Vicki Pettersson - The Given

“Prophecy now bears down on your head like an anvil!” Donel added for good measure.

Sarge glared at him from over one destroyed shoulder before turning back to Grif. “No, prophecy is a gift. It’s a message from the Divine.”

Grif glanced at Donel. Then why did it feel like a threat? Sarge moved aside.

Donel lifted the scroll once more. “Time to earn your fate, Griffin Shaw.”

“Just read it,” Grif said, because he didn’t care. Kit was dying. Or dead.

Kit . . . God, Kit.

Donel opened his mouth. Teeth like daggers winked as he drew in a deep breath.

“Of course, you should give him his miracle first,” Sarge said.

The room froze over. Arctic wind rushed in, numbing Grif’s limbs. He looked at Donel and trembled, but not from the cold.

“What?” Sarge said innocently, like nothing had happened. He blinked at Donel. “You’re giving him prophecy. The scroll states he’s equally entitled to one miracle.” When no one moved, he shrugged. “Didn’t you read the fine print?”

Donel’s eyes narrowed into slits. “That option’s only exercised if a Pure is willing to grant one from his personal coffers . . .”

And for the first time, Sarge smiled. Grif smiled, too. He already knew what he . . .

Donel roared, and light rippled from his skin. Grif cringed as it stabbed at him, rays like swords, the sound threatening to rupture his eardrums. It was no use. Donel’s anger infused the room with infernal heat. The world was afire. Suddenly, the air twisted and a cooling balm of shadows encased him. Grif blinked the haze from his eyes and saw that the heated rays were still trying to reach him, but he was enshrouded in black feathers and arms—shielded by Sarge’s wings, he realized—though Donel continued to roar.

Then the ship’s deck disappeared above them, and the heavens surged overhead. Lightning flashed, and Donel’s roar cut off with a chagrined yelp. For a moment, the fullness of the silence was deafening, the heavy hand of God’s presence stifling. Donel fell to his knees. Shifting, Sarge lowered his head and folded his wings behind him. Grif risked a skyward glance but saw only the deck closing back over them, plank by plank, though the air remained sulfurous and shocked.

“I wash my hands of this, Francis,” Donel rasped, when time began moving again. His teeth were bared, and his voice rushed like rapids. “You are playing favorites with these mortals! You are interfering!”

Sarge shrugged one tattered shoulder. “I’m not the one who just got reprimanded.”

Donel unfurled his wings with a sharp snap. They spanned one end of the ship to the other. “This is all on you!”

“Yes.” Sarge looked at Grif, no longer speaking to the other Pure. “It is.”

Donel roared and shot up, directly through the newly built illusion of the ship. The report of the wood splintering was like cold and hot air crashing together. The other Pures followed his storm cloud, and, breathing hard, Grif watched them go until Sarge reached out and gently waved his hand over the breech.

“Jesus,” Grif breathed, as silence again loomed.

“No. That was His daddy.”

Who else, Grif thought, could cow a Seraph?

Sarge answered the thought by quirking one eyebrow. “Donel forgot himself. It’s not his place to impart lessons to the Chosen.”

That’s right. It was Sarge’s job.

“You knew what he was going to do.”

“What, ambush you with prophecy? Yes. And I couldn’t stop him . . . there’s nothing anyone can do to stop prophecy, Shaw. Once it’s uttered, you are on a one-way street leading directly to your fate. You will either fulfill it or you won’t. But I could at least offer a little guidance.”

He meant that even one-way streets could be littered with potholes.

Grif nodded to show he understood, then licked his lips. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Donel was right. It’s time to figure out once and for all who killed Griffin Shaw.”

“Fine. Tell me about this prophecy.”

“And?” Sarge quirked one eyebrow.

Grif huffed at the Pure’s knowing look. “And, yeah. I’ll go ahead and take that miracle now as well.”

And sharing a dual thought of Kit Craig, Sarge and Grif both smiled.

Grif normally traversed worlds using actual doorways. Windows worked, too, but a recognizable portal of entry into the Everlast was calming for souls who’d been traumatized by sudden death. Grif rather liked it himself, even when returning alone to the Surface. Fifty years of skipping along moon shadows, and the sudden emergence from the silky black cosmos onto the Surface—especially the Las Vegas Strip—was a bit jarring. So he took a moment to compose himself, imagining the time and location he wanted to reappear on the Surface, then reached out and opened the hatch that Donel had been blocking.

As expected, he levered himself up onto the deck of a ship rocking beneath the weight of a faux pirate battle. The bridge between worlds was that simple for him. Sure, the wooden hatch bent like putty when he touched it, and rippled as if rustling wind lived inside the slivered surface, but for Grif it was like stepping from a dry sauna into a wet one. When you were both human and angelic, the membrane between worlds was rice-paper thin, and crossing from one to the other was as easy as blowing out candles and making a wish.

“Hey!” The shout sounded behind him as he headed toward the gangplank, and he turned to see an actor squinting at him through a dashing black eye patch. The faux pirate rushed to block him, pointing at Grif with a wooden sword. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Grif muttered, shoving the sword aside like a turnstile, and leaping to the dock next to some wide-eyed tourists. Germans, if their tube socks were any indication. Ignoring them, he began heading south . . . on a Saturday night that he’d already lived.

That was his miracle. Not a rush to Kit’s defense. Not, thankfully, an arrival on the scene to a murder in progress. No, this was a real miracle—a return to the Surface and to the past. Not only that, Grif was using his miracle to kill two birds.

“How far back do you want to go?” Sarge had asked, leaving it up to him.

“You mean do I want to go all the way back to 1960?”

The incline of Sarge’s head indicated it was an option. “You can’t alter your own fate, of course. But . . . there is Evie.”

Evie, whom he’d married in 1958, when he was already thought to be a confirmed bachelor at thirty-one, and she still a dewy-eyed twenty-two. Evie, whom he’d loved so much he couldn’t imagine living without her.

Evie, who’d also fallen under attack because Grif had neglected to protect her.

But these memories were dusty and light compared to the boulder of grief that’d slammed into Grif when Donel told him Kit was dying. That was a blow that’d stopped the breath in his chest, and made his lungs scream along with the denial in his mind. That was an event that, if true, made him want to simply lie down and die as well.

Again.

“Send me back to the time of Barbara McCoy’s death,” he told Sarge, with a nod of his head. “I can stop that murder, question her killer, and then she can help me find Evie.”

From there, he’d go on to protect Kit and find out who killed him fifty years earlier.

Easy-peasy. Right?

“No,” Sarge had said, reading his mind again. Grif huffed in annoyance, but Sarge just crossed his arms, looking more like his old self. “It’s anything but easy. If you choose this path, if you go back in time, nothing will happen as it’s meant to. You’ll be rewriting history, and fate will try to rip the pen from your hand and scribble over your intentions. Do you understand what I’m saying?”