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 f*ck 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 if 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.
“I know,” Grif managed this time.
“Well, finally. Something you know.” Evie’s skull tilted like it might fall from her neck, yet her grip tightened. “Come on, lover. Let’s go die so you can get on with your new life.”
And she pushed him hard, shoving him through the bungalow door, back into the trajectory of the past where a man waited with a knife destined for Grif’s gut. Back where another held a vase meant to shatter his skull. And back to where a Centurion would soon arrive to wheel him through the cold, unyielding Universe to his lonely post in the Everlast.
And knowing all of this, as he hadn’t the first time, Grif cried out for Kit.