Sentinel

The footsteps stopped behind the bench.

“I’m not going to run off,” I said, and I wasn’t planning to.

There was a pause. “I know.”

A few seconds later, he came around the bench and sat beside me, his hands resting on his thighs. Neither of us spoke for what felt like forever. He was the one to break the silence first.

“I’m sorry for yelling at you back there.”

I choked on a laugh as I slid him a glance. “No, you’re not.”

One side of his lips tipped up, but it wasn’t a real smile that showed off those dimples. I hadn’t seen one of those since I’d woken up this afternoon. “Okay,” he conceded. “I’m not sorry for what I said, but I am sorry for raising my voice.”

“It’s okay.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that.”

I stood a little too fast, and my knees backhanded me in the form of sharp bursts of pain. “But it is okay.”

My back was to him, but I could feel the frown in his voice. “Everything is not okay, Alex. I’m pretty sure the world is coming down around us. It’s all right for things not to be okay.”

I placed one foot in front of the other as if walking a balance beam, but my equilibrium hadn’t caught up with the healing, and after three steps I could’ve easily passed as a drunk.

“It doesn’t mean you’re weak if you admit that things are pretty screwed up right now,” he continued.

I stood still. “This isn’t a very motivating speech.”

Aiden laughed dryly. “It’s not meant to be. More like a dose of reality.”

“I think I’ve had enough doses of that recently.”

He let out a heavy sigh. “You don’t have to be okay with what happened to you, Alex. No one expects that. I sure as hell don’t.”

Turning around slowly, I opened my mouth to tell him that was the last thing I wanted to talk about, but that wasn’t what came out. “If I’m not okay with that, then what am I supposed to be?”

His eyes met mine. “Angry.”

Oh, there was a whole lot of that.

“You can be upset—scared—and you can rage that it wasn’t fair, because it wasn’t. A lot of this stuff hasn’t been fair for you, but especially this. Nothing about it was right, and you’ve got to let yourself experience those emotions.”

“I am.” Kind of. Strange thing was that I felt all of those things, but it wasn’t enough. Like a cap on a bottle unscrewed just enough to let a little bit of air in.

A sad look crossed his face as he shook his head. “You’re not. And you’ve got to let it out, Alex, or it will rot you from the inside.”

My chest rose sharply. I was already rotten on the inside. “I’m trying.”

“I know.” Aiden leaned forward, his eyes never leaving mine. “I’m sorry I doubted you this morning.”

“Aiden—”

He raised a hand. “Hear me out, okay? The last thing you needed when you woke up after something like that was to have me react that way. I know that didn’t help.”

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