Chapter 35 Whip
WHIP
“Well, shit.” X shoved his hands on his hips and stared down at the two children. “Guess I’ll go google ‘how to explain murder to minors.’”
I shot him a look, and he pressed his lips together but didn’t make a move toward the kids.
Levi was so frozen it was like his feet were cemented to the floor. “What the fuck do we do now?”
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?
Violet stood in the middle of the carnage, soaked in blood and shaking, her hand still twitching like it missed the weight of the knife she’d just used to carve open the man who used to be her brother.
She stared up at me helplessly. “I didn’t… What do we…?”
All five of them seemed to be waiting on me for answers. The two kids included.
It had been years since I’d had anything to do with a child.
I’d actively avoided them after I’d lost mine, the hurt of seeing other dads with their kids too much for my broken heart to bear.
Even now, my stomach rolled at the sight of the boy and girl, who were much too close to the ages my children had been when they’d died.
But where my kids had been blond and blue-eyed, these two were dark-haired with the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen.
I found myself down on my knees in front of them, using a voice I hadn’t used since I’d gotten in a car with my family. and I’d been the only one to walk away from it.
“Hi.” My voice cracked, and I had to swallow hard. “My name is Wyatt. Sometimes people call me Whip though. What are your names?”
They were dirty, hair matted and unbrushed. Despite the late hour, they didn’t wear pajamas. They both had on oversized T-shirts that fell around their knees, and grimy sweatpants that clearly hadn’t been washed in a very long time.
I suspected the kids probably didn’t smell very good, but it was hard to tell with the stench of rotting bodies and blood in the air so thick that it drowned out everything else.
They were roughly the same height, and when they didn’t offer their names, I tried a different question. “Are you guys twins?”
The boy nodded.
I smiled at him. “Let me guess. You’re the oldest, right?”
The girl shook her head sharply. “I’m older! By two minutes!”
I widened my eyes like that was quite the feat. “Wow. You were faster than him, huh?”
The boy frowned at me. “But she’s not faster anymore! I can beat her in a running race.”
“Only if you cheat!” she shot back at him.
My heart squeezed at their bickering. It took me right back to being in that little house with my family around me, the scent of coffee in the air, my wife humming along with the radio playing in the kitchen, the kids running around our feet, arguing with each other while they got ready for school, and I got dressed for work.
Those were the things I’d missed most.
The silence in my house had been deafening ever since.
“You know who else is really fast?” I pointed at X. “His name is Knox.”
The kids both peered up at him. The boy cocked his head to one side. “I could beat you.”
X looked him up and down. “I dunno, kid. Your legs are pretty short.” He sat himself down on the edge of an armchair, so he was more eye height with the boy. “Want to know a secret? These guys don’t call me Knox. They call me X.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “Are you a superhero? Like X-Men? Is that why you’re fast and you have a special name?”
Levi snorted.
X shot him a glare then turned back to the kids. “You know what? I kind of am a superhero.”
“Explains your love of tight pants,” Levi muttered.
“Hey!” X scowled at him. “I wore Hendrix’s suit like, two times! It’s not my fault he has chicken legs and I work out!”
I squeezed my eyes shut, wondering if there would ever be a time in my life where things weren’t chaos.
But then I would take X and Levi bickering any day over the silence in my house.
I tried again to get the kids’ names. “So my superhero name is Whip, he’s X. That big guy over there with the drawing on his face? His superhero name is Reaper. And this beautiful lady here is—”
“Omelet,” X filled in.
The kids both squinted at him.
“Violetta,” I corrected. “But you can call her Violet.”
They both seemed less confused by that.
A tiny bit of the tension in the boy’s shoulders dropped away, despite the fact we were still standing in the middle of a murder scene. “Her name is Arianna, but I call her Ari.”
I held my hand out to her. “Nice to meet you, Arianna. Can I call you Ari too?”
She looked a little hesitant but took my fingers and nodded. “He’s Will.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Short for William?”
He nodded.
I grinned at him. “So we all have superhero names. That’s pretty cool.”
The little boy kept glancing over at Violet, and then back to me. “Is she okay?” he whispered.
I glanced up at Violet. She hadn’t moved. It was clear to me she was in shock, and we needed to get her out of here so Grayson could check her over.
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.”
He would have to get behind me.
Violet squeezed her fingers. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But I know that Whip has a nice shower here and the bathroom door has a lock on it. You can go in there and you will be absolutely safe, and nobody else will come in.”
Her voice was small when she said, “Will you stand at the door and make sure?”
“Of course I will.”
Ari nodded, but then she looked Violet up and down and grimaced. “Maybe you should go first though. You’ve got that bad guy’s blood all over you.”
Violet glanced down at herself in surprise, like in caring for the kids and keeping them distracted, she’d almost forgotten about the state she was in herself. She forced a laugh, like it was no big deal. “You’re right. I’ll go first.”
Ari nodded fiercely. “I’ll stand at the door and protect you.”
I could practically see Violet’s heart melting. But she knelt so she was at Ari’s eye height and said seriously, “You don’t need to protect me, sweet girl. There’s nothing here to be afraid of. You see all these men? Including your brother? They’re the good guys.”
I wasn’t sure she was one-hundred-percent convinced, but then X, with his head in the back of one of my cupboards, let out a shout of glee. “Pop-Tarts! I knew I left some here that day we tortured—”
I coughed loudly.
X, for once in his life, got the subtlety. He grinned apologetically and waved the box of sugary treats in front of the kids’ faces. “Who wants one?”
Will stared at the box with clear hunger in his eyes but also a healthy amount of distrust. “What do we have to do to get one?”
I frowned. “What do you have to…”
It dawned on me that someone had forced them to do things in order to be given food. My fingers clenched into fists. I looked to Levi, knowing I needed someone to ground me before I flew out the doors and resurrected the dead, just so I could abuse them the way they’d abused these kids. “I can’t—”