Page 88 of Mortal Things

We fall back into silence.

“Do you remember our resolutions from that day?” Laine says.

I think of us both perched beside my windowsill, watching billows of snow cover the world outside in white. She was already Raven’s Harbinger then, but even so, I can’t help but think that the look of wonder on her face then was a genuine one, a love for mortality still wholly intact as she studied the wintry world.

“To keep things just as they are,” I say, and she nods.

We had said it solemnly by that window, had turned to each other and held out our pinkies and hooked them together, had made a promise. And at the time, I had interpreted it as our way of confronting the changes we were about to step into—college and distance, learning how to grow up, how to step beyond the shackles of our pasts.

What had Laine thought?

“Did you mean any of it at all?” I ask her. “You knew it was a lie.”

She closes her fist around her pendant, then wraps her arms tighter around her knees. “I believed in it more than anything I’ve ever believed in. That, maybe, if I put it out into the universe, this hope that things could stay just the way they were. That maybe we could have gone on forever that way.”

Étienne’s words come back to me. Stories are the most beautiful lies in the world.

We tell ourselves things that we hope can be true someday. We make up goodness because sometimes the world doesn’t have it. We wrap ourselves in lies until we can figure out how to make them real.

“I’m sorry, Rose,” Laine says. She looks at me, her eyes glossy. “More than I can say.”

I stare at her, this girl for whom I’d once given up my life. And even though it will take more than a single conversation for us to find our way back to each other, the thing is, even if I had known about all the betrayal, even if I could have foreseen it, I would have done the same. I would still have saved her. I would save her now, again and again.

“Well,” I answer, and look away. “You found me.”

She smiles a little, opens her mouth to reply, then decides against whatever it is that she’d wanted to say. Her hand opens, revealing the pendant. She nods at me, then takes my hand and turns it so it’s facing up. She presses the pendant into my palm.

Suddenly, there is a commotion in the garden. A scream from Charlotte. A flash of light.

We jump to our feet in unison—before I can even process my own movements, I’ve tucked her pendant into my pocket and am sprinting down the hall toward the back of the house. Laine follows at my heels.

Right at the edge of the garden, I skid to a stop. Katie is crouched stiffly beside Charlotte, while Willow and Scarlet stand in front of them, bracing themselves as if for an attack.

And before them, shrouded in tendrils of darkness, is Raven.

33

“I knew you’d find your way here,” he says to me.

Of course he would. Perhaps he can sense me too easily, now that I am linked to him as his Regent. No matter where I go or what I do, he will find me.

I take a step toward him until I’m nearly standing between the three gods, so that my distance from each of them is the same. “You don’t have to take this path,” I say.

He gives me a hollow smile. “And you, young Harbinger, believe you understand what that path means?” His eyes go to Laine, who emerges at my side with her crossbow pointed at him, and to my surprise, sympathy flickers across his face. “It was always a mistake to pair you both,” he tells her. “I recruited you, but Scarlet had wanted you, too.”

Laine doesn’t flinch at his words, doesn’t take her eyes off him. Instead, she does something unexpected—she lowers her crossbow, then takes a knee before him.

Raven narrows his eyes at her. “You do this for her, don’t you?”

Laine’s grip tightens on her crossbow. “Always,” she replies.

No. I want to scream at her, rush to her and shake her shoulders. No, what’s wrong with you! You can’t give in now!

But before I can move, Laine turns her head slightly up to shoot me a secret, pointed look. Then she’s looking back down again, and I turn my head, every muscle in my body tense, my mind spinning.

Raven steps up to Willow, his long, lean silhouette towering over her as she confronts him. It seems impossible, seeing them like this—I have only ever known Willow as Raven’s ally, someone who had been a goddess long enough to see Raven step into his own role, who had served as his mentor.

Now she turns that same steady, gentle gaze on him. “You won’t find what you’re looking for,” she says. “Not like this.”