Kieran’s hand closes around my wrist, his skin hot against mine. “It’s time to stop.”
“No.” I pull free, scanning the tree line for more animals. “There has to be something I’m missing.”
“You’ve checked every animal we’ve come across. You’ve searched the wind patterns. They’re not here.”
But I don’t stop. Instead, I push harder, reaching and searching, desperate for any trace of Oliver’s warmth.
“He’s not here.” The words come out broken. “He was never here.”
I lower myself to the ground and press my palms flat against the cool earth, as if the soil holds answers my magic can’t find and being closer to the island itself will reveal what I’m missing.
Kieran settles beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off him. He’s not touching me, but he’s there the way a sheathed blade is there—present, ready, and waiting for the moment it’s needed.
“When I was twelve,” I hear myself say, “Oliver taught me how to ride a bike.”
Kieran shifts slightly, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“It was summer. Eleanor was studying to get ahead before starting at Blaze, and Eric was preparing for his first Council presentation.” I dig my fingers into the dirt, as if it can keep me grounded. “Oliver woke me up early and dragged me to the garage to give me a shiny new bike, and he spent the entire day running beside me until I figured it out.”
I pause, thinking. Why am I telling this story to Kieran Cross? He doesn’t care about when I learned to ride a bike. He probably mastered riding one at age five and equipped it with multiple ways to carry and conceal weapons before turning six.
But I can’t seem to stop.
“He skinned his knees worse than I did because he kept tripping over his feet trying to catch me when I wobbled.” A bitter laugh escapes my throat. “When I finally managed to ride all the way around the block by myself, he cheered so loud the neighbors complained.”
“He was a good brother,” Kieran says softly, as if he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and upset me further.
“He was the best.”
Was.Past tense.
I didn’t mean to use past tense.
Kieran’s hand moves, settling on my back between my shoulder blades. The touch is light and barely there, but his heat calms me, just like it did the morning I woke up on his bed with his arms wrapped around me.
“You’re not in this alone,” he says, and the air between us is charged, like it was in the Fury Loop when he pinned me to the ground and counted to five.
One, two, three?—
I look away first.
He withdraws his hand, the night air rushing into the space where his palm was, and I scrub at my face with my sleeve.
“I don’t know why I’m on the ground, as if thedirtmight have answers to my problems.” I sniff, pretty sure my attempts at scrubbing off the dirt are making it worse.
And while the dirt isn’t helping anything… what grows from it here might. So, I grab onto that thought with both hands, because practical Evie is so much easier to be than the version sitting in the dirt telling Kieran Cross about her brother’s skinned knees.
“We should go to Circe’s herb garden,” I say, sitting straighter now that I have a concrete goal. “Her botanical specimens have properties that don’t exist anywhere else in the known magical world. If we’re sailing through monster-infested waters, those herbs could be invaluable.”
I push myself to my feet, brushing dirt from my clothes as I latch onto the practical task like a lifeline.
Kieran stands and walks by my side as we head back to the palace, his hand on the hilt of his dagger, ready to defend us if necessary.
As we walk, I keep talking.
“Just because Oliver’s not here doesn’t mean he’s not somewhere else in the Lost Islands. There are dozens of documented locations in this region. Calypso’s island of Ogygia. Aeolus’s floating isle. The land of the Lotus Eaters. According to Strabo’s geographical surveys, the Lost Islands span an area roughly equivalent to?—”
“Evie.”
