She’s right.
Of course she’s right.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, but the words are useless. They don’t fix anything, they don’t bring Oliver back, and they don’t undo the two weeks I let her hope. “I’m so sorry, Evie.”
She stares at me for a long moment with red-rimmed eyes, tears tracking down her cheeks.
“You were my best friend,” she says, barely able to speak the words. “You were supposed to be my best friend.”
Then the heat’s slamming into me like a wall, surrounding me like it did in the Fury Loop, and the air’s turning to fire in my lungs.
I try to breathe, but it’s like swallowing lava. My skin’s screaming, like every nerve ending lit up at once, and I can smell something burning, and I think it might be me.
I should defend myself. I should fight back instead of falling to my knees while my best friend cooks me alive.
But my legs won’t work, and my magic won’t come, and all I can think isI deserve this.I lied to her about this for two weeks, and I deserve every second of pain she wants to give me.
“Jade!” Wind shoves me sideways, arms are around my waist and forcing me to stand, and Logan’s in the dome with me, murmuring in my ear. “We have to move.”
“No.” I twist against him, and he must be using his vampire magic to circulate the air in the heat dome, because I can breathe again. “Let me go.”
“She’s going to kill you.”
“She won’t.” I shove at his chest, but he doesn’t budge.
It’s like trying to push a mountain. He’s holding me in place like I weigh nothing, like I’m a child throwing a tantrum.
Panic surges through me, and my lightning erupts without permission, silver electricity crackling across my skin and straight into Logan’s chest.
He takes a sharp breath inward, color flushing his face, and his grip falters, his chest heaving with a breath that sounds like it actually matters. And when his eyes meet mine, they’realive—present in a way that makes my heart race. He’s looking at me like I brought him back from the dead.
It’s a sick reminder that every time I electrocute him, I’m jumpstarting a corpse.
That’s why he loves you,a cruel voice whispers in the back of my mind—the same one that tried to get me to kill him earlier.You’re a defibrillator for his dead heart.
The thought makes me want to throw up.
“Jade,” Logan says, rougher now. “Stop fighting me.”
I squirm again, but it does nothing. “You’re hurting me.”
“You’re wrong about Evie.” His eyes are wild and desperate, and now that I’m looking closer, I see the dark, hollow shadows beneath them. “She can kill you. Shewillkill you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No matter what I did, no matter how many times I went back, I couldn’t stop her from releasing this dome,” he says. “It happened in different ways each time, but it always happened, just like how Oliver and Deidre always died. So, I gave up trying to stop her and decided to save you from inside it instead. Last time, I wasn’t fast enough. She cooked the air in your lungs, andyou dropped to the deck, and you weren’t breathing, and I—” He stops and swallows, his hands shaking like they do when he’s jumped back too much. “I held you, and you were still warm, and your heart wasn’t beating. The grief was enough to push me past my limits so I could get here in time. So don’t tell me she won’t go through with it, because she absolutely will, and I’m not sure if I have another jump left in me, so this is it. You need to let me help you, because if you die in this timeline, it sticks.”
His hand goes to the rings hanging from his neck, and I don’t think he’s realizing he’s doing it, but I’m suddenly hit with a horrible thought—if he can’t save me, would he want to keep his humanity? Or would he remove the token, so he didn’t have to feel?
The dome answers before I can, tightening around us, the temperature spiking so fast my vision blurs. My skin’s blistering, there’s copper and ash on my tongue, and beyond the shimmering dome, Evie’s pouring everything she has into killing me.
She killed me.
In another timeline, my best friend killed me.
“Okay.” The word scrapes out of my throat, because Logan may have lied to me about what he is, but I don’t think he’s lying aboutthis.
He releases me, and I stumble, barely catching myself.
