Evie
Four searches. Six hours. Approximately fourteen thousand square feet of ballroom floor mapped and re-mapped until my knees ache from crouching on cold marble.
I’ve traced every corner, every alcove, every spot where Oliver might have lingered during last night’s Halloween Ball.
I’ve traced his heat signature from the entrance where he arrived with Jade, through the crowd where he chatted with Tyler and Avery, past the refreshment table where he grabbed two drinks—one for himself, and one for Jade.
My power has always been strongest with family. Shared bloodlines produce overlapping thermal wavelengths. It’s basic genetics, documented in Eleanor’s third-year thesis.
Oliver’s signature should be easy for me to follow.
And it is… right until it isn’t.
Crouching near the back of the ballroom, I press my palm against the cold marble floor where his trail leads to one of the service corridors.
His signature is relatively fresh here, maybe eighteen hours old.
Well, fresh for a family member. It would be long gone for anyone else.
Well, anyone other than Kieran, who runs like a furnace so hot it would burn even a witch, but he’s an anomaly I’ve yet to understand.
Like I have multiple times today, I follow the golden warmth of Oliver’s thermal echo as it winds through the corridor, up a staircase, across the second floor, and up to the Observatory.
The glass dome looms against the night sky, and I press my hand against the outer wall, where Oliver’s signature leads.
Then, at the wall, it stops.
It doesn’t fade. It doesn’t bloom the way a signature does when someone fire travels. It just ends, as if Oliver walked into solid stone and ceased to exist.
“That’s not possible,” I mutter, running my fingers along the rough surface.
Either my ability is malfunctioning due to emotional compromise, Oliver’s trail was deliberately erased, or there’s a mechanism in this wall I don’t understand.
But being trapped in a wall—or wherever he is—is better than being dead. Because like Constance said, he’s not dead. He’s missing. And missing people can be found.
I just need more power.
And where can I get more power?
The Crown.
My heart stutters at the idea. Because firstly, the Scorched Circles are off-limits after 10:00 PM. Secondly, the Crown is forbidden. If I get caught up there, I’m expelled. Sent home in disgrace, the Thorne child who couldn’t make it through first semester.
But up there, with the volcanic energy amplifying my abilities...
I might be able to sense Oliver anywhere on the island. I might be able to find a trail I’m missing.
Expulsion versus never finding my brother? There’s no real choice.
It’s 10:32 PM. The Circles closed for the night half an hour ago, which means they should be empty.
So, I start moving, letting my heat sensing ability guide me through the shadows.
Two patrolling faculty members are near the main quad, so I loop around the library to avoid them.
A cluster of students is lingering by the fountain, so I cut through the back gardens instead.
I thread through the cold spots like a needle through fabric, invisible and silent, becoming one with the darkness.
Soon, the Scorched Circles rise before me, seven rings in the volcanic slope. In daylight, they’re intimidating. At night, they’re ancient and watchful, the residual heat from today’s training clinging to the stones in layers of overlapping memories.
I pause and scan for heat signatures—mainly for Jade and Logan’s, since they’ve been sneaking out here for weeks.
Tonight, the Circles are empty.
So, I begin the climb.
Loose volcanic rock shifts under my boots. The wind picks up as I climb higher, whipping my hair loose from its bun and sending the pencils I’d forgotten were in there clattering down the mountainside.
“The Crown,” Kieran said on our first day at Scorched Circles. “Raw magical amplification. No safety features. The only circle where a challenge could end in death. You will never train there. You will never set foot there. Am I understood?”
We all nodded, too terrified to do anything else.
Now I’m climbing toward it. Alone. In the dark.
This is insane. This is absolutely, certifiably insane.
By the time I reach the summit, my legs are burning and my lungs are screaming for air. But the exhaustion vanishes the moment I look out, because the path ends where I’m standing.
Beyond it, the Crown stretches before me—a flat expanse of jagged volcanic rock, maybe forty feet across, its edges dropping into darkness. There are no carved barriers like the lower circles, and no safety features. It’s just raw stone and a long way down.
From up here, I can see everything. The academy’s windows glow far below, the moonlit ocean stretches to the horizon, and the lower circles pulse with a faint orange warmth from today’s training.
I stop at the boundary.
One step. That’s all it takes to cross from “reckless but survivable” to “expelled and possibly dead.”
This is either the smartest idea I’ve ever had or the last mistake I’ll ever make. But if the Crown’s amplification can boost my heat sensing ability enough to scan the entire island at once...
I take a deep breath and step onto the stone.
My foot makes contact, and I’m blasted with a thermal echo so violent it whites out my vision. My hands fly to my temples, my knees hitting volcanic rock. The explosion is so bright and intense that it drowns out everything else.
Underneath the blast, seared into the center of it, are two heat signatures burned so deep and hot I’m amazed the rock didn’t melt entirely.
And one of them…
Oliver.
The warm, steady pattern that’s been a constant in my life since before I could walk. My brother. My friend. The one who always made everything okay.
The second signature is less familiar, but given that Professor Thaddeus is also missing, the logical deduction is that it’s his.
I scan for entry points, departure trails, or any indications of how they got up here or where they went afterward.
There’s nothing.
The blast scorched it all away. If there were fire travel blooms, they’re gone. If anyone walked up here or walked away, I’ll never know. The only signatures that survived are the two at the epicenter.
The temperature spike must have been enormous. Instantaneous.
Final.
The word surfaces unbidden, and I try to push it down. Because final isn’t a scientific term. Final can’t be measured or quantified or disproven with better data.
But this doesn’t feel like a departure or a transition.
It feels like an ending.
“No.” The word comes out broken, whipped away by the wind.
I push deeper, searching for detail I missed. A secondary trail, a continuation, or any evidence that Oliver walked away, that he’s on this island waiting to be found.
No matter how hard I push, there are only two thermal fingerprints blazing impossibly bright, surrounded by the echo of a heat blast so intense it erased everything else.
The analytical part of my brain keeps trying to form lists. Possible explanations.
One: unprecedented magical phenomenon requiring further study.
Two: deliberate signature erasure by unknown third party.
Three—
I can’t finish thinking about the third option, especially with the Crown’s amplification flooding through me, making everything too bright, too loud, and too much.
I don’t know how long I stay there. The sky shifts from black to deep blue to the first pale gray of approaching dawn, and I don’t move. I can’t move.
Because my brother came to the Crown last night, and he never left.
“Evie.”
A heat signature registers at the Crown’s perimeter.
All I can pull from it is fragments—core temperature elevated, moving fast and controlled, not winded from the climb—but the details won’t sharpen into a face or a name.
My magic is too saturated with the impossibly huge thermal blast to process anything new.
“We need to get you out of here.” He lies down beside me on the volcanic rock, flooding my senses with intense, radiating heat.
Then he’s wrapping his arms around me, fire engulfs us both, and the world dissolves into flames.