He flexed his fingers, the air around them alive with a faint crackle. Tiny filaments of lightning crawled across his knuckles. The storm wanted to rage—to burn—but he held it on a leash, the way he always had. Lightning seemed to live in his bones. His father had taught him it was a gift meant to guard others, not to destroy.
He raised his hand. A flash, precise and controlled, leapt from his palm to the vines choking Andrew. White fire danced over green, splitting the growth into blackened threads. It would sting his new friend’s neck a little, but it wouldn’t cause any lasting damage—better a little singed than dead.
Andrew gasped, dragging in a desperate lungful of air.
Juliette’s strangled gasp pulled Edmund’s attention back to her. Another tangle of vines crawled toward her throat, and for one heartbeat his composure cracked. He saw a woman far too good to die in the dark, one he was trying not to care about, but his heart was disobeying orders.
“Hold on,” he muttered, keeping his voice low and steady, though his pulse thundered. He had to help her, but he could sense the men closing in.
He turned his hand outward again, the charge building hotter, brighter, until the air itself seemed to hum. The two men outside froze mid-step, now noticing he wasn’t trapped like his friends and was, in fact, alive. Shortsighted on their part to leave an unconscious man unbound. A bolt seared the night, blinding white and instant. The men leaped out of the way, tumbling to the ground.
He quickly turned his attention back to Juliette as he heard footsteps running away. Their attackers were escaping, but the sight of her—bound, breath shallow, fear flickering in her eyes—hit him hard and drew his whole attention. Andrew’s rescue had needed quick action, but this ... this required care, though time was ticking. He couldn’t hurt her. Hewouldn’t.
“It’s okay; I’m going to get you out,” he murmured.
He slipped one hand between her and the living snare, feeling the vines pulse faintly against the palm of his hand, the warmth of her body beneath the back of it.
The air between them crackled faintly as he shaped the lightning charge low and outward, willing it to flow away from her, not toward her. Light flared along the vines, bright threads racing across the greenery as it shriveled back, retreating like something alive that had been startled.
Juliette’s breath caught as the last of it fell away, the air around them smoking slightly. Edmund moved his hand away quickly from where it had hovered a hair’s breadth from her ribs.
Silence followed, broken only by the hiss of dying vines and Juliette’s unsteady breath. Edmund placed his hand on his thigh, his body trembling slightly from the exertion, which normallywould have been nothing, but the pain in his head made him feel weaker. He slowly exhaled through his teeth.
He looked at Juliette—at the raw courage in her eyes, the trust she’d placed in him without hesitation—and felt the dangerous flicker of something resembling hope.
“Thanks for being careful. I didn’t fancy the idea of being struck by lightning,” she whispered, trying for lightness, though her voice shook.
He nodded brusquely, which made his head throb. “You’re safe now,” he said quietly. He looked at Andrew. “You’re both safe.
“We need to move,” he said, bringing the familiar soldier back into his voice. It was a safer place to be. After all, all his father remembered was war, never peace.
He didn’t think peace and love were for him. Not all Aetherians who were Fated found love for one reason or another. However, the Aether still gave them the chance. They were reborn because the potential was there to love so deeply, but it didn’t mean it happened. He could live for a thousand lifetimes and only find his true love after many centuries of war and pain.
Yet, looking at Juliette, hope flickered. His father’s memories might have shown them only as warriors, but that didn’t mean Edmund had never known love. Perhaps his father simply couldn’t glimpse the quieter parts of Edmund’s past lives, the softer moments beyond the battlefield.
Could he have love as well as war? No, he would not allow hope. He knew his duty, and it was to protect the innocent.
Yet even as he turned to check the road, he could still feel the ghost of that warmth where his hand had been—and despitehimself, was acutely aware of the abnormally strong emotional echoes that arose whenever he was around this woman.
He would keep his distance. Someone full of sunshine like Juliette deserved to be with someone who hadn’t seen the horrors of war. All these thoughts raced through his mind in a matter of seconds.
“Isla,” Andrew said hoarsely, only now able to speak and cutting through Edmund’s thoughts, “they took Isla.”
Isla was his priority now that he was a detective, a protector. He helped others get their happily ever after. He’d forget about his own hope and focus on others.
Chapter Twenty
Isla tried to move, but the world had shrunk to the width of her own body—unyielding, crushing, suffocating. Her shoulders scraped against something rough. Cold crystal pressed into her cheek. When she tried to take a deep breath, the scent of earth and minerals was overpowering, like the inside of a freshly broken geode, but amplified.
The Terra Summoner had laughed when she had cried out in fear. He had trapped her in a cage of stone and crystal, growing it tighter and tighter until she could hardly move.
Though she was no longer blindfolded, shadows pressed in on Isla from all sides. Dust caught in her throat and she choked out a cough.
She strained to move her arms, which ached in their current position, but shards scraped at her body, and she froze as pain bit into her skin. A thousand glittering edges caught the faintest traces of light, gleaming like teeth. Her heart thundered. The harder she tried to still herself, the more the crystalline prison seemed to press in, closing the last inches of air around her.
Then a faint grinding hum surrounded her, the sound of minerals shifting, getting comfortable. The space around her shivered for a moment as if breathing in sync with her panic. Then the minerals paused right before crushing her, but leaving no room to move unless she wanted to be skewered.
Then came the flash. A blinding pulse of white light seared through the cracks—bouncing off crystals, amplifying her fear.A child’s past scream or her own rang out, muffled under dust. The thunderclap that followed shook the walls of her mind, and she wasback therejust as they’d planned, just as her memories had shown—beneath the broken cot, the orphanage collapsing around her. The air thick with smoke and grit. Lightning crawling across the sky outside the single jagged hole she could see through, each strike a white monster slashing toward her from the skies. She’d screamed until her throat tore, but no one came. And now, decades later, the same light flashed through the crystal prison, flickering like a heartbeat, and she was that terrified child again—small, unseen, and utterly alone.
