Jade
Even now, after all of it, Logan’s still trying to protect me.
My lungs don’t cooperate with that thought.
They pull in air too fast, then stall, then try again, like they’ve forgotten the sequence.
My hands aren’t fists anymore—they’re just hanging at my sides, useless, the electricity under my skin misfiring in small, disorganized bursts that I can’t pull together into anything shaped like a feeling.
How am I supposed to process a Revenant who wants to burn through time so I can be ignorant and in love with a version of him that isn’t real?
My eyes drop to his chest before I can stop them.
He’s pulled the necklace out from beneath his shirt, the entwined rings hanging down like he’s exposing the most vulnerable part of himself.
It’s the glint of metal that I’ve kissed, pressed my face against while his hands tangled in my hair and his breath went ragged and I thought, this is what it feels like to be wanted.
Really wanted. Not for what I can give someone, but for who I am.
It always felt like it hummed with energy of his own, and I realize with a sickening thought that it’s because it the metal literally does hum with an energy of its own.
“The token.” The word comes out too loud in the muted silence of the black flames. “What did the Geryon mean about it binding your soul to your…”
Your corpse.
I can’t say it. Because Logan’s alive. He’s here with me, and he’s alive, and my brain can’t process anything else.
His hand moves to his chest, his fingers closing around the rings. The gesture is so instinctive and protective that my chest aches with it.
He’s holding onto them the way I used to hold onto his hand—like letting go would mean falling.
“When Ambrogio turns a supernatural, he doesn’t just preserve their magic.
He amplifies it.” He’s watching my face the way he watches everything, cataloging my reactions and calculating what to say next.
“The surge is violent, and the soul shatters to make room for the extra power. But the token captures the soul during the transformation and keeps it preserved. It lets me feel things—really feel them, not just echoes.”
“So without the token, what you’d feel for me would be an echo.”
The word feels muted. Not real.
“Without the token, I’d feel nothing.” His eyes hold mine, and they’re fierce and burning. “I wouldn’t feel love, or guilt, or grief. I’d be what everyone thinks Revenants are—a bloodthirsty, power-hungry monster wearing the face of the person they used to be.”
No. This can’t be real. He can’t be saying this. Because I’ve memorized his face. I’ve traced his jaw with my thumb and kissed his mouth and stared into his eyes while he was inside me, thinking this is it—this is what love feels like.
If all of this is true, it means the only thing keeping him human enough to feel it back is a piece of jewelry hanging around his neck.
“Every single thing I’ve felt for you is real.
” Logan lets go of the rings and reaches for my hands, but I pull back, wrapping my arms around myself.
The hurt that crosses his face almost destroys me.
“Because of the token, my emotions are as real as they ever were. That’s why I never take it off.
That’s why I told you to never try to remove it. ”
“Because without it, you wouldn’t love me anymore,” I finish for him, each word breaking a part of my heart.
His expression shatters. “I can’t imagine not loving you. But I don’t want to take it off and find out.”
I stare at the chain around his neck.
Two fused bands of metal from two dead people. That’s the entire barrier between the Logan I love and a monster that wouldn’t care if I existed.
That chain could be ripped off his neck.
The rings could be crushed with a rock, a blade, or a strong enough fist. Kieran could do it the second these black flames drop, and Logan would still be standing here.
He’d still be breathing, walking, and looking at me with those storm-gray eyes I love so much, but the part of him that loves me would be gone.
Not dead. Not sleeping. Just... erased, like it was never there at all.
That’s worse than him dying.
If he died, I could grieve him. I could mourn the person he was and carry his memory and eventually, in some distant, impossible future, I could learn to breathe without him.
But if the token is destroyed, he’d still be right there in front of me.
He’d have the same face, the same voice, and the same hands, but he wouldn’t feel a thing.
My throat closes. I try to swallow around the tightness and can’t. The electricity under my skin flickers and sparks, but it’s weak now, like my magic is too exhausted to be angry.
“Did someone force you to do this to yourself? Did they trap you and pin you down and turn you into this against your will?” Electricity crackles up my arms, igniting me from the inside out.
“If they did, I swear to the gods that I’ll kill them.
