Page 118 of Graceless

"She is not going to be hidden," Raq said.

"Then let me tell you what is coming, and you can decide whether you still want to say that sentence out loud in this kitchen." Cam turned his cup over on its saucer, empty, a man clearing space on a table. "There is going to be a census."

The pot started up on the stove.

"Every borough," Cam said. "They will pass over this city and count everything in it that is not human, and write down what they find. It is old work. It has been done before, and not often."

"Who is doing the counting," Raq said.

"You know who does the counting."

And that was the moment my kitchen changed.

I have seen that man take a knife off a person. I have seen him walk into a room and empty it without a word. None of it prepared me — because he did not move, and it did not matter. He went completely still, and the air over the table got heavy, and the fixture over the sink dimmed and came back, and every hair on my arms stood up at once. The soup went still in the bowl. My teeth ached.

"Say the word, Camael."

"The host," Cam said.

"Say the word."

"Your brothers." Cam did not blink and did not look away and it cost him something; I watched it cost him. "They are coming over this city with their eyes open, and they will look at your street, and they will look at her."

"When."

"Days. It does not keep a calendar."

"And you knew this when."

"I have known since the eleventh of the month," Cam said, "because I was asked to provide the routes."

Raq stood up.

He didn't push the chair back; the chair went over. And the room changed: the light went thin, the whole house went silent — not quiet, silent, the refrigerator, the radiator, the street, all of it gone — and there was suddenly something standing between the stove and the table that was not a large man in a coat, and my body understood it before my head did, the way you understand a dog that has stopped wagging.

Cam did not stand. He looked up at his brother from a kitchen chair, and he had gone the color of paper.

"Baraqiel."

"You gave them the routes to this borough."

"I gave them the routes I have always given, and if I had refused I would be under review myself by Thursday, and there would be no one in that building who knows what is in this house⁠—"

"Raq." I said it flat and it came out steady and it was the hardest thing I did all night. "Raq. Look at me."

He turned his head.

His eyes were wrong. That's the only way I have to say it: the blue was up, all the way up, lit from behind like a window with a fire in it, and he was looking at me out of it and there was nothing on his face I recognized, and I made myself hold still and keep my voice ordinary.

"Sit down. You're scaring me."

He sat down.

The light came back. The refrigerator came back on. And Cam let out a breath — one, short, through his nose — and I saw it, and I said nothing about it.

"There is more," Cam said.

"Then say it."