to play there.
The temperature grew uncomfortably hot.
I called off my flame. There was no enemy at present, just a prospective lover whose lips were burning enough.
My fire didn’t withdraw. It refused to depart.
It wouldn’t return to the well of powers deep within me, where it belonged.
It burned brightly and furiously, draining me.
Terror struck me.
I grasped Zak’s face with my palms and pulled away from him.
“Rosebud?” he asked.
“Zak, something is wrong,” I said. “I can’t stub out my flame.”
Panic flitted by his blue eyes, and the lust in them vanished in an instant.
“Close your eyes, Rosebud. Focus and pull the flame back to your center.”
I followed his instruction, but the flame leapt higher, lighting up my hair like a lavender Christmas tree.
“Paxton!” Zak shouted. “I need you to put out her fire!”
Paxton materialized right away. He wore a new outfit since my fire had ripped apart his leather armor. Burn marks on his jaw, neck, and arms showed that he hadn’t fully regenerated.
The Demigod of Sea conjured up icy streams and poured them down on me to douse my fire.
I glared at him, but I couldn’t do anything other than tremble in weakness in Zak’s arms.
Paxton didn’t seem concerned that I might try to fry him again.
“She used too much power breaking out of the icebox,” he said. “She hasn’t learned how to control her magic.”
“You forced her to draw that power before she was ready,” Zak roared. “I’ll fucking strangle you to death after this!”
Paxton’s current of ice couldn’t do a damn thing to my fire.
I turned incorporeal before solidifying again. I turned to a shadow in my flame, then back.
“No, no, no!” Zak shouted in panic. “Rosebud, you can’t fade off.”
“My cells are breaking down,” I said, tears flowing down my face, but my fire licked them off at once.
Never thought I’d die this way—consumed by my own flame.
The words of the ancient elemental in the tree echoed in the back chambers of my head. Such an abomination... You’re an impossible breed.
I was never supposed to exist, but somehow I’d been conceived and born into the world.
And now nature was going to correct its mistake and unmake me.
“No, Marigold! You must hang in there,” Zak cried out, slapping at my fire in an attempt to draw it to him.
The fire ignored him and kept feeding from me.
I’ve just found you. You can’t leave me,” Zak called as I faded in and out of his arms. He turned his head to Theodore and shouted with all the menace in the world. “You’re supposed to be an expert on Olympian powers. Come up with a solution, or you die.”
I collapsed against his chest when I regained my solid form for a moment.
“I want you, Zak,” I sniveled.
My magical flame sapped me, but the other flame between my thighs also consumed me, raising a carnal need in me, even though I was being unmade.
In my last moments, my need to mate with this demigod only increased.
“The problem is that her power might not come from the Olympian gods,” Theodore said in awe. “It doesn’t seem possible, but she might be beyond the Olympians.”
It no longer mattered what I was. I wouldn’t make it. I was being broken apart, cell by cell.
My ghostly form slipped through Zak’s embrace.
Out of his wits, Zak infused his lightning into me. I turned solid at the energy feed.
It wouldn’t last, though. My fire drew more energy from me than he could supply. But while I lasted, I needed to get my last words out.
“Tell Héctor, Axel, Yelena, Nat, and my old pack Jasper and Circe in the Other Academy that I said goodbye. Tell them I went out fast and I didn’t suffer. Tell them to live long and prosper.” I tried to make a gesture like Spock did from Star Trek, but my fingers turned transparent at the moment I raised my hand.
“I won’t let you die, Rosebud,” Zak said furiously as he kept pouring his lightning energy into me.
And then another energy source joined him— storm, dark and delicious. It came from the Demigod of Sea.
I didn’t want his fucking power. I would rather die—
But my body took them both in greedily, and my back arched at the satisfied sensation of the feeding.
“You’re only prolonging the inevitable, Zak,” I whispered. “I’ll drain you, too. Now let me go. There’s no need to go down with a sinking ship.”
“I’ll never let you go,” he said and kissed me.
Lightning rolled down my throat from his tongue.
Paxton sent