For James—for talking me through this book in the beginning, living with me through its middle, and helping me see it through to the end. It’s as much yours as it is mine. Ditto the series. Ditto my life.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Vicki Pettersson

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Here’s the thing. Every two-bit Tom and Dick on this glorified mudflat thought prostitution was legal in Las Vegas, but that’s never been true.

Least, not when Grif was alive.

Maybe times had changed—plenty on the Surface had—but it was more likely that the johns were too lazy to trek out to Nye County for a sampling from the legal sexual menu. No, there was too much premeditation in that. But score a lay in some trucker-heavy roach-motel, and a man could tell himself he was the victim of impulse. Caught up in the moment. Just a little ol’ fly snared in Sin City’s glinting web.

Grif knew different. People created chaos, not places, and they were damned good at it no matter where they lived. And when this glittering gem of a city teamed up with the world’s oldest profession, fantasy piled atop fantasy; it could convince anyone that impulse was a virtue, not a vice.

Just one roll of the dice, he thought, checking the number on the warped motel door against the entry in his notebook. Just one sip, make sure to tip. Play hard, enjoy the ride, and be certain to take your secrets with you when you leave.

Nicole Rockwell’s last john, however, had taken a bit more.

“Help me!” she was yelling as Grif came through the door. Impressive, since she was missing her larynx. “There’s been a terrible crime!”

Can’t argue that, Grif thought, gaze skimming the hem of her cheap vinyl skirt. “You Nicole Elizabeth Rockwell?”

“Wh-what?” She looked from Grif to the fresh corpse on the bed—her own—then back again. “Yes.”

“Right.” He shut his notebook, returning it to his suit pocket. “Come with me.”

Rockwell took one good look at his quasi-transparent form and promptly collapsed on the bed. “Wh-who are you?”

“Griffin Shaw. I’m here to help.” He hesitated, then jerked his head at her remains. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.”

Her expression, blasted and constricted all at once, made his jaw twitch, but he shrugged it off. Guardian wasn’t his beat. As a Centurion, he merely assisted the recently, and violently, deceased into the Everlast. Those who’d been clipped early often had trouble getting there on their own. As Grif well knew.

He explained all of this to Nicole quickly, flatly, hoping it would keep the hysterics to a minimum. Given half a chance, females were always either jawing or at the waterworks. Dead or alive.

“But I can’t just leave,” she protested when he was finished. “I’m going to a bonfire this weekend, the first one of the spring. And my best friend is waiting outside. We’re gonna chill downtown at the Beauty Bar tonight. Unwind a bit, ya know?” She glanced down at Grif’s proffered cigarette. A calming tactic. “Oh … thanks, honey.”

Something stirred Grif as he bent down and lit her smoke. Probably the shake in her voice, though she talked like a lady, too. Not like most of the rabble he’d been picking up this decade. He snapped the Zippo shut. “Look, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, kid. But you’ve been rooked.”

“What?”

“You know, you got the dust-off. Killed. Murdered. Clipped. It’s a rough deal, but you’ve had some good times, right? Some wild rides?” He gave a little hip thrust to illuminate the point.

“I’m not a hooker,” she said evenly.

He let his eyes roam around the sex flop. “’Course you’re not.”

Blowing out a stream of smoke, Nicole returned his flat stare. “So where exactly is this … Everlast?”

“Now you’re choosy?” Grif muttered, glancing at his watch. He would’ve turned away, but the walls were mirrored and their reflections overlapped, her horrified heat wrapped over his impassive ice. Sighing heavily, he motioned her to the door.

Nicole didn’t move. “What if I wanna do it all over?”

“What over?” he mumbled, lighting his own stick.

“You know. Life. Earth. Humanity. Come back until I get it right.”

“Relax, sweetheart. Mattress time don’t count against you.”

That got her back on her feet. “I told you! I’m not a hooker! I’m a photographer—”

“Where’s your camera?”

“Well, it’s not here, but I have this notebook—” She pointed at the dresser bearing a crappy twenty-inch television and a Moleskine identical to his. Except for the blood splatter.

“Sure,” he said. “A photographer’s best friend.”

The fight drained from Rockwell then, and she slumped where she stood, falling so still the only sound in the room was the soft drip, drip of her arterial blood as it fell from the bed to the floor. “But I’m not done here.”

“Just take my hand, kid. It’ll be all right.”

She looked at him dubiously. Grif frowned. Sure, his suit was rumpled, but it was clean enough, and his pomade had held at his time of death, though it was hidden beneath the brim of his fedora. A little ginger stubble had sprouted—he’d been offed after five—but if his eyes were hard, they were also clear. All in all, not too bad for fifty years dead.

Yet Rockwell remained unconvinced. “How do I know you’re not tricking me? You could latch on and suck my soul down to hell, like in that movie.”

“You mean Ghost, right?” A couple of the younger Centurions had explained about that. Some sleeper flick that hit it big a couple decades ago. Now he had to explain himself to every corpse that walked his way. “Look, I’m not a demon, and I’m no ghost. I’m a … gentleman.”

Nicole blinked.

“Lots of firsts for you today, eh, Ms. Rockwell?”

Eyes narrowed, she crossed her arms. “Piss off, Shaw. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Grif fought not to grind his teeth. He’d get hell from Sarge if she took it in her mind to hang out here and haunt the place. And he’d be damned—figuratively speaking, of course—if he was going to let her sully his perfect Take record. Besides, she’d been dead all of five minutes. She didn’t yet know what was good for her.

Grinding his cigarette beneath his heel, Grif said, “What are you going to do, honey? Throw down the ménage in this joint for the rest of eternity? Though … I guess it does beat sizzling.”

“Sizzling?”

“One wrong turn outta here, and …” He made a sound, trout frying in a pan. It was a rotten trick but it worked.

Nicole shuddered in her demi-cups, then stood and slowly glanced around. “So, that’s it, huh? Twenty-six years of—”

“Twenty-nine,” Grif corrected.

“—of mortal struggle, and this is how it ends.”

Grif made another show of looking at his watch, while peering at Nicole from the corner of his eye. She didn’t look like she was going to leak, he decided gratefully. Instead, she looked like she was going to kick something.

She did … then dropped back to the bed, and put her head in her hands while Grif began hopping around.

“Damn it, lady!” He glared, cradling his throbbing shin. “I’ve had enough of this postmortem crap! Get your lifeless, flabby backside off that bed and follow me!”

Now she began to cry.

The recently murdered were so sensitive.

Sighing, Grif lifted his hat and ran a hand over the top of his head. He could practically hear Sarge’s barked reprimand. Patch it up, Shaw.

“Sorry,” he muttered, stealing another glance at his watch.

“Fuck you, Mr. Sensitivity!” she yelled. “I’m not following your washed-out, B-movie, pseudo-Five-O ass anywhere!”

“Careful, peach. Look how you get to spend eternity.” Grif showed his teeth, and though there wasn’t any blood in her ethereal body, Nicole blanched. Then her outline began to shimmer. Not much time left. “That’s right. We’re all stuck in the clothing worn when we die. Kinda makes you wish you’d overcome that latex fetish, huh?”

“Oh, God.” Nicole looked up at the mirrored ceiling and fussed with her hair, but it sprang back into the deflowered do she’d been sporting at the time of her death. “Oh, God!”

“She’s on her lunch break,” Grif muttered, but his heart softened anyway. He couldn’t help it. He was lucky to have been offed in 1960. He’d watched too many Centurions shy away from mirrors in the Everlast in the decades since.

“All right, I have an idea.” It was technically against the rules, but the girl was looking at him with those tearful eyes, and he was looking back, really seeing her for once. Helpless females always got to him. And though Rockwell was a lady of the night here on the Surface, there could be someone waiting for her on the other side. They might not recognize her like this … or want to.

Besides, he’d been blood and bone once, just like her. In the end, and that’s what this was, they were exactly the same. “All right, listen up. There are some clothes in that dresser over there—”

“How do you know—?”

“I just do,” he interrupted, “and you’ll move fast if you know what’s good for you. You’re starting the Fade. I can send you back into your body long enough to change your clothes and do something with that mop on your head. But you gotta keep quiet. Your E.T.D. is twelve fifty. If someone hears you rummaging around at one, my superiors will know I interfered.”

Nicole nodded vigorously.

“All right. Get back in.”

“In?”

“Your body. You gotta line up those pulse points over your earthly remains. Then I can fuel them.”

It wasn’t technically necessary, but using her remains was a way to ground her both mentally and physically, giving her the impression of purchase on the Surface even though her spirit was already free. It was like tying a boat to a dock, securing it there even as waves crested around it.

Rockwell did as told, carefully settling her ethereal energy atop her body so that it looked like a shimmering chalk outline. Grif listened for a faint click in the etheric, her final pulse point snapping into place, before echoing the action, positioning his translucent body above hers so their chakras aligned. It required submission on her part, and a smothering of her energy with his own. It was a sensation most loose souls found claustrophobic, but Rockwell didn’t even flinch.

Probably used to it, Grif thought, letting himself sink.

Vacuumed silence overran the room, blunting even Grif’s celestial senses. Shape and form and sensation blurred as their energies melded as one, and they fell together, burrowing back into skin and cells and tissue and blood. By the time they fully occupied Nicole’s body, her life energy was cocooned safely inside of his.

The blood in her core was not entirely still. Her sluggish pulse still lapped like low tide at the shore, not yet aware its efforts were futile. Grif was, though, which was why the sudden explosion of color behind the dead woman’s eyelids rocked him. Then the tang of blood and saliva invaded his mouth, followed by the ache of mortal injury—dulled by shock but still keen—and Rockwell’s gaping wounds were suddenly his. Stinging fingertips—she had fought—were also his. The clamminess seeping in to claim the once-warm body made him want to gasp and struggle, and the ache that swelled inside him wasn’t from injury but from a long-forgotten, yet familiar, desire.

Life.

Grif clenched his jaw, and felt foreign teeth grind together in an unfamiliar way. Pushing that discomfort away, he forced his energy down, past cells and tissue and the molecules that made everything on the Surface so tangible. An instant later, he was facedown beneath Rockwell’s deathbed, alone in spirit, lying in a sticky pool of blood. When he slid out from under the bed, Nicole was already sitting up, literally holding her head.

“I feel like shit,” she gurgled.

“Well, keep your eyes on the floor, honey, ’cuz you look even worse.”

She did, though glared at him first. “And keep yours to yourself.”

“Not a show I care to see,” he muttered, but crossed to the window to wait. Clumsy rummaging followed, silence, then exhausted groans and more silence.

Grif needed a moment to recover anyway. Rubbing his aching chest, he pulled back one grungy curtain panel. He’d left the pain of mortality behind long ago, and the suggestion of skin over his soul smothered and burned, like he’d been dipped in hot wax.

How could he have forgotten this?

A movement outside the window caught his eye, and he focused on it like an alley cat spying a rat. He tried to zoom in, but Nicole’s humanity blunted his vision. He’d gotten so used to telescopic eyesight—to all the gifts afforded a Centurion—that he was unaccustomed to limited senses. Yet there was just enough residue from the Everlast to see clearly into the blackened winter night, and when Grif finally focused, he couldn’t help but wish for full celestial vision again.

If Grif was a B-movie version of an old-school P.I., then this woman was a full-fledged screen siren. Even from a distance, he could make out silky sable hair pulled back from sky-high cheekbones. They rode a round, sculpted face with lips tucked at the center of it like full, pink cushions. And that shape, he thought, as she stepped from the car. Curves like he hadn’t seen on a woman in decades. More hairpins than Mulholland Drive, every sweeping stretch draped in red silk, shimmering in places that made his mouth go dry.

Maybe it was just his imagination, but the outfit looked like a throwback to his time, when women wore clothes that made them look like walking gifts instead of unwrapped packages. Mirage or not, he thought, rubbing at his eyes, she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen.

Yet even from a distance, even as she angled her head to reveal a neck as smooth and creamy and inviting as the rest of her, there was a sharpness to her, an awareness of her surroundings as she squinted … then looked directly at him.

Grif jumped. Did she actually see him?

“Shit,” he muttered, letting the curtain fall. It was Nicole’s humanity. He was wearing her life-force, sharing it, as much as she was his.

“What?” asked Nicole, sounding startled.

“Nothing,” he muttered. They needed to move anyway. “You ready yet?”

“Not quite,” she said quickly, halting his turn. “You’re not peeking, are you?”

Grif just made a sizzling sound through his teeth. The rummaging started up again, more frantic.

“Can I ask you something?” she managed, though breathing hard. Each exhalation jerked at Grif’s chest, like someone was cross-stitching his heart. He’d have to return to the Everlast for a jolt of energy before his next Take. “Why can’t I remember who … My death?”

“Because it was violent,” he said shortly. No need to sugarcoat it. She knew, even if she didn’t want to say it. “It’s the Everlast’s way of protecting your soul so you don’t relive it over and again. You’ll go through a process called incubation, which will rehabilitate you to forget your earthly years.” And, he didn’t add, forever conceal the horrors associated with her brutal death. “Then you can move on to Paradise. It’s all meant to keep you focused on moving forward, not looking back.”

“Like you?”

No. Not like him at all. “You done?”

She blew out a breath, causing a particularly hard jerk on his heart, and made a sound of assent. He turned to find her in front of the dresser, leaning against it, looking uncertain. She’d replaced her hooker-wear with jeans and a tee. Both were still too tight in Grif’s opinion, but classic enough to defy most eras. Her hair had been tamed into a style that made her look only half-dead, and at Grif’s half-hearted thumbs-up, she staggered back to the bed, exhausted from the blood loss.

“More to the left,” Grif instructed, squinting one eye as she attempted to resume her previous pose. “Perfect.”

He climbed aboard once again, inhaled deeply, and withdrew his own energy, the needle in his heart disappearing instantaneously. Solitary silence reigned inside of him again, though it brought with it an unexpected sidekick: loneliness.

Damn it, he thought, as he stood, wiping at his mouth to hide his shaky breath. He’d have left her as she was if he’d known he’d have to feel that. But as he rubbed his chest, the last of the energy tethering Nicole’s soul to her body fell away, and she rose again from her deathbed.

“Better?” he asked, swallowing hard.

If she heard the shake in his voice, she didn’t show it. “Much.”

Then, though she hesitated, she reached out and put her still-warm hand in his. “Thanks.”

“All in a day’s work.” And despite the ache in his heart, and the ghostly memory of all his mortal pain, he shook it off and led her away.

Proof that he really was an angel.

Though ostensibly leading the way, Grif allowed Rockwell to go first. As he’d told her, he was a gentleman, and though he was careful to keep her close—last thing he needed was for the kid to get lost in the moon shadows—he gave her enough space to keep her from feeling flanked, like a dead woman walking.

Another calming tactic: the use of doorways to pass from the Surface and into the Everlast. Or if a door wasn’t available, a window. Some sort of passageway a human mind could latch onto to ease the transition. Opening the door to find the cosmos splayed before you like a celestial buffet was shock enough, so it was best if the Take didn’t notice it until it was too late. So Grif kept his hand at Rockwell’s back, and waited for her gasp as he used his celestial power to will the door open at her touch.

Yet Grif was the one who jolted at the sight of the grungy hallway. He jumped again when it began to bend, rippling in the same way pinned sheets moved in the wind.

That wasn’t right. In fact, it was all wrong.

