Page 86 of Mortal Things

32

As our gathering ends, Laine disappears back into the estate before I can catch up to her.

I find her sitting on the bottom of the staircase, staring up at the night sky peeking out through the top of the steps. Her crossbow is propped against the wall, and her pendant necklace is in her palm instead of looped around her neck.

I look on for a moment as she turns the Artifact idly over and over. With her legs folded up under her, she looks just like the friend I used to know. A pang of loneliness and nostalgia hits me.

We don’t greet each other, but she nods at me as I take a seat beside her. The silence between us lingers.

Why is it suddenly so difficult to talk to each other? Why have we been avoiding it ever since we left Raven’s estate?

Finally, I clear my throat and nod at her crossbow. “So,” I say. “Archery practice, huh? Was that actually true?”

She snorts and casts me a begrudging look. “Yes,” she grumbles. “At least, it was before I became a Harbinger.”

“For your school?”

She straightens a bit. “Two-time regional archery champion, that’s right.” I whistle, and it gets a smile out of her. “After I agreed to become a Harbinger, I kept practicing. It was a good way of letting off steam, especially after a bad mission.”

Somehow, I have a hard time imagining the Laine I’ve always known—nerdy and artsy and weird—going around claiming souls and capturing mortal artifacts adjacent to death. What other jobs had Raven sent her on?

“And music?” I ask. “Were you actually an Oasis nerd?”

She looks genuinely offended at that. “I am an Oasis nerd, thank you very much,” she says. “Do you want me to start quoting lyrics? We’ll be here all afternoon.”

“Okay, fair enough.” I hold up my hands. Some of the ice between us is thawing, although I still feel a little cold. “Were you always aiming to get into art school?”

She nods. “The year I became a Harbinger, I was working on my portfolio. There was a scholarship to my dream school that I knew I could get, so I’d set my alarm clock for two in the morning and paint in my room by flashlight. I’d cover the bottom of my bedroom door with a bathrobe so my parents wouldn’t know I was awake.”

Another mental image of the Laine that existed before I knew her, younger and more idealistic, hunched over her desk in the middle of the night, working by lamplight.

A brief silence passes between us before I say, “Earlier, back at the estate.”

“Hmm?” She looks at me.

“You said we don’t have time for this. To get into everything. Well, now we do.”

Laine doesn’t answer for a long moment, and I don’t push her. She keeps her eyes on her hands, rubbing at some nonexistent stain on her thumb. We both know that it isn’t really the lack of time that had kept us quiet until now.

“So,” she says at last, “what do you want to get into?”

I hesitate, not sure where to start. How do you bridge this vast of a distance? How do you find your place in a story that’s only halfway done?

“You said you became a Harbinger for your mother,” I say. “What happened?”

Laine’s lips tighten. Maybe this is still too hard a question for us, and I open my mouth to change the subject, but she shakes her head. “My father,” she says. “He was awful to us.”

I stay silent and listen as she shares the entire story, a side of her family that she had never shared with me until now. She tells me about his violent rages, the way she was able to discern in the sound of his footsteps whether he was in a good or bad mood.

She tells me about the day Raven came for her, how she’d done it to free her mother from everything.

“Oh, Laine,” I whisper. “I never knew.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she says. “What was the point of telling you, with what I was assigned to do?” She looks down. “The last thing I needed was you feeling sorry for me.”

I can imagine her doing it. Throwing herself over her mother as unhesitatingly as she’d thrown herself at me. And even though, for me, it was a moment preordained by her patron god, I know in my heart that she would have done it anyway. I know it, because how many things have I done in service to Raven? How many lives have I been forced to take against my will?

“You’ve been working for Raven, all this time,” I say quietly.