The Taken (25 page)

“Chambers can afford it,” Kit murmured, stepping over a suspiciously dark pile. These shoes had taken her from a gala to a strip club to a horse ranch in one night. One thing was sure, Griffin Shaw got around.

Yeah, and he thinks he has wings to do it. Kit rolled her eyes, but stilled when Grif stiffened, palm tensing over her own. “What was that?”

“City boy,” Kit whispered, pulling him forward. “Don’t you know a horse when you hear one?”

But the noise sounded again, and this time it drew out like a long, low foghorn pushing its way through a thick mist.

Holding her a little tighter, Grif started again toward the barn.

The whitewashed stables were pristine and impressive beneath the full beat of the day’s sun, but ghostly in moonbeams that sliced through the clouded night.

“Paul?” Kit called out, earning a glare from Grif, but the door wasn’t only unlocked, it was slightly ajar. Her eyes quickly acclimated due to a light in the long room’s farthest corner. Given the sounds, it seemed a groomsman or trainer was still working there. Maybe a horse was ill or giving birth. The barn’s center was covered by a thick rubber matting that absorbed the clack of Kit’s heels as they walked, but that only heightened her sense of heading into an abyss.

“Get behind me.” Grif’s voice was low and tight as they advanced past the pine-paneled stalls.

“The breezeway doors are open,” she whispered, recalling that the exercise yard was on the other side. All she saw was a sliver of moonlight peering inside like a curious visitor. Meanwhile, the dark figures moving through the stable windows looked like shadows shifting in another world.

“What is that smell?” she asked as they rounded the corner. Then her gut—holding her nerves, which were holding her heart—registered the visual like a punch. It also registered the scent as fresh blood.

“What is . . . ?” she tried to say, but her voice was airy with the loss of breath.

The body was strung up along the front of a giant treadmill, a way to exercise the horses when the Vegas heat grew too extreme. She recognized that much. She tried to add, “Who is . . . ?” but she knew that, too. After all, she’d seen Paul only hours before, and his face—as always—was pristine. So instead of asking questions with unfathomable answers, her mind locked onto the one fact she could actually grasp.

I gave him that watch.

Then she screamed.

Next thing, Grif’s hands were under her arms, his voice insistent but nonsensical in her ear, his breath rising and falling, it seemed, for them both. He pushed her back around the corner, but it was too late. Kit had seen the extended reins holding Paul’s arms wide, a second pair securing his legs against the giant treadmill. An iron bit pulled his mouth into a macabre grin, and a bloodied whip lay abandoned in the pool of blood at his feet.

But the shallow movement of his tattered chest told her he was still alive.

“Get your phone,” Grif was saying. “Call the police.”

But then the sound came again, slipping around the corner to steal her focus, and the coolness fled the air as the world blurred. The horse in the nearest stall stomped its displeasure.

No, I just saw him. He’s at a party. He’s with a girl . . .

Grif’s arm moved around her waist. Nearness and support. She would have liked that . . . except that it meant that what she’d just seen was true. That it’d happened. That, like Nic, Paul was also dead.

Almost dead.

I have to call the police, I have to call, I have to . . .

But she couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she move?

And then, suddenly, she was at her car. Grif was rummaging in her purse; wide, strong fingers jerking at the delicate cloth. He found the phone, dialed, then he took her face in his wide, warm hands.

“Look at me.” His hands were so hot they almost burned her cheeks, and she felt fevered as she stared into his face. “I’ll take care of this. Get in the car. Stay warm. I’ll need to see if I can . . .”

Help, he was going to say. He was going back in there to help Paul.

Kit nodded, a motion that seemed to unlock her teeth. They began an uncontrollable chatter.

“Help will be here soon, and we’ll show them the text. It’ll all be . . .”

He was going to say “okay.” She saw the words forming . . . and saw them melt away. That’s when the thought that’d been chasing her since Nic’s death finally caught up, and when it hit her, it wrapped its unrelenting grip around her heart, and began to squeeze.

It was never going to be okay again.

Chapter Eighteen

P
aul died before the cops even arrived. But the first police officer on the scene, Dennis, was an obvious friend, and he folded Kit into his body like he was the one with wings. He also told Kit what Grif couldn’t, that it was all going to be okay, and snapped at his partner, a Detective Hitchens, telling him to take a walk, though he glanced at Grif when he said it. Grif nodded once, then hung back as Dennis swung Kit around. She needed an old friend right now, not him. He’d let the officer get her settled, warm her up, and calm her down, then rejoin them later.

But the wail that Kit had let out upon seeing Paul’s mutilated body followed him as he disappeared back into the dark. It’d sounded brittle and ruined, like something had fractured inside of the woman. And while she might not yet be able to accept her ex-husband’s death, Grif knew she was already blaming herself for it.

I’ll take care of this
. That’s what he’d told Kit before calling the cops . . . but he hadn’t fulfilled the promise yet, and he could at least try that. Because Paul’s death, he knew, lay on his shoulders, not Kit’s.