“Get back,” Grif told Rockwell, as the ripples merged across from them to form a giant, diaphanous bubble. Features began emerging in the bulge of that apex, pressing through wood grain and peeling wallpaper until they became recognizable as an enormous face.

Rockwell stared at the emerging face like it was part of a magic show, wonder and delight replacing wariness. After all, it was her first glimpse of sinless sentience. All she saw was a brilliant smile forming in the wood chips. A nod of welcome in the dip of the giant head. A shimmering film of gauzy Everlast to mask the staggering appearance of one of God’s most awesome creatures.

Grif saw fangs and a predatory gleam in an incendiary eye. “Get back!”

But Rockwell had already forgotten him. Once a newly gleaned soul glimpsed a Pure—in any form—the Centurion who guided them to the Everlast was just a leaf in the forest of their memory. Utterly forgotten.

“Do you know who I am?” The voice ground deep and low with the sinew of the splintering walls.

“No,” Nicole said dreamily, stepping forward.

“Yes,” Grif replied and reached out to grip Rockwell’s arm, but she’d begun the Fade and merely shuddered as his energy invaded hers. Gaze locked on the Pure, she stepped directly into the undulating hall.

This wasn’t right. “Stop, Nicole! It’s an angel!”

The hallway cocked sharply at that, casting Rockwell to one bowing side. The face grew more prominent, as if pressing against a thinning membrane … and Grif realized that was exactly what was happening. The Pure wanted something, but wouldn’t, or couldn’t, breach worlds to get it.

Its chin sharpened. “Use my proper title,” it said in that slivered voice.

Grif swallowed hard. “A Pure.”

“I am of the order of the Powers,” it hissed. “The first of the created angels, kin to the Dominations and Virtues, controller of demons, and guardian of the heavenly pathways.”

“Whoa,” said Rockwell.

But the voice, with breath as hot as a furnace, was directed at Grif. So was the fiery gaze. “Do you know who I am now?”

Grif knew only one angel in the order of the Powers. “Anas.”

Keeper of the Gates, the chosen Pure who shepherded mortal spirits into Paradise proper. It was said Anas was the first angel that uninjured souls saw after death, though to say she welcomed them into heaven was giving her too much credit. From what he’d seen, she mostly ignored the human souls, chin high and gaze distant as they passed through the Gates.

But Grif wasn’t at the Gates. Anas—and her big, bulging forehead—was on mortal turf, so he reached forward to pull Rockwell back.

But the mouth opened, and the Pure inhaled, lifting Nicole Rockwell from her feet. The woman was like a rag doll sucked into a tornado, gone in an instant, jerked into the fanged mouth, and a throat that was black and specked with burning stars.

Grif stepped into the hallway to follow after her.

“Not you.”

And the walls shifted with a whipping exhalation. Blown from his feet, Grif tumbled back into the mirrored motel room, and the door rocketed shut.

Heart pounding, Grif just lay there for long seconds.

When nothing else happened, he wiped at his eyes, which were suddenly gritty and dry. In fact, his whole etheric form felt like it’d been sandblasted by the hot, needled breath. Even still, instinct and stubbornness had him stupidly rising to the fight. Rockwell was his Take.

Crossing the room, Grif motioned to the door again, willing it open with his celestial power. The door didn’t budge. The cosmos didn’t appear.

“Fine.”

And dropping his head and arms, Grif fisted his hands so that his wings flared with a rip of the silky air. Gossamer-black, dripping dew, sprung directly from the Everlast itself, the wings rose and plunged like a waterfall of spears. He whirled, propelling himself forward until the wingtips caught the door and sliced it from existence.

Anas awaited.

“Disobedient! Child of wrath!” Her face was inches away, contorted with rage.

“No need to get personal,” Grif told her evenly, though the membrane between worlds was now stretched so tight she looked like she was being smothered in plastic.

Anas hissed, and her fangs elongated, the sound of wood stretching. “Breath …”

“Oh, that?” Grif got it now. He was in trouble for joining his energies to Rockwell’s, for reanimating her body with his. He shrugged it off. “That wasn’t breathing. I was just trying to help.”

“You donned the sinful flesh—”

“It wasn’t really a sin. More like a lapse of judgment—”

“You have breath!”

“I gave it back.”

“And now flesh!”

He drew a blank until he recalled the grit in his eyes when she blew him back. He looked down, panicking. “You gave me … skin?”

Her snarl grew to a fanged smile. “You cannot enter the gloaming, Child of Sin. You have no place in the Everlast.”

“That’s Child of God to you.” Grif’s eyes narrowed. “And I have wings.”

“Ah, that’s right.” She grinned so widely that wood grain punctured the plastic. “I’ll take those.”

And she plucked his wings from his body—his flesh—then pushed him so hard that decades rushed by, along with burning stars and rioting universes that roiled around him like debris as he fell … fell … then landed with a jarring thud.

Rockwell’s corpse bounced as he landed on his back, on the bed. Unmistakably, on the Surface. It shocked Grif into losing the breath he didn’t even know he possessed. Then the pounding began in earnest, starting at his shoulder blades, where his wings should have been. It spread like lava through his core and into his limbs, nothing like the lapping low tide of the pulse he’d shared with Rockwell. This was a red monsoon. His veins throbbed and surged as they … what?

What?

“Fill with blood.”

Grif turned his head and found Nicole Rockwell’s eyes fixed on him, though her pupils were overtaken by surging flame as Anas stared from the dead girl’s body. His heart leaped again, and his veins pulsed and rushed and, yes …

Filled with blood.

And the yearning ache he’d felt while inhabiting Rockwell’s body crested in his chest. Rearing against the pain, Grif felt new flesh stretching over bone. A scream lodged against his unused vocal cords, and he fell still, closing his eyes, trying to hold it all back.

“Breathe,” Anas instructed through Rockwell’s corpse.

Grif gasped and shivered. This was the animation of skin coupled with life force. This wasn’t just the innate desire to live. This was rebirth. This was life.

Clamminess lunged to seize the new oxygen in his lungs. It was only the experience of having been alive for thirty-three years once before that kept the confining flesh from being revolting. Maybe when it warmed, Grif thought, he wouldn’t feel such a need to run from himself.

But blood still clotted most of the virgin veins, and his heart had to struggle to move it. Its amplified thump hammered like the lead bass in a marching band.

“Breathe.”

The word banged like a pot off Grif’s competing thoughts. Worse were the spasms ripping through his chest. Fear, insecurity, guilt, and sorrow all huddled in newly exposed corners, naked, cowering things, frightened children trying to pull the covers of the Everlast up to their chins.

But the protective coating was slipping away. He knew it, and it was why—even without a true heartbeat or thawed blood or a sense of self and place in the universe—he began to shake in his new flesh. “No …”

“Breathe,” Anas hissed again.

“It hurts,” he managed, squinting into her fiery gaze.

“Being clothed in sin does, yes.”

“I can’t …” The shake of his head, side to side, set the pots to clanging again. He had no idea how he heard Anas’s voice above them, only knew that she said, “It will hurt more when you die again.”

And a knock sounded at the door.

He stilled, looking at Anas.

“You must flee,” she said, eyes still burning, breath still scalding. Still merciless.

“Why—”

She cut him off. “There’s a window in the bathroom. Go while you can.”

“But I—”

“But you’re lying next to a murdered woman. And you, Griffin Shaw, are alive.”

He couldn’t comprehend it, but the burning skin, the pulsing blood, the breath in his chest … “It’s too much.”

It was all too much.

Another knock at the door, louder, accompanied by annoyed voices on the other side.

Anas was right; the time for privacy was over.

“Just enough then,” Anas said impatiently when he still didn’t move. She pursed Rockwell’s blue lips. Everlast washed over him in a cooling balm and he could sit, and then stand.

“It won’t last.” And the burning eyes dulled, then snuffed out completely, leaving behind Rockwell’s black, sightless pupils.

Yet the small hint of Everlast had cleared his mind and Grif could see what Anas had, and what anyone else would when they entered this room: a man standing over a woman’s blood-splattered body.

Whirling, he darted into the bathroom, and wedged open the small, single-paned window. He heard the door to the room open just as he clambered through, and reached the rusting ladder right before screams sounded behind him. Half-falling, half-jumping, Grif hit the ground seconds later, and ran from the voices and the building. He ran blindly. He ran until the sliver of Everlast wore off.

He ran until he could run no more.

CHAPTER TWO

Kit had never been to the station house on a Saturday night and found it even noisier and more crowded than during working hours. The irony was that if she had stuck to those hours—if they had—she wouldn’t be here now. Waiting to be interviewed by a cop. Shivering in a dress meant for cheerful occasions, not sober ones. Mourning the death of her best and oldest friend.

“Kit!”

She looked up, relief washing over her at the voice, strain immediately returning as she spied the tight look marring her ex-husband’s always handsome face. He might be able to hide his emotions from an entire courtroom, she thought as he wound his way through the noisy room, but she’d known him too long not to see the irritation bristling from him. The hard-pressed man was one of his best looks, and Kit knew then that he’d only come in case she needed council. The go-to attorney. Another favorite.

Kit chided herself, feeling stupid as Paul neared. But they’d once shared a life and a bed, and Kit needed someone around her who’d known both her and Nic well. Yet as soon as Paul perched on the plastic chair next to her, her loneliness doubled.

And it made her wonder. If he’d been the one she’d never see again after tonight, would there be anything left behind to miss?

The shame accompanying that silent question settled next to the guilt already at home in her gut.

Nic was dead.

“What the hell happened, Katherine?”

“Don’t interrogate me, Paul.”

“Hey, I left a Caleb Chambers fund-raiser for this,” he said, which explained his tuxedo, the over-styled hair, and the hint of scotch lacing his breath. No, Kit thought, catching two underage girls whispering from behind cupped palms as they stared at Paul. She wouldn’t have missed him at all.

“At three thirty in the morning?”

“VIPs and generous donors to his various charities are often invited to his house for a private party after the gala.”

Of course they were. And Kit didn’t have to ask which group Paul belonged to. He was always trying to buy his way into something. “Well, while you were brown-nosing the don of the social scene, someone murdered Nic. She’s dead, Paul.” She blinked. “I could be dead.”

His brows knit, and he reached for her hand after a brief hesitation. He really was a handsome man, Kit thought, automatically pulling away. His golden hair glinted even under the station’s harsh fluorescent bulbs, and his eyes were the color of spring moss. But they were unable to hold a gaze, which meant unable to hold a promise. The girls across from them didn’t seem to notice. Nothing but experience could teach them that anyway.

“Let me guess,” Paul said, oblivious to the teens, to Kit’s fractured heart, to everything but being right. “You came up with some harebrained idea and Nicole ran with it.”

Kit looked away, jaw clenched. Paul knew them, that was for sure. Nic had run with it like she always did—blindly, blithely, madly. Like the idea was chasing her instead of the other way around. But this time it’d chased her into the grave.

Kit covered her mouth with a fist to hold back a cry.

“Dennis said you guys snuck into an illegal brothel.”

Her head shot up. “You already spoke to Dennis?”

“I need all the facts if I’m going to represent you.”

“I don’t need representation,” she spat, twisting the word. “My best friend was murdered while I waited only yards away! Those are the facts!”

“Please lower your voice.”

“Right,” she said bitterly. “Paul Raggio’s first rule of decency and decorum. Don’t make a scene.” Don’t make a mess. Don’t make a real effort when phoning in an emotion would do.

Yet he surprised her by putting a hand on her knee. “I’m trying to help.”

Kit sat back and tried to steady her breathing. When she thought her voice would hold, she looked up. “It wasn’t just an illegal brothel. It was a movable operation. Truckers let each other know about it online.”

Hearing the explanation aloud didn’t make it sound any better. Paul’s answering silence made it significantly worse.

“Look, Katherine—” he finally said.

“Kit.”

Paul gave her his courtroom look, the one solely responsible for her falling out of love with him. “Truckers tweeting about their roadside lays is tawdry, but hardly breaking news, and if I know you, you were going after a bigger fish. What was it?”

“It” was a Pulitzer. At least, that’s what Nicole had said. Make our mark before we’re ancient … or at least thirty.

“Truckers passing time on the road in the most predictable way possible might not be news, but concrete proof that judges and councilmen are passing the same women between them is prize-winning reporting.”

Paul leaned forward, the sweeping angles of his face hardening into calculated thought. “What do roadside hookers have to do with Nevada politics?”

“Good question. Though not one I was even asking. Not at first.” Kit wasn’t interested in politics, but people. What they did and why. Human nature fascinated her, and this had started out as a human-interest story—on johns, their habits, and why they’d even use hookers when they presumably had wives and girlfriends waiting at home. “In order to find out, we put an ad out on Gregslist.”

Paul’s brows lifted high. “And these guys talked to you?”

“Of course not,” Kit scoffed, but that hadn’t deterred Nicole and her. It was too fascinating an idea, and Kit was too curious, to simply let it go. Especially after Nic came up with the idea of posing as a hooker just to get a chance to talk to one of them. “But she didn’t catch any action until she started playing down in age.”

“Gee, what a surprise. Pretend you’re a hooker, get a revved-up guy alone in a hotel room, and then ambush him with a camera and a legal pad. That is a good way to get killed.”

“We’re not stupid, Paul,” she said, back on the defense. “We weren’t meeting a john. Another prostitute answered the listing. She warned us we were encroaching on already staked territory.”

“Gregslist has street corners?”

Kit shook her head, remembering. “You should have seen this message, Pauly. It was full-on text-ese. Whoever this girl was, she should’ve been giggling over school dances, not sexting strangers.”

“Underage?”

“That was our impression.”

Paul leaned back, crossing his arms. “Maybe she’s illiterate. Or just playing the juvie for extra dough.”

“We considered both. But then she sent us this.” Kit drew a printout from the handbag at her side.

His eyes widened at the names on the list. He’d probably been hobnobbing with half of them just hours before.

“And that’s just some of them,” Kit said, pleased she’d managed to surprise him. “She promised more if we met in person, but she wanted to verify we were legit first. After that, she swore to give us names that would make fat-cat heads roll.”

Paul sighed, and shot a glance at the girls straining to hear the conversation. They immediately burst into an uncontrolled fit of giggles. “Do you really have to talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like that,” he said, straightening his jacket like it’d straighten Kit out as well.

“Embarrassing you in front of your groupies?” she asked, tilting her head. “Shall I revert to syllables they can sound out?”

“I’m talking about all of it.” He let his gaze scan her body. “Your June Cleaver dress, Bettie Page bangs. The Hayworth face paint. The stupid car.”

Kit narrowed her eyes. “Watch your mouth, dear. That’s a Duetto.”

He scoffed and flexed. Giggles rose around the room like startled pigeons. “See, that’s what I mean. You weren’t born mid-century, Kit. Get over it. At your age, playing dress-up should be reserved for the bedroom.”

“This isn’t dress-up, Paul.”

“This” was her lifestyle … one that clashed violently with his post-yuppie materialistic drive.

“Makes it hard to take you seriously,” he mumbled, looking pointedly at her peep-toed heels.

“People are going to take me seriously, all right. The whole damned country will take me seriously when I bust this case wide open, vet every name on that list, and find out who killed my best friend!”

He shook his head and huffed out a dry laugh, no longer looking handsome. Again, the girls across from them didn’t notice. “Kit, the men on this list could own you a thousand times over.”

Kit clenched her teeth at the dig. She came from money, a fortune Paul once thought would marry perfectly with his ambitions, and he’d married her before realizing the entire inheritance had been poured back into her family’s newspaper. He’d even encouraged her to sell once he realized newspapers were worth less in the Internet age than the paper used for printing, but there was no way she’d ever do that.

