The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2) - By Vicki Pettersson Page 0,1
despite his Centurion status, he didn’t read. Glancing at his sarge, who still stared up at him through the teen’s sidelong smirk, Grif resisted the urge to give him a little kick. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that the answer to this question wasn’t on these pages. It wasn’t even Sarge’s fault. He didn’t provide answers, only guidance.
“Little late for visiting hours,” Grif finally said, offering him a hand.
Sarge accepted the help, and when they locked grips, the teen’s skin was grave-cold. Summer or not, the kid would be frosted over when his displaced consciousness returned to his flesh. Grif would have felt bad about that, except that angelic possession generally left the host body with a little something extra, too—something that would benefit that individual for the rest of their mortal life. The kid’s throwing arm, for instance, might suddenly turn him into the next Mickey Mantle. Or new parts of the brain, previously inaccessible, might light up like mental landing strips in his mind, making him the next Einstein. But none of that was Grif’s concern.
“What’s wrong, Shaw?” Sarge said, sensing his impatience. “I told you I’d be coming. Or am I disturbing something back in that warm, wide bed?”
Grif drew back, eyes narrowing. “That bed, and what goes on in it, is none of your business.”
A look that was too knowing for the young face overtook the teen’s features. “It’s no wonder you got no incentive to leave this mudflat.”
“That’s not why I’m here and you know it,” Grif said, jaw clenching.
Yet the knowing look remained, and silence stretched between them. “Got a smoke?”
Grif scoffed. “I can’t be seen giving the paperboy a cigar.”
“That’s why I came to you in a vision,” Sarge said, and the marble eyes swirled faster. “Besides, I know you have one. I can smell it on you.”
Grif did. He’d gone through the motions of putting one in his pocket as he dressed. That was the trick with visions. If you went along with them, believed and acted as though they were real, they’d reveal their secrets. If you fought them, they’d turn on you like a cornered rattler.
So Grif pulled it from his pocket, watched the swirling eyes widen, and even lit the stick for Frank. The first hit of nicotine took, and bliss gradually replaced judgment. Even angels had their vices. Then Grif asked, “What’s with the paperboy guise?”
“It’s not a guise. I’m actually in possession of your paperboy.”
Grif was surprised. The kid looked healthy, at least in the vision. Usually only the very old, very young, or mentally incapacitated were susceptible to Pure possession.
“He’s a sleepwalker,” Frank supplied, closing his eyes as he inhaled again. “And I needed him to make a delivery.”
Grif glanced down at the paper in his hands, and knew the real one would be waiting on the doorstep when he truly awoke. “So what do you want?”
“Same thing God wants, Shaw,” Frank answered, and it was true. As powerful as the Pure were, they had no will outside that of God’s. “I want you to come Home.”
Grif just jerked his head. “We agreed I get to stay until I find out who killed me.”
“It’s been four months,” Sarge said, eyes still closed.
“Yes, and I’ve been working on it nonstop.”
The marble gaze found his again through the smoke.
Grif raised his chin. “Fifty years is a long time. Leads dry up. The case is cold.”
“So what makes you think it can ever be solved?”
Why did he think he could solve the mystery of who’d killed him fifty years earlier? Because he wasn’t leaving this mudflat again until he did, that’s why.
“I got an appointment with a woman. Today,” he told Sarge. “I think she’ll be able to help me.”
Sarge tucked one arm beneath the other, propping it up, another gesture that was too old for the young body’s knobby limbs. “And then what?”
“Then I follow the answers until they lead me to the killer.” Or killers . . . because in the brief flashes of memory that Sarge and Company hadn’t been able to wipe out, he’d seen that the man who’d attacked him that fateful night hadn’t been working alone. There’d been two of them, and they’d taken his life.
They’d murdered his wife.
“I mean what happens after that?” Sarge pressed, absently scratching the boy’s bony rib cage. “After you solve your life’s, and afterlife’s, greatest mystery?”
Grif couldn’t even begin to guess. He hadn’t been granted wings and the status of angelic helper because he was special. Being