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“Are you sure about that?”
“The vortex core is open air. The water is held back by the same force that’s spinning it. I’ll control our rate of descent, and if the vortex destabilizes, I’ll have us out before the walls collapse.”
I turn my focus back to the spinning water. The roar is filling my ears, and the sword is pulsing fifty feet below me, and my electricity is reaching for it so hard that silver arcs are jumping from my fingers toward the lakebed.
He reaches for my fingers, and the electricity shoots through his arm, silver veins flashing under his skin from wrist to elbow before sinking in.
“If anything goes wrong, I’ll bring us back to this moment,” he promises. “We’ll figure out another approach.”
“And if you can’t go back again?” I ask, since he traveled us back four—no, five—times during the drakon attack, including the loop when I died and he couldn’t bring me back with him.
“I have enough magic left.” His jaw tightens in the way that means he’s done the math and doesn’t love the result. “I can do one more jump. Maybe two.”
“Maybe two,” I repeat. “So, what you’re saying is, we should try really hard to make this one work.”
“I’m saying the sword is fifty feet below us, and it’s been waiting five hundred years for you. I’d rather not make it wait any longer.”
“Five hundred years,” I repeat. “No pressure.”
He turns me to face him, away from the vortex, and the roar fades behind the steadiness of his gray eyes moving over my face.
“Hey.” His thumb brushes the racing pulse at my wrist. “You almost died in this lake, then you stood back up in this boat and drained five hundred years of storm through your body to kill the thing that did it. The vortex isn’t the scary one here, Jade. You are.”
A laugh breaks out of me—shaky, but real—and some of the ice in my chest cracks with it.
“Is that a yes?” he asks.
“It’s more of a ‘hold onto me and don’t you dare let go.’”
“I won’t let you go,” he promises. “Ever.”
His arm locks around my waist, and there’s a pressure against my skin from every direction, steady and firm, like being held by hands I can’t see. He gives me a nod that’s supposed to be encouraging, then we step off the edge of the boat, and my stomach jumps for one horrible second before the air catches us and the drop becomes a descent.
As we sink through the center of the vortex, the world turns to water and light. The walls spin past us on every side—tons of lake held vertical and churning, lit from within by the last threads of my silver woven through it. The spray catches my arms, but my face stays dry. My feet are pointed down. And Logan’s arm is fixed around me, his magic holding us steady, just like he promised it would.
Below us, the sword grows.
What was a point of light from the boat sharpens with every foot we drop. First into a blade-shaped blaze, then into the thing itself: a sword buried to the hilt in a slab of rock rising from the center of the lakebed, silver-white light pouring off it in waves that pulse up the walls of the vortex. It’s still beating in time with my heart, and the closer we fall, the harder it is to tell whether I’m feeling my pulse or its glow.
Above us, the circle of sky shrinks. The roar of the water changes as we drop deeper, until it’s less a sound and more a pressure.
Finally, my boots touch stone. Everything goes quiet. And ten feet ahead, the Storm Sword waits.
“That’s it,” I say, because what else are you supposed to say when you’re standing in front of a celestial weapon that was forged for you, and the majority of it is buried in a slab of rock as if it’s Excalibur waiting for King Arthur to free it from its stony prison?
“That’s it.” Logan’s arm loosens around my waist, and I feel every inch of distance as he steps back.
“Cool.” My eyes are locked on the hilt, and I swallow, since this feels like the moment, and if I mess it up, I don’t know if Logan’s magic can give us a do-over. “I guess I’ll just… go get it then.”
“If you can drain a drakon and survive five time loops, you can pull a sword from a rock,” he says with the flat certainty he uses for chess moves and escape routes, and the knots in my chest loosen, because Logan doesn’t say things he hasn’t already calculated to be true. “You’ve got this.”
I close the distance between us before I realize what I’m doing. My hands find his chest, his hands find my waist, and when I kiss him, his fire floods through the points of contact. My electricity answers, and the silver arcs jumping between our mouths make both of us shudder.
When I pull back, his eyes are soft in a way that makes my chest ache.
“For luck,” I explain with a shrug, but it’s so much more than that, more than I can ever put into words. It’s thank you and I love you and don’t you dare leave me all at once, and none of those things fit into the moment before I pull a goddess’s sword out of a rock.
“You don’t need luck,” he says, but his hands stay on my waist for an extra second before he lets go. “Now, go get your sword.”
