“You hurt?”

Eve dropped her shirt, looking up at the figure in her bedroom doorway. He had dark brown hair, a taut, wiry frame, and he was still in his khakis and military gear, which hid the death metal band t-shirts she knew he loved to wear. 

In her quietest moments, Eve could admit that her brother’s tendency to use music to quell his occasional tempers was why she had dyed her hair jet-black and cut it harshly at an angle. The purple paint on her walls had been covered in black wallpaper too, but it hadn’t drained the edge off her grief in the way she’d hoped. But no amount of Metallica would save her from the annoyed frown on Robbie’s features that he seemed to only wield at her. 

“Nope.” Eve turned away as she popped the ‘p’ in the word, rolling her eyes. A hand pulled her arm until she was back to facing him, his eyes flaring in annoyance.

“Resa’s got three broken ribs because of you.” Robbie said, his voice sharpened like a knife. Right, so it was about the hunt they’d just been on. Herd of fauns, three of them working together, with Eve on sniper rifle duty. There hadn’t been a good vantage point, as she’d explained in the mission briefing, but Theresa had icily replied that it was her hunt, not Eve’s, so it was her call. On the hunt, Eve hadn’t been able to get a good shot, so she had done what any good hunter was supposed to do: she had adapted. 

“I didn't ask her to,“ Eve snipped back, pulling her arm out of his grip. “I can take a hit.”

Robbie threw his hands in the air. “Right. Sure. Let’s fucking test that idea, huh?” Without warning, he kicked her. Sure, it wasn’t forceful, although the bruise on her sternum still protested. It was the kind of kick meant to create distance, not do damage, and it was dialed right down to a five, but Eve’s metal knee buckled before the rest of her, and she hit the floor hard. Robbie winced in regret, but moved in anyway, pushing her down as Eve tried to get up and hovering his boot over her face. “You wanna talk about how this’d end if I was a fucking faun?”

His point made, Eve kicked her good leg at the one bearing his weight, which knocked Robbie off balance and gave Eve time to get back to her feet. “All of us get knocked off our feet sometimes.” Her voice carried a shard of ice Eve hadn’t been able to wield a year ago. 

“Bullshit. You fall easier and you get up slower, you know that.” 

“I’ve been training with mom and Jake–”

“Mom’s gone back to church, and Jake’s messing up in our sparring so often I think he wants me to punch him in the face–”

“I’m cleared for the field! You have to get over it!”

“You’re going to die!” Robbie shouted, drowning out anything Eve might have said, his statement crushing the air out of her lungs. Out of his as well, both of them stunned by the simplicity of the truth that was spoken so rarely in this house. “You won’t- you won’t even make it to eighteen.” 

Eve’s lips trembled. She looked up at her big brother, and saw the matching tremor in his jaw. She felt so much smaller than him. Smaller than she used to be. Twelve point five per cent smaller at least by weight, the surgeons had said, but it felt like so much more than that. Sometimes it felt like the scalpel had taken more than her leg, more than her innocence. Every part of her family had taken a cut too.

“I’m still a hunter,” she said quietly. “I have to make it right.” 

Robbie rolled his eyes, and cupped her shoulders, dropping his head down to her level. “You can’t make anything right if you’re dead. So find another fucking way. You could take over the camp, teach, I don’t know, reinvent the dispellates. You’ve got that instagram thing, you could become a pro at tracking fae online. There’s other ways to help. You can’t be first, Evie.”

Eve stared up at him, searching his gaze. She hadn’t heard of what he was saying. Hunters who didn’t hunt were retired, and they weren’t popular. Retirement was earned, not gifted just because you got hurt. She put her hands on his arms, but not to push him away. Instead, it was like clinging to a life raft. “It’s- It’s my sacrifice to make. Everyone agrees.”

“Everyone else has their head too far up their own ass to talk about their feelings. Fuck them. Do you want to die?”

Eve exhaled slowly, a small tear spilling from her cheek. Her biggest failure. Despite herself, despite herself, they all knew the answer. “No.”

Robbie pulled her in tight for a hug, so she wouldn’t see the tears in his own eyes. “Then find another way. Please, Evie.”

—----

Humans healed from concussions. She'd been gentle. Out of the dozens of rules Robbie had broken, this one was a small one to add to the list. Later, she'd find time to feel bad about it. Eve set the security guard down on the ground gently, and swiped his access card, into the morgue. 

It took her a while to get through everything that needed doing. All the files, all the samples. It hadn't been here long, but it had clearly sparked curiosity. That was exactly why it couldn't stay. 

