Page 44 of Wildfire

There was no time to call up the fire under his skin. All he had time to do was throw a fourth fireball at the pouncing monster, as much power behind it as he could muster at the last second.

So this was how he died.

Save the Girl, Get the Man

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

It was too early in the morning for Typhon to be strutting around campus, murdering his students—Wilder’s students. He should have eaten more of the toast. Not as fuel, maybe, but to have given them a few minutes so they could’ve missed this horror show.

But the girl. She hadn’t been lying there for minutes or hours. It’d been seconds, and he didn’t know how fast Typhon’s poison worked on mortals, but there was a chance—achance—that she might still be alive.

Before he could think too much about leaving Wilder behind, he grabbed her and rushed into the faculty building, where he dropped her on the floor, only thinking at the last second to protect her head from hitting the tiles underfoot.

Already, her breathing was shallow. When he felt for her pulse, it was so light and thready that he could hardly sense it, and it was way, way too fast.

Okay, so he could do this. Hermes wasn’t the best healer on Olympus—that was Apollo, who was pretty much the best at everything he tried—but he was up there. And it wasn’t all sewing tidy stitches. Some of it was just godly intuition, which was all Hermes had at his disposal right then.

He ran his fingertips down her forehead, across the bridge of her nose, her lips and chin and neck. He was searching for—for something he could use. He might not have magic the way that Wilder did, but hewasmagic. And damn it, he wasn’t helpless here.

When his fingers pressed over her chest, he felt the fluttering of her heart. If the poison reached it, she’d die. Since he couldn’t feel it exactly, he focused on what he thought the poison would feel like—a blight, a dark spot within her—and when he caught the image of it in her body, he pulled on it.

There was nowhere for it to go but into himself, but that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t die from Typhon’s poison, no matter how vile. He was an Olympian, for fuck’s sake.

By the time he sensed the jump in her heart, he felt absolutely fucking awful. His head was throbbing, the world spinning around him, and his stomach clenched around a sharp cramp.

With a gasp, the girl shot up, scrambling away from him.

“Hermes?” she asked, dark brown eyes wide, curly hair matted in the back from her spot on the floor.

He sent her a shaky smile. “In the flesh. What’s your name again?”

“Ameshia,” she said. Her brown lips had turned a faint shade of gray, but she was breathing and conscious, so Hermes was going to take the win.

On shaky arms, he pushed himself away from her. He knew how the poison worked for humans—they died. It seeped through their skins and attacked their organs and they died. But Hermes’s organs were impermeable, and every bit of poison in his system was trying to force its way out.

“So I need you to do me a favor,” he said, every word scraping up his dry throat. The sound of his own voice made his head throb harder.

She nodded. She must’ve felt like shit, he certainly did, but she didn’t complain or slump there in the hallway with her face against the cold floor like he wanted to. She put her mind to the task ahead. “Go to professor Ward’s office. Tell him Typhon is here outside. Then stay in there, okay?”

She nodded, scrambling to her feet to rush down the hall. And Hermes pulled himself up too. He’d left Wilder out there, and his favorite flamboyant professor could hold his own for a minute, but Hermes couldn’t just abandon him. He couldn’t stand finding Wilder with deep tears in his skin, his blood splattered across the lawn, like they’d found Marco.

Dizzy and—gods, was this what it was like when mortals felt ill?—absolutely reeling, he rushed back outside to see the burst of flame from Wilder’s hands. It was enormous, and not at all enough. Typhon would barrel through it, wrap his putrid hands around Wilder’s neck, and snap it.

The beast let out a roar when Wilder’s flames burned his flesh, but he didn’t stop. And Hermes did the only thing he could think of—he ran as fast as he could and barreled into Typhon before the monster could fall on Wilder.

They rolled across the grass, velocity the only thing that allowed Hermes to come out on top, and he could feel the seconds slipping away before Typhon overwhelmed him.

It was the exact wrong time to grin like a madman, so, of course, that was precisely what Hermes was doing. He held Typhon by the neck, poison searing through his skin and into his body, mixing with the stale ache of what he’d taken from Ameshia.

And he opened his mouth.

What he’d meant to say was, “Hey, bud.” Instead, the second he opened his lips, he vomited. He emptied the contents of his stomach—water, a bit of toast, and something golden and vital that Hermes did not want to think too closely on, right into Typhon’s face in a disgusting splatter.

“Shiiiiiiit,” Hermes groaned, just before Typhon tossed him off.

Even Gods Die

Half the student body arrived in time to see Hermes vomit on Typhon.

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