Page 121 of Graceless

It went through me like a hand around the spine. My eyes filled. That's a physical fact and I'm not going to be embarrassed about it; you don't get a vote when something like that opens up two feet from your face.

He watched me feel it. He had done it on purpose, and he watched me feel it, and he waited for what always happens next.

Beside me, Raq had not moved at all. He was looking at his brother with something I could not read and did not have time to.

I put my spoon down on the table.

"They're beautiful," I said. My voice came out wrong — shaky, wet, an octave off, and I let it, and I kept going anyway. "They really are. Nothing anybody made comes close." I got my breath. "The answer's still no."

Nothing moved in Cam's face.

"Sit down or put those away," I said. "You're going to knock over my saints."

Beside me, Raq made a sound.

I turned my head. He had one hand over his mouth and his shoulders were going, and then he gave up entirely and laughed — the real one, the rare one, the low rolling one I have heard maybe four times, out loud, in his brother's face, in a kitchen full of wings.

"Baraqiel."

"Put them away, Camael." Still laughing. Wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand like a human being. "You heard the woman. The saints."

"I am attempting to convey the gravity of⁠—"

"She told you to mind the furniture." He sat back in his chair with his hand over his face, and his shoulders were still going. "All the ages of that speech, brother, and this is the first time I have ever enjoyed it."

For a second I thought Cam was going to take the roof off the house.

Then something went across his face — something almost human, some old exasperation with a much younger brother — and he made a small disgusted sound, and the wings folded down into nothing between one blink and the next. The air came back. The room was just a room with three people in it and a stove.

"Do you know what she sounds like," he said, to Raq.

"Yes," Raq said, still grinning, and it took years off him.

"Of course you do."

He stood and put his coat on, and at the stairs he stopped with one hand on the rail.

"Then hear the rest of it, since apparently in this house information is a beverage that gets served whether one wants it or not.

"When it happens, you will know. The lights go first — they take the current with them, block by block, it cannot be helped; the borough will call it a brownout and by morning it will be an argument with Con Ed. Everything down here that is not human will feel it and go flat and still, and I do mean everything, including the thing under the fish market, including me. Nobody looks up. Nobody stands up. Nobody speaks."

"How long?" I said.

"Minutes. It will feel considerably longer." He looked at me. "Be in this house. Be in the back room, away from the street. All the lights out. Do not go to the window, Caterina — and I understand that I am telling a woman whose entire profession is looking closely at things not to look, and I am telling you anyway. They are not accustomed to being seen. Being seen makes them curious, and there is nothing on this earth you want less than that."

"And what do we do?"

"Nothing," Cam said. "There is nothing to do. That is what I came to tell you. There is no plan, there is no arrangement, there is nowhere in this city I can put you that they will not pass over — that is why I wanted you out of the city, and you have declined, and so what is left is this: you will sit in the dark and be quiet, and they will pass over, and everything depends on what they decide they saw."

He went up two steps. Stopped again.

"And you." Not turning around. "Baraqiel. Whatever you are considering right now — don't."

He did not wait for an answer. The door shut, soft, the way a courteous man closes a door.

I sat there a minute with my hands around a cold bowl.

My whole body was still vibrating — geared up for a war that never came, every nerve dressed for battle with nothing left to fight — and twelve inches to my left sat the one outlet on earth I wasn't using. He was heat all down my left side without touching me. He was always heat. I drank my cold decaf and stayed furious.