Once she had all the evidence of it cleared, all that was left was removing it, itself. Eve double checked the cabinet number on the file, and unlatched the corresponding vault. 

Cool air rushed out to meet her. The tray that it was on barely squeaked as she rolled it out. The smell was one Eve had become used to since she’d been recruited by the Whistlers a few short years ago, but her hand still paused on the zip.

It wouldn't change what was beneath the plastic. It sucked the air out of her, when the zip parted to reveal Robbie's face. His eyes were sunken, cheeks hollowed out and grey. Quartz crystal pierced his skin from the inside out, forming a ring around his throat. There were fingernail scratch marks around each crystal. Eve unzipped further, and found more quartz jutting from his shoulders, his arms, his chest. Under the plastic, she could feel more crystal that had erupted from his knees, his thighs. But nothing in his ears or eyes, nothing in his spine. No autopsy had been completed yet, so she knew the cuts around the crystal in his elbow must have come from an attempt to cauterise the infection before it spread. As Eve squeezed his bloodstained hand, Robbie's face became wet. The morgue, which before had only hummed with machinated cooling, bounced the wretched sounds that ripped out of her lungs. Her head dropped unconsciously against his. 

She could still smell the alcohol on his lips. That too was a cauterizing, she knew, from the increasingly volatile tempers he'd been struggling with more and more the last few years. This time, when Eve’s siblings had whispered amongst themselves in concern. Unstable, they'd said. Compromised. But no attempt to talk him from the brink had worked. He shouldn't have been up against a nymph like this, but he had been anyway.

Just like that, an eighth of them was gone. He wasn't here, his mutilated corpse lay in his place. Eve squeezed his hand until she felt the bones protest, kissed his cheek like he might remember to kiss her back, until the lump in her throat stopped feeling like flesh and started feeling like crystal too. Someone would notice soon. The edit to the security footage would become obvious if she stayed much longer. Every tear was a potential smear of evidence to what it had cost Eve to get in here. 

But first she had a call to make. The first of several. 

“Hi Jake.” Could he hear the tears in her voice?

“Evie.” She could hear the strain in his. Eve drummed her fingers against the plastic of her thigh, looking anywhere in the morgue except the body on the tray. Her red eyes began to sting every time she looked at the quartz. 

“It's him.”

A long silence followed. For the first time in her life, Eve could hear her oldest brother straining against what duty demanded his reaction was. Maybe she had just never noticed it before. He settled on the most fitting one, his voice cracking with grief. “Shit.”

It hadn't been that long since dad, and mom. It hadn't been that long since Jake had become the head of the Farran household. 

“I can call the others,” Eve offered. “Call Dani-”

“No,” came the answer, hard and fast. Sometimes, it was like Jake still saw her as seventeen, in need of protecting from a faun’s hooves.

“I've done it before.” For other hunters, ones she hadn't known. She had the starts of a script, something that drew the least grief each time. How much harder could it be for her brother? 

Again, she heard the load bearing silence as Jake pulled himself together. Eve remembered that while she had lost an older brother, Jake had lost a younger one. “I know,” he said softly. “This one’s on me. You just need to bring him home. Okay?”

This one. The words echoed in her head long after their goodbyes, as the corpse's weight settled over her shoulder. That choosing to live was to do this, over and over again. She’d known, but she hadn't known. 

In the eighteen hours it took to drive the corpse back to the family home, everyone else had gathered for the funeral. They came in a crowd towards her, hugs and kisses and gentle reassurances Eve could bear even less than the gentleness in Jake’s tortured voice. A broad figure lurked at the back in the dark. He probably knew better than anyone what had caused Robbie’s downward spiral over the last year, dotted with blood soaked tempers, brawls with humans in bars, arguing with family, quiet sobs over slaughtered corpses that he stifled the moment anyone else came near. Maybe some of the others had already asked him, or maybe they hadn’t. Deep down, every Farran already knew the answer already: that Robbie’s heart, which had once saved Eve’s life, had also killed him. A common hunter weakness: emotional compromise. 

She wondered if Daniel knew Robbie would have counted him a sibling too. She wondered if that had been a good idea, if losing one of nine might hurt less than one of eight. From the ache in her chest as Jake and Theresa began to pull the body bag out of her van, Eve doubted it. There was no fraction of loss that made this manageable. And yet, counting her brothers and sisters, Eve knew she had to learn how to. 

As his body was lowered into the ground (in an unmarked grave, only known by those who were already here), they each took turns goodbye. When it came to Eve, she knelt, plastic knee hitting the damp dirt forcefully, cupping her sibling’s corpse’s face for the last time. (Or worse, for the first.)