The Lost Read online

  The splintered voice lifted. “Let me see her. I need that light again. It’s been so long . . .”

  Grif’s arms tightened around Kit’s shoulders with a clanking of metal, fine slim blades marshaling anew. “Get behind me, you piece of celestial waste. You won’t touch her or me, because I am also one of God’s own.”

  “Pure and God’s child?” Icy derision funneled Kit’s body in a mini-tornado. She shuddered in Grif’s arms. “Not possible.”

  And the rush of wind rose again. Grif shifted, slivering the air with wings that’d gone blade-sharp, and Kit heard a sound like roots grinding beneath a relentless saw. Then there was an elongating cry, one stunted with the fluttering of pebbles and dead leaves, like debris roiling in a twister. The sound whipped around her, fed into the walls, and then, inexplicably, retreated out the front door.

  Kit’s ragged breathing was suddenly the loudest thing in the room. Grif’s grip softened on her shoulders, but remained there to steady her. Eyes squeezed shut, Kit didn’t move at first, but then she risked a glance over his left—wingless—shoulder, and found Jeap exactly where he’d been lying when she’d entered the room.

  “Wh-what was . . . ?” But there were no words for what she’d just seen. Irises like opaque stars in eyes that moved independently of each other. Breath like a storm. A voice alive with the sounds of a forest.

  “That,” Grif said, jaw tight, “was an opportunist.”

  “It touched me, Grif. Just for a second, but . . .” She looked at him. “It felt like death itself.”

  She searched his face for reassurance, yet all he did was nod.

  “Is he gone?” she asked, panicking all over again.

  “Yes,” Grif said, voice strange. “It’s gone.”

  Kit noted the word choice, and shuddered. “It butchered him, Grif,” she told him as steadily as she could. “Jeap lifted his arm and I saw bone. I saw—”

  Grif cut her off with the shake of his head. “No. Jeap did this to himself.”

  “No way!” Pulling away, she pointed at the motionless teen. “Look at him! He can’t even sit up. He’s lying in his own feces!”

  “Because he didn’t do it today.”

  Kit shook her head. Though simple enough, the words didn’t compute.

  Something in her expression made Grif soften. “I told you it couldn’t be stopped.”

  “You mean Jeap has been like this, by himself, for more than a day?” She shook her head, like that could make it not true.

  “More than many days from the look, and smell, of things.”

  Horrified, she met Grif’s gaze. “Jesus. Someone just left him here?”

  “Likely someone as strung out as he was, yes. And that’s what I need you to do now, too.”

  She nodded. “We’ll call an ambulance. They can help—”

  “Can they?” Voice raised, and angry now, Grif cut her off. “Look at him, Kit. The flesh is falling from his body. Gangrene. Can’t you smell the rot?”

  Kit’s chest tightened, and bile soured in her throat. It was the very thought she’d been trying to keep at bay. “I thought it was that thing—”

  “That thing was an angel, Kit.”

  “No way.” Jerking away, she stepped back. “That was nothing like—”

  “Nothing like me, no. But it was horrifying and awesome and destructive. There are angels out there who are all of those things.”

  Kit glanced down at her shaking hands. She needed a cigarette to get her nerves back under control. “I don’t understand.”

  Grif clutched her shoulders again, but this time he gave her a little shake. “And I don’t have time to help you. Take my phone, Kit. Go make your call, but I need to help him before, or in case, that angel comes back, and I can’t do that unless you leave.”

  “Leave him to die?” Her voice cracked on the last word, and the shock she’d been fighting off finally found its way into her limbs. She began to shake.

  “He’s afraid, Kit. But he’s also holding on because you’re here.” Grif closed his eyes, and his nostrils widened as he filled his lungs with the filth and poison in the room, along with something else Kit knew she’d never be able to smell. “He’s ashamed. He wants to let go, and knows there’s nothing left for him here, not even his own body, but he’s not going to listen or come with me as long as you’re in the room.”

  “How do you know that?” Kit whispered, slowly shaking her head.

  Opening his eyes, Grif met her gaze. “Because I know death.”

