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

  I laughed. “Well, you can try.”

  “Challenge accepted.” Ryan pressed one more quick kiss to my lips, then I headed to my suite to change and make coffee and get ready for my meeting with Justin, Portia, and a few others. PR bullshit. How did this even become my life? I wondered as I let myself into my suite.

  I took a quick shower, then pulled on a pair of black pants and a dark gray sweater, pulled my hair up into a messy bun and screwed around with my unruly bangs until they looked a little less crazy. Then I headed into my kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. I straightened the piles of books and magazines on the coffee table.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door, and Portia, Justin, Jenson, and Amy walked in. Jenson gave me a quick hug, and Justin shook my hand when he walked in. Everyone stopped in the kitchen to grab coffee and food, then made their way to my tiny living room.

  “Okay. We have a few things on the agenda today,” Portia began. “First off, we need to figure out our strategy for dealing with the endless allegations and other nonsense against Daystar.” She took a gulp of her coffee. “I love having meetings in coffee snobs’ rooms,” she said, and I shook my head. “Aside from that, we need to discuss where we are in the search for the missing powered kids and the woman in blue.” She pulled a folder out of the pile in front of her and slid an envelope out of it. “This came for you.”

  “For me, or for Daystar?”

  “Both.”

  I stared at her.

  “It’s okay. I checked it all over. It’s all in order,” Amy said. I took the envelope from Portia and removed the paper inside. I read it over, then looked up at Amy.

  “Is this for real?”

  She nodded. “His lawyers got in touch with me last week about it. I act as the legal counsel for everyone on the team, so I went as your representative.”

  “In case it was a trap of some kind,” Portia added.

  I looked down at the paper again.

  “What is it?” Jenson asked.

  “Virus left me everything. His mansion, money, all of his investments… everything.” I clamped my mouth shut. Virus, who I knew as Damian Rutherford, had been my partner in crime back in my burgling days, but my reluctance to pull off all of the jobs he wanted resulted in us splitting. He’d joined Mayhem and ended up dead at Maddoc’s hands. Another way to get to me, punish me. He’d been stupidly rich, thanks to his father’s real estate holdings, plus the money he’d stolen over the years. He was almost as good a thief as I was.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s another letter in there. We didn’t open that,” Amy said.

  I reached into the large manila envelope and pulled out a white, letter-sized envelope with “Jolene” written on the front of it in Damian’s cramped handwriting.

  “Damn it.” I held the letter in my hands. “I’ll read it later. This is stupid.”

  “Well, I wish somebody would do something that stupid for me,” Amy said, and Portia laughed.

  “He barely knew me. Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Just a guess, but maybe you should read the letter,” Justin said around a mouthful of glazed donut.

  “I will. Um. I’m gonna want to look into donating it. Amy, can you help me with that?”

  “Sure thing. We’ll set aside time to go over everything after it’s all had time to sink in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why are you immediately planning on donating it?” Justin asked.

  “I don’t need it. I live here, I eat here. I already have a decent savings between my money from before and Mama’s life insurance—”

  “Which you also gave away, mostly,” Jenson cut in. I shrugged.

  “I don’t need it,” I repeated.

  “You are the weirdest damn super villain I’ve ever heard of,” Justin said, grinning. I laughed, and so did Jenson.

  “You must feel pretty stupid now, huh?” Portia said archly, and I elbowed her.

  “Be nice,” I muttered.

  “It’s okay. I do feel stupid. I feel used, and moronic. I was afraid, back when you all started showing up, forming this team. That was why I started the blog and the videos. I had good intentions when I started out, keeping tabs on the supers, because nobody else was doing it. I didn’t trust any of you, because I figured, really, what’s to stop you from stomping all over those who don’t have your powers, right? But it turns out that I was getting my funding from the only assholes who are actually planning on stomping on everyone,” he finished, bitterness evident in his tone. “And yeah, I feel like a major prick for everything I said about Daystar, for not looking at the situation from all sides. I was stupid.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve been over this. I should be more pissed about this than any of you, and I’m over it. Let’s just move on.”

