A shockwave sent us hurtling through open air. Ezra, having been nearest to Atticus at the time of impact, got the worst of it, while Leigh, farther off, only suffered a few scratches from being tossed off her feet. Since I'd been on my knees when the blast reached me, I flew only a short distance, and hit the ground rolling, my body scraping over the uneven, dilapidated street until finally jolting to stop against the side of an overturned building. Distantly, I felt bits of metal and rock shallowly pierce my flesh, chasing my same path after Atticus's explosion.
I blinked once slowly, and minutes passed in an instant. Shouting. Someone was shaking me.
"Stop," I groaned, blearily batting off the person hovering over me.
My sight adjusted to take in Leigh's tear-stained face. The laceration by her cheek and another streaking through her eyebrow mixed with her tears to create the disconcerting image of someone crying blood.
"We're almost surrounded," she said, voice cracking. She tugged me up by my arm, hugging her second close to her chest, like it was broken. "It's not safe anymore. We have to go now!"
Surrounded? For a single, dull witted moment, I wanted to ask by whom.
Then I processed the words being shouted overhead and took in the swarm of gray closing in, tightening their wide circle. Not around me and Leigh. We were incidental. They enwreathed what had once been Atticus, now Nightshade, returned as a villain in full. His worst fear realized.
He would rather be dead.
He told me so. Hearing his distorted screams beneath the roaring hurricane of power encapsulating his obscured form, I knew I couldn't follow Leigh and leave him to that miserable half-life. Feeling a pain never blunted by joy, a prisoner in his own body.
But what could I do? The kindest thing - what he would have wanted - would be to have someone put him down once for all, ending both him and the risk he posed to others.
As much as it felt like killing a part of myself, I refused to burden another with a life they didn't deserve solely to protect my own fragile emotions. The love I felt for him - and I genuinely thought it was love, the newly budding type that, given time, may have matured into the forever kind - wouldn't stay my hand from what needed to be done.
If I couldn't save Atticus Courten, I swore to find a way to end him.
He loved me enough to embrace his own eternal torment without a hope for reprieve, and I loved him enough to break my own heart.
"Don't kill him! Capture only!"
I tracked the voice to the Constable, who accumulated a new set of protectors to replace the incapacitated, not counting for Fate, the only one of the previous retinue to return to the Constable's side unscathed. Beneath his cowl, Fate alone appeared largely indifferent to the threat in front of him, and ambivalent to his duty as a guard, instead scanning his surroundings in a long sweep. Searching out villains they'd missed, perhaps?
No. That couldn't be it. Any escapee from the caved in prison that remained alive and had avoided recaptured would be incredibly foolish to stick around the epicenter of gathered Supers. Only after thinking it, I realized that the same narrow definition applied perfectly to me. Escaped, undetained.
Foolish for not running.
I let Leigh drag me to my feet before murmuring, "I'm staying." And although our earlier whimsy seemed criminally out of place, like laughter at a funeral, I contorted my lips into a thin smile. "I expect you to find a way to break me out of prison when this is over, presuming they don't get you on that arrest warrant first."
YOU ARE READING
Super•Villainous
Fantasy"I've been looking for you." There was an unexpected rasp to his voice, a hint of desperation. He stretched out one hand, as if to brush it across my cheek, or perhaps wrap it around my throat. Oddly enough, I didn't know which option frightened me...
