The Taken Read online

  The Taken

  Celestial Blues

  Book One

  Dedication

  For James—for talking me through this book in the beginning, living with me through its middle, and helping me see it through to the end. It’s as much yours as it is mine. Ditto the series. Ditto my life.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Vicki Pettersson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Here’s the thing. Every two-bit Tom and Dick on this glorified mudflat thought prostitution was legal in Las Vegas, but that’s never been true.

  Least, not when Grif was alive.

  Maybe times had changed—plenty on the Surface had—but it was more likely that the johns were too lazy to trek out to Nye County for a sampling from the legal sexual menu. No, there was too much premeditation in that. But score a lay in some trucker-heavy roach-motel, and a man could tell himself he was the victim of impulse. Caught up in the moment. Just a little ol’ fly snared in Sin City’s glinting web.

  Grif knew different. People created chaos, not places, and they were damned good at it no matter where they lived. And when this glittering gem of a city teamed up with the world’s oldest profession, fantasy piled atop fantasy; it could convince anyone that impulse was a virtue, not a vice.

  Just one roll of the dice, he thought, checking the number on the warped motel door against the entry in his notebook. Just one sip, make sure to tip. Play hard, enjoy the ride, and be certain to take your secrets with you when you leave.

  Nicole Rockwell’s last john, however, had taken a bit more.

  “Help me!” she was yelling as Grif came through the door. Impressive, since she was missing her larynx. “There’s been a terrible crime!”

  Can’t argue that, Grif thought, gaze skimming the hem of her cheap vinyl skirt. “You Nicole Elizabeth Rockwell?”

  “Wh-what?” She looked from Grif to the fresh corpse on the bed—her own—then back again. “Yes.”

  “Right.” He shut his notebook, returning it to his suit pocket. “Come with me.”

  Rockwell took one good look at his quasi-transparent form and promptly collapsed on the bed. “Wh-who are you?”

  “Griffin Shaw. I’m here to help.” He hesitated, then jerked his head at her remains. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.”

  Her expression, blasted and constricted all at once, made his jaw twitch, but he shrugged it off. Guardian wasn’t his beat. As a Centurion, he merely assisted the recently, and violently, deceased into the Everlast. Those who’d been clipped early often had trouble getting there on their own. As Grif well knew.

  He explained all of this to Nicole quickly, flatly, hoping it would keep the hysterics to a minimum. Given half a chance, females were always either jawing or at the waterworks. Dead or alive.

  “But I can’t just leave,” she protested when he was finished. “I’m going to a bonfire this weekend, the first one of the spring. And my best friend is waiting outside. We’re gonna chill downtown at the Beauty Bar tonight. Unwind a bit, ya know?” She glanced down at Grif’s proffered cigarette. A calming tactic. “Oh . . . thanks, honey.”

  Something stirred Grif as he bent down and lit her smoke. Probably the shake in her voice, though she talked like a lady, too. Not like most of the rabble he’d been picking up this decade. He snapped the Zippo shut. “Look, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, kid. But you’ve been rooked.”

  “What?”

  “You know, you got the dust-off. Killed. Murdered. Clipped. It’s a rough deal, but you’ve had some good times, right? Some wild rides?” He gave a little hip thrust to illuminate the point.

  “I’m not a hooker,” she said evenly.

  He let his eyes roam around the sex flop. “ ’Course you’re not.”

  Blowing out a stream of smoke, Nicole returned his flat stare. “So where exactly is this . . . Everlast?”

  “Now you’re choosy?” Grif muttered, glancing at his watch. He would’ve turned away, but the walls were mirrored and their reflections overlapped, her horrified heat wrapped over his impassive ice. Sighing heavily, he motioned her to the door.

  Nicole didn’t move. “What if I wanna do it all over?”

  “What over?” he mumbled, lighting his own stick.

  “You know. Life. Earth. Humanity. Come back until I get it right.”

  “Relax, sweetheart. Mattress time don’t count against you.”

  That got her back on her feet. “I told you! I’m not a hooker! I’m a photographer—”

  “Where’s your camera?”

  “Well, it’s not here, but I have this notebook—” She pointed at the dresser bearing a crappy twenty-inch television and a Moleskine identical to his. Except for the blood splatter.

  “Sure,” he said. “A photographer’s best friend.”

  The fight drained from Rockwell then, and she slumped where she stood, falling so still the only sound in the room was the soft drip, drip of her arterial blood as it fell from the bed to the floor. “But I’m not done here.”

  “Just take my hand, kid. It’ll be all right.”

  She looked at him dubiously. Grif frowned. Sure, his suit was rumpled, but it was clean enough, and his pomade had held at his time of death, though it was hidden beneath the brim of his fedora. A little ginger stubble had sprouted—he’d been offed after five—but if his eyes were hard, they were also clear. All in all, not too bad for fifty years dead.

  Yet Rockwell remained unconvinced. “How do I know you’re not tricking me? You could latch on and suck my soul down to hell, like in that movie.”

