The Given

CHAPTER ONE

A rule of thumb for all the aspiring angels out there: it’s damned tough to go incognito when you’ve got a twelve-foot wingspan trailing behind you like a big, feathery flag. That, along with the stardust dripping like celestial sauce from those feathery tips, is a dead giveaway that you’re doing more than popping to the Surface for a doughnut and a cup of joe. Sure, the mortals can’t see you, even if you’re only six feet behind them and closing in fast, but guys like Griffin Shaw—who were both angelic and human—could spot that semitransparent form coming from a galaxy away.

Not that there was anyone else like Griffin Shaw.

Grif’s first instinct was to ignore the whole situation. Unfortunately, the angelic herald currently trailing cosmic matter all over downtown Las Vegas had dropped right into Shaw’s path on an evening that was both chilly and boring. Defying the cold precisely because of his boredom, Grif was sitting alone on the patio of a wine bar, sipping a doppio espresso just to be contrary, and trying not to let his depression get the best of him. There was nothing sorrier than an angel with a case of the blues.

Of course, there was more than mere boredom gnawing at Grif. He’d been reading the front page of the Las Vegas Tribune just before the other angel traipsed into view, brooding over a headline that would’ve been just as at home atop the page when he’d died in 1960 as it was now: LAS VEGAS WOMAN DIES IN VICIOUS ATTACK.

Grif snorted. People rarely expired from a sweet-natured one.

As he read on, even his sarcasm fled.

“Barbara McCoy,” he said aloud, “age seventy, was found shot dead by her cleaning service when she neglected to answer the door for her biweekly appointment. No one had seen the victim, who reportedly lived alone on the fifteenth floor of the exclusive Panorama Project high-rise, for two days. McCoy was the widow of the famed and notorious mobster Sal DiMartino and had left Las Vegas after his death fourteen years ago, only to return recently. An anonymous source said the victim had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. There were no witnesses, and no suspects at this time.”

There was also no photo to accompany the article.

Grif rarely swore, but he let a good one rip now as he threw the paper down and slumped in his seat. He’d been looking for Barbara McCoy for six whole months, scouring records and deeds and dead-end leads . . . all while obsessing over the words she was supposed to have said about his death fifty years earlier.

Both Shaws got what was coming to them.

What Grif had gotten was a knife in the gut. His memory of the event included little more than a visual snapshot of his wife, Evelyn, falling to the floor and sharing his fate.

Yet Grif had recently learned that Evie hadn’t died that long-ago day, and McCoy had been his best shot at finding out where she was now. He’d also been looking forward to asking the woman . . . just what the hell did she think it was that Evie and he deserved?

Grif stared at the headline, unblinking, and felt heat boiling, building in his chest. He was back to square one just like that, without even one decent lead into his past. Six months of gumshoeing down the drain. Six months of thinking he was closer to finding out who killed him, and learning what had befallen Evie.

Six months of walking the same earth as Kit Craig, yet living without her by his side.

Grif shook his head to clear his mind, because of all of them it was that thought that would undo him. Blowing out a hard breath, he looked up and squinted into the distance . . . and that’s when he spotted the Centurion.

The other angel didn’t seem to notice him, and neither did her mark, a man with a baseball cap drawn low, hands tucked deep into the pockets of his black leather jacket. His mind was obviously occupied by whatever mischief was going to kill him in the next few minutes, and he didn’t even glance Grif’s way as he disappeared around the corner of the building adjacent to the wine bar. He didn’t look behind him, either, though that didn’t mean anything. Most people never did see death coming their way.

As for his celestial shadow, Centurions were angels who’d once been human as well, but had been pressed into duty as heavenly tour guides for newly murdered souls. Most people who died traumatically—murder, suicide, or simply an unexpected accident—had trouble reaching the Everlast on their own. Since Grif was still half Centurion as well as half human, he could recognize a fellow tribe member as far off as the Milky Way.

The curious thing about this sighting, however, was the timing. Centurions usually showed up in the moments just after a soul was freed from its earthbound flesh. As far as Grif knew, he was the only one ever forced to witness a Take’s death. Assisting the newly dead into their celestial forevers was supposed to be healing for the Centurion, too.

So what was this little chit doing stalking her Take like some haloed feline looking to take down an oversized mouse?

The question fused with Grif’s boredom and disappointment to fire his curiosity, so he downed the rest of his espresso, tucked his paper under his arm, and rose to follow. By the time he reached the corner, both the angel and the man she’d been trailing had disappeared. Yet downtown Las Vegas was laid out like a waffle, an easy grid of crisscrossing streets, and this one was also one-way. All he had to do was pick up his pace and head west.

Or was it east?

