Page 52 of Graceless

"I know exactly what I'm going to do tonight," I said. "I'm going to lie in that bed and tell myself it was adrenaline. Adrenaline does things to time. Everybody knows that, it's a whole⁠—"

"It doesn't."

"I know it doesn't."

The refrigerator cycled. Somewhere above us Donnie's television was arguing with itself.

And then something happened to me that has happened maybe four times in my life, and every one of them was in front of a painting. The fear went somewhere. Not away — down, filed, out of the working area. And what came up in its place was the thing I am actually good at.

I have two weeks of evidence in this house.

"Take your shirt off," I said.

He went very still. "Cate."

It was a warning. Quiet, and not for himself.

"Off." My voice came out level and strange, my hands-are-steady voice, the one I use over a panel with a scalpel in my hand. "Now."

He took his shirt off.

I made myself look at it properly, the way you look when it's your job — the whole field, corner to corner, no flinching at the interesting part. Two scars. Long, low, symmetrical, running from the shoulder blades to mid-back. Old. Silvered. Clean — not the mess a blade leaves, not the pucker of a burn. Even. Worked.

Then I walked past him. Not ran — walked, on legs that belonged to somebody else, across the room to the easel, and I took the muslin off my client's five-hundred-year-old panel and dropped it on the floor.

The kneeling angel. The ash-gray robe. The face that has been coming up out of the dark under my hands for two weeks, weeping, looking straight out.

And the bare shoulders. And the two long marks where wings root.

Different face. Different man — I know that face better than my own now, I've had my eye three inches from it under a loupe. It is not his.

Same scars. Same place. Same length.

"They took them," I said.

Not a question. My voice was doing something I didn't authorize.

"Yes."

Then I walked to the kitchen table and picked up Tara's folder off the top of the mail and took out the photocopy. Chapter six. The roster. Twenty officers, transliterated by a dead man in 1912, footnoted, ordinary as a union roll — the column I had folded closed on the train.

His back. The panel. The paper in my hand.

I stood in the middle of the room holding all three at once and the floor went out from under the whole day.

I turned around with the paper in my hand.

"Your name," I said. "Whole. Now."

He looked at me the way he'd looked at me through the four-inch gap on the first night, like a man reading the only line on the form that mattered.

And then he said it — one word, and the room seemed to lean in to hear it, and I swear the work light steadied, I swear the house held its breath, three generations of Fontanas in the walls going quiet at once:

"Baraqiel."

I didn't move. Then I looked down at the paper in my hand, and I ran my finger down the column I hadn't let myself finish on the train — past Semyaza, past the names like weather — to the ninth name on the list.

Baraqijal.