Page 128 of Graceless

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.