Jade
No. No, no, no.
How’s he so fast? I fire traveled immediately. I didn’t hesitate. But Oliver’s eyes are already wide with shock, blood soaking his shirt in dark, spreading bursts.
A scream tears from deep in my chest at the same time as thunder booms overhead, so loud the Crown shakes beneath my feet.
Thaddeus’s head snaps up, his dagger arm pausing for a second. He looks... startled?
Good. At least something’s different this time.
But Oliver’s still dead. Still crumpled on the volcanic rock. Still gone.
My chest feels like it’s caving in. We were supposed to save him this time. We were supposed to be fast enough. Logan went back so many times—he pushed himself past exhaustion—and it still wasn’t enough.
The unfairness of it makes me want to tear the world apart.
But the only good thing about how it’s playing out this time around? Thaddeus hasn’t attacked me yet. Maybe it was the force of my scream, or how the thunder answered my call, but I startled him. Maybe even scared him.
Which means I can still make the bastard who killed Oliver pay.
The Crown’s power surges up from my feet and through my entire body—that raw amplification that makes it the deadliest circle on the mountain—and I throw my hands up to the storm, palms facing the sky. The charge builds, wanting to descend, searching for a path.
My first instinct is to contain it like Logan taught me.
But no. That’s not what I need now. I need the opposite. I need to become the storm.
So, I look up to the sky, reach for the energy overhead, pull it toward me, and let the glass sphere shatter.
The lightning strikes my upraised hands with the force of a god’s fist. And for one blazing moment, I’m not flesh and blood, but pure electrical current.
Power beyond anything I’ve ever imagined courses through me—not my little sparks, but nature’s fury itself.
It’s agony and ecstasy, like being torn apart and remade in the same instant.
Every nerve ending screams. Every cell lights up. Thunder rumbles—not from above, but from inside me, echoing through my bones. I’m the storm’s fury made flesh, and I’ve never felt more alive in my life.
When the lightning fills me completely, I return my focus to Thaddeus, thrust my hands forward, and release it through my palms. Every moment of fury pours out of me in one continuous stream of silver destruction, and the power feels endless, like I’m channeling the entire storm through my body.
My fingers curl as I push out more and more of it, my eyes narrowed as I glare at Thaddeus with revenge sharper than the blades he threw at me. The air screams. The ground cracks beneath my feet. I think I’m screaming, too, but I can’t hear anything over the roar of pure, relentless power.
When I run empty, white spots dance in my vision, and there’s a strange ringing in my ears.
The sphere is shattered. My legs feel like jelly, and I have to catch myself with my hands against the rough volcanic ground, dizziness washing over me in waves.
Thaddeus lies flat on the ground, smoke rising from his charred body. The smell makes me want to gag—burnt flesh and ozone and a chemical that shouldn’t exist.
But I don’t feel guilty. Not even a little bit. Because Thaddeus killed Oliver. He killed me multiple times. He deserves this.
“Is he dead?” I ask Logan, gasping for breath, gazing around at the scorched earth around us. “Please tell me he’s dead.”
Then, as if in response, Thaddeus’s fingers twitch. A crack appears in the blackened skin of his chest. Then another. Fresh pink flesh shows through, like watching a snake shed its skin in fast-forward.
“How?” I reach for my electricity—my lightning—but it barely crackles. “I just hit you with actual lightning! From the sky!”
Logan’s already moving, dropping to one knee beside Thaddeus’s healing form, his dagger plunging into our professor’s chest with surgical precision. Right through the heart. No hesitation, no dramatic speech—just swift, brutal efficiency, followed by a sickening twist of the blade.
Thaddeus’s skin goes gray, spreading from the wound until he looks less like a person and more like someone carved a statue from cigarette ash.
We killed him. Thaddeus is dead now. Really, truly dead. If he isn’t… then fuck my life. Literally. Because I’m pretty sure I won’t have a life anymore, thanks to Thaddeus’s determination to take it from me.
Still, none of it matters, because we didn’t save Oliver.
The weight of it crashes over me like a tsunami. Logan knew we wouldn’t have time, but he let me try anyway, even with his powers draining from the previous failed attempts. He did it for me. Because I told him I’d hate him for the rest of my life if he didn’t let me try one final time.
Now Oliver’s dead anyway. And when I turn to look at his body, the unfairness of it makes me want to scream again, to call down more lightning from the sky until the entire mountain burns.
“I’m so sorry,” I say softly. “We tried. Gods, Oliver, we tried so hard.”
Then, I hear it. A wet, rattling breath.
“Holy—” I scramble toward Oliver on my hands and knees, relief rushing through me faster than any electricity in the world. “He’s alive. Logan, he’s still alive!”
Logan’s next to me in a second, his arms around my shoulders, pulling me close.
“The wound’s too deep,” he murmurs in my ear, holding me tighter. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“No, don’t say that.” I reach for Oliver’s hand, as if that could be enough to help him. “There has to be something. Healing magic or—” My voice rises with hysteria. “You can go back again. One more time. Please, Logan, just one more—”
“I can’t go back to any point before us exiting the passages,” he snaps at me—literally snaps. “By then, it was already too late.”
As the words leave his lips, I know with a sinking feeling that he’s right. Thaddeus had all but killed Oliver by the time we stepped out of those passages. Not even fire travel could get us up there fast enough to stop him.
Silence descends around us.
Then, somehow, Oliver speaks.
“You,” he says as his eyes flutter open, blood bubbling on his lips as he focuses with terrible clarity on Logan. “You killed him. You killed Miles.”
My blood turns to ice. The air goes still. No breeze, no nothing. Even my fried nerves stop their painful tingling.