“I’m a newsperson, Paul,” she’d told him. “It’s who I am as much as what I do.”

“Then go down with your ship,” he’d replied. “But you’re not taking me with you.”

And he’d taken himself right out of her life.

“Being rich doesn’t make a person immune to the law,” she said now, another familiar argument.

“There’s no proof that anyone on this list has broken the law,” Paul pointed out.

She knew that. And it would take considerable resources—time, energy, favors, and yes, money—to prove otherwise. For now, Kit had her reporter’s instincts. “I saw something.”

“Tonight?” He leaned in again when she nodded. “What?”

“A man … or his silhouette, at least. He was in the room with Nic. He pulled aside the curtain that overlooked the parking lot. It was like he was looking right at me.”

“Did you see his face?”

Kit shook her head. “No. Only his silhouette. But he was wearing a hat—not just a hat, but a stingy brim, like Sinatra—”

Paul leaned back, letting his hands drop. “Gimme a break.”

“I know the style, Paul,” Kit said, irritated. “Maybe he knew I was there, or just knows of my lifestyle, and he was taunting me.”

“Please don’t repeat that to anyone. I can see the sordid headlines now: Rockabilly Murderer Targets Street Whores.”

“Bravo,” Kit snapped. “You just insulted my life and my profession in one breath.”

“Voice,” Paul reminded her, gaze wandering. The girls across from him straightened, but his expression remained smooth as it traveled the rest of the room.

Kit pulled out her gold cigarette case, mumbling, fighting not to whack it against his pretty head.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

Kit blew a stream of smoke directly into his face, running her tongue along her top lip when he coughed. The girls gave her a nasty look.

“These are vintage Gauloises.”

“Trolling eBay again?”

She shook her head. “Some old coot was storing them in a backwoods cabin for the past fifty years.”

Shaking his head, Paul stood. “I gotta go.”

“Wait.” She put a hand on his arm, panicked but unable to help it. “You’re gonna help me, right?”

His jaw clenched as he looked away. He was either considering it or posing for a profile shot. “You got anything else?” he finally asked.

“In my notebook, but I gave that to Nic.” She cursed the impulse now. There was little chance of recovering it as it’d surely been admitted into evidence.

Paul opened his mouth to answer, but stopped and jerked his chin at an approaching detective. “Here comes Dennis. He’ll look after you. You don’t need me tonight.”

Kit stared up at him, wondering at what point he thought she’d have ever needed him, if not tonight.

Glancing back down, Paul caught her expression and his jaw clenched. “Look, I’ll read the reports. Ask around, see what I hear.”

He paused, waiting for a thank-you, but Kit merely took a drag on her stick. He was right, she didn’t need him.

Shaking his head, he turned.

“You know, Nicole was once your friend, too,” Kit said loudly, just as Dennis reached her side. “She was killed because someone was hiding something big.”

Paul turned slowly, and waited, knowing there was really nothing he could do if she was determined to make a scene. It was just another thing he couldn’t control about her—like her hair and clothes, like her lifestyle. Like her emotions.

“I’m going to find out who did it,” she told him, chin wobbling but gaze hard. “I’m going to find out what they were hiding. And I’m going to bring them to justice.”

“Still the intrepid girl reporter,” he said, but the bite had left his voice, and his gaze had softened. It was what he’d called her in the beginning, back when she, too, had gazed at him like those girls across the room. Tears, already close to the surface, welled.

“Give me a couple of days,” Paul finally sighed, returning, one hand outstretched for the papers. “I’ll look into it in my spare time.”

“Thank you,” she replied, even though he’d said it like there wouldn’t be a lot of it.

Leaning down, he gave her a dry kiss on her cheek. “Get some rest, Kit.”

Kit didn’t say anything, but watched him go, like every other girl in the room. Then she shrugged at Dennis’s chiding look, sucked down the last of her stale tobacco, and rose to be questioned about her best friend’s murder.

Kit spent the next few hours in a room with the cold personality of a morgue, giving a statement about the time, hours, and days, leading up to Nicole’s death. Some questions could have as easily been applied to a job application as a murder interview, and strangely, these were the ones that tripped her up. How long have you known Nicole Rockwell? What’s your relationship to the deceased? Have either of you ever been a part of a murder investigation before?

Oh, Nic.

The hysteria she’d felt at the murder scene was gone, and the resultant shock had dulled into a numbness to rival a visit in any dentist’s chair. The indignation at being questioned—no, doubted—by Paul had evaporated like boiling water, not too unlike their relationship, actually. All that remained was a faint ring of fatigue.

Dennis, whom Kit had known both personally and professionally, in that order, brought her fresh tea, let her light another cigarette while they were still alone, and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, kneading slightly at her neck before letting his arm drop. Kit looked up with a watery smile, grateful for even that small touch.

“You understand we have to ask you these things,” he said, when his partner arrived and she’d been read her rights and informed the interview would be recorded. “Not because we think you’re guilty, but because it’ll help us put together a picture of the events leading to the crime. Rarely is something like this truly random.”

“I know that.”

“That’s right,” said his partner, who was so stiff he could have been pressed into his clothing. He’d introduced himself as Detective Brian Hitchens. She didn’t know him, but unfortunately he seemed to recognize her. “You’re a reporter, aren’t you? The same one who released the name and address of a gangbanger last year?”

She could tell from the way he said it that he already knew she was, and harbored a grudge over it. Kit gave Dennis a wary glance, then answered, “He was sitting on a stash that would make a cartel blush.”

“It got one of our men shot.”

Her heart jumped in her chest, but she held his dark gaze. “I didn’t pull the trigger.”

“How’s the saying go? The pen is mightier than the bullet? Or the knife.” It was sword, but he knew that. The intimation was that tonight wasn’t the first time she’d put someone in danger.

“Damned straight,” Kit said, without apology, but inside she was cringing. She knew her work helped people … but did it also hurt them? Kill them? Had it killed Nic?

“Let’s get back to the interview, shall we?” Dennis said, shooting Hitchens a hard look. “Tell us about Nicole.”

Her favorite color was blue. She could dance for hours and never break a sweat. She was a flea market junkie, she could recite every line in Grease, and she wore beautiful lingerie just for herself …

“We’ve been friends since junior high. Met on the student newspaper. She was a wiz with the camera, even then.” Kit cleared her throat, which had tightened in a painful knot, and took a sip of her cooling tea. “She could tell a story with her photos, or even alter one with a camera angle alone. She was a college dropout, but smart. Edgy, liked to push people’s buttons. And of course, she was a billy, like me.”

“Billy?” Hitchens asked, glancing at Dennis and back to Kit.

“Rockabilly,” Dennis answered with a small smile, and Kit flashed back on an image of desert sun glinting off the pomade in his jet hair, ciggies tucked in his shirtsleeve, and creepers crossed at the ankles as he leaned against a ’sixty Starliner. It’d been a while since she’d seen him that way, but she smiled, too.

“I’ve heard of it.” Hitchens leaned against the wall. His forearms looked like black logs folded across his chest. “You dress up like you’re stuck in the fifties. Took ‘Let’s Do the Time Warp’ literally.”

“It’s not just music or dress,” Kit explained, though Hitchens’s pinched expression told her she needn’t bother. She gave Dennis a look to let him know she was taking one for the team—rockabilly didn’t fit in any better with life on the force than it did in a federal courtroom. Fortunately, Kit didn’t have to worry about either, as a reporter. “It’s vintage cars, hot rods. Pinup girls. Mid-mod home décor. Cigarettes. It’s a way of living.”

It was a celebration of the senses, and it married well with Kit’s theory that life was about the details. She was ever aware of what she put on her body, how she wore her hair, how she crafted her cocktails. Despite the effort, or because of it, Kit had only grown more fond of rockabilly after a decade-long involvement. In a world increasingly guided by touch screens, sometimes it seemed nothing touched the mainstream populace at all.

“It’s a subculture,” Dennis added.

“A lifestyle,” corrected Kit, again pulling out her gold cigarette case.

“You can’t smoke in here,” said Hitchens. Dennis looked pained, but nodded. Kit returned the case to her purse, a square, red Lucite clutch that Hitchens now eyed suspiciously, like it was a piece of a puzzle he was still trying to fit.

“Let me get this straight. Your friend was involved in a subculture that essentially lives in the past? So maybe it was one of these weirdoes who offed her.”

Dennis stiffened, but didn’t say anything.

Kit was careful to move nothing but her eyes. “My friends and I get off on American cars, swing music, and nautical-themed tattoos. We’re not murderers.”

Hitchens huffed. “It still sounds weird.”

“Probably because it demands more of you than plopping down in a La-Z-Boy, sticking your hand down your pants, and plugging into someone else’s reality.”

“O-kay,” Dennis said loudly, straightening as quickly as Hitchens. Kit just leaned back and crossed her legs. “So we’ve defined Nicole’s lifestyle as rockabilly. Boyfriends?”

“Plenty,” Kit answered, then looked at Hitchens. “All weirdoes.”

“And when did you last see her alive?”

“Twelve thirty. There’s a café attached to the motel. Just a hash house serving grease and caffeine to overtired truckers. She did a round there to attract our contact’s attention, as agreed, then crossed the gravel lot and went up the motel stairs.”

She’d dressed in conventional hooker wear, Kit remembered—too short, too low, too tight—and had shot Kit a pained grimace as she fought the skirt for movement, hating that such a junky item of clothing would even touch her body. Not yet knowing she would die in it.

“She didn’t take her camera with her? We didn’t find one at the scene.”

“She left it in my car. It’s hard to fit a Nikon D3 in a tube top, and she didn’t want to scare away our source. She took my notebook instead.”

The cops looked at each other.

“I could use it back,” Kit tried.

“Evidence,” Dennis replied, though there was a strange frown marring his brow.

Hitchens propped himself on the table so that he was looming over Kit. “All right, so Nicole entered the room alone, and you stayed in the car the whole time?”

“Didn’t take my eyes from that door.” Which meant the killer had been inside, lying in wait the whole time.

“We’ve confirmed with the motel manager that the place was being used as an unofficial whorehouse,” Hitchens said, looking through his notes. “The rooms were booked in blocks. One woman picks up all the keys. Then they’re returned in a single envelope placed in the drop box the next morning.”

“My research confirms the same.”

Head still lowered, Hitchens lifted his gaze. “Your research?”

“Well, I don’t just make up the stories that go in my newspaper, Detective Hitchens. I fact-check. Double-check. Then I find secondary confirmation and I check again. This was an ongoing operation. Truckers driving through the southern portion of the state, probably through Arizona via the new Hoover Dam bypass, would tweet about it online.”

“So you think it was a passion kill? Some trucker snapped when he found himself being interviewed rather than undressed?”

“No. We were supposed to be meeting a girl there, maybe a woman. And she had a list naming some of the most powerful men in this city as clients. I think one of the names on that list killed her.”

“I’m sorry,” Hitchens said, “but what would Vegas’s most powerful leaders want with street lays in a fleabag motel off a stretch of highway best known for being forgotten?”

Kit exhaled. “I don’t know.”

Dennis leaned forward. “Kit, can you think of anyone who might want to harm Nicole?”

“She was a reporter,” Hitchens remarked under his breath.

“But well-liked,” Kit countered. “I told you. Vivacious. Happy. Full of life.” And now she was dead. “But she was also stubborn, a total pit bull when something captured her curiosity. Even I thought there was a better way to do this thing, but Nicole wanted the list. And she wanted more than just names, she wanted proof.”

“And what did you want?”

Kit looked at Hitchens. “To know who this girl was.”

Why she was on the streets at such a young age. Why she’d ever consider selling her body for money. For Kit, it was always about the person more than the story. That’s why she was working for her family’s newspaper rather than running it. “I wanted to help her.”

Dennis looked at his partner. “If she was juvie, it could’ve been a pimp.”

“I worried about that,” Kit said, “but Nic just said I was weaving tales again. That my imagination was getting the best of me, and that if the girl was defying a pimp by meeting with us, then she must really be desperate.”

“But she didn’t come. And you waited a full hour before checking on Nicole?”

“She texted me after ten minutes, told me to stay put.”

“We’ll want to see that text,” Hitchens said.

But Dennis looked worried. “So is it fair to assume that whoever was with Nicole knew you were waiting in the car?”

Kit nodded, and told them about the figure that’d momentarily pushed aside the curtains.

“I’ll have forensics do a run on those panels,” said Dennis, standing. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

A rockabilly lifestyle, a sting involving truckers, young girls, possibly pimps. An anonymous woman who’d written the names of the city’s movers and shakers on a list that had drawn Nicole to her death. Was that all?

Wasn’t that enough?

Kit shook her head. “No.”

But there was more, of course. There was Nicole’s family and friends to inform. There were visits to make and a funeral to plan.

“Do you still have this list of names your contact gave you?”

Kit nodded at Dennis. She could print another copy. “So you believe me?”

“It’s an angle,” he said. “But even without that list, you girls were playing with fire.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d done so, and maybe that was the problem. They’d thought their journalism credentials could protect them from anything. “We’re a great team.”

And before she’d realized she’d spoken as if Nic were still alive, Hitchens said, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have left her alone in that room.”

“Brian,” Dennis said.

But Kit lowered her head, knowing he was right. And, somehow, she was going to have to live with that.

CHAPTER THREE

In the dream, Grif was driving through the desert, waiting for Vegas to rise out of the inky darkness like a neon mirage, just as he had fifty years earlier. Evie was straining forward next to him, as if she could force the car faster with the weight and heat of her body, like she could bend the entire world to her will with her curves alone. She’d always been like that. Taken the not-inconsequential gifts God had given her—beauty, jets, guile—and parlayed them into bigger game than her Iowa roots allowed. More than what her simple family had expected of and for her. Certainly more than what Grif could give.

He felt it when she finally shifted, turning to him, though he didn’t dare look back. “Your love should have saved me.”

“I know.”

“You weren’t strong enough.”

Grif kept his eyes on the narrow, snaking road. “I know that, too.”

“Are you strong enough now?”

Was he? He had a strong title, Centurion, and a strong job, helping others. And even if Centurions were the lowest celestials on the totem pole, he was still an angel. That had to count for something.

But would he be having these dreams if he were truly strong? No. He’d have already healed from the trauma of his death and moved on into Paradise. Tightening his hands on the wheel of his dream ’fifty-six Chevy Bel Air, Grif sighed. Incubation was supposed to have pulled these flashbacks from his mind. Yet they regularly reached up in the guise of a dream or an unintended thought and coldcocked him, like a fighter sprung early from his corner. And in that brief, flashing moment, even in the Everlast, Grif remembered, and felt, it all.

“I don’t have to be strong,” he finally said, refusing to dwell on it. “I’m dead.”

And that’s how he got through his days. His job was to escort Takes to the Everlast, that’s all. Didn’t matter if their deaths had been accidental, if they’d been murdered, or if they’d severed the rip cord themselves. It wasn’t his responsibility to figure out how they’d gotten that way. Not anymore.

Evie laughed beside him, like she could read his thoughts.

“Yet you still help people. Never could break you of that soft habit, could I? All the time, helping others instead of just keeping your head down and doing for us. And look where it got you. Look where it got me.”

He finally did turn to her, and she was just as pretty as he remembered. Eyebrows plucked into perfection above irises of dipped chocolate, blond hair styled into waves so flawless they were severe. But she was also angry. “I don’t know where it got you,” he said.