  The team, in general, was not pleased to have Justin around so much. And now, he was living here with us, mostly because I was pretty sure that Killjoy and his people would try to get to Justin, especially now that he was actually reporting facts instead of just being Mayhem’s mouthpiece. My teammates never let a chance to tell him he was a dickhead pass them by, and, other than Jenson and Ryan, they mostly tried to pretend he wasn’t there. I felt kind of sorry for him, stuck here with a bunch of people who wanted to hit him, but it was better than being dead, so he’d just have to deal with it.

  We went over some ideas for the next few Detroit UnPowered shows, and Jenson gave us and update on the status of our search for the missing powered kids.

  “Basically, there’s not a whole lot to go on. Mysterious woman in blue appears, grabs a kid, sometimes from right under their parents’ noses, and disappears. We don’t see her until she does it again. No trace of the kids once they disappear. Victims from twenty-two countries, mix of genders, ages from five to fourteen. Mix of powers. She doesn’t seem to care what powers they have, as long as they have them.”

  “There aren’t enough of us working on this,” I said. “We’re stretched thin already, between me having to watch it and a few of our newer members having second thoughts about whether they really want to be here or not.”

  “Vivian and Lindsey,” Portia said, nodding.

  “Dani’s not super into it anymore, either,” I said quietly. “She wants people to pay for Monica’s death, but her heart isn’t in the rest of it. I’m sure you’ve noticed that,” I said to Portia.

  “Yeah. And Chance… well, Chance has never especially seemed like she was into any of this,” she said.

  “Right. So that’s like a third of our team who doesn’t even necessarily want to be here.”

  “I know,” Portia said with a grimace. “Caine and Beta are out on their third patrol run of the day, exactly for this reason. Monster went out twice today, I’ve been out twice. You went out and weren’t supposed to.”

  “I resigned from patrol missions. And I’m sorry, but my strengths lie in all of this detail stuff, not in punching things,” Amy said.

  “It’s fine. I appreciate you coming forward and actually settling that with me instead of just half-assing it. And we need your skills,” Portia said. “I’m going to need to talk to the rest of them. And then maybe we need to look at recruiting, except that the way things are now, I don’t trust anybody.”

  I took a gulp of my coffee, thinking.

  “Which hero teams did Mayhem hit again?” I asked her.

  “Southwest region, Northwest Region, Mountain. A couple of teams in Canada, two in South America. A handful in Europe, too,” she said. “Why?”

  “It might be time to start consolidating. See if those that Mayhem didn’t kill want to join up to fight against them.”

  “But that would leave their own regions unprotected,” Amy pointed out.

  “They are already, anyway, thanks to Mayhem. And besides Portia, there have to be a few other teleporters out there, still. Maybe we need to start thinking bigger. Strength in numbers.”

  “Each reg
ion needs its own team,” Portia argued, shaking her head.

  “They need people there, yes. First responder types. But right now, they have nothing and we need help. If we all start working together, maybe we can hold on and make sure it doesn’t all fall apart while we’re trying to catch this bastard,” I said. “I know this whole thing has been set up regionally since it started, but we don’t have that luxury now, not with Killjoy and his team picking off regional teams one at a time. What do we do when there’s nothing left? It’ll be too late to organize, then.”

  No one said anything for a long time. The fact was, we were headed exactly for that situation. The regional super teams were understaffed as it was, and there was never any lack of villains and troublemakers to deal with. Killjoy was taking out teams one at a time, decimating them, which allowed, in at least half of the cities he’d done it in, the villains to run rampant.

  Yet, somehow, the hero teams kept being blamed for it. A lot of the rhetoric came directly from sources involved with the Tribunal, which meant Eve.

