Chapter 36 #3
Then he wheeled — one convulsion of those storm-gray wings, up and east after the others, light stuttering, one wingbeat hitching where Raq's knee had been — and the voice came back over my yard like something thrown over a shoulder, already a block away and losing none of its cold:
"This is not the end of it, Baraqiel."
His name. Hanging in my yard after him. And beside me, even the arms went still — the fisherman, the immovable engine-room calm of him, entirely still — and that, more than anything the night had done yet, is what put the ice in me.
Raq swayed. The fisherman took one step toward him. I was already moving —
And the sky came back.
One shape, out of the tail of the procession, peeling down out of the dark.
And everything in the yard stopped, because there was nothing left — Raq got in front of me, got mostly in front of me, bleeding, listing, one leg refusing its share, and Sar was suddenly on my other side — and none of it mattered, because this one wasn't coming at them.
It was coming at me.
Slow. That was the worst part — no dive, no violence, just an unhurried descent straight down over my broken clothesline, the cold arriving ahead of it — down, and down, until it hung over my head, wings the width of my whole yard, blotting out the sky.
Raq lunged and the fisherman caught him — caught him, held him, said something fast and low in a language older than the yard — and I put both hands over the middle of me, and I looked straight up at it, and I did not run.
There was nowhere. And I am my grandmother's granddaughter. We do not die running.
It stopped.
Everything about it stopped, the way a man stops on a stair when he hears something in a dark house.
It was listening.
It bent toward the middle of me, toward the small quick heart going under my hands like a bird in a fist, and it listened — and I got one clear look at its face, and its face was the kind of beautiful you pay for looking at, and what was on it was not anger.
Something in it was breaking.
And it spoke. Quiet — nothing like the other one's organ-voice — quiet the way you speak in a hospital room, down through all that cold, to me:
"Do not be afraid."
The first words out of their mouths, every time.
Because they always were. The thing that has to say that first — he'd told me at my kitchen table, and I'd called it the saddest job description I'd ever heard, and now one of them was saying it to me over my broken clothesline, and my whole chest cracked down the middle.
"I'm not," I said. My voice came out in pieces. "Not of you."
Its hands lowered. Felt and seen — a decision leaving a room.
And its mouth moved once more. Brief. Small. One word, shaped and not spoken, a word I couldn't hear.
Then it went backward — not up, backward, away through the air, wrong, like the tide changing its mind, never turning its face from the middle of me — and then it wheeled, and took the sky, and fled east after the others faster than anything that size should move.
The count poured on over the borough and out toward the ocean, and did not come back.
Up and down Bay 50th, one at a time, in no hurry at all, the streetlights came on.
Raq stayed on his feet until the last of them cleared the rooftops.
Then his leg went, and he sat down hard against the broken wall, and I got to him before my knees got a vote.
He was breathing hard — ragged, winded, a man after a fight — blood dark from his hairline, the blue banking out of his eyes in stages, and when I took his face in both hands he leaned.
Into my hands. All of that impossible weight, held up by two palms, and it turns out I can.
"You're bleeding."
"It will close." His voice was gravel at the bottom of a river. "Caterina. You threw. The pin. At the host of heaven."
"You were both in Mrs. Esposito's arbor. I improvised."
"You threw a kitchen implement at a census of the Almighty."
"And you punched one in the face. Twice." My hands were shaking on his jaw and I did not take them back. "We'll split the lightning bolt."
Something came out of him that was almost a laugh — wrecked, one syllable, blood in it — and then his forehead came down onto my shoulder and stayed there, and his whole frame shook once, twice, and went quiet, and we sat in the wreckage of my yard — the cracked pavers, the murdered clothesline, Mrs. Esposito's grape arbor scattered to matchsticks — under a sky with nothing left in it but stars.
"Well," said the fisherman's voice behind me, cheerful, conversational. "That is the single most alarming thing I have ever witnessed. And I have witnessed alarming things."
I turned. He was standing by the dead geraniums where he'd set me down — big as Raq, built like the sea, salt-gray stubble and laugh-lines, a canvas jacket that had died at some point and continued working.
He looked at me. At the nightgown. At the wreckage.
At the rolling pin, lying in the middle of the yard like a dropped sword.
And a smile spread across his face like sunrise coming up over water, and he said, over my head, to the man leaning in my hands:
"Raq. I like her."
"Sar," I said.
The smile came down to me, delighted. "How—"
"You smell like fish."