Vicki Pettersson - The Taken

Standing, Grif swayed under the weight of the feathers buried beneath his flesh, and gave Anne a baffled half-smile. Tipping his hat, he backed away. “I need to find Kit.”

But when he turned, Anne was there, her face inches from his again, blank with shock. “But the knowledge is here! Right on the tip of my tongue.”

“The past is dead.” Evie was dead. But Kit, and yes, his sudden, unexpected, baffling love for her, was very much alive. Using free will, not power, Grif circumvented Anne, and kept walking.

“You can’t save her.”

But he would try.

“You can’t save her!” The Pure screeched again when he kept walking, her fury fully returned. Grif didn’t need to turn around to know her eyes were roiling. “Everyone around you is in danger! Kit is. Tony, too! You can’t even save yourself, Centurion!”

Grif halted at that. He waited for Anne to come to him, knowing she would, and tilted his head sideways when she did. “What did you say?”

“You’re a Centurion. Your job isn’t to save, but to Take.”

“Not that. You mentioned Tony.” He jerked his head. “That man you saved me from yesterday, Schmidt. How did he know where I was staying?”

Anne said nothing.

“I thought Paul told him.” He’d thought Paul had died because of it. “But it wasn’t him, was it?”

Anne watched him closely, studying his shifting expressions and emotions with bald hunger. But Kit had never told Paul where they were staying after her house had been broken into. As far as Grif knew, only one man alive knew they were at Tony’s. Grif looked at Anne. “Where is he?”

But the Pure had reverted back to her stoic, contained self. It was like her emotions were rubberized. They elongated, but always snapped back into their original form. “Just let her go. Then we may shed this flesh and go, too. No more pain. No more grief or guilt or anguish.”

Grif shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Incubation would wash away all my problems.”

“Yes.”

“No more worry over whodunit. Or anything at all.”

“That’s right.”

“But Anne?” He reached up suddenly, and slid his fingertips along her cheek and behind her neck. Anne, shocked by his touch, didn’t answer or move. “Anne,” he repeated, “if she dies there won’t be any more of this, either.”

And Grif kissed her this time, allowing the thought of Kit to coalesce in the front of his mind. He thought of her insistent smile and chatter and refusal to be cowed by life, and how it made him want to drink her in so that he might feel that hopefulness, too. He brought to mind their night together, how her body was white silk and hot curves and the only exhilaration he’d felt in half a century, and he poured that knowledge into the kiss. He let Anne in on the secret. He gifted her both with a vulnerability she’d never known and the only thing that would protect against it, which was one and the same. He let her feel love.

He let her know what she was missing, and this time he was prepared for the scream. But it wasn’t enough. Covering his ears, he cowered low and squeezed shut his eyes, feeling the cry thunder through his flesh. It pounded at him until he fell to the ground and sent his wingless back to throbbing all over again.

When the street was finally silent, when the aftershocks had faded and the car alarms were silenced, and when Grif was alone and finally able to pick himself up from off the ground, he hobbled down the alleyway and into the street, slamming his hand atop the first taxi he found. He had to get back to Tony’s home. He had to find Kit.

He just hoped it wasn’t too late.

Kit!” Grif bolted through Tony’s home, heart racing after finding the door unlocked, all alarms disengaged. Had he left it that way? Had she? “Kit!”

“She’s not here,” came Tony’s voice from the kitchen.

Relief whooshed from Grif in a gut-emptying sigh, and he strode across the living room where Tony already had a bottle of wine open and waiting. “Oh, Tony. Thank God. I thought…”

“Heyja, Grif.”

“Jesse.” Grif’s heart sunk at the sight of the Centurion… then leaped when he saw the other one. “What are you doing here?”

Leaning against the wall in a black turtleneck, with combat boots poking from beneath a long flowered skirt, Courtney shot him a disinterested look, then returned her attention to the view outside the open glass door without answering. The maimed souls from the nineties had just begun trickling in from incubation, and Courtney was his district’s greenhorn.

“She’s just tagging along,” Jesse offered, shoving hands in pockets that flared almost as wide as the wings on his back. Parachute pants, Grif remembered. Offed in the eighties, the kid had gotten stuck with the rawest deal in fashion history.

“I have some time before my next Take,” Courtney countered coolly, because the only thing she hated more than talking was Jesse talking for her.

Finally, Grif’s gaze landed on the old man crumpled on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, blood pooling around his head from the back half of his skull, which had been caved in with an equally blood-soaked rolling pin. Grif’s shoulders slumped. “God. Tony, I’m sorry.”

Tony, already in the first stage of his plasmatic fade, sidled up to him. “You kidding? I’m relieved. I don’t have to walk around in that broken-down flesh no more. Who knew my arthritis was acting up that much?” He rolled his shoulders, then shrugged. “Guess you just get used to things, huh? They sneak up on you over the years, and pretty soon you forget you ever knew any different.”

Shaking his head as he stared at his destroyed body, he then turned to Grif, bushy brows arrowing up. “Hey, did you know you have wings?”

Grif shrugged. The dead, at least, saw him for who he was.

“I guess you did know,” Tony said, then jerked his head at the back door. “No wonder my dogs liked you.”

Two furry lumps could be seen through the glass door, one piled atop the other, where they’d dropped after being shot in the head. Their ephemeral forms joined Tony, one at each side, and he absently scratched them behind the ears.

“Where’s Kit?” Grif asked, swallowing hard. If she were here-if she were dead-he’d know it. He was her Centurion, after all. Plus, she’d already be at his side, probably yapping about how she knew she’d seen his wings.

“Wasn’t here when I got home,” Tony said, and Grif couldn’t help but heave a relieved sigh. So she’d fled after their fight. He’d check her house. Next to him, Tony scratched his own head. “I called to her, to you, even the dogs, but no one answered. Then, I was bent over the wine fridge, looking for a second merlot, when… when…” He looked over at Jesse. “What happened then?”

“Your head was smashed in like a rotted watermelon.”

Grif lit a stick with shaking fingers. “Jesus, Jesse.”

“That’s all right,” Tony said, putting his right arm directly through Grif’s chest as he tried to pat his back. Tony jerked back, and Grif shivered with the plasmic intrusion, and took in another grounding puff of smoke. “I guess the only real surprise was that it didn’t happen sooner. You can’t live like I did, and make as many enemies as I made, and not expect it to come back ’round.”

Nodding, Grif let that sit for a moment, and they stared together at Tony’s cooling body before Grif said what he was really thinking. “Can’t rat me out to Caleb Chambers and not expect some fallout, either.”

Tony said nothing.

Tilting his head, blowing smoke into the other man’s face. “Why, Tony?”

Frowning, Tony stepped away, then gestured to his body with one hand, the house with the other. “Because I wanted out of this fishbowl for good, Grif! Ever since you and that broad busted in my pad, I’ve felt more alive, and freer, than in years! It made me realize that life was just passing me by! I was as much in prison as old Frankie Alessi!”