Vicki Pettersson - The Given

“Who? God?”

Sarge huffed, a bitter laugh. “Even I haven’t seen His face yet. No, it was Donel. A Seraph.”

The highest of the celestial tribes.

“God uses the Seraphim to settle things . . . in-house, if you will.”

“I thought the archangels were his heavies?”

Sarge shook his head. “Too unpredictable. They’re fanged and untouchable and full of righteousness. Plus, you can’t look them directly in the face.”

“That would make it hard to have a good heart-to-heart.”

Sarge tried to smile, but the grin wobbled on his face. It looked like the action pained him. “Anyway, Donel said he had a message from God. So he grabbed me by my robe and told me to open my mouth.”

“Your mouth?” Grif tilted his head. “Why not your ears?”

“Because messages from God are not something you hear. They’re something you feel.” Sarge swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple moved like a boulder in his throat. “He made me feel it all, Shaw. Everything you’re still angry about. The manipulation and the pain. The cruelty in the way I drove you and Kit apart. As Pures, we are not allowed to help mortals—it intrudes upon their free will. But we’re not allowed to hurt them for the very same reason.”

The thought of it, all that pain and longing and heartache hitting someone all at once, made Grif sag on his feet. And he’d never heard of a Pure feeling true emotion before. After all, they, too, were tools—created for a specific purpose. Life lessons, and the weight of them, were not gifts that God bestowed on mere tools.

Yet not a day went by that Grif, too, didn’t feel the pain caused by Frank’s actions. Who was he to question how God dealt with His creations? So he crossed his arms.

“You want me to say it, don’t you?” Sarge said, and his face contorted in a wry, pained smile.

“Why not?” Grif said. “After all, confession is good for the soul.”

Pures didn’t have souls, but Sarge confessed anyway.

“I could have told you at any point that your wife was still alive, but I guarded that information and used it against you instead.” The words poured from him like they’d been building inside of him all these months. He nearly shouted, as if thrusting the confession at Grif would relieve him of its weight. “I also knew Kit loved you so much that she would insist that you return to that first love. It hurt you both. I hurt you both, and I feel your pain even now.” He paused, then offered Grif another wry smile. “And yes, I feel that, too.”

“What?”

“That.” Sarge lifted a hand, finger shaking with palsy as he pointed at Grif. “The agony of not having seen Ms. Craig in six long months.”

Grif looked away. There was agony, yes. It was sewn across his heart, stitched there in Kit’s initials . . . therefore he rarely bothered anymore about his heart. But the rest of Sarge’s statement wasn’t quite true. He had seen Kit, though she didn’t know it. He’d used his ability to enter and exit buildings undetected to watch her while she slept. He needed to see for himself that she was okay, something that would be easier on them both if she wasn’t awake.

Yet there was torment in that as well. He’d only visited her three times, but on the third he’d been compelled to let her know he was there. She should know he was thinking of her, he’d reasoned. That despite their separation, the need for it, he would always be there.

So he plucked a feather from his wing and left it on the pillow next to her, watching her breath stir the individual vanes, remembering the way it’d once felt on his neck and chest and mouth.

Kit must have remembered, too, because the next time he came to watch her sleep, he found that she’d left him something as well.

The note read:

This isn’t Twilight, and I’m not your Bella. If I catch you stalking me again I’ll pray so hard that your boss in the Everlast will have no choice but to listen. God knows that feathered beast owes me.

Funny how the dearest memories could evoke the exact opposite reaction in people.

“I didn’t know,” Sarge said softly, reading the memory.

No, how could he? He was a created being, not a birthed one. He had the power and intelligence and expanse of the Universe at his disposal, but he was also soulless.

Sometimes, like six months ago, that made him a monster.

“I didn’t know,” Sarge repeated, voice cracking this time, “that love in the heart was as indispensable as breath in the chest.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Grif muttered, feeling his own chest seize up, the stitches coming undone.

“I didn’t know,” Sarge said again, “that I was digging out that poor woman’s heart with a dull knife.”

“Stop talking!” Grif’s voice bounced off the hollowed planks overhead and thundered along the ones at his feet. Sarge actually cringed; he truly believed Kit’s pain was his own fault, yet even after all he’d done, Grif knew better. He was the one who’d returned to the Surface, broken the rules, and fallen in love with one woman while still searching for another. With one foot in the present and the other stuck firmly in the past, it was Grif who had broken Kit Craig’s heart.

And true agony was in having to live with that.

I want to die,” Kit said, only two months earlier.

“No,” Grif whispered, but his hiding place swallowed the word, smothering it in shadows. Despite her written warning to stop stalking her, to go away, he still followed. He’d always follow. And now, despite his aversion to tears, he was crying, too.

She was folded up in the fetal position, her good friend Fleur curled around her as if she was all that was holding her together. Kit’s entire covey of girlfriends was unabashed in their friendship, clinging to each other in a way that men never did, and these two alternated their tears, though only Kit sobbed. Grif had followed her to Fleur’s home, because she hadn’t been spending much time at her own mid-century ranch home. There were, he knew, too many memories of the two of them there together.

“Forget Griffin Shaw,” Fleur told Kit, smoothing Kit’s hair from her face, the flaming dice of her shoulder tattoo flaring with the motion.

“I don’t want to forget him.”

“Why?” Fleur and Grif whispered at the same time.

Kit stilled and looked up at her friend. Her face, usually powdered perfection, was naked today, almost translucent, and it only added to her air of vulnerability. Her eyes, swollen like storm clouds, were rimmed in angry red and swimming with tears. “Because if I forget that I loved him then it would be like it never happened. And that would mean that it didn’t really matter or that I never really lived it. And it did. I did.”

“You torture yourself.”

“No . . . I just don’t know how to get over him.”

“That’s because there’s no getting over a love like that.” Fleur cupped Kit’s face between lacquered fingers, and bent down until they were touching foreheads. “You just move on anyway.”

“But I can barely lift my head.” Kit’s voice cracked, and Grif’s heart went with it. “I know it makes me needy and really stupid to hold on to a man who doesn’t want me, but I can’t stop thinking of him. I close my eyes and he’s there. I wake and it’s worse. There’s no name for this . . . for this heartache.”

“Sure there is,” Fleur answered, her smile bittersweet as they both fell still. “It’s called life.”

Kit didn’t answer, making Grif wonder if that meant that she agreed or she didn’t. Finally, Fleur shifted. “Come on, we can’t hole up here forever. Let’s get dolled up and go out. We’ll call up some greasers with a hot rod. Go drink rum from a tiki mug. We’ll raise some hell and get tattoos.”