I look at Logan one more time, but he doesn’t speak.
“Fine.” The word tastes bitter in my mouth. “Great. Nobody believes me.”
Evie shifts uncomfortably. “That isn’t what they said.”
“No, Evie, it’s okay. We need more data. We need to be critical.” Sparks crack between my fingers, sharp and bright, and the wind picks up around the boat. “I’ve got storm magic I can’t control, a goddess who ghosted me, an army of supercharged vampires that wants to kill me, and no one on this boat thinks any of it’s real, but?—”
Suddenly, the sky splits.
One second the sunset’s bleeding copper across the water, then it’s swallowed by a wall of black clouds. The wind hits the boat sideways, and Evie’s charts rip off the deck, spinning into the dark before she can grab them.
“Jade!” Logan grabs my arm, and I wrench it away. “Find the sphere?—”
“There is no sphere!”
Thunder crashes through the deck, through the hull, and through my bones. The boat lurches so hard I stagger into the railing and grab on. Cold rain hits in a wall, plastering my hair to my face and soaking through my clothes in seconds. There’s salt water in my eyes, my mouth, and my lungs, and then electricity’s arcing off my hands and scorching the wood, as if it has a mind of its own.
Stop stop stop stop?—
I can’t.
Everyone keeps telling me to control it, like there’s a switch in my body, like I can reach inside my chest and politely ask the storm to take a seat. But there is no switch. The stormisme. My rage is the wind tearing at the sails. My guilt is the rain hammering the deck. My fear is the lightning searching for a target.
Then, Evie’s magic explodes into a shimmering dome of heat that spreads out and encloses the boat.
The rain evaporates when it hits the shield, hissing into steam and filling the air with scorched metal fog. The wind bends around the edges, the storm’s roar turning muffled. Her arms are shaking, and sweat’s beading at her temples, evaporating instantly from the heat rolling off her skin.
“Evie, drop it!” Logan calls through the steam, his eyes flat and calculating. “If you burn out, you collapse. If you collapse overboard, you drown.”
He time traveled,I realize.He tested which words work the fastest, and now he’s using them to save us all from whatever Evie did in a timeline we’ll never have to live.
“Two Thornes lost at sea.” He stalks slowly toward her, holding her gaze in challenge and stopping a few feet away. “Is that what Oliver would have wanted?”
Evie makes a sound like she’s been punched in the stomach.
The dome drops, rain crashes back, and my whole body goes electric with fury. Because Logan weaponized Oliver to break Evie’s concentration, and I know he rewound time to find those exact words. It’s the cruelest, most efficient combination, because that’s what Logan does. He optimizes, he calculates, he finds the fastest path between two points, and he doesn’t care who he crushes to do it.
The storm surges, and I look up at the swirling clouds, as if they hold every secret and answer that no one’s wanted to give me.
“Tempest!” Her name rips out of my throat, aimed at the black sky. “I know you can hear me!”
Bolt after bolt of lightning slams into the water around us, so close together that it’s like we’re in a cage of silver fire.
“You put this in me and left!” A wave slams me sideways, and I’m on my knees on the flooded deck, grabbing the bench as saltwater burns my eyes. “I can’t do this alone! I can’t?—”
Pressure pushes down from the sky, foreign and wrong, its magic so big it makes my lightning feel like static electricity.
And then, a figure steps down through the clouds. The storm literally parts for him, and he descends through the gap, the wind solidifying beneath his feet with each step he takes.
He’s tall in a way that doesn’t make sense. His skin’s the blue-gray of storm clouds, and his hair is silver-white, whipping in winds that aren’t the same winds hitting us, as if he’s carrying his own weather system.
Then, he lands on the ocean.
Not in.On.He’s standing on the surface of churning water like it’s a floor, the waves going flat under his feet.
There’s an ancient leather bag in his hand, and when he holds it out to me, it’s like someone’s reaching through my ribs, grabbing the live wire wrapped around my soul, and ripping the storm out of me.
Lightning cracks and pours inside the bag, wind screaming after it. Rain bends horizontal, streaming into leather that shouldn’t be able to hold a puddle, let alone a storm.