Page 6 of Graceless

I was two neighborhoods into that thought when my brother fell into step beside me.

He does that. No sound, no arrival — the sidewalk is yours, and then Camael is on it, matching your stride with his hands behind his back, like an inspector failing a building. He wears his own face down here, minus what would blind, and the severity survives the translation: my brother has the features of something designed for a purpose and displeased to be interrupted at it.

"Nine lanes of Fifth Avenue," he said. Nothing else, for a block. My brother can make a silence stand at attention. "In daylight. At speed. In front of two hundred and forty phones, all of which I have since visited, which cost me an afternoon I will not recover. You were a smear and a rumor and a dead pixel. You're welcome."

"Cam."

"What was it, Baraqiel."

The full name, in my brother's mouth, has a weight I won't describe.

"A bus," I said. "A woman stepped in front of it. Now she is not in front of it."

"Yes," he said. "The woman." And something in the way he set the word down — with tongs, at arm's length — made me look at him. "I had them pull what there is. Caterina. A restorer, if you can call scraping varnish in a cellar a profession. Back taxes. A dead grandmother. A brother circling the house like a gull." He recited it flat, itemized, a creature of files."Nothing. She is nothing, brother. Which is what makes it interesting, because nothing does not do what she did."

"And what did she do."

He stopped walking. Made me stop too — he has always been able to do that, stop me with stillness; it is an older trick than any they list in the books that got us wrong.

"It was loud," Cam said, and his voice went down into the register he saves for the things that frighten him, which I had heard perhaps three times in ten thousand years. "You think it reached you because it was meant for you? It reached everything, Raq. Every ear between here and places I will not name on a public street. Hell heard it. Things older and hungrier than hell heard it. There has not been a cry like that in a very long time, and every one of them is now asking the same question I am, which is what, precisely, answered."

The street did its street things around us. Gulls. A car alarm. Somewhere, a man arguing with a lottery machine.

"Do you know what she is?" my brother said, quiet now, and terrible. "She is the kind of thing that caused all the trouble in the first place. That exact kind. The reaching kind." His lip did something that on a human face would be called a curl. "Stay away from it."

It.

I want to be careful here, because what happened next I had no name for, and I have names for nearly everything; the collection is extensive. Something came up through me from a floor I did not know the building had. It was not protectiveness. Protectiveness I have felt — for cities, for the species in general. Abstract. This was not abstract. This had teeth, and one object, and a single syllable I refused to let finish forming.

And it turned me on my own brother.

"Say that again," I said.

Cam went still. I watched him redo ten thousand years of arithmetic about me in the space of a breath — ten thousand years of me watching, obedient to nothing but inertia, and now this, squared up on a sidewalk over a pronoun —

"Shall I handle it?" he said, softly. "That would be cleanest. Before the others come sniffing. Quietly — kindly, even. You know I can make a problem very small, brother. It is the entire, wretched job."

And there it was, the thing about my brother that I had spent ten millennia declining to look at: I did not know what he would do. I never have. He has come down through every century I've served out down here, fixing my collar, filing my disasters, insulting my coat — and he tore the wings off the only family I ever had, on schedule, with precision, and called it what the paperwork called it. Both of those are Camael. There is no third Camael to break the tie.

"If anything comes near her," I said, "wings or no wings, yours or theirs, I will do what I did in Sunset Park tonight. Slower."

"Hm," said Cam. But he'd heard it. I saw him hear it.

The trouble in the first place. The phrase would not settle. And from somewhere under ten thousand years of still water a thought came up whole, looked at my brother, and went back down before I could hold it:

It was not the humans at all, was it, brother.

I did not say it. I did not know what it meant. I marked the spot and left it.

"So you will sit in your room," Cam said, straightening, hands behind his back, inspection concluded, "and carry hell's paper, and watch. It is what you are for." He turned to go, and delivered the rest over his shoulder. "Walk away from her, Baraqiel. They will notice. They may have noticed already." A pause, one beat too long. "And they are the kindest thing on the list of what's coming."

He left first, because he always leaves first; being left is for the fallen. At the corner he was a man. Then the air moved, and the corner was empty, and even I had almost missed the going. The gulls went on with their argument overhead as if nothing four seconds older than the ocean had just been standing under them, deciding whether to be my brother or my problem.

I stood a while with the syllable I had not let finish, and the sentence I had not let surface, and the list he had not itemized.

Every ear between here and places he would not name.

Then I stopped standing.