  “Why does the rest of the Tribunal put up with Eve’s bullshit?” I asked. “I mean, when they were here, it seemed like for the most part they couldn’t stand her.”

  “Politics,” Justin said through another mouthful of donut. “There’s a long process to selecting the leader of the Tribunal. If they recant now, if they say they were wrong in choosing Eve, they look like idiots after all of the pomp and insanity of naming her their leader. They’ll support her publicly, even if they hate her personally.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “What? I did learn some shit along the way doing my show,” he said.

  “Could have fooled me,” Portia muttered.

  “Okay. Well, that might be something to start working into your show, if you want to look into it more. Eve is crooked as fuck and everyone on the Tribunal knows it. StrikeForce knows it, and I bet we’re not the only ones who have run up against her and seen that.”

  Justin nodded. “Yeah. I can start working with that. There’s also some pretty good video of you from today.”

  My stomach twisted. “Doing what?”

  “Oh, the usual. Throwing solid steel bike racks at assholes, carrying jets across the sky. Boring shit, really,” he said. Jenson laughed. “We need to start working harder on your image.”

  “I don’t have an image.”

  “Even you know that’s bullshit. Right now your image is pretty much ‘psycho killer with zero control and a major attitude problem.’”

  “Wow… thanks, Justin.”

  “Anytime.” He leaned forward. “Look. I’m here. You brought me into this. And I’ll do what I can to help StrikeForce because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the best thing for this city. But I owe you. I raked you across the goddamn coals and helped everyone hate you. That’s on me, just as much as it’s on Eve and Killjoy and Alpha and anyone else who had their own game they were playing along the way.”

  “I don’t need to be protected. Or saved.”

  “Yeah no shit. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about undoing some of the wrong I’ve done. I owe you that.”

  I noticed Jenson and Amy exchanging a look, Amy trying and failing to hold back a giggle.

  “She has a boyfriend,” Amy said.

  “And it’s super serious,” Jenson said, ending on a gale of laughter as she and Amy lost it.

  I shook my head. “Did you … did you two seriously just quote The Lego Movie at him?”

  Jenson shrugged.

  “Dorks,” I muttered. I glanced at Justin to see him looking at Jenson and Amy in confusion. “Sorry. We watched it on TV last night.”

  “I don’t want to be… what the hell are we even talking about now?” Justin asked, and Amy and Jenson started laughing harder.

  “Good lord we are all losing our minds here,” Portia muttered, standing up. “This is what it looks like when people start breaking under the pressure.” That only made Amy and Jenson laugh even harder, Amy wiping tears away from her eyes. Justin looked like he wanted to run and take his chances on me chasing him down and finding him again. Portia gulped back more coffee and put her cup in the kitchen sink.

  “Okay. I think we’re good here. I guess I’ll get you back on the schedule. Limited, though,” she said to me. I gave her a salute, and she rolled her eyes and let herself out, grabbing her stack of folders and notebooks as she went. Amy and Justin followed shortly after, and I heard him saying “I do not want to be her boyfriend,” as the door closed behind them. Jenson turned to me and laughed.

  “I’m sorry. We couldn’t help it,” she said.

  “It’s fine. He was already sure we were all nuts anyway.”

  “And, you do have a boyfriend and Justin looks at you sometimes like he’s undressing you with his eyes.”

  “You mean the same way David looks at you?” I shot back as I carried my cup to the kitchen. Jenson didn’t answer, and I glanced back to see her looking uncomfortable. “Hey, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Things are just… they’re just weird between us right now. I guess I’m a little oversensitive.”

  I studied Jenson. She was the one person on the team who mostly managed to keep her personal feelings out of her work. But she worked super closely with David developing all of the tech for the team, plus the additional stuff they made for me.

