The Given

by Vicki Pettersson

  “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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The nightclub possessed the sultry warmth derived from quickened breaths and writhing bodies, along with the irresistible pulse of a rockabilly beat. Yet chills still shot along Kit’s limbs as she walked, keeping to the edges of the dark room while she squinted through stage light and smoke, searching for what she’d lost. There. A glimpse of a broad-shouldered man just before a handful of couples, swinging to surf guitar, obscured her view. Shifting, she spotted him again, wearing a Sinatra suit and a skinny tie, a tilted fedora and beneath that, if she wasn’t mistaken, a smile just for her.

  Kit’s breath caught like it’d been snared. She dodged the sweaty limbs of a couple marrying their actions to Imelda May’s bluesy, rasping voice, which soared over the sound system and climbed into their bones. Kit’s heart tripped over itself as she took two more steps directly toward the man, almost a run. Then he closed the distance between them.

  Kit recoiled. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Grif.

  She missed him like rain. She was as parched as the cold, unyielding desert outside, longing for his voice or touch or anything to make her feel alive, or at least less desiccated. Hating herself for feeling that way, she turned to find a drink. Maybe one of the greasers would buy her a Pabst. She needed something that would go down easy and quickly.

  The hand fell on her arm before she could move. The man in the fedora had caught up with her, and his fingertips trailed her wrist. His gaze was bright and playful in a face too youthful yet to be chiseled. His size was close, though. And a slow song was beginning. She might be able to close her eyes and pretend.

  “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.

  How’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.”