Jade
My nails press into the sigil on my palm as if pain can ground me and make everything okay, even though nothing will ever make any of this okay.
“It was Halloween night.” The words fall out of my mouth before I can stop them. “During the ball.”
Flames are flickering in Evie’s palms, and her chest is heaving, and all I can think is I’m about to destroy you, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
“Logan and I were in…” I hesitate. “There are these tunnels underneath Blaze Academy. Secret passages that connect different parts of the school. Logan showed them to me a few weeks ago—it’s how I snuck out for our training sessions. Anyway, we were down there when we heard screaming.”
Evie’s brow furrows for half a second—probably surprise about the passages—but then I say the next part and none of that matters.
“Oliver was yelling about not letting someone recruit you to become a Revenant, and we followed the sound out of the passages and to the bottom of the volcano.”
“Professor Thaddeus was there,” Logan adds, and the tightness in my chest loosens the tiniest bit at the fact that he’s standing with me through this. “He had Oliver.”
“And before we could do anything…”
I can’t say it. The words are sitting on my tongue, and I can’t make myself spit them out.
So, Logan finishes for me.
“Thaddeus stabbed him in the chest.”
The sound that tears out of Evie is animal and broken. Her heat shield dies, her knees buckle, and Kieran catches her before she hits the deck.
I did this.
The thought slams into me so hard I can barely breathe.
“You could have used your time magic to save him,” she says, softer now, clinging to Kieran’s arms like he’s the only solid thing left in the world.
“I tried.” Logan’s mask cracks, and for a second I see the Logan from that night, exhausted and desperate as he pushed his magic to the brink.
“I brought us back again and again. I pushed my power further than I ever have before, but I couldn’t get us there early enough to stop it. His fate was already set in stone.”
It was just like Deidre during the hellhound attack. She always ended up dead, no matter what I did differently.
Kieran cuts through my thoughts, his arms wrapped around Evie like he’s trying to shield her from the truth she’s already heard. “How many times did you go back? How many loops?”
“Five,” Logan says, sounding steadier than I ever could.
His eyes find mine, and I’m not on the boat anymore. I’m on wet rock with rain in my eyes and Oliver’s blood between my fingers while Logan told me there was nothing I could do to change it.
“So, Oliver died,” Evie says so flatly that it sounds like she’s somewhere else. “And Thaddeus?”
“Dead.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “We killed him.”
Evie takes a sharp breath inward.
“Thaddeus kept coming for me.” The memories crash over me, and I can’t stop them.
Cold steel sliding into my stomach in the first timeline, then into my chest in the second.
The world tilting sideways when he threw me off the Crown during the third loop, using what must have been air magic, which means Thaddeus was a Revenant too. “He killed me three times.”
Callie inhales sharply. Kieran’s eyes bore into me.
“Logan kept bringing me back seconds before I died.” My nails are biting into my palms so hard that I’m drawing blood. “In the final loop—the one that ended up sticking—I channeled lightning through my body from the storm overhead, like I did with the hellhounds, and I threw it all at Thaddeus.”
Although my lightning didn’t kill him, and now I know why. It’s because he was a Revenant, and I needed help from Logan—another Revenant—to end him.
“We killed him together.” Logan takes over, and thank the gods, because I’m not sure I can describe the rest. “We burned the bodies on the Crown to destroy the evidence.”
Evie takes a deep breath, then stands. Kieran stands with her, as if he’s prepared to catch her if she falls again. I move closer to her, because out of me, Logan, and Callie, I feel the most at fault here.
“You burned my brother’s body,” she says, so quietly I almost don’t hear it. “You turned him to ash.”
“We had to,” I say, and the excuse sounds pathetic, because it is pathetic. “If anyone found out what happened… if the Council discovered—”
“I don’t care about the Council!” Heat explodes from her hands in a wave. “He was my brother, and you burned him like garbage and let me spend two weeks thinking he might still be alive!”
“I’m sorry.” I’m crying now. When did I start crying? “I wanted to tell you every single day, but I didn’t know how—”
“How?” She laughs, and it’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard. “You open your mouth and say the words. ‘Evie, your brother is dead. I watched him die, then I burned his body, and I’ve been lying to your face this entire time.’ That’s how.”
She’s right.
Of course she’s right.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, but the words are useless. They don’t fix anything, they don’t bring Oliver back, and they don’t undo the two weeks I let her hope. “I’m so sorry, Evie.”
She stares at me for a long moment with red-rimmed eyes, tears tracking down her cheeks.
“You were my best friend,” she says, barely able to speak the words. “You were supposed to be my best friend.”
Then the heat’s slamming into me like a wall, surrounding me like it did in the Fury Loop, and the air’s turning to fire in my lungs.
I try to breathe, but it’s like swallowing lava. My skin’s screaming, like every nerve ending lit up at once, and I can smell something burning, and I think it might be me.
