Chapter Four
With sweaty palms and a racing heart—and wings still unfolded and pricked to the smallest shift of the air current in the room—Grif watched Kit exit the dingy, deserted home. Every nerve in his body screamed at him to follow, and he allowed himself a shudder at the memory of the way that angel—that thing, as she called it—had been staring at her when Grif arrived.
It had looked ravenous. It lunged for Kit like it was about to dine.
Yet that otherworldly presence was gone, and Grif needed to forget the interaction for now. At least he knew what was happening to the missing Lost souls, and he’d report back to Frank once he hit the Everlast, but first he needed to secure this one. He’d given Jeap Yang’s unwelcome visitor a good jolt, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t return.
Squinting through the room’s corralled chemical haze, Grif stared at Yang’s abused remains. Sarge had stated that this kid and Grif had something in common, but gazing at the drug-addled body, Grif was damned if he could see what.
Yeah, they’d both been born on this great big mudflat, if decades apart. They’d both once been healthy strapping young men with promising futures, each of which had been altered by choice and fate and damning mistakes. Grif saw that much. They’d also each died in ways horrific enough to sentence them to a post-life stint in incubation, or what Grif liked to refer to as the Tube. In you went, broken and weary and weighed down with your past, and out you came, polished up enough to pass through the Pearly Gates. At least that’s how it worked for most.
It hadn’t for Grif, which was why he’d gotten stuck working the Centurion beat, and if Jeap were broken enough—ashamed of his life’s actions, haunted by guilt, or hanging on for a chance to make it all right—then he’d end up doing the same, helping other injured souls into Paradise until he, too, healed enough to move on.
But the similarities stopped there. Newly shorn from his body, Jeap’s soul was the spiritual equivalent of a newborn . . . and in this case one that was a strung-out, drug-addled, abandoned shell of a human with no hopes of locating on his own which way was up. In turn, Grif was like protective services for the soul. One that’d come through the same system, graduated without honors, and was now charged with ferrying this Lost scrap of life into the Everlast.
He had fifty years’ worth of experience in dealing with the dead, plus instinct honed as a mortal P.I. before that. Right now that experience and instinct had him standing stock-still in the filth-strewn room before he pulled out his Luckies and lit a stick. It was a stalling tactic . . . and a calming one. It showed he wasn’t here to judge. It also helped shield his strong sense of smell from the room’s toxic chemical haze. He’d be lucky if the lining in his nostrils survived it.
Blowing out a defensive stream of smoky tar, he said to the empty room, “You can come out now. No one here but us dead people.”
Jeap’s shallow breathing immediately ceased, his chest falling still in mid-inhalation, as if he’d been waiting for permission to die. Nothing happened after that, though. A regular Take would rise immediately, his or her ethereal form emerging directly from the earthly remains, but maybe the Lost were different. He’d have to ask Sarge.
In any case, the kid had to know death was coming, and he’d probably overthought the experience. On top of the attempted soul-rape, Jeap was likely so scared by everything he didn’t know that he’d rather hold on to the fetid remains of a decaying body than let it go for . . . well, only God knew what.
Maybe that’s why Grif had been sent to Take the kid. He knew enough of both heaven’s clockwork and earth’s timeline to merge the two into one seamless thread. “If you’re worried about the girl, don’t be. She’s calling for help, though she’ll be back soon, and if you want to get out of here before all those people see you like this, now’s your chance.”
Not the most sensitive speech he’d ever given, but not the least, either. Still, nothing happened.
Frowning, Grif bent over the body, using Pure eyesight to see past flesh and bone, searching for life beneath the earthly remains. Nothing. So he took another drag from his stick, bent closer, and exhaled hard. An ethereal mingling of temporal smoke and supernatural license washed over the corpse, causing the thin eyelids to flip open like shades. Grif stared. The starry, otherworldly gaze was also gone.
Straightening, Grif looked around. It took a moment, one in which he had to remember both to look and not look, but then he caught the shimmery thread of plasma slithering into a beat-up entertainment unit, the only real furniture in the room. Tucking his stick between his lips, he crossed the room in two strides, bent, and yanked the bottom doors open with both hands. There, inside, were the coiled-up spiritual remains of Jeap’s newly shorn soul.
“No need to worry now, son,” Grif said. “It’s all over.”
