It wasn’t the choir-singing, romantic reunion I imagined, but I also understood. “My eyes…”
“That’s not a good enough reason for how I acted.”
“It’s not that big of a deal, Aiden, but I forgive you.”
Aiden stared at me a moment longer and then sat back. His gaze drifted over my face and then to the sheared locks. I wanted to hide. “Come here,” he said gently.
The coldness seeped into my chest, and I stayed in place, but the words burst out of me as if my mouth had been hijacked by inner Alex. “I look like Frankenstein.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I look like Frankenstein with a beauty-school-dropout haircut.”
Our eyes locked again. “You’ve never been more beautiful to me than you are right now.”
“You need your eyes checked.”
He smiled a little. “And you need your head examined.”
I bit down on my lip.
“Come here,” he said again, raising his hand.
This time, I didn’t think about the numbness and the coldness in my chest. I pushed past them and forced my legs forward. In three uneven steps, my fingers curled around his.
Aiden tugged me into his lap, fitting me against his chest so I could hear his heart thunder in his chest. His arms swept around me, holding me in place. A breath shuddered through him, and gods, I loved it when he held me like this.
His lips brushed my forehead. “Agapi mou.”
I smiled against his chest, and in the dark, I could almost pretend that everything was normal. And in that moment, I needed that. I really did.
Just as the sun began to crest the horizon, thousands of students, hundreds of staff members, and those who had sought refuge converged on the cemetery that rested beyond the dorms, nestled against the fortress-like wall surrounding the back of the Covenant.
The cemetery was a lot like the one on Deity Island. Statues of the gods oversaw the massive mausoleums and graves, and hyacinths bloomed year-round. To me, those flowers had always served as a twisted reminder of what could happen if you were favored by a god.
I wondered if there’d be a flower named after me one day. Alexandrias had a nice ring to it. Hopefully they would be beautiful, like a dense spike of vibrant red flowers, and not look like something you’d find growing up from a crack in the pavement.
In death, a half and a pure were treated as equals, and like my mom had once said, it was the only time the two races would rest side by side. But things were still segregated amongst the living, even when there was no greater time than now for halfs and pures to come together as one.
Pures took center stage, situated in front of the funeral pyres. It didn’t seem to matter that only one of the linen-wrapped bodies had belonged to a pure, and the other three bodies belonged to halfs. Ritual and law decreed that pures got first-row seating, and so they did. Behind the pure-blooded Council members, students, pure Guards and Sentinels, and civilians, stood the half-bloods. I knew they could barely see the pyres or hear the memorial speech being given by Diana and another Head Minister.
Our group stood off to the left of the masses, there but separate. We had followed the somber procession through the campus just before dawn, and the eight of us had moved as a collective group to the side, as if we all agreed without words that we would be a part of this but would not separate into the class structure.
One would think most of the eyes would be faced forward at a funeral, but they weren’t. A lot of people stared at our group, namely Aiden and me. Some of the stares were openly hostile. Others looked disgusted. Those looks came from the pures. The halfs just seemed shocked and awed.
Aiden’s hand tightened around mine.
I glanced up at him, and he gave me a faint smile. There was no way he didn’t know half the congregation was staring at us, but he held onto my hand. I think he knew I needed that connection.
It was funny how things were so different. Before everything had happened, whenever Seth was around large groups of halfs, he got stared at in wonder.
I got stared at because I was holding hands with a pure-blood. How messed up was that?
Looking over the crowd, I caught the eye of a pure-blooded student. Pures looked just like halfs, but all of us had this gods-given, wonky ability of sensing the difference between the two. He stared at us like he wanted to rip my hand out of Aiden’s and then take a day’s worth of time to explain why we shouldn’t be holding hands.
My eyes narrowed on him as I raised my free hand and scratched the bridge of my nose…with my middle finger.
The pure’s head whipped forward. Back in the day, I probably would’ve been beaten for that, but I was the Apollyon, so I doubted he’d go tattle. And honestly, there were much bigger problems than a half and a pure being naughty.
Tightening my grip on Aiden’s hand, I forced my gaze to the pyres. The words spoken were in ancient Greek, and for one of the first times in my life, it didn’t translate into “wha-wha-wha.” I understood the language, and the words were powerful and moving, prayers and accolades truly fit for those who’d died by Ares’ hand, but there was something missing. Not that Diana or the other minister was doing anything wrong. I didn’t understand it at first, but then I got it.
What was missing…it was inside me.
The words spoken meant something, and I felt the somber pall hanging over the campus. As the torches were placed along the foot of the pyres, I even thought about Lea and how she deserved this kind of burial, not a hastily dug grave out in the middle of nowhere. My chest ached for her and all those who were being mourned.
I mourned.
But while I felt these things, I really didn’t feel them. The sharp pang of grief, a feeling I’d become well familiar with over the past year, was numbed. When the orangey flames licked into the air and covered the bodies like blankets, I didn’t turn away like I always did. The finality of it was muted. There was this ball of coldness deep in my chest, sharp shards of ice in my veins, and every so often fear, spiked like the flames.
Fear and pain were things I did feel—they were real, and tangible enough that I could taste them. Everything else was dulled, like I was disconnected and detached from the rest of the human scale of emotions, and I didn’t understand why.
Realizing this caused that very fear to skyrocket, bringing along a nice little dose of anxiety, and it figured that, since fear and apprehension were like two peas in a messed-up pod, it made sense that if I felt one, I’d feel the other.
My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and my palms were sweaty by the time the funeral was over and the sun was directly overhead. The crowd started to move back toward the campus. There’d be a feast in the memory of those who were lost, and most of group was attending it. Marcus had left to join Diana. Solos was chatting it up with Val, and Luke and Deacon were walking ahead with Olivia.
Air sawed in and out of my lungs at an alarming rate, and I only became aware of how slowly we were walking because there was a good distance between us and the crowd ahead.
The cord was spazzing out. Maybe it was reaction to my anxiety levels or something, but sights and sounds were amplified. The calls of the birds were shrill. Leaves rustled like a thousand papers crinkling. The sun was too bright, conversation from the mass of people too loud. Gods, the pressure came out of nowhere, clamping down on my chest—holy crap, it was hard to breathe—like someone had put vise grips on me. A sharp, hot tingle swept up my spine and spread along my head.
There was something definitely wrong with me, and it wasn’t of the panic attack variety. Running through my head on repeat was one thought: why couldn’t I really feel anything other than this? Where was the grief? Why did my chest feel empty and cold unless I was angry or scared? But last night, when I’d been in Aiden’s arms, the numbness hadn’t felt so bad, like the lid had been unscrewed just a bit more. And I was normally a pretty emotional person. In any given day, I experienced a hundred different things like I was trying ice cream flavors.