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“You.” The word comes out before I can stop it, and heat floods my face that has nothing to do with his thermal output. “I care about you, and what the Geryon said to you, and the fact that you suddenly have telekinetic control over your weapons. So put the swords away and talk to me.”

The amber in his eyes retreats another fraction, green filling in. His pulse slows under my fingers, one beat at a time, and the swords turn from white-gold to ordinary steel.

Only then do I let my hand fall from his arm, slow and casual, and press my throbbing palm flat against my thigh where he can’t see the skin.

He slides his swords into the double sheath at his back with a motion so practiced it barely requires him to move. But his hands are shaking when they come back to his sides, and that’s what makes my chest ache.

“I’m not going to Pine Valley,” I say, able to breathe again for the first time since those black flames erupted in the center of the deck. “Logan’s a Revenant, and he tried to kill me. Jade covered up Oliver’s murder and lied to my face for two weeks. Whatever they’re planning, they can plan it without me.”

“Without us.” Kieran steps forward, and the space between us is small enough that his chest almost touches mine. “I’m staying with you.”

The barrier crackles behind us, black fire and silver lightning, and I don’t care what’s going on inside it. Because Oliver’s dead. My best friend betrayed me. The only person I trust on this ship is in front of me, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to let him lose himself to whatever made his blades glow gold and his eyes burn amber.

His hand finds the side of my face, and his palm sears my cheek. A gasp starts up my throat, but I turn it into a slow exhale, leaning into his hand instead of away.

My eyes close. Kieran’s temperature, his pulse rate, and the thermal gradient between his skin and mine blur together until they’re meaningless data my brain can’t file. Then I open my eyes, reach up, and place my palms against his chest, leaning toward him as if he’s gravity and I’m being pulled into his orbit.

But his skin is getting hotter, the searing against my cheek sharpening into a sting that spreads through my jaw and down my neck. My palms are burning where they’re pressed against his chest, the skin from his forearm meeting fresh heat, and my breath thins as I fight to stay where I am.

Needing something to hold onto, I count through it. One second. Two. My eyes are watering, but I hold my body still through sheer willpower while white-hot pain scorches my hands, because pulling away from Kieran is a message I refuse to send.

Three seconds. Four.

My legs are shaking.

I can’t.

“Stop.” I pull back, cradling my hands against my stomach, and Kieran goes still, his expression hardening. “We need to talk about what the Geryon told you.”

“No,” he says, amber light seeping into his eyes again. “I need to put a blade through the Revenant on the other side of that wall. I’ll make sure to get his heart this time.”

“Putting a blade through Logan’s heart isn’t going to fix what’s happening to you.”

“Nothing’s happening to me.”

“Your blades unsheathed themselves and orbited your body,” I snap. “Your eyes were blazing amber. That’s not nothing. That’s new, and it started after the Geryon told you who your father is. If you think killing Logan is more important than figuring out what’s happening to your body, then the war-blood is already making your decisions for you.”

His hands curl at his sides, and the space between us goes so hot that my next breath burns on the way down. My eyes water from the scorched air, but I blink the sting away, holding his gaze like the heat is nothing.

“Don’t tell me what’s making my decisions,” he finally says, so low I almost can’t hear it.

“Then talk to me and tell me yourself.” I hold my ground, even though his heat’s pressing against my burned palms like an open oven door, every nerve in my hands screaming at me to step back. “We both heard the Geryon. He said your war-blood will demand its due. He said the hunger you feel now will seem mild compared to what’s coming next, and that you’ll be forced to choose between the man you are and the demigod you were born to be.”

His thermal output spikes, the air going so thick and scorching that my body overrides me, stepping back before I can stop it.

“I didn’t ask for a prophecy,” he says. “I didn’t ask for a divine father. I didn’t ask for war-blood, or a fate-thread, or any of it.”

“I know.”

“I spent my entire life believing that steel gives me more strength than magic.” His hand goes to the handle of his dagger, its blade glowing through the sheath as he pulls it free. “Steel Before Spells. I practiced every day for hours, until the movements were so deep in my body that I could do them half-asleep.” He turns the blade slowly, and the glow pulses in time with his heartbeat. “When those vampires came with their magic-dampening artifacts and killed every witch around me, I fought back. Because I’d put in the years that nobody else had, and the blade answered when their fire couldn’t.”

My chest tightens. He told me about the vampires while my fingers traced the tally marks on his ribs in the moonlit spring, and his body shook against mine. He spent three months hunting the rest of their clan with nothing but steel. And when he waited for my judgment, I traced every mark and told him it didn’t make him a monster.

I still believe that. I always will.

“Now a cosmic judge tells me my father is the god of war, which means the steel was never answering me because I earned it. It was answering magic I didn’t know I had,” he continues, and I’m not sure if the gold light in his eyes is from the weapon, or if it’s from him. “For years, I’ve told every student the same thing—your blade is earned. You put in the hours, and the steel answers. Turns out I was making them a promise their bodies can’t keep, because none of them have a god’s blood making the steel sing for them like I do.”

“That’s not true,” I say, steady and sure, because this is a logic problem, and I can solve logic problems. “The war-blood might explain why weapons feel natural in your hands, but it doesn’t explain the technique you built around that instinct, or the drills you designed, or the philosophy you teach. It doesn’t explain why you made me repeat the same disarm forty times in a row, even after I told you I understood the mechanics on the third try. Because you knew the difference between my brain learning a technique and my body learning it, and you wouldn’t let me stop until my muscles knew what to do without my head getting in the way.”