Darkest Day (StrikeForce #3) Read online

  “So, you’re playing matchmaker?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m trying. They’re not making it easy.”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “I never would have seen you in the matchmaker role before.”

  I smiled behind my mask. “Well, ordinarily I don’t give a shit, but they’d be so cute and dorky together, whispering sweet nothings in Elvish or Klingon and crap like that.”

  He laughed then, and I couldn’t help but laugh, too. “And besides that,” I continued, “Jenson doesn’t really open up to people, and David’s sweet, you know? I think she needs someone sweet. Someone who’ll treat her right, and he will because he’s completely nuts about her. I can’t believe she doesn’t see it,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said.

  “So, yeah. I’m not going to tell Jenson because then she’ll cancel and I’ll feel like a jerk.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I put my thumb to the print scanner on my door.

  “You shouldn’t be alone,” he said. “What about Dani?”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine. I’m just going to curl up and watch TV until I pass out. Hopefully I’ll sleep through as much of the rest of the day as possible.” I glanced up at him. “I’m fine,” I repeated.

  “You’re sad,” he said quietly. “And you miss your mom and that’s normal. You don’t have to be fine right now, Jolene.”

  I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked back up at him. “I really don’t have any other alternative. Not while the asshole who ordered her death is still breathing. I’ll see you later,” I said, and then I closed the door behind me.

  I went to my bedroom and pulled off my uniform, slipped into some pajama pants mama had bought me a few years ago that had silly, cartoonish looking smiling suns on them. She’d joked, then, that she was trying to make me into a morning person. I pulled on a tank top and grabbed one of the blankets off of my bed.

  I went back to the living room and settled myself into a corner of the couch. I pulled the blanket up over me. This wasn’t just any blanket. Mama had crocheted it for me when I was fifteen. Aqua and white stripes, because aqua was my favorite color at the time. It was warm and comfortable, and I could still picture Mama sitting in the recliner in our trailer, working on it as she watched TV in the evenings after work.

  I kind of wished I could cry. Maybe that would feel more normal or something, but I just didn’t seem to have it in me to do it. It was more like a numb sadness that just hadn’t gone away since she’d died. No. Since she’d been murdered. Because while her death would have been devastating no matter how it came, the fact that she’d been murdered to get to me made it so I could barely breathe sometimes.

  And this was one of those times. And while I could admit that I kind of wished Jenson was around, part of me was relieved to be alone. I didn’t know if I could stand trying to be human when all I could manage to do was stare straight ahead without actually seeing what I was looking at.

  I lay there like that for a long time. A few hours, based on the number of cooking shows that started and ended on Food Network, curled under my afghan, staring off into space.

  I was eventually shaken out of my zoned-out state by a light knock on my door. I got up and looked at the small security monitor to see Ryan standing there.

  I opened the door and he looked down at me. He’d changed as well, jeans and a dark blue t-shirt. He held up a thermal carafe and what looked like a bakery box.

  I raised my eyebrow at him and waved him in.

  “I don’t know what else to do at times like this, so I’m gonna do with my grandma and grandpa do whenever anyone seems to need comfort.”

  I closed the door behind him and turned around. “Which is?”

  “Feed you.”

  He brought the stuff he was carrying into the living room and set it on the coffee table, and then he went to my kitchen and grabbed one of the plain white mugs out of the cabinet and set that there as well. I watched him the whole time, and I couldn’t help smile a little.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Coffee,” he said, “because I know that you’ll drink it,” he said and I smiled. “And some beignets and madeleines from that one food truck down the street.”

  I shook my head. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I know. There’s probably something normal people do when someone they know is dealing with something like this, but this is all I know to do,” he said. “If I was my grandma, I’d bake you an apple pie so good you’d be sure she put some kind of magic into it. If I was my gramps, I’d probably deep fry something and keep it coming until you couldn’t eat another bite. This is the best I can do.”

  I met his eyes. Warmth. I felt warm inside for the first time since Mama had died. Not perfect, not okay. But alive and not under an absolute fog of sadness.

  “It’s perfect,” I said quietly, and we stood there for a few moments, eyes locked. And then I made myself look away. “There’s only one cup though. You like coffee just as much as I do.”

  He shook his head. “You’re not in the mood to hang out. This was for you.”

  “You can stay for a cup of coffee at least,” I said. “If you want.”

  “Okay.”

  He went to the kitchen and grabbed another cup, and I sat on the couch. He sat beside me and poured coffee into both cups.

  “Half and half and sugar,” he said, and I nodded.

  “How did you know I took my coffee like that?”

  “Super senses, remember?“ he asked. “I can smell it when we end up in the dining hall together before our shift sometimes.”

  I lifted the steaming cup to my mouth and took a sip.

  “This is definitely not the coffee from the dining hall,” I said, taking another drink. It was smooth, rich, smoky with the teeniest hint of a fruity flavor. Nothing like the bitter stuff they served in the dining hall.

  “No. The dining hall coffee is shit. I brewed this in my suite.”

  I watched him as he took a sip.

  “You’re a coffee snob, then?” I asked with a smile as I took another drink.

