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Animal. I’m supposed to have an animal? A snake is not an animal. A snake destroyed Eden. The fortune teller is back in my head: You will end the world. Anger fills me at her prediction, at the unknowns—at Micah for doing that to me and not warning me. “What did you just do?”

“Forced you to become your destiny. You have to learn to fight with your familiar. You need to know your body. Remember that you don’t have physical limitations you’ve assumed in the past. You can’t break a bone. You can die, but not easily. We aren’t exactly counting cholesterol, but we do count bullets. Too many of them can end badly, but a cut or minor injury will heal quickly.” He throws a punch at my face.

My arm lifts and my wrist blocks his, and that shadow slithers in my mind. “Are you crazy? What if you would have hit me?”

“You’d get over it,” he assures me, and throws another punch. I block it again.

“Stop doing that,” I order.

“Make me,” he grinds out again, with yet another thrust of his fist.

From there, we begin a vicious exchange of him punching, me punching, and I forget objecting. I forget everything but the battle and how fast and strong his every action and move is. I don’t want him to be faster and stronger, and I see the snake again, or rather, feel it there, inside me. I heave back and charge him with a force that sends him flying backward, with me coming down on top of him.

I straddle him and flatten my hands on his chest. He catches my wrists. “Now what, Seer?”

“I kill you?”

“Interesting,” he replies.

“What’s interesting?”

“You’re thinking about killing me, and I’m thinking that you turned down my bed, and now you’re on top of me. But then Seers are known for liking things rough.”

“You’re trying to get in my head again. You’re trying to rattle me. It won’t work. And that’s not funny, anyway.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“No,” I say, feeling the recoil of the snake, the calmness overcoming me. “No, it’s not, and I didn’t turn down your bed. You weren’t in it.”

“Would that have made a difference?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly, confused in all kinds of ways about him.

He studies me a long beat before he says, “I wasn’t with Celine, if that’s what you think. There’s nothing left between me and Celine.”

“Does she know that?”

“She has an unhealthy obsession with me.” He tugs the wrist he still holds and pulls me down against him.

I gasp with the shock of the intimacy, our mouths so very close, my hands settling on the warm, hard wall of his chest. I don’t push away. I don’t even think about distance. “Micah,” I murmur, his name a whisper on my tongue while my body roars with the feel of him pressed to me.

“She also believes I have an unhealthy obsession with you.”

I can barely breathe. I shouldn’t want this to be true. I shouldn’t. And yet, I find myself asking, “Because of Jeremy?”

“No. Not because of Jeremy. You and I, we’re alike. She and I are not.”

My emotions are pinging all over the place, and I don’t know what is real and what is part of the combat game he’s playing with me. My fingers curl roughly around the cotton of his shirt. “No. Stop. Just stop.”

“Stop what, Ember?”

“You just said you saved me to do anything to me you want to do.”

He rolls me over, and his big body settles on top of me. “To piss you off. To make you fight. To make you use your powers.”

“Do it a different way.”

“No. I will not be gentle, Ember.”