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“You did it.” He’s gazing at me with the love I kept trying to see in the red, and the difference between these gray eyes and the red ones is so stark that my hand flies to his face to make sure he’s real.

“Say you love me,” I tell him. “Right now. Say it.”

“I love you.” The words come out so easily that my tears fall harder, because red-eyed Logan couldn’t say them at all. He reached for them and found nothing, and this Logan didn’t even have to reach.

“Okay.” I’m nodding too fast, my electricity doing frantic things along the sword’s blade. “Okay. Good.”

“Look at me.” His hands are on my face now, his thumbs catching tears. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

Yes. Every part of me is hurt, but the hurt isn’t physical, and I can’t explain two entire futures to a man kneeling on a lakebed inside a vortex that could close at any second. I can’t tell him I held his corpse. I can’t tell him what I let the other one do to me, or that I asked for more. Not here. Maybe not ever. “The sword showed me… it doesn’t matter right now. We need to get out of here.”

“It clearly matters. You’re shaking.”

“I’m shaking because I just pulled a celestial weapon out of a rock after dying five times, and I’ll probably be shaking for a while, but I promise I’ll tell you everything when we’re somewhere that isn’t the bottom of a lake.” I force myself to stand, then grab the sword at the last second, because I went through hell to get this thing and I can’t leave it behind, even though it’s what sucked me into that hell in the first place.

As I’m getting my footing, lightning hits the stone where the sword used to be, creating a column of silver-white energy that connects the broken stone to the storm above the vortex. It pours down in a continuous stream that makes the lakebed vibrate under my feet, then the air starts to prickle, and a figure steps out of it onto the cracked stone.

She looks exactly like she always looked when she walked out of the cockpit—wild dark hair moving in a wind that doesn’t touch anything else, sharp cheekbones, sleek black clothes, and eyes that can’t decide if they’re storm-gray or electric blue. Her mouth is curving into the smile she used to give me before takeoff, back when I was young and she let me sit in the co-pilot seat.

I blink a few times to make sure she’s real.

“T?”

“Hi, Jade,” she says, the air humming when she speaks. “You look good with that sword.”

“You look good with… are you kidding me?” My electricity surges through the blade, and silver arcs crack across the ground between us. “Really? After everything, that’s what you open with?”

“You pulled the Storm Sword from its stone.” She steps off the cracked rock, the lightning column behind her fades, and suddenly she’s just T. The woman who kept terrible sugar-free candy in the cockpit, taught me card tricks on long flights, and complained about air traffic control. “Do you understand how long that sword’s been waiting for you?”

“Do you understand how long I’ve been waiting for you?” I shoot back, the sword shaking in my hand. “You put lightning in me on a plane. You dropped me in a clearing with a Hydra that wanted to kill me. You vanished with no explanation and no instructions. No ‘hey, Jade, you’re a witch, I’m a storm goddess, I just gave you magic that’s going to be different from everyone else’s at your ancient witch academy, and here’s how to use it so you don’t accidentally kill your classmates or attract a council of witches that either want to capture you or kill you.”

T tilts her head, and the air around her shifts the way it used to when she’d check the instruments before takeoff.

“You’re right,” she says. “That was a lot to deal with on your own.”

“A lot to deal with?” My electricity surges through the sword. “You flew my family everywhere, and the whole time, you were a goddess. You were a goddess, and you sat in that cockpit and complained about air traffic control at LaGuardia while you were deciding whether or not to rearrange my entire life.”

“The complaints about LaGuardia were valid.” She gives me an amused smile that I want to electrocute off her face. “That airspace is a nightmare, even for me.”

“Don’t make jokes right now.” I step toward her, and the sword flares so bright that the watery walls of the vortex glow silver. “I almost died five times trying to get to your sword. A drakon crushed me, drowned me, and electrocuted me, and I would have died for real if Logan couldn’t travel through time. Actually, I wouldn’t be here right now at all, because Thad would have killed me on the Crown before I even realized what my magic could do.”

Logan shifts behind me. I can feel the tension radiating off him, and his hand brushes my lower back, just enough to let me know he’s close. The touch sends a pulse of electricity from my spine through the blade, and the current grounds me enough to keep me talking instead of screaming.

“I begged for your help every morning at the Worship Center for days on end, and I hate mornings.” My grip tightens on the hilt. “I screamed for you on the sea when we were dying of thirst and I was trying to pull clouds out of an empty sky. You either ignored me, or you didn’t hear me, but I’m going to bet on ignored me.”

The wind in her hair shifts direction, and the mischief on her face is gone. The woman standing on the cracked stone suddenly looks more like the T who sat with me during bad turbulence than the goddess who stepped out of a lightning bolt.

“I heard you,” she says quietly. “Every time.”

“So… you ignored me.” I glare at her.

“You needed to find your own way. If I’d been there to catch you every time you fell, you would have learned to wait for me instead of learning to fly. And you needed to learn to fly, Jade. Because what’s coming is bigger than anything I could possibly catch you from.”

The anger that’s been fueling me since she stepped out of the lightning falters. Because there’s a weight in her voice when she says what’s coming that I’ve never heard from T before.

“The Revenants,” I say, the fury in my voice thinning out without my permission. “The Blood Coven. Ambrogio. And the… apocalypse.”