Vicki Pettersson - The Taken

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.