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I know that pattern. I catalogued it for the first time in the spring on Lotus Island, two seconds before he kissed me.

“You asked me once why I’d risk everything for you,” he says, and the seriousness in his eyes makes it hard for me to breathe. “In my room at Blaze, you called yourself a bookish Thorne who could barely hold a blade.”

“I remember.”

“You’re still bookish.” The corner of his mouth shifts. “And your grip has improved, but it’s still the second worst I’ve ever corrected.”

“Second worst?”

“Second worst,” he confirms, and his free hand comes up to my face, his fire seeping into my skin through the contact.

His eyes drop to my mouth. The heat from his fingertips on my cheek is spreading down my neck, pooling at the base of my throat, and I’m cataloguing the temperature of his skin against mine out of pure habit, even though the data is meaningless right now.

The silver light is warmer and softer. The air smells like night-blooming flowers and ancient bark. The animals are gone. Even the trees have cooled by a few degrees.

Then Kieran’s hands are closing around my waist, and I’m off the ground before my scanning registers the movement.

My legs lock around his hips, and the world tilts as he carries me off the path in three strides. Bark hits my back, he pins me against the trunk with his hips, and his hands are gripping my thighs, his face inches from mine, his green eyes so focused that my scanning goes haywire trying to process the thermal output rolling off him.

He holds me there for a few seconds, pinned and breathing hard. His hips are flush against mine, and the pressure between my thighs is a specific, immediate heat that my scanning tries to quantify and fails. Because I’m not sure how we got from my friends and maybe girlfriend were brutally murdered by vampires to I want to feel every inch of you against me, but apparently trauma and arousal share the same thermal frequency—or at least they do to Kieran Cross.

“Are you sure?” I ask, my fingers tracing down the back of his neck. “Because if you’re worried about hurting me again, I need to know now, before I lose the ability to form sentences.”

His exhale is ragged, and his hips press forward with a slow, deliberate pressure that makes my thoughts scatter. “I’ll be careful,” he promises, and I have no idea how it’s possible to be careful when your literal output gave a witch second-degree burns, but I honestly don’t care right now.

His forehead presses against mine. Our breathing is tangled together, his green eyes are dark, and my legs are locked around his waist. We’re both trembling, and his mouth is a breath away from mine, and⁠—

A tremor rolls through the ground.

Kieran’s hands lock on my thighs, he quickly places me on the ground, and his head snaps toward the path.

The shift from desire to combat readiness is so fast that my scanning barely tracks the transition.

The next tremor is stronger, and I’m flooded with a thermal signature so massive that the reading fills my entire range. Because there are four legs barreling toward us through the trees at a speed my brain processes as fast before the data resolves into numbers. The ground’s shaking harder with each second. The sound of hooves is hitting the forest floor, filling the air with a rhythmic, thundering impact, and whatever that thing is… we can’t outrun it.

Which means we have to be protected when it gets here.

So, I release my heat shield around me and Kieran seconds before a boar the size of a car, with tusks longer than my forearms, explodes onto the path.

31

EVIE

The boar hits the shield at full speed, the force of it traveling through the barrier and into my body. My boots skid backward in the dirt, and Kieran’s hands grab my waist from behind to keep me upright.

Another impact, this one harder than the first. The bristles along the creature’s spine are smoking, singed from the heat, and the skin around its snout is reddened. But its ivory tusks are undamaged, and it’s already lowering its head for another charge.

They punch into my shield with a concentrated force that sends a crack of pain through my forearms.

Kieran’s hands tighten on my waist. “How long can you hold it?”

“I don’t know. Holding the shield is draining me every time it hits.”

At its next charge, I brace, and Kieran braces behind me. His chest is against my back, and the impact slams through the shield and into both of us. My boots slide back six inches in the dirt, but Kieran’s feet hold, and the only reason I’m still standing is because his body is propping mine up.

“It’s learning,” Kieran observes. “The first charge was head-on. The second was tusk-first. Now it’s dragging its tusks along the surface to weaken the barrier.”

“How intelligent is this thing?” I ask.