Page 59 of Mortal Things

“Who did you give up?” I ask him softly.

He shakes his head once. “I no longer remember,” he replies. “It doesn’t matter now.”

To have been separated from his humanity for so long that he no longer remembers who had once loved him. To have been a god for so long that he no longer feels the pain of mortality. Maybe that is a mercy in itself.

“Why did you show me all this?” I say.

“It is impossible for me to tell you the web of threads that has led to your life today,” he answers. “So I must show you. Know that something happens because of a thousand occurrences before it, that decisions in the immortal world can echo events from centuries earlier, that they may ripple through centuries to come.” He nods at me. “None of us are free from it. Not mortals, not gods. And not your Étienne.”

My Étienne.

The way he says this hollows something out in me, and leaves me frightened. “Tell me what it all means,” I say hoarsely. “What is his connection to me?”

He looks away for a moment. Above us, the moon has traveled out of the atrium’s night sky, its silver light the only lingering reminder of its presence.

“Your friend’s attack was no accident,” he says at last.

I stare at him, uncomprehending. “Laine?”

But somehow, in that moment, I already know what he’ll say next.

“The thief who attacked her,” Raven says, “was Étienne.”

YOU WOULDN’T HAVE noticed him, on that day.

He was a Harbinger, after all. As a mortal, you would not have remembered his actions. You would have seen it, but your mind would not have been able to process it. You would have only witnessed a young man hidden under a scarf, hurrying down a snow-lined street, and the two laughing girls, set on a collision course with him.

On that day, the boy named Étienne had dressed carefully for the occasion. Thorn had told him that Rose was not supposed to see his face. He was not to say a word to her, was not to make eye contact with her. He needed to move quickly. Fulfill his job, leave the scene, be done with it.

In spite of his patron god’s faith in him, he was nervous. Most of his jobs for Thorn did not go like this. He collected lies from criminals, con artists, attorneys, salespeople, parents trying to soothe their children, women trying to protect themselves. He fetched rare manuscripts of ancient books. He stole art, lies of what the world looked like that still managed to tell truths.

But he had never been ordered to kill someone. There was a first time for everything.

The air was unseasonably cold that day. All the better for him to hide himself, he supposed, as he pulled a hoodie over his hair and wrapped a scarf tightly around the bottom half of his face. Before heading out, he stood in front of his bathroom mirror and wove an illusion over his eyes, darkening the color of his irises from bright green to a blue so deep that it looked black. He changed his hair color to a dark brown, adjusted his silhouette to be lankier, more hunched. He changed himself until he was unrecognizable, and then he stood and stared at himself in the mirror, trying to convince himself that he wasn’t staring at a stranger.

At a monster.

He spotted them easily. They were the only two teenage girls on the sidewalk, and they were emerging from an alleyway right as he rounded the corner. Immediately, he recognized Laine. His eyes went to the girl beside her.

Rose. His mark.

Later, whenever he recalled that moment, the thing he remembered the most was the pang of regret that shot through his heart at the sight of her. The instant, fleeting thought that she was pretty, that she seemed nice. She was in the middle of laughing about something with her friend. And in another life, he might have stopped to ask her name.

But in this one, he kept his head down and sped up. The girls stopped talking. He noticed Rose’s head turn in his direction, and for an instant, he thought about giving up. He could just walk right past them. He could fail this job for his patron god and tell Thorn he couldn’t do it, that he should pick someone else.

But it was too late now, and he was nothing but a liar.

23

The thief who attacked her was Étienne.

Immediately, I start shaking my head. A wave of shock descends, and with it comes denial, incredulity, dizziness.

It isn’t possible, because how could it be?

Étienne doesn’t know Laine. He lived in London during my time in New York City with Laine—we were just two specks of humanity, dust on the wind. It isn’t possible, because how can two particles of dust cross paths in the magnitude of this world?

And yet, even as I think this, my memories return, along with a nagging whisper in the back of my mind.