He’d never seen her in the Everlast. She’d probably bypassed it, went straight into Paradise. That’s what the pure angels did, right? And that’s what she’d been to him. His angel. His Evie.

His wife.

But right now she was his conscience.

“Yes, you do,” she said accusingly, just as Grif knew she would. He’d had this dream before. And what Evie didn’t say, but what still rose in the dark between them, was that if he hadn’t died, he could have saved her. And that was really why it was so hard to look at her: all that beauty and life and energy straining forward in anticipation of a future that would never come.

He scrambled for an answer, trying to think of something that would make it better—

“Hey, man.”

Coming to with a hard snort, Grif squinted, and tried to focus. Darkness, layers of it, crowded in and he shook his head. He had no idea where he was. Then the marching band took up again in his skull, and he remembered.

“Hey,” the voice said again. “Over here.”

Bleary-eyed, wiping drool from his chin, Grif turned his head. Dark lumps rose from the ground in uneven mounds, and a brick wall speared up at his back. The sky rose darkly behind that.

“Where am I?” he rasped.

“Man, and I thought I was wasted.”

The voice found form in the face of a shaggy-haired man who sat up among the lumps on the ground, plastic shifting around him as he peered, too closely, at Grif. The man’s breath kept Grif from doing the same. He recoiled. The pounding in his head throbbed.

Breathe.

“Yo, how’d you find this place? This is prime real estate. Usually nobody bothers me out here.”

“Ain’t gonna bother you,” Grif said, the words guttural, and scraping raw. Clearing his throat, he focused on bringing his senses back to life. That’s what was happening, after all. He was coming back to life.

His first observation was of the dark. That, and the chill. It was predawn, by Grif’s best guess, and nighttime in the desert was notoriously cold. He already knew from the bungled Take that it was winter but hadn’t noticed until now. Then he remembered it’d been late winter the last time he’d been in Vegas, too.

A cricket chirped, pricking his ears, and a breeze caught on the plastic bags around him, but the thumping headache was still rattling his brain’s pots and pans, making it hard to concentrate.

Breathe.

But he already was. The cold was only pressing in from the outside now, and his insides were beginning to thaw. He willed his hands to move, concentrating on touch as pins and needles shot into his limbs. He tried to sit up.

Never mind, he thought, barely able to lift his head. Though it wouldn’t be long. He was already feeling stronger, less panicked, so he settled back to wait. One thing he’d learned in his half-dozen years as a P.I. was when to act and when to sweat out a moment. Most people didn’t have the discipline to be still and wait. Grif didn’t have a problem with stillness or discipline.

The same obviously couldn’t be said for his companion. “You got some funky threads there, buddy. You first come around that corner, I thought to myself, Jimmy, ol’ boy, that man is straight up Dragnet. Like some old detective and shit.”

Two points for the wino. At least the man’s babble gave Grif another concrete detail to focus on. He was, indeed, wearing his favorite suit, the gray flannel with give in the sleeves, his white shirt, black tie. For some reason, that had a smile crawling up his face. Material things had no value in and of themselves, he knew that. There was no difference between a diamond and a brick in the Everlast. Only those things God had assigned value to could sustain a soul.

But this was the suit he’d died in, and though he’d worn it ever since, it hadn’t felt like this in the Everlast. The soft, clean cotton never caressed his skin like a lover’s touch while there. This sort of touch was a gift only the living possessed, though most never realized it.

“Missing your stingy brim, though,” Jimmy, still babbling, observed.

Grif perked up. Where was his hat?

Frowning, he looked up in time to spot a star hurtling across the sky. Grif followed the movement, eyes tickling so deeply in their sockets that he gasped, and for the first time in half a century, he sucked in raw ozone and earth instead of the silky cosmos.

And dust, he thought, choking. And decay, he realized, scenting the trash around him … fruit rinds, coffee grounds, half-finished meals that used to be animals. Human waste. The unwashed bum. No wonder the Pures would rather Fall than don flesh.

But then Grif covered his face with his palm, and was reintroduced to himself. The hotel soap he’d showered with fifty years earlier, the Sen-Sen he chewed after every meal, the faint whiff of coconut in his pomade, and beneath it all … flesh. Warm, gritty, and real.

And it was the flesh—the sinful flesh—that finally grounded him. No sooner did he have that thought than click. The radio found its signal.

For one brief moment his senses were amplified. He could scent the shadows. He could taste the night. Yet before he could reach out and touch anything, it was all whisked away, the protective blanket of the Everlast ripped entirely from beneath his chin. All that remained was its knowledge, buried in the coils of his gray matter.

Grif sat up, then rose unsteadily to his feet, bracing against the dirty brick wall for support. He had to figure out where he was.

“Yo, Dick Tracy!” Jimmy called, as Grif began walking away. “Buy me a brewski, right? I let you crash at my pad … least you could do!”

Grif had no idea what Jimmy was talking about, not until he rounded the corner and caught sight of pumps, a glowing storefront, and a dark-haired man standing cross-armed with his back to Grif. Ignoring the man for now, Grif looked up at the backlit sign. Gas station. Perfect.

On a hunch, Grif checked his pants pockets for his wallet. Opening it, he saw it, too, was as when he died. Same amount of money—and lucky for him he’d just cashed out at the casino cage—and the same photo of Evie that he carried with him everywhere. He took time to study that with his new-old eyes, then tucked it safely away, just like the dream.

His watch was on and working. His piece strapped to his right calf. Lot of good that did me, Grif thought wryly, before frowning. Odd, though. His driver’s license was missing. He coulda sworn he’d had it on him when he died.

Grif didn’t know if the dark-haired man heard his sigh, or just sensed Grif behind him, but he turned suddenly, giving a startled curse when he saw Grif. “Where’d you come from?”

Grif hesitated, then jerked his head in the direction he’d come. “Checking on the local wildlife.”

“You mean Jimmy?” Worry replaced wariness. “He all right? They didn’t get to him, too, did they?”

“They?”

“You know,” the man said, in an accent that curled in the air like smoke. “The ones who chopped up the woman across the street.”

Grif glanced in the direction the man had been staring. In the background a wide sun was beginning its push over mountains wearing robes of dark purple. In the foreground was a truck stop, rigs idling white smoke in the cool morning air. And across from the closest of those was a sagging two-story motel with an even more depressing café riveted to its side. It was littered with yellow crime-scene tape, and what had to be a whole unit of patrol cars.

Grif hadn’t run very far.

“Jimmy’s fine,” he said, heading inside the station. It was brighter, more crowded than in his time and with a security camera straight out of a science-fiction movie, but still clearly a gas station.

“You a cop?” the man asked, following. He slipped behind the counter, pulled down the Luckies Grif pointed to, and tossed over a book of matches. “Or maybe a reporter?”

“A word-hack?” Grif made a face, tossing exact change onto the counter. Six bills for a pack of cigarettes. He couldn’t believe it. What was that? A 2,400 percent increase in fifty years? He’d consider quitting the habit if he thought he’d be here long enough to properly start again. “I’m gonna need a map. And some coffee for our friend out back.”

The cashier’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not from here, are you?”

Grif wondered if it was the map or his concern for Jimmy that gave it away, but considering the man’s dark eyes, skin, and curling accent, Grif didn’t think he had any room to comment. “A few years since I’ve been in Vegas.”

“Just passing through?”

Grif bent over the map. “Aren’t we all?”

The man shrugged, his attention back across the street now that Grif was no longer a mystery. “Coffee’s in the back. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

But Grif needed him even as the door shut behind him. “Who drew this? An amnesiac monkey?”

Because the map looked deliberately confusing. Red lines, yellow ones, blue. A big squiggly in the middle that meant blast-all. The topography made no sense. He couldn’t even locate the Marquis, the grand hotel where he’d died, and was considering popping out back and asking Jimmy exactly where they were when a tinny voice swept through the room.

“Griffin Shaw,” it boomed, causing the knobs where his wings had been torn from his body to pulse with pain. “Did you really tell one Melinda Childers that a rap on the head was the nicest thing her husband ever did for her?”

The voice had Grif jumping, not because he’d thought he was alone but because it was so familiar. “Frank?”

Whirling, he looked for the Pure who was in charge of the Centurions, but he saw no one.

“Up here.”

Grif turned back to the register.

“Up.”

Grif’s gaze rose to the security monitor behind the counter. Gone were the live shots of the building that’d divided the screen before. In their place was the Pure who appeared to each Centurion in the guise they most identified with authority. For Grif, that meant a sergeant in a detectives’ bullpen, something he’d long stopped questioning.

Glaring through blurred static, and a picture that rolled every few seconds, Sarge crossed his great arms and gave Grif a cold stare. His wings, as black as the rest of him, took up the whole of the screen, though Grif could still see the tips, currently gold-tipped with fury. Hard lines drew his mouth down like a thin hook, and his jaw clenched reflexively. He hadn’t seen Sarge this mad since Harvey brought home the wrong soul.

Frank leaned back, and the celestial camera—or whatever was allowing Grif to view him in the Everlast—pulled wide to reveal a desk that was as broad and imposing as the Pure behind it. “Childers?” Frank repeated, pointing to some papers on his desk.

Grif glanced outside to make sure the cashier wasn’t looking before he answered. “What is that? My folder?”

Sarge just stared. Like Anas, he had no pupils, though instead of her hot open flame, the rounds of his eyes held mist swirling over black marble. “And you told Simon Abernathy he wouldn’t have gotten dusted if he’d stuck to shilling fish and chips on his side of the pond?”

“He was an illegal.”

“Shaw.” Sarge threw down his pen. “You are a Centurion! You are greeting people in the most vulnerable moments of their afterlife. Don’t you remember what that was like?”

“Sure I do,” Grif said, tapping out one of his smokes. He lit it behind a cupped palm, and exhaled before meeting Frank’s restlessly churning eyes. “Though the part right before that gets a little fuzzy.”

Frank narrowed his gaze. “We’re not having this conversation again.”

“Good.” Because Grif had been murdered. No amount of yapping would convince him to forgive it. And, for some reason, he couldn’t forget. “Then maybe we can talk about what the hell I’m doing on this mudflat. In flesh.”

“You have sensitivity issues, Shaw.”

Despite those, or maybe because of them, Grif just blew out a stream of smoke. “Maybe I could put on a dress. Sing a little show tune?”

Frank just stared back at him from the video screen. With his angelic nature hidden behind this familiar guise, it was easy to forget he was created in and of Paradise. Yet, unlike some of the other Pures, Frank didn’t seem to resent the Centurions. Sure, they were celestial misfits; no longer mortal, not truly angelic. But Centurions had still been created in God’s image, they remained His beloved children, and Frank said it was his job to see those souls at peace.

Admittedly, Grif didn’t always make it easy.

“That it?” he asked, when Frank just kept eyeballing him. “You knocked me back to the mud just to talk about my bedside manner?”

“No, smartass.” Frank’s curse was cause enough to raise a brow. “You barred yourself from the Everlast when you did this.”

And Nicole Rockwell’s corpse replaced Frank on the screen. Grif shot a nervous glance out the window, but the cashier was still staring across the street, giving a play-by-play to whomever he was talking to on his cell.

“Come on,” Grif protested. “I was nice to the working girl.”

Sarge’s words were just a voice-over. “She wasn’t a hooker, Grif.”

Grif sighed. “Yeah. That’s what she said.”

“It’s not what she said, Shaw. It’s what she did.”

And the image fluttered, shifted, and then there was Grif, entering the motel room just as Nicole Rockwell spotted her dead body and began screaming.

“Damn,” Grif whispered under his breath.

It looked more incriminating, more premeditated, from a distance. There was no sound, but he couldn’t fault the picture. Especially after he’d resuscitated Nicole’s body, and she made him turn away so she could dress.

“The girl wanted some privacy,” Grif objected, having seen enough.

“No … she wanted this.”

And Grif watched, slack-jawed, as Rockwell scribbled something on the Moleskine he’d seen lying on the dresser. When his image finally turned away from the window and back to her, she made sure her head was on straight, literally, and that her body was blocking the notebook.

Grif cursed again. “She tricked me.”

“You let her trick you.” Frank’s wide face reappeared on the screen.

“I wasn’t thinking straight!” Grif protested, then finally got the nerve to say what was really bothering him. “You sent me to Vegas. Vegas!”

Frank’s face remained impassive. “It was mandatory. Doing Surface time in the city where you died—”

“Was murdered,” Grif corrected.

“Is part of your rehabilitation and healing process.”

“I’m fine,” Grif muttered.

“Then what are you still doing here?” Frank asked, gesturing at his office in the Everlast.

“You mean here?” Grif motioned around the gas station on the Surface.

The swirling eyes narrowed. “You want to see the rest?”

The rest? Grif frowned. What was left?

But Sarge was shaking his head, and Grif suddenly found he couldn’t hold the stare. He might be slow on the uptake, but he was catching up fast now. His actions had changed something on the Surface. They’d altered fate somehow, and whatever his interference had allowed—whatever Nicole Rockwell had written in that notebook—was big enough to gain a Pure’s attention. No, he didn’t want to see.

But Sarge showed him anyway. The static blurred with a wave of his hand, and there was the same dingy hotel room but a new scene. Another woman and her john entering, freezing when they spotted Nicole’s corpse on the bed. Grif was already gone, of course, and the woman fled screaming, but the man looked around … then pocketed the notebook.

“Who is that?” Grif asked, leaning forward, studying the blond hair, stocky build …

“None of your damned business, that’s who!” Sarge reappeared, and looked like he was going to come at Grif right through the screen. “You are not a P.I. anymore. You’re not even human! Yet you took anchor in a body still pulsing with life, and so that must mean you want the human experience again. Fine. You’re demoted, angel.”

Every instinct told Grif to remain quiet. “What’re you gonna do?” he said instead. “Confiscate my halo?”

Frank’s gaze narrowed. “Go back to the man outside.”

Grif looked at the cashier. He waved when he caught the man looking back.

“The other one,” Sarge snapped. “And take the map. You’re gonna need it.” And the security screen returned to normal.

Muttering to himself, Grif pocketed the Luckies and folded the map, and was halfway to the door before remembering the coffee. When he finally exited, the cashier looked over, scoffing when he saw the steaming cups, one in each hand.

“You’re really not from here.”

But he didn’t follow as Grif headed back around the side of the building, and Jimmy was right where he left him, seemingly passed out, though his head lifted when Grif stopped in front of him. “Here.”

But it was Sarge’s misty, marbled gaze staring out at him from the mortal flesh. Grif jolted, scalding his flesh with the coffee. “What are you doing? Is he … possessed?”

“It’s easy to control those who have no possession over themselves,” Sarge said. “Now look in his left coat pocket.”

Grif set down the cups. “Why?”

“I’m giving you a case.”

“Another Take?” Grif asked, withdrawing a file folder.

Jimmy’s expression altered, both hard and sympathetic all at once. “Not a Take. A case. You think you can do my job, Shaw? Make the decisions and sacrifices required of a Pure?”

What the hell had the Pure ever sacrificed? Grif thought, but Frank didn’t give him the chance to ask. “Open it. Find out more of exactly what it is we do.”

A black-and-white glossy stared up at him, a rap sheet stapled across from that, but he ignored the vital stats and studied the face. He recognized her immediately, of course. The pretty woman he’d seen from the motel window, though pretty wasn’t a word he’d use to describe her up close. Siren would work, and her baby blues were lit up as if she knew it, and it amused her.

