Vicki Pettersson - The Given

When Grif finally reached the jutting ledge, he slowly peered over it to scan the flat rooftop. He spotted the angel first, if only because she immediately turned and waved at him, though he hadn’t made a sound. One glance at her half-flattened auburn hair and her neo-classic American uniform—blue jeans and a white T—and Grif was startled into speaking.

“It’s you.”

The man in the leather jacket, who’d been leaning over the opposite ledge and down at the place where Grif had been seated not two minutes earlier, started at the sound of Grif’s voice. Turning, he gasped when he saw Grif standing there on the ladder, and took one giant step back. His heel caught the rooftop’s ledge, and he came up short against the stunted wall behind him. Before either of them could say another word, the man fell backward, arms pinwheeling, a small yelp escaping his lungs as he disappeared over the building’s side.

Grif and the female Centurion looked at each other. A dull thud sounded below.

“Well,” she said, blinking at Grif. “That was anticlimactic.”

Good news,” the Centurion called back to Grif, raising her voice to be heard over the shocked screams that’d begun as soon as the man’s body hit pavement. She was leaning over the rooftop edge, studying the ground, her wings instinctively flared for balance. “He didn’t land on anyone.”

Still shocked by the abruptness of events, Grif didn’t move. “Did I . . . did he? I mean, did I cause that?”

The Centurion responded by motioning him onto the roof. “Kinda like the chicken and the egg, right? What came first? Don’t think about it too much or it’ll mess with your mind . . . and you can just ask him when he gets up here. But he’s going to need a minute to untangle his soul from that messy splat he just made all over the sidewalk.”

Grif gained the rooftop on rubbery legs and headed over to join the Centurion at the ledge, but she held up a hand, stopping him in his tracks. “I’d stay there if I were you. They can actually see you, remember?”

And from where every other human was standing, it might look as if he’d pushed the guy. Grif froze, then began his own backpedal. “I gotta get out of here.”

“Nah, you’re all right,” the angel said with a dismissive wave, and she would know. Her case file would have also included the amount of time she had to clear out with the man’s soul. So, smiling, she took a seat on the ledge where the man had just taken his header. Despite the flat half of her hairdo, her silhouette was pretty in the grays of dusk. “You’re looking good, Shaw.”

“So are you, Nicole.”

Her smile widened. “You remember my name.”

“Sure,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I remember the names of all my Takes.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Especially the one who got you busted back to the Surface.”

“Especially that one.” Yes, Grif was the first and only person ever allowed to claim both angelic and human status, but his dual nature hadn’t been intended as a blessing. It was meant as punishment.

Only the most broken souls were pressed into service as a Centurion. Assisting other traumatized souls into the Everlast was supposed to help them move past the pain and guilt of their own violent deaths, allowing them to eventually move on as well. It was a job for the hardest cases . . . and, well, Grif had proven harder than most.

Nicole Rockwell’s meter had come due just over a year earlier. She’d been working undercover in her job as a photojournalist, posing as a prostitute in order to try to elicit information from women she suspected of being forced into the world’s oldest profession.

Not women, Grif remembered now, but girls.

Surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath of her death, Nicole’s primary concern hadn’t been her near-severed head but the clothes she’d died in. She would evermore exist as a soul that seemed to have a soft spot for squeaky latex and cheap lace. How could Grif not feel sorry for that? So he’d gone above and beyond his celestial call of duty, and allowed her spirit to reenter her earthly remains long enough to change into some clothes more fitting for eternity. However, in the short time that his back was turned, she also left a note for her best friend . . . one that would have gotten that woman killed if Grif hadn’t stepped in there as well.

He’d interfered, altered fate, and paid for it. Yet he still wasn’t sorry. After all, Kit Craig—girl reporter, rockabilly enthusiast, and, yes, Grif’s subsequent lover—still lived, and he’d do it all again in a heartbeat . . . even though she now lived her life without him in it.

Nicole shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. If I’d known it would put Kit’s life in danger . . .” She trailed off, and silence swelled between them. Grif wondered how much she knew of what had gone on between Kit and him in the last year. How they’d married his P.I. skills with her investigative journalism and seen an end to that child prostitution ring. How they’d put the drop on two vicious drug cartels.

How they’d fallen in love.

“Don’t worry about it, Nic.” He tried to keep his voice light, but it was hard. His throat still had a tendency to close up at the thought of Kit. “We got out of it alive.” Then he changed the subject. “But what about you? Guess you didn’t make it through the Tube?”

That was what Grif called incubation, the divine process of erasing all memory and emotion from a traumatized soul’s mind so that it could move on into God’s presence. Obviously it didn’t always work that way. Grif was still haunted by his death . . . and so what? Why shouldn’t he be allowed to know who killed him fifty years earlier?

Maybe Nicole felt guilty over putting Kit in danger the day she’d died. Maybe by letting it go now she could finally move on.

Instead, she surprised Grif again. “Nope. Didn’t move on. And it’s all your fault.”

He drew back. “How’s that?”

“Well, you shoved me through that door, right? One moment I’m freshly dead, and the next I’m swinging from star to star, traversing universes, sipping from the Milky Way.”

“So.” Grif shrugged. “That’s how it works. You go into incubation, clear your mind, then enter the Pearly Gates as angels pluck harp strings and sing hallelujahs.”

“Yeah, but first I had to listen to a lecture by Father Francis about—”

“Who?”

“You know, the angel in charge of our rehabilitation?” She rolled her eyes, and recited his official title. “Saint Francis of the Cherubim tribe. The Pure charged with rehabilitating Centurion souls, blah, blah, blah.”

“You mean Frank,” Grif said, silently adding “the immortal pain in my ass” to Frank’s title. “Father Francis” appeared to each person in the form they most closely identified with authority. For Grif, it was a sergeant in a police bullpen, so he called him Frank, or Sarge. Nicole apparently had Catholic schoolgirl issues. Father Francis it was.

“Anyway,” Nicole went on, fluffing and resettling her wings behind her. “I couldn’t get what he told me about you out of my mind. How you were just trying to help me. How I used your latent humanity to manipulate your broken emotions and put you in danger.” She winced again in apology. “So I decided to pay it forward.”

A decision that’d obviously gotten her in trouble, otherwise she wouldn’t be forced to witness the deaths of her Takes before escorting them Home. “What’d you do?”

Nicole was eager to defend herself. “It was my second-ever Take, right? A murder-suicide, if you can imagine. The file said that a woman was going to shoot the man who was beating her, then turn the gun on herself, and I thought, this is the one.”