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 instinct 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