Page 66

“Intelligent enough to change tactics three times in thirty seconds.”

The boar pulls back and circles. Its small black eyes are fixed on the shield with a focus that makes my stomach clench, because it’s studying my barrier the way Kieran studies an opponent’s stance, looking for a gap in the defense.

Kieran’s heat shifts against my spine, pulling inward, as if his fire is collecting itself into a single point.

“When I give the word, drop the shield,” he says against my ear, and the authority in his voice is the Scorched Circle instructor, the man who trained me to hold a blade by telling me exactly when to swing.

“But the shield is the only thing⁠—”

“The tusks are enamel. They won’t burn. The rest of the boar will.” His hands slide from my waist to my hips, firm and deliberate. “We can’t burn it from inside a dome. So, I need you to let me out, so I can burn it myself.”

I almost point out that I’ve never seen him use fire in combat. But the boar is circling for another pass, the shield is failing, and the man behind me sounds more certain than I’ve heard him sound all day.

“Tell me when.” I widen my stance, bracing myself.

“I will. But I need you to not just drop it. You need to blow it outward,” he says, his mouth close to my ear. “Hit the boar with the full force of your shield and give me space for my attack.”

His hands leave my hips, heat flares behind me, and I glance over my shoulder as fire pours out of Kieran’s closed fists and stretches, drawing itself into twin swords of white-gold flame. They’re exact replicas of the ones he left on the temple floor. Divine heat rolls off them in waves, and the air along each edge bends and shimmers, warping the clearing behind them.

She could shape flames into weapons and fight with them as well as I fight with steel.

The words he said on the forest path are ringing in my head.

This is Liora’s magic. Liora’s technique.

He must have learned this from her.

“Now, Evie,” he says, jolting me back into the present, and the boar charges.

I pour every remaining ounce of magic into the barrier and throw it outward with as much force as I can manage.

The explosion tears across the clearing in a wall of heat. The boar takes the full blast mid-stride, and the force lifts it off its hooves, launching it through the air. Its bristles ignite, fire racing along its spine, and its shriek rips through the forest as it crashes through a tree and tumbles across the ground.

The detonation throws me back as well, flinging me into a tree, the impact knocking all my breath out of my lungs.

The boar’s upright in an instant. Its bristles are burning, the skin along its flanks blistered, but those black eyes are sharp and furious as it lowers its head and charges straight at Kieran.

Kieran charges back.

One fire blade sweeps across the boar’s throat in a clean, horizontal arc. The other drives downward through the top of its skull. It’s the same technique I’ve watched him drill in the Scorched Circles a hundred times, but now his blades are white-gold flame, the wounds burning where they cut.

The boar’s massive body crashes to the forest floor, and Kieran’s on top of it in the same breath, driving both fire swords through the creature’s body and into the earth beneath it.

Fire erupts from the crack in the ground, a column of flame so bright and hot that it swallows the boar’s body whole. Heat hits my face from thirty feet away, and the entire forest shakes. Trees groan around us. Leaves curl and blacken at the edges of the clearing, and silver light vanishes behind the blaze.

For three seconds, the only light in Artemis’s sacred forest is Kieran’s divine fire, burning white-gold and furious.

When the flames recede into the cracked earth, the ground seals itself closed, and the silver light returns. A scorched circle of blackened earth is all that remains where the boar was lying.

Kieran’s standing in the center, white-gold fire crawling up his forearms, licking across his skin in slow, winding tendrils. His chest is heaving. A tear is ripped in his shirt where a tusk grazed his ribs, and the skin beneath is already healing. The fire swords have dissolved from his fists, and his empty hands are at his sides, his fingers curled and burning.

He looks every bit a war god—the son of Ares standing in a ring of scorched earth with divine fire on his skin and a dead monster beaten into the ground beneath his feet.

Then a deer steps onto the path at the edge of the clearing, tearing my gaze away from Kieran. It’s the same kind of deer that’s been watching us since we entered the forest—dark eyes and a too-hot body, quiet and still.

Kieran’s head snaps toward it, and a fire blade leaves his hand before I can open my mouth. It hits the deer in the chest, and the animal crumples, fire erupting across its body.

By the time my brain catches up to what just happened, the deer is a burning shape on the forest floor, and Kieran is turning toward the next movement in the trees.