  “Not a snob. Heightened sense of taste and smell. So when something doesn’t taste all that great normally, it tastes really bad to me. The stuff in the dining hall is bitter and metallic. And the coffee maker needs to be cleaned, because I can taste mold in the coffee sometimes.”

  I made a face. “And now I’m never drinking dining hall coffee again.”

  “Stop by my suite for it whenever you want. I drink almost as much coffee as you do,” he said. “Or we could get you your own pot and grinder for in here.”

  I shook my head and he opened the bakery box and offered it to me. I took out a beignet, setting it on a napkin on my knee. We sat and ate and drank in silence for a bit. The weird thing about being quiet with Ryan was that it was never awkward. Usually, I felt like someone was supposed to be talking, or like either I or whoever I was sitting with was just waiting until it was polite to leave. Usually, that was me. But with Ryan, as I’d learned during our patrol shifts, we could not say a word and it was comfortable. It reminded me of that scene in Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman tells John Travolta that that’s when you know you’ve found someone special, “when you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.”

  Unless he was pissed at me, as he’d been when he’d found out that I’d kept the fact that Dr. Death had been negotiating for his blood, and had used it in experiments. That had been a shitty week.

  “This is really good. Thank you,” I said after a while.

  “You’re welcome. I debated with myself for over an hour whether I should do it or not, because I know you would have preferred Jenson or that you wanted to be alone.”

  “I don’t prefer Jenson, exactly. She’s my best friend. She gets me. That seems to be something the two of you have in common. I don’t feel like I have to constantly be acting like everything is just fine when yo
u guys are around.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I hate feeling like this.”

  “I know.”

  We sat in silence for a bit, drinking our coffee. I reached into the bakery box and grabbed a madeline.

  “You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” I asked after a while.

  He sat back and looked at me. “What?”

  “I keep thinking of everything I could have done differently. And not just if I hadn’t gotten involved with Killjoy. If I’d thought to protect her that day instead of assuming Dr. Death would stick to the way he usually did things, the whole mad doctor routine. If I’d made her move away from here. If I’d made her move in here with me so she was surrounded by security all the time. I could have done so much differently.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. “You could have done that stuff. Sure,” he said slowly. “Your mom had the same protection all of our families have. Her house was under surveillance and had security on it that would have prevented anyone other than you and your mom from getting too close to it. We had people watching her travel to and from work. We had algorithms scanning faces from the security feed at her work. None of us thought for a second that when Death said he was up to something, that it would be so personal. And if had been just Death, it wouldn't have been your mom in danger. None of us saw Killjoy turning into the fucking Devil Himself. You could have moved her away. And then what? How would we have gotten to her in time if someone had tracked her down? You could have moved her in here… do you think for a second that she would have gone for that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay. So what were you supposed to do differently? There is no one to blame but the motherfucker who ordered her death. We can second-guess every move we made that day. I know I have. But it came down to us sticking with what we knew, and we didn’t know much because none of us were trained for this shit.”

  “You sound almost as pissed as I feel,” I said.

  “I’m pissed,” he agreed. “I hate seeing you hurting like this. I hate that it happened to her, because she was really nice and every time I saw her when you were in the hospital, I’d think that you had the same eyes. And I heard her tell Jenson one time that she thought I had a nice butt,” he added, and I laughed.

  “Jenson said Mama may have mentioned that.”

  He flashed a quick grin, and then we went back to sipping our coffee in silence. I thought about him saying he’d heard Mama talking about him.

  “So, the super sense thing. What’s that like?” I asked him. I’d learned when we’d first been introduced that he had super senses. It was easy to forget that when you looked at him, because he looked, to me at least, like strength was his thing. And he was strong. Excellent reflexes and strength. But I also knew that he could shoot a stun gun at a super-speed target from over a mile away, and hit it. I knew that he apparently could taste how long it had been since a coffee maker had been cleaned. “It seems like it might be distracting,” I added.

  He shrugged. “It is. When I first got my powers, I was sure I was going to lose my mind. That call when we brought in Vivian earlier made me remember how insane it all felt. I could hear everything. Smell everything. Eating or drinking was a nightmare, because everything tasted too strong. I lost like forty pounds the first year I had my powers, because I just couldn’t make myself keep eating enough most days.”

  I watched him. “So, for example… how far away can you sense things?”

  He shook his head. “That depends on a bunch of stuff. Whether it’s windy. Whether we’re in a wide open space or a crowded building. Pretty far, though.”

  “What about now?”

  He closed his eyes, and we were quiet for a while. “I can hear your heart beating. The television. The heat blowing through the vents. I can hear Dani a few doors down filing her nails. On the next floor down, one of the cleaning crew guys is using that weird-smelling metal polish on the elevator doors.” He paused, still focusing. “Down in the dining hall, they just put out a fresh pizza. It has mushrooms on it, which is disgusting.”

  I laughed, and he opened his eyes. “Really?”

  He nodded. “You want more?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. You never cook in here, because there’s no lingering cooking scent. You don’t use the shampoo and soap they provide us. Yours is more herbal. Lavender and vanilla.”

  I blushed a little, nodding.

  “You had watermelon recently. I can still smell it in the air.”