The soul was shivering, even though the spiritual world was absent of heat or cold. Jeap might feel better if Grif could get him to look in the mirror. His ethereal remains resembled the boy he should have been, before the drugs took him hostage. Sure, he’d be forever confined to the dingy clothes he’d died in, and he’d made a gross error in judgment by recently cutting his own hair with what must have been a kitchen knife, but his skin was unblemished beneath the sad mop, his eyes clear, and his mind was likely sharper than it’d been in years.
When Jeap realized Grif wasn’t going to grab, berate, or otherwise abuse him, he gave a jerky nod. “You made him go away.”
Nodding, Grif offered a hand, and after a moment Jeap accepted it. He straightened with a groan and wiped off the back of his jeans. “Thank you. He was tugging at me, and it felt like his fingers were splintering beneath my skin, but it felt like splinters of ice, and then . . .”
“Yes?” Grif said, because Jeap had frozen, as if the memory of those icy fingers had riveted him to the floor.
“Then it saw her. That girl you were talking to.” Jeap looked at Grif, eyes going wide. He began to shake again and put a hand to his stomach like he was going to be sick. “I felt what it felt, and it wanted to snuff that light in her from existence, to infect her with illness and disease and hatred and horror . . . oh my God.”
“Stop,” Grif commanded, and had to will himself not to shake the kid, or slap him, anything so he’d shut the hell up about Kit. “Stop thinking about it. It’s gone.”
Happy to oblige, Jeap nodded sharply, but looked around the room to make sure for himself. That’s when he caught sight of his corpse and winced. “Did I do all that to myself?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Grif asked, because he didn’t remember his death, either. That was the Everlast’s way of protecting the dead. It kept them from reliving those final, horrifying moments over and over again, so that they could more easily move on.
Not exactly foolproof, though, was it? Grif thought, taking one final, steadying drag before flicking aside his smoke. He couldn’t remember who’d killed him, yet he couldn’t forget it, either.
Jeap shook his head. “I remember entering this room. It didn’t look like this, though.”
“What day was that?”
“Friday.”
Today was Tuesday. “Which Friday?”
Jeap shrugged. “I don’t know exactly, but my girl always gets paid the first of the month. So . . . last Friday, I guess.”
The kid was off by a week, but Grif just nodded. No wonder he was dead. He’d been pumping this filth into his veins for almost twelve straight days. But Jeap was thinking of something else. “Come to think of it, now that I can actually think, I mean . . . I guess she wasn’t really my girl. I mean, how can you really love someone if you help them do this?”
“She buy you the drugs?”
Jeap ran a hand over his head, jerked it away in surprise, then moved across the room to study his reflection in the window. Groaning, he tried to smooth out his hair, but it fell back into the matted mess from the time of his death. “Man, she introduced me to it,” he finally replied, turning back to Grif. “Said I’d get the ride of my life. Guess she meant the last ride.”
“Would she get high with you?”
“Yes.” Then he thought about it. “No. Wait.”
Grif waited as the kid’s brow furrowed.
“I don’t know.” He stared at Grif. “Why can’t I remember?”
“Because your death was violent,” Grif said simply. “Even if it was self-inflicted.”
“Violent. Yeah.” The kid rubbed his hands up and down his arms, and shuddered. “I burned and felt dirty inside even as I was doing it. But I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t stop . . .”
Grif saw where this was headed, and placed a steadying hand on Jeap’s shoulder. The last thing he needed was for the kid to panic and run off-track. “The Everlast keeps you from recalling a violent death so you don’t have to relive it. You’re not meant to take it with you.”
Jeap laughed humorlessly. “Man, I’ve been living this death every day for the past two years.”
“Hey,” Grif said sharply, causing the kid to jump. Grif softened his tone. “Guilt is an empty emotion. There’s no place for it in the Everlast.”
Jeap licked his lips. “You . . . sure that’s where I’m going?”
“That’s where I went.” And Grif had enough guilt for the two of them.
“You’re an angel,” Jeap pointed out then. Shifting his gaze, Grif caught sight of his wings in the window across from him. Only the dead could see them. Tar-black and sharp as blades, they crested high over his shoulders, flashing ebony muscles when he flexed. They were magnificent.
“Not always,” he said, returning his gaze to Jeap’s. “I was murdered in 1960. So I know what you’re going through.”
Jeap narrowed his eyes. “That must be why you look different.”
“Than what?” Grif said.
