Page 60 of Graceless

"Here's what I've got. The whole framework, so you know what you're working with." She set it out like a tray of tools. "Sunday school, catechism, every church ceiling in Brooklyn: God made the angels. Some of them rebelled — a third, the sisters were specific — and there was a war, and Michael won, and the losers got thrown down. The fallen. And the fallen became demons, and demons are what tempt you off the path, and that's why you go to confession." She pushed her cup aside. "That's my inheritance, Raq. All of it. And I'm guessing most of it's wrong, since one of the fallen fixed my gate chain and drinks my coffee. So." She looked at me. "How much of it is true?"

"Less than the ceilings would like," I said. "More than nothing. Ask it in pieces and I'll tell you which is which."

"The paintings, then. First. I've cleaned a hundred angels — the robes, the wings, the baby faces. Is that what you are? Is any of that real?"

"No. The paintings are what people could bear to look at. The real thing terrified everyone who ever saw it. When one of us arrived, the first words out of our mouths were always do not be afraid — because they always were. Every time. That is what I am. The thing that has to say that first."

She went still, and something moved through her face that was not fear.

"That's the saddest job description I've ever heard," she said.

Nothing in the long record has ever said that to me.

"Okay." She was building it as she went, out loud, one brick at a time. "So you came down. You fell — to earth. That's the whole word. That's why they call you the fallen. You're a fallen angel." She had a framework. She clung to it. "So then what are you now? Because in the story I got, that's what a demon is. An angel that fell. That's literally the catechism, Raq — the fallen become demons. Is that what you became?"

"No." I did not manage to keep the distaste out of it. "That's the paint job again. Demons were never angels. Nothing that fell became one. That much is true and you can keep it. What they actually are — ask me again when you've heard the rest." I shut that door in my face before anything could come through it. "I fell. I didn't become. What I am is what's left. Not what's next."

"Okay. Then last night on the corner you told me I was right to be afraid of you — of what you are, not what you'd do. Fine. So what else is out there, Raq? What should I actually be afraid of?"

"Something real. It is already on your list — you just haven't reached it yet. Keep asking in order and you will have all of it before you stand up. And when we get there, hold on to this: whatever is out there is more afraid of me than you will ever need to be of anything."

She heard it. All of it. And I turned my cup a quarter turn and did not move another muscle.

She sat with that a moment — and I watched it do both of its jobs at once, the comfort and the chill, because a shield that size is only comforting in proportion to what it implies is coming.

"Okay," she said, finally, steady. "Then I want the specs on the shield. What can you do? Itemize. I've seen fast. I've seen you argue with a bus and win. I've watched you hear a delivery truck two blocks before it turned onto mine. Give me the whole list."

I itemized. Flat. No performance, no apology. "Fast — what you saw on Fifth Avenue was me being careful. Strong. I don't age. I don't sicken. I heal from nearly anything. I hear what I choose to hear and most of what I don't. And the ground is a preference. A rooftop is a chair to me. I have watched this block from above it more nights than from that doorway."

She took the figures line by line. And as the list got longer, she leaned in — slow, unaware of it, her elbows finding the table, the cup forgotten — and her pulse picked up. I could hear it. Not fear-fast. The other fast. Her breath went shallow, her pupils went wide in the kitchen light, and the warmth coming off her skin changed, and every one of those readings arrived in me down channels built for hunting.

I kept my hands on the table. It cost more than the answers had.

"The rooftops. How do you get up there? Can you still — without them. Can you fly?"

"No." I kept everything off my face, which is how she knew everything was on it. "I jump. Six stories is a step."

"Well — that's basically flying."

"No." The kitchen dropped a degree on the word, and I let it. "It is not."

She looked down at her coffee, and grief crossed the table for a thing she never saw and never will. I have stood in the presence of thrones. Nothing has ever moved me like her lowered eyes over a cooling cup.

"Hold on." The cup stopped halfway to her mouth. "Oh my God. That was you. That night. I was killing the lights, one in the morning, and there was a shape on the roofline across the street — tall, still — and I got goosebumps down both arms, and I told myself it was a vent stack. And then I would have sworn it tilted. Like a head. And I closed the curtains and told myself I was losing it." Relief came up through her whole body; I watched it rise. "I wasn't losing it. It was you. You were up there over my house like a gargoyle⁠—"

"Which roof."

The joke died in her mouth. I felt it die, and could not spare it.

"Across the street. Straight over the Espositos'."

"What time."

"One. Maybe a few minutes after — I'd just finished photographing. It was the night I called you, Raq. Right before I heard someone at the gate. I saw that thing on the roof, told myself I was crazy, closed the curtains — and then the chain moved, and I forgot the roof completely."

"No. That was not me. When you called that night, I was six blocks south, at the far end of my circuit." And then I told her the part that had gone through me like nothing in the whole span of the record, because nothing in it has ever stepped into my footprints to look at what I look at: "But that roof is mine. The northeast corner, by the chimney — I stand there when the wind comes off the water, because the sound carries to your windows. It stood in my post, Caterina. Exactly in it. It was seeing what I see. And you never told me you saw it."

"I told myself I didn't."