Vicki Pettersson - The Taken

“Well, while the Latter-Day Saints clearly aren’t all saints, they’re not all Chambers, either.”

“Don’t have to tell me,” Dennis said. “I was raised in the Church.”

“Shut up,” Kit said, drawing up straight and causing Dennis to grin sheepishly. He’d never mentioned it in all the years they’d known each other. “So should I call you Jack instead of Dennis, then?”

Dennis didn’t laugh. “Believe it or not, this case has made this old Jack Mormon want to go back and visit the fold. I need something to… Well, it’s just not an evil I’ll ever understand.”

And when people didn’t understand something, Kit thought, they often turned to a system, and a group, to help make sense of it.

“What about you?” Dennis crossed his ankles. “All recovered?”

He said it lightly, but Kit saw the worry in his eyes. She shrugged reassuringly. “I rebound quick. Doesn’t hurt that I got a fantastic byline and an exclusive story.”

“Not to mention a guardian angel,” Dennis said, jerking his head Grif’s way.

“Oh, he’s not a Guardian,” Kit replied, with a smile. “Anyway, I have to run. I have an old mobster’s funeral to attend.”

“Ah, yes. Tony the Cobra. Have a pizzelle for me at the wake.”

“Sure,” Kit threw over her shoulder, before pausing at the door. “And listen, there’s a barbecue blowout tonight. The Bender Boys are playing and Eddie Denning wants to show off his new hot rod. I know the girls would love to see you.”

“You mean the weirdoes,” Dennis corrected, and Kit raised a fist in mock attack. He held up his hands and smiled. “I’d love to come. I’ll have to go home and change first.”

“Damned straight,” she said, giving his chambray and khakis a critical once-over. “Wear your creepers and grease that hair. I expect you to take me for a little swing around the block.”

“My pleasure,” he said, picking up a pen and lowering his head over his mounding paperwork. “Now stop flirting with me. Your fallen angel looks like he’s going to come through that window.”

Kit smiled widely, because it was true. Grif was in a smolder. But…

“He’s not fallen, either.”

“No?” Dennis looked up and cocked a brow. “What is he, then?”

Hand on the door frame, she shot her old friend one last grin. “Busted.”

What an absolutely stunning day for a funeral.”

The sun was bright, the spring was draining the snap from the retreating winter, and Kit had apparently decided to be thankful for the Now… even if she was twelve rows deep in a cemetery.

“What?” she asked in response to Grif’s sidelong glance. “You want it rainy and storming just to match your mood?”

He snorted. “Not likely in Vegas.”

And not convenient for the guests at Anthony “the Cobra” Prima’s farewell bash, most of whom were hovering on the brink of their ninth decade, and shakily at that. Yet Grif had watched, baffled, as Kit drew a conversation out of everyone she met-complimenting one elderly woman on her vintage peacock brooch, sharing makeup tips with another-red lips apparently did wonders for any woman-while patting the hand of, and nodding agreeably with, a man who insisted they were related.

Yet even Kit’s relentless cheerfulness couldn’t disguise that most of the people gathered around Tony’s humble grave would soon join their friend, more resigned to that and to saying good-bye to yet another peer than they were sad.

“Just think,” Kit said, after the graveside ceremony was over and they had a moment alone. “Had you lived out your natural life, you might be here, too. Gnawing on your dentures. Hitting people with your cane.”

Grif gave her a fish-eyed stare. “You finished?”

Sighing, Kit shook her head. “I’m sleeping with an old guy.”

“Are you finished now ?”

She then gifted him with such a wide smile that he couldn’t help but smile back.

“Good. Then you stay here.” He tried not to feel smug when her smile fell. “Try to pump some of these old-timers for info on Tony’s relationship with the DiMartinos. I get the feeling they were still watching him, but I didn’t get time to ask him about it before he…”

“Went to the old dago deli in the sky?”

Grif pinched the bridge of his nose, and sighed. “Just stay here. And remember, you still need to be safe.”

“It can’t get much safer than this,” she said, and Grif had to agree. There didn’t seem to be much to fear in this crowd. Yet he’d seen someone from across the shiny, flower-strewn casket, and he thought it might be someone he knew. Someone from before.

Glancing behind him, making sure Kit hadn’t followed, he approached a wheelchair-bound man who had his back to the dispersing crowd as he gazed out over the expansive green cemetery.

“Joe?” Grif said, coming to a stop at the man’s side. “Joe Pascuzzi?”

The man looked up, eyes thick with cataracts that made his gaze a blurry, diluted blue, but it was Joe all right. Beneath the wispy hair and paper-thin skin was the man Grif had known fifty years earlier-an associate of the DiMartino family, as made as a man could get.

“Who are you?” Joe asked, a frown rearranging his wrinkles into new patterns. “Are you my nurse? Where’s my nurse?”

Grif’s hopes plummeted. Joe’s eyesight wasn’t the only thing that’d gone.

“Never mind, old buddy,” Grif said, though Joe had never been that. He turned away. “Have a good day.”

“That you, Shaw?”

Grif froze. The voice had changed, the cadence and timbre stronger than before, and those watery eyes were suddenly fixed on him.

Grif knelt in front of him, and stared. “Sarge?”

“Who the hell else?” Joe’s lips curled up as he stared down a passing woman. She hurried quickly on, as if she knew who Joe was… or used to be. “Think she’s got a cigar?”

Grif shook his head. “First the bum, then the baby, now the old guy… what are you doing?”

Not-Joe glared back. “And you call yourself a detective? I can manipulate the very old and very young. People with a tenuous grasp on reality. Those closer to the Everlast than life.”

“But Anas-”

“Yeah, I saw what happened to Anas. I ain’t donning flesh just to bring your sorry ass back from this mudflat.”

Grif shrugged. “She didn’t find it so bad. Not in the end, anyway.”

“That’s right. And Anas was there on God’s authority. Obviously, He already knew how it was going to go down with her… and you. His ways are mysterious.”

“So I’ve heard,” Grif muttered darkly.

Joe’s expression hardened at that. “Hey, my job is just to deliver a message. The Host has conferred.”

“And?”

“And it’s unanimous. We have the death we needed on record. It’s not the one we thought we’d get, but considering the good that will result from both Chambers and Schmidt being gone, the scales are again balanced.”

“Which means?”

The milky blue eyes watched him carefully. “Katherine Craig may live.”

Relief flooded Grif so hard and fast, he swayed. He had saved her? He hadn’t killed her after all?

Sarge gave him time to digest that, then said, “We’d still like you to come back, though.”

“That an order?” Grif asked, though from Sarge’s-or Joe’s-responding scowl, he knew it wasn’t. Grif was still wearing flesh. Which, as Anas told him, meant he still possessed the gift of free will.

“I thought you might ask that,” Sarge replied sourly, “and I already brought it up to the others.”

That meant the Seraphim, Cherubim, and the Thrones. All in the first triad of Creation, higher even than the Archangels.