“Than me.”
Glancing at the corpse, Grif huffed. He hoped so. “That’s because I’m both angelic and human.”
He explained to Jeap in a quick rap how he’d been forced to cram his soul back into flesh four months earlier. The dual natures had hurt at first. His blood had eventually warmed, and his coagulated veins had warmed, but he’d suffered throbbing headaches for weeks after, migraines like earthquakes. Breathing was as torturous as if he were a lunger. Memory was a plague.
But then a Pure angel transferred some of her celestial strength into him in hopes that her amplified angelic senses would drive him mad, and he’d flee back to the Everlast. The plan backfired. Earth, the mudflat, had instead become bearable again. His senses were additionally magnified, almost as strong as they’d ever been in the Everlast. He’d since gotten used to the twin feathers she’d tucked deep behind each shoulder blade, and almost never felt them.
“I’m both ageless and clothed in mortal flesh,” he concluded, as Jeap listened, rapt. “I have free will, like all humans, but am still bound to the Everlast. In short, Purity lives in me, even though it shouldn’t.”
“So how did you die?” Jeap asked.
Hands tucked in his pockets, Grif shrugged. “I was stabbed in the gut. A doc probably coulda patched me back up, but one never got the chance.”
“You weren’t found in time?”
“I was dry-gulched right after I was stuck.”
“You were what?”
“Whacked over the head with a ceramic vase.”
Jeap winced, then looked back at his remains. “So what will happen to me?”
“You’ll go through a process called incubation. It’s . . . healing. It’ll rehabilitate you so that you forget most of your earthly years. Then you can move on to Paradise.”
Jeap looked over at his body and shuddered. He still had the wide-eyed aspect of the Lost, but at least he didn’t look like he was going to run. “Think I’ll get to come back, too?”
Grif winced before he could help it. He wouldn’t wish a return to the Surface on anyone. Except himself, of course. “Aren’t you tired, son?” he asked quietly.
“Exhausted,” Jeap admitted, swallowing hard before he met Grif’s gaze. “But I have regrets.”
“ ’Course you do.” Grif shrugged. “That’s how you know you were alive.”
“I did things I shouldn’t have,” Jeap added.
“That’s how you know you were human.”
Jeap thought about it. “If the afterlife—”
“Everlast,” Grif corrected.
Jeap lifted his chin. “—is so great, then why are you here?”
Grif sighed, wishing the kid wasn’t quite so alert now. “I’m looking for the guy who killed me,” Grif finally said, then mentally corrected himself. Guys.
Jeap slumped. “I guess I don’t have to do that.”
Nope, and again, Grif wondered what Sarge thought he had in common with this gowed-up kid over half a century his junior. Jeap must have wondered the same thing, as he stared at Grif’s wings, then back at his mortal remains. “And that other thing? The one that was pulling on me?”
“Once Pure.” Grif shrugged. “Now Pure evil. But don’t worry. It can’t ascend.”
“It called me lost, but I don’t feel lost. In fact, I actually feel . . . good.” Jeap tilted his head, and took a moment to think about that. “For the first time since I can remember, I don’t feel like hiding.”
“Good. Then you should get through incubation just fine.”
“She should hide, though.”
“What?”
“That girl. She needs to run, something. That . . . thing. It’s going to circle back for her.”
From far away, it seemed to Grif that he heard screaming in the night. He managed to control his voice as he spoke. “How do you know that?”
“It was in me, right?”
Grif gave a jerky nod.
Jeap tried for a nonchalant shrug, but it morphed into a shudder. “So I was in it, too.”
Grif’s mortal blood took up the scream, zinging through his veins, forced by his frantic heart. God, he thought. Not Kit. Not again.
“Let’s go,” Grif managed, needing to get this duty over with so he could get back to Kit.
But Jeap gave his earthly remains a final sad, lingering look.
“What?” Grif asked impatiently.
“I don’t know. Now that I think about it, maybe under the weight of flesh and blood and, you know, free will, maybe we’re all just a little bit lost.”
Grif froze, staring at the kid. “C’mon,” he finally said, hoping Jeap hadn’t noted his hesitation. “You’re beginning the Fade.”
And he led Jeap toward the adjacent bathroom, where he shut the door. Jeap stopped him with a hand on his arm before he could open it again.
“You sure they’ll take me? I’m . . .” Jeap looked back at his destroyed body. “Unclean.”
