Allied: A Superhero Reverse Harem Romance (The PTB Alliance Book 3), стр. 22
I picked him up and gently put him over one shoulder, sneaking out of the office as carefully as I could. I was a little too big for the door with him slung over me like that, so I had to do this weird crouch creep thing that allowed us to exit at the same time. It sucked. My quads hated me for it.
"Are you, you?" Izzy asked, tears in her eyes.
No one sat with her except for Cassie, who held her hand and looked absolutely irritable about having to do it. But my heart went out to my girlfriend and I gave her a thumbs up, a smile, and patted her cousin. "I think he overdid it a little bit. But I think I'm going to be okay. Still feel kind of shitty about how Allison went down, but I'm not drowning in sorrow anymore. Give me a minute to take him up to the infirmary, then I'll be back down here with the rest of you. And we can all go see Patterson, together."
I was met with a murmured collection of assent. I nodded to the group, tucked James in a little more carefully, and headed off to the infirmary, letting the signs guide the way.
Chapter 8
Wasn't it possible to just run off and start our own chapter of the Alliance somewhere? We could train almost anything that came along except for a Flyer or a Presto, and those weren't all that common. Hell, maybe the other Alliance locations would loan us teachers.
I wondered all of it as I walked along that dark, narrow hallway and tried to remember to breathe. Everything was going to be fine, if I held myself together and I thought things through. Over the past little while, I'd gained most of my found family back. I'd become a superhero again. My parents had more or less come to support me; at least saving me when shit really hit the fan.
We could just call Scribe's whole situation a wash and be done with it, couldn't we?
But I knew we couldn't. Deep down, we were the only ones who could really fix the situation; and that was because we were the only ones with the full story. At least, as full a story as was available at the moment. I still wasn't certain why Scribe had turned on us or if it was really Scribe turning on us to begin with. Maybe it was Allison. Maybe he'd suffered some kind of terrible injury after he'd gotten electrocuted.
Traumatic brain injuries were a hell of a thing and I sure didn't have the medical expertise to try to diagnose a man who had been through one.
"You nervous, Strikes?" Nishelle asked.
I wrapped my hand around hers. "Nah. You some kind of chicken?"
She smiled at me just like she used to so many years ago. We were all so old, so battered, so exhausted from our current circumstances. It felt as though we'd aged a few hundred years, but I knew it'd hadn't even been a decade. I couldn't imagine what things would look like in another few years.
Yarborough's PTB Alliance had to change, and we were in Thomaston to do just that.
We entered Logan Patterson's office as one, our heads held high, our consciouses in the gutter.
He was a tall, strong white man with dark blue hair that stood straight up in a mohawk across the top of his skull. Logan reminded me of the kind of guy who had peaked in high school or college and never quite made it beyond that. Not that I disliked him; I just didn't know him as well as I could have.
And whose fault was that? Scribe had kept us as an island for so long. The other Alliance locations worked together constantly; hadn't Ardent's crisscrossing the nation been proof of that? How long had it been since we had gone to help or gotten help from the others?
When I thought of it, I realized it had been just before I'd accidentally poisoned Nishelle.
Everything led back to that same general time period. Everything at once. It was when Isabella had started her ascent within the organization. It was when we'd lost Nishelle, so we'd thought, and it was when I'd ended up behind bars. It was when Adam's nosebleeds had gotten worse. I didn't know what shitty fulcrum sat on top of that smidgen of time in the universe, but it could go fuck itself.
Logan's eyes landed on me.
They were the eyes of a snake, ready to strike if it was deemed necessary. I tried to look all together unthreatening and perhaps even a little bit friendly; which simply wasn't my look, but I was trying.
"I want a full report. Which one of you wants to go first?" he asked.
Nate started forward, but I let go of Nishelle's hand long enough to move in front of him. "I'll do it. I'll be as brief as I can, but you have to understand that it's a little confusing at first. I wasn't even certain of some things until this walk up here."
"You were deep in thought and coming up to talk to me, then you decided to change your story for me? Is that it?"
His voice was gruff, distrusting, and I didn't blame him. It took a certain amount of paranoia to exist within the Alliance, especially at his level. While what Izzy did had been almost unheard of at the time, more people were slowly starting to break out and away from our position due to people like Scribe.
I sighed. "No, sir. I simply put together some threads as I was walking. They say movement helps power the brain and, sometimes that's true for me."
"Go on."
Nodding, I walked to the center of the office