...Maybe Mom was right and I needed to start sorting out my priorities for the future rather than in that moment.
A high, broken-hearted cry shattered the quiet, busy work. Nate hung his head and let Izzy slide to the ground, limp and pale. Lexi threw herself atop her, sobbing at the top of her lungs. For Adam's part, he just looked ashen. Exhausted, broken, and wanting nothing more than food and a long, hard sleep, I went over to my boyfriend and slid my arms around him.
He did the same to me. There were tears in his eyes but they didn't quite make it down to his chin. Instead, he swallowed twice, hard, and carefully moved me away from the scene. We went back to the chair where he pulled me onto his lap and held me. "Can you stand it if we just sit here for a little while?"
"I'll do whatever you need me to," I whispered, stroking his hair.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Nate drew Lexi into his arms. She buried her head against him but I didn't feel any flicker of jealousy. They'd been close for decades. Of course he would comfort her at such a time. Anyone would.
Adam tucked his head on top of mine and looked anywhere but where Nate was. It was always a possibility, especially during a fight. In some cases, it was just a matter of time.
But as far as I knew, the Reeds hadn't lost a superhero in the Alliance for a long, long time.
Neither had the Clarks.
I wasn't really the religious sort, but I heard Adam whispering a little prayer for his sister. When he finished, I kissed him on the forehead.
As far as I knew, there was no way to bring someone back from the dead.
But I wished there was.
Chapter 19
In the end, we lost everyone from Thomaston except my cousin and we’d lost Isabella from the Yarborough team. I suppose you should count Scribe, too, but I didn't know if he counted as one of us anymore.
I didn't think he did.
The total loss of life to civilians was incalculable. The superheroes that had been assigned to Yarborough were a mixed lot of dead, traumatized, and disappeared. In all honesty, we simply never found some of them. And others? ...Some we didn't look for. Those who were close to retirement or had expressed interest in changing their lives got off with it.
Usually, they'd have had to pay some little fee to get out of their contract. With everything up in the air, we let them go. And I just hoped that their bodies weren't left somewhere unpleasant; that they were actually alive and thriving somewhere else. We just didn't have the resources to hunt everyone down and try to sort them out, and it hurt to admit to that.
We planned a quiet, peaceful funeral for Isabella. Only a handful of her birds had survived what Scribe had done, but those that had were taken in by the rest of us. It was the least we could do for her. We moved into a house in the suburbs, adopted a couple of wayward cars that no longer had owners for whatever reason, and tried to settle in to a different life with too many choices.
The day of the funeral was nearly two weeks later. The funeral homes were so jam-packed with mourners that we had to wait our turn, but the morticians did excellent work with her. She was given full honors, placed in the Hall that we'd walked through when I returned from prison, and Adam was spared speaking for his dead sister. Nate and I sat on either of his sides during the dedication by Lexi, who broke down toward the end.
She came back to sit with us a little while later. We did what we could to comfort her, but there was little we could do. She thanked us for what we did, at least. Then sighed and looked up at us as the rest of the funeral went down. "I'm putting in for a transfer to Thomaston."
"You do what's right for you, Lexi," Nishelle said. "You can always come home if you want to. And we're always just one phone call away."
Lexi bowed her head at that and hid her face from the world as she cried for her dead lover, our dead friend. Because in those final moments, Izzy had given us the chance to save the one person who mattered the most to her. She'd given me back my boyfriend, and, after so many years of trying, finally saved her brother.
In the end, I didn't have anything to say to Isabella. We'd never been close, but I appreciated her. I understood her a little better, in death. And maybe I'd realized we weren't quite so different after all.
I did what I could for Adam, but he was mostly stony silence. He'd gone to pieces when he'd killed Allison, but this? He understood the death of his sister in the line of action. It hurt