Grif held out his hand, and because the kid needed it—because they both did—gave him a little smile. “The place would be empty if they only accepted the pure. Now come on.”
And he reopened the door so they could step directly into the Everlast. Jeap gasped, sucking in stardust and solar wind, and as horns heralded his arrival, Grif led him into the Universe’s welcoming arms.
Kit was neither ashamed nor surprised that she had a little breakdown before calling the cops. What the hell was she supposed to do after stumbling upon a man who was both rotting and alive, not to mention possessed by some sort of malevolent spirit? Of course it’d freaked her out. She was a reporter, not a crime scene technician. Not a clairvoyant.
Certainly not a D-E-V-A.
Shuddering at the memory of leaves whipping along interior walls, Kit gave in to tears that scalded her cheeks in the dawning light. Duty eventually got the best of her, and so her hiccupping sobs were gradually replaced by deep, cleansing breaths. Still, she didn’t dial 9-1-1 like a normal civilian. Instead she invoked one of the perks that came with her job, and called Detective Dennis Carlisle.
“I like you, Craig,” he said, voice dusted over with sleep. “But I’m hanging up.”
“Don’t you dare, Dennis. I need you,” she said quickly, tucking the phone between chin and shoulder so she could shakily light a cigarette. Her hands were almost steady. “You specifically at a crime scene.”
“Call O’Connell,” he said, and Kit heard bedcovers rustling as he rolled over. “You can trust him to do the job.”
Kit was as trusting of the law as anyone who reported events on both sides of it, but that wasn’t the point. “I need someone who is going to care as deeply as I do.”
Even over the phone, he saw right through her. “You mean who will listen to your opinion and feed you information in return.”
“No reason we can’t turn this investigation into a two-way street,” she said lightly, and inhaled.
“Investigation?” Now he was awake. The covers rustled again as he shifted in bed, and Kit briefly found herself wondering if anyone was lying next to him. “What makes you think—”
“You’ll want to bring the CIS unit, too,” she said, cutting him off.
“Dammit.” A pause, and the silence made her wince. “Are you okay?”
She warmed at the question, the way it was asked, and answered affirmative before giving him the address. Dennis hung up without a good-bye, but Kit smiled anyway. He’d moved to town a handful of years ago from Southern Cal, another locale with a strong rockabilly contingent, and as theirs was a small subculture, they’d met within weeks. They bonded over a common love of beach bands and car parks. Dennis was a cop, but more than that, he was a true friend. He’d come.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking so slapdash” were his first words to her, and she pushed herself from the side of her Duetto as he stepped from his unmarked car.
Glancing down, Kit made a face. Her shoes and bag were all right—hard to screw that up when all you had in your closet was vintage perfection—but the capris and sweater set were boring at best, and she was barefaced, hair untidily pinned. “I was in a hurry.”
Dennis frowned. Everyone in the scene knew how fastidious Kit was about her appearance. “Tell me,” he said, as he made to sit next to her.
Kit jerked her head at the foreclosed home’s open door. “See for yourself.”
After that he was too busy to talk at all.
As hoped, Dennis gave instructions to the beat cops that he’d be doing the interviewing, so they left Kit alone while they secured the crime scene and started the door-to-doors. Kit propped herself on the hood of her car to observe the comings and goings, and to eavesdrop on the officers’ conversation while she waited. She wasn’t given this leeway because of him, or because she was a witness, or because she was a reporter.
Kit’s father had been a cop, killed in the line of duty. The circumstances surrounding Martin Craig’s death were every cop’s unspoken fear: an anonymous call, a botched robbery, a masked thief who simply didn’t like men in blue. It also remained unsolved.
“What the hell was that?”
Kit jumped as Grif materialized behind her in that way he had, as if dropped like a star from the heavens themselves. He could reappear on the Surface any time he chose after returning from a Take—whether it was one second after he’d left, an hour, or a week—as long as it was in the future. He’d clearly chosen this point in time because the cops would be too busy to question his appearance . . . and wouldn’t even know he’d been here earlier.
Kit took in his clenched jaw, stony gaze, and hard frown, and pushed to her feet. “I’ve been waiting to ask you the same thing.”
He came around the car to stand with her, toe to toe, which wasn’t as romantic as it sounded. “You snuck out while I was sleeping.”
