Darkest Day (StrikeForce #3) Read online

  I’d have to make sure we came back to destroy anything I’d missed, but I felt more than a little satisfaction to have set Killjoy back again.

  Red Scare pulled himself up, and I threw more power at him. He pulled the knife out of his thigh and chucked it at me and I batted it aside and hit out with my power again.

  “You should stay down,” I said as I stalked forward. Of course, being the asshole that he was, he stood up and lunged toward me again. I raised my hands and shoved back and he went flying back into the racks behind him yet again.

  “Okay, stay down,” I said, and of course he didn’t disappoint. He got up and started charging at me. I had to give him credit; he was much stronger than I figured he’d be. I wondered if he’d had a dose of whatever Raider and Maddoc had had.

  “Oh my god, this is booooring,” I said as I threw him back again. “Are you gonna stay down yet, Care Bear?”

  “It’s Red Scare, you crazy bitch,” he muttered as he pulled himself up again.

  “Stop playing with your prey already. Knock the fucker out so we can go,” Ryan called.

  I sighed and pulled my stun gun out of my belt, aimed at Red Scare’s head, and pulled the trigger. He fell to the ground immediately, and I went over and cuffed and collared him as Ryan dragged his captive over.

  “You are no fun,” I told him as I bent over Red Scare.

  “Were you trying to see if you could put his head through the cinder block?” Ryan asked.

  “Maybe,” I answered. “Your turn to call Portia. I think she’s tired of hearing from me in the middle of the night.”

  Ryan shook his head, then started talking into his comm. A couple of minutes later, Portia appeared, looking exhausted and rumpled as if we’d gotten her out of bed.

  “Thanks, boss,” I said, and she rolled her eyes in response.

  “Do I even want to know?” she asked.

  “Nope. All you need to know is that they work for Killjoy and totally tried to kill us after we blew their door off. Oh, and don’t get too comfy because Jenson might need you soon.”

  She shook her head again and in the next moment, both she and our two prisoners were gone.

  Ryan and I flew to where Jenson and the others had been heading, and when we got there, it was to find a line of police cars, officers hauling guys in cuffs into the backs of the cars, while a few more sleepy looking older men stood with Jenson and Dani.

  “Local PD was a huge help,” Jenson said when she saw us. “These are all guards. Still criminal enough that most of them have warrants out on them, so the PD was happy to step in even if this was a SF thing. And these guys,” she said, gesturing toward the three men standing with them, “are all upper level mob guys.”

  “No sign of Giannotti, though?” I asked, and she shook her head.

  “Look who else we got, though,” she said, and I looked toward where David was standing. Beside him, cuffed and collared, was the electro chick I’d set free from StrikeForce, the same one who’d been at Daemon’s house the first night we’d gotten in to see what we could find out. She was giving me a death glare, and I blew a kiss at her.

  “Nice job. Daemon’s cousin, right?” I asked, and Jenson nodded.

  “We’ll see what we can get out of these guys. They weren’t surprised to see us, which means they know what their organization is involved with. We’ll break ‘em eventually,” Jenson said, smiling sweetly at the mob guys. Ryan and I watched as Jenson and the others loaded them in the jet, then we all headed back to Command.

  “Six assholes in one night. Not a bad night’s work,” Ryan said as we flew.

  “And I smashed a bunch of the vials in that factory,” I said.

  “When did you do that?”

  “When I threw Red Scare into the wall. They were on a shelf there.”

  “Hm.”

  “I was multi-tasking.”

  “Very efficient.”

  “I do try, sometimes,” I told him, and he laughed.

  “He is gonna be pissed when he hears about this,” he said. “You need to be careful.”

  “I will. I needed this. I feel like I can breathe. Things are finally starting to happen. We’re hurting him.”

  “And we’ll hurt him more before we’re through,” Ryan promised. I kind of hated how much I liked the tone he used when he said it, how my heart sped up a little, and a stupid grin appeared on my face.

  “Thanks for doing this with me,” I said eventually.

  “Anytime, partner,” he answered, and we flew the rest of the way toward Command in comfortable, relaxed silence.

  When we got back, I made sure the prisoners were all settled and accounted for, gave my little hit squad hugs and high-fives, and then headed up to my suite.

  I was tired enough that I was pretty sure I’d sleep through just about anything.

  I had just gotten into bed when my phone rang and I groaned, pulled it off the nightstand, and glanced at it. Unknown number.

  I smirked. I usually hated even the thought of talking to Killjoy, but this could be fun. I quickly turned on my tracking app, then answered.

  “Hello.”

  “You’re gonna pay for that, sweetheart,” Killjoy’s deep voice rumbled over the phone. “I’m gonna hurt you in ways that’ll make you wish you’d never crossed paths with me. You think you hurt now? I can make you hurt worse.”

  I bit my lip, determined to keep him on the phone. Pissing him off would just make him hang up. I had to be better, no matter how badly I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought of him.

  “We both know you don’t want to hurt me,” I said.

