have anything,” I insisted.
Marie adjusted the skull-shaped agate on her finger and clasped her bloodstained hands in front of her. “The Absyrtus Heart.”
“A shriveled-up old plant?”
“You remember what I said about Astraea and how she helped me when I was sick?”
I could only nod.
Marie looked down. “She used the Heart to heal me.”
“ ‘Heal’ is not the correct word,” Nyx chimed in.
Marie rolled her eyes. “Roll up the partition please.”
“I think I’ll leave it down.”
Marie side-eyed her, then angled her body so that her back was to Nyx. “The protection of the Absyrtus Heart is tasked to your family. As a service to our community, they’ve cultivated plants, poisonous and benign alike, used in the work of conjurers, root workers, alchemists, witches, and others for as long as I can remember.”
The image of Astraea’s gravestone flashed in my mind. Her grave had been cleared, flowers had been left there, and her date of death had been 1680. I locked eyes with Marie. “What are you?”
“I couldn’t explain it if I tried.”
“I’m gonna need you to try before I flip.” Another wave of nausea broke over me and sweat dampened my back.
Marie leaned against the seat. “That illness I told you about, the one that made me so sick I thought I would die? It was plague. Some strain of the Black Death.”
“What?” I couldn’t comprehend what she was saying. “You’re telling me you got the plague? How is that even possible?”
“It was a long time ago,” Marie said quietly.
I was done trying to be polite. “How old are you? Because I’m really, really confused.”
“Three hundred and seventy-six.”
A high-pitched ring sounded in my ears. I thought I was gonna pass out. “No. Nope. Nah. Stop the car.” I couldn’t see straight. “Let me out.” I pulled on the door handle—I’d jump if I had to—but it didn’t budge. “Let me out!”
“Please, Briseis.” Marie put her hand on my shoulder.
“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.”
Marie sighed and shook her head. “Sometimes I wish it wasn’t true. I wasn’t lying when I said I felt lost without Astraea. She knew what I’d become, even when I didn’t fully understand it myself. After she used the Heart to save me, she never told me how she came into possession of the plant, why she and her family knew how to care for it, where it came from, nothing. All of this is