The Given (3 page)

“Would you like to dance?” he asked, as she knew he would.

She gave him a gentle smile and wondered how he'd respond if she said,
What I'd really like is to die.

Then she shook her head—both an answer and a way to empty her mind of the thought. Kit tried not to think too much these days. She didn't like where her thoughts led. The man took it well, doffing his hat, offering up a rain check with a shrug, and returning to his crew in the club's center. Kit smiled wistfully after him. What a life. Checking out Betties, rocking to Elvis, slamming back brew. Kit was not much older than the guy, only thirty, but she felt ancient.

She was wondering when and how that'd happened when she suddenly felt another pair of eyes on her. Searching the room, she found him. Dennis Carlisle. He stood out because, like her, he was the only other person who wasn't moving. Light rocketed off the planes of his face, and though he otherwise fit in—dressed like a greaser in a white T and cuffed jeans, hair slicked and sideburns long—his rigid stance still reminded her of a police officer. His frown also reminded her that she'd broken his heart by not returning his calls, his texts.

And that, again, reminded her of Grif.

After another moment, Dennis shook his head and sighed. Then he turned away, and Kit just let him go.

“That's it.” Another hand appeared, this one on the opposite arm, and way less gentle than the first. Kit spun like a top and found herself being dragged directly across the dance floor by Fleur Fontaine, her friend's steps quick and light in a mermaid-tail dress that sparkled in the strobes. Kit actually stumbled in her vintage peep-toes, trying to keep up.

“What's going on?” she said, as Fleur pulled her into the side bar. Velvet walls muted the MC's voice from the other room, along with the upright bass that meant the start of a new set. Seated at a high-top table adorned with a flickering red-domed hurricane lamp were three other of Kit's besties. Lil DeVille, Charis Cointreau, and Layla Love—new to their inner circle. All sported stage names, de rigueur in the rockabilly subculture where they lived and thrived. False identities . . . for true friends.

Yet she tilted her head as she looked at them now. Despite their smiles, Kit noted concern in their gazes, and that had nerves jumping in her belly. “What is this?”

“This,” Fleur said, depositing Kit dead center, “is an intervention.”

Layla slid a drink across the table. Not a Pabst but a gin fizz. It'd do. Kit picked it up. “What are we intervening . . . in?”

“Not we,” Fleur corrected, then waggled her finger to exclude Kit. “Us.”

Kit set down the drink and rose to leave.

“No.” That firm hand again, pushing her back to her red-cushioned seat. “Hear us out. We love you and if we don't tell you this shit, who will?”

She placed her hand on her hip. “What shit?” Though she already knew.

“You're in trouble, Kit-ster,” piped in Charis, eyebrows drawn low beneath Betty bangs. A bright yellow poppy pinned back one side of her dark hair. “You've stopped living.”

“I haven't—”

“You used to laugh—” started Lil, whose own smile lines fanned out in winking flirtation from eyes that were always alight. Except for now, Kit noted.

“You did. All the time,” cut in Fleur, no stranger to fun. None of Kit's girls were. That's why they were . . . well,
Kit's.

And now she was mute. She lowered her gaze. She already knew all this.

“You used to smile,” Charis pressed.

But now Kit cried even before she was awake.

She said nothing. She didn't press back.

That seemed to embolden Fleur. “And you used to
dance
.”

But Kit couldn't even imagine that anymore. Sometimes she had trouble just getting to her feet in the morning. Forget the dance floor.

“Talk to us, Kit,” said Layla. She was powdered and dyed into Monroe perfection, and Kit found herself thinking, But you'd never understand. You're too perfect. Too whole. You've never been broken like this. “You used to talk to us.”

But Kit had run out of things to say. For the first time in her life she felt alone, solo in a world she'd once felt a part of, without even the desire for something, someone, more. She was a reporter who dealt in fact and had once believed that the truth really did set you free. But then she learned that the man she loved had a wife who was still alive, and he left Kit to go find her. It hadn't set her free at all. Instead, it'd set her adrift . . . and now nothing really touched her anymore.

