Vicki Pettersson - The Given

“I was blinded by all of that darkness.” She’d opened their bungalow door and pushed inside before she ever saw the shadow move. And she stared for so long, wondering with dumb displacement what Tommy DiMartino was doing in their private space, that she hadn’t even realized what he’d done until Grif cried out.

“I felt that knife like it’d entered my own gut. Worse, my heart cleaved right in two. I even thought of my little sewing kit on the bathroom sink, and I thought maybe I could just stitch up your belly with red-colored thread so that everything would be as it was meant to . . . as it’d been just one minute before. Then I saw the doll.”

It was the strange juxtaposition of a young girl’s toy in their attacker’s bloodied hands that shocked her into realization, and she screamed as Griffin and Tommy fought. However, nobody could hear her through the isolation of their lush garden. Nobody was there to see Tommy fall, still grasping his sister’s doll. Nobody saw Grif blindsided by a clay vase after that, more shadows moving, until they were all facedown in a puddle of blood.

“Do you remember, Griffin? Do you remember how I tried to reach you?”

He remembered the same deep brown eyes that stared at him now, filled with tears as she cried out, Damn it, Griffin, no . . .

Her fingertips suddenly found his, and Grif realized Evie had been saying his name over and over again, just as she had then. Griffin, Griffin, Griffin . . .

It was all she ever called him. It was what she called him still.

Why do you . . . she had said.

“Why would you dredge all this up again?” she said now.

The question was abrupt, and rocked Grif back on his heels. He blew out a hard breath before reaching into his jacket’s inner pocket, and pulled out Kit’s phone and the image she’d taken of the newly discovered map. Pointing, he said, “Because I think you’re in trouble, Evie. And this is why.”

The doll. The diamonds. The dueling families. He explained it to her quickly, simply, then told her the map showed where Sal DiMartino disposed of all the lives he’d ended in his notorious run of the city . . . and where he’d buried one doll with diamonds for eyes.

Evie stared at the image for so long that the screen timed out and the phone went blank. Then she shook her head, placed her hands over her face, and began to sob. Horrified, Grif watched as her little shoulders sank forward and caved in on themselves, and her broken voice lifted and fell like a brittle leaf on a swirling wind.

“Please don’t cry,” he begged, inching forward and taking her hands in his. She pulled him close, and still kneeling, he put his head in her lap.

“But the world,” Evie moaned, hands running over his head just as they used to. “The world is such a dangerous place.”

Grif just kept his head bowed, because yes, it was. And even an angel, even a Pure, could do nothing about that.

Kit rode in the passenger’s seat of Dennis’s car, with a known criminal at the wheel and a gun pointed at her middle. Yes, she was scared out of her mind; she was shaking, gaze darting from the locked doors to the streets and people just beyond them and back to Justin, who was sitting cool but smelled like old sweat and stale breath, too. He’d been cooling his heels for a long time, and was obviously pleased to be taking action.

Yet Kit had also just spent seven hours in jail, ordering her mind, parsing out possible fates for herself. None of them had included watching Dennis dumped in a dark corner of the jail’s side lot, being kidnapped in a police car, or being ferried into the deep heart of the cold Mojave. So she latched on to the thought that she was going to get out of this alive, that there was still time to find Grif and fulfill the prophecy and make some meaning of all this together.

And then Justin Allen spoke.

“You still have no idea what’s going on, do you?” He looked at her with a secretive smile plastered across his face for at least the fifth time. It was getting tiresome.

“Sure I do.” Kit blew out a shaking but resolute breath. “You’re working with Barbara DiMartino, who calls herself Barbara McCoy, to find diamonds that she’s coveted for fifty long years.”

She had the satisfaction of watching Justin’s face fall, and his hard swallow of that stale breath made her realize she’d hit some sort of nerve.

“Why would you say that?” he asked.

“I told you. I saw you leave Barbara’s high-rise that night.” After fetching Gina Alessi from Sunset, dressing her like a doll, making it look like Barbara had died. They’d been buying time . . . but why?

“You also shot at my partner,” he reminded her, knuckles going tight on the gun at his side.

Kit refocused on his face. His eyes glittered in each streetlight they passed. He was anticipating something. And she was a part of it. “I also know that Barbara is still alive, and here you are again, a man who should be running scared just like Eric and Larry. So why aren’t you?”

“I’m made of sterner stuff,” he said.

“No doubt,” Kit replied, because it couldn’t hurt to appeal to his ego. “But that’s not it. You know something they didn’t, don’t you? Something worth sticking around for. Is it something you found out at Sunset? Larry was just muscle, Eric a computer grunt, but you were the Life Enrichment Coordinator. You didn’t just have access to financial information, you had access to the residents.”

Their memories. Their stories.

His only answer was silence, and Kit finally smiled. “Tell me, how long did it take you to contact Barbara after learning of the diamonds and the map from Gina?”

Justin’s mouth thinned into a tight line, and he made a sharp left on Sinatra. They were headed to the south end of the Strip, angled in the direction of the Black Mountains.

“Let me guess,” Kit went on, encouraged by his silence, forming that clue. “You snuck Gina out of Sunset and drove her to Barbara’s home on Saturday night. You then dressed her up in Barbara’s clothes, and waited for me to arrive. Barbara was setting me up.”

She went crazy when I told her about you . . . she became obsessed.

“Like I said,” Justin Allen huffed, shaking his head again. “You don’t have a clue what’s really going on.”

Then she was close. Nobody had been reported missing at Sunset, so Barbara must have taken Gina’s place. Hiding in plain sight, as usual. And who there would know? The place was in upheaval right now, so who’d really look?

Abruptly, they swung into an empty lot where a long industrial building stretched in the night like a frozen yawn. Kit’s heart leaped into her throat. Maybe he wasn’t taking her to the mountain at all. Maybe he was going to get rid of her here first, steal the map and dump her body inside one of these bays. Or a Dumpster. Nobody came here at night. There was no one for miles to hear her scream.

Swallowing hard, Kit searched the car’s cabin for the plasma she’d seen earlier. She saw nothing, but what did that really mean? Maybe she didn’t have the ability to see the ethereal warning sign anymore. Or maybe, as Grif said, you just didn’t see it when death was coming for you.

Carelessly, and, Kit noted, without looking for cross traffic, Justin whipped across two dark alleys in the industrial lot before he swerved one last time and his headlights speared the roll-up bay of an automotive store. For a moment, Kit just stared at the lone figure spotlighted there. What she saw was so unexpected, and so out of place, that her mind couldn’t make sense of the stark sight.

What was Al Zicaro doing seated in his wheelchair in total darkness, alone in the night?