Cherry-cream lips and sable-hued bangs stood out against pale skin, stark, even in black-and-white. A rose, blood-orange, he imagined, was tucked behind one ear. He glanced over at the name—Katherine Craig—then back at the photo.

“I don’t get it.”

Jimmy’s mouth moved. “What’s your job as a Centurion?”

Grif cleared his throat. “Secure the Take. Clean ’em up. Bring ’em home.”

Do it respectfully, he added silently. Okay, so he’d learned his lesson.

But Sarge wasn’t through yet. “And when do you meet your Takes, Shaw?”

“When they are most traumatized. Immediately after corporeal death.”

Every Centurion knew that, because that’s why they existed. They were the losers. The few murdered souls that incubation couldn’t cure. Still tethered to the Surface by memory and regret, they were pressed into assisting others to cross into the Everlast. The idea was that helping others would relieve their mental anguish. Then they, too, would be able to enter Paradise proper.

The bum gave him a tight smile. Grif blinked. For a moment he thought he saw fangs. “Not this one.”

“Sarge?”

Frank’s roiling liquid gaze suddenly looked shuttered. “You gotta watch this one, Griffin. See, you might be back on the Surface, back in flesh, but you’re not human. Take away a Centurion’s wings, and all they’re left with is an intimate acquaintance with death.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can still see death coming. It also means you’re gonna watch that woman die, and you’re going to feel the death as if it were your own.”

Grif froze. That’s what he was doing here?

“No.”

He began to shake his head. He might be a misfit in the celestial realm, but everyone knew the only thing keeping him sane was the protective layer of Everlast that lay between Paradise and the Surface. It was a balm, a numbing cream rubbed atop his sore soul. Flesh would scrub off that balm and expose him. Without it he’d wither.

But Sarge knew this better than anyone, so all Grif asked was, “Why?”

“Because you caused it, Shaw.” Now Frank didn’t look angry, vengeful, or cold. He just looked sad. “Katherine Craig is fated to die because of you.”

Grif’s newfound breath deserted him, but his mind fired fast.

My best friend is waiting outside …

The siren in the car. The way she’d looked up at him in a way no woman had in over fifty years: as if really seeing him. And the blond man who’d pocketed the Moleskine.

Whatever Nicole Rockwell had written in it was going to lead the man directly to Katherine Craig.

Grif tossed the folder to the ground. “I won’t do it.”

Jimmy’s expression, and Frank’s darker one beneath it, didn’t alter. “You’re going to bring that poor girl’s soul home, Shaw. You’re going to see that she gets safely to incubation where she can heal from her death, and the grief over a life and family she’ll never have.”

“No.”

“You will do this so that she damned well doesn’t end up like you. And, Grif? You’re going to do it nicely.” The bum’s nostrils flared, his stare tumultuous and bright. “Keep the map until you get your bearings. You’ve been navigating by the constellations for so long now that the streets mean nothing. Now, go.”

Grif closed his eyes, and the same loneliness that’d run him under when he sank through Nicole’s body wracked him again. Lowering his head, he shook it side to side. “I still remember things I shouldn’t. And the memories will be stronger if I stay on the Surface. Humanity … hurts.”

Silence reigned for so long Grif could almost believe Frank was reconsidering. But when he looked up, the bum’s gaze was bleary, confused, and pinned on the coffee cup next to him. “What the hell is this? Where’s the sauce, man?”

Grif bent, pocketed the folder, and turned to leave. But, just in case, he paused to mutter, “You forgot my damned hat.”

“You forgot my damned beer!” Jimmy replied, but Grif was already walking. He was just out of the drunk’s view when he spotted it coming fast, like a soundless comet or a falling black star. It dropped directly to his side, sending a small puff of dust into the air, causing Grif to cough.

Yeah, yeah, Grif thought, bending down. It’s all dust. We’re all dust. I get it.

But he didn’t give Sarge the satisfaction of looking back or up, and he didn’t give thanks. Instead he dusted off his fedora, settled it atop his head, and kept walking.

Somewhere out there was a woman with powerful blue eyes, a secretive smile, and curves that made him want to cry. A woman he was going to have to face in both this world and the next. A woman fated to die because of him.

Again.

Kit shouldn’t have been surprised at the sun’s ascendance in the sky, or by downtown’s early-morning bustle. Yet she stood at the bottom of the concrete stairway outside the station, shoulders slumped and limbs heavy, as astonished by the urban landscape as she’d be in a foreign country. It was startling that these people had dressed this morning—or not, in the case of the vagrant sprawled to her left—and bewildering that they could now think of coffee, or gambling, or work.

And what the hell was there to laugh about, Kit wondered, anger flashing as a passing woman threw back her blond, perfectly coiffed head—neck white and pristine and unmarked by a butcher’s knife—loosing an inappropriate amount of joy into the world. Kit wanted to grab the sleeve of the blonde’s suit jacket, or maybe a handful of that carefully styled hair, and say, “My best friend was murdered last night. Why the hell are you still alive?”

Why am I? she thought, tears welling.

Why was anyone?

Kit realized she was causing a scene, looking rumpled, dazed, and literally shaking in the sidewalk’s center. Swallowing hard, she wiped her eyes with her cardigan before beginning the long walk to the police lot where she’d parked the night before.

It was still wintry this early in February, but Kit didn’t hurry. Her steps were as measured and precise as an army recruit’s. She even halted stiffly beneath the bald tubing of an old neon sign to stare into a refurbished café where lawyers and D.A.s and those who made their living off of other people’s vices were talking shop and swapping stories. Blue pendant lamps glowed like crystal jellyfish, and the scent of fresh bread and baking sugar rushed out to envelop her when the door was thrown wide.

Kit frowned and stared. The café didn’t look inviting to her. Instead, it looked too hot, like a nuclear reactor. Like it would consume and destroy every bit of life that entered there.

Or maybe she was just projecting.

Hurrying the rest of the way to her car, she slammed the door on the sounds of downtown Vegas, and locked herself in the cocoon-like silence. The familiar squeak and scent of leather wrapped around her like a sumptuous throw. The perfume that’d been her latest flea market find, and that she’d been wearing the night before, tickled her nose. Slumping, Kit let her head fall. She should go straight home and sleep, but she didn’t dare start the car with her hands still shaking. Besides, sleep meant closing her eyes, and even blinking was a nightmare. She’d rather cling to the raw numbness of her fatigue. She preferred her overheated anger at the world.

Swallowing hard, she dialed Paul’s number to see if he’d done any work on the list she’d given him in the station. He didn’t answer, no surprise, but it made her want to gore something with her red fingertips. Forget that it was not yet seven and there was nothing he could have done in three predawn hours. Forget, too, that he’d never been available when Kit needed him, anyway.

But Nicole had. Kit glanced at the metaphorical elephant in the car, Nic’s camera, lying lens-up on the passenger’s seat, its wide, alien gaze locked on her. Nic loved that camera like Kit loved the Duetto, so much that her predominant memory of Nicole was in a one-eyed squint, shoulders hunched as she held the camera to her eye.

“With my shots and your smarts, we’re sure to hit the major wires,” she’d said, pointing the camera up at the room where she’d die within the hour.

“Sure you don’t want me in there with you?” Kit asked, staring at the window.

“The girl was insistent. She wants me alone.”

“I could hide under the bed.”

Nicole raised her brows. “And where’s the first place you’d look? Besides, I’d blow any trust I’d built once you climbed out from beneath a stained mattress with old jizz caked on your kneecaps.”

Kit made a face. “Get me a Brillo pad. I need to scrub that image from my brain.”

“Well, do it from within this George Jetson cockpit. I’ll text you and have you come up when the girl and I have established a rapport. Until then … smile. I’m about to take the photo for your byline.”

Nicole snapped a few shots of Kit in profile, the motel sagging like a battered woman in the background, then smiled as she studied the images. “God, I’m good.”

She was. She could see everything through her lens. So well, Kit thought, that sometimes she was utterly blind without it.

Kit slid her key in the ignition. She should go home. There was nothing outside the safety of this car but more bright sky and oblivious people and futile anger. But how was she to be alone with this grief? It wasn’t that she wanted someone’s shoulder to cry on—her sadness was heavy enough to knock two people over—but it’d be nice to see someone who’d known Nic alive and well, and who’d also feel the loss now that she was no longer either of those things.

So despite the wrinkles in her dress, the bedraggled ends of her hair, and the shadows haunting her eyes, Kit went to work. She would crack soon, she felt it like an animal sensed an impending earthquake, and would have to be home by then. But not yet. Not now. Her grief still hadn’t entered the nuclear reactor’s core. But she knew from previous experience—her mother’s death, her father’s—that when it did, the world as she knew it would be flattened, every particle in her life rearranged, her personal universe blown away.

If only there was a way to take a photo of that.

CHAPTER FOUR

The graveyard-shift waitress in the roadside café was bleary-eyed and slow. The short-order cook was uninspired, and more interested in the activity going on outside the attached motel where Rockwell had died. And the vinyl booth was ripped in so many places it was impossible to sit comfortably. But the coffee was hot, melting the last of Grif’s cosmic thaw, though he wouldn’t have wished the runny eggs and burned toast for anyone’s first meal back on the Surface—or their last.

Yet it didn’t matter much to Grif. He couldn’t taste it. The Everlast must have somehow flash-fried his senses. He couldn’t feel the fork in his hand, either—not the way he should, at least. His eyesight was clearer, but after the Technicolor wonder of the Everlast, it was small comfort. Yet his nose worked well enough that he was thankful not to be in Jimmy’s trash pile any longer, so he supposed that was something.

But his hearing was hollow and tinny, probably about right for an eighty-four-year-old man.

You’re not human.

No shit, he thought, moving his shoulders. The blades still ached where Anas had ripped the wings from his back.

Yet when he finally looked up from his empty plate, the headache dogging him was gone, and he almost felt a part of the world. So, belching lightly, he got down to the business of locating Ms. Craig.

The map alone didn’t help; Sarge had been right about that. But a journey was rarely a straight shot from point A to point B. It was the landmarks and details that made all the difference. The bent street sign and the shifty-eyed man leaning against it. The car parked in the wrong direction on a residential street.

The intricate brick face on the Strip-side bungalow where he’d died.

Yeah, details he remembered.

Fortunately, the waitress wasn’t so comatose that she couldn’t point out the diner’s location, south of Sunrise Mountain just off of Boulder Highway. Outside the window, self-storage units rose like tombstones from each side of the street, and trailer parks squatted behind those. So he knew where he was but still not where he was going.

Vegas’s streets hadn’t changed that much, he thought, squinting at the black-and-white grid. Though there were certainly more of them. And the place sprawled like it could go on forever. He remembered a time when the Boys tried to pay their entertainers in real estate. The talent had laughed and held out their hand for hard coin instead. Who, they said, would want to own land in this glorified litter box?

But according to this map, people did, and there was only one reason Grif could figure the population would sprawl all the way from the Sheep Mountains to the Black: to get away from other people.

The infamous Las Vegas Strip was clearly marked and the major streets leading from it jumped out at him like old friends at a surprise party—Trop, Flamingo, Sahara—but that wouldn’t help him find one lone woman.

So he put the map aside for now and pulled out the folder Sarge had left him.

There, still stapled inside was the Polaroid of Katherine Craig. His case. Before Grif could flip the thing over, his gaze caught on the whites of her teeth, a single dimple, and crinkles around smoky eyes. It took a moment before he could shake off the image and focus on the page behind it. Once he did, he found the information he sought.

Katherine Craig, age 29, born in Las Vegas to Shirley and Martin Craig, both deceased. Mother was a homemaker, died of cancer when Katherine was 12. Father was a police officer, killed on-duty while responding to a robbery when she was 16.

So one parent passed directly through the Gates, Grif thought, sipping at his cooling coffee. The other was dumped into incubation a few years later. Shirley Craig would definitely be waiting in Paradise, though her husband might still be in the Tube, depending on how long it took to get over the trauma of his death. Katherine was going to end up doing time there as well, so it was entirely plausible that if she healed quickly and her father did not, they’d emerge at the same time.

“Some family reunion,” Grif muttered, and kept reading.

Marital status, divorced from one Paul Raggio. Schooling, private and then UNLV. Occupation: interned in the Sterling Hotel’s advertising department, demoted for insubordination. Moved to guest services, same hotel, but fired a month later for insulting a guest. Has since worked as a reporter for her family-owned newspaper, the Las Vegas Tribune. A business constantly on the edge of bankruptcy.

So the girl was a native Las Vegan, had a mouth and possibly a temper on her, and a documented history of getting herself in touchy situations. Yet even as Grif thought it, he knew he was projecting. It was easier on him to believe that she and Nicole Rockwell had forged a head-on with death, but Sarge had made it clear Craig’s twisted fate was Grif’s doing. Besides—mouth, temper, and occupation aside—no one deserved murder.

So there you have it, Grif thought, leaning back. A nosy divorcee who lost both her parents young, and was destined to die in the same city she was born. Those were the facts, and facts were bricks Grif could lay side by side and atop one another until a pattern emerged and a wall was built. Intelligence and instinct were mortar binding it all together, and with enough of both, he would insulate himself from the emotion that was useless in good detective work.

It would be debilitating to someone who could see death coming.

Facts were a damn sight better than a good sense of direction, Grif thought, and—feeling like he had a big enough wall built up now—he went ahead and flipped the photo back over.

Why the hell was she smiling like that? he wondered, his newfound breath lost to the visual kidney punch. Her mouth was blown so wide that the soft insides showed at the corners, like another grin was building in there. As if her laughter tumbled. Like joy was a living thing.

You caused it, Shaw. Katherine Craig is fated to die because of you.

He looked away, gazing out the window at where Craig had been parked, her tiny foreign car dark, her wide-eyed face white, as she stared up at the window where her friend had just died. Directly at him, he remembered.

“More coffee?”

Grif nodded at the waitress, silent. He couldn’t taste it but he needed the warmth.

Yet the coffee didn’t ground him this time, and it sloshed onto the Formica as he tried to lift it. It was hot enough to burn his new flesh, and should have caused him to hiss, but he didn’t. The waitress noticed it, too. He looked back at her and noted a faint silvery outline to her silhouette.

Plasma. He knew what it was, though it was usually gone by the time he arrived for his Takes. This was a shimmering thread, but growing dark at the edges.

You can still see death coming.

So blunted mortal senses, but a celestial sense for death.

“You need to get that mole checked,” he said before she could comment on his burn. “It’s not too late, but it will be in another year.”

The waitress’s eyes widened, but he said nothing more, and she scurried away. Sarge was probably stomping around the Everlast, muttering about sensitivity. So what. Those were the facts. Facts were bricks. Now she could do something about it.

Grif, however, needed more facts, more bricks between him and this … this …

Woman. Katherine.

Case.

Straightening, Grif flipped past the rap sheet until he came to the last page of the report, hoping to find an address … which he did. Right across the top of her autopsy report, dated two days from now. She would die at home, he saw, but most people did. Although they didn’t usually die from multiple stab wounds—she’d suffer thirty-two in all. He shouldn’t be surprised. Murderers were like superstitious ballplayers. They rarely deviated from a play that had worked well before.

Grif hadn’t looked too closely at the placement of Rockwell’s wounds, but the coroner’s notes showed Craig’s deepest, deadliest cuts would be precise and controlled, no breaks in the incisions, no hesitation on the killer’s part as he stole her life. So Craig’s murderer wasn’t just skilled with a knife, he’d probably killed even before Rockwell. Could he be ex-military? A hired killer? A butcher?