I should defend myself. I should fight back instead of falling to my knees while my best friend cooks me alive.
But my legs won’t work, and my magic won’t come, and all I can think is I deserve this. I lied to her about this for two weeks, and I deserve every second of pain she wants to give me.
“Jade!” Wind shoves me sideways, arms are around my waist and forcing me to stand, and Logan’s in the dome with me, murmuring in my ear. “We have to move.”
“No.” I twist against him, and he must be using his vampire magic to circulate the air in the heat dome, because I can breathe again. “Let me go.”
“She’s going to kill you.”
“She won’t.” I shove at his chest, but he doesn’t budge.
It’s like trying to push a mountain. He’s holding me in place like I weigh nothing, like I’m a child throwing a tantrum.
Panic surges through me, and my lightning erupts without permission, silver electricity crackling across my skin and straight into Logan’s chest.
He takes a sharp breath inward, color flushing his face, and his grip falters, his chest heaving with a breath that sounds like it actually matters. And when his eyes meet mine, they’re alive—present in a way that makes my heart race. He’s looking at me like I brought him back from the dead.
It’s a sick reminder that every time I electrocute him, I’m jumpstarting a corpse.
That’s why he loves you, a cruel voice whispers in the back of my mind—the same one that tried to get me to kill him earlier. You’re a defibrillator for his dead heart.
The thought makes me want to throw up.
“Jade,” Logan says, rougher now. “Stop fighting me.”
I squirm again, but it does nothing. “You’re hurting me.”
“You’re wrong about Evie.” His eyes are wild and desperate, and now that I’m looking closer, I see the dark, hollow shadows beneath them. “She can kill you. She will kill you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No matter what I did, no matter how many times I went back, I couldn’t stop her from releasing this dome,” he says.
“It happened in different ways each time, but it always happened, just like how Oliver and Deidre always died. So, I gave up trying to stop her and decided to save you from inside it instead. Last time, I wasn’t fast enough.
She cooked the air in your lungs, and you dropped to the deck, and you weren’t breathing, and I—” He stops and swallows, his hands shaking like they do when he’s jumped back too much.
“I held you, and you were still warm, and your heart wasn’t beating.
The grief was enough to push me past my limits so I could get here in time.
So don’t tell me she won’t go through with it, because she absolutely will, and I’m not sure if I have another jump left in me, so this is it.
You need to let me help you, because if you die in this timeline, it sticks. ”
His hand goes to the rings hanging from his neck, and I don’t think he’s realizing he’s doing it, but I’m suddenly hit with a horrible thought—if he can’t save me, would he want to keep his humanity? Or would he remove the token, so he didn’t have to feel?
The dome answers before I can, tightening around us, the temperature spiking so fast my vision blurs. My skin’s blistering, there’s copper and ash on my tongue, and beyond the shimmering dome, Evie’s pouring everything she has into killing me.
She killed me.
In another timeline, my best friend killed me.
“Okay.” The word scrapes out of my throat, because Logan may have lied to me about what he is, but I don’t think he’s lying about this.
He releases me, and I stumble, barely catching myself.
“Your lightning disrupts magical frequencies,” he tells me, flipping straight into battle mode. “Throw as much as you can up at the dome. I’ll scatter the heat with wind. Then I’ll count to three, and we’ll strike.”
I nod slowly and reach for my magic. It’s there, waiting, silver electricity crackling to life across my skin.
“One.”
Logan’s hands rise, wind spiraling around his palms.
“Two.”
Evie’s heat shield gets brighter and hotter, and my lungs are starting to seize.
“Three.”
My lightning erupts outward in a crackling web of silver, tearing through the thermal barrier, creating gaps in the shield.
Logan’s wind rushes through those gaps and scatters the heat, pushing it away in a concentrated blast that makes the shield sputter and die.
Evie stumbles, the dome collapses, and just like that, I can breathe again.
In. Out. In. Out. You’re alive. You’re still alive.
The deck goes quiet.
Evie’s standing with her hands raised and smoking. Her chest is heaving, tears streaming down her face.
She’s looking at me like she realizes what she almost did.
No—what she did do, in another timeline.
I open my mouth to say something. Her name, maybe. Or I’m sorry, even though I know she won’t accept it.
Nothing comes out. Because I’m looking at my best friend, and all I see is the girl who killed me.
“I’ll never forgive you,” she says, steady and quiet, calm in the worst possible way. “I don’t care if we survive this. I don’t care what happens after. I will never forgive you. Ever.”
She turns and walks to the far end of the boat, not looking back. Kieran sheathes his blade and follows her, moving with the kind of certainty that tells me Evie will never be alone in her grief, whether she wants company or not.
As I stand there watching her go, Logan’s words replay in my mind.
She killed you. In another timeline, she killed you.
And I know I’ll never be able to look at her the same way again.