  He didn’t answer for a while. “You know nothing. I love the idea of hurting you, Jolene. It keeps me up, some nights, thinking of all the ways I’m going to destroy you, all the ways I’ll ensure that you have no one to turn to but me. You’re a disappointment, always were. But I admit I was a fool for you. You used to love hearing from me. Remember?” he asked smoothly. “Your eyes would light up, and you’d get that secretive little smile. We really should have fucked at least once,” he added, a wistful tone to his voice.

  It took everything in me not to gag.

  “Yeah, you really screwed that one up,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Let’s be honest. You were never going to fuck me, were you? Nah, you were too cozy with somebody else.”

  I rolled my eyes. “This again. Really?”

  “Caine,” he spat.

  “My work partner, you mean? Not everybody plans to fuck everyone they meet. Unlike you. I mean, really? Eve?”

  He laughed coldly. “I saw that. Cute, Jolene. Very cute, calling her out like that. You’re smarter than I gave you credit for.”

  “You mean you were lying when you called me a smart girl before?” I asked, trying to sound surprised.

  “I meant it, until I started seeing you and that asshole together all the time.”

  “Working,” I added, rolling my eyes again. “Not that it matters.”

  “You say working, but I have it on good faith that you spend all your time with him.”

  A chill went up my spine. “According to who?”

  “You should be careful, Jolene. It’s a bad idea for people like us to get close to others.”

  “Killjoy—“

  “I have to go. Can’t have you tracing this. I just hope you learn a little something, you worthless whore.”

  “Wait!” I started to say something else, but then the line went dead.

  “Motherfucker,” I muttered. I checked the tracking app, and sure enough, it had been unsuccessful. I got up and walked down to David’s lab, mulling it all over. I’d have him look at the phone, just in case.

  I handed the phone over to David, explaining what had happened.

  He messed around with the phone a little, listened to the recordings from Killjoy’s calls, and shook his head. “Yeah, if you want to leave it, I can see what else I can do.” He met my eyes. “You seem like you could use a vacation.�
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  “What do you mean?”

  He studied me. “You look like you could snap at any second. Every time I see you, your shoulders are up around your ears, your jaw is clenched so hard it looks like you’re in pain, your fists are balled,” he said, glancing down at my hands, which, I realized, were formed into hard fists at my sides. I forced myself to unfurl my fists. “You’re not sleeping and you’re losing weight.”

  “Could we not? Because I’ve had this conversation with Caine, and more often than I’ve wanted to with Jenson, and I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine, huh? You’re a lot of things right now, Jo, but ‘fine’ isn’t one of them. You’re still mourning on top of everything else. I’m just saying that where you are right now, it would be easy to make a mistake or find yourself in the kind of situation you can’t get out of, and you have a lot of people here who care about you.”

  “Jenson also already tried to guilt me. I wish you wouldn’t,” I said. David sighed.

  “She cares a lot about you. And I do, too.”

  I nodded. “Look, I’m handling things the only way I know how. I need to find my own way to work through all this shit and staying focused on Killjoy and ending his insanity is keeping me together right now.”

  David set the phone down. “Just make sure you don’t turn into somebody else on the way there. There are some things you can’t come back from.”

  “Jesus, David,” I groaned.

  He waved it off. “Fine. I do have some news that should make you happy, though.”

  “Oh?”

  He nodded. “Portia mentioned your idea about an anti-porting device so they’ll stop running off when you fight them.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling a little excited. If he’d managed it, this was a big deal.

  “Okay, well, anti-port technology already exists. We have it here at Command. It’s why we don’t just have assholes like Killjoy porting in here all the time. That would be a major security risk, right?”

  “But how?”

  “It basically sends out regular electromagnetic pulses that prevents anyone trying to port in from succeeding. Messes with their powers, kind of in the same way the dampening collars do. Portia has a chip in her uniform that allows her to breach it, but the security is attuned specifically to that chip. I’d love to talk to the guy who invented it but he passed away a couple years ago,” he said. “Genius.”

  I stared at him. “Okay.”

  “The thing is, the current device is huge. No one’s ever thought of making something like what you wanted. But,” he said with a grin. “Once Portia told me about it, I started messing around. I ended up kind of merging the same tech I used in the containment bubbles like the one you used that day with the Zamboni bomb, and instead of making the barrier just physical, I could make it so that it would use those same electromagnetic pulses that the dampeners use, and what shields Command from teleporters.”

  I smiled. “And you made this thing work?”

  “It’s still in the testing phases. Portia’s been helping me with it. The only way we even get close is if you’re able to attach the device to the person you’re trying to contain, and then you activate it with a remote, the same way the containment bubbles work. We’re about fifty-fifty with keeping her contained when we test it, but we’re getting there.”

  “That is amazing!” I said, and he laughed, a slight blush appearing on his face.

  “Told you it would cheer you up a little. I should have a working model in the next few days, I’m hoping. We’ll get him, Jo,” he promised.

  “Yeah, we will. Thanks.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see what I can do with the phone. I’ve been working on a faster tracking algorithm, but I set it aside to work on the teleporter dampening thing.”

  “Thanks. And you are awesome, by the way.”

