Page 115 of Reaper and Ruin
But we couldn’t just leave these kids here either.
I smiled at Will. “She’s okay…she just…”
I had no idea how to explain to a child what Violet had just done.
X bent to murmur in my ear, “You’re really wishing you’d let me google it right now, aren’t you?”
He wasn’t wrong.
Ari’s big eyes took in every inch of Violet’s blood-spattered body. “She’s a super hero too, isn’t she? That’s why she killed the bad guys?”
Violet flinched, but the girl’s question had gotten through. She knelt beside me, so she was at their eye height. “Is that what these people were to you? Bad guys?”
Ari’s eyes darkened. “Yes.”
Will picked up her hand, facing off against us in a way that made me think it wasn’t the first time the two of them had only had each other.
Violet’s voice trembled, and she pointed to Travis, dead on the floor. “Is he your father?”
Will shook his head. “No. He is.” He pointed at the dead body on the couch.
Ari sniffed, but she wasn’t crying. She just stared down at Travis’s body on the floor. “We thought he was going to be a superhero too…but…”
My jaw clenched. “But he wasn’t a good guy either, was he?”
Will and Ari both shook their heads, but it was Will who spoke. “We hid upstairs when he was here. He was mean. He did bad things…”
“That was smart of you,” Violet told him gently. “To hide.”
Ari’s eyes had suddenly lost all of their innocence. She stared down at Travis’s dead body, then she leaned down, so her face was mere inches from his.
She screamed.
She screamed her little lungs out, inches from his dead, unseeing eyes. Then did the same to both of her parents.
None of us moved to stop her or silence her.
When she finally looked up, tears ran down her cheeks. But when Violet opened her arms, Ari walked right into them without hesitation.
She crumpled into Violet’s embrace and let the tears come, her sobs mixing with Violet’s as the two of them cried together, the bodies of their shared enemies dead around them.
We didn’t ask if they wanted to come with us. When Violet scooped up Ari and carried her out the door, Will followed without hesitation. Violet’s free hand fell to the back of his head, keeping him by her side.
Violet Garrisen might have been someone’s monster tonight.
But just like that, she’d also become someone’s hero.
In the darkness, the six of us piled into my five-seater car, the two kids squished into the middle back seat between X and Violet. X made them play I Spy the entire way back to my place, and I parked the car in the driveway to excited shouts of “Traffic lights! Street sign! Rat!” and “You didn’t see a rat! That doesn’t count!”
Rat was the only one that had actually started with R, which was the letter X had given them.
We all got out of the car, shushing the kids, trying not to wake my entire neighborhood since it was the middle of the night, and we didn’t need any extra eyes watching us.
Once we were inside, I went about doing all the things that needed doing. “Right. Everyone needs a shower. And food.”
“I don’t want a shower,” Ari said quickly.
Levi’s eyes flashed at her response. “I’m going to go back there and kill those motherfuckers all over again.”