  Kit stared at Grif like she’d never seen him before, but finally turned to slowly pick her way across the destroyed room. She’d return the flashlight to her trunk, get that cigarette, and call for help that would arrive too late. Meanwhile, Grif would execute his fated, unstoppable job.

  Yet she paused at the threshold to the home, one hand clutching the open doorway as she glanced back over her shoulder. Grif looked the same as always in his loose-fitting suit, the fedora shading his eyes, still wingless to her human gaze. But the hard worry on his face was unfamiliar and made worse because he was looking at her and not back at Jeap.

  “That angel . . . is it really gone?” Kit asked.

  Grif inclined his head, but looked no less worried, and Kit knew why. She’d talked to, and interacted with, a creature not of this world. Worse, it’d talked back.

  “It was dangerous,” she said, speaking from her gut. She might not know the ways of the Everlast, but she’d learned long ago to trust her gut. “Not just to Jeap, but to me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Grif said, eyes narrowing. “I’m dangerous when it comes to you, too.”

  Chapter Four

  With sweaty palms and a racing heart—and wings still unfolded and pricked to the smallest shift of the air current in the room—Grif watched Kit exit the dingy, deserted home. Every nerve in his body screamed at him to follow, and he allowed himself a shudder at the memory of the way that angel—that thing, as she called it—had been staring at her when Grif arrived.

  It had looked ravenous. It lunged for Kit like it was about to dine.

  Yet that otherworldly presence was gone, and Grif needed to forget the interaction for now. At least he knew what was happening to the missing Lost souls, and he’d report back to Frank once he hit the Everlast, but first he needed to secure this one. He’d given Jeap Yang’s unwelcome visitor a good jolt, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t return.

  Squinting through the room’s corralled chemical haze, Grif stared at Yang’s abused remains. Sarge had stated that this kid and Grif had something in common, but gazing at the drug-addled body, Grif was damned if he could see what.

  Yeah, they’d both been born on this great big mudflat, if decades apart. They’d both once been healthy strapping young men with promising futures, each of which had been altered by choice and fate and damning mistakes. Grif saw that much. They’d also each died in ways horrific enough to sentence them to a post-life stint in incubation, or what Grif liked to refer to as the Tube. In you went, broken and weary and weighed down with your past, and out you came, polished up enough to pass through the Pearly Gates. At least that’s how it worked for most.

  It hadn’t for Grif, which was why he’d gotten stuck working the Centurion beat, and if Jeap were broken enough—ashamed of his life’s actions, haunted by guilt, or hanging on for a chance to make it all right—then he’d end up doing the same, helping other injured souls into Paradise until he, too, healed enough to move on.

  But the similarities stopped there. Newly shorn from his body, Jeap’s soul was the spiritual equivalent of a newborn . . . and in this case one that was a strung-out, drug-addled, abandoned shell of a human with no hopes of locating on his own which way was up. In turn, Grif was like protective services for the soul. One that’d come through the same system, graduated without honors, and was now charged with ferrying this Lost scrap of life into the Everlast.

  He had fifty years’ worth of experience in dealing with the dead, plus i
nstinct honed as a mortal P.I. before that. Right now that experience and instinct had him standing stock-still in the filth-strewn room before he pulled out his Luckies and lit a stick. It was a stalling tactic . . . and a calming one. It showed he wasn’t here to judge. It also helped shield his strong sense of smell from the room’s toxic chemical haze. He’d be lucky if the lining in his nostrils survived it.

  Blowing out a defensive stream of smoky tar, he said to the empty room, “You can come out now. No one here but us dead people.”

  Jeap’s shallow breathing immediately ceased, his chest falling still in mid-inhalation, as if he’d been waiting for permission to die. Nothing happened after that, though. A regular Take would rise immediately, his or her ethereal form emerging directly from the earthly remains, but maybe the Lost were different. He’d have to ask Sarge.

  In any case, the kid had to know death was coming, and he’d probably overthought the experience. On top of the attempted soul-rape, Jeap was likely so scared by everything he didn’t know that he’d rather hold on to the fetid remains of a decaying body than let it go for . . . well, only God knew what.