  “Two days ago,” I said in disbelief.

  “You must sleep with this blanket on you every night. It smells strongly of you.”

  “I do.” I smiled at him. “Now I feel sorry for you when we’re in the mini jet together after I’ve been chasing some asshole down. Sweaty Jolene must not be a great scent.”

  “That’s pretty much the last thing I’m thinking about when we’re together,” he said, and then he took a gulp of his coffee.

  “Right.” Because he was actually focusing on flying the jet, not worrying about how I smell. “So you learned to kind of filter everything out?”

  He nodded. “It took a long time. I still wasn’t all that great at it, even when I came to work here. Sometimes, I’m still not.”

  I studied him, remembering something else he’d told me about his powers that first day. “And, the x-ray vision thing?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

  “It’s not the way most people think it is. It’s not automatic. I have to focus pretty hard to make it work. And it’s not like actually seeing the thing, but the general shapes of things.” He met my eyes. “People always think it’s like that scene in the old Superman movie when Lois asks just how much Superman can see.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t bother asking you what color underwear I’m wearing?” I asked.

  He glanced away. “All I would be able to tell you was if you were wearing them or not. And no, I haven’t tried to look.”

  “I didn’t think you would have,” I said quietly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not a jerk,” I said. “And if you really are, and this is all an act, I really don’t want to know right now.”

  His eyes locked onto mine. “I don’t think I’d make a very good actor.”

  I nodded, and we both looked away.

  “We can watch something else if you want,” I said. “Unless you were planning to leave?”

  “Not unless you’re kicking me out,” he said. “And this is fine.”

  We settled in, finishing off the carafe of coffee and demolishing the baked goods he’d brought while watching baking competition shows on Food Network. We didn’t say much, and again, I was grateful that I didn’t feel like I needed to chatter constantly with Ryan. I leaned back into my corner of the couch and had to admit that I was glad he’d showed up. It shouldn’t have made any difference, having him there with me, but I was finding that, just as I relied on him to have my back when we were out on patrol, I was beginning to get used to the idea of him having my back at other times as well.

  I woke up with bright sunlight falling over my face. I grimaced and put my arm over my head. And then I realized that I must have dozed off on Ryan.

  I also realized that I was snuggled under my afghan, the top of it pulled up to my chin.

  When I opened my eyes. I realized I was still on the couch, and the TV was still on Food Network. My apartment had that nice, warm, cheery glow it always had in the morning, sunlight flowing in through the windows and across the hardwood floors.

  Which meant…

  I glanced at the clock.

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered. It was fifteen minutes past our patrol time and Ryan was probably waiting for me so we could get going. I swung my legs off the couch, and my gaze wandered across the coffee table. The carafe and bakery box were gone, but there was a bottle of water there with a folded piece of paper propped up against it.

  I grabbed it and stood up, unfol
ding the note as I headed toward my bedroom.

  I swapped patrols with Dani and Portia for today, so we’re on at one. Get some sleep, and I’ll see you later. R.

  I read it again, sending a mental thank you to my partner. I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep, but I wanted a long hot shower and a lot of coffee, and I definitely didn’t feel like dealing with super-powered assholes just yet. I’d made it through a day I’d been dreading for the past couple of weeks by focusing on work, and the night thanks to my awesome patrol partner and plentiful coffee and baked goods. I hadn’t fallen apart, which was the thing I definitely didn’t want to do. I was tired of feeling weak and lost, and now I was just grateful that one more heartbreaking milestone was behind me.

  Chapter Six

  After doing my patrol shift with Ryan, I was too on edge to just sit around and do nothing. There had been another shift between us, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. He’d been there when I’d needed someone, even though I hadn’t been willing to admit it until he showed up. He hadn’t tried to make me talk or cheer me up or anything. It was a weird kind of respect, that he could just leave me alone while being in the same room. I appreciated it, probably more than I’d ever be able to express. Still, I felt weird around him now, and I wasn’t overly fond of feeling that way.

  So instead of sitting around, I volunteered to take Chance’s shift, and she seemed surprised for a moment, and then said, “knock yourself out. Thanks.” And then she’d gone wherever it is that Chance goes when she’s not with the rest of us. She kept to herself a lot. I think part of it was that she was sort of friends with Crystal, who we locked up with Alpha and Nightbane when we’d overthrown Alpha. I wondered sometimes if Chance had been involved in the rest of it, but Portia said she was just quiet. Besides that, Chance didn’t really feel like her powers fit in on the team, but Alpha had brought her on board anyway. The way I’d heard it, she had the ability to affect the probability of something happening. So, say someone was either going to turn left or right, for example, she could make them turn left. Admittedly, it wasn’t really the kind of power that seemed very useful when it came to fighting. She seemed to make up for it by training almost endlessly. She knew several styles of martial arts. If I wasn’t so slow, I probably would have been begging her to show me a few things. She was about my age, maybe a little younger. We probably should have been friends, but I just didn’t have it in me to try to socialize with anyone else and she didn’t especially seem like she was interested in making friends. Jenson, Dani, David, and Ryan were more than enough for me as far as socializing was concerned.