Page 59

At the bottom of the descending column, through the spray and the crackling lightning along the water walls, there’s a silver-white light. It’s the exact frequency of my electricity, radiating in a rhythm that matches my heartbeat.

Because right there, driven into the lakebed and blazing my exact shade of silver, is the Storm Sword.

28

EVIE

The fire travel deposits us in wet grass, where the sun is setting on the horizon, thanks to the time zone change from New Orleans to Turkey.

Will jet lag be easier without having to arrive on an actual jet, or worse because of the instantaneous travel?

There’s no time to further analyze it, because my heat sensing is already mapping the terrain. Mainly, the single marble column standing alone in the marshy field, radiating a deep, steady heat that has no business coming from a two-thousand-year-old piece of stone at dusk in November.

Luckily for us, the site is empty of tourists and guides. I guess people don’t think this single column in a swamp is worth the detour from the main Ephesus ruins.

Kieran’s eyes sweep the perimeter. “How long do you need?”

“Two minutes, maybe less.” I pull the parchment from my jacket pocket and unfold it. “Keep watch.”

He takes position five feet to my left, both swords drawn, three knives rising into orbit behind his shoulder. His thermal signature is running at the steady plateau I’ve catalogued as alert readiness, and the heat of it presses against my left side in a way that would be distracting if I let it.

I don’t let it. After all, I have twelve lines of ancient Greek to get through, and mispronouncing a single syllable in a divine invocation is the kind of mistake you only get to make once.

Not wanting to waste a second of time, I kneel at the base of the column, hold out my hand, ignite a flame from my palm, and start speaking the invocation. My other hand is holding the parchment, and while the light from my flame makes the letters easier to see, the ancient Greek sits heavy on my tongue. The vowels are longer than modern Greek, the consonants sharper, but the rhythm of the couplets is built for chanting, each line feeding the next in a cadence that pulls my flame higher with every word.

Heat rolls off the marble in waves that thicken with every couplet. The ground hums under my knees. By the ninth line, my flame is taller than I am, stretching toward the top of the column on its own, and sweat slides down my spine even though the burn has never once hurt me.

Finally, I finish the twelfth line, the flame reaches the top of the column… and the entire thing snuffs out.

I stare at my hand in shock. This can’t be right. My fire should listen to me. It always listens to me.

But I don’t get a chance to try again, because hundreds of buzzing heat signatures bloom across the top of the column.

I look up, and my stomach drops.

They’re bees. Each one is running warmer than any insect should, and they’re moving together, spiraling down the marble in coordinated patterns that are clearly swarm behavior.

I stumble backward, my hands moving to hide my face as I prepare for a stinging onslaught… but the bees fly right past me and go for Kieran. The wind off their wings brushes my cheeks and bare hands, hundreds of bodies streaming past close enough to touch, and not a single one lands on me.

His swords cut the air in arcs so fast I can barely track the individual strikes. Bees drop by the dozen around his boots, shredded by steel, and his floating knives are firing through the densest clusters in coordinated bursts that thin the swarm from three directions at once. He pivots, and the blades follow. The coordination between his hands and the telekinetic steel has the same seamless precision I recorded during the sparring sessions with Fang, except now he’s applying it to targets the size of his thumbnail and hitting every single one.

A bee lands on his neck between strikes, and his thermal output jolts down four degrees in a single beat. His sword arm hitches. I reach for my fire, ready to do something, but he recovers and keeps cutting. The bees keep falling. His knives keep firing. He kills twenty more bees in the next two seconds.

Then another one gets through and lands on his forearm. His output drops to 103, his swords slowing by a margin so small that only my thermal tracking would catch it. Every bee that lands takes heat with it.

Two more get through. His left sword catches air where a bee was a half-second earlier, and one of his floating knives dips six inches in its orbit before he hauls it back into formation.

My fire flares in my chest. Because no. I’m not letting bees bring down Kieran Cross.

So, I run toward him, the bees split around me, and I’m inside the range of his swords in a flash. A blade sweeps past my left shoulder, close enough that the steel grazes my jacket, but I drop low, coming up inside his guard the way he taught me at the Scorched Circles. My crossguard dagger deflects his next floating weapon, and then I’m through the swarm and by Kieran’s side, ready to do whatever I can to help.

His grip is loosening on the steel, and his output is at 97. He’s barely aware of my presence.

I’ve never registered him at 97. Not ever. I don’t know what these bees are doing to him, but it’s not normal. They’re sucking his heat out of him, or his demigod blood, or his soul⁠—

I grab the front of his shirt with both hands, pull him against my body, and throw my heat outward. The magic tears out of me in a rush that empties my lungs, and the shield snaps into place around both of us—a sphere of shimmering, concentrated heat that curves three feet past us on all sides and seals at the ground.

Then, I push.