Jade
No. Five more minutes. I was having the best dream...
Hands are shaking me, hard and annoying, and when I crack my eyes open, Logan’s face is right there. Normally that would make my heart do stupid things, but now, I just want him to let me sleep.
“What?” I sound drunk. Feel drunk too, actually. Heavy and floaty at the same time.
“We need to go.” His hands are still on my shoulders, his grip too tight. “Now.”
“Go where?” I try to sit up, and the world tilts sideways. “We’re staying here. Remember?”
Then I see Callie in the grass. She’s ten feet away, her blonde hair everywhere, her skin the color of old milk.
“What the hell?”
I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to move, and okay, bad idea, because the ground is wobbling and my legs aren’t cooperating and—
Logan catches my arm and steadies me.
“Why is she here?” I ask, although it comes out too sharp and loud. Because we walked into these woods alone. We found this clearing, and we had sex, and I definitely would have noticed if his ex-girlfriend showed up at any point during those activities.
“She wandered over while we were asleep,” he says, clipped and flat. “The fruit has a hypnotic effect. It hit her harder because she ate more than you did.”
I stare at the way she’s lying there, barely breathing, looking like she’s barely clinging onto life.
“That doesn’t make sense. We were busy, and then we fell asleep, and she just... stumbled through the forest and collapsed next to us?”
The possibility of anything else makes my skin crawl.
Callie watching us. Callie seeing Logan touch me, kiss me, and move inside me…
Stop. Focus.
“She looks half dead.” I gesture at her pale face. “People don’t look like that from eating too much fruit.”
“I don’t know what the fruit does.” His jaw tightens. “I just know what it did to you.”
“What are you talking about? What did it do to me?”
“I don’t know the specifics.” His eyes are pained when he says it, like he’s looking at me but not seeing me. “All I know is that it’s numbing your magic.”
I reach for my electricity, for that buzzing under my skin that’s been there since T touched my forehead in the plane.
There’s nothing.
So I reach again, harder this time, like maybe I missed it, like maybe it’s hiding somewhere I didn’t check.
All that’s there is an empty space where the lightning should be.
“That’s not possible,” I tell him. “I always have something. Even when I’m exhausted, it’s still there.”
“I know.” He releases my shoulders and walks to Callie. “When we’re intimate together, your electricity—”
“Are we seriously talking about this when she’s right here?”
“Your electricity reacts, even when you’re trying to control it,” he continues, crouching beside Callie and sliding his arms under her body.
Heat floods my face. Because okay, he’s not wrong. But talking about it when Callie’s right here, even if she’s not conscious…
“Tonight, there was nothing.” He stands, lifting Callie against his chest. “Not a crackle. Not a spark. Nothing.”
I run my fingers along my rings, trying not to look at Callie as his words sink in. “You think the fruit did this to my magic?”
“Callie couldn’t light a single flame.” He shifts her weight in his arms, and her head lolls against his shoulder. “I made her try before she passed out, and nothing happened.”
“What about you? Can you still use yours?”
“Yes.”
“How?” I frown at him.
“I didn’t eat the fruit. I was too focused on you.”
The answer wraps around me like the golden warmth humming through my veins. Because Logan puts me first, always, even when the rest of the world is falling apart.
But if the fruit’s why my magic’s gone, why Callie looks like a corpse, and why everything feels soft and wrong…
Lotus.
The word surfaces from ninth grade English. Men eating flowers and forgetting their homes, their families, and everything else that mattered.
“We’re in the Land of the Lotus Eaters,” I say, even though it sounds insane. “From The Odyssey.”
Logan nods once and starts walking.
I follow, because what else am I going to do?
But my eyes keep drifting to Callie, her blonde hair swinging with each of his steps, the pale curve of her neck, and how easy it would be to stop caring again if I had a few bites of that golden fruit.
Stop it. Don’t touch that fruit. This isn’t about Callie. This is the island playing mind tricks on you.
But ever since we started this damn quest it feels like it’s about her—this perfect beautiful girl who knows Logan in ways I never will, who’s shared years with him when I’ve only had weeks, who wears his promise ring like a trophy.
I force myself to not look at her during the rest of the walk back to the ship, breathing as shallowly as possible to block out the fruit’s sweet smell.
I dig my nails into my palms, twist the metal of my bracelet into my skin, anything to ground myself so I remember that I should absolutely not be reaching for lotus fruit as if it’s a pill that will wash away all my problems.
Eventually the trees thin out, the cove appears, and our ship’s still there, rocking gently in the calm water where the island pulled us in.
Logan wades into the sea without slowing down.
I splash in after him, and the cold hits me like a slap.
It’s like someone reached into my skull and ripped out the golden fog, and my magic slams back into my body so hard I stumble, electricity sparking at my fingertips and racing up my arms. The glass sphere in my chest is intact again, humming with power that was muted and sleeping seconds ago, and the sheer relief of feeling it makes my eyes sting.
“The water breaks the effect,” I say, staring at the static crackling between my fingers as I follow Logan back up onto the ship.
He props Callie against the back mast, already checking the sails on the surviving mast. “Stay on the boat,” he tells me. “Don’t set foot on that island again.”
“Evie.” Her name hits me like a bucket of ice water. “Kieran. They’re still—”
“I know.”
“We have to get them.”
“You can’t.” He turns to face me, his eyes hard. “The lotus might hit you faster the second time, and you’re more susceptible to being pulled in by it now that you know what it feels like. Even the smell could be enough.”
I open my mouth to argue, then close it, because he’s right.
I was seconds away from giving in and eating the fruit for the entire walk back to the ship.
And now that I can finally think straight, I don’t want to sink back into the golden haze that wrapped around my mind and didn’t want to let me go.
I wasn’t me back there, and that scares me more than anything on this journey ever could.
“Fine.” The word scrapes in my throat. “But if you tell Evie we have to go, she’ll fight you. Kieran, too, given how… loyal he is to her.”
Logan watches me with those storm-gray eyes and waits for me to continue.
“Tell her…” I swallow and force myself to keep going. “Tell her you found Oliver, and that he’s on the boat waiting for her.”
The suggestion hangs between us, and I hate myself for it.
Logan holds my gaze for a long moment, as if he’s giving me a chance to take it back.
I don’t.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promises. “Stay here, no matter what. Okay?”
“Okay.” I give him a small smile, and then he vaults over the side of the hull, disappearing into the trees.
My legs won’t stay still, so I check the sails, the ropes, and I even check on Callie. She’s still slumped against the mast, her eyes half-closed, looking like death warmed over.
The boat rocks beneath me, the stars rearrange themselves overhead, and somewhere in those golden trees, Logan’s telling my best friend that her dead brother is alive… and I’m the one who told him to do it.
What kind of person does that make me?
I don’t have an answer.
So I just keep pacing, keep watching, and keep waiting for the moment when everything falls apart.