He sighed. It didn’t matter. Orienting himself in this town required little more than a skyward glance at the Stratosphere hotel’s spearing tower, though Grif personally preferred the midnight view, when neon scattered the darkened sky. Right now the day had briefly settled into the halfway mark, and in the crawling gray shadows of dusk Grif could easily track the shimmering thread of plasma curling around the corner. The silver tail sparked with undulating light and was another sign of impending death. It wouldn’t be long now.

Grif turned into an alley that was more of a narrow afterthought, and was struck by the sight of dirty brick walls pocked with blackened doors and pungent Dumpsters tilted in disarray. Dusk had a harder time stretching in here, and he had to squint from beneath the brim of his fedora to locate the thread of plasma. There, he thought, catching its silvery tail, and he craned his neck upward, following it into the sky.

A jumper, Grif thought, catching sight of the Take just as his pant leg disappeared over the rooftop. The man’s Centurion guide was nowhere to be seen, but she’d have been given a case file before hitting the Surface, and it would’ve included the Take’s physical description and the location of his death. She was likely already waiting on the roof.

Grif had to follow more discreetly. He still possessed a degree of celestial strength, and wings that flared defensively against supernatural attack, but donning mortal flesh for a second go-round meant that he could also die again. It wasn’t a fate he was anxious to repeat.

As he wrapped his fingers around the ladder’s cold rungs, Grif told himself he didn’t intend to interfere. This wasn’t his Take, and he was fine with that, but there would be a cosmic pause right after the man died, a few slipstream moments that would pass unnoticed by the mortal world as the soul unhinged itself from its terrestrial body. It’d be nice to talk shop with the other Centurion, if only for a few minutes.

Grif had been utterly alone for months.

When Grif finally reached the jutting ledge, he slowly peered over it to scan the flat rooftop. He spotted the angel first, if only because she immediately turned and waved at him, though he hadn’t made a sound. One glance at her half-flattened auburn hair and her neo-classic American uniform—blue jeans and a white T—and Grif was startled into speaking.

“It’s you.”

The man in the leather jacket, who’d been leaning over the opposite ledge and down at the place where Grif had been seated not two minutes earlier, started at the sound of Grif’s voice. Turning, he gasped when he saw Grif standing there on the ladder, and took one giant step back. His heel caught the rooftop’s ledge, and he came up short against the stunted wall behind him. Before either of them could say another word, the man fell backward, arms pinwheeling, a small yelp escaping his lungs as he disappeared over the building’s side.

Grif and the female Centurion looked at each other. A dull thud sounded below.

“Well,” she said, blinking at Grif. “That was anticlimactic.”

Good news,” the Centurion called back to Grif, raising her voice to be heard over the shocked screams that’d begun as soon as the man’s body hit pavement. She was leaning over the rooftop edge, studying the ground, her wings instinctively flared for balance. “He didn’t land on anyone.”

Still shocked by the abruptness of events, Grif didn’t move. “Did I . . . did he? I mean, did I cause that?”

The Centurion responded by motioning him onto the roof. “Kinda like the chicken and the egg, right? What came first? Don’t think about it too much or it’ll mess with your mind . . . and you can just ask him when he gets up here. But he’s going to need a minute to untangle his soul from that messy splat he just made all over the sidewalk.”

Grif gained the rooftop on rubbery legs and headed over to join the Centurion at the ledge, but she held up a hand, stopping him in his tracks. “I’d stay there if I were you. They can actually see you, remember?”

And from where every other human was standing, it might look as if he’d pushed the guy. Grif froze, then began his own backpedal. “I gotta get out of here.”

“Nah, you’re all right,” the angel said with a dismissive wave, and she would know. Her case file would have also included the amount of time she had to clear out with the man’s soul. So, smiling, she took a seat on the ledge where the man had just taken his header. Despite the flat half of her hairdo, her silhouette was pretty in the grays of dusk. “You’re looking good, Shaw.”

“So are you, Nicole.”

Her smile widened. “You remember my name.”

“Sure,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I remember the names of all my Takes.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Especially the one who got you busted back to the Surface.”

“Especially that one.” Yes, Grif was the first and only person ever allowed to claim both angelic and human status, but his dual nature hadn’t been intended as a blessing. It was meant as punishment.

Only the most broken souls were pressed into service as a Centurion. Assisting other traumatized souls into the Everlast was supposed to help them move past the pain and guilt of their own violent deaths, allowing them to eventually move on as well. It was a job for the hardest cases . . . and, well, Grif had proven harder than most.

Nicole Rockwell’s meter had come due just over a year earlier. She’d been working undercover in her job as a photojournalist, posing as a prostitute in order to try to elicit information from women she suspected of being forced into the world’s oldest profession.

Not women, Grif remembered now, but girls.

Surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath of her death, Nicole’s primary concern hadn’t been her near-severed head but the clothes she’d died in. She would evermore exist as a soul that seemed to have a soft spot for squeaky latex and cheap lace. How could Grif not feel sorry for that? So he’d gone above and beyond his celestial call of duty, and allowed her spirit to reenter her earthly remains long enough to change into some clothes more fitting for eternity. However, in the short time that his back was turned, she also left a note for her best friend . . . one that would have gotten that woman killed if Grif hadn’t stepped in there as well.

He’d interfered, altered fate, and paid for it. Yet he still wasn’t sorry. After all, Kit Craig—girl reporter, rockabilly enthusiast, and, yes, Grif’s subsequent lover—still lived, and he’d do it all again in a heartbeat . . . even though she now lived her life without him in it.

Nicole shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. If I’d known it would put Kit’s life in danger . . .” She trailed off, and silence swelled between them. Grif wondered how much she knew of what had gone on between Kit and him in the last year. How they’d married his P.I. skills with her investigative journalism and seen an end to that child prostitution ring. How they’d put the drop on two vicious drug cartels.

How they’d fallen in love.

“Don’t worry about it, Nic.” He tried to keep his voice light, but it was hard. His throat still had a tendency to close up at the thought of Kit. “We got out of it alive.” Then he changed the subject. “But what about you? Guess you didn’t make it through the Tube?”

That was what Grif called incubation, the divine process of erasing all memory and emotion from a traumatized soul’s mind so that it could move on into God’s presence. Obviously it didn’t always work that way. Grif was still haunted by his death . . . and so what? Why shouldn’t he be allowed to know who killed him fifty years earlier?

Maybe Nicole felt guilty over putting Kit in danger the day she’d died. Maybe by letting it go now she could finally move on.

Instead, she surprised Grif again. “Nope. Didn’t move on. And it’s all your fault.”

He drew back. “How’s that?”

“Well, you shoved me through that door, right? One moment I’m freshly dead, and the next I’m swinging from star to star, traversing universes, sipping from the Milky Way.”

“So.” Grif shrugged. “That’s how it works. You go into incubation, clear your mind, then enter the Pearly Gates as angels pluck harp strings and sing hallelujahs.”

“Yeah, but first I had to listen to a lecture by Father Francis about—”

“Who?”

“You know, the angel in charge of our rehabilitation?” She rolled her eyes, and recited his official title. “Saint Francis of the Cherubim tribe. The Pure charged with rehabilitating Centurion souls, blah, blah, blah.”

“You mean Frank,” Grif said, silently adding “the immortal pain in my ass” to Frank’s title. “Father Francis” appeared to each person in the form they most closely identified with authority. For Grif, it was a sergeant in a police bullpen, so he called him Frank, or Sarge. Nicole apparently had Catholic schoolgirl issues. Father Francis it was.

“Anyway,” Nicole went on, fluffing and resettling her wings behind her. “I couldn’t get what he told me about you out of my mind. How you were just trying to help me. How I used your latent humanity to manipulate your broken emotions and put you in danger.” She winced again in apology. “So I decided to pay it forward.”

A decision that’d obviously gotten her in trouble, otherwise she wouldn’t be forced to witness the deaths of her Takes before escorting them Home. “What’d you do?”

Nicole was eager to defend herself. “It was my second-ever Take, right? A murder-suicide, if you can imagine. The file said that a woman was going to shoot the man who was beating her, then turn the gun on herself, and I thought, this is the one.”

“Let me guess. You messed with the time-space continuum and stopped her.”

“That’s what you did,” she pointed out, like that made it okay. Grif pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “There was a six-month-old baby in the next room,” she said defensively.

“So, what, you bound your soul to hers while it was still in her body?” That was how Grif had helped Nicole. There’d been just enough blood pumping through her veins that, with the help of his angelic energy, she had time enough to change her clothes and tidy her hair—or half of it—before totally bleeding out.

Nicole shook her head. “She was alive, and too jumpy for me to make a decent connection. So instead I lined up my chakras with her dead husband’s body and animated him. It was gross, too. He was a smoker. There was tar in his veins.” Tilting her head, Nicole grimaced. “He also had a big wad of chewing gum for brains.”

“He’d just been shot,” Grif pointed out. “His thoughts were likely a bit scrambled.”

Nicole scoffed, which caused her wings to flare behind her in a downy white cloud. Their tips were threaded with silver and sparkled prettily as they settled. “No, my thoughts were scrambled when I died. This guy’s mind was a book of pornographic mad libs.”

By this time, the screaming from below had been replaced with ominous silence. Someone had taken control of the situation. Grif made out the sound of sirens in the distance, though they were too far away for the humans yet to hear.

“Oh, right,” Nicole said, picking up the sound with the strength of her celestial hearing. She glanced back over the ledge, but her Take was apparently still trying to work out that he was dead, because she just sighed and crossed her legs. “So I get in his body and I’m sorting through this briar patch of mental bullshit until I finally find a memory that doesn’t make me want to puke. It was one of those before-memories. Before . . . before . . .”

