The Taken

“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.