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Procrastinating this very important task isn’t doing either of us any favors, so, I turn toward the sword and move toward it. The pull in my chest is calm and steady, which is honestly making me more nervous than the desperate yanking from earlier. Because I can understand desperate. Calm and patient, on the other hand, feels like the sword knows what’s coming and I don’t.

Which, honestly, fair.

Silver arcs of electricity trail off my fingertips as I walk, drifting toward the hilt in slow threads. The light inside the stone flickers faster with every step I take, and the moment I’m in front of the rock, I stop and stare at it.

The stone comes up to just below my waist. The blade is buried so deep that only the silver hilt and crossguard are visible, electricity dancing across the metal in tiny, persistent arcs that look exactly like mine.

I start to reach for it, then look over my shoulder at Logan.

He’s standing where I left him, his hands at his sides, his eyes on me. The glow from the sword is lighting up his face in silver-white, and he gives me a small nod that says go ahead and I’m here and I’m not going anywhere all at the same time.

I turn back to the sword. Electricity jumps from my fingertips to the metal in bright, eager arcs, and my heart is pounding, because this is it. This is the moment I’ve been walking toward since T put lightning in my body and changed my life forever.

So, I wrap my fingers around the hilt, and every volt of electricity from the sword floods my body so fast that I don’t have time to scream before silver-white swallows everything.

34

JADE

Grass presses soft under my boots instead of stone. The sun is warm on my face, and the air filling my lungs is dry and clean.

I’m on a hilltop, and the sword is in my hand, a full blade of silver-white metal that stretches longer than my arm. My electricity is flowing through it in smooth, controlled arcs, and the current pouring through the metal is so clean and right that I can’t remember a time when this sword wasn’t mine.

Suddenly, three women are standing beside me.

Ruby’s the closest, her turquoise eyes bright in the sunlight, the Lunar Crescent gripped in her left hand with the ease of someone who’s carried it for years. She looks exactly like she did when I left Pine Valley, minus the expression on her face. Because in Pine Valley, Ruby smiled at me over leftover pizza and asked me questions about my lightning with the enthusiasm of a girl who’d been waiting to meet me her whole life.

Here, her jaw is set, her shoulders are squared, and the crescent bow is already half-raised.

“Took you long enough.” Her grin is quick and warm, despite the battle-ready stance. “I was starting to think Tempest picked a champion who couldn’t find her own sword.”

“No problems there.” I hold up the blade, and silver electricity races along the metal in a clean arc that makes Ruby’s grin widen. “It was just buried under an electrified lake in Venezuela, inside a rock that was guarded by a lightning-eating sea serpent. You know, a totally normal hiding place for a celestial sword.”

Ruby bumps her shoulder against mine, and my electricity sparks against her skin. She laughs, and my chest aches with belonging.

“Amber, Sapphire.” Ruby nods toward the two women behind her. “Meet the girl who’s been keeping us all waiting.”

The woman on the left closes the distance between us in three confident strides. She has sun-warmed skin, sky-blue eyes, and a golden scepter in her right hand that’s radiating heat I can feel from several feet away.

Given that Ruby and I talked at length about the other two star touched, that’s clearly Amber, who was chosen by the sun goddess, Sunneva.

“You found your sword.” She grabs my free hand and squeezes. The warmth from her palm collides with my electricity, both of our magic sparking at the contact. “Ruby’s been pacing for weeks.”

“In my defense,” Ruby cuts in, “you paced, too.”

“I paced once. You wore a groove into your and Connor’s porch.”

The third woman is already beside us, her big blue eyes taking in everything at once. She has long, white-blonde hair with blue streaks, and the Star Disc holstered at her hip trails glitter in lazy spirals that dissolve before reaching the grass.

This is clearly Sapphire—the changeling from Maine who survived execution trials in the Winter Court, married the fae prince who was supposed to kill her, and earned a throwing weapon forged by the star goddess Celeste.

“Ruby’s been driving us crazy waiting for you,” she says, the stardust from her disc drifting toward my blade. “Riven pretends he doesn’t care, but he asked about you twice last week, which for him is basically a meltdown. He’s ready to get this whole help the world recover from the apocalypse thing over with as soon as possible so he can return to his favorite hobby of brooding around his ice palace. Well, our ice palace.” She smiles slightly, as if the ice palace is her own personal heaven.

A laugh pushes out of me, and the sound is so foreign after everything I’ve been through that my chest aches from it. Because I’m standing on a hilltop holding a celestial sword with three women who’ve been waiting for me for years, and for the first time since T touched my forehead on the plane, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Then the wind shifts, and the smell hits. Smoke and ash, thick enough to taste on my tongue.

Holding my breath, I turn toward the breeze, and the hilltop drops into a field below, where scorched earth stretches in every direction. Hundreds of bodies are scattered across the charred ground, and they’re wrong, with limbs at angles normal bodies don’t hold. And their eyes—every pair I can see from this distance—are a deep red-gold, glazed over and empty of life.