“Yes.”

“By your hand?” Nyx wasn’t any less fierce for being injured.

“Yes,” Eavan admitted.

“It was worth it then. Now, if you want to make me happy, go celebrate with Cillian. Call it a cure for your guilt.” Nyx closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

Eavan stood there for several moments. Some things never change. Her grandmother was still the family matriarch, still focused on her personal agenda, still determined to save Eavan from dying from the “disease” of mortality.

Quietly, with only Muriel for a witness, Eavan walked over and kissed her grandmother’s forehead and whispered the same words she used to whisper as a girl: “You’re such a bitch, Grandmama Nyx.”

Nyx smiled but didn’t open her eyes. “Love you, too, Evvie.”

After her shower, Eavan sat in Nyx’s room and flipped through a manila folder she’d found in Daniel’s office, one she hadn’t given Cillian. He had looked up when she walked past the sitting room, but he hadn’t followed her into Nyx’s room.

Eavan flipped through the pages and stared at the names:

Christophe, James

Imlee, D—?

McKinsey, Rachel

Wall,???

There were more than a dozen pages on different people and other thicker packets of information that made no sense to her.

She wasn’t meant for a normal life, but that didn’t mean she had to give up hope of everything she’d believed. Maybe Nyx was right: maybe she couldn’t deny what she was. She was a murderess, a daughter of glaistigs, but she was also daughter to a long-gone human father. She’d commit a few murders to keep her appetites in control. She wasn’t going to become fully glaistig. There were choices left to her—not as many as before Daniel, but still enough that she could keep hold her of her humanity.