  He just shook his head. “I’ll give your phone to Jenson in the morning. We’re meeting for coffee before her early training shift with the rest of the recruits Portia’s looking at.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows. His blush deepened. “Do tell.”

  He laughed. “There’s nothing to tell yet. We had fun the couple of times we’ve gone out. I am taking this painfully slowly. And the fact that her goddamn ex is here now, reminding her with his presence every single day how badly relationships can go sometimes, it’s not going anywhere.” He shrugged. “Even if we never get there, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m lucky to have her as a friend. I’m not going to push this. If it develops into something, then that’s great, but if not, I’ve still got a hell of a good friend who gets me in ways not many people do. I’ll take it.”

  I smiled at him. “Thank you for not spewing any shit about being in the friendzone.”

  “Only assholes bitch about being friends with a woman as if it’s a consolation prize or something. Honestly, I’m lucky to be friends with her. She never gets pissed when my mind starts wandering or I start writing down ideas or possible solutions in the middle of a conversation. It’s not even something I mean to do, but it happens sometimes and usually it ends up offending people. She gets it. She plays video games and she’s better at them than I am. She’s getting me back into comic books, which I haven’t read since I was a kid. It’s weird, because she’s so serious and kind of cool most of the time, but my life has actually become fun since I started hanging out with her.” He shrugged again. “I don’t want to lose that. Ever.”

  “And now you just made me realize how much I take her for granted,” I said.

  He laughed. “And what about Caine?” he asked, doing my eyebrow-waggling thing back at me.

  “Don’t even,” I grumbled. “‘I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Uh huh. The sharing stops when it’s your turn. I see how it is, Jo.”

  I laughed and waved at him over my shoulder. I left the lab and made my way back up to my room, replaying my conversation with Killjoy over in my head. Every step made me worry more about the mole we obviously had in StrikeForce and my good mood from talking to David came crashing down. Killjoy’s sources had told him I spend a lot of time with Ryan. All he’d ever known before was that I worked with him, and he’d extrapolated and imagined a bunch of other shit. But this sounded so much worse. Daemon had warned us of this, and we’d suspected it even before that. Now we had confirmation: somebody was paying attention to me, and reporting my movements back to Killjoy.

  I got on the elevator and pushed the button to go up to my suite. I would have rather talked to Portia about our mole problem right that second, but I knew she’d been running herself ragged, too. Instead, I pulled out my laptop and typed out an email and hit send on it, then crawled into bed. Of course, hearing Killjoy’s voice again helped the nightmares come easily, and I spent the night in and out of sleep, trying to escape from something that there was no escaping.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning, I had an early meeting with Portia to discuss the email I’d sent her as well as the events of the previous few days. We talked about David’s anti-teleport tech, and how we needed to make sure that we cleaned out the factory, just in case there was another cache of those vials there somewhere, and what our role was in helping local law enforcement in their case against the Mafia guys they’d taken after our little raid on the Giannotti compound.

  “We’re going to get torn up in the media for that if they have the media ties we think they do,” Portia said, and I nodded in agreement. “Their ties with law enforcement might prove to be a challenge, too. We know they have people in the DPD, we just don’t know who, or high up in the organization they are.”

  “Yeah, it could be a mess, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they end up ‘escaping’ or something like that. The important thing is we have some of the lieutenants here now and that’s going to hurt them. We hurt Killjoy with what we did last night. Those vials and shit that we broke at the compound where we found Red Scare were probably important, since
we know that other than Render, Red Scare is his top muscle and he wouldn’t have been guarding the place otherwise.”

  “One more reason for him to get pissed and call you last night.”

  I nodded. I had my phone back. Jenson had delivered it after her coffee date with David, and she told me he hadn’t been able to get anything else off of it but he was going to keep working at it.

  “We also had another powered kid go missing yesterday. From L.A., this time.”

  “Shit. Did that meeting Amy and Chance were going to happen yet?”

  She shook her head. “Right now, we’re just all keeping touch and sharing info. It seems like we’re not the only ones dealing with craziness. Another mini-Confluence happened along the west coast late last week and that’s causing chaos.”

  “I heard about that. We need to figure out who’s taking the kids.”

  “So far, all we have is two witnesses who say they saw a woman in dark blue whisk the kids away, grabbing them and then totally disappearing. It’s not a hell of a lot to go on, and her strikes are so random we’re like a million steps behind her. We’re getting an accounting of all the super powered kids we know of, but it’s imperfect because the parents are more likely to keep it a secret, trying to protect their kids from undue attention.”

  I nodded. “And what about—“

  At that moment, alarms started going off on the monitors behind her desk. The monitor labelled “biometrics” was flashing.

  “What the hell?” she muttered.

  And then we heard noise coming over the speaker on her desk. “Portia! Somebody! Caine’s down.” Lindsey’s voice was full of panic.

  “Where- Jolene, we don’t even know where they are!” Portia shouted at me, but I was already gone. I made my way to the nearest exit, pulling my mask back on, and then I flew toward where they were supposed to be patrolling, on the east side.