You are not a P.I. anymore. You’re not even human!

Grif gave Sarge’s voice a mental shove and kept reading, saw that there were no lacerations on the finger or hands, meaning Craig would succumb easily to attack. So maybe it’ll be fast then, Grif thought, then caught himself. How pansy was it that he didn’t know if he wanted that more for her or for himself?

Facts, Grif thought, as he started to sweat. He needed bricks. Reason and instinct. Mortar. He needed a wall if he was going to get through this.

I need the Everlast, he thought desperately, reaching for his coffee. But as he lifted the cup, one last word on the autopsy report caught his attention, and the cosmic freeze he’d felt when relearning how to breathe wrapped its cold fingers around his throat again.

Rape.

So not like Nicole Rockwell, after all.

The grease and coffee rebelled in his new stomach, and Grif bumped the table as he rose. Throwing too many bills onto the tabletop, he then stumbled out into the crisp, bright morning, the last of Katherine Craig’s life. He immediately turned his gaze directly into the fiery sun. How?

How did Sarge expect him to do this? How was he supposed to watch a killer, a rapist, come to this smiling woman’s home, and do nothing to stop it?

Take away a Centurion’s wings, and all they’re left with is an intimate acquaintance with death.

“I can’t,” he said aloud, earning a look from a bleary-eyed woman just stepping from her room. Not a hint of plasma around her, he noted, panicking.

How the hell was this supposed to help him heal, he wondered, as a crow cawed above him. Grif covered his ears, wincing. The animal was circling for the kill. Grif’s death senses caught that.

“Where’s your infamous mercy?” he rasped, stumbling out of the lot and onto Boulder Highway, away from the crow, the half-dressed woman now watching him suspiciously … toward another who wouldn’t see him at all. And still, there was no answer from on high.

In this question, it seemed, there never was.

Craig.”

Kit hadn’t been in her office more than five minutes before her doorway fell dark. Her boss’s tone had Kit glancing up with guilt, but Marin Wilson returned her pale-faced stare with eyes that were grim as well as sharp. Studying Kit’s atypically rumpled appearance, she allowed silence to sit between them before gesturing to her office with a jerk of her head.

Kit sighed and stood, ignoring the stares from the main press room, Marin’s wake a defensive wall between her and their unspoken questions. When they reached Marin’s office, Kit shut the door behind her without being asked, took a seat, and waited.

Marin dropped into an ergonomic chair on the other side of a desk so loaded with papers it belonged on Hoarders. She ran a hand through short, spiky hair, newly silver, a side effect of chemo. She didn’t care. Marin disdained pretense of any kind. She’d rather apply pressure than lipstick, and found Kit and Nicole’s love for fashion so bewildering she often studied them like they were exotic animals at the zoo.

The look she gave Kit now was less baffled, but also a delay tactic. Marin believed most people found silence intolerable, a theory neatly backed up by the existence of tell-alls, the Kardashians, and Twitter. But when Kit only stared back, Marin broke the silence with a sigh. “Time off.”

“No.”

Marin’s nostrils flared. “Ms. Craig. One of our reporters has been murdered while pursuing a story. You need to trust that every person at this newspaper is going to do their best to discover how and why. Rockwell was one of our own. We’ll take care of it.”

“I want to do it myself.”

“You’re not a police officer.”

And there, in Marin’s infamously caustic subtext, was the censure Kit had been dreading. She and Nic had pursued a story without a direct assignment from on high, proof that Kit was irresponsible, in over her head, and incapable of seeing this story—this tragedy—through to the end. Kit fought back tears. “No, but I’m the daughter of one.”

“Kit.” Seeing the tears, Marin softened. But not much. “Go home.”

“Auntie.”

Marin rolled her eyes. “Stop. You only pull that ‘Auntie’ crap when you’re trying to weasel out of something. Just like—”

“Don’t. Don’t make this about my mother.” She spoke sharply, but if anyone knew why, it was Marin. In ways, they both lived in Shirley Craig’s shadow. But Kit wasn’t going to get into that now.

Leaning back, Marin folded her arms. “What do you have?”

“A list of names.” Kit handed her the sheet she’d just printed, then told her about the anonymous contact. Marin’s expression narrowed further, and Kit rushed on. “I was writing my account of Nicole’s … of the crime scene when you came in. The lock on the motel door wasn’t damaged. The killer was already in the room. He had a key, maybe a contact at the motel, or the simple ability to pick locks. I don’t know.”

“But you think the person who killed Rockwell is on this list?”

“Would she be dead otherwise?”

Marin tapped her chin. “What else were you two working on?”

Kit shrugged. “She was helping John with a photo essay on the homeless living in the underground tunnels. I just finished an op-ed piece on the city’s backlog of rape kits, not exactly breaking news. There was a lifestyle piece on a new gallery opening downtown.”

Marin squinted.

“I swear. That’s all. I mean, the gallery’s devoted to nudes painted in neon and wearing animal heads, but I don’t see anyone killing for that.”

Her aunt looked at the list, gaze snagging and widening on the last few names. She finally put it down, where it disappeared in the sea of papers. “You’re going to run this entire newspaper someday, Katherine.”

Now it was Kit’s turn to squint. “You only pull that ‘Katherine’ crap when you want something. And I told you before. Changing the world is more important to me than running it.”

Marin sighed. “And now you sound like your father.”

She did—because her mother might have taught her how to live, even while dying, but it was her father who’d taught Kit what to do—right up until the very last breath.

Don’t just find the easy answer, Kitty-cat! Find the truth!

But this, too, was an old argument, one neither of them had the energy to chase. “Well, you’re going to inherit it, in any case. Sooner rather than later, if this latest quack doesn’t get my dosage right.” She rubbed at the veins in her right arm in what had to be an unconscious gesture. “So you might try acting as you’d wish your employees to do in the future.”

“You mean run everything by you beforehand.”

“I wish Ms. Rockwell had.”

Kit winced, and looked away.

“Oh, Katherine,” Marin said, more softly. “Come stay with me. Just for a time.”

And be watched over at home as well as at work, Kit thought, shaking her head. No thanks. Her aunt was pragmatic, dogged, kind … and a total control freak. “I appreciate the offer. I do, but—”

“I don’t want you alone. There’s a killer out there. One with the potential ability to pick locks.”

Kit lifted her chin. “My locks aren’t simple. My security system was installed by one of Dad’s old cronies. And my dog has sharp teeth.”

“You don’t have a dog.”

Kit shrugged. “I’ll feel better surrounded by my things.”

“They’ll remind you of Nicole.”

“Breathing reminds me of Nicole.”

Her aunt heard the crack in her voice and snapped her mouth shut on whatever she was about to say. Tilting her head, she waited a moment, then spoke quickly, sharply. “Your stubbornness is annoying.”

“I come by it honestly,” Kit said evenly, because now she sounded like her aunt.

Marin tapped one stubby finger on her chair arm. “Fine,” she finally said, leaning back. “Then here’s how this is going to work, and I won’t take no for an answer. I’m still your boss.”

Kit tensed.

“Drop everything else you’re working on, hand it to John or Ed, and focus that innate stubbornness on winnowing down that list. You find that damned contact of yours.” Marin leaned forward, sharp eyes honed. “You write down every damned detail about that crime scene, hound the detectives, and drive this damned story into the ground. Then we bury the murdering bastard that stole our reporter, our girl, with it.”

Kit found herself unexpectedly smiling. Yes, this was what she’d needed. This was why she’d come here instead of going home. She stood.

“Copy me on everything, I don’t care how small or seemingly insignificant. I want an update on your work to date, and daily reports after that.”

“Thank you, Auntie.”

“Don’t thank me.” Marin stood, too. “I’ve known Nicole since she was fourteen years old and you dragged her home like some flea-bitten stray. I don’t think I ever saw her without a camera under her arm. I definitely never saw her without you.”

She looked at Kit like she was wearing one of her more outrageous outfits … or nothing at all. And that’s how Kit felt standing in this office without Nicole. Naked. Like something vital was missing.

“The thing is,” Marin continued, chin wobbling, “if I ever had a child, a daughter, I’d want her to be …” She waved one arm, and shook her head. “Well … nothing like either of you. But I cared for that girl. I still care. So go out there and get me the goddamned truth.”

“I’ll get you your truth,” Kit swore, with identical familial passion. “And a goddamned murderer.”

Marin smiled briefly, eyes turning up at the corners like a cat considering a three-legged mouse. “Have that report on my desk by morning. I’ll be your personal research assistant and an extra pair of eyes. Meanwhile, I’d like you to reconsider staying with me. The circumstances surrounding Ms. Rockwell’s death are … unsettling.”

“Your stubbornness is annoying,” Kit said, but reached over to place a hand on her aunt’s arm.

Marin grazed Kit’s knuckles with her own before letting her hand fall away. “Runs in the family.”

CHAPTER FIVE

In addition to the death senses, Grif was relieved to find he’d retained his celestial ability to unlock things. He entered Craig’s ranch house without even having to touch the keyhole, bypassing the red blink of a security camera with the wave of his hand. Yet he’d already discovered the ability was clearly meant only for use in locating Katherine Craig. The one time he’d tried to open the back door of a gentlemen’s club—just to ask for directions, of course—he’d been yelled at and chased by the owner’s dog. Briefly caught, too, he thought, scowling at the ripped hem of his pant leg. He’d have given the fleabag a mouthful of feathered daggers if he’d had his wings. As it was, he had to stick to the plan. He couldn’t shield himself from attack, never mind Craig.

And though he still felt vulnerable without his full celestial powers, the limitations were also a comfort. Like a rainbow, their absence was an intangible promise. He’d be back in the protective lap of the Everlast in a few short hours’ time. Just an angel’s blink, really.

Though still long enough for a woman to die.

Pulling the autopsy papers from his breast pocket, he looked up Katherine Craig’s time of death. Ten fifteen at night. Just over two hours from now, and not even a full twenty-four since Rockwell’s murder. At least Craig wouldn’t have to live with her grief for long, Grif thought, tucking the papers away.

He looked up, squinting into a darkened hallway. Outside the home, the chalky white walls had gleamed beneath the full moon, the Spanish tile roof a red convex helmet above shuttered eyes. Inside, the dark wood floors creaked under Grif’s weight as he moved out of the foyer, pausing at the entry of a sunken living room with ceiling beams in matching black chocolate. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something both comforting and disturbing about the room. He liked it, though he knew he shouldn’t.

A chandelier sat in one corner, a cascade of translucent capiz shells falling nearly to the floor, and a floor screen divided the large room in half, though a giant free-form sofa was the real focus. Grif could almost see Craig lounging there, sable curls thrown back against the silk brocade pillows, creamy neck bowed in a revealing arch. But he shook himself of the image as soon as he imagined her smiling, tilting that jet-black head his way.

A boxy television anchored the north-facing bay windows, and Grif crossed to it. How about that? It was the same model he’d bought for Evie right before he’d died. She’d wanted the most modern available, of course. Said it was important to show that he was a thriving independent contractor. Success, she claimed, made people want to trust you.

Because the thought of Evie made him smile, he reached for the knob next to the television screen and gave it a hard twist to the right. Black-and-white static immediately filled the room, but the sound was off, which Grif gave thanks for a moment later when the static cleared and a woman’s image popped on the screen.

Grif jolted as Katherine Craig emerged from the same foyer he just had, dropping her bag and briefcase onto the sofa and kicking off her shoes. She disappeared into the room behind him, then emerged moments later with a tumbler in one hand, climbing the short steps with slumped shoulders, then turned in to a hallway.

The shot cut off there, and the next image was of Craig entering a darkened bedroom, but time had clearly passed. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, hair wet, tumbler empty. She was headed back into the kitchen with her glass when the shadow rose up behind her.

The first blow was just to stun. After all, rapists didn’t generally want to roll in blood. Craig lifted her right hand, as if to fend off the punch that had already come, but a second fist flew from nowhere and the crystal tumbler shattered. Strong fists ripped at that shining mane of glossy black hair, pulling Craig up even as she fell. Two attackers, Grif realized, as Katherine Craig disappeared beneath a relentless onslaught of grabbing hands and pummeling knees.

Grif turned off the television. He didn’t need to see it twice.

He didn’t go directly to the bedroom. He couldn’t, so soon after what he’d just seen. Instead he crossed to the fireplace, red brick lacquered white, and stared into an antique mirror with scrollwork that swirled up like gold smoke. Unable to meet his own reflected gaze, he studied the snapshots that’d been tucked haphazardly into the ornate frame, a casual juxtaposition that somehow worked.

He was immediately drawn to a woman who reminded him more than a little of Veronica Lake. She had a cascade of glossy blond hair that obscured one side of her face while revealing a long neck that looked translucent. The dim light gave it the blue-white aspect of a still-developing negative.

But it was the wide smile that caught Grif’s breath—the smile within a smile, he thought, touching the photo’s side—and that was how he recognized Katherine Craig. How many incarnations did she have? he wondered, eyes skimming photos, finding others. Her face was painted differently in all, her hair dyed in colors that defied nature’s rainbow. She was even clearly bewigged in some, but in each she still wore that trademark smile, a radiant blast that warmed even the sepia tones.

She had a lot of friends, Grif saw. His Evie had always said she was a man’s woman, that boys were simpler and made better sense. “Like solid corner pieces of the world’s puzzle,” she’d explained, and Grif couldn’t argue. But Craig was obviously a woman well liked by other women.

Moving on to the frames housed on the mantel, he honed in on one of Craig with a slim blond man, arms thrown about one another’s waists, both of them posing like Egyptian statues. They were close, he thought, though they didn’t give off the vibe of a couple.

Not that it mattered anymore.

Grif wasn’t surprised to find most of the photos also included Nicole Rockwell—my best friend is waiting outside—or that she, too, was a fan of varying appearances. One photo showed her with hair so red he could almost feel heat and scent flame. But by now she was tucked into the Tube in the Everlast, until she could forget enough to heal and move on to Paradise.

Turning away, Grif saw that the adjacent wall was lined from floor to ceiling in rough-hewn bookshelves, the top rows lined in hard covers, spines so cracked they looked like torture victims. The pulp fiction was piled up below that, tilting in dangerously angled stacks. Baskets of magazines filled the bottom shelf: hot rods in one, full-sleeved comics in another, and a name he recognized from the Everlast, Oprah. So that was the woman who kept so many souls from using a disadvantaged childhood as an excuse for poor behavior.

Even without another person in it, the house radiated life. Shaking his head, Grif stopped short of entering the kitchen. Cursing his mortal sight, he rubbed his eyes, but no. It was all still there. Excluding a gleaming white pedestal table perched in the corner, something pink had seemingly puked all over the room. The oven was pink, the stovetop. Even the icebox. Though larger, it was also the same basic layout as the kitchen in The Honeymooners. Grif snorted. After fifty years, and a dip in the forgetful pond, that memory had somehow stuck.

One of these days, Alice, he heard Ralph Kramden saying, and POW! Right to the moon!

He replaced Audrey Meadows’s face with Craig’s.

One of these days, Katherine. Pow! Right to the Everlast!

A covered patio sat on the other side of the room, and wincing, Grif slid the adjoining door open for some fresh air. The past and the present were mingling, joining forces to knock the breath out of him. Anas had said he had no place in the Everlast, but he wasn’t adapting so well to the Surface, either. He couldn’t tell if having been alive once before was more of a help or a hindrance.

