Chapter 36 #2
No weapons. No light. Just fists, and mass, and a speed my eyes kept losing — a grip caught and reversed, a throw that didn't land because the other body already knew it was coming, knew it the way you know your brother's fake before his shoulder drops.
They'd learned this in the same school. You could see the school in it.
It drove Raq into the broken arbor and the wood went to matchsticks under them. Raq came out of the matchsticks with a paver in one fist and put it into the thing's ribs and the paver went to powder.
Blood hit the concrete. Dark. His — the first I had ever seen out of him, running from his hairline, black in the blue light of his eyes — and something in me went off its hinge.
"HEY!"
I was moving. Rolling pin cocked, bare feet on frozen concrete, absolutely no plan beyond sixty years of Sunday ravioli and the end of the world —
"HEY! GET OFF HIM!"
— and I threw it.
Both hands, full turn, everything my back had — Nonna's maple rolling pin went end over end across my yard and hit the angel square in the shoulder blade with a sound like a bat off a garbage can lid.
It did nothing. Obviously it did nothing. It bounced.
But the thing turned — half a second, its attention on me and off him — and Raq took the half second.
And I was still coming, pin gone, hands empty, a pregnant woman in a nightgown charging the front of a storm, when an arm like a dock piling closed around me from behind and lifted me clean off the ground — and the smell hit me even then, even there, through the cold and the terror, my traitor pregnant nose filing it away: salt. Diesel. Fish.
"No, little sister." A voice I had never heard, warm as an engine room, absolutely immovable. "Not you."
"PUT ME DOWN—"
Across the yard the angel caught Raq with a blow that dropped him to one knee on the broken pavers, and followed it with another that put his shoulder through the yard fence, and I came apart in the fisherman's arms.
"He's going to kill him — he's going to kill him, let me GO—"
"No." Calm as a tide table. He didn't even tighten his grip. "That is not permitted."
"What—"
"Watch," he said. "Watch. He has waited a very long time for this."
And over his arm, thrashing, I watched my insurance man get up off his knee and take down an angel.
He took its knee out with a kick that would have felled a bridge.
Caught the counterblow on his forearm — bone sound, terrible, absorbed — and answered inside it, close, fast, filthy.
It fought like the parish taught you: squared, correct, every strike from a stance.
Raq fought like Bath Avenue at two in the morning — the headbutt, the elbow, the paver, whatever the yard put in his hand.
It fought beautifully.
Raq fought ugly, and ugly was winning now.
He put it down onto the cracked pavers hard enough to feel through my feet.
Followed it down. Got a knee on the joint of one storm-gray wing, pinning it bent across my pavers, and drove his fist down once, twice, into that perfect unmarked face, and the light of the thing guttered like a pilot flame in wind, and the third blow was rising when the angel wrenched loose and took the sky.
Straight up. Out from under him, one convulsion of those enormous wings that flattened us all with cold air — and it was twenty feet up, thirty, hovering over my clothesline with its light stuttering and its wings beating wrong, out of reach of the wingless thing standing in the ruin beneath it, breathing hard, wanting it back.
Behind me, conversational, the fisherman's voice:
"There it is. When the ground stops agreeing with them, they remember they have wings."
The arm set me down.
The angel hung above my yard, wings beating slow, its light stuttering where Raq's fists had been, and looked down at the man who had just put it on the ground.
And it spoke.
A voice like Cam's and nothing like Cam's — the same unhurried certainty, pitched to carry from the sky to the ground, level and cold and filling my yard from fence to fence the way an organ fills a church.
"You disgrace what is left of you, Baraqiel. Fallen, and fouling the world with an abomination."
Abomination. Aimed at the middle of me, at the small quick heart under my hands, and something in my chest went white — and Raq moved.
One step. Bleeding, one leg wrong beneath him, putting himself in front of me again, the way he will apparently be in front of me until the sun burns down — and he lifted his ruined face to his brother hanging out of reach above my clothesline, and answered him, gravel-voiced, almost gently.
"Careful, brother." A breath. "One day, this may be you."
The angel went still.
Wings still beating, holding him to the air — but everything else stopped, the stuttering light steadying, all of him going motionless the way Raq goes motionless. The family stillness. He looked down at Raq for a long moment.
And he did not answer him. Which, in that family, I was learning, is an answer.