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“He had wounds to the neck,” Raven says at last. “As if he had been hanged in his room.”

I hold my breath. Raven hadn’t told me the whole story of what had happened, possibly to spare me the details. But now there has been another death. “Did a Wraith do it?” I ask.

“Wraiths should be incapable of crossing into the mortal world,” Raven says. “They are fragments of souls.” There is a slight pause in his words. “Only something in the immortal realm could give them such power.”

I think of his suspicions of Thorn, then of the crow-like Wraiths from my first test, when I’d looked up to see one perched on the roof, tilting its eyeless head down toward me.

I clear my throat. “During my test,” I say, “there was a Wraith watching me. It didn’t approach or attack. But it was picking at the carcass of a pigeon on the roof. I thought perhaps the carcass was also part of the Wraith’s illusion, but it did not have a mirage-like appearance about it. There were others with it, too. Dozens of them, all circling.”

My patron god listens, his expression unchanging. “Did they interfere with your test?” he asks.

“No.”

“And did Étienne Beauchard comment on them?”

I shake my head. I hadn’t considered that Étienne would have seen them, too, upon his arrival to the Met.

Raven’s gray eyes narrow at me. “Someone was influencing the line between the mortal and immortal realms,” he says, “both at your test, and tonight. A Wraith that can eat mortal flesh. A Wraith devouring a Regent’s soul.”

“You think Étienne had something to do with tonight?”

He glances over his shoulder at the theater. “Who sent Soren down into the bathroom?”

My heart stops for a second.

Hadn’t he made Soren dizzy, to protect me from the Regent’s wrath? Didn’t he casually remark on how Soren must be heading to the bathroom to retch? Doesn’t Raven already suspect Thorn?

The thought turns me cold, and suddenly, all I can picture is how sinister Étienne had looked under the harsh bathroom light, the way the shadows had obscured his eyes.

Had there been another reason for him to act as he did?

I shake my head. “Are you saying he knew the Wraith would be there?” I say. “Why would Étienne invite me to come downstairs with him, and potentially stop something he’d wanted to happen?”

“He cannot, after all, claim a Wraith’s soul himself,” Raven says. “And I don’t imagine that Thorn wanted a Wraith to kill more than his target.”

I feel sick to my stomach. “But why would Thorn want to kill the Regent of Knowledge? I know he and Aurora have never been allies, but I hadn’t thought it warranted a feud.”

“Tomorrow, pay a visit to Thorn’s estate,” Raven says. “Find his Regent, have a conversation with him.” He nods at me. “I expect you to keep it discreet. The other gods need not know about this.”

This is the kind of delicate job that would have once gone to Terran, a mission handed down directly by Raven and involving another god. I’m far from becoming his official Regent—and after failing my first test, might not become his Regent at all—but he is treating me as such. I wonder if he knows more than he lets on, if this imbalance in the immortal world is far greater than I know, if his reluctance to tell me more is something I should be worried about.

Keep it discreet. The other gods need not know about this.

Are the gods moving against one another? Are there factions forming?

“I doubt Étienne will tell me anything,” I mutter.

Raven gives me a small, humorless smile at that. “You underestimate what he may reveal to you. Mortals are remarkably obvious in their vulnerabilities.”

Warmth creeps into my cheeks. I don’t want to understand what Raven is suggesting with such a comment, as if I might be one of those vulnerabilities.

“You talk like you remember what it’s like to be a mortal,” I mutter.

He looks away from me and back down at the midnight street. “I’m reminded at times,” he finally says.

I think of all he must have presided over, war and famine and injustice, the secrets stored away in his heart, the shadows of mortals that stretch long and terribly across history. It is as if I can see the remnants of a soul there, of who he must have been as a young man. In this moment, he appears as if he deeply misses mortality.

Who had he cared about, when he was alive?