“I knew you wouldn’t sleep for long. And I left you Jeap’s address.”
“You left me to find my own way,” he corrected.
“I left you a hat with a built-in compass.”
He narrowed his eyes beneath his old fedora, and, swallowing hard, Kit took up the offense. She crossed her arms. “You didn’t tell me there were angels masquerading as monsters.”
He opened his mouth like he had something more to say about that, but then shook his head and changed the subject. “Don’t you realize what you could have done?”
“Nothing, apparently.” Sighing, she stared east where the sun had begun its stretch into the sky, its yellow yawn wide behind the lavender-draped mountain range. Nothing she did ever seemed to matter against fate’s heavy fist.
Grif stepped forward, into Kit’s personal space . . . and not in a good way. “You got yourself gummed up in something you shouldn’t have, Kit. Your name’s going to be attached to a death you never should have touched. Again.”
Kit understood his worry. She’d been targeted for death the last time she’d had an inadvertent run-in with fate, but hey—they’d come through that okay in the end. Besides, done was done, and Kit knew she’d try to save Jeap again, given the chance. It wasn’t the human element she was worried about anyway.
“That thing had black stars for eyes, Grif. It had a voice that sounded like a hurricane. It could see me.”
And as soon as she said it, Kit could see that was why he’d been worried. His jaw clenched as he jerked his head. “It shouldn’t have been able to. You’re alive. You’re Chosen—”
“And angels can’t harm the Chosen,” she said quickly, though it was really a question. “Those are the rules, right?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the fallen ones have a history of breaking rules.”
Kit froze. She’d have reached for another cigarette if she could have moved. “But they’re weaker than you guys, right? Like, neutered and scared with their tails tucked between their legs?”
“The fallen angels hate God and everyone on His Christmas list. They especially hate humans.”
Kit held up a hand. “I appreciate the theology lesson, but right now all I want to know is why. Could. It. See. Me?”
“Better question: why could you see it?” Grif shook his head, but still tried to answer. “I think it’s because you know so much. Too much.”
The EMTs emerged just then, carefully rolling Jeap’s body from the abandoned home. Watching them go, Kit was glad Grif had Taken the boy. Jeap Yang had suffered enough.
“Dennis has no idea what that drug is,” she said, lighting another cigarette. The sight of the body grounded her back in this world, but her nerves spiked all over again. “He’s seen heroin, roofies, X, meth, GHB, and one or more of them combined into a lethal cocktail, but he’s never seen a drug made with paint thinner and lighter fluid.”
Grif glanced back at the house, and Kit watched the memory of thickly clogged needles flash in his dark gaze. The recollection of the cleaners and solvents in the corner made Kit wince, too. “He shot industrial cleaner into his body?”
“Among other things.” Blowing out a skein of smoke, she pulled out her Moleskine. “Dennis did a check on the kid. He’d been going to a trade school for culinary arts. Jeap wanted to be a chef at one time, can you believe that?”
“Well he cooked up a hell of a recipe here,” Grif said.
“Someone else gave it to him, though,” she said, flipping the notebook shut. “And I’m going to find out who.”
Tapping out his own smoke, Grif eyed her as he tucked the pack in his pocket. “Kit—”
“Don’t even try—”
Grif grabbed her by the arm, cigarette forgotten. “You read a private file. You weren’t even supposed to be here.”
She stomped her foot. “You weren’t going to do anything!”
“I was going to do my job!” Clenching his fist, he busted his cigarette, which was how she knew he wanted to grab her again.
“It’s not a job,” she said anyway. “Jeap is a person!”
“Not anymore.” Grif held up a hand, sighing immediately, taking the sting out of her shock. He knew how it sounded. “Just so you know, he was fine when I left him in the Everlast. Happier than he’s been in over two years.”
Kit goggled, but not for the reason Grif would expect. “He’d been living like that, with that fate, for two whole years?” She rubbed her free hand over her face. “And you still don’t think I should have intervened?”
“Interfered,” Grif corrected. “Living that way was Jeap’s choice. He said as much himself.”
Kit’s jaw clenched reflexively. “What else did he say?”
“He said his girl introduced him to it. Recently.”
Kit brightened at that. “Good, then we find out who he’s been seeing recently and we have our first lead.”
Grif shook his head. “We don’t have a lead, because this isn’t an investigation.”
