Chapter Thirty
Grif returned to the hospital just before eleven A.M., stripped to his shirtsleeves, jacket hanging over his left shoulder. He was hot, cranky, and because of Sarge’s emergency Take, he still hadn’t gotten that cup of joe. But he didn’t dare stop now. Kit was no doubt wondering where he was, and probably sore at him all over again.
He’d just explain, he decided as he neared Dennis’s room. Kit was a lot of things, but unreasonable wasn’t one of them. Unkind wasn’t, either. She’d be pleased to know another traumatized soul had been seen safely home. Still, things weren’t easy between them right now, so his explanation, and apology, were on his lips even as he walked through the door.
“So I found the guy stumbling around in these underground tunnels. Said he was looking for ‘the light.’ I told him that wasn’t the way it worked and the nut job ran from me, so I had to send for another Centurion to corner him. She’s the one who escorted him off the mudflat, which is why I couldn’t return before now. I was stuck, here and now, and had to hoof it back in terrestrial time.”
The rush of words felt like a train wreck, but when Grif finally paused for a breath, Kit still said nothing. She also, he noted with a quick skip of his heart, hadn’t yet looked at him. “Kit?”
Leaning against the wall across the room, she continued gazing out the window, arms crossed and brow furrowed. Grif stared, trying to figure out what was off about her. She was totally still, but it felt like there was something rushing through her body, like a roaring river contained between the silent banks of her flesh. Something inside her was shifting, though she never moved. But what?
Then she looked at him, and that imagined sense of movement solidified in her gaze. The river freezing over, he thought, going cold himself. Whatever it was had settled.
“What do you see, Grif?” Her voice was wooden and distant, and seemed much farther away than the other side of the room.
He let his gaze roam, telling himself he was doing what she wanted, and not trying to escape the expression that matched that flat tone. Dennis still lay unconscious, the heart monitor bleating regularly at his back. The chart was at the foot of his bed—it looked like the doctor had been here, and signed it—but other than that, not much had changed. “You shut down your computer.”
She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. “I mean, what do you see when you look at me.”
He saw his dream girl reimagined for the twenty-first century, that’s what he saw. He saw the silk scarf holding back her hair, and her ladies’ guayabera and her capri jeans and her canvas tennis shoes. Even dressed down, she was era-appropriate. “I see my girl.”
Kit closed her eyes, and a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Yeah,” she murmured, the smile lingering a few moments longer. Then she opened her eyes. “But sometimes what you don’t see is more important.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Negative space,” she whispered, giving him a sad smile. “The holes left by that which is no longer there.”
Grif didn’t say anything. The look in her eyes . . . he didn’t know it. It was as foreign as Europe. As far off as France. It was like a place he’d never wanted to go, and for some reason it was here, in this room, in the very way his girl now held her elbows, arms across her chest, like she was holding herself together.
“You still love her,” she finally said.
Grif swallowed hard, but kept his unblinking gaze on her strange one, willing her back from that far-off place. “Evie is dead, Kit. All I want is to—”
“It’s okay,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I mean, it’s good that you still love her. A new love can’t replace an old love. I always knew that. That’s not what new love is for.”
His heart began thumping in his chest. “Babe. You’re just tired. Let’s go home and—”
“I am tired.” She nodded, but not to him, to herself. “I’m tired of trying to make you forget. I try with my words and my laughter and my hard work on your behalf. I try with my body.” She laughed sadly at that. “I try so hard to be enough that you don’t wake up every morning and wish you were someplace else.”
Grif shook his head, almost violently. “You are enough.”
“I know.” She lifted her chin in that stubborn way he loved, and said, “I’m Kit Craig. Girl reporter. Rockabilly babe. One of the few humans who can talk to the Pure. And I love like a goddess. I’m passionate and devoted and open, with soft spots that can be pushed like bruises . . . and every single one of them was reserved for you.” Her voice hitched, but she recovered it immediately. “That’s how I love. And that’s how I want to be loved. But I can’t compete with her anymore.”
He didn’t even try to interrupt now. She had made up her mind about something in the short hours he was gone, but he couldn’t be sure what it was quite yet.
“I can’t compete,” she said again, “and I can’t get the knowledge from your tears out of my mind. I always told myself that I understood why you still cared for her, but I don’t anymore. Now that I felt your greatest sorrow—loving and losing Evelyn Shaw—I can’t find it in my heart to deny it. In your mind she’ll always be perfect and beautiful and beloved.”
