Jade
“Logan,” I say, his name coming out strangled when I speak it. “What does he mean by the dead one?”
Logan just keeps his gaze locked on the Seer’s with the same measured calm he shows before stepping into the Scorched Circles, not turning to look at me at all as the Seer begins to speak.
“The Ashford bloodline. Old magic. Proud magic.” The Seer’s massive head tilts, studying him. “You were gifted with fire that burned strong and bright. You had a promising future mapped out before you.”
Tension coils in Logan’s shoulders, and his hands hang loose at his sides, deliberately relaxed.
“Then one night, that future was stolen.” The Seer’s ember eyes flare brighter.
“You had just returned home from dinner with your parents. You went to your room, and forty-three seconds later, you heard a crash. Eight seconds after that, you were downstairs, staring at an assassin standing over their bodies.”
My nails dig into my palms hard enough to break skin.
“In your despair, you reached back and traveled through time itself,” the Seer says, his awe unmistakable. “You used magic born from a moment of grief so absolute that reality bent rather than let you break. But the gift was cruel in its infancy. Thirteen seconds was all you could grasp.”
Kieran inhales sharply from across the deck.
“Those thirteen seconds were enough for vengeance.” The Seer’s ember eyes dim, as though what he’s seeing disturbs even him. “You used them to kill the man who destroyed your world twenty-seven times.”
The silence that follows is absolute.
Then Kieran steps forward, his body coiled with barely restrained violence. “This entire time, you’ve known what was coming because you’d already lived it.”
Evie speaks before Logan can answer.
“You could have saved Oliver. You could have gone back and stopped it from happening.”
“I tried,” Logan says, and it comes out broken. “But it didn’t work. Some deaths can’t be changed.”
“You tried?” The air around Evie shimmers with heat.
“You tried and you couldn’t save my brother, but you could save her?
” She points at me, and the hatred in the gesture makes me flinch.
“Because that’s how you saved her life during the Hydra trial, isn’t it?
You traveled back in time. So why could you go back for Jade, but not for Oliver? ”
Logan says nothing.
It’s Callie who explodes.
“You didn’t tell me.” She’s shaking, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “We were together for three years, and you never told me you could travel through time?”
She can barely get out the last three words.
I can’t really blame her for that. The entire concept is hard to wrap my mind around, even after jumping back with him more times than I can count.
The Seer of Essence glides forward, and those burning red eyes fix on Logan with an intensity that makes my skin crawl.
“Now we will see what you truly are.”
Logan goes rigid.
“Your body stands before us,” the Seer says, colder now. “But life does not flow through it as it should.”
What?
“You carry dual magic. Fire from your mortal life, burned into your essence. It is strong and pure—the magic of a witch who trained himself to perfection.”
That part I understand. Logan’s fire has always been more controlled than anyone else’s at the academy. Not to mention that he can use it to travel back in time.
“Alongside the fire magic, there is air magic.” The Seer’s red eyes burn brighter. “Hidden beneath layers of careful control, it is the power that came when you sold your soul to the resurrected one.”
The words don’t make sense.
They’re just sounds. Syllables strung together that my brain refuses to process.
Sold your soul.
Air magic.
Resurrected one.
“You do not feed on humans, as lesser vampires must, but on supernatural blood.” The Seer’s voice drips with contempt. “You drink from the willing one who offers herself to you, who believes it will earn her a place by your side.”
Callie makes a strangled sound.
And suddenly I’m seeing all of it, in excruciating detail.
Callie could barely stand when she came out of Logan’s office weeks ago, and I was too jealous to wonder why.
She got paler every day on this boat, and I blamed seasickness, even though she grew up on the water and has likely never been sick at sea in her life.
I woke up next to her in the Land of the Lotus Eaters and she looked half-dead, and I didn’t ask a single question.
“You wear a token.” The Seer’s gaze drops to the chain that hangs beneath Logan’s shirt. “An ankar token that binds your soul to your corpse, anchoring your humanity so the monster does not consume what remains of the man.”
No.
I shake my head, as if that can make it untrue and stop the Seer from saying what I fear is coming next.
“You are not witch.” The Seer’s declaration rings out across the water like a death sentence. “You are not vampire. You are a creature that should not exist.”
The Seer stops directly in front of Logan.
“You are a Revenant.”