It’s probably just these fragile new lungs, he told himself, sucking in a deep breath. Yet it was more of the same outside. Loungers with diamond frames cushioned in colorful patterns. A rolling patio cart adorned with pink flamingoes and a coal barbecue that’d been turned into a planter for succulents.

Life so vibrant against the still, dark night that it practically screamed.

You’re projecting, Grif told himself, and maybe he was. But the collision of old and new in this house unnerved him. It echoed eerily of the way he’d plowed head-on into Katherine Craig’s life, and his stomach roiled at the thought of all this vitality ending because of him. And it scared him how much he wanted to take it back.

Returning to the kitchen, needing this night over with, Grif almost missed the ripple. It slid behind him, like a breeze sneaking into the windless night. He whirled, squinting hard, but saw nothing. Yet the air purled like curtains parting to reveal a new act. As one of the younger Centurions, Jesse, liked to say, There’s a disturbance in the Force.

A ripple was a forward thrust, the gears of the Universe picking up speed as fate shifted onto a one-way street toward inevitable conclusion. For Grif, and for Craig, it meant there was no stopping what would happen here tonight. It had, in some sense, already happened. So he wasn’t surprised at the way the sliding door vibrated when he touched it, sending out an eddying pulse—one attached to everything else in the world.

This was violence’s point of entry.

Grif stared at the door. He had no wings, no celestial shields or weapons to prevent the attack. Just the ability to open doors and lose himself inside. But he relocked the door anyway. He’d already made it easy enough for the world to rob Katherine Craig of her smiles.

Finally, he moved down the darkened hallway, and into the back of the house, where he found himself having to choose between rooms. He turned right, into the one with the largest doors, and didn’t even need the pulsing force of fate to let him know this was where Craig would die. The bed was made, pristine in the burgeoning moonlight, but Grif could make out the plasma ringing it like an etheric chalk outline.

You gotta watch this one, Griffin … and feel the death as if it were your own.

Turning, Grif searched for the best place to do that, deciding quickly on the mirrored folding screen that turned the room’s left corner into a Hollywood boudoir. It was a tight fit but he could stand behind it unseen. Lie down, too, because that’s what he needed just now.

Sinking to his knees, Grif simply tilted over to drop his forehead to the floor. Yet when he closed his eyes he saw the television screen again, and Craig’s mouth, wide with silent cries as her battered body disappeared into a vortex that narrowed and shrunk, until only a diminishing star remained, centered in his mind. It, too, finally disappeared.

Pow, Katherine! Right to the moon.

CHAPTER SIX

The wind had picked up by the time Kit arrived home, and for the millionth time she wished she’d gotten her garage door fixed. The outdoor carport was a charming architectural detail, and one of the distinctive mid-century features that had drawn her to the sprawling ranch house in the first place. Yet when the wind was spitting at you and your best friend was dead, you wanted a bit more protection than four beams and a wooden roof afforded.

I’ll start a fire, she thought, holding her swing coat tight as she rushed to the front door. Something to warm her, keep her company, and burn away the night. Shoving her key into the giant teal door, she wondered if she should have accepted Marin’s offer to stay in her cozy stacked town house, or at least returned one of the dozens of calls from friends offering to come over. Her father had always said Kit was too independent. That a friendly nature and curious mind was well and fine, but truly living required being known by another soul. In the years after her mother died he’d lamented not giving Kit a sibling, though the wish was likely as much for him as it was for her.

At any rate, the reality of being alone had all seemed more distant in the day. For one thing, she was used to it. For another, a companion had seemed unnecessary fuel when her body still burned at the core, waiting to ignite. But now, with the wind blowing icicles through her veins, it felt like she, too, was in the grave. All her nuclear energy had been snuffed like a match between the night’s icy fingers.

A shower would help, Kit thought, shivering. Some whiskey. That fire to watch over her until light appeared again. That was a start.

Kit punched in her code, silencing the alarm before dumping her bag and briefcase on the sofa. Kicking off her ballerina flats, she left the lights off and headed straight for the kitchen. She flipped on the utility light hovering over the gold drink caddy along the right wall, which she’d salvaged from the Dunes right before the city blew the old girl up. Hotel estate sales, now mostly a thing of the past, were the best. Yet the decanter holding the scotch and the full set of crystal tumblers had been her mother’s, a garage sale find from the summer before she’d died. It was the only glassware Kit drank from when she was alone.

She poured two fingers, thought a moment, then poured a third, already sipping as she headed back into the living room. Yet something caused her to pause at the doorway. Glass halfway to her mouth, she turned back to face the wall of sliding glass. Outside, the wind roared, a tornado in an inky vacuum. She crossed to the door slowly, disconcerted but ultimately uninterested in the disheveled woman reflected back at her, then pressed her forehead against the cold pane so the room behind her disappeared. For all the movement outside—branches swaying, bushes ricocheting, the water eddying in the pool—there was no life. Who would venture out on a night like this, anyway?

So why did she have the feeling of being watched?

Because you are surrounded by the dead, she told herself, nose pressed against the glass. Your dead mother’s drink, your dead father’s voice, your dead friend’s camera. The world might be raging outside, but the inside of her home was a crypt, and Kit felt sealed up by all the loss.

Without using her hands, she pushed back from the sturdy glass door, her image again superimposing itself on the chaos outside. It was rare that she didn’t care what she looked like. Kit believed a person’s way of moving about in the world spoke volumes about them, and to her it was an art.

But she didn’t judge herself tonight. Forget the curve of her hips, a too-wide flare in a heroin-chic world. Forget even the clothes that marked her as a devoted lover of another era. Tonight she was the odd one out because of one thing alone: she was still breathing. She was still alive.

That was a relief, right? So why, as she stood there, exhausted and alone, was she thinking that it’d be nice if the wind could reach inside her homey tomb and whisk her away as well?

Living requires being known by another soul.

So why the hell was she here? Because the woman who’d known her best was dead, and the man she’d stupidly wed didn’t even know how to live. And for all her big talk about the ability of the press to change lives, and the power of living deliberately to give meaning to one’s own, Kit was still standing here alone.

Take away this sad woman across from me, she found herself thinking, focusing on her dark, wind-whipped eyes. Put her in a different place entirely. Please … just make her disappear.

The first thing Grif noted as Katherine Craig broached the room was the shadows under her eyes. He could see her clearly, though he was altogether invisible to her from behind the folding screen. Plasma moved tellingly behind her in a faint shimmer of silver-gray that threaded the room, inching her way. Despite that, all he could focus on were those telling circles, dark as bruises above the apples of her cheeks, as if the day had gone and punched her square. Then his gaze flickered, and he caught a real movement behind her.

And here comes tonight’s knockout blow.

But first, the shower. It gave the intruders, which soon materialized as men, time to position themselves in the hallway, not that time was a factor anymore. They’d entered the home almost as soon as Craig left the kitchen. Grif had felt the invasion like a worm burrowing under his flesh. This woman was already dead, he thought, even as she disappeared under the water.

Nervous, or perhaps just impatient, one of the men stepped forward as if testing the room. Grif jolted. It was the blond he’d seen through the gas station’s security camera, the one who’d taken Craig’s notebook after Rockwell was murdered. He looked to be in his forties, older than Grif if you didn’t count death years, but still strong enough that muscles fought against his turtleneck as he moved.

There was a hiss from the hallway, his partner cursing, and a gloved hand appeared, gesturing him back. Instead, the blond slid along the wall in total silence, almost like he was wandering, to disappear in the darkness of the corner opposite Grif. There was nothing after that, and he knew the rest was already planned. The two men were like sparring partners, waiting to come together at the clang of the bell.

Grif felt a headache growing behind his eyes, and forced himself to relax his clenched jaw. He tried to control his breathing, but felt like he was waiting for a bell, too. He needed a corner man to talk him down, help him shake it out, get his head right. If he could just talk to Sarge, he could make him see that this wasn’t right. Not for Grif. Not for the woman, Craig, either.

And what about these men? Why couldn’t someone talk sense into them? That was one thing Grif had never been able to wrap his gray matter around, crimes against women. To him, it was like lifting a babe from the carriage and smashing its melon on the sidewalk. Easy destruction, just for the sake of it.

And forget about premeditated violence, the unstoppable train that was just minutes away from Craig’s station. Even a random, careless act—even bad luck—was too much for most females to handle. After all, wasn’t the way Grif had bumped into Craig’s life random and careless?

But it was physiology that was really at fault. Even the big girls were easy to put down. Craig wasn’t big or small, but right in the middle where a woman should be. She was like that roller coaster he’d loved at Coney Island as a kid, made up of long slopes and wide curves, built for thrills. Something wild, he thought, but also something that made a man just want to let go.

You’d think that kind of natural wonder would engender a sort of awe in all men, but some were the moral equivalent of a smoker’s cough. They were a black noise let loose in the world, a cloud heralding illness and death. The two men entering this room were like that. Walking cancer. Destruction, just for the sake of it.

The shower droned on. He glanced down at the wristwatch Evie had given him on their second anniversary, latching on to the memory for distraction. He remembered the way she’d bitten that sweet lower lip of hers, watching him unwrap it, though she’d waited until it was fastened around his wrist to tell him it was a knock-off. Like he cared. Point was, Evie had been thinking of him even though he hadn’t exactly hung the moon for her in the previous twenty-four months, and he was both touched and secretly relieved that she still celebrated being his wife. That she still believed in him.

So he accepted the watch, and wore it religiously, never telling her he thought timepieces were silly affectations, never saying that he believed nothing really started until a person got there anyway.

But everyone’s here now, he thought wryly, lifting his head as the shower snapped off. At least for fourteen minutes longer.

You’re going to bring that poor girl’s soul home. You’re going to offer her guidance.

But I don’t want to, he found himself thinking as the plasma moved like a panther in the air. It peeled away from the hallway, padding silently through the bedroom and into the bathroom.

Propping one creamy, pale leg at a time on the vanity stool, Craig began toweling off. The limbs appeared disembodied from where he stood, but the blond cancer-man could see everything from his corner, and Grif knew he’d be the one to add violation to death.

I didn’t cause this, he almost said aloud, and realized desperation had somehow turned the thought into a prayer.

Nicole Rockwell did this, he said silently to whomever was listening. Frank did this, because he was allowing it.

God did it.

There was no reprimand. As with any prayer, no answer at all. Instead, the wind just continued howling outside, while another minute dropped away within.

Bricks, thought Grif, squeezing his eyes shut. Twelve minutes, and this will all go away.

Time enough to change your mind, Sarge, he thought, feeling panic rise, making itself known as an ache in his chest.

A white robe whirled and was wrapped tight. Grif’s boxing robe had always been white, too. He’d loved the feel of it, the scent of bleach against the stiff terry-cloth. Not that it ever stayed white for long.

Plasma swirled, wrapping around Craig’s legs like shackles as she rubbed her hair dry. Grif wanted to close his eyes.

Then she stepped into the room. The shower had relaxed her, and the booze piggybacked her fatigue so that her empty tumbler hung from two fingertips. But instinct—prey’s or woman’s—had her suddenly stiffening. She whirled, eyes wide, but the cancer-man in the hallway, faceless beneath a ski mask, was already on her. Grif had already seen this on the TV, but the sound hadn’t been turned up then. His death senses were firing like rockets now, and Craig’s knifed gasp jolted him. The slap of flesh was a shot fired. The man’s growl was feral as he pounced.

Craig strained forward, but it was useless, and only had her robe falling wide. She turned instinctively to close it, and spotted the blond man already reaching for her flesh. But Craig—Grif’s Take, his case, the woman—looked away from that oncoming train for a split second, and, with a mixture of shock and horror, focused on him.

She screamed, and this time it didn’t sound like static from a television. It sounded like a woman. It sounded like his Evie.

It sounded like a bell ringing, calling him from his corner.

Grif rocketed forward, clambering over the bed like he was bounding the ropes. As he entered the ring, he thought he heard an announcer’s voice in the static buzz of adrenaline coursing in his veins. It was an audience’s far-off roar, and it swelled when Grif rounded the S-curve of Craig’s white, naked hip and caught the man holding her, hard in his ribs. The blond stuttered in surprise, allowing a backward step that gave Grif space to pivot, just as the hallway man shoved Craig to the ground.

Rage had him going for the man’s throat. There was no training driving him now; the rust of death-years had softened the one-two, one-two-three-four of his youth into an uncontrolled flurry, but Grif knew just what to do when he caught the chin. He might not have wings, but he still had fists.

Fear entered the hallway man’s eyes, but then Grif connected … and the swirling plasma parted like the Red Sea.

Sure, a part of Grif still knew he was wearing a watch with marching minutes, that fate wouldn’t allow a knockout blow. But something had snapped inside him, that same howling something the Everlast had failed to heal, and he half-believed that if he punched hard enough—if he could just send his award-winning, no-holds-barred southpaw hook directly through the back of the cancer-man’s no-good skull—he could prevent what was already done. He could turn his timepiece into a stopwatch. He could halt Craig’s death.

The murderer’s feet caught air, out for the count before he hit the wall. Grif pivoted through the motion and turned, pulling back one of his mitts and letting loose a fist that wiped the What the fuck? right off the blond rapist’s face. The blow struck home, and Grif was suddenly there. Solid on the rock, square on the Surface, sure-footed in the mud, knuckles singing, breathing deep of the polluted air.

The awareness cost him. A fist came out of nowhere to deaden his nose, and he gagged as blood filled his mouth. The blond man loomed for a moment, but then there was a flash, a white tide rolling his attacker to the other side of the room.

Not a tide, Grif thought, staggering. A different kind of natural wonder. He broke through the shock of tasting his own blood just in time. Pushing Craig aside, he took the blow meant for her, and bled some more, but it didn’t matter. The blond was suddenly gone, reduced to a shadow dragging his sparring partner from the room. Grif tripped on his own legs before realizing he didn’t need to follow. The air was curiously cancer-free. It was also clear of silvery-white plasma, naked but for shadows that loomed in black and grays.

So Grif just bled. Chest heaving, stinging knuckles bunched on his knees, breath straining in lungs that creaked, he squinted at his watch. Then he looked back up at Craig, who stared back at him with open-mouthed horror.

“Ten seventeen,” he said, and offered her what had to be an unsettling, bloody smile. But unbelievably, miraculously, time had just proven his long-held theory right.

Nothing really started until a person got there, anyway.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kit wrote about crime, imagined it, was outraged by it, but up until now it was something that happened around her, not to her. Sure, the threat of attack was a reality for any urban woman. Someone stronger and larger than you could always turn on a whim, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. But then life could turn on you like that, too.

Yet knowing it wasn’t the same as experiencing it. That was probably why shock was settling in now, why she’d begun shaking, and why she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. She was in the bedroom she loved, yet the objects she’d so carefully collected suddenly looked like props on a Hollywood set. Vibrant and pretty enough, but without any real value or substance.

And while she was wearing her favorite cream robe, soft as snow, it now sported an unfamiliar tear in it that almost looked obscene. And with the wet blood of a total stranger staining its hem, it was. It was.

And don’t forget this, she thought, touching her lower lip, already growing fat. But her fingertips were scented with the foreign man, and she jerked her hand away, and began shaking harder.

Kit looked around at her unfamiliar room, her gaze finally landing on the most unfamiliar thing of all.

“Who are you?” she asked the man hunched on the floor.