So, hugging the high property wall, he surveyed the white brick to see if there was an easy point of entry to return to the barn. His impromptu plan was to hop it and approach from the back. If Paul’s charming personality held true to form, his Centurion might still be arguing with him over his passage into the Everlast. It sometimes happened, even when the newly deceased wasn’t a total heel.

Grif found a delivery gate about a third of the way along the wall, but it was padlocked, and the lawn beyond it dark. Neither deterred Grif, and he crossed the sprawling estate in a silence so absolute even the horses couldn’t hear him. From this angle he could see what he’d missed before. A carriage house sat only yards away, white and pristine under the full moon. That’s where he’d drag a reluctant soul if he couldn’t convince it to leave before the police came. Some Centurions let the souls squat near their own remains while the police and medical examiners did their thing, but he’d found the medical jargon and black humor either depressed or angered the dead. So he liked to draw them away, if possible.

Yet his approach to the carriage house stalled when a throat was cleared directly behind him. It was the cop who’d been eyeing Kit and him from the patrol car, the one Dennis had called Hitchens.

“Going somewhere?” The steel-lined voice belied the thumbs tucked casually in his front pockets.

“I’m with Kit,” Grif tried, wondering if her friendship with Dennis extended to his partner.

Those thumbs twitched and Grif knew that it didn’t. “I know.”

Since Hitchens had the look of someone who wanted a chase, Grif joined the man on the darkened lawn, pulled out his Luckies, and let one flare in the dark.

Hitchens decided to chase anyway.

“We’ve been keeping tabs on that weirdo. She was present at the scene of a murder. Two, now.” He raised his dark brows like he expected Grif to elaborate.
In the billiards room, with the candlestick
 . . .

“She wasn’t present here.”

“She is now.”

“Right.” Grif nodded, as if mulling that over. “Well, keep up the good work, Detective.”

Then he headed toward the barn.

“You can’t go in there,” Hitchens called after him.

Grif turned and looked at him like he was crazy. “Why would I want to go in there? There’s a dead body in there.”

But their voices would have driven away any Centurion in the carriage house, even if Paul had to be dragged kicking and cursing into the Everlast. On to Plan C. Slowly, staring into the bushes and night-shrouded trees, Grif headed to the rear of the barn, well clear of the chaos.

“What are you doing?” Hitchens wasn’t going to let up, which was fine. Grif hadn’t expected him to.

“Looking.”

“For?”

“Doves.”

“Doves?”

He spared the man a glance. “You know, little birdies? Feathered symbols of peace and purity.”

Hitchens’s expression soured further.

Grif almost smiled. “Mourning doves in particular, though a white one will do in a pinch.”

Hitchens placed his hands on his hips. “It’s the dead of night at the ass-end of winter.”

“I know,” Grif replied, and turned back to the nearby bushes. “Should make ’em very easy to spot.”

Okay, so he was just messing with the guy now. Yet Guardians didn’t exactly play it straight, either. Most of the angels in that tribe appeared to their assigned mortal soul in the form of those sweet, winged messengers of peace, thus most people couldn’t spot the celestial heralds if one dropped a turd on their heads. Grif, though, knew how to look. If a Guardian had been here, then Paul Raggio’s death had been preventable. If not, that meant it was long predestined that he would die today, and Grif wouldn’t be held accountable.

So he worked his way across the lawn, the individual blades still illuminated by the remaining angelic strength in his cornea. He scoured the ragweed and underbrush while Hitchens followed a short distance behind. “See one yet?”

“Nope,” Grif said, ignoring the man’s scorn.

“And what does that mean, Sherlock?”

Grif turned so abruptly he actually startled the man, who’d gotten too close. Hitchens took a large step back, covering the uncertainty in the gesture by placing his hands on his hips. Grif, though, stepped forward and stared him straight in the eye. “It means the heavens are closed. It means the angels have abandoned mortals to our folly. It means Raggio doesn’t get a fast pass through the Pearly Gates.”

“That right?” Hitchens gave an indulgent smile. “Well, I doubt that’s where the guy was headed anyway.”

Grif lifted a brow. “What makes you say that?”

Something slithered behind Hitchens’s gaze, but was gone before Grif could name it. “People who die with their bowels falling from their bodies usually aren’t Boy Scouts,” Hitchens said, watching Grif carefully. He shouldn’t have told Grif that, but he was after a reaction. And something more. “Besides, the kid was a lawyer. He’s probably already taking briefs for the damned.”

Grif gave the surrounding darkness a final visual sweep. “Nah. There is no hell. Mortals who have proven themselves unfit for Paradise have to join the Third.”

“The Third?” Hitchens asked, mouth immediately turning down.

“That’s the percentage of the angelic host who followed Lucifer in mutiny against God.”

Hitchens’s lost swagger turned into outright contempt. “What are you? The resident Jesus freak?”

Grif told himself to stop talking. He should return to Kit and try to console her. He should save his voice for someone with the capacity to listen. But there was something dark and small about this man. Something combustible that lived inside him, like it was just waiting for a match. If Grif could warn him away from that fire, help him avoid whatever mental ember that would send his life down a destructive path, then it might help right the wrongs Grif himself had already set into motion. Sarge might still say he was meddling where he shouldn’t be, but it wasn’t as if that condescending old angel was doing much to make the world a better place.