I’ll kill every single one of them, and they’ll beg me to stop before I’m even halfway done.
Just give me a name, Logan. Give me someone to hurt for this, because I need it to not be your fault.
I need there to be a villain here that isn’t you. ”
The last flicker of hope drains from his face, quiet and final, like a flame going out.
“No one forced me.”
Four words, and every escape route I was building in my head collapses.
“Then tell me why.” My hands curl into fists, nails digging into my palms hard enough to draw blood.
The black flames flicker, and Logan glances at them, his jaw tightening.
“The fire won’t hold much longer.”
“Then talk fast.”
The careful neutrality in his expression cracks, the calculated control falls away, and what’s left is exhaustion so deep it looks like it could swallow him whole.
“I trained for four years,” he says, low and measured, as if he’s afraid a single wrong word will break me, which honestly isn’t far from the truth.
“Every single day since my parents died, I pushed my magic harder, burning through every limit I had. And in four years, the most I ever gained was a handful of extra seconds. Seventeen seconds was the most I could ever do.”
The black flames shudder. A fragment of Kieran’s voice bleeds through, sharp and furious, and then the wall steadies again.
“No amount of training was getting me far enough.” Logan’s hand drifts back to the rings, resting his fingers against them like he’s checking them for a pulse.
“I was going to spend the rest of my life staring at a wall I couldn’t break through, knowing my parents were on the other side of it and that I couldn’t save them. ”
His thumb traces the outline of the fused rings in a slow, repetitive loop that I’ve seen him do a hundred times when he thought no one was watching.
“This past summer, someone approached me.” He lowers his fingers from the rings and his gaze moves to the black flames, watching them flicker and avoiding my eyes, as if he’s seeing the events of the past summer playing out in front of him.
“She told me about Revenants. She told me that a witch who became one would keep their fire magic, but that it would be stronger and amplified.”
“This summer? You’ve only been...” I gesture at him, because I don’t have a word for what he is that doesn’t make me want to throw up. “You walked into the academy in September and you’d been turned, what, a few weeks before?”
“Yes.”
I stare at him.
Weeks. He’d been a Revenant for weeks when I met him.
The realization hits my stomach first, then my chest, then my throat, each one worse than the last, because my brain is rewriting everything at once and I can’t keep up.
Every kiss. Every touch. Every time I looked into his eyes and felt safe—all of it’s being swallowed by a single word that won’t stop echoing through my skull.
“Did it work?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. “Did it make your time magic strong enough to save them?”
He holds my gaze, because we both know what’s coming next.
“It went from seventeen seconds to thirty,” he says, and I don’t understand how he sounds so calm about it.
“So you sold your soul for thirteen extra seconds.”
“Yes—until the night on the Crown. When we were there, I went back minutes, and I think it’s because the Crown’s amplification is permanent.
” He says it like he’s handing me a loaded weapon.
“Since then, I keep getting stronger. The Revenant power and the Crown’s amplification are compounding, making me more powerful than I’ve ever been before. ”
The hope in his eyes is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
Because it’s obvious where he’s going with this. I’m already imagining the math he’s been doing in his head these past two weeks, lying awake while I slept beside him, counting seconds like coins, calculating growth rates and projecting timelines.
“You think you’ll be able to go back years,” I say, and it’s not a question.
“I’ve gained minutes in the two weeks since Halloween. On the night of the hellhound attack, I was able to go back eighteen of them,” he says, raw and urgent, like he needs me to believe the way he does. “If that trajectory holds—”
“Logan,” I snap at him, and his eyes jolt back to focus. “We’re not talking about hours, or days, or even weeks. We’re talking about four years.”
“I’m immortal now,” he says simply. “I have all the time in the world.”
“And if you’re able to do it?” I push. “If you can get back to when you were eighteen years old and save them? Then you’ll do what, exactly? Live out the rest of your life differently? Never become a Revenant? Never meet me?”
He flinches, but he buries it in a second.
“I’ll find you again,” he promises. “And the version of me that never lost them—that never became this—he’ll deserve you.”