Perfect? Grif thought, as Kit shook her head. Evie had been beautiful, yes. But not perfect. And Kit was already beloved. He opened his mouth to say so, but she didn’t give him a chance.
“I asked you once if you ever dreamed of me. Well, now I don’t have to wonder. I know your dreams like I know my own.” She shrugged. “In a way, it’s good. I can see that it’s not my fault that you can’t be fully present. There’s nothing wrong with me . . . another woman simply beat me to the punch.”
What the hell had happened while he was gone? Grif looked around the room like she’d told him to do earlier, as if that could provide the answer. And this time he saw it. The plasma ringing Dennis was gone. Grif’s gaze shot to the heart monitor. His vitals were good. Normal, even. His color was fine. He was still unconscious, but etherically? He looked almost healthy.
Grif’s exhalation shot from him in harsh rattle. “Who the hell have you been talking to?”
She looked down, causing a loose curl to drop over her forehead. An hour ago, Grif would have thought nothing of reaching out and slipping it back behind her ear. But not now.
“You have two loves, Griffin Shaw,” she said, still not looking at him. “You have two lives. And one has to go.”
Now Grif wanted to reach out to shake her, but the foreign look she gave him when she looked up again made him feel emptier than he had since landing back on the mudflat.
“You’re lost, Grif,” she said. “Lost to the past. Lost to me.”
“I’m not Lost,” he said, through clenched teeth. He had to force his jaw to relax just so he could get his next words out without biting them off. “And I love you!”
“I know,” she said simply. “But I know something else now, too.”
Kit glanced at Dennis, her neck working as she swallowed hard. It looked like she was on the verge of something, like leaping from a jagged cliff but even less fun. Studying her, he only caught the last part of her whisper.
“What did you say?” He tilted his head.
Kit swallowed hard. “I said every life is improved by that which is Pure.”
Holding stock-still, Grif let his eyes alone canvass the room, squinting suspiciously at every shadow, then honed back in on Kit. “It was Frank, wasn’t it?”
Her gaze fell.
“He came through in Dennis, right?” When she didn’t answer, he yelled. “Did he?”
“We made a deal.”
Grif actually backed up. The room spun, and he had to plant a hand on the wall to still it. The Pure had been planning it all along, he realized. He’d brought Grif that damned case, leading to Jeap and the other Lost souls. He’d probably known what Scratch was doing . . . and what it would take to stop the fallen angel. It was why he’d been so silent since assigning Grif the case. The Pure’s only job was to see to it that the Centurions in his care moved on. And that still included Grif.
He looked at Kit. “Whatever you’re about to say? Don’t.”
“Grif—”
He shook his head, mind spinning, finally catching up. “Frank is using your goodness, your thoughts and emotions, against you. Don’t you see? He’s been trying to drive us apart all along. That’s why he sent me to Jeap. He knew you would go, start investigating it, that you’d involve Dennis.”
Kit shook her head. “But—”
“What? You don’t think he’s capable of it? An angel?”
Kit finally blinked, and for a moment she was there, his girl, open to him. But only for a moment. She shook her head. “It’s too late.”
“No.” Grif was suddenly next to her, his hands on her arms. “Whatever you did, we can fix it. Whatever deal you made, we can take it back. We can do anything as long as we stick together. We’re a team.” He shook her when she didn’t answer. “Right?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But what?” He squinted into her unreadable face, not understanding.
“But that’s not what I want.”
His hands dropped away, and suddenly he was floating, loosened and untethered, like when he free-fell through the Universe. But no. His feet were already on the Surface. “What?”
“I— I don’t want to be chosen by default.” And this time she didn’t just glance at Dennis, she put a hand on his shoulder. She faced him, her back to Grif.
“Kit—?”
“She’s here.” Kit turned to face Grif, and he saw that a single tear had slid over her cheek. “And that means you’re still a married man.”
Glancing down at his ringless finger, the air exploding from his chest, Grif looked at the ceiling, under the bed, toward the private bathroom where someone with a Centurion’s wings might be hidden. Meanwhile, his mind raced. Evie had come through incubation . . . when? And she was a Centurion now? Why hadn’t Sarge told him? Why had he told Kit? And was Dennis to be Evie’s Take? Her first?
Where the hell was she?
“No, Grif.” He looked back to find Kit shaking her head, sheet-white as she watched his frantic search. She huffed, and managed a humorless laugh. “At least I know I made the right choice.”
Grif threw up his arms. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Kit! Why are you looking at me like that? What do you mean she’s here?”
“I mean your wife. Evie,” she said, spacing her words carefully. “She’s still alive, Grif. Evie’s still alive.”