In other words, Grif had to try.

“The Third are still alive, active, and angry. They’re like invisible rabid wolves. They inhabit a vast forest as dark as the earth’s core. That’s where blighted souls are sent when they leave this stinking mudflat.

“But the Third doesn’t just wander the eternal forest like the souls of the damned. No, instead they
are
the forest. They move like a gust through the trees, like old leaves lifting from the decomposing floor. They place themselves at strategic points in the woodland. The damned can’t ever gain their bearings, much less navigate the place. It’s said that if a soul were to reach the other side of the eternal forest, they’d be able to find their way into the Everlast . . . and, of course, the Third—the fallen angels—can’t allow that.”

Hitchens was captivated despite himself. Outside of soft porn and Monday night football, it was probably the first time he’d allowed himself to be carried away by someone else’s narrative. “But they’re angels,” he protested. “God made them to protect mankind.”

The man’s interest, and engagement, gave Grif hope.

“And they violated their angelic nature by turning against God. If you’re against God, you certainly harbor no love for his most beloved creatures.” Grif looked up in the sky and the blades that had once supported his wings shuddered. “Remember, angels are not God’s children. They’re not Chosen. They’re not made in His image. They’re just winged monsters who are there to serve Him.”

Hitchens stared at Grif for a long moment, then shook his head. “Let me see if I got this straight. All the assholes who should have taken a tumble into a fiery pit are instead walking around in a forest with fairies jumping out from behind the trees?”

In that moment, something flared, twin flames of white-hot fury located directly behind Hitchens. Grif took an involuntary step back, but stopped there. Anne wouldn’t confront him with Hitchens present. Still, he corrected: “Angels. Not fairies.”

Flame erupted in Anne’s gaze as she shot him another fiery warning, but then the glasses went back on, and she melded again with the night.

“And they don’t jump out at them,” he continued, eyes fixed on the place he’d last seen her. The itching between his shoulder blades now thrummed. He felt his wings like phantom limbs and knew it was because the Pure was near. “They ambush them. They ride herd. And every time they catch a soul, they do to it whatever that soul did to earn their spot in the forest.”

Anne growled, a sound too broad and loud for the human ear, though the horses in the barn behind them began whinnying in unison. A crack sounded, hooves on wood, and a half dozen others followed, along with alarmed shouts and a particularly sharp cry. Hitchens glanced over nervously. At least that spooked him.

“They torture those souls that way again and again. They do it endlessly. They do it for lifetimes.”

A whip of wind slapped him, and he stumbled back as the Pure rocketed straight into the air, but Grif already knew Pures hated it when mortals discussed them, their world, and their true natures. He’d been prepared. However, Hitchens had not.

Offering a hand, he helped up the now visibly shaken detective.

“Don’t know about you,” Grif said, shoving his hands into his pockets, “but I think I’d rather burn.”

And, shooting the wide-eyed man one last smile, he headed back across the lawn.

Hitchens’s voice rang out a second later. “You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”

“Not as sick as you,” Grif muttered, knowing as only someone with a healthy dose of celestial eyesight could, that he’d flat-out wasted his breath.

B
y the time Grif returned to her side, Kit had mostly composed herself. Dennis had the unpleasant task of informing next-of-kin as to Paul’s death, and since she had once been his next-of-kin, she convinced Dennis to bring her along. Though relations between Paul’s parents and her had iced over after the divorce, they still exchanged Christmas cards and the occasional phone call. It would help, Kit thought, for her to be there.

Either that, or they’d blame her entirely.

God knew she blamed herself.

Grif knew that, too. He rejoined her side in that stealth way he had, though Kit knew the moment he arrived. Her world warmed a bit with his presence, but Kit wrapped her arms around herself anyway, and looked out into the darkness. Right now her world was operating at a few degrees below the arctic chill.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he tried, as she knew he would. She continued to stare into the unyielding night.

“You keep saying that.”

“Dennis said it, too.”

She gave him a look that was more wry and despondent than any she’d worn since her father’s death. “It’s his job to say that.”

“As a cop?”

“As a friend.”

Grif studied her face, those expressive brows drawing now, and even though he didn’t move, she felt as though he inched closer. “I’m a friend.”

“Thought you were an angel?” she shot back before she could stop herself. She held up a hand immediately. She didn’t want to injure anyone else. She certainly didn’t want to argue. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

No
. Kit shook her head. “Look, I know that you’ve been there and done that as a P.I., but I’ve spent my entire adult life investigating these sort of stories as well. Sordid tales about murder. Stories that invite people into lives they’d never lead, or want to. But they weren’t just stories.” She shook her head, and slumped against the cool wood of the white ranch fence.

“When I was sixteen I had to read the headline blaring the news of my dad’s murder over the front page of my own newspaper. When I was twelve my mother’s obit took up a whole page inside. They were more than just stories then, and the same goes for all the bylines since. Same goes for now.” She looked directly up, and though close, Grif’s expression was blurred by her tears. “But I think I’ve started something here that I can’t stop. And I have a bad feeling about how this story is going to end.”