“But I fell in love with this version of you.” I blink up at him, tears blurring my vision. “The one you’re so desperate to erase. The one I don’t even think I know anymore.”
The impact ripples across his features, like I put my fist through his chest and closed my hand around his heart—if he even has a heart anymore.
“You know me.” He says it quiet and certain. It’s the same tone he used when he told me to trust him on the Crown, and I did, because I’m an idiot who falls for boys with brooding eyes and devastating secrets. “You know me better than anyone alive.”
“I know what you showed me.” The electricity under my skin flickers weakly, too drained for anger but trying anyway.
“I know the version of you that trained me in the Scorched Circles and kissed me in the Drowned Tower. I know the version that held me through the trials in the passages and let me cry on him and made me feel like I was loved for the first time in my life. Was that real? Any of it?”
“All of it.”
“How am I supposed to believe that? How am I supposed to believe anything you say ever again? You sat there while I told you about the Revenants. You held my hand and said you’d help me destroy them, and you were one of them the whole time.”
“I know.”
“You watched me learn that I was chosen to kill creatures like you, and you didn’t say a word.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that!” The scream rips out of me, and beyond the black flames, thunder crashes. “Stop agreeing with me like admitting you lied erases the fact that you did it in the first place.”
“It doesn’t.” His expression cracks open, like whatever’s left of his soul is shattering. “Nothing I say will erase it.”
“Then why are you even…” I press my hands against my eyes, trying to stop the tears that are already soaking my palms. “Why are you still trying? Why don’t you just let me hate you?”
“Because I can’t.”
I drop my hands, staring at him through blurred vision.
“I’ve tried.” He laughs, and it’s the most broken sound I’ve ever heard.
“Gods, Jade, I’ve tried so hard to stay away from you.
From the moment you crashed into Blaze Academy with your chaotic magic and your terrible impulse control and your face that makes me forget how to think, I told myself I’d keep my distance.
I told myself I was too dangerous. That you deserved better than a dead man who couldn’t feel things properly until you kissed me in the woods and jumpstarted my heart. ”
Jumpstarted.
He told me I make him feel alive. He asked me to flood him with my lightning over and over again, as if my magic is the only thing that makes his blood move.
Maybe it literally is.
“But I couldn’t stay away.” His hands are shaking, like they do after too many jumps in a row. “Every time I told myself to stop, to let you go, I couldn’t. Because you looked at me like I was someone worth knowing. And I was so selfish that I took it.”
The words land like shrapnel in the raw, bleeding center of my chest.
“Was any of it real?” I ask, hating how small and pathetic I sound. “Not the token. Not the magic. Just you and me.”
Determination hardens his eyes, and he closes the distance between us.
“Look at me.” His hands come up to cup my face, his thumbs brushing away tears.
A spark jumps from my skin to his fingertips, and his breath catches—a sharp, involuntary inhale, like a man surfacing from deep water.
“Everything I feel for you is real. The token doesn’t create feelings.
It just lets me access what’s already there.
And what’s there for you…” He takes a shaky breath.
“It’s the only thing that’s felt real in four entire years. ”
I want to believe him. Gods, I want to believe him so badly it feels like my ribs are cracking.
“I don’t know how to do this.” The admission tears out of me, broken and bloody. “I don’t know how to love you and know what you are at the same time. I don’t know how to be the person Tempest chose to destroy Revenants when you’re one of them. I don’t know how to—”
I choke on the impossibility of everything I’m supposed to be and do.
“Then let me take it back.” His forehead presses against mine, and for a brief, painful moment, everything feels the same as it always did.
“I have a theory that your electricity helped me go back as far as I did during the hellhound attack, and I’ll tap into that, if you’ll let me.
I’ll take us back hours. I’ll release the storm in that bag and blow us off course, and we’ll never reach the Geryon.
I’ll figure out another way to get us out of the Lost Islands.
And when you learn the truth about what I am, it’ll come from me.
I swear to you, Jade, if you give me the chance, I’ll do it right next time. ”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. To really, truly look at me.
“I can give you a version of this where you have time to process it before the world demands you react,” he says. “Please, Jade. Let me give you that. Just this once, let me do one thing right.”