The words sliced his brain in two, shorting out all thought, sending shivers into his limbs until his knees gave way. He braced himself against the wall, and looked around for more substantial support, but Kit remained far away.
Evie’s still alive?
“Can I get some water over here, please?”
Both Kit and Grif jumped. Dennis was suddenly staring up at Kit, head tilted to one side with a smile. Aside from the bruised flesh peeking beneath his bandages, he looked no worse than if he’d just woken from a restful nap. Kit bent with a cry, and buried herself in a hug. It looked like she needed it more than he did.
“So that’s the deal,” Grif mumbled, throat tight as he straightened. He caught his breath, though his mind still whirled. Dennis’s life in exchange for the knowledge that Evie still lived. And Kit, knowing what Grif would do—what he’d have to do—had accepted it.
Splaying his feet wide, mostly for balance, he shoved his hands into his pockets, and stood at the foot of Dennis’s bed. He waited until Kit had straightened, and had no choice but to turn back to him. He shook his head. “Guess he knew exactly how to get to you, huh?”
She didn’t ask who. Frank was as much a presence in this room as any of the living. But she shook her head. “He knew how to get to you, too.”
Evie’s still alive.
And Sarge had known it all along.
“You should go,” Kit said tearfully. “I imagine you’ll want to get right to work.” And she turned back to Dennis, making it easier on them both for Grif to leave.
Next to her, Dennis frowned. He knew he was listening to a loaded conversation. Grif’s gaze traveled between the two of them, both one-hundred-percent, twenty-first-century mortals. Both hourglasses, their time on this mudflat limited in years.
So Grif crossed the room and picked up his jacket. Maybe that shrink, Mei, was right. Let Kit have the life she was meant to have with someone from her time. Grif had just knocked into it like a meteor, a destructive force, sending it off track for a while.
Still, he paused with his hand on the door. “You should at least know one thing before I leave.”
Because it wasn’t like he hadn’t been here at all. The time he’d spent with Kit, even if it did end like this, should count for something. The love they felt for each other didn’t lose its meaning just because it couldn’t stand up to a universal force.
“The knowledge in those tears that Scratch shared with you? Those old regrets you now hold against me? Yeah, they haunted me. They drove me back to the Surface to try to right old wrongs, and sure, they were the reason I got out of bed and paced almost every night, too.
“But every regret, every thing I ever cared for or about, and every wish I held in my heart about my first life, they all drowned with you, Kit.” He shook his head. “I let them all sink to the bottom of that pool when I thought I was losing you. I cried new tears. And they were all for you.”
Her brow furrowed. Of course she remembered. Filled with love, they’d mingled with hers to banish that soul-sucking bastard once and for all. But Grif needed her to know that he remembered, too.
“And as I cried,” he continued, hoping like hell he wouldn’t do so again now, “I prayed and swore to God that I’d leave those old torments behind. I’d let that old life go as long as I could have this new one. I swore nothing would ever matter again as long as you lived.” He stared. “But I guess neither Scratch nor Sarge shared that with you, did they?”
Kit swayed, but it was Dennis who was next to her now, and he was the one who put a hand on her arm. Again, maybe that was the way it should be. Dennis was a good man. He and Kit were a good fit.
“I just thought you should know,” Grif said, tapping his fedora back on his head and giving her a final nod. “You’re the girl who loves the truth, and the truth is . . . I’ve loved you more than anything in my entire life.”
And because his throat really did close up after that, and because Dennis was watching him without blinking, and Kit could barely see through her tears—and because she’d made a deal with Sarge that sealed her in place—Grif left. He strode down the hall blindly, concentrating on keeping his footsteps steady and moving forward. That way, maybe his mind and heart could follow.
“Grif!”
He stopped dead, too fast, and swallowed hard. When he turned, she was hanging back, half-inside Dennis’s room, half-out. He suddenly understood how she’d felt all these months. Half-here, half-there.
Evie’s still alive.
It was the thought that kept both of them rooted in place.
“Let me know.” Kit cleared her throat. “When you figure it out, I mean.”
Grif’s head didn’t seem to be working. She looked so different all of a sudden; someone he didn’t know. Someone he couldn’t touch. “Figure what out?”
“You know,” Kit gave him a watery smile, looking briefly touchable. “Who killed Griffin Shaw.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then gave her a grateful nod. That’s exactly what he needed to do . . . or at least it was a reason to keep moving forward. The past, even the near past, was gone.
Now, Grif thought, as he turned and began walking again, all he had to do was figure out exactly where he’d left it.