“Not when the bulb is broken.” His elbow was on the windowsill and his head was in his cupped hand. The setting sun became flashes on him as the girders holding the bridge arched up. “Maybe by dying I can be fixed,” he said over the rumble of a passing truck. “Maybe I can do some good when I’m dead. I’m not good for anything alive.”

I swallowed hard. He wouldn’t do anything after he died, unless it met his needs.

“It’s going to be okay,” Peter said. “I’m not scared of death. I’m scared of dying. Not dying, but how I’m going to die.” He laughed, but it was tinged with bitterness. “DeLavine told me that being born and dying are the only two things we do perfectly. There’s a hundred percent success rate. I can’t do it wrong.”

“That sounds funny coming from a dead man,” I said, my breath catching when a big truck went past, shaking the grate we were on. This was wrong. This was so wrong.

Peter pulled his elbow from the window and looked at me. “He said how I feel when I die is the one thing I have control over. I can be afraid, or I can go boldly. I want to do it bravely—even if it hurts. I’m tired of hurting, but I can take a little more.”

I was starting to shake, though the air from the setting sun coming in was warm and my window was down. His soul would be gone forever. The spark of creativity and compassion—gone.

“Can … can I ask you something?” I ventured. The oncoming traffic had grown thin, and I prayed that they hadn’t shut down the southbound lane for some reason. It was probably just Nick driving slow so we would meet somewhere in the middle as planned.

“What?”

His voice was tired and weary, and the sound of lost hope in it knotted my stomach tighter. “When Ivy bit me,” I said, darting a glance at him, “some of my aura went to her. She was taking my aura along with my blood. Not my soul, just my aura. The virus needs blood to stay active, but is it more than that?”

His expression was unreadable, and I rushed forward with the rest of it while I still had time. “Maybe the mind needs an aura to protect it,” I said. “Maybe the still-living mind needs the illusion of a soul about it, or it will try to get the body to kill itself so that the soul, the mind, and the body will be back in balance.”

Peter looked at me from Nick’s face, and I saw him for what he was: a frightened man who was stepping into a new world with no safety net, both extremely powerful and tragically fragile, reliant upon someone else to keep his mind and body together after his soul was gone.

He didn’t say anything, telling me I was right. My breath quickened and I licked my lips. Vampires take auras as their own to fool their mind that a soul still bathed it. It would explain why Ivy’s father risked his own death to provide her mother with his blood and his alone. He bathed her mind in his aura, his soul, in the hopes that she would remember what love was. And perhaps, in the instant of the act, she did.