Strikeforce (Book 4): Day's End Read online

  by Colleen Vanderlinden

  Published by Peitho Press

  Detroit, Michigan, 2016

  © 2016 Colleen Vanderlinden

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at [email protected].

  Contents

  Books by Colleen Vanderlinden

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Cast of Characters

  Letter from the Author

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For my daughters —

  May you write your own stories, be your own heroes, and never, ever stop growing.

  Part One

  Savior

  Chapter One

  “Next up on Detroit Today: the death of a super villain. Is Daystar a menace or a hero? Is Mayhem’s destruction of superhero teams really such a loss? We’ll update you on the latest kidnapped powered children. And hear what a psychologist has to say about the mental stability of the average powered being—”

  Jenson snapped the television off. “Assholes,” she muttered. We were in David’s lab, where he was working on some improved dampening collars. He sat, hunched over his workbench, while several Jensons monitored incoming security and media feeds. Jenson — the real Jenson — sat with me. We were testing out some of the new tech David had come up with for me. Mostly environmental and physiological monitoring stuff, but there was some new cloaking gadget he’d been trying to get working since shortly after the Tribunal had called for me to turn myself in after Render’s death. He nearly had it right. It didn’t turn me invisible, but it kind of made my armor blend into whatever my surroundings were. The only problem seemed to be that if I moved, it held onto the old surroundings for too long before blending into the new one.

  “I mean, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we’re wired differently, probably,” David said from his part of the lab. “Look at us. Really, look at anyone in any kind of law enforcement or military situation. We run into places everyone else has the sense to run away from. We signed up for this voluntarily.”

  “Yeah, but you know the point they’re trying to make is that we’re somehow unbalanced and dangerous, and the powers are to blame for that,” Jenson said.

  “The powers just make everything more of whatever it was. So if you’re violent and controlling, the powers let you be more of that. We scare the hell out of them, and I can’t even blame them for that,” I said, setting aside the dampening collar I’d been testing. “It’s why they see Killjoy and Mayhem as a good thing. Having us organized, in positions of power? It scares the shit out of them. So every team his little crew manages to take down makes them sleep a little better at night.”

  The room was silent. The fact was, we hadn’t actually seen Killjoy do any of it. The last shreds of the previous incarnation of Mayhem were still locked up here at Command: Raider, the red leather twins, the electro that was Daemon’s cousin, plus Alpha and his people. We still had Daemon, too, and he had continued to be an asset to us during his confinement. So Killjoy had either gathered a new team that quickly, or he’d had more people waiting in reserve. Either notion made me want to scream. He was out there. He’d been credited with bringing down three city’s super hero teams in the past month, even though nobody had actually seen him anywhere near any of the scenes. He was hitting the hero teams hard. He was winning, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  Ever since the day Render had died, I’d been pretty much confined to Command. I’d gone out a few times, mainly to get Justin, who we now knew to be our friend Detroit UnPowered, and a few times tracking down what was left of Killjoy’s known facilities. I’d expected that to draw him out. Instead, he’d been silent.

  Honestly, I would have felt better if he’d been around and up to his old tricks. This silence, this calmness while they utterly and systematically destroyed some of the smaller super teams was making me jumpy. Every day I didn’t hear from him or those working for him was another day he had to surprise us with something really, really bad. I had the nagging feeling that he was planning on working his way up to the more powerful super teams, and he was just biding his time until he was ready. Keeping quiet gave him time to regroup, and probably recruit more assholes to work for him. Time to gather new facilities, new supplies. More money. We’d helped the Detroit police take in a good number of Detroit Mafia members, and most of them were now in federal custody. But we hadn’t gotten the big guy, the one who’d arranged the little working relationship between the Mafia and Killjoy. The head of the Giannotti crime family was still out there somewhere, and despite the leads Daemon had given to the feds regarding his uncle, the old mob boss was nowhere to be found. So we had to believe that Killjoy was still getting funding, because now Giannotti would need Killjoy’s muscle even more, with so much of his organization in custody.

  And all of that, all of that mess, all of that murder and craziness… that wasn’t even all of it. The kidnapping of powered kids that we’d started tracking weeks ago had continued. Dozens of powered kids missing across the world, without a trace. It had taken a while for the media to connect the dots. Justin had actually been instrumental in pushing the story on his show, in getting the stories of the families out there. Unsurprisingly, it had only made the general population more nervous about powered people. Of course, there was sadness that kids were missing. Any parent seems to be able to relate to that fear. But underneath it all, there was this weird line of tension. Some of the worst anti-powered groups had praised the kidnappings, believing that it was the act of someone like them, someone who hated powered people.

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Any one of those powered kids would have kicked the snot out of a non-powered person who tried to mess with them.

