“Jade. Wake up.”
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 isshehere?” 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 werebusy,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 notseeingme. “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 stillthere.”
“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…