  Maybe that’s why Grif had been sent to Take the kid. He knew enough of both heaven’s clockwork and earth’s timeline to merge the two into one seamless thread. “If you’re worried about the girl, don’t be. She’s calling for help, though she’ll be back soon, and if you want to get out of here before all those people see you like this, now’s your chance.”

  Not the most sensitive speech he’d ever given, but not the least, either. Still, nothing happened.

  Frowning, Grif bent over the body, using Pure eyesight to see past flesh and bone, searching for life beneath the earthly remains. Nothing. So he took another drag from his stick, bent closer, and exhaled hard. An ethereal mingling of temporal smoke and supernatural license washed over the corpse, causing the thin eyelids to flip open like shades. Grif stared. The starry, otherworldly gaze was also gone.

  Straightening, Grif looked around. It took a moment, one in which he had to remember both to look and not look, but then he caught the shimmery thread of plasma slithering into a beat-up entertainment unit, the only real furniture in the room. Tucking his stick between his lips, he crossed the room in two strides, bent, and yanked the bottom doors open with both hands. There, inside, were the coiled-up spiritual remains of Jeap’s newly shorn soul.

  “No need to worry now, son,” Grif said. “It’s all over.”

  The soul was shivering, even though the spiritual world was absent of heat or cold. Jeap might feel better if Grif could get him to look in the mirror. His ethereal remains resembled the boy he should have been, before the drugs took him hostage. Sure, he’d be forever confined to the dingy clothes he’d died in, and he’d made a gross error in judgment by recently cutting his own hair with what must have been a kitchen knife, but his skin was unblemished beneath the sad mop, his eyes clear, and his mind was likely sharper than it’d been in years.

  When Jeap realized Grif wasn’t going to grab, berate, or otherwise abuse him, he gave a jerky nod. “You made him go away.”

  Nodding, Grif offered a hand, and after a moment Jeap accepted it. He straightened with a groan and wiped off the back of his jeans. “Thank you. He was tugging at me, and it felt like his fingers were splintering beneath my skin, but it felt like splinters of ice, and then . . .”

  “Yes?” Grif said, because Jeap had frozen, as if the memory of those icy fingers had riveted him to the floor.

  “Then it saw her. That girl you were talking to.” Jeap looked at Grif, eyes going wide. He began to shake again and put a hand to his stomach like he was going to be sick. “I felt what it felt, and it wanted to snuff that light in her from existence, to infect her with illness and disease and hatred and horror . . . oh my God.”

  “Stop,” Grif commanded, and had to will himself not to shake the kid, or slap him, anything so he’d shut the hell up about Kit. “Stop thinking about it. It’s gone.”

  Happy to oblige, Jeap nodded sharply, but looked around the room to make sure for himself. That’s when he caught sight of his corpse and winced. “Did I do all that to myself?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” Grif asked, because he didn’t remember his death, either. That was the Everlast’s way of protecting the dead. It kept them from reliving those final, horrifying moments over and over again, so that they could more easily move on.

  Not exactly foolproof, though, was it? Grif thought, taking one final, steadying drag before flicking aside his smoke. He couldn’t remember who’d killed him, yet he couldn’t forget it, either.

  Jeap shook his head. “I remember entering this room. It didn’t look like this, though.”

  “What day was that?”

  “Friday.”

  Today was Tuesday. “Which Friday?”

  Jeap shrugged. “I don’t know exactly, but my girl always gets paid the first of the month. So . . . last Friday, I guess.”

  The kid was off by a week, but Grif just nodded. No wonder he was dead. He’d been pumping this filth into his veins for almost twelve straight days. But Jeap was thinking of something else. “Come to think of it, now that I can actually think, I mean . . . I guess she wasn’t really my girl. I mean, how can you really love someone if you help them do this?”

  “She buy you the drugs?”

  Jeap ran a hand over his head, jerked it away in surprise, then moved across the room to study his reflection in the window. Groaning, he tried to smooth out his hair, but it fell back into the matted mess from the time of his death. “Man, she introduced me to it,” he finally replied, turning back to Grif. “Said I’d get the ride of my life. Guess she meant the last ride.”

