Logan crosses the four feet between us and stops with two feet left, close enough that my electricity sends a thin arc from my fingers to his forearm and his eyes close at the contact, his chest expanding with a sharp inhale.
He opens his eyes, and the intensity in them nearly makes me take a step back.
“Then we’re even.” He bends down slowly and picks up my bracelet, holding it like it’s the most fragile object in theuniverse. “Because I was supposed to deliver you to them, and I’m standing in a cabin planning how to keep you away.”
He takes my wrist and loops the gold chain around it, his fingers steady where mine were shaking. The broken clasp dangles loose against my pulse point.
“Hold still.”
A flame catches in his palm. He touches the tip of it to the broken clasp, and the metal softens, glowing orange for a half-second before he presses the two pieces together.
When he pulls his hand away, the clasp is gone, and the bracelet’s a single unbroken circle around my wrist, welded shut.
“Now it can’t fall off,” he says quietly. “No matter how hard you twist it.”
My throat tightens. Because he just sealed my nervous habit onto my skin with fire magic, and somehow that’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me.
“You asked if I love you for you or for what you are,” he says, and when he takes my hand again, I let him. “The truth is that I started falling for you on a forest floor when you kissed me like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and I couldn’t pull away, because for the first time in months, I felt alive.”
“Because of this.” I release electricity from my skin into his palm, and his whole body shudders, the veins in his forearm lighting up silver under his skin for a half-second before fading. “Your blood’s moving right now, isn’t it? That’s whatalivemeans. It’s not me. It’s my electricity.”
“Yes, your magic made me unable to pull away.” He holds my gaze and laces his fingers with mine, as if he can’t bear the thought of letting go. “But the electricity stopped after the kiss. My blood went still again. And I spent the next two weeks—from the Emberhearth ceremony until the Drowned Tower—thinking about you anyway. Two weeks of sitting across a dining hall pretending you didn’t exist while the chandeliers flared everytime Oliver touched your shoulder. Two weeks of reading the same page of the same book in the library because I could hear you laughing from where you were studying with Evie below. Your lightning made my blood move for two minutes in those woods, butyoumade it impossible for me to stop thinking about you for fourteen straight days without touching me once.”
I should pull my hand away. I should walk out the door, climb the ladder, and make decisions with my brain instead of whatever stupid organ in my chest keeps overriding it.
Instead, I bring my free hand up and press his palm flat against my cheek, and electricity jumps between us at every point of contact. His eyes close, and the breath he pulls in shudders through his whole body.
When he opens them again, I rise onto my toes and slowly close the distance between us one inch at a time. He doesn’t move. He just waits, his breathing shallow, letting me come to him like he doesn’t trust himself to close the gap.
When my lips finally brush his, it’s just the softest graze, light enough that I feel his breath catch before I feel the shape of his lips.
The kiss lasts three seconds, maybe four. It’s soft, and his hand trembles against my cheek, and I pull back before the warmth in my chest can convince me to stay, because if I don’t stop now, I won’t stop ever.
“I still love you,” I say, and the words come out steadier than I expect. “I don’t know what that means yet. I don’t know if it makes me a traitor to my destiny or if it’s the only thing that’s going to save us both. But I love you, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t just because it would make everything easier.”
The current between our palms pulses in time with the heartbeat hammering through my wrist where the welded bracelet sits against my skin.
“I’ll love you whether you complete your destiny or burn it to the ground,” he tells me, and the words hurt, because they mean he’ll always love me, even if I ultimately destroy him. “That’s not going to change, no matter what you decide.”
For one dangerous second, I want to close the gap again. I want to kiss him until neither of us can think and pretend that destiny is just a word and not a blade hanging over both our heads.
But I’ve already hit my quota for emotionally reckless decisions today. And we still have a demigod who keeps a minimum of ten weapons on his body at all times, a furious best-friend-turned-alternate-timeline-murderer, and a half-drained blood donor waiting for us topside.
So, I pull my hand free, and the current breaks, cold rushing into the space between us.
“Let’s get back up there and tell everyone we’re road-tripping to upstate New York,” I say, forcing a confidence into my voice that I don’t totally feel. “Because we have Luna’s chosen champion and her wolf pack to convince that I’m not a complete disaster who’s hopelessly in love with her mortal enemy, and if I’m going to lie to a bunch of werewolves about my undead boyfriend, I’m going to need him there with me for moral support.”
32
NINA
Fifteen portraits linethe front of the Starflare Ballroom.
Sam Reeves. Deidre Mitchell. Elizabeth Bradley. Gabriel Dumont. Francis Willingham. Deacon Park. Leo Martinez.
I keep going until I’ve catalogued all fifteen students. Fifteen lives erased in a single night.
We’re sitting shoulder to shoulder in the seats that were brought into the ballroom. What’s left of the faculty sits in a row behind the podium, their expressions calibrated to the appropriate mixture of sorrow and resolve.