“Griffin Shaw. I’m here to …”

She watched him struggle, as if he didn’t actually know why he was there.

“I’m here to help,” he finally said, then winced.

“How did you get in my home?” she said. Whose voice is that? It was brittle and half-swallowed. Hard and meek at the same time. One more thing she didn’t recognize.

Her defensiveness seemed to fortify the man named Shaw. Slowly, he rose to his feet. “Just be glad I did.”

She was. She studied him, the rumpled roomy suit, the tightly razored pomp. His hair was dusky, a light brown that’d probably faded from the cool ginger of his childhood. Kit loved ginger hair. It put her in mind of blue skies and green hills and made her fantasize about French-kissing young, rebellious English princes on imaginary Welsh vacations. Yet this man could bulldoze fantasies with one hard look alone.

“They were going to kill me.”

It was another foreign thought, and something else that didn’t belong in her home. In fact, she hadn’t even known she was going to say it until it was out of her mouth. Shaw lifted the Mies van der Rohe chair that’d toppled when her attacker—his? theirs?—had fled. He sat with a groan, but kept that hard gaze on her.

“Yes,” he said, matter-of-factly, and the confirmation was a gut-punch. Kit lowered her head, and shook even harder. “Ever see either of those men before?”

“No.”

“No idea who they were?”

Kit shook her head, then realized she was usually the one asking the questions, and wondered why she wasn’t doing so now. She looked up, and out came that foreign voice. “Are you some sort of cop or something? A detective?”

Again, that hesitation, a genuine frown marring his brow. “I’m a P.I.”

“Who hired you?”

“I’m here because of Rockwell,” he said, both answering the question and not.

“Nic?” The strange voice broke on her friend’s name, and the tears finally came. Shivering, she pulled her savaged robe tight, then realized the man had moved toward her uncertainly, like he wanted to comfort her but knew he didn’t have the right. She looked at him again.

“There’s something familiar about you,” she said, sniffling. He edged back again in response, leaning into shadows that reached out to obscure his features. Darkness bent over him in a protective arch, almost like wings jutting from his back …

Squeezing her eyes, Kit shook her head to clear her vision. She was definitely in shock.

“’Course there is,” he said gruffly. “I’m the guy who just saved your life.”

She wiped her face. “Something else.”

Shaw jerked his chin at her. “Have another drink.”

“I’m not drunk,” she said, and was happy to hear her voice had some snap back.

“No, I mean it. Have another drink. You’re shaking like a leaf.” He tilted his head. “I don’t feel so hot, either.”

Kit had been so worried about herself—not to mention scared and confused—that she’d momentarily forgotten he’d been assaulted, too. “Oh, geez. Are you hurt?” she asked, moving toward him.

He jerked back, and his wings flared. Kit gasped, blinked, but they were just shadows again, surrounding that craggy face, and eyes that knew so much they gave away nothing. Kit shook her head again, and swayed.

“Whoa there.”

She felt a steadying hand on her arm. Warm. Real.

Gentle.

“I’m sorry. I thought I saw …” How was she supposed to say, while still sounding sane, that she thought she’d seen wings, with feathers the length of her forearm, rising from his back like black smoke? “Nothing.”

“You’re falling asleep on your feet.”

Her lids jerked open. She was. “Pills. I took a couple to relax. I just wanted to … go away.”

That would explain the hallucinations, Kit thought. Pills plus whiskey plus near-death equaled wings. What an equation.

“Come on,” Shaw coaxed, leading her to her bed. “Let’s get you settled into this pastry puff.”

“No. We gotta get out of here. They might …”

“They won’t be back tonight.”

“How do you know?” Kit asked as her head found the pillow, amazed by his certainty, amazed that anyone could be certain of anything after today.

“I can tell,” he said as he gathered the covers around her, and maybe he could. Maybe men who popped up to protect strange women could sense danger in a way others couldn’t. Maybe he’d tracked so many predators as a P.I. that he had an instinct for them.

Still, she sat back up. “We need to call the cops. I have a friend there …”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said shortly, and waved a hand before her face, as if smoothing out her frown. Relief flooded Kit in an almost dizzying rush, and she fell back, nodding.

Kit wondered how many women he’d rescued since becoming a private investigator, but what came out was “I don’t want to be alone.”

The stranger who’d saved her, who looked familiar but wasn’t, who seemed as suspicious of her as she did of him, hesitated. Then he leaned forward, tucked the covers up to her chin, same as her father used to do when she was young, and stared down at her with enough calm for them both. “I will watch over you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and this time hers was a different strange voice, not brittle but slurred. Neither hard nor meek. A voice that was the sum of the equation of all the day’s events.

The man, Shaw, leaned back, disappearing again into the shadows. Where he belongs, Kit thought. Where he can evaporate like he was never here at all.

Her eyes fluttered shut, closing out even the shadows, but his reply chased her into sleep. “Least I could do.”

What the hell was he doing?

Grif leaned back in the leather chair, the question dogging him for the hundredth time that night. Well, he was watching a physically and emotionally beaten woman sleep, and had been for hours, just as he’d promised. Unwilling to entertain any more of his own dreams, he was also fighting off his own mortal need for rest. But more than all of that, the real question was, what the hell had he done?

I’m here to help. That’s what he’d told Craig, which was ironic since it was the same thing he always said. I’m here to help.

Instead he’d hoo-dooed her into not calling the cops, waving his hand before her like a second-rate Houdini just to buy himself time to think. Because Katherine Craig was alive. She still had flesh and breath, which she’d likely be thankful for when she woke, but the point was that she shouldn’t ever wake again.

Fate, he was willing to bet, was pissed.

But the ripple had smoothed out, and the plasma dogging the woman had disappeared. None of his celestial senses picked up a hint of looming death, and even his headache had dulled. And it had all happened at the moment Craig was scheduled to die but didn’t.

Pulling out his Luckies, Grif lit a stick and noted his scraped knuckles with odd fascination. Flexing, he wondered what it meant that they were both still alive.

“Means you’re in deep with Sarge, that’s what,” he muttered, slumping on the chair in Craig’s bedroom. The lack of communication alone told him that much.

But Sarge had dumped him back on the mud to do a job no soul should have to shoulder. And now that Grif had screwed up his case, what was the celestial response? Silence … with the additional bonus of memory and emotion to cement him to the Surface. Now it looked like he was stuck here until Sarge saw fit to reclaim him.

They’ll probably send another Centurion to Take her, Grif thought. Maybe even her Guardian, a Pure. Yet, despite it all—screwing up Craig’s life and death, along with the pain of breathing and remembering—he didn’t regret beating off those men. Craig had been so outnumbered, so helpless, and literally naked, that it seemed unnatural not to help. He couldn’t stand by and watch a woman get beaten, raped, murdered. He’d rather be dead.

“I thought for a moment that it had all been a dream.”

Grif jolted and, looking over, knew exactly how she felt. Katherine Craig sat up, the covers slipping down the upper half of her body to reveal her bare neck and one smooth shoulder, the skin so flawless it was like a curvy pail of warm, fresh milk. He swallowed hard, keeping his gaze away from the flare of her hip and breasts as she pulled her robe tight, but it was like trying to keep his eyes off the hills framing a sunrise. After all, it was so much more of an event when there was something majestic supporting it.

Yet Craig’s eyes weren’t bright with dawn. The shadows that’d been beneath them the night before were now deep half-moons, made even darker with knowledge. Oddly, coupled with the cascade of rumpled raven hair and her round bare face, it made her look impossibly young.

“Did you sleep?” she asked, the very question eliciting a yawn. It felt strange. He hadn’t been tired in decades. Grif shook his head, putting out his cigarette in a white ceramic vase. Craig’s shadowed eyes narrowed at the movement, but she didn’t chide him.

“Coffee?” she asked instead, pushing back the covers.

“Please.” His voice was as musty with disuse as his manners. He stood, and so did she, which was how they found themselves uncomfortably close. It was odd, Grif thought. He knew what she looked like close to death, close to naked, close to him … yet didn’t really know her at all.

“Excuse me,” she said, lowering her head and skirting him. Grif shoved his hands in his pockets, allowing distance between them as he followed her from the room.

The house looked fresh-scrubbed in the early morning, unfiltered light falling over the dark wood floor like the kiss of a veil. The furniture was even more lacy and feminine glowing with the dawn, and the soft surroundings seemed to revitalize Craig. Until she rounded the corner.

There she saw the kitchen’s sliding glass door, marginally ajar, which put a hitch in her step and breath. Cursing himself for not closing it before, Grif crossed to it and locked it shut. By the time he turned around, she was already standing with her back to him, stiff in front of the coffee pot. Though there was no mistaking its use, it was the one thing in the room he didn’t recognize from his time on the mud. It looked like it belonged on a rocket ship. Almost immediately the thing began to froth and foam, and Grif’s hands were curled around a hot cup in only a few moments more.

So there had been some improvements with the onset of the twenty-first century, he thought, sipping his first decent cup of coffee in fifty years. It was smooth and strong, black and warm, and it made him wonder what else he’d been missing. He’d learned a lot after incubation, things a Centurion needed to know when visiting the Surface, including the objects surrounding his Takes. Cars were different, phones were different, and information flowed through the air now. The Internet. That had been the hardest for him to muscle into his mind.

But many details were considered too small and mundane for the Centurions’ purposes. They tapped the mud too briefly for things like newfangled coffee-makers to matter. Instant coffee that tasted like a wet dream was apparently one of them.

Craig joined him at the white pedestal table, where he’d positioned himself in the corner, an effort to appear unthreatening. Craig shifted uncomfortably anyway, pulling her robe tight.

“How do you feel?” It was a question Grif never asked … though when you met someone right after a violent death, it wasn’t usually necessary.

She stared. “Like my best friend was murdered, I was attacked, and there’s a strange man drinking my coffee in my house.”

Grif sighed. Served him right for asking. And it had him looking again at the woman across from him, vulnerable in her robe and bare face and mortal body. Strong in her gaze, mind, and will to live.

“How about I ask the questions for now?” she went on, and one slim brow lifted high.

He inclined his head, and slumped into his corner chair. “You’re the reporter.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Toldja.” He pointed to himself. “P.I.”

She tilted her head. “But you never said who hired you.”

Yep, she was a strong one. Sharp, too. “Someone interested in the Rockwell case.”

“She wasn’t a case to me. She was a friend.”

“Probably why she left you this.” He threw her notebook on the table between them. He’d discovered it in the corner where he’d felled the blond man the night before. Even if Grif hadn’t seen the man stealing the journal on the gas-station security cam, this would have been proof positive that he was both girls’ killer.

Or would have been, if not for Grif.

Recognizing it, Craig let her cup clatter to the table, sloshing caffeinated gold across the shiny top. The spill looked like one of those Rorschach tests Grif’d had to take when entering the army. He wondered what it said about him that this one resembled a black angel carrying an enormous scythe.

“I found it on the floor.” He jerked his chin. “Open it to the last entry.”

She did, immediately. It was interesting, Grif thought, the way curiosity wiped away her fatigue. Maybe that was the spine holding her up, the wire threading her resolve. Whatever it was, it sparked the moment she spotted it, the name Rockwell had circled when Grif had allowed her to re-dress for the Everlast.

“This is why they took my notebook!” She looked up, met Grif’s gaze, then back down again. “Oh, Nic! You’re so smart.”

“So smart she almost got you killed.”

Not that he could talk.

Kit shook her head, not listening. “We were working on a story. She was meeting with someone who could provide us information when she was killed.”

“What kind of information?”

“Powerful men in compromising positions,” she said cryptically. It reminded him of Frank.

“You should go to the police.”

“You said you were going to call the police.”

Grif shrugged. “You fell asleep before telling me your cop friend’s name.”

Her eyes narrowed, though the notebook still had her attention. “I gave him this list yesterday. But this narrows it down to one.”

Grif thought of the plasma seeping into her home, curling about her flesh. “I’m sorry to break it to you, but your friend can’t help you. You have to run.”

“What?” She looked up, face wide with shock.

“Get out of town,” he said shortly. “Change your name. You got money?”

“Yes.”

“Use it. Buy yourself a new identity. Invent a new life.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, leaning over the table that wired strength back. “I’m not the one who committed a crime. I didn’t kill anyone. I stumbled onto a story, followed a source, and have clearly found something that’s more than what it seems. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Don’t matter, Katherine—”

“Kit.”

“What?”

“My name is Kit. Only my family calls me Katherine.”

Grif tapped out a smoke. “They could call you Howdy Doody for all I care. You’re still marked for death.”

She fell back at that, and Grif sighed. Too harsh. And too knowing. But he needed her to wise up, and fast. “I’m talking about the squiggly your friend drew in that notebook. Whoever killed her, whoever attacked you, saw it. It made you a target.”

“Then there’s something to it.” She lifted her chin.

“Look, I’ve seen this before. You want to change your future? You gotta change it now. In this case, alter everything about yourself.” The memory of the dooming plasma circling her ankles revisited him. It was gone for now, but he imagined it roaming outside like a wolf, searching for a way back in.

But Kit shook her head. “My life is here.”

He shrugged. “Not much longer.”

“That a threat, Mr. Shaw?”

“It’s Grif,” he said, slumping. “Only my family called me Mr. Shaw.”

“Cute.” She made a face, then crossed her arms. “But I’m not leaving. I’m going to get answers for Nic. I need to find out who killed her, why, and I’m going to make them pay for my busted door. Nobody enters my house without invitation,” she said, and looked pointedly at him.

Grif didn’t want to look impressed, but it was hard with her staring him down, tough and determined-looking. Like a lion-tamer. Like she’d said … cute.

“Guess I’ll stick around then, too,” he finally said, lifting his cup. He tried to sound spontaneous, but it was a decision he’d come to in the deep, lonely night. He couldn’t save her just to allow her to die later.

“I don’t even know you,” she snapped, as if wielding a whip.

“You didn’t know me last night, either. And you still don’t know who attacked you.”

She frowned. “You think they’ll be back?”

“You think they’ve left?” he said, and she winced again. Best to be straight, though. She needed facts. Facts were bricks. Maybe she could build herself a wall with them, too, one tall and wide and strong enough to keep her alive when he was gone. Knowing Sarge, that would be soon.

Which brought him to the other thing he’d decided in the long hours where no one on either the Surface or in the skies had been talking to him. Sarge and company had stripped him of his celestial powers, leaving him only with the tools to sense impending death. They’d dumped him here as a freak—neither Centurion nor mortal—with holes in his memory and orders to watch a fated murder.

But Grif had altered fate, and not with wings, but fists. With the part of him that had free will. The part that was human.

So Grif had decided to block out his death senses, temporarily ignore his angelic side, and use whatever remaining time he had on this mudflat to take care of a little business. A murder that had been haunting him for decades.

“Ah, here comes the catch,” Kit said, studying his face.

“No catch. I just need help with an old case I’m trying to solve. A double murder.”

“And?”

“And you’re a reporter.” And the case was so cold it had frostbite. It would be hard enough for him to get records, reports, and access to eyewitness accounts with no resources or contacts. But with all the newfangled electronics, it was damned near impossible. Still, as long as he was camping out on the mud, why not take a look?

“And you’re a hardened P.I.,” she replied coolly. “Why don’t you lone-wolf your way to the answer?”

“Because it happened here. In Vegas. And I’ve been away a little while.” He showed teeth as he answered, causing fear to move behind her gaze. Good. She should be a little afraid. “Besides, I need some help getting around.”

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