  “I hadn’t noticed any weirdness,” I said. “Was I being obtuse again?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “No. I mean, we’re good. I think all of the weirdness is on my end.” I stayed quiet, waiting to see if she wanted to say more. “I want the man, okay? Goddamn it, I want him so badly it’s making me crazy. But it’s not the time and I don’t know if it ever will be. And then, you know, what if we start something up and then it all falls apart and then we hate each other and I’ve lost my best friend other than you? I’m not the most gregarious person. I keep to myself and if I actually become friends with someone, that’s a big deal. You’re the same way,” she added.

  “I am.”

  “Okay. So you get it.”

  “Or it could end up that, you know, the guy who’s one of your best friends also ends up being the love of your life or something sappy like that,” I said with a shrug.

  “Not everybody is you and Caine,” Jenson said. She turned the kitchen faucet on and started washing the coffee cups from the meeting.

  “Yeah. Well, not everybody is you and James, either.” Every time I saw her ex-fiancee, I wanted to punch him in his stupid chiseled face. “Not everybody’s a lying, self-serving, cowardly fucknozzle.”

  “What the hell is a fucknozzle?” she muttered.

  “James. I decided I’m calling him that from now on.”

  In spite of herself, Jenson chuckled. She set another coffee cup on the dish rack, and I dried it and put it in the cabinet. “I don’t know. I mean, what made you finally decide to move forward?”

  “Him almost dying. And even then, I was too freaked out by the idea. We didn’t really move forward until that night he overheard me telling you all the reasons it would never work between Caine and I. I didn’t consciously decide, even then. It just kind of happened.”

  “Doesn’t it scare the hell out of you?”

  I glanced at Jenson. She was focusing on the cup she was washing.

  “Every second, pretty much. Especially the business we’re in, especially seeing how my enemies love going after those I care about. Sometimes, I swear I can barely breathe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it’s still worth it,” I added quietly.

  “Maybe.”

  “Have you actually talked to David about any of this?”

  She gave me a look as if I’d just suggested that she give Maddoc a lap dance or something. I laughed. “Well, it would be a decent first step. And how the hell did I become the one giving relationship advice?”

  “Because you have a good one with Caine. Bitch,”
she added.

  “We get on each other’s nerves. We argue all the time. He’s stubborn as hell and I know he thinks the same thing about me. It’s not perfect.”

  “But it’s yours.”

  “Yeah.”

  She washed the last cup and I dried it and put it away. “I’m actually supposed to meet with him after he finishes his patrol shift with Caine,” she said, glancing at the clock on the microwave.

  “Get him, girl,” I said, and she rolled her eyes at me.

  “You are the worst,” she said. We hugged, and then she let herself out of my suite. I turned on the radio in my living room and made my way into my bedroom, kicking off my pants and socks as I did. I pulled on my pajama pants and a tank top and got into bed. I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours now, and it wasn’t an uncommon thing at all anymore for any of us to go that long without sleep. Ryan had gone two whole days without sleeping more than once in the last couple of weeks, and it was only thanks to Jenson’s multiples that any of us got any rest at all. Except for Jenson, of course. She had to be awake for her multiples to stay active. I still wasn’t quite clear about how it all worked.

  I was thinking about it as I drifted off. It didn’t take very long. I didn’t know how long I slept before I felt Ryan climb into bed beside me and pull my body close to his.

  “Hey,” I murmured.

  “Hey.” He pressed a kiss to my bare shoulder. “See, I woke you up.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Don’t think I can manage much else though,” he said wistfully, nuzzling the back of my neck. “I can barely move.”

  “Are you okay?” I started to sit up, and he held me tighter.

  “I’m fine. Just bone tired, Jolene. Three shifts in one day is getting pretty goddamn old.” I heard him yawn behind me. “I’m sorry.”

  I took his hand in mine, laced our fingers together. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

  “I’m supposed to put you first,” he said, his voice already taking on that drowsy tone it got right before he fell asleep. This was the third time he’d come to me like this, but I’d gotten familiar with that tone during the days he’d spent in the hospital after Render’s attack.