“Actually it is.” The voice came from behind Grif, and even Kit hadn’t seen Dennis’s arrival. She’d been too focused on Grif’s stubborn face. Grif turned, and suddenly both men were silhouetted against the rising sun, just like the mountains at their back, both formidable and unmovable as they squared off against each other.
“We’re extremely interested in finding out who’s dealing this drug,” Dennis said. “For obvious reasons.”
Kit wondered how much he’d heard of their conversation, but his face remained professionally blank.
“Obvious to some of us,” Kit replied hotly, ignoring Grif’s glare.
Dennis ignored it, too. He and Grif liked each other well enough, but neither of them would let that get in the way of their respective jobs.
“That’s fine,” Dennis said, turning to Kit. “Because you’re the one I need.”
“Me?” Kit said, surprised.
“Her?” Grif said, wary.
Dennis looked at Kit and cocked his brow. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
“Done,” Kit said immediately.
“Kit—” Grif tried to edge between them.
Kit stepped to the side, bringing Dennis into view again. “What do you need?”
“Like crimes,” said Dennis.
“It wasn’t a crime,” Grif tried again. “It was a—”
“It was awful,” Dennis said sharply, his glare just as honed. He turned back to Kit as Grif clenched his jaw. “Worst I’ve ever seen. So I’m willing to trade. But I need names, dates, anything you can get from reporting sources.”
“You mean anything that might not have made it into print in the past,” Kit said thoughtfully, biting her lip.
“You got stuff like that?” he asked.
Kit thought of her aunt’s personal files at the paper and smiled. “And in return?”
“Interviews with Jeap’s immediate relatives, if he has any. Barring that, friends.”
“Doesn’t seem like he had any real friends,” Kit commented.
“Associates, then.”
“You want this in print?” she asked, as he ran a hand over his head.
“Anything you gotta do to shine a light on what happened in there. I want to find out who’s dealing this shit.” For a moment, his face crumpled. “His flesh was falling from his bones.”
“I want in with the coroner,” she said, while his defenses were still down.
Up they went again. “Kit . . .”
“Dennis,” she said, her voice carrying the same warning. But she was distinctly aware that he was holding all the cards here. Just as she was aware that Grif had yet to speak. That was just as worrisome.
Dennis finally sighed. “I should be able to swing it. But I’m calling in a big marker.”
“I’ll do the same,” she said, thinking of her aunt’s files again. “Then we’ll hit the major wires together and hit them hard.”
“Deal,” he said, and they high-fived to seal it.
“Damn,” Grif said under his breath.
“Stay by the phone.” Dennis threw a look behind his shoulder as an officer called him over, then began backing away. “I’ll call you as soon as I get a lead.”
Then he was gone, and she was left with Grif’s heavy silence spoiling the morning air. It was only marginally better than the stench inside the house, Kit thought, and set her jaw before looking at him.
“You know,” she told Grif, leaning against her car as he glared at her. “You could help me. Dust off your detective’s hat.”
“I don’t have a detective’s hat,” he snapped. “I have a hat that beeps.”
But Kit’s mind was made up, so she just ignored his anger and his glare, and glanced back at the abandoned home. “How the hell did that thing get inside Jeap?”
As annoyed as he was with her, Grif joined her against the car, and eventually slipped his arm around her waist. “The Pures can possess the bodies of those who are . . . closer to God’s mysteries than the rest of us. Usually very old or young.”
“Sometimes a sleepwalker?” she asked, recalling what he’d told her of his vision.
He nodded. “And sometimes those weakened by drugs. I guess the fallen angels can do the same.”
“I drink alcohol,” Kit pointed out, then looked at the cigarette burning low in her hand. “And I smoke.”
“Not to the point that you black out. Or allow the flesh to fall from your living body.”
She gave him a tight smile, but flicked the cigarette away anyway.
“Hey.” Grif shifted to cup Kit’s face in his palms and locked his gaze on her own. “You’re more alive than any person I know. And I swear on my life, I won’t let that thing near you again.”
It was exactly what she needed to hear. Blowing out a long breath, she leaned forward and he pressed a kiss to her forehead. For the first time since she woke in the middle of the night, she settled and smiled.
“Come on,” she said, opening the driver’s door. “We can’t do anything for Jeap until Dennis gets back to us with sources. Let’s roll.”
Grif just crossed his arms.
“We have an appointment this morning, remember?”
