Page 41 of Fractured Fate

“I need to sit down somewhere quiet.”

“Text Riley and tell her to meet us in the hedge maze’s center courtyard,” Lukas said, looking at Blaire. He turned to Aiden. “Can you handle the sun?”

“Not really. It was one of the reasons I avoided the cafeteria. This heat wave is brutal.”

Blaire looked up from her phone at Aiden, tucking her long blonde hair behind her ear. “What about your dorm room? We can hang out there.”

“Works for me. I don’t have anything else going on today. I thought about borrowing Mom’s car to drive up and see Charlotte tomorrow, so I wasn’t going to do much today.”

“Charlotte?” Blaire tapped her phone, presumably texting Riley where to meet them. “Why?”

“I’m a little worried about her,” he said as he started toward the doors that led outside, the others following. “Ever since she settled up in Athens, and we returned from Europe, she’s seemed more and more stressed.” He wouldn’t tell them what she confided in him about. He didn’t know if she’d want them to know.

As soon as the heavy double doors swung open into the courtyard, he regretted not finding a quiet spot in the library to hide in. The bright sunlight was oppressive, the humidity stifling. The sound of students laughing and talking as they walked around the expansive cobblestone courtyard sounded like his eardrums were being raked over a cheese grater. Even the sounds of bubbling water from the massive tiered fountain in the center court in front of the main building made his eye twitch.

“Come on, we need to get you back inside. You look pale,” Lukas said, stepping around Aiden and descending the wide stairs, the chain on his hip swinging and clinking in a way Aiden hadn’t paid attention to before in all the years Lukas had worn one.

With the headache bringing the surrounding sounds into sharp focus, Aiden wanted to rip the chain from his best friend’s belt and toss it to the ground.

Once they reached the dorm building and took the stairs to his room, he finally relaxed. His room had the curtains pulled shut, blocking out the hot sun, and the air conditioning kept it chilly. A slice of paradise.

He set his things on his desk before collapsing on his bed against the wall and throwing an arm over his eyes. A weight settled next to him on the edge of his bed.

“If the blood doesn’t work, I’m calling a nurse,” Seth said from beside him.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

In the pause, Aiden imagined Seth turning his sharp, steel-hued gaze to Mera when she said, “He’s more than capable of assessing his own symptoms. Not everything requires medical intervention.”

Seth groused. “But what if this has to do with you being shot?”

Aiden didn’t want to think about it. Every night he had to think about it. Wake up with memories that didn’t feel like his own. How could he remember something he wasn’t alive for?

“I didn’t even think of that,” Blaire said from far away. He suspected she was sitting on the bed on the other side of the room that used to belong to Seth before he moved out. “I thought with your healing, and everything that happened, there would be no lasting effects.”

“None of us have ever come back from the dead,” Lukas said. “Not like this.”

“What do you mean by ‘like this’?”

Lukas must have been lost for words, because after a long pause, Mera took a scant breath and said, “Like you humans, we can come back from clinical death, but once we reach legal death, we can’t heal through that.”

“I thought death was death,” Seth said.

Aiden lowered his arm now that his eyes had adjusted to the room’s dimness.

Mera gave a brief shake of her head. She sat at the foot of the far bed near Blaire and Lukas with her legs crossed. Her foot swung back and forth, the metal ends of the shoelaces on her combat boots tapping lightly with the motion. “Clinical death happens when the heart stops, and legal death is when the brain stops.”

He hadn’t heard of that before but knew for certain he went beyond clinical death when a rogue put a bullet into his skull. Shuddering at the memory, he refocused on Mera, who continued to explain things to Blaire.

“—top of that, there are some injuries too severe for our healing to react to fast enough before we either bleed out or something equally severe.”

Seth shifted on the bed. “Remember what Kai said?”

The corners of Blaire’s lips turned down as she studied Seth. “About?”

“When you first joined the academy and asked about our kind, you asked questions about vampire myths and legends.”

“Oh yeah,” Blaire said, a hint of embarrassment in her tone.