Vicki Pettersson - The Given

“You mean your trickster gods?” He grinned as he grabbed hold of Kit’s arm with one hand and pulled out a zip tie with the other. “Don’t worry. We’ll be careful of the earth’s balance. We’re still going to pull those diamonds from this desert floor, of course, but we brought along another little doll to replace it.”

Try as he might, Grif still couldn’t bring himself to think of the woman he’d married as anyone other than Evelyn Shaw. Maybe it was because he’d spent so many years revering Evie and vilifying Barbara. The difference between the two women in his mind was insurmountable. Evie Shaw was a blossom, a woman who gave to the world simply by being in it. Barbara DiMartino was a taker, a black hole that absorbed and annihilated anything that got too close.

And Grif was an utter, pathetic fool.

Name aside, though, Grif had to admit that this woman certainly conducted herself like Evie. Forget the age that’d put spots on her hands and wrinkles on her face and neck. Her posture, when not feigning illness, was straight, but with an anticipatory forward bend. Evie had always leaned into life. Her brown eyes, wiped of moisture, were dark glittering orbs that missed nothing, and Grif had to admit that’d always been the case. He’d thought her clever. Turned out she was cagey as well.

There was also no arguing that despite their disparate appearances, Evie was more energetic and agile than he was right now. Because, for his part, Grif suddenly understood the meaning of “bone-tired.” It meant the world grew colder than you’d ever known it, starting from within. It meant mere instants of physical relief, and those only between breaths. It meant being forsaken by your own marrow. He could literally feel the muscles in his legs shrinking, atrophying, causing him to wobble as he tried to rise from his side of the car once they arrived at the mountain. He braced against it, and he knew.

The Fade was coming. His angelic side was dying, just as Sarge said it would, and Grif would be gone from the Surface before the night was through. He had accepted this at some point in their journey up the mountain, and now all there was left to do was climb.

“What time is it?” he asked, as Evie poked him in the back with the barrel of his own snubnose, forcing him around to the trunk of the car. Once again, it seemed he was doomed to die by a bullet from his own gun. At least now he knew why there’d only ever been four bullets in it. That’s how many were left when it’d been shoved back into its holster at his cooling ankle.

“What does it matter?” Evie retorted, fumbling with the trunk lock, because it didn’t to her. She had no knowledge of the celestial timetable he was on. She had never even given him a chance to explain about his Centurion status, or that he hadn’t lived the last half century as she had, but died and spent that time mourning her .

No, the only thing she’d openly wondered about was his appearance, how he’d managed to stay so young-looking and whether he’d give her the name of his plastic surgeon before he died.

Dying again, he finally decided as Evie rummaged in the trunk, would be a relief.

As she donned a long fur coat, Grif thought about goading Evie into shooting him, and speeding along the process, but knew that wasn’t what the Pures had in mind. Of course, they’d want there to be a cosmic lesson for him in all this. Besides, he knew from the time he’d spent carting traumatized souls into the Everlast that the best way to come to terms with the demise of your life was by facing it square on.

So he took the flashlight and shovel that Evie handed him, resigned to his role in fate’s plan, and they began picking their way up this slope of the Black Mountains. The bleak chill of the night was matched only by the brilliance of the stars in the sky. This far out from the obscuring neon of the city, they were diamonds piercing black velvet. It made Grif wonder why, if one sought treasure, they couldn’t just look up.

It also made him wonder whether Donel was up there, watching. Gloating. Maybe Sarge was already readying a place for him in incubation. Maybe now that he’d found Evie—now that the yearnings of his heart had proven a total farce—God would deign to see him this time around.

Dropping his head, Grif continued the uphill slog, prodded in the back by his own gun every time his feet lost purchase atop bramble and the porous black rock that gave the range its name. Another scuffle sounded off to the right as they climbed, causing Evie to jolt and stumble. She apparently saw no irony in clinging to Grif’s arm to right herself as she took aim into the darkness, before quickly swinging the barrel of his gun back up and into his side.

“Coyotes,” he muttered, the last of his celestial eyesight pulsing as he spotted a four-legged creature. Evie shivered and shoved him forward, in front of her. He could have shoved back, it wouldn’t take much, but forward was exactly where he wanted to be. He was so tired of living in the past.

He was suddenly so very tired of it all.

Finally, the bobbing beam of light found the hillside’s first crest. Darkness still lay on three sides, lousy with coyotes and treasure, but the entire Las Vegas Valley blazed on the fourth, the city lights knifing up into the sky. However, that wasn’t what caused Evie to halt, or to draw in a sharp breath, or to take one uncertain step back.

No, most remarkable were the two figures waiting for them beneath a natural black outcropping. Justin Allen, as massive as ever, looking much like one of the craggy formations around them . . . and Albert Zicaro at his side, standing of his own volition, a shovel propped in front of him like he was a developer breaking ground.

For the second time in an hour, the world shifted around Grif. Another trick, he realized, blinking hard. The world was chock-full of them.

But then Grif caught the uneasy smile on Evie’s face and recognized it as the one she wore when trying to work out anything, from a crossword puzzle to the handling of a nosy neighbor. She was plotting a course of action, taking inventory of her options. Whatever her thoughts as she studied Zicaro, Grif didn’t think she looked nearly as frightened as she should have. Then again, she was using him as a shield.

“Where?” was all Zicaro said.

Instead of answering, Evie just pulled her fur more closely around her shoulders. “You know, Sal always said there were only two durable things in this godforsaken valley. Bills and boulders. He spent the bills, or at least I spent them for him, and marked the graves of his enemies with headstones carved from the valley’s mountain ranges.”

Grif thought she was stalling again. Zicaro clearly did, too, because his face was shifting into a snarl, but Evie just reached out—gun still steady at Grif’s back—and guided his hand, forcing him to scan the hillside with the flashlight. She dismissed the foreground, the jutting outcropping, but jerked the beam back suddenly, a smile in her voice. “There.”

“Watch her,” Zicaro told Justin as he turned to scour the mountainside, and Justin—eyes trained on Evie like dual moons in the night—began edging toward her as Zicaro stumbled around behind him. Knowing she was outnumbered, Evie didn’t move. She couldn’t keep her gun trained at Grif’s back and on Justin—or Zicaro—at the same time. He had to hand it to the old girl, though. Instead of panicking, she fell even stiller, that strange expression fixed to her face.

“Here!” Zicaro finally called, a note of triumph causing his voice to tremble. Justin waved them forward with his gun. Despite his failing eyesight, Grif then spotted it, too, the giant slab of pink sandstone that was indigenous to this valley . . . but not to the Black Mountains.