeal death. This was no problem for the Pure. They had never lived, and didn’t even possess souls. They couldn’t begin to understand the agony of having life ripped from you.
But attending death was torture to Grif . . . and it was meant to be. He’d overstepped his duties as a Centurion—saved a woman from being murdered instead of simply watching her die—and that was really why he was here now.
He didn’t regret it, though. It was why Kit—his girl, his new love—was still here, too.
“Why?” Sarge asked now. “Got room in your bed for another case?”
Grif gave Sarge a black look, then snuffed his cigarette butt on the corner lot’s wet grass. “There a map in here?”
“Why don’t you bring along your little tour guide?” Sarge said, dripping sarcasm, spitting stardust.
“I can’t bring Kit on a Take and you know it.” While his sense of direction on the mudflat was improving, and he’d memorized most of Las Vegas’s major crossroads and intersections, he still hadn’t recovered his internal sense of direction. Kit usually guided him when they were out together.
“But she’s so accepting of you, Shaw—your job, your wings, your angelic nature. She loves you just the way you are, right? So why shouldn’t she see you doing what you do best?”
“She did.” Grif smiled. “Back in that warm, wide bed.”
Sarge gave him a deadpan stare. “Map’s in the paper. The real paper. And . . .”
It wasn’t like Sarge to hesitate. “And?”
“This one is Lost.”
Grif’s breath caught in his chest, but he managed a short nod. He’d known this duty was coming.
“He might be less skittish with someone who used to be human,” Sarge explained, then paused. “We can’t afford to lose this one, Shaw.”
“This one?”
“There were two before him. We . . . don’t know where they went.”
Grif blinked. The Host of angels created by and for God to do His will and protect His children . . . didn’t know? Sensing it best not to voice that thought, deciding Frank already knew it anyway, Grif cleared his throat. “So how does he die?”
“Show up at sunrise and you’ll see,” Sarge said.
Because the lesson in Jeap’s death wouldn’t just be for the kid. Grif still had healing to do, too. Sighing, he turned to leave.
“You know,” Sarge said, raising his voice so the treble in the teen’s throat cracked. “It’s not that you have a bad sense of direction, Shaw. True, you’re out of your place and time, and you’ll never be able to properly orient yourself on this mudflat again . . .”
Grif turned around slowly, and waited while Frank tapped ash onto the curb.
“But lots of folks are like that,” he said, moving to the bike and picking it back up, gaze fastened on Grif, the dust of asteroids in his eyes. “Most people are simply inattentive. They don’t see the blessings in their lives until it’s too late. So you might find you have more in common with Jeap Yang than you think.”
Grif clenched his jaw so tight his teeth ached. “You calling me Lost?”
“I’m saying some guys spend their entire lives searching for a place to settle.”
“I’ll settle when I find out who killed me.”
“Will you?” Sarge blew out the last of his smoke with a hard breath, then he flicked the cigar into the street. “Because I may not know what it is to be human, but I do know one thing. A person isn’t defined by their death. They’re defined by their life.”
Grif wanted to pretend he didn’t know what that meant, but they both knew better. “We done here?”
“Just one more thing.” Sarge hopped back onto the bike, and with roiling eyes no human possessed, he shot Grif a final look over his shoulder. “Try not to f*ck this one up.”
And though he turned away, and pumped his feet, he didn’t just leave Grif staring as one of God’s most powerful creations rode away on a Schwinn. As befitting a vision, he took off with a roar, ripping through the sound barrier, spewing stardust, and leaving the detritus of dead galaxies trailing behind him.