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But the current keeps coming. Centuries of stored storm energy rips loose behind my lightning, and it doesn’t flow into me anymore—it burns. Wave after wave of power that was never mine, five hundred years of strikes funneling through one arm into one body. The rope of current doubles in width. My palm goes from hot to blistering. There’s no valve, no brake, no way to stop what I started, because I told all of it to come home, and all of it is coming home.
Every muscle in my body seizes. My heart stutters, skipping a full beat and slamming twice fast to catch up. The current keeps packing into a body with no room left, pressure building behind my ribs, and the smell of burning reaches me, and I refuse to identify it, because I know it’s me.
But the drakon is dying, and I’m winning, so I force my arm back up and pull harder.
The surge that answers makes my heart skip longer this time, and the dark at the edges of my vision is creeping inward, just like it did in the water.
No. This can’t be happening. I’m lightning made flesh, storm given form… and now, that power is electrocuting me. It’s killing me with the exact power that makes me me, volt after volt of it grinding through my chest, and the betrayal of that hurts almost as much as the current.
My knees hit the boards. My arm stays up. I can’t feel my fingers anymore, can’t feel anything below my elbow except heat, and my body’s failing—my legs gone, my vision going, my heart misfiring—while my hand keeps its death grip on the storm.
I keep pulling, keep pulling, keep—
Logan’s arms wrap around me, black fire howls through the pain, and the vortex tears me backward through time while my hand is still reaching for the lightning.
27
JADE
My hands are on the sides of the boat. Again.
The mist is thick. Again.
The lake is flat. Again.
My heart’s beating, steady and whole, and I now know two things I didn’t a few minutes ago.
First, I can drain the drakon’s lightning. Second, if I try to hold it all inside my body, the lightning will kill me before the creature has a chance.
Logan’s hands are on my face in an instant, his fingers cupping my cheeks as if he’s making sure I’m still here. His skin is gray, and his eyes are bloodshot, searching mine with a desperation that sends my electricity arcing from my cheeks into his palms.
“It worked,” I tell him. “But my magic was weakened because—”
“Your magic was weakened because you channeled it into me,” he says flatly. “Now you want to drain the drakon from the start, with full reserves, without channeling into me first. You think if you have all your magic from the start, you’ll be able to stop it from overwhelming you like it did in the timeline you experienced just now.”
My stomach drops.
“How did you know?” I ask, even though it’s pretty damn obvious how a time traveler can know about things that haven’t happened yet.
“There was another loop,” he says slowly, like he’s forcing out each word. “We tried your plan, and the drain worked. You reached for the drakon the second it surfaced, the lightning poured back into you, and the drakon was weakening.” He reaches for my hands, squeezing them so tight it hurts. “You were holding its lightning. Then the volume hit a threshold your body couldn’t process—again—but this time, it was stronger than what you just experienced.”
My electricity crackles against his wrists, and he continues before I can ask a single question.
“I couldn’t get close enough to touch you because your electricity—no, the drakon’s electricity—was lashing out at me every time I tried.” His fire flickers out around our hands, sputters back, then flickers out again. “I watched it electrocute you for eleven seconds before your heart stopped.”
Eleven seconds. He counted.
Of course he counted.
I pull his hands from mine and press them flat against my chest, right over my heartbeat. My electricity floods through his palms, and the breath he takes shakes his entire body.
“Feel that.” I hold his gaze, as if breaking it will mean losing him. “I’m here. That’s real.”
He holds his hands there, his palms flat over my heart, and the desperation in his eyes shifts into the calculated focus I’ve seen him wear before every dangerous decision he’s ever made. His jaw tightens. His breathing stretches out into long, deliberate pulls. The fire that was flickering against my chest steadies into an even burn. And just like that, the man who was shaking apart a few minutes ago locks it all away behind the gray eyes of a strategist who’s already running the next loop in his head.
“The drain is the right approach.” He pulls back, his bloodshot eyes sharp again. “But your body can’t hold five hundred years of its stored lightning. The volume overloaded your heart.”
Water vibrates beneath the boat, and dread fills my chest. It won’t be long now.
