Page 22 of Mortal Things

Enemies. I frown, looking at him. Suddenly, I think back to the moment when Raven had been dancing with me, along with his words.

I have my suspicions, and a task for you, Regent-Elect.

“You did know that Thorn would challenge my confirmation,” I say.

His expression remains calm. “I only suspected it,” he replies.

“You think the god of Lies had something to do with Terran’s death,” I say. “With the Wraiths, and this imbalance you mentioned in the world. Is this the task you’d planned for me?”

“Thorn’s Regent will be the one challenging you during each of your confirmation tests,” he says. “I want you to lean in to that close proximity with him.”

“You want me to get close to Étienne?” I say, warmth rising unbidden on my cheeks.

“It should be fairly easy for you.”

My heart jumps, and I scowl at my own reaction. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not a coincidence that Thorn wants a chance to seize you as his own Harbinger,” Raven says. “You’ve hated this position for as long as you’ve worked for me. You fight it.” He smiles tightly. “The god of Lies likes those who resist, is drawn to those who question everything. He will want his Regent close to you.”

A mission to get close to Étienne, whatever that means. I swallow, dreading everything about the upcoming tests. “I don’t question everything,” I mutter.

Raven studies me. “You remember your first assignment as my Harbinger. Yes?”

I nod. A teenage girl, destined to drown in the Bronx River at twilight last year, on a summer afternoon of record-breaking heat. Terran had personally come to fetch me that evening. I came down from my apartment to find him at the bottom of the stairwell, a larger-than-life figure who introduced himself as my Regent. He accompanied me on my first task from Raven: to claim the girl’s soul.

I can still remember his gentle, lined face. The thread of light in your soul, Harbinger, is both a power and a burden.

I close my eyes. When I do, I can see myself on that first day, still numb at the prospect of my new life, heading in the direction of the Bronx River. I can see the shadowed water of that unbearably hot afternoon, hear the shouts of the four teenagers as they clustered along the bridge, each daring another to jump in. I can still pick out the face of the girl I was sent to collect, fearful and ecstatic and eager to please her friends.

I can still remember diving into the water with her—not to save her, but to close my hand around her wrist, to feel the thread of her soul leave her body and wind itself tightly in my chest.

I wince. Even then, during that first mission, I had wanted to revive her, had felt my soul pushing back against what I was required to do, as if its real power was to gift life back to her instead of death. When I’d returned to Raven afterward, I had stayed silent and angry, unwilling to meet his eyes. Even now, after completing so many similar missions, the memory hurts.

“I did as I was told,” I say stiffly.

“You resented me for it,” he replies. “Had it been left to you, you would have refused to claim her soul.”

“You never told me why she needed to drown that day.”

“There is no reason that makes sense to a mortal,” he replies. “In order for death to exist, there must be life. In order for life to exist, there must be death. She was a thread among a billion others, not just in my dominion, but for all the gods. She died because there happened to be a heat wave, because months earlier, an old man living on the other side of the world missed his flight, because there was a crop failure in the Deccan Plateau of southwestern India. One thread pulls an infinite number of other threads. This is how balance is maintained in the world.”

I have always hated this answer from him, just as I hate when people say that everything happens for a reason. As if there was a reason for this girl to lose her life in the river. For the man in the train station to die. For my mother to have abandoned me.

I look away, lingering instead on the paintings lining the open hall behind us. They are from the mortal world—a nineteenth-century work of a funeral, an unfinished oil of Claude Monet’s wife on her deathbed, scenes depicting the executions of deposed monarchs or prisoners, framed mosaics of skeletons made before the first century. Vaguely, I recall once tracking down a minted coin of death for him, as well as a statue of a mother cradling a dying man, her son, in her arms.

Death is a natural part of life. Hadn’t I said that to Étienne? Hadn’t he reminded me that it, too, is a cruelty?

“I think the real reason is that the gods just don’t care,” I answer. “As long as you get what you need from the mortal world.”

He smiles bitterly at that. “You think I don’t care about the deaths I see.”

“How can you?” I shake my head. “There are so many, every single day. Things that must shatter you. God or not, the only way to bear that is to abandon your human heart.”

He tilts his head slightly at me. “It is difficult for you to fathom that both can be true. To you, it would mean accepting that the world is the way it is simply because … it has to be.”

My hands tighten against the railing. It would mean that there was no reason, no excuse, no rationale behind why my mother left me. That the reason she left is because some thread on the other side of the world was pulled, which set off a bunch of meaningless reactions that led to her leaving. That the only reason is because, well, she wanted to.

“I accept you, Lord Raven,” I say tightly.