Gavriel stepped forward, looked down, and every muscle in his body locked.

A crater yawned beneath them, ten miles across if he was being generous with his spatial reasoning and conservative with his terror. The interior was carved into a colossal bowl of black obsidian, smooth and ancient and so impossibly deep that the bottom looked like it belonged in a different time.

Cooled lava ridges ringed the walls in concentric shelves, and the scale of the thing made him feel like a man standing on the lip of a soup bowl for the gods.

At its center sat a lake.

Black. Massive. Still as glass, except for the ice that was spider-webbing across its surface in real time, crystalline fractals racing outward from the center like the lake was freezing itself while they watched, sealing over with the slow, deliberate patience of something that wanted to be found before it finished closing.

Serena turned to him and flashed a grin. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” he answered, without hesitation, without thought, without the half-second pause that self-preservation usually demanded before agreeing to anything Serena Frostborne proposed while standing on the edge of a cliff. The matebond carried his answer before his mouth did. She felt it land, and the warmth that came back through the connection was worth the fall that was about to follow.

She grabbed his hand.

Two facts competed for dominance in Gavriel Sterling’s mind as he stared into the volcanic abyss: first, that whatever lived at the bottom of this thing was ancient, dangerous, and probably hungry. Second, that Serena’s hand was in his, and he would walk into every single one of those things smiling if she asked him to. She asked.

She sprinted straight off the rim, him next to her and they plummeted.

Volcanic wind screamed past them as the crater swallowed them whole, the obsidian walls blurring into a dark smear on either side, the black lake growing from a distant coin to a goddamn continent in the space of three heartbeats.

Gavriel’s stomach relocated to his throat and set up permanent residence, his body registering freefall with the enthusiasm of a man who had been thrown off things before and never once enjoyed the experience.

“FUCKING HELL, SERENA! I KNEW THIS WAS COMING AND I STILL—”

Serena wrapped herself around him mid-air, arms locking around his shoulders, legs around his waist, her body pressed flush against his.

A massive pink parachute burst into existence above them, transparent and glowing pink, blooming outward like a flower made of light. It caught the air instantly, their descent yanking from terminal velocity to a controlled drift in a single rippling pulse of Fae magic that snapped his spine straight and rattled his teeth.

Then his body glowed green.

The green light erupted from his skin without warning, without intention, without him doing a single conscious thing to summon it. It surrounded Serena in the same breath, wrapping around her and her pink parachute in a cocoon of emerald energy that was so much stronger than what she’d produced that the comparison felt like putting a candle next to a bonfire.

Her pink parachute dissolved. Vanished. Replaced entirely by his magic, which held them aloft with an effortless buoyancy that felt, to Gavriel, like barely flexing a muscle he’d just discovered.

The sensation was unlike anything he had ever experienced, power flowing from a reservoir so deep he couldn’t feel the bottom of it. Whatever lived inside him was vast and what he was using right now felt like skimming the surface with a fingertip. A ripple in an ocean that stretched farther than his awareness could reach.

This time, Serena’s mouth dropped open.

“That’s new,” he commented, looking at the green light wrapping both of them like a second atmosphere. “Different feeling than when you pull the gold.”

Serena blinked at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before. The woman who synthesized ancient scrolls at reading speed, who solved temple puzzles while bleeding, who maintained composure through Queen Bellatrix’s holy water, was staring at him with her mouth open and her brain visibly buffering.

The expression was so fundamentally un-Serena that Gavriel started laughing.

“You alright there, Frostborne?”

She shook her head once, rebooting. “Gav, I’m doing nothing right now.”

“You’re pulling from me.”

“I am absolutely, categorically, doing nothing. You fabricated the parachute and surrounded me with your magic on your own. You are also forcefully, and actively recharging my Fae magic—”

She stopped. Inhaled. Recalibrated.

“This is very advanced, Gav.”

Gavriel looked up at the green parachute he had apparently fabricated. Then down at Serena, who was straddling him a thousand feet above a black lake, wrapped in his magic, wearing an expression that was equal parts awe and academic indignation.

“Huh,” he said. “Neat.”

The word landed like a grenade in a library.

“Neat?”

Gavriel’s smile widened into the particular brand of devilish that preceded every terrible decision he’d ever made and most of the great ones. “Yeah. I’m quoting you there.”

“Oh, I am WELL aware,” Serena snapped, and the snap had heat in it because she had been quoted back to herself by a man she had a matebond with while parachuting from his magic above a crater, and the indignity of it was competing with the hilarity of it and losing. “But this is advanced. You are really—”

“Good looking?” Gavriel finished.

Serena laughed. The laugh broke out of her before she could catch it, bright and real and helpless, the kind of laugh that came from the gut and didn’t ask permission from the brain first. She laughed the way she only laughed around him, the way she’d laughed on the ramparts months ago when he’d lectured her about fortifications, the way she’d laughed in the temple when the water was rising and he’d told her to take her time.

The way that made him forget, every single time, that she was supposed to be his best friend’s mate.

Her forehead dropped against his shoulder, still laughing, her body shaking with it, and Gavriel held her there a thousand feet above the ground in a parachute made of magic he shouldn’t have, grinning like a man who had just discovered that the afterlife was surprisingly fun and he was in no rush to leave it.

The green light pulsed around them, steady and warm, carrying them down.