“Don’t kill me!” I shrieked, trying to move as far away from her as the confines of the car would allow.

Nyx burst out laughing from the driver’s seat. “Miss Briseis, please try to calm down. She’s entirely too taken with you to kill you.”

Marie threw her hands in the air. “Nyx! Damn! I’m tryna be serious. She’s scared and you’re not helping.”

Nyx laughed.

“I would never hurt you,” Marie said. “Not for any reason, and I’d kill anyone who tried. But I guess I don’t need to tell you—you’ve seen that for yourself.”

“Maybe we stop talking about killing,” Nyx said.

I whipped around and stuck my head through the partition, seeing if I could squeeze through somehow. But Nyx was in the front, and she’d killed a man, too.

Was this some kind of joke? They both seemed too nonchalant, like it wasn’t a big deal that Marie had crushed a dude’s skull with her bare hands or that Nyx folded a grown-ass man into a pretzel.

I turned to Marie. I searched her face for any hint of malice, any sign she wanted to embarrass me by making me think she was some kind of monster. I saw only kindness in her eyes, which had returned to their normal dark brown color.

“Okay,” I said to myself. “Okay, just—just give me a minute to think.” I tried to put my thoughts together. “Those guys at the cemetery were after me because I have the Absyrtus Heart?”

She gave a quick nod.

I readjusted my glasses. “And they want it because the Absyrtus Heart is a cure for the plague?”

“It is the cure for impending death, no matter the cause,” Marie said. “But the result is immortality. I’m sitting here the same as I was the day Astraea used the Heart to save me. I’ll be seventeen forever.”

“But it’s still there, the Heart. I saw—” I stopped, remembering the patch of vacant earth next to the plant. “There were two?”

“I don’t know how she did it, but Astraea used one of them to save me. Imagine what somebody might do to have that kind of power.”

“I—I don’t know what to say. This can’t be real.”