“Before whatever happens between two people who love each other that makes them want to kill each other.”

“Yeah,” Nicole said softly, and frowned. “And it’s beautiful, you know? He’s not as gross, and she’s beautiful, all filled with love and hope, and so I say the words—through his voice box, of course—that are attached to the thought so that his wife can hear them. And maybe not do what she’s going to do.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Margarite, you are the only good thing in my life that I never ruined.’ ”

“Cheery.”

“Hey, she was shoving a smoking pistol down her throat. It was the best I could do.”

“So, lemme guess. She latched on to that good-ish memory, put the gun down, and ran into the other room to hold her baby, thanking God for her life.”

Nicole rolled her eyes. “No, she came over, and kicked her husband’s corpse in the balls as she screamed that she knew he’d been fucking her twin sister all along. Then she shot him in the skull again.”

Grif stared.

“That shit hurts, by the way,” Nicole added, rubbing her forehead. “Nothing should ever touch your third eye.”

Grif was starting to regret he’d followed Nicole onto the rooftop. “So, this is your punishment for interfering? You gotta watch all your Takes die just like I do?”

Nicole shrugged, and one golden-white feather fell to the rooftop. She was molting. “Father Francis is a stickler for the rules.”

Yes. Frank was.

Just then, a transparent hand appeared on the ledge next to Nicole. The Take had finally found his way to the rooftop. Instead of offering to assist the dead man up, Nicole shifted to one side and sighed. “I don’t really mind. Being back here, I mean. Seeing mortal turmoil and struggle. It’s helping me remember.”

And that was the problem. Grif frowned. “It’s supposed to help you forget.”

“Yeah, but I’m remembering the good parts,” she said, looking up at him, sadness etched in her face. “I remember everything from the first bite of chocolate ice cream on a hot day to laughing until your sides hurt. I recall what it’s like to want something that isn’t totally unattainable. Of having choice and chance. I remember how it feels to still have hope for the future, your life laid out before you like an unopened gift. You know?”

Grif nodded as the Take threw his leg over the ledge and fell gasping—sans air, of course—onto his back.

“I want more.”

Nicole’s words were so soft that Grif almost didn’t hear them, but when he shifted his gaze back to hers, her eyes were moist with unshed tears.

“That’s not really how it works,” he grumbled, looking away. He wasn’t very good with tears.

“Hey . . . hey, guys!” The newly deceased began waving his arms in the air. Like he was easy to miss.

Ignoring him, Nicole stood and crossed the rooftop to square up on Grif. “But it worked for you. You came back. You get to search for whoever killed you fifty years ago. And you found love again.”

So she did know about Kit.

“That’s different,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a . . .”

He was going to say “mistake,” but it wasn’t that. The love of a woman like Katherine Craig was nothing short of a miracle.

“Hey!” The dead man began stumbling their way.

“That’s all I want,” Nicole said, arms out, like Grif could help her. “I died before I could fall hard, you know.”

“Maybe your Take could teach you something about that,” Grif said, as the man joined them.

“You know what I mean. I died before I knew what it was to love someone unconditionally . . . and now I never will.”

“Hey!” The man reached for Grif, screaming when his hand slid right through him. “What the hell is going on?”

Grif shifted slightly and cocked one eyebrow. “Son, you are not going to get very far in the Everlast with that kind of language.” He turned back to Nicole. “Look, maybe you’re lucky. Once you know love, you also know loss.”

Nicole shook her head as the dead man turned to her. “Don’t give me that ‘Woe is me’ bullshit, Shaw. You got a second chance with a woman worth more than a thousand lifetimes, and then you ruined it all just because you couldn’t get over your past.”

“Goddamn it! Would somebody listen to me?” The dead man grabbed Nicole’s arm—now that they were both transparent, he could do that—and she immediately shifted and reversed grips, yanking so fast he fell forward. She grabbed him and held him down by the scruff of his neck. Even Grif had a hard time seeing the speed of her movement.

“Don’t touch a woman unless and until she asks you to,” she growled, and stars burned in her eyes. “Got it?”

Grif snorted. “Gee, what a shocker that guys weren’t crawling all over you. Oh well. Better luck in the Everlast.”

Her eyes narrowed, extinguishing stars. “You know what, Shaw? I’m not just here for a Take. I actually have a little something for you, too.”

Grif shoved his hands into the pockets of his baggy suit and lifted one eyebrow. “What?”

“It’s a gift from me to you.” Nicole smiled coldly. “For breaking my best friend’s heart.”

And she whirled with the speed of light, rapping Grif’s skull with the bony arc of her beautiful left wing. Sunbursts exploded as his eyes rolled back in his head. He could do nothing to stop his fall, but as the rooftop rose to meet his face, he did have time for one fleeting thought.

Thank God I didn’t know this broad while she was still alive.