The word hits me like lightning through water.
It’s not a sudden shock. Instead, it’s a slow, devastating spread that travels outward from the point of impact into a wave that snatches the ground from beneath my feet. My hands are at my sides, my ears ringing with the echo of a word that’s rearranging everything behind my eyes.
Revenant.
My chest cracks open. It actually feels like my ribs are splitting apart, like my body knows the truth before my brain can catch up, and that it’s trying to reject it physically.
I told Logan everything Circe said about the Revenants and the Blood Coven. He held my hand, pulled me close, and said he was there for me.
You’re not facing this alone. Whatever comes next, I’m here with you. Always.
He said always while being one of them.
I believed him. That’s the part that’s going to destroy me. Not that he lied, but that I believed him with my whole chest, without hesitation, because I’ve never trusted anyone the way I trusted him.
Still, I think back desperately, grasping for proof that the Seer is wrong, that this is a trick, or that it’s a test we have to pass.
When I first told Logan about Revenants, back at the academy after Constance warned me about them, he said he’d seen the term in old texts. He was as confused as I was.
He was pretending.
After Circe’s island, when I explained what I’d learned, he listened. He asked questions and seemed appropriately horrified. He was protective when I admitted I felt overwhelmed. He was worried about me.
Because he’s a good actor.
The denial’s clawing at me, desperate to find a way to make this not true, because even now, I’d rather believe a three-bodied ancient judge is toying with us than accept that Logan looked me in the eyes and lied to me every single day since we met.
Silver sparks dance across my knuckles, and I can’t make them stop because I can’t focus, can’t breathe, can’t think past the word Revenant echoing through my skull.
Tempest star touched me to turn me into a weapon against the Revenants. I’m destined to destroy them.
If that’s true, then I’m destined to destroy Logan.
The ground tilts beneath me. Because I can’t be both the girl who loves him and the weapon that’s supposed to end him. They can’t coexist. One of them has to die, and I don’t know which one, and the not knowing is tearing me apart from the inside.
Denial continues its sickening swirl through my stomach as the Seer of Consequence drifts forward, his silver eyes fixed on Logan, studying him longer than anyone else.
“Your fate-thread is tangled with the storm touched’s.” The Seer pauses, his ethereal form flickering. “The threads wrap around each other so completely that separating them would destroy them both.”
Tangled together. Impossible to separate.
My fate is wrapped around Logan’s. My thread is always wrong, because Logan is wrong, because he shouldn’t exist, because he’s what I’m meant to destroy, because—
The thoughts are chaos in my head, as tangled as the threads themselves, and I can’t make sense of a single one of them. All I can do is stand here feeling like my heart’s been ripped out of my chest, because I don’t know what’s true anymore and what’s a lie.
But the Seer doesn’t care about my—or anyone’s—pain. All he cares about is the truth.
“You will become either the storm bringer’s greatest weapon, or her complete destruction,” he says, his silver eyes swirling faster. “The thread refuses to show which.”
My hands are shaking. The whole boat might be shaking. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s the electricity shorting out my nervous system.
The Seer pulls back, and Logan turns to face me, his eyes finding mine across the deck.
And he’s just... waiting.
I open my mouth, but no words come out. Because what do you say to the person you love when you learn they’re what you’re destined to destroy?
You’re the only person who makes me feel alive.
But he’s not alive.
He hasn’t been alive since…
Since when? When did this happen? When did he become this thing? Was it before we met? After? Was any of it real, or was I just another mission, another manipulation, another—
Stop.
I force my lungs to work. Air in. Air out.
Logan’s still watching me. His face is blank in the way it gets when he’s trying to hide everything he’s feeling, but his eyes...
His eyes are terrified.
Not of the Geryon. Not of Kieran, or Evie, or Callie.
Of me.
The sound of steel snaps me back to focus as Kieran’s blade clears the sheath, and then he’s moving, putting himself in front of Evie, blade angled low, his body a wall between her and Logan. His green eyes are empty of everything except the bloodthirsty, burning focus I’ve only seen during combat.
“Kieran,” Logan says, careful and measured. “Don’t.”
Kieran’s blade doesn’t waver. He just watches Logan with searing intensity, and I reach for the storm inside myself, ready to strike him down if he dares to get that steel anywhere close to Logan.