Page 82 of Graceless

"Hey," I said. "It's delivered. Tara's got her white whale."

"What whale?"

"It's a—" I looked at eleven feet of fallen angel waiting sincerely for the whale. "Never mind. It means she's obsessed and happy. It's a good thing."

He took my bag off my shoulder, and everything about it was right except a half-second at the front of it — a delay, like a man coming back from a distance to answer to his own name.

"Tell me everything," he said, and held the door for me.

I told him everything, over dinner, over the dishes. He asked the right questions in the right places. He laughed where laughing went.

At eleven he went out for the circuit, same as every night.

He was back in four minutes.

I heard the front door, and then he was standing in the kitchen doorway, and I knew the face — the working face, the one from the corners — and I put the towel down.

"What."

"It's gone." He said it like a man reporting a weapon missing. "The thing that walks your block. Every night, the same circle, the same hour, for weeks. Tonight there is nothing. No pass, no trace, cold all the way to the avenue."

"Gone is good," I said. "Isn't it? Gone is — it gave up. It got bored. It went to bother somebody in Canarsie."

He looked at me, and didn't answer.

"Raq. Tell me gone is good."

"Things like that do not get bored, Caterina," he said. "They get called off. Or called away — to wherever the next part happens." He looked past me, at the basement door. "It watched this block for weeks while you worked. You finished today. And tonight it is gone."

"Well," I said. "That's an odd coincidence."

"No," said Raq. "No, it is not."

CHAPTER 22

RAQ

The circuit first, because the circuit is always first.

Eleven o'clock. Both corners clean. The alley clean. The laundromat step, still cold — a second night with no pass, and I stood over the absence longer than I have ever stood over the thing itself.

Mrs. Esposito's light went off at the correct minute. The Wongs' cat took its post on the fence and regarded me with the flat professional courtesy one watchman gives another. Down at the corner, two men argued about the Mets in front of the deli with the volume of men who have had this argument for thirty years and intend to have it for thirty more, and the sound of it came up the block warm as a lit window.

I have guarded palaces. I have stood over cities that named themselves eternal and are sand now. I have never once, until now, understood what any of it was for.

Donnie's window blue with the fights. Her basement dark. Her kitchen yellow.

I went up to close the watch from the roof.

Cam was waiting on it.

Not the alley. Not the corner, in a gray coat, with a pretext. The roof — the place I watched her from all those months, the seam between the tall houses with her yellow window at the bottom of it. He stood exactly on the spot where I had stood with her in my arms, and he was looking down the notch at her light, and everything in me went to iron.

"Camael."

"Baraqiel." He did not turn. "The window is charming. I understand the appeal better from up here."

"Step away from the sightline."