She closed her eyes and lifted her drink. “I know. I'm . . . pitiful. Mooning over a boy. I'm a fucking country song.”

“It's okay, honey,” Fleur said, voice overly bright now that Kit had said something,
anything.
“We all know the tune.”

“Sure,” said Layla, edging so close her perfume threatened to clog Kit's pores. “When I was with Joe I thought I was Eartha Kitt, all ‘C'est Si Bon.' Then he met someone else and it turned out I was Tammy Wynette. ‘Stand by Your Man.' ”

She made a gagging motion with her finger, and Kit almost smiled. They were trying so hard.

“Look,” Fleur said, folding her hands over Kit's. “Griffin Shaw is just one man. One of millions who are just waiting out there for you to either moon over them or break their hearts. I bet there's some greaser in the other room right now who would be willing to take you for a swing and heal that beautiful heart.”

Kit thought of Dennis, how patient he'd been with her, how he'd waited for her to turn her mind from Grif and finally choose him. That patience had eventually snuffed out, along with the expectation that lighted his gaze whenever he looked at Kit. He was right to turn his back on her. He knew that Kit's heart was a seeping wound.

Kit thought about playing along just to end this uncomfortable conversation. She could flash her own dazzling smile—God knew she was good at hiding behind that—but these were her best friends, the girls who knew of her frailty and faults, and loved her anyway. If she didn't share what she was feeling with them, who would ever really know her?

“Look,” she said, leaning over the table. The other four women did the same, closing rank in a tight huddle. “I used to think I understood the world at large just because I got paid to report it. I thought I could intuit a person's motives by merely adjusting the focus of my critical lens. Zoom in close enough and any news story will reveal itself. I trusted my gut. I always sought and spoke the truth. And I believed that most people out there were like me, like you.” She gestured to them all. “Good people who treated others the way they want to be treated. Who wished strangers well and meant it. Who took joy in the simplest things . . .”

And these girls did. They understood the glory in one blade of grass, a singular sparrow's song . . . a kiss truly meant and felt. If Kit could exist on such simple fuel—and do it after she'd endured the illness and death of one parent and the murder of the other—then other people out there must as well, right?

“And then Nic died.”

If someone took a picture of their tight huddle just then, they'd have been mistaken for pin-ups of the past. Sad ones. Every one of the women froze, a stillness Kit broke with the shake of her head. “And I realized that some people victimize others just because they can. They use their power to manipulate the young.”

Like Caleb Chambers had, until Grif and she had stopped him.

“Or feed a junkie's addictions just to line their pockets with green.”

Like two warring drug lords had . . . until Grif and she had stopped them, too.

Or tear two people who loved each other apart, Kit thought. Just because they could.

She thought of the angel, the Pure, whom they hadn't been able to stop at all.

“I thought that I could stop some of that. That
I
could make a difference.”

And perhaps it'd seemed obscene to God, and all His winged monsters in heaven. The so-called Pure. Because what did she get for trying to live her best life daily? For loving a man who suddenly appeared before her, and for wanting love in return?

“I was betrayed. I was abandoned. I was left worse than when He found me.”

The girls thought she meant Grif, and all began babbling at once, trying to console her. Kit let them, because there was no explaining what she knew of the Everlast and of the Pure and of Griffin Shaw's true nature. And she
really
didn't know how to state that she'd very simply lost her faith—in the truth, in the world, and in God.

Kit had been holding her drink throughout the telling, but she put it down now, because even though it was wet, she knew it would taste dry. “I'm going home.”

“Wait. We're sorry,” Fleur said, trying to pull her back to her seat. “We won't talk about Griffin Shaw, or men at all. Just . . . stay.”

“Someday,” Kit promised, and folded her hands atop Fleur's for a brief moment. She meant it, too. She was still optimistic enough to believe she'd feel better someday. “But not tonight.”

She simply didn't feel like dancing.