  So, yeah, it was all pretty much a mess, and there was no way we could keep up with it all.

  But other than the few times I’d gone out tracking leads, I’d been stuck at headquarters. Even I had to admit that it was stupid for me to be out in the open when everyone from the Tribunal to the Mafia wanted a piece of me for one reason or another. It wasn’t lost on me that an actual murderer was being heralded as a hero, while I was basically on house arrest for beating the hell out of another actual murderer who just happened to die of his injuries. Fear makes people illogical and stupid. I tried not to hold it against them, but it wasn’t easy.

  I had other shit to worry about.

  Despite the fact that I didn’t exactly feel bad about it, Render’s death still haunted me. I’d most definitely been trying to kill him when I’d taken him down after he’d injured Ryan. I’d wanted him dead in that moment, and it was only afterward, when he was in custody, that I was glad I hadn’t succeeded. It had given me time to try to get my head right. To be grateful that I hadn’t taken a step I couldn’t come back from. Time to remind myself that we’re supposed to be abov
e shit like killing, because there are judges and juries and laws that are there to decide someone’s fate.

  And then, despite seeming to improve, he’d died. I didn’t mourn him at all, but his death changed my life nonetheless.

  I’d killed someone.

  I’d done the thing that separated the heroes like StrikeForce and the other super hero teams from the villains. I’d taken that last step over the line, and it had changed everything. Non-powered people feared us more. The Tribunal wanted to lock me up — with Eve, Killjoy’s maybe-girlfriend, leading the call. The media was calling for me to turn myself over. The many hate groups who had sprung up in the wake of people gaining powers had all seemed to unite in a gleeful hatred of one powered person in particular: me.

  Portia was getting destroyed in the media for her refusal to turn me over or lock me up, and the rest of the team was getting badmouthed as well.

  And I had new nightmares to add to the never-ending playlist that started the second I fell asleep. Sometimes, I was forced to watch Render trying to kill Ryan all over again, in agonizing detail, except this time, I wasn’t quick enough to save him, and Ryan died.

  And sometimes, the dream played out exactly as things had that day, with Render alive, and then dying later on.

  Of the two, reality was the less terrifying one. I knew despite everything that I would’t have changed a single thing I’d done that day.

  “You’re doing it again,” Jenson said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Doing what?”

  “Obsessing. Overthinking everything.”

  “Honestly, we both know I probably don’t think enough,” I said. “If I did, we would’t be in many of the messes we’ve found ourselves in.”

  Jenson sighed. “You’re not going to be perfect. Not ever. The only ones who are perfect are those who never actually act, because the decision not to act means that by default, they’ll never make a mistake. We’re not mind readers. We’re not perfect. We are going to fuck up sometimes. That’s life. It’s just that when we mess up, it’s magnified and dissected and discussed at length.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “And despite what you think, you’re not a bad person,” she added.

  We’d had that discussion, over and over again since Render’s death. I’d killed someone. There was no way “good person” and “murderer” went together. And you could spin it any way you wanted, that I’d been defending my teammate, that I was defending myself… whatever. I knew better. Sparing Render’s life hadn’t even entered my mind in that moment.

  What the hell did that say about me?

  And I was dragging everyone around me into this weird gray area as well. StrikeForce was supposed to be super-powered law enforcement. My teammates were covering for me, defending me, defying the orders of what was supposed to be the central enforcement body of the super powered community.

  So it was a mess, and I couldn’t even beat the shit out of anybody to make myself feel better, because I was supposed to be keeping a low profile, and when I was out and about, I was supposed to be trying to be “good” and “heroic.”

  Ugh.

  Nothing was simple anymore. Of course, maybe it never had been.

  Jenson and I sat watching a few of the local feeds for a while, the lab silent other than the occasional sound from where David was working.

  “Did you two hear about Jarvis from Equipment?” David asked after a while. Jenson nodded.

  “No. What about her?” I remembered Jarvis well. She’d been the one to design and fit me for my original StrikeForce uniform, and she was still the one we went to when we needed to tweak the uniform to add some of David’s tech. Jenson had also gone to her to make the all-black uniform I wore when I’d gone out on stealth missions.

  “She’s missing,” Jenson said quietly.

  I froze. “What? For how long?”

  “We’re not sure yet. She and her daughters went on vacation. Chicago, I think, and then they were supposed to come back here because her husband was speaking at some conference or something downtown. We can’t tell yet if they ever made it back here or not. At least a few days, though.”

  “Shit. Her daughters?”

  “No powers,” David said, knowing I was already wondering if our mysterious woman in blue, the one who’d been abducting super powered kids worldwide, was involved. “And the one taking the kids has never taken a parent before. I think this is something different.”

  “So what are we doing about it?”

