were yours?”
Grif tried to keep his shrug nonchalant. “Where else was I going to get something so precious on such short notice?”
“But it said it knows you now, Grif.” Her tone said he’d better not try to evade.
“It’s not a possession thing, okay? Not like Brunk. It only gained knowledge of the emotional memory responsible for those tears.” Grif braced himself for the inevitable, and uncomfortable, questions by looking away. What do you love so much that it makes you cry? Or whom?
Yet they never came. Glancing back, Grif wondered why, then remembered Kit’s earlier hurt. What do you think it feels like to know the man I love spends most of his waking hours thinking of another woman? “So that’s why you let Dennis intercept when Scratch tried to reach me.” Though muted, there was still a note of accusation in her voice.
“Dennis didn’t intercept,” Grif said, immediately defensive. “I let him run a pick.”
Kit blew out an annoyed breath. “You know I don’t understand your stupid baseball analogies.”
Grif just shook his head. “Look, I’m the one who got rid of Scratch.” At least for now, he thought. “Besides, it just wanted to scare you. You’re the best person I know. No way are you ever destined for the Forest.”
“Well, I’m scared, okay? It knew things about me. It called me ‘the girl who loves the truth.’ ”
“One of your enemies told it,” Grif guessed. “Someone who ended up in the Forest instead of the Everlast. Someone it could torture for information once it . . . saw you.”
Because while it’d been surprised that Kit could see it the first time, it was ready for her the second. And aggressive, Grif thought, swallowing hard.
You are just some choice bit of beauty that I have not yet broken.
Kit, busy blowing her Betty bangs from her forehead, didn’t notice the shudder that rocked Grif in his seat. “I’d like to think I don’t have enemies terrible enough to warrant an eternity of torture in the Forest.”
“Chambers?” Grif reminded her, causing a wince. Bringing down that local kingpin, a man who’d tried to kill them both, was the first case they’d worked together. Chambers had died terribly . . . though not as terribly as he’d lived. That’s what landed a soul in the Eternal Forest.
“I wouldn’t even wish Scratch on him,” Kit said solemnly.
Grif didn’t say it as they drove on, but neither would he.
Where the hell are we?” Grif asked, taking a deep breath. They needed to change the subject, and regroup. Someone in the valley was feeding young kids a drug that had skin falling from their bones. As a distraction from soul-stealing angels, it was a good one.
“There is no hell, remember?” Kit muttered, knowing what he was doing, but allowing it all the same. “Though if there were, you wouldn’t be too far off. Meadows Village is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Vegas. It used to be the first place newcomers wanted to live, but now it’s the last. It’s located in Naked City.”
“Oh, sure,” Grif said, the old memory revisiting slowly. “I’ve been to Naked City.”
Silence filled the car. It was the briefest of pauses, but it’d been happening more and more lately. Grif would mention something he’d seen or done, because the memory was somehow closer now that he was back on the Surface. Sometimes he could even smell the old scents, as light as the pressed powder Evie used to use on her skin. Other times he could hear the East Coast accents trailing behind trouble boys walking the casino floor, even though he knew they were long gone.
And sometimes the places Grif recognized on this second go-round were less real than those dogged memories; the casinos and restaurants and mom-and-pop hash houses seemed like shells to him, more fragile somehow now that the original owners were gone. But it was the natural order of things, and tucking the past away was how the living could go on.
Thing was, despite Kit’s love for all things of his era, she could never really know what came before. Maybe the silence that kept rising between them meant she was beginning to understand that. But how to keep her from worrying over it?
Have you ever dreamed about me?
“When?” she asked now, shaking him from his thoughts.
“When what?” Grif cleared his throat, his mind. “You mean when was I here? Just over fifty years ago, I guess,” he said, beginning slowly. “Evie and I had just met.