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His body arced off the ground.

Still lifeless. Still pale.

“Again,” Roman gritted out. There was a note of hope in the command.

Shay drew another deep breath. Exhaled. Flattened her palms over his torso once more as rain drummed all around them.

Another surge of lightning flowed through him. Again, his body arced.

“Now,” she told Roman.

He resumed chest compressions. Counted thirty before pinching Pax’s nose shut and breathing into his mouth.

They continued like that, Selkie and Shadowmaster alternating between shocks and chest compressions, both of them quietly breaking as Pax remained still. Dead. Sayagul was curled up in an anxious ball between the boy’s limp knees, her slitted eyes shining. She was so silent—this whole time, she had been nothing but silent. Already heartbroken. Already grieving.

Roman cried, “I can’t handle this?—”

“One more time,” Shay insisted, even as her heart cracked into two jagged halves. “We’re not giving up.” Like hell they would ever give up on this boy.

She shocked him again?—

And just like that, Pax came back to life.

He let out a gasp, lurching up to a sitting position.

Roman sobbed and gathered the kid into his arms, Sayagul scrambling up to wiggle between them.

“It’s okay,” Roman was saying, hugging a shocked and gasping Paxton tightly, the dragon squished flat between them but utterly happy to be there. “It’s okay, Pax, I got you. You’re home.”

His heart was beating properly and he was breathing and he was indeed home.

Roman, still holding Pax, turned his head, his eyes meeting Shay’s. “Thank you,” he mouthed, hugging his brother tightly, his fingers curling in Pax’s muddy jacket.

Sayagul echoed her person’s thanks with a whisper of her own, the dragon peering up at Shay with eyes filled with gratitude.

Shay had just begun to respond when she felt it—the warning signs of a surge in magic. The same signs she’d spent her whole life running from. Her whole life taking medication to avoid.

With a panicked gasp, she staggered to her feet and hurried off—away from the highway. Away from Roman and Paxton and Sayagul as her body and blood and aura sizzled. Turning her into something wild. An untameable force of nature. Like she was not a woman at all, but a bundle of live wires.

A living storm.

A cry of pain broke out of her. Above their heads, the sky echoed her call—shattering like glass. Pale lightning forked through the bloated clouds, illuminating the stretch of highway in an eerie blue glow. The rain fell ever harder.

And Shay crashed to her knees.

She could scarcely breathe. Her blood felt like it was on fire. Her muscles and even her brain, her skull pulsing as if there were electric currents flowing through the bone, threatening to crack it open like an egg. Lightning wove between her teeth, making her gums bleed andsting?—

“Shay?” Roman called. He got to his feet?—

“I’m fine,” she gasped. But she turned top-heavy, tipping forward without warning. She planted her hands on the ground, fingers curling in the soaked dirt. “Stay away. Please, just—” She swallowed bile, the muscles all throughout her body twitching, mud soaking through the knees of her bodysuit. “Please stay away,” she rasped. Her nose began to bleed, red dripping off the tip. “I don’t want to hurt you. Either of you.”

Roman listened. Respected her wishes and stayed put.

Shay remained like that for several minutes. Kneeling in the damp earth that slurped up every last drop of her shed blood. Vehicles sped by on the highway, moving so quickly their passing was like a scream that further fried her nerves. She could sense Roman, Paxton, and Sayagul silently observing her.

Slowly, mercifully, the twitching in her muscles began to subside, and so did the nosebleed. The black that had engulfed her vision faded, pupils shrinking back to their normal size.

Safe. She was safe. Fine.