  “You mean Ghost, right?” A couple of the younger Centurions had explained about that. Some sleeper flick that hit it big a couple decades ago. Now he had to explain himself to every corpse that walked his way. “Look, I’m not a demon, and I’m no ghost. I’m a . . . gentleman.”

  Nicole blinked.

  “Lots of firsts for you today, eh, Ms. Rockwell?”

  Eyes narrowed, she crossed her arms. “Piss off, Shaw. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Grif fought not to grind his teeth. He’d get hell from Sarge if she took it in her mind to hang out here and haunt the place. And he’d be damned—figuratively speaking, of course—if he was going to let her sully his perfect Take record. Besides, she’d been dead all of five minutes. She didn’t yet know what was good for her.

  Grinding his cigarette beneath his heel, Grif said, “What are you going to do, honey? Throw down the ménage in this joint for the rest of eternity? Though . . . I guess it does beat sizzling.”

  “Sizzling?”

  “One wrong turn outta here, and . . .” He made a sound, trout frying in a pan. It was a rotten trick but i
t worked.

  Nicole shuddered in her demi-cups, then stood and slowly glanced around. “So, that’s it, huh? Twenty-six years of—”

  “Twenty-nine,” Grif corrected.

  “—of mortal struggle, and this is how it ends.”

  Grif made another show of looking at his watch, while peering at Nicole from the corner of his eye. She didn’t look like she was going to leak, he decided gratefully. Instead, she looked like she was going to kick something.

  She did . . . then dropped back to the bed, and put her head in her hands while Grif began hopping around.

  “Damn it, lady!” He glared, cradling his throbbing shin. “I’ve had enough of this postmortem crap! Get your lifeless, flabby backside off that bed and follow me!”

  Now she began to cry.

  The recently murdered were so sensitive.

  Sighing, Grif lifted his hat and ran a hand over the top of his head. He could practically hear Sarge’s barked reprimand. Patch it up, Shaw.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, stealing another glance at his watch.

  “Fuck you, Mr. Sensitivity!” she yelled. “I’m not following your washed-out, B-movie, pseudo-Five-O ass anywhere!”

  “Careful, peach. Look how you get to spend eternity.” Grif showed his teeth, and though there wasn’t any blood in her ethereal body, Nicole blanched. Then her outline began to shimmer. Not much time left. “That’s right. We’re all stuck in the clothing worn when we die. Kinda makes you wish you’d overcome that latex fetish, huh?”

  “Oh, God.” Nicole looked up at the mirrored ceiling and fussed with her hair, but it sprang back into the deflowered do she’d been sporting at the time of her death. “Oh, God!”

  “She’s on her lunch break,” Grif muttered, but his heart softened anyway. He couldn’t help it. He was lucky to have been offed in 1960. He’d watched too many Centurions shy away from mirrors in the Everlast in the decades since.

  “All right, I have an idea.” It was technically against the rules, but the girl was looking at him with those tearful eyes, and he was looking back, really seeing her for once. Helpless females always got to him. And though Rockwell was a lady of the night here on the Surface, there could be someone waiting for her on the other side. They might not recognize her like this . . . or want to.

  Besides, he’d been blood and bone once, just like her. In the end, and that’s what this was, they were exactly the same. “All right, listen up. There are some clothes in that dresser over there—”

  “How do you know—?”

  “I just do,” he interrupted, “and you’ll move fast if you know what’s good for you. You’re starting the Fade. I can send you back into your body long enough to change your clothes and do something with that mop on your head. But you gotta keep quiet. Your E.T.D. is twelve fifty. If someone hears you rummaging around at one, my superiors will know I interfered.”

  Nicole nodded vigorously.

  “All right. Get back in.”

  “In?”

  “Your body. You gotta line up those pulse points over your earthly remains. Then I can fuel them.”

  It wasn’t technically necessary, but using her remains was a way to ground her both mentally and physically, giving her the impression of purchase on the Surface even though her spirit was already free. It was like tying a boat to a dock, securing it there even as waves crested around it.

  Rockwell did as told, carefully settling her ethereal energy atop her body so that it looked like a shimmering chalk outline. Grif listened for a faint click in the etheric, her final pulse point snapping into place, before echoing the action, positioning his translucent body above hers so their chakras aligned. It required submission on her part, and a smothering of her energy with his own. It was a sensation most loose souls found claustrophobic, but Rockwell didn’t even flinch.

  Probably used to it, Grif thought, letting himself sink.

  Vacuumed silence overran the room, blunting even Grif’s celestial senses. Shape and form and sensation blurred as their energies melded as one, and they fell together, burrowing back into skin and cells and tissue and blood. By the time they fully occupied Nicole’s body, her life energy was cocooned safely inside of his.