She held out for the length of his blank stare, then smiled when he finally jolted, and edged around the nose of the car. “That’s right. Mary Margaret.”
They’d finally tracked down Mary Margaret DiMartino, a woman Grif believed could provide information that would help him unearth who exactly had murdered him and Evie in 1960. Unfortunately, the past fifty years hadn’t been easy on Mary Margaret, which was why she’d been so hard to locate.
Still, Kit refrained from pointing out that he didn’t seem to mind her investigative bent when it came to his old mystery. Mostly because it was the greatest mystery of both of his lives.
But also because Kit, too, had a vested interest in knowing who killed Griffin Shaw.
The pad was raided.”
“What?” She allows the word to curl softly at the end, like the steam rising from her cup, the first of the day. And like the steam, there’s no mistaking the heat from its source.
Tomas answers quickly, working to deflect her anger before it’s even risen. “A girl came by early this morning. She called the cops.”
The woman curses in her native tongue, not caring that Tomas—American all the way back to his pasty, backwoods, pig-f*cking grandfather—can’t understand. How, after she’s worked for a year getting everything in place, could something go wrong now?
“Why didn’t you stop her?” she asks, switching back to English.
“She looked like . . . somebody.”
“Somebody we know?”
There is a soft rustle on the other line, and she realizes Tomas is shaking his head as if she can see him. Idiot. Though she does have an ability to see things no one else can. She is blessed this way. It’s why she is who she is.
“No,” Tomas finally says. “Someone who would be missed.”
“Who is she?”
“I’ve never seen her before. She’s . . . different. Healthy. Has some money, too.”
Hearing another telling rustle, she can picture, with her talented mind, Tomas peering out the window of the small tract home, darting a quick glance at the street now littered with cops and flashing lights and this woman who’s called danger down upon them all. She can also feel his eagerness to leave—he needs to flee, with his record—but she hasn’t given him permission to do so.
And she won’t. Not yet.
“She’s outside now,” he says, scrambling for the information she wants. Anything so she will let him go. “She’s smoking and leaning against a fancy car.”
“What kind of car?”
“Not sure. Some vintage number with a soft top. Nothing ever meant to crawl the streets of this neighborhood.”
“Is she Law?”
“I don’t think so,” he answers. “She’s too . . . girly to be a cop. She looks like some sort of, I don’t know. Pinup girl.”
“I don’t care how attractive you find her,” the woman snaps. “I want to know if she’s dangerous.”
More rustling. “She’s Anglo, like me. Dark hair, loose curls. Slim. No, doesn’t look a bit martial.”
Neither do I, the woman thinks, gazing out her own window at the gray, empty street. “But she is motivated?”
“She broke a window and went inside by herself.”
By herself. What good is it to have a watchdog with no bite? Maybe she should show Tomas what teeth really look like. “And you just let her?” she snaps.
“She was after something.” No bite. Just a whine.
The woman sighs, and closes her eyes. There is nothing to be done with a man like this. Nothing but use him for his brawn, and eventually turn his greed against him. She remains silent for a long while, pondering just how to do that, knowing he’ll wait for as long as she wants.
“Follow her,” she finally says, opening her eyes.
“But the cops—”
She stops him there. “I want to know what she knows.”
This time he knows better than to argue. “Done.”
“Tomas.” The silence following his name is loaded. She knows he’s spoken to some of the other men, her countrymen. She also knows—they’d told her—that in their language she is sometimes called “mother” and “bride.” But to Tomas, she is the least motherly or maidenly woman he’s ever meet, and that’s how she keeps him tied to her, close, on a leash. “We’re too near to our goal to allow some random stranger to trip us up.”
“I know what to do.” And that’s why she keeps him at all.
“Make sure she doesn’t see you,” she says in parting, and waits for the answer that should have come. Of course. I’m not stupid. Nobody ever sees me.
Instead he says nothing. She curses silently, knowing then he’s already been seen, but she doesn’t call him on it. Instead she hangs up, letting him believe he’s won a little something with the deceit. She will allow him to follow this newfound trouble, and get the answers she needs first. It will allow her to remain hidden. Smoke and shadows, after all, are where she thrives.
She will take care of Tomas—who knows too much, yet does too little—after that. And the strung-out kid in the abandoned house that this useless man was supposed to be watching?
He’ll be considered lucky in comparison to Tomas’s coming fate.