Then, thunder rumbles overhead, low and ominous, and the first fat drops of hot rain start to fall.
“I saw the notes,” Oliver forces the words out. “Miles’s research.”
Logan’s gone completely still beside me. His fingers dig into my shoulders, not painfully, but desperately. Like I’m the only thing keeping him anchored to the scorched earth below us.
“He knew what you are.” Oliver’s breathing gets shallower, wetter. “And then he was dead.”
Tears burn my eyes, mixing with the rain on my cheeks. “Oliver, please,” I beg, unable to process anything other than the fact that he’s still alive. “Hold on. We’ll get you help. Just hold on.”
His grip on my hand loosens.
His chest rises once more, rattles, and goes still.
“No.” I shake him gently, then harder. “Oliver? Oliver!”
But even as I’m shaking him, even as I’m begging him to breathe, I know it’s futile.
Because the light in his hazel eyes—the color so similar to Evie’s—is gone.
The boy who made me laugh, who made me feel normal in this crazy place, is never coming back.
No more chances, no more time loops, no more trying again.
The rain washes the blood from his lips, making him look peaceful in a way that makes everything worse.
Then I turn to Logan. His arm is no longer around my shoulders.
He hasn’t moved, hasn’t denied anything.
He just sits there next to me, the rain plastering his dark hair to his forehead, looking totally and completely lost. Like Oliver’s words shattered something inside him that can never be put together again.
“What did he mean?” My voice is steady, but my heart’s hammering so fast it’s like it’s trying to beat out of my chest. “Why would he say that about Miles?”
When Logan’s focus returns, he’s staring down at Oliver’s body like he’s watching the world crumble. And when he finally meets my eyes... there’s fear there. Raw fear. The kind of fear that comes from having your deepest secret ripped into the light.
Reality hits me like a truck. Because Oliver wasn’t delirious. He wasn’t confused in his final moments.
He knew exactly what he was saying.
“You killed Miles,” I repeat Oliver’s words, and it’s not a question, because the truth is written all over Logan’s face. “Your own emberlinked partner. You’re the one who killed him.”
His hands clench and unclench at his sides, fire sparking at his fingertips. The rain hisses where it hits his skin.
When he finally speaks, his voice is barely audible over the rain.
“Yes.”
No excuses. No justifications. Just the truth, raw and terrible, laid bare for me to see.
“Why?” I stand and blink away tears, or rain, or both. “No more lies, no more secrets. Just... tell me why, so I can understand. Please, Logan. I want to understand.”
I need to understand.
And so, I say nothing, watching him, waiting for him to explain.
He runs a hand through his soaked hair, and when he looks up at me, he seems younger. Lost. Broken.
“Miles was brilliant. Too brilliant.” His words come out rough, like they’re being dragged from deep in his soul. “He was watching me, documenting every inconsistency, every moment that didn’t add up. Every time I slipped and knew something I shouldn’t.”
All I can do is stand here, frozen in time, trying to reconcile the fact that the man in front of me—the man I love—killed his own emberlinked partner.
But underneath the shock, understanding stirs.
Because I know what it’s like to have magic that doesn’t fit, that marks you as different.
The fear that follows you everywhere you go.
The constant looking over your shoulder, wondering who’s watching, who’s noticing, and who’s going to be the one to turn you in.
“He confronted me in the Ember Archives,” Logan continues, like he’s reciting from a textbook instead of confessing to murder.
“He had all this evidence laid out. He knew I could manipulate time, and that I could compel other witches. He even...” A bitter laugh escapes him.
“He made himself a token to resist my compulsion. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough. ”
“But why?” I ask. “What did he want?”
“To expose me.” Logan stands, his hands clenching into fists.
“He said abilities like mine shouldn’t be kept secret, and that the Council deserved to know.
That I was wasting my power by not exploring it to its full potential, and that I was being selfish by not telling them about what I can do, so they could learn everything about me that they could.
He didn’t understand that they think we should be studied.
Controlled. Prodded and tortured like lab rats.
Forced to do anything they want to support their twisted agendas.
He wanted to turn me in and condemn me to a fate worse than death, to a life that would never truly be my own. ”
Conviction rings in his voice, and as I listen to him pour his soul out to me, it clicks.
This entire time, Logan’s been shielding me from the same fate he’s been running from.
Every time he helped me hide my electricity, every lesson about control—he wasn’t just teaching me.
He was trying to save me from what almost happened to him.
From what Nina fought against in Fire Philosophy class and Garrett supported.
From the Council of witches that fears anything that’s different.
But still… his own emberlinked partner?
“You really think Miles would follow through?” I finally ask. “That he’d turn on you like that?”
“He said if anyone found out that he knew and kept quiet, he’d be cast out of every coven.” Logan looks up at the storming sky, rain streaming down his face, then returns his focus to me. “His reputation, his family’s standing—all of it would be destroyed.”
“So, he chose his reputation over your life.” The words come out fierce and protective. “He chose his family’s social standing over helping his partner. And you killed him for it.”
“I tried everything else first.” Desperation bleeds into his voice, and he rushes to continue. “I went back dozens of times, trying different arguments, different approaches. But Miles wouldn’t budge. He was going to report me immediately, and if he did...”
“They’d come for you,” I finish. “Take you away. Lock you up. Turn you into their experiment. Force you to do everything they demanded.”
He nods, watching me like he can make me understand if he focuses on me hard enough.
“The fight got physical. I grabbed him, tried to stop him from leaving, and then...” He pauses, gazing out at the mist-shielded academy.
When he turns back to me, his eyes are set, all traces of emotions gone.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. But once it was done, I couldn’t go back far enough to change it. ”