  “Would she get high with you?”

  “Yes.” Then he thought about it. “No. Wait.”

  Grif waited as the kid’s brow furrowed.

  “I don’t know.” He stared at Grif. “Why can’t I remember?”

  “Because your death was violent,” Grif said simply. “Even if it was self-inflicted.”

  “Violent. Yeah.” The kid rubbed his hands up and down his arms, and shuddered. “I burned and felt dirty inside even as I was doing it. But I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t stop . . .”

  Grif saw where this was headed, and placed a steadying hand on Jeap’s shoulder. The last thing he needed was for the kid to panic and run off-track. “The Everlast keeps you from recalling a violent death so you don’t have to relive it. You’re not meant to take it with you.”

  Jeap laughed humorlessly. “Man, I’ve been living this death every day for the past two years.”

  “Hey,” Grif said sharply, causing the kid to jump. Grif softened his tone. “Guilt is an empty emotion. There’s no place for it in the Everlast.”

  Jeap licked his lips. “You . . . sure that’s where I’m going?”

  “That’s where I went.” And Grif had enough guilt for the two of them.

  “You’re an angel,” Jeap pointed out then. Shifting his gaze, Grif caught sight of his wings in the window across from him. Only the dead could see them. Tar-black and sharp as blades, they crested high over his shoulders, flashing ebony muscles when he flexed. They were magnificent.

  “Not always,” he said, returning his gaze to Jeap’s. “I was murdered in 1960. So I know what you’re going through.”

  Jeap narrowed his eyes. “That must be why you look different.”

  “Than what?” Grif said.

  “Than me.”

  Glancing at the corpse, Grif huffed. He hoped so. “That’s because I’m both angelic and human.”

  He explained to Jeap in a quick rap how he’d been forced to cram his soul back into flesh four months earlier. The dual natures had hurt at first. His blood had eventually warmed, and his coagulated veins had warmed, but he’d suffered throbbing headaches for weeks after, migraines like earthquakes. Breathing was as torturous as if he were a lunger. Memory was a plague.

  But then a Pure angel t
ransferred some of her celestial strength into him in hopes that her amplified angelic senses would drive him mad, and he’d flee back to the Everlast. The plan backfired. Earth, the mudflat, had instead become bearable again. His senses were additionally magnified, almost as strong as they’d ever been in the Everlast. He’d since gotten used to the twin feathers she’d tucked deep behind each shoulder blade, and almost never felt them.

  “I’m both ageless and clothed in mortal flesh,” he concluded, as Jeap listened, rapt. “I have free will, like all humans, but am still bound to the Everlast. In short, Purity lives in me, even though it shouldn’t.”

  “So how did you die?” Jeap asked.

  Hands tucked in his pockets, Grif shrugged. “I was stabbed in the gut. A doc probably coulda patched me back up, but one never got the chance.”

  “You weren’t found in time?”

  “I was dry-gulched right after I was stuck.”

  “You were what?”

  “Whacked over the head with a ceramic vase.”

  Jeap winced, then looked back at his remains. “So what will happen to me?”

  “You’ll go through a process called incubation. It’s . . . healing. It’ll rehabilitate you so that you forget most of your earthly years. Then you can move on to Paradise.”

  Jeap looked over at his body and shuddered. He still had the wide-eyed aspect of the Lost, but at least he didn’t look like he was going to run. “Think I’ll get to come back, too?”

  Grif winced before he could help it. He wouldn’t wish a return to the Surface on anyone. Except himself, of course. “Aren’t you tired, son?” he asked quietly.

  “Exhausted,” Jeap admitted, swallowing hard before he met Grif’s gaze. “But I have regrets.”

  “ ’Course you do.” Grif shrugged. “That’s how you know you were alive.”

  “I did things I shouldn’t have,” Jeap added.

  “That’s how you know you were human.”

  Jeap thought about it. “If the afterlife—”

  “Everlast,” Grif corrected.