She didn't look back as she left the side lounge, returning to the main club, where a sole male crooner was singing over the heads of a crowd of couples. You could choke on the pheromones rising in that room, and the hope in it—the life and the joy—had Kit rushing to the front door, which a man dressed like a fifties bellhop held open with a smile. Only when the cold night air finally hit her heated cheeks did she dare take a breath, though she kept up her pace until she'd reached her vintage Duetto and opened the door.

Then a silence closed in around her, a too-heavy blanket that made her ears want to pop. She whirled, searching, sure someone was watching her—from the doorway of the club, from behind the building, from within the cars around her.

Nothing.

She gave the lot one more scan, then huffed, sending a white puff of air into the night before climbing in behind the steering wheel of her car. There was nothing out there, she thought, as the car rumbled to life. At least, not for her.

H
ow's the head, Shaw?”

Stars, the imagined kind, floated and swirled before Grif's eyes in a pattern that made his stomach flip and churn. He bit back bile and groaned in annoyance. He recognized that voice. Tilting his head in the direction from which it'd sounded, Grif caught a burst of bright light between his slitted lids before everything went black and vision again slid away. Blinders.

The voice, Sarge's, tsk-tsked. “The flesh. It's just so weak.”

That steeled Grif's resolve, and he managed to sit up straight. “Does God know you're knocking His children around like this?”

“I never touched you, Shaw.”

“No, you just sent your pretty little lackey to do your dirty work.”

“So sorry to interrupt your life-in-progress. I know how busy you've been trying to find out who killed you.”

“Sarcasm is ugly on the Pure.”

“How do you know? You can't even see me.”

“Because you attacked me, kidnapped me, and then put blinders on me.” Grif stood up, because he couldn't just sit and take it, yet his legs swayed.

“I understand you're upset.”

Upset? Scowling, Grif folded his arms. He'd ceased taking calls from his celestial superior after the Pure had used Kit's goodness against her. Against
them.
He wasn't upset. He was downright furious.

“Please, sit down,” Sarge said, his voice coming from Grif's left this time.

“Or what?” Grif rounded on the voice, on the Pure angel who'd given him a second chance at life, and then went ahead and destroyed that, too. “You'll smite me?”

It was hard to toss off a pointed look when he couldn't see—he couldn't even tell if his eyes were open—but he gave it a decent try. “You're a created being who will never know what it is to be born or die. To live or love. You don't understand a damned thing about how I feel.”

“But I do. At least, I do now.”

Grif neither knew what that meant, nor cared. He just wanted to figure out where he was so he could get out of there, but that wasn't going to happen until Sarge willed it. So he located the hard surface he'd been propped against when he came to, some sort of giant wooden box, and plopped back down. “Where's your mercenary little angel?”

“Mr. Naumes was starting the Fade, so Ms. Rockwell had to take him for processing before he washed out completely. She asked me to apologize for the shiner.”

Grif huffed. “No, she didn't.”

“No, she didn't,” Sarge admitted. “I didn't realize when I asked for volunteers that she had her own reasons for offering to secure you.”

That's because he hadn't asked Grif, who knew firsthand how fiercely Kit and her friends covered for each other. Even, it seemed, in the Everlast.

“She'll be punished.”

“Nah, don't do that.” He
had
broken Kit Craig's heart, after all, and he'd feel the same way if he were Nicole. “Let's just get this over with. What do you want?”

At that, the blindness tore away, stinging like duct tape being ripped from the skin. Grif rubbed his eyes, blinked, and looked around. Wooden cargo boxes, stamped and stacked in neat piles, lined the sides of an oblong room. Everything from ceiling to floor was made entirely of wood. Planks, Grif realized, tapping his feet. The sound was more hollow than he expected, and he frowned as he spotted the netting strung from the low-hanging beams. Thick hemp ropes coiled along the walls, and along with the swaying, it put him in mind of a . . .

“It's not really a ship,” Sarge said from somewhere behind him. “We're still in Vegas. Treasure Island, to be exact. It was Rockwell's idea. We needed someplace central but quiet—though the next pirate show is in an hour, so we should make this quick.”