  “Portia just found out today. She has David and me scanning the region.”

  “I have the drones out. Really, I need to make more of them. All of the stuff we’re trying to find, I don’t have enough drones. I never thought it would get this nuts,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Jesus. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” I said, rubbing my face. “She’s amazing, and she’s sweet, once you get past that whole dry sense of humor she’s got going. Damn it.”

  “It’s always something,” Jenson said. I kept thinking about Jarvis as the other two went back to work testing the monitoring devices.

  A while later, one of the guards from the prison facility popped her head into David’s lab.

  “Daystar?”

  I stood up and went to her. Daisy, I think. Super speed, which, along with starting fires, was one of the more common powers. Now that I was spending more time at Command, I was getting better at actually learning people’s names. Mostly because I was bored out of my mind.

  “What’s up?” I asked her when I stepped out into the corridor.

  She looked concerned for a moment, then she straightened her shoulders. “Crystal asked me to ask you if you’d come talk to her sometime.”

  “Crystal.”

  Daisy nodded.

  “Did she say why?”

  “She didn’t say. She just asked me to ask you to stop by when you had a chance.”

  I studied Daisy for a moment. Crystal was Alpha’s girlfriend, part of his little crew who’d worked along with Killjoy to keep StrikeForce ineffective and useless. Alpha had also given Killjoy samples of blood and DNA from everyone on the team to help Dr. Death prefect the cocktail Killjoy had taken to get more powerful.

  I had no love at all for Alpha and his people.

  And I had a strong feeling we didn’t have all of them in custody. We knew we had a mole. We knew that others in SF had gone along with what Alpha was doing, even if they hadn’t known why.

  We also knew that I was one of those issues that seemed to divide people. One of my charms, I guess.

  I wondered how close Daisy was to Crystal. She fidgeted a little under my gaze.

  “Well. That was it. Whenever you feel like it, or not,” she said quietly.

  I glanced back at Jenson, who just shrugged. “Want me to come with you?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll see you guys later. Don’t have too much fun without me.”

  I caught a slight blush from David and laughed as I walked away. They were still tiptoeing around what pretty much everyone knew they both wanted. Of course, it probably didn’t help that Jenson’s ex, James, was still with us. He’d gone straight to Eve and the rest of the Tribunal with news about Render’s death, despite giving Jenson and me this whole load of shit about how he was on our side and he wanted to help us. He still held to that, that if he hadn’t gone to them, if they’d found out about it and thought that maybe he’d been hiding things from them, they would have replaced him with someone less friendly toward us. I didn’t like the guy. Didn’t trust him. But it made a certain kind of sense.

  I thought about James and Jenson as I made my way over to the prison wing. The tension whenever the two of them had to work together was ridiculous, and it wasn’t the good, sexy kind of tension, either. It was the kind of tension that made you want to hit something. Preferably James. Jenson was an absolute professional, and she did her job despite clearly wishing she was just about anywhere else when James was aro
und. For his part, he kept quiet, did the duties Portia assigned to him, and seemed to watch every damn thing we did. I was tempted to toss him in one of the cells in the prison wing just on principle, but I figured that was one of those things that would just result in Portia having to clean up a mess later.

  I arrived at the prison wing and stopped to check on Daemon before heading to the women’s section. As usual, his ex-girlfriend, Deena, and his daughter were with him. He was playing Candyland with the kid while Deena, who was maybe starting to seem like less of an ex the longer they were with us, read a book. He gave me a wave when he saw me walk past, and I waved back.

  Another murderer. Daemon had never actually stooped so low as to get his hands dirty himself, but he used his powers of mental manipulation to make at least seven people kill themselves. The only thing going for him, I guess, was that they weren’t exactly good people. Four had been Mafia, rivals of his own family, and he’d killed them at his uncle’s behest. Two had been people Killjoy had wanted culled from his own ranks. Sal had said that Killjoy thought they were going to betray him, so he had Sal convince them to off themselves. According to Sal, Killjoy had watched the whole thing. And laughed.

  The last one had been someone who’d pissed Sal off. I didn’t know the whole story on that, and he had refused to say more than that. The only thing I knew for sure was that that last murder had been all on Sal.

  And yet… I didn’t hate him. Wasn’t I supposed to hate him? Or at least be disgusted by him? Everyone else did their best to avoid him, even though he’d helped us.

  It was just one more small way I was starting to feel like the odd man out on StrikeForce.

  I shook the thoughts off as I headed toward the women’s wing. I passed Alpha and Nightbane’s cells on the way there. Alpha sat, as usual, staring at the wall with a blank look on his face. Nightbane, though, just as he did just about every time he saw me, glared out the small window of his cell at me. Sometimes, he yelled shit at me, but today, he settled for just glaring.