  The blood in her core was not entirely still. Her sluggish pulse still lapped like low tide at the shore, not yet aware its efforts were futile. Grif was, though, which was why the sudden explosion of color behind the dead woman’s eyelids rocked him. Then the tang of blood and saliva invaded his mouth, followed by the ache of mortal injury—dulled by shock but still keen— and Rockwell’s gaping wounds were suddenly his. Stinging fingertips—she had fought—were also his. The clamminess seeping in to claim the once-warm body made him want to gasp and struggle, and the ache that swelled inside him wasn’t from injury but from a long-forgotten, yet familiar, desire.

  Life.

  Grif clenched his jaw, and felt foreign teeth grind together in an unfamiliar way. Pushing that discomfort away, he forced his energy down, past cells and tissue and the molecules that made everything on the Surface so tangible. An instant later, he was facedown beneath Rockwell’s deathbed, alone in spirit, lying in a sticky pool of blood. When he slid out from under the bed, Nicole was already sitting up, literally holding her head.

  “I feel like shit,” she gurgled.

  “Well, keep your eyes on the floor, honey, ’cuz you look even worse.”

  She did, though glared at him first. “And keep yours to yourself.”

  “Not a show I care to see,” he muttered, but crossed to the window to wait. Clumsy rummaging followed, silence, then exhausted groans and more silence.

  Grif needed a moment to recover anyway. Rubbing his aching chest, he pulled back one grungy curtain panel. He’d left the pain of mortality behind long ago, and the suggestion of skin over his soul smothered and burned, like he’d been dipped in hot wax.

  How could he have forgotten this?

  A movement outside the window caught his eye, and he focused on it like an alley cat spying a rat. He tried to zoom in, but Nicole’s humanity blunted his vision. He’d gotten so used to telescopic eyesight—to all the gifts afforded a Centurion—that he was unaccustomed to limited senses. Yet there was just enough residue from the Everlast to see clearly into the blackened winter night, and when Grif finally focused, he couldn’t help but wish for full celestial vision again.

  If Grif was a B-movie version of an old-school P.I., then this woman was a full-fledged screen siren. Even from a distance, he could make out silky sable hair pulled back from sky-high cheekbones. They rode a round, sculpted face with lips tucked at the center of it like full, pink cushions. And that shape, he thought, as she stepped from the car. Curves like he hadn’t seen on a woman in decades. More hairpins than Mulholland Drive, every sweeping stretch draped in red silk, shimmering in places that made his mouth go dry.

  Maybe it was just his imagination, but the outfit looked like a throwback to his time, when women wore clothes that made them look like walking gifts instead of unwrapped packages. Mirage or not, he thought, rubbing at his eyes, she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen.

  Yet even from a distance, even as she angled her head to reveal a neck as smooth and creamy and inviting as the rest of her, there was a sharpness to her, an awareness of her surroundings as she squinted . . . then looked directly at him.

  Grif jumped. Did she actually see him?

  “Shit,” he muttered, letting the curtain fall. It was Nicole’s humanity. He was wearing her life-force, sharing it, as much as she was his.

  “What?” asked Nicole, sounding startled.

  “Nothing,” he muttered. They needed to move anyway. “You ready yet?”

  “Not quite,” she said quickly, halting his turn. “You’re not peeking, are you?”

  Grif just made a sizzling sound through his teeth. The rummaging started up again, more frantic.

  “Can I ask you something?” she managed, though breathing hard. Each exhalation jerked at Grif’s ch
est, like someone was cross-stitching his heart. He’d have to return to the Everlast for a jolt of energy before his next Take. “Why can’t I remember who . . . My death?”

  “Because it was violent,” he said shortly. No need to sugarcoat it. She knew, even if she didn’t want to say it. “It’s the Everlast’s way of protecting your soul so you don’t relive it over and again. You’ll go through a process called incubation, which will rehabilitate you to forget your earthly years.” And, he didn’t add, forever conceal the horrors associated with her brutal death. “Then you can move on to Paradise. It’s all meant to keep you focused on moving forward, not looking back.”

  “Like you?”

  No. Not like him at all. “You done?”

  She blew out a breath, causing a particularly hard jerk on his heart, and made a sound of assent. He turned to find her in front of the dresser, leaning against it, looking uncertain. She’d replaced her hooker-wear with jeans and a tee. Both were still too tight in Grif’s opinion, but classic enough to defy most eras. Her hair had been tamed into a style that made her look only half-dead, and at Grif’s half-hearted thumbs-up, she staggered back to the bed, exhausted from the blood loss.

  “More to the left,” Grif instructed, squinting one eye as she attempted to resume her previous pose. “Perfect.”

  He climbed aboard once again, inhaled deeply, and withdrew his own energy, the needle in his heart disappearing instantaneously. Solitary silence reigned inside of him again, though it brought with it an unexpected sidekick: loneliness.

  Damn it, he thought, as he stood, wiping at his mouth to hide his shaky breath. He’d have left her as she was if he’d known he’d have to feel that. But as he rubbed his chest, the last of the energy tethering Nicole’s soul to her body fell away, and she rose again from her deathbed.