Vicki Pettersson - The Given

Sarge’s face had altered the most. His sunken eyes resembled craters and his mouth had collapsed in a permanent frown. Even his nose appeared diminished, great furrows etched from the corner of each nostril down to his mouth. The vertical striations repeated along his cheekbones, fleshy landslides carved into his skin from his eyelids all the way to his chin. Like melted wax, these new features had hardened into a grotesque mask. Only his gaze, mist swirling over shining black marbles, remained the same.

“What the hell happened to you?” Grif whispered, as Sarge drew closer. Sarge was a real angel. He was Pure spirit created from the same worldstuff as Paradise itself. Angels couldn’t die, because they’d never lived, and they couldn’t be injured for the same reason.

So what had happened to Frank?

“Are you even still an angel?” Grif blurted.

“Don’t be stupid,” Sarge snapped back, which actually calmed Grif a bit. Sarge might look different on the outside, but at least he still had the same haughty demeanor.

“Sorry, it’s just that you look . . .” Grif hesitated.

“Say it. I already read it in your mind.”

Grif hated that, so he crossed his arms and did say it. “Puny.”

Sarge’s misshapen jaw clenched, but he leaned against a crate marked EXPLOSIVES and nodded. “I am . . . much diminished.”

“I don’t get it. What happened?” Grif asked again.

“You happened, Shaw,” the new Sarge said, folding his hands in his robe and regarding Grif with that surging gaze. “You and Katherine Craig.”

Grif tried not to look as gut-punched as he felt. Six months. That’s how long since his own name had been coupled with Kit’s. It was also the last time Sarge had appeared on the Surface. Appeared, more important, to Kit, who was sitting vigil over a friend’s deathbed. Angels could possess the bodies of those nearer to death than life—the very old or the very young, the sickly and the dying—even those with bodies weakened with drink or drugs.

Angelic possession usually healed or otherwise improved the life of the host body, but Sarge’s reasons for appearing in Dennis Carlisle’s body hadn’t been altruistic. Dennis, a cop, had taken a bullet meant for Kit, and using Dennis’s body, Sarge had told Kit that her friend would die if she didn’t do exactly what he wanted.

So Kit did. She told Grif—the man she loved, the one she’d saved just as thoroughly as he’d saved her—that Evelyn Shaw was still alive. And Grif—who’d been looking for any sign of his wife for the past fifty years—had left. And Dennis had lived.

“I believed I was doing God’s will,” Sarge said now, following Grif’s thoughts into the past.

“You tricked her.” Bitterness sat like ash on Grif’s tongue. This was really why he hadn’t talked to Sarge—or any of the Pure—for the last six months. Not for his sake. He knew how to be an island. He’d do fine alone. But Kit . . .

“You used her emotions and her natural goodness against her. The finest woman I’ve ever met, one of the people you were created to support and protect, and you manipulated everything that was good in her. You knew she’d do anything to see that Dennis lived.”

Including give up Grif.

“Yes,” Sarge said simply. “And my actions brought you both pain.”

Now Grif opened his eyes. His fists clenched as he stared at the Pure, his biceps twitching. Unfortunately, even in his weakened state, Sarge would see a blow coming. And, of course, he already knew Grif’s thoughts. So, instead, Grif said, “And since when do you care about that?”

Because even though Grif had been gutted, whacked over the head, and buried so deep no one had ever found his bones, what Frank had done to him and Kit was even worse. It was the cruelest thing he’d ever known, and looking at the Pure, he had to wonder if God didn’t feel the same.

“Since I was punished,” Sarge confirmed.

Considering all the ways God doled out punishments—floods and famines, pestilence and disease—Grif almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

“He do that?” Grif jerked his head at Frank’s shorn wings. They’d once soared in beautiful black arches from shoulders that reminded Grif of rocks. Gold-tipped, they’d glinted even in full dark. Now they sprawled in spikes from ashy shoulders that were withered and hunched.

“No. I clipped those myself.”

Like a monk who voluntarily lashed himself until his back seeped with blood, clipping one’s own wings was significant in a way that Grif would likely never understand. It was the most visible aspect of angelic power, and an obvious lessening of status and strength. More than that, the shearing appeared to have changed something on the inside of Frank. Ghosts moved behind his marbleized gaze. Something heavier than gravity turned his mouth low.

Something vital, Grif thought, something Pure, had been lost.

“My job,” Sarge began quietly, “has always been to see that the souls in my care, the Centurions, work through the pain of their own deaths, forget their mortal lives and loves and regrets, and move on to the safety and absolution of God’s presence. I’ve always been able to fulfill my duty. Until you.”

Grif shifted uncomfortably, but Sarge continued.

“I should have known you were different. Your recollection of your life in the fifties was more acute than those possessed by other Centurions. Most have memories like line drawings, scratched in dull pencil, erased and rubbed over a dozen times. But yours burst like hothouse flowers in full bloom. Still, I thought it would be okay. You remembered that you’d been murdered, but you didn’t recall how. I should have told you then that your wife still lived.”

“Yes. You should have.”

Sarge shrugged one shoulder. “It’s not our way to reveal All. We’re concerned with moving souls into Paradise, that’s it. Forcing you to don flesh again and return to the Surface—making you feel the pain of living and dying all over again—was supposed to be a punishment for assisting Nicole Rockwell.”

Grif rubbed the knot on his skull where Nicole had knocked him out. No good deed went unpunished.

“Never did I think that you’d use the free will that comes with being human to try to save those you were only supposed to Take. You should have heard the uproar from the Host when the time for Katherine Craig’s death came and went, and she still lived.”

Grif could only imagine . . . though he still couldn’t bring himself to care. Kit had been alone in her bedroom when two men had broken into her house. Grif had hesitated, he’d watched the plasma swirl about her naked ankles as her attackers closed in, but in the end he couldn’t just sit by and watch her die.

Sarge nodded, following his thoughts. “And then you fell in love. We decided that if we couldn’t force you from the Surface, we could at least use you to find lost souls. Those who hid from their guides. Those who fell prey to the Fallen.”

Grif shuddered. He didn’t even want to think about the ghastly, distorted, and truly evil fallen angels.

“You have to understand,” Sarge was saying, “nobody had ever possessed both angelic power and free will at the same time. You were the first. An angelic human.”

“I was a tool to be used until you didn’t need me anymore.”

Sarge lowered his swirling gaze. “Like I said, my job is to see that all the souls in my care move on to God’s presence.”

And he didn’t care how that got done.

“I was returning to the Everlast when he struck.” Sarge pursed his lips at the memory, his legs loose as he rocked with the ship. “I had just left Dennis Carlisle’s body, and I was so pleased with myself, thinking that you’d find your wife easily and quickly now that Ms. Craig was out of the picture. I was so sure that she was the one standing in the way of your progress. He caught me just as I reached the Gates of the South Wind.”