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“We won.” Ruby’s hand lands on my shoulder. “Ambrogio’s dead. The Blood Coven is gone. Selene and Endymion are reunited, and the world is ready to heal after the apocalypse that nearly destroyed us all.”

Amber releases a breath and tips her head back to the sun, the Solar Scepter resting against her shoulder. She’s grinning, even though her golden skin is streaked with dirt and dried blood that wasn’t there when I first arrived on the hilltop.

Sapphire wipes the back of her hand across her forehead, smearing ash all over it. Her eyes are bright, and when she turns to me, the fierceness in them cracks into relief.

“Riven’s going to be insufferable about the fact that he killed the last member of the Blood Coven,” she says. “Especially since it was…”

She trails off, and I don’t ask more, because my electricity is screaming through the blade, my eyes moving across the scattered bodies on the field. Face after face after face, red-gold eyes staring at the sky, and my bracelet is cutting into my wrist where the sword’s hilt presses against it as I search for the one Revenant I don’t want to see in this hellish battlefield.

There are too many of them.

Please. The word starts looping through my head, aimed at Tempest, at Hecate, at anyone listening. Let him have run. Let him have escaped before the end. Let him be anywhere in the world except this field.

But pleading to the gods isn’t going to help anything. I need to get in there. I need to search.

Without a word, I set off into a run, ignoring the others as they call my name from the hilltop. My lungs are burning, my pulse is roaring in my ears, and some desperate part of me is bargaining with every step.

I’ll give the sword back. I’ll give the war back. I’ll give all of it back—just don’t let him be here.

The deeper I run, the worse the field gets. The ash is thicker here, the ground blasted into craters, and there are bodies in every direction, so many I can’t check them all. Any one of them could be him. Every step brings a new face I have to look at and pray isn’t his.

A Revenant lies face-down to my left, blond hair spread across the ash. Two more are crumpled together on my right, their limbs tangled, their red-gold eyes aimed at the sky. My electricity crackles along my arms in erratic, panicked jolts, and the sword is pulling me forward, toward the center of the field, to where the fighting was thickest and the scorch marks cut deepest into the earth.

Eventually, dark hair appears through the smoke at the center of the field. It could be any of a hundred Revenants, except my chest is already caving in, because the sword’s pull has stopped, as if I’ve reached my final destination.

I walk the last twenty feet. Running would get me there faster, and I can’t get there faster. I need these seconds. They’re the last seconds of my life where this might not be true.

Then I’m looking down, and the might-not is gone.

He’s on his back, his shirt ripped in multiple places. The chain that held the fused rings is gone. His eyes are open—a deep red-gold with flecks of copper that catch the fading sun, and they’re staring straight through me, fixed on a sky they can’t see.

No. This is wrong. His eyes are gray. Storm-gray. The gray that darkened every time my current hit his blood. The gray I watched decide to burn through time every time I died. They tore the token from him and put out the gray first, and the thing that died on this field died wearing a stranger’s eyes in his face.

He was ended twice, and I wasn’t there for either one.

The Storm Sword drops from my hand, my electricity dies, and I drop to my knees beside him. My hands find his face, and his skin is cold in the permanent way, with none of the coolness that made my electricity jump between our bodies and pull that sharp, desperate breath from his chest.

My current reaches for him anyway, the way it has since the beginning, and nothing answers. The circuit we made is open at his end, and my lightning keeps flickering against his skin, asking a question his body will never answer again.

“Logan.” My electricity flickers once at my fingertips, a weak pulse against his cold skin. “I did this. I have the sword that was built to destroy you, and I held it, and I⁠—”

“Jade.” Ruby’s boots crunch in the ash behind me. “We saved everyone. We ended the war.”

Her voice disappears into the wind, and my heart isn’t beating anymore. My blood is as dead as a Revenant’s. Because without Logan, I’m just a girl holding a sword she wishes she’d never touched, breathing scorched air she doesn’t want, winning a war she’d lose a thousand times over if it meant he’d hold me in his arms and tell me he loved me again.

I pull him into my lap, and his head lolls against my arm, heavy in a way Logan’s never been heavy. My fingers search his neck for the chain, for the rings, for anything of him left to hold, and they close on nothing.

“Come back.” I press my forehead to his, my tears falling onto his cheeks and sliding down skin that can’t feel them. “You go back. That’s what you do. Every time I die, you go back and you fix it and you save me. So go back, Logan. Go back and let me be the one who⁠—”

My voice breaks apart, because he can’t. The man who bent time whenever the world tried to take me from him is gone, his own death the one moment he can’t rewind. All those resets, all those loops, every version of every day he spent saving my life, and I couldn’t give him a single one back.

“You promised.” I say it into his cold skin, and my voice comes out small and vicious at once. “In the boat. You said you’d never let go.”

“Jade.” Ruby crouches beside me, her voice gentle. “He was already gone. After the token was removed, that wasn’t Logan anymore. What we ended on this field was just the thing wearing his face.”

Her words land in my body one at a time.

The thing. Wearing his face.