Super•Villainous

LXI

I stared without seeing, listened without hearing. Vaguely, I was aware of someone speaking to me, though I couldn't place who, their hand firm on my shoulder, another hand leaning in to press over Leigh's heart. All I could do was sit there, waiting for the earth to swallow me up, to bury us both - me and her. It felt like that was how it had always been. If she was causing trouble, a safe bet would be that I wasn't far off. That's what our teachers said, what Adrian said, what her parents reluctantly acknowledged. How right they had been to disapprove of our friendship. I had wrought unto their daughter worse consequences than they ever might have imagined.

Just as the pressure on my shoulder became an uncomfortable weight, accompanied by the sensation of painful tingling, it disappeared, and I heard Atticus's raised voice further off. Even beneath a dozen layers of disbelieving shock rendering me half-catatonic, I recognized him, could recognize him anywhere, although I couldn't bring myself to care about who his words were directed at, why he sounded the way he did, or who was coming to blows behind me.

Despite everything, I felt... funny. The weight of all I'd lost threatened to smother my once-resilient soul, but my body felt lighter than ever. Suddenly it was like I'd never inhaled a proper breath before. I preferred the struggle, a physical reflection of my grief. Somehow it made the pain more bearable.

A sputtering cough dragged me back to the present, and, just like that, I forgot all about the strange warmth bubbling beneath my skin.

"Leigh?" Her back arched in her sudden bid to breathe, as though shocked back to life from no source I could see. I wasn't about to question it. A small flame of hope lit up my soul once more. "Hospital! We need to get her to the hospital right now!"

I didn't even have the time to stand.

First came the sharp prickling in my fingers, hot needles being jabbed into my skin wherever it touched Leigh. The true pain followed, like a spear thrust through my hand and bullets to my chest. By that point, I was no stranger to pain. It was the exhaustion that caught me off guard, too sudden to be anything other than the result of someone's superpower, and even after the discomfort faded thanks to my healing, the fatigue remained.

I stiffened in place. "This doesn't feel right. It... stings." I clawed with one hand at my own freshly bleeding chest and said, "What's happening?"

Atticus whirled around wildly for the source of my newest injuries and fell upon Fate as the inevitable cause, who stood closer than anyone else. "What have you done?"

"Let's not be hasty." Ren planted himself between the two of them, arm outstretched haltingly towards Atticus. "I've been reading him this whole time and he did nothing you would be unlikely to thank him for."

"As though I should trust your word," Atticus replied, and although the words came out rigid and cool, his eyes seemed to burn. "You stood by and watched when you could have stopped the Constable before things got this far."

"I did." Ren dipped his chin curtly, the corners of his thin lips pulling down into a slight frown. "I made a bad bet. Sue me."

"Oh? And what bet was that?"

"I'd been counting on his allegiance turning earlier," Ren said, craning his neck to look at Fate. "We got there in the end, though. Eventually. I wish the circumstances hadn't needed to be so... theatrical, of course. I hadn't calculated on that girl's arrival, and then it was too late. Fate had been so close to breaking by that point, too. If she'd only showed up a minute or two later-"

"Shut. Up," I forced out when I noticed Leigh's breathing even out through the bleary film of exhaustion clouding my vision. Leaning over her, I fumbled at her wounds, and although my fingers came away wet, I encountered no torn skin. Her flesh had woven seamlessly back together, leaving no trace of Ferrus's attack on her body beyond the holes in her jacket and the still warm blood soaking into it. "Leigh?" I smacked her, marking a streak of red on her cheek from all the gore I'd been drowning in for hours. The gore never seemed to end. "Wake up!" I struck her once more. "You're fine! Stop being so dramatic! I know you're only pretending to be dead now, you awful, horrible, inconsiderate-"