Page 129 of Graceless

Stand where they can see you. Give them something else to look at.

I went up the back wall of her house with the census pouring over the harbor, and I stood on the parapet over her door, and I stopped holding myself down.

I had been holding myself down for a season. Fitting through doorways. Sitting in chairs. Keeping my voice inside the range her species finds survivable. I let all of it go, and what stood up inside my skin stood up, and the old power came off me in a heat-shimmer I had not permitted since the fall.

And my shoulders ached. Deep, at the roots, where the phantom weight has hung for ten thousand years — ached, and then itched, fierce and sudden, the way a limb itches that is not there to scratch.

And then my brothers came over the water.

The host came over the harbor in formation — wing to wing, silent, the slow procession of the count — and I knew the order they flew in. I knew the names. Brothers I last saw across a gray plain with my blood on their hands, coming over Coney Island in the dark, and every window under them went out like a snuffed wick.

Sar landed on the roofline across the street without a sound.

"You were not asked," I said.

"No." He set his feet, face to the sky, a man reading his own water. "I was not needed, either. Happy circumstance."

And far off, high on the water-tank roof where the el crosses — in the open, in plain sight of everything above — stood Camael.

Not hiding. Not flying. Wings furled, hands at his sides, in full view of the count he had routed, and I could not read what he intended from a mile of dark rooftops, and that frightened me more than the sky did. My brother has stood on the right side of every line since the first line was drawn. I did not know what he was standing on tonight. I do not think he knew.

The count came on, and passed over us, and read us, and did not slow.

Until.

One peeled off over the avenue.

It came down through the formation without disturbing it, a stone dropping through water, and it was not aiming at me. It was aiming past me. Down. At the house. At the small quick heartbeat behind the brick that had never once stopped being the loudest thing in my world —

I went off the parapet.

No plan. No wisdom. Ten thousand years of discipline gone in half a second of physics — I went into its path with everything I had left, knowing exactly what the first blow struck by the fallen makes true, that it gives the machine its reason, gives them her, gives them the child, gives them everything.

I struck my brother out of the sky anyway.

And heaven forgive me, I was glad.

The sky fell into my yard.

A sound like a girder dropped from orbit. The corner of my roofline exploded — brick, slate, a chunk of parapet spinning past the clothesline — and two shapes came down through it tangled together — one burning blue, one pale and wrong — off the wall next door, through Mrs. Esposito's grape arbor, and into my pavers hard enough that the concrete jumped under my bare feet and every window on the block rattled in its frame.

They came up in the wreck of the arbor, and for one full second before it swung, the blue blaze of Raq's eyes lit it whole — and I will never entirely stop seeing it.

It looked like him.

That was the horror, under the awe. Not a monster — a man, built on Raq's scale, bright, skin with light coming up through it like moonrise through marble, and a face like his. The same architecture, the jaw, the brow — except new. Unmarked. No scars, nothing lived-in anywhere on it. A body that had never carried anything, never bled, never sat in a kitchen chair. Raq as he must have been before. Raq without the price paid. And off its back, half-spread, two vast wings the gray of storm light.

Wings couldn't shock me anymore. Cam had opened his over my soup. It was the wings on that body — on his build, on his shoulders, rooted exactly where Raq carries two scars like closed mouths.

They took that from him, I thought, with a clarity like ice water.

And then, right behind it, faster than the fear: and they still lost. Because the one with the scars was the one I'd follow anywhere. The unmarked one was just proof of what Raq gave up. The marked one was proof of what he'd chosen.

Then it swung — a fist out of the dark the size of my sink — and Raq wasn't there and then was, inside it, and hit it in the jaw so hard the wall behind them moved, mortar dust sighing down.

The angel came back off the wall swinging and caught Raq square in the chest. The blow threw him the width of the yard — through the clothesline pole, bent iron screaming — and Raq was up before the pole finished falling, already swinging, and they closed again like two freight cars deciding on the same track.

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.