The Taken. Vicki Pettersson

and emotionally beaten woman sleep, and had been for hours, just as he’d promised. Unwilling to entertain any more of his own dreams, he was also fighting off his own mortal need for rest. But more than all of that, the real question was, what the hell had he done?

      I’m here to help. That’s what he’d told Craig, which was ironic since it was the same thing he always said. I’m here to help.

      Instead he’d hoo-dooed her into not calling the cops, waving his hand before her like a second-rate Houdini just to buy himself time to think. Because Katherine Craig was alive. She still had flesh and breath, which she’d likely be thankful for when she woke, but the point was that she shouldn’t ever wake again.

      Fate, he was willing to bet, was pissed.

      But the ripple had smoothed out, and the plasma dogging the woman had disappeared. None of his celestial senses picked up a hint of looming death, and even his headache had dulled. And it had all happened at the moment Craig was scheduled to die but didn’t.

      Pulling out his Luckies, Grif lit a stick and noted his scraped knuckles with odd fascination. Flexing, he wondered what it meant that they were both still alive.

      “Means you’re in deep with Sarge, that’s what,” he muttered, slumping on the chair in Craig’s bedroom. The lack of communication alone told him that much.

      But Sarge had dumped him back on the mud to do a job no soul should have to shoulder. And now that Grif had screwed up his case, what was the celestial response? Silence … with the additional bonus of memory and emotion to cement him to the Surface. Now it looked like he was stuck here until Sarge saw fit to reclaim him.

      They’ll probably send another Centurion to Take her, Grif thought. Maybe even her Guardian, a Pure. Yet, despite it all—screwing up Craig’s life and death, along with the pain of breathing and remembering—he didn’t regret beating off those men. Craig had been so outnumbered, so helpless, and literally naked, that it seemed unnatural not to help. He couldn’t stand by and watch a woman get beaten, raped, murdered. He’d rather be dead.

      “I thought for a moment that it had all been a dream.”

      Grif jolted and, looking over, knew exactly how she felt. Katherine Craig sat up, the covers slipping down the upper half of her body to reveal her bare neck and one smooth shoulder, the skin so flawless it was like a curvy pail of warm, fresh milk. He swallowed hard, keeping his gaze away from the flare of her hip and breasts as she pulled her robe tight, but it was like trying to keep his eyes off the hills framing a sunrise. After all, it was so much more of an event when there was something majestic supporting it.

      Yet Craig’s eyes weren’t bright with dawn. The shadows that’d been beneath them the night before were now deep half-moons, made even darker with knowledge. Oddly, coupled with the cascade of rumpled raven hair and her round bare face, it made her look impossibly young.

      “Did you sleep?” she asked, the very question eliciting a yawn. It felt strange. He hadn’t been tired in decades. Grif shook his head, putting out his cigarette in a white ceramic vase. Craig’s shadowed eyes narrowed at the movement, but she didn’t chide him.

      “Coffee?” she asked instead, pushing back the covers.

      “Please.” His voice was as musty with disuse as his manners. He stood, and so did she, which was how they found themselves uncomfortably close. It was odd, Grif thought. He knew what she looked like close to death, close to naked, close to him … yet didn’t really know her at all.

      “Excuse me,” she said, lowering her head and skirting him. Grif shoved his hands in his pockets, allowing distance between them as he followed her from the room.

      The house looked fresh-scrubbed in the early morning, unfiltered light falling over the dark wood floor like the kiss of a veil. The furniture was even more lacy and feminine glowing with the dawn, and the soft surroundings seemed to revitalize Craig. Until she rounded the corner.

      There she saw the kitchen’s sliding glass door, marginally ajar, which put a hitch in her step and breath. Cursing himself for not closing it before, Grif crossed to it and locked it shut. By the time he turned around, she was already standing with her back to him, stiff in front of the coffee pot. Though there was no mistaking its use, it was the one thing in the room he didn’t recognize from his time on the mud. It looked like it belonged on a rocket ship. Almost immediately the thing began to froth and foam, and Grif’s hands were curled around a hot cup in only a few moments more.

      So there had been some improvements with the onset of the twenty-first century, he thought, sipping his first decent cup of coffee in fifty years. It was smooth and strong, black and warm, and it made him wonder what else he’d been missing. He’d learned a lot after incubation, things a Centurion needed to know when visiting the Surface, including the objects surrounding his Takes. Cars were different, phones were different, and information flowed through the air now. The Internet. That had been the hardest for him to muscle into his mind.

      But many details were considered too small and mundane for the Centurions’ purposes. They tapped the mud too briefly for things like newfangled coffee-makers to matter. Instant coffee that tasted like a wet dream was apparently one of them.

      Craig joined him at the white pedestal table, where he’d positioned himself in the corner, an effort to appear unthreatening. Craig shifted uncomfortably anyway, pulling her robe tight.

      “How do you feel?” It was a question Grif never asked … though when you met someone right after a violent death, it wasn’t usually necessary.

      She stared. “Like my best friend was murdered, I was attacked, and there’s a strange man drinking my coffee in my house.”

      Grif sighed. Served him right for asking. And it had him looking again at the woman across from him, vulnerable in her robe and bare face and mortal body. Strong in her gaze, mind, and will to live.

      “How about I ask the questions for now?” she went on, and one slim brow lifted high.

      He inclined his head, and slumped into his corner chair. “You’re the reporter.”

      “And how do you know that?”

      “Toldja.” He pointed to himself. “P.I.”

      She tilted her head. “But you never said who hired you.”

      Yep, she was a strong one. Sharp, too. “Someone interested in the Rockwell case.”

      “She wasn’t a case to me. She was a friend.”

      “Probably why she left you this.” He threw her notebook on the table between them. He’d discovered it in the corner where he’d felled the blond man the night before. Even if Grif hadn’t seen the man stealing the journal on the gas-station security cam, this would have been proof positive that he was both girls’ killer.

      Or would have been, if not for Grif.

      Recognizing it, Craig let her cup clatter to the table, sloshing caffeinated gold across the shiny top. The spill looked like one of those Rorschach tests Grif’d had to take when entering the army. He wondered what it said about him that this one resembled a black angel carrying an enormous scythe.

      “I found it on the floor.” He jerked his chin. “Open it to the last entry.”

      She did, immediately. It was interesting, Grif thought, the way curiosity wiped away her fatigue. Maybe that was the spine holding her up, the wire threading her resolve. Whatever it was, it sparked the moment she spotted it, the name Rockwell had circled when Grif had allowed her to re-dress for the Everlast.

      “This is why they took my notebook!” She looked up, met Grif’s gaze, then back down again. “Oh, Nic! You’re so smart.”

      “So smart she almost got you killed.”

      Not that he could talk.

      Kit shook her head, not listening. “We were working on a story. She was meeting with someone who could provide us information when