Chapter 36
CATE
Iwas up before the word finished.
He was already in the bedroom doorway — filling it, backlit by nothing, because there was no light left anywhere to backlight a man — and the whole street outside had gone the kind of quiet that has weight.
"The back room," he said. "Now."
"The votive—"
"Leave it."
"It's the only—"
"Leave it burning. Nothing that's coming needs light to see." He crossed the room, and stopped, hands almost on me, that catch he does now. "May I."
"Go."
He carried me down my dark hallway past my dark kitchen — the little flame on the sill, the pad on the refrigerator, my whole life going by at four watts — into the back bedroom, no windows, no street.
He set me on the bed. He wrapped the quilt around me.
He crouched and took my face in both hands, and his palms were burning hot, and his eyes had light in them that came from nowhere in the room.
"Whatever happens. Whatever you hear. You stay off the window side of this house."
"I know. Back room, lights out, don't look. I was in the kitchen for the briefing." I got a fistful of his shirt. "Say it back to me."
"Say what back."
"That you're staying in this room."
He didn't say it.
"Raq. Say it back."
"You are going to be all right," he said, which was not what I asked for, and he pressed his mouth to my forehead and held it there one second longer than he ever does.
I should have known right then.
Then it arrived, and there was no more room for knowing anything.
The air went thin and high, a mountaintop climbing in through the walls.
My ears filled with a pressure that had no sound inside it.
The house began to hum — not shaking, humming, down in the joists, a bridge with a train still miles off — and Nonna's medal ticked against the plaster over the bed, tick, tick, tick, and every hair on my body stood up and stayed there.
Something enormous was coming over Brooklyn.
I curled around the low center of me with both arms and put my mouth against the quilt.
Don't hear her. Don't hear her. Don't hear her.
The hum deepened. The medal ticked faster.
And the room was empty.
I knew it the way you know a power cut — by texture. The pressure of him, the density a room has with him in it, gone.
"Raq?"
The hum. The medal.
"Baraqiel."
The whole name, out loud, into a dark house, and nothing in the house answered it.
I got up. The doctor can bill me.
Down the hallway with one hand on the wall, through the kitchen where the votive still burned and the saints were rattling on their nails — all eleven, a soft chatter, teeth in a cold — and my hand went out on its own and closed around the handle of Nonna's rolling pin where it lives in the crock by the stove.
Solid maple. Sixty years of Sunday ravioli.
It came with me and I did not stop to discuss it.
The back door was open.
I went out.
Do not go to the window, he'd said. Nobody looks up.
I stood in the middle of my yard in a nightgown with a rolling pin, and I looked up.
The sky was wrong. Not black — a deep hard blue lit from nowhere, the bottom of a swimming pool with the lights on.
And moving through it, high and slow and silent, came the count: dozens of shapes my eyes refused to keep, pouring in off the harbor, and under them every roof in Bensonhurst glowed faintly, the way pavement glows when headlights pass.
And on my roof, on the parapet, directly over my door, stood Raq.
I will be an old woman with this picture still filed under glass.
He was not hiding. Everything else in that borough was flattened into the dark, and he stood on the edge of my roofline, feet apart, chin up, shirtless in March, facing them.
Bigger — bigger the way a room is bigger when a wall comes out — and beautiful in the way that ruins the word for everything after.
His eyes threw blue light onto the brick like a welder's arc, two stories down, in the dark.
And behind him, spread across the whole back of my house, were the shadows of wings.
Cast by nothing. There was nothing there to cast them, and the shadows spread anyway, vast and exact on the brick. Every saint on my wall inside is a bad photograph of what stood on my roof — and that is what he is when he stops apologizing for it.
One roofline over, above the laundromat, stood a second figure. Same stance. Same stillness. Facing the same sky.
I had come out of my house looking for one man. There were two standing.
And then something up there changed.
Raq
I did not decide on the roof. The roof was decided the day Camael stood on her stairs and said don't.
Hiding has never saved anything I have loved.
I have hidden things in deserts and catacombs and holes in the world's attention, and every one of them was found, because hiding only tells the finder what matters to you.
