Page 52

“Great,” I say with a huff. “First, we steal a ship from the academy. Now we’re stealing a fishing boat in Venezuela. Our criminal record is really diversifying here.”

Logan’s already walking toward the nearest fisherman—an older man sitting at the edge of the dock. The lightning overhead is still flaring in rapid, converging bolts, and the man’s gazing up at it with an expression that says he’s seen the Catatumbo every night of his life, and he’s never seen it do this.

Logan kneels beside him, black-lined flames igniting in his palms, and when he speaks, his voice goes layered and rich.

“You’ve decided to let us borrow your boat,” he says, hypnotic in a way that makes me want to melt right into him. “You’re tired, you’re going to go inside and go to bed, and when you wake up, you won’t remember us or this conversation.”

The fisherman’s expression goes slack, and he gestures toward a flat-bottomed wooden boat with a pair of oars and a small outboard motor that looks older than I am.

I look back at the center of the storm, where lightning is hitting the water so fast that the surface is glowing white.

There’s a decent chance we’re going to destroy this man’s boat. That boat is probably how he feeds his family.

So, I pull a chunky gold ring off my right hand—a band with five diamonds that I made when I was sixteen. It’s worth more than the boat, the dock, and probably the house this man lives in, and I press it into his weathered palm before I can think about it too hard.

He blinks at the gold in his hand, his eyes go wide, and he starts speaking in rapid Spanish. Then his eyes get a dazed look—one that happens whenever the compulsion is pulling on someone’s mind—and he turns around and heads inside.

I watch him until he closes the door, then I look back at Logan.

“Let’s go,” I say, and we climb into the boat.

It rocks under our weight, and I grab the sides harder than I intended, because boats and I have a complicated history that includes nearly drowning during a ship voyage through a sea of monsters. Twice.

Logan takes the oars and pulls us away from the dock with long, even strokes. The stilt village recedes behind us, and the center of the storm grows brighter with every moment we get closer. The lightning is constant overhead, bolt after bolt converging on the point ahead of us, and my electricity is crackling along my forearms in a current that matches the sky’s rhythm.

Then, mist rises from the lake’s surface. It’s so dense that the stilt village disappears behind us, and the mountains vanish ahead.

Silver-white pulses of muted lightning filter through the mist. My ears ring from the absence of thunder. The air is heavier, vibrating at a frequency that makes my electricity buzz through my veins, and the flat-gray water under the boat reflects nothing, not even the lightning.

Logan stops rowing. The oars rest in the water, and the boat drifts, mist pressing in from every direction until the world shrinks to a circle of white fog and the two of us sitting in a borrowed fishing boat.

His hand finds my knee.

The contact sends electricity jumping from my leg into his palm, and his eyes flutter closed in an intimate way that makes heat flood into the pit of my stomach. When they open again, his fire seeps through my jeans, and the dual sensation of his magic and the charged air is making my skin feel too tight for my body.

I cover his hand with mine. Our fingers lace together on my knee, and the electricity cycles between our joined hands in a slow, heavy pulse as we sit there for a few moments in silence.

“Jade,” he finally says, and hearing my name in his mouth with nothing else around us—no wolves, no wards, no Ruby and Connor, no Pine Valley, no world at all except this boat and this fog—makes my chest crack.

Then the surface of the lake shifts beneath our boat in a single, massive displacement that lifts the hull two feet and drops it with a slap that cracks through the silent mist.

Logan’s hand leaves my knee, and then he’s gripping the oars, scanning the lake.

My electricity is screaming. It’s a full-body alarm racing from my scalp to my heels, every nerve lit up with warning.

“There’s something in the water.” I’m on my feet, and the boat rocks violently, and I grab the side to stay upright.

“I know.” Fire ignites in Logan’s palms, pushing the mist back by ten feet and revealing the water moving in a circular pattern centered on our boat.

Lightning flares bright enough to turn everything white, and a ridge of scales breaks the lake’s surface. Each one is the size of my palm. Silver-white arcs of electricity jump from scale to scale in branching patterns identical to the lightning overhead, and the creature rises from the water in a long, curving line that stretches at least thirty feet before disappearing back under.

My electricity buzzes at a frequency that’s making my vision blur, and Logan’s fire is casting our shadows across the fog in flickering orange shapes.

We sit there in silence for a few seconds, bracing ourselves.

Then, a head rises from the lake, bigger than the boat, with a jaw that could close around the hull in a single snap. The scales covering its face are the same crackling, electric plates I saw on its spine. Its eyes are two white-hot points of electricity that lock onto me with an intelligence that makes my stomach drop, because this thing is ancient and aware, and its body rising out of the water is thicker than a subway car, and it just keeps coming.

It opens its jaw, blinding white light coming from inside its mouth.