The Given Read Online Free PDF Page A

this over with. What do you want?”
    At that, the blindness tore away, stinging like duct tape being ripped from the skin. Grif rubbed his eyes, blinked, and looked around. Wooden cargo boxes, stamped and stacked in neat piles, lined the sides of an oblong room. Everything from ceiling to floor was made entirely of wood. Planks, Grif realized, tapping his feet. The sound was more hollow than he expected, and he frowned as he spotted the netting strung from the low-hanging beams. Thick hemp ropes coiled along the walls, and along with the swaying, it put him in mind of a . . .
    â€œIt’s not really a ship,” Sarge said from somewhere behind him. “We’re still in Vegas. Treasure Island, to be exact. It was Rockwell’s idea. We needed someplace central but quiet—though the next pirate show is in an hour, so we should make this quick.”
    A pirate show. Grif shook his head. “The Rat Pack would be appalled at the—”
    But Sarge stepped into view just then, and Grif’s words cut off in a sharp gasp.
    The angel’s once-great arms had shrunken down to a quarter of their former size, and were now spindly, as frail as kindling. His wings were as bald in spots as his head, as if he’d picked and worried those feathers out of place. The remaining plumes had lost their glossy black sheen and lay flat against each other in dull, uneven rows. His skin, once as dark as those onyx wings, was ashy and sagged in all the wrong places, and his frame was more of a reminder of strength than the threat of it.
    Sarge’s face had altered the most. His sunken eyes resembled craters and his mouth had collapsed in a permanent frown. Even his nose appeared diminished, great furrows etched from the corner of each nostril down to his mouth. The vertical striations repeated along his cheekbones, fleshy landslides carved into his skin from his eyelids all the way to his chin. Like melted wax, these new features had hardened into a grotesque mask. Only his gaze, mist swirling over shining black marbles, remained the same.
    â€œWhat the hell happened to you?” Grif whispered, as Sarge drew closer. Sarge was a real angel. He was Pure spirit created from the same worldstuff as Paradise itself. Angels couldn’t die, because they’d never lived, and they couldn’t be injured for the same reason.
    So what had happened to Frank?
    â€œAre you even still an angel?” Grif blurted.
    â€œDon’t be stupid,” Sarge snapped back, which actually calmed Grif a bit. Sarge might look different on the outside, but at least he still had the same haughty demeanor.
    â€œSorry, it’s just that you look . . .” Grif hesitated.
    â€œSay it. I already read it in your mind.”
    Grif hated that, so he crossed his arms and did say it. “Puny.”
    Sarge’s misshapen jaw clenched, but he leaned against a crate marked EXPLOSIVES and nodded. “I am . . . much diminished.”
    â€œI don’t get it. What happened?” Grif asked again.
    â€œYou happened, Shaw,” the new Sarge said, folding his hands in his robe and regarding Grif with that surging gaze. “You and Katherine Craig.”
    Grif tried not to look as gut-punched as he felt. Six months. That’s how long since his own name had been coupled with Kit’s. It was also the last time Sarge had appeared on the Surface. Appeared, more important, to Kit, who was sitting vigil over a friend’s deathbed. Angels could possess the bodies of those nearer to death than life—the very old or the very young, the sickly and the dying—even those with bodies weakened with drink or drugs.
    Angelic possession usually healed or otherwise improved the life of the host body, but Sarge’s reasons for appearing in Dennis Carlisle’s body hadn’t been altruistic. Dennis, a cop, had taken a bullet meant for Kit, and using Dennis’s body, Sarge had told Kit that her