Vicki Pettersson - The Given

She reached for him and he tried to do the same, and he finally felt her fingertips curl again around his left hand. Squeezing tight, she tried to pull him close. “Griffin,” she said, and his name echoed in his brain like a train rattling on its tracks.

“Griffin.” The rattling intensified, pushing apart the sides of his skull. Keep your head together, he thought, then convulsed with the black humor.

Grif’s life poured out over the floor.

“Griffin, dear,” she repeated, one last time, clinging fast to his numbing fingertips. “Why do you . . . ?”

But another voice filled his head just then, overwhelming the rattling and Evie and the past. “Dude. Dude!”

Hold on, he thought, reaching for Evie. Yet the voice ripped through him, clean as a butcher’s blade through the belly, cleaving the past from the present. His eyes rolled back around and he found himself nose-to-nose with the bartender, who was peering into his face with too-wide eyes. He ignored the man and pushed to his knees, and though he already knew it was futile, his gaze shifted to the ring finger of his left hand. There was nothing there.

“Where?” he rasped to the bartender.

The man didn’t have to be asked twice. “Out the front,” he replied, offering Grif a hand.

Grif accepted the help up, and when he was steadied, said, “Go tell Dennis they’re gone.”

The bartender just nodded—knowing questions could wait—and Grif staggered to the front door. He whipped it open and had to shield his eyes from the burn of the harsh daylight. When they’d finally acclimated, he realized he was leaning against the bar’s unlikely guard—a tiki god the circumference of a redwood, with a carved mouth large enough to swallow Grif whole. He pushed away from it to scan the lot at the same time that the telltale creak of wood sounded over his shoulder.

“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing his pounding head.

“What’s wrong, Shaw?” The sound, wood straining against its own grain, slivered through the late-afternoon air. “Can’t take a dose of your own medicine?”

Sighing, Grif turned to face the twelve-foot tiki god. The surface of the whittled face had already shifted to take on Sarge’s features, though the wood was carved in the wrecked mien of his most recent visage, the face ruined by emotion. Grif briefly wondered if Sarge’s old face was gone for good.

“How much do you know?” Grif asked, rocking back on his heels.

“When it comes to those in my charge, I know all.”

“Know, but don’t tell,” Grif scoffed, and put his hand on the door. He’d had enough of this creature’s games. “I’m going back inside.”

“But don’t you want to ask your question first?”

Grif glanced back at the hunk of wood.

“The one that’s worrying you beneath that sore knot on your head.”

He meant how did Larry, a mere human, manage to hit him? Why had he grown dizzy? How could he have not seen it coming?

Because Grif had been looking for the man to strike. Looking . . . and yet unable to stop it.

“How you been feeling lately, Shaw?”

“Fine.” But other than the flash of heat that then swerved into a biting cold—the agony of the newly returned memory—he was hardly feeling a thing at all. Yeah, he was trying to keep his feelings for Kit at bay, but it was more than that. He actually felt drained. Numbness had been pressing at his skull from the moment he’d awoken today.

A creaking sound, as Sarge gave the tiki equivalent of a shrug. “That’ll change soon. In another day you’ll start having problems with your five senses, one at a time at first, but they’ll all worsen.”

“Why?”

“The prophecy, Shaw.”

The prophecy.

Reunite with your true love before the anniversary of your death . . . or all is Lost.

That was it. Reunite with the woman he loved. Do it before the anniversary of his death . . . or be whisked back to the Everlast for his mind to be stripped down so he wouldn’t even know himself.

“You can’t keep ignoring it.” And the carved holes where Sarge’s eyes should have been pulsed with pity. “You’re weakening, Shaw. Your celestial strength is fleeing you. Nobody in the Everlast expected you to still be here a full year after your return.”

“So they were wrong.”

“But you’re not a stone, Shaw. You’re not meant to last on the Surface forever. Like all living things, you have an expiration date. Yours happens to be the fifty-first anniversary of the day you died. That’s why the date was referenced in your prophecy. As soon as you’ve reached the exact date and time of your return . . . you’ll start the Fade.”

“Even though I’m wearing flesh?” Grif’s heart thudded so hard in his chest that he heard it in his ears. The Fade only occurred after death. So . . . “I’m dying?”

“As soon as you’re born,” Sarge said, as annoyingly cryptic as ever. Then the giant head tilted. “However, in your case it’s not the flesh that’s deteriorating. It’s your angelic side. After all, you know as well as I do, Pures were never meant for this world.”

Grif focused, did a mental countdown. “But that’s only one more day.”

Sarge shrugged again. The wood groaned. “If you haven’t satisfied the prophecy by that time, you never will.”

So he’d just Fade away instead. His body would weaken until he caught back up to Zicaro and everyone else from his first life. Only he wouldn’t take fifty years to get there. He’d manage it in a single day.

“And then back to the Everlast,” Grif muttered. “A full Centurion once again.”

Sarge barked out a laugh, and it sounded like bushes rattling. “After all the trouble you’ve caused? No. The Host won’t allow that. What would keep you from just repeating your mistakes?”

“So another wash through the forgetful chamber,” Grif muttered.

“That’s right. Back to incubation.” The tiki mouth re-formed into a wide grin, but Grif had a feeling Sarge was watching him carefully. “And this time they’re going to recycle your soul.”

Grif froze. “No.”

No way. He didn’t want to come back to this blasted mudflat as another person entirely. He wasn’t perfect, and not remotely a good angel, he knew that. But at least the memories in his head were his own, as were his thoughts and feelings. This was his life.

“Your time left on the Surface can now be counted in hours” was all Sarge said. “I’d use it wisely if I were you.”

But to do what? Help Kit find out who killed her father fourteen years earlier? Find out who killed Barbara? Or try to find Evie?

But then he thought of leaving Kit again, forever this time, and closed his eyes as everything else dropped away. These were all epic questions, and the last had consumed him for half a century, yet what would it matter if he ever solved them or not?

Without Kit, he wondered, what the hell was the point?

“Now you’re asking the right question,” Sarge said approvingly, but when Grif opened his eyes, the great wooden gaze had gone flat again, and the tiki god was once more a mere statue.

Kit drove blindly, hands shaking on the slim mahogany steering wheel, eyes too wide in the rearview mirror. She didn’t know where Grif was, and had no way to get a hold of him, so she veered toward Marin’s town house and the only family she had left. Panic was growing inside of her, pushing at the edges of her psyche and threatening to attack. She had to get somewhere where she felt protected and safe.

She was still shaking as she knocked on Marin’s door, one arm clutched about her middle. When Marin answered, she took one look at Kit and pulled her inside her home, into her arms. Amelia strode into view behind her, and there might as well have been an audible click as the woman’s professional mask slid over her face. She took hold of Kit’s arm and led her into the kitchen. She must, Kit decided, look worse than she’d thought.