There was one thing left I had never tried.
The thing I was made for, before I was made for nothing.
Stand where they can see you. Give them something else to look at.
I went up the back wall of her house with the census pouring over the harbor, and I stood on the parapet over her door, and I stopped holding myself down.
I had been holding myself down for a season.
Fitting through doorways. Sitting in chairs.
Keeping my voice inside the range her species finds survivable.
I let all of it go, and what stood up inside my skin stood up, and the old power came off me in a heat-shimmer I had not permitted since the fall.
And my shoulders ached. Deep, at the roots, where the phantom weight has hung for ten thousand years — ached, and then itched, fierce and sudden, the way a limb itches that is not there to scratch.
And then my brothers came over the water.
The host came over the harbor in formation — wing to wing, silent, the slow procession of the count — and I knew the order they flew in.
I knew the names. Brothers I last saw across a gray plain with my blood on their hands, coming over Coney Island in the dark, and every window under them went out like a snuffed wick.
Sar landed on the roofline across the street without a sound.
"You were not asked," I said.
"No." He set his feet, face to the sky, a man reading his own water. "I was not needed, either. Happy circumstance."
And far off, high on the water-tank roof where the el crosses — in the open, in plain sight of everything above — stood Camael.
Not hiding. Not flying. Wings furled, hands at his sides, in full view of the count he had routed, and I could not read what he intended from a mile of dark rooftops, and that frightened me more than the sky did.
My brother has stood on the right side of every line since the first line was drawn.
I did not know what he was standing on tonight. I do not think he knew.
The count came on, and passed over us, and read us, and did not slow.
Until.
One peeled off over the avenue.
It came down through the formation without disturbing it, a stone dropping through water, and it was not aiming at me. It was aiming past me. Down. At the house. At the small quick heartbeat behind the brick that had never once stopped being the loudest thing in my world —
I went off the parapet.
No plan. No wisdom. Ten thousand years of discipline gone in half a second of physics — I went into its path with everything I had left, knowing exactly what the first blow struck by the fallen makes true, that it gives the machine its reason, gives them her, gives them the child, gives them everything.
I struck my brother out of the sky anyway.
And heaven forgive me, I was glad.
The sky fell into my yard.
A sound like a girder dropped from orbit.
The corner of my roofline exploded — brick, slate, a chunk of parapet spinning past the clothesline — and two shapes came down through it tangled together — one burning blue, one pale and wrong — off the wall next door, through Mrs. Esposito's grape arbor, and into my pavers hard enough that the concrete jumped under my bare feet and every window on the block rattled in its frame.
They came up in the wreck of the arbor, and for one full second before it swung, the blue blaze of Raq's eyes lit it whole — and I will never entirely stop seeing it.
It looked like him.
That was the horror, under the awe. Not a monster — a man, built on Raq's scale, bright, skin with light coming up through it like moonrise through marble, and a face like his.
The same architecture, the jaw, the brow — except new.
Unmarked. No scars, nothing lived-in anywhere on it.
A body that had never carried anything, never bled, never sat in a kitchen chair.
Raq as he must have been before. Raq without the price paid.
And off its back, half-spread, two vast wings the gray of storm light.
Wings couldn't shock me anymore. Cam had opened his over my soup. It was the wings on that body — on his build, on his shoulders, rooted exactly where Raq carries two scars like closed mouths.
They took that from him, I thought, with a clarity like ice water.
And then, right behind it, faster than the fear: and they still lost. Because the one with the scars was the one I'd follow anywhere. The unmarked one was just proof of what Raq gave up. The marked one was proof of what he'd chosen.
Then it swung — a fist out of the dark the size of my sink — and Raq wasn't there and then was, inside it, and hit it in the jaw so hard the wall behind them moved, mortar dust sighing down.
The angel came back off the wall swinging and caught Raq square in the chest. The blow threw him the width of the yard — through the clothesline pole, bent iron screaming — and Raq was up before the pole finished falling, already swinging, and they closed again like two freight cars deciding on the same track.