Page 2 of Graceless

I tore them out.

The sound his body made was different from the sound on the plain. Closer. Specific. A sound that belonged to one man and not to hundreds, and it went into the place behind my sternum where the first wave had lodged and it joined it there and I understood that the place would never be empty again.

He fell forward. My hands were full of feather and bone and the wet warmth of what had been torn, and he was on the ground in front of me, face down, the place where his wings had been open and raw, two wounds that ran the length of his back like mouths that could not close. His shoulders shook. He did not make another sound.

I set the wings down. I did it carefully — aligned, side by side, the feathers still carrying warmth. Precision. The only thing I had left to offer.

Around me the plain was finishing. The host wept while they worked — I could see it in the ranks, the tears running while the hands kept moving, grief and obedience operating the same body at the same time, and the tears fell on the grey ground and pooled and ran together and if you had been standing on the far ridge you might have thought it was rain.

It was not rain. It has never been rain.

I straightened. The others filed past me. They reported completion. They waited for dismissal. I dismissed them with words that were gone before I finished speaking, and then the field was empty except for the fallen — my brothers, wingless, scattered across the grey plain like a battlefield's aftermath, which is what it was though heaven would never call it that.

I looked at my hands.

There was nothing on them.

Nothing. Not a mark, not a stain, not a trace of the warmth that had been there seconds ago. Heaven's work leaves no residue on the ones who carry it out. You bear it on the inside, where no one will ever find it. Where you can never set it down.

I stood there a long time.

Then I put my face back together — deliberately, piece by piece, the way you reset a room after something has broken in it. I spread my wings. They were still mine. My grace was still mine — bright, obedient, intact, the whole apparatus of what heaven had made me, untouched and unpaid for.

I walked back into heaven's light carrying all of it. The sound, in the place where I would keep it. The two wounds on his back that I had made. The way he had turned and grieved me instead of himself. The feathers I had laid down carefully, side by side, as though care meant anything at all, as though it could be called back later and used as evidence that I had tried.

Somewhere behind me, on the grey plain, in the rain that was not rain, my brother was face down in the dirt with his back torn open, and he would heal, eventually, because the fallen do not die easily — but the scars would stay.

They would stay on both of us.

It was done.

It would not be undone.

CHAPTER 1

CATERINA

The angel under my arm was worth more than I was, and I was carrying him to Manhattan in a tote bag from a pharmacy that had gone out of business during the Obama administration.

That's not me being dramatic. I'd run the numbers. The panel was a small early-sixteenth-century devotional piece, Lombard school, a guardian angel with a face like a bored saint and a sky behind him the color of a healing bruise — and even cracked, even with two centuries of yellowed varnish dimming him to the inside of an ashtray, he was insured for a number with commas in it. I was insured for whatever my brother could get for a row house on Bay 50th if he ever managed to talk me into selling it, which he had not, which was the entire war of my adult life.

So. The angel was worth more than me. I'd made my peace with that around the same time I made my peace with the saints.

There were eleven of them on the walls of the basement, where I lived and worked and occasionally slept, all of them my grandmother's. St. Anthony for the things you've lost. St. Jude for the things you've given up on, which is a fine distinction the Church apparently felt was worth two separate men. A Sacred Heart so lurid it could've doubled as a nightlight. I'd taken exactly none of them down in the two years since Nonna died, partly because the plaster behind them was a different color and I couldn't afford to paint, and partly because taking them down felt like a thing you couldn't take back, and I had enough of those.

I did not believe in a single one of them. I want that on the record early. I'd been raised on their feast days and their candles and the specific terror of Sister Margaret, and somewhere around the year I spent watching a good woman die slow while I lit every candle the parish had, I'd quietly handed the whole apparatus back. I fixed angels for a living and believed in none of them. It was the kind of joke God would tell, if there were one, which there wasn't.

I wrapped the panel in glassine and then in acid-free board and then in a moving blanket, because I am a professional even when I am broke, and I let myself out into the gray.

Donnie was at the mailbox.

Donnie lived upstairs and paid me eleven hundred dollars a month, which is the only sentence about Donnie that matters and the only reason I had not yet pushed him down the stairs. He was standing in the vestibule in a wifebeater and boxer shorts and unlaced work boots, going through the mail with the slow attention of a man who had nowhere to be in this life or any other, and he looked up when my door opened, the way he always did. Like he'd been waiting.

"Caterina." He said it wrong on purpose. Cat-a-REE-na, leaning on it. "Cold out."

"Eleven hundred a month, Donnie," I said, which was a thing I'd started saying to him instead of good morning, a little reminder to us both of the terms of our relationship. I edged past him with the angel held away from his orbit, because Donnie had a way of being damp.

"You should sell," he called after me, cheerful, into the street. "This neighborhood? You're sitting on gold."