Darkest Day (StrikeForce #3)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  I shook it off and tried to focus on Jenson and Ryan complaining about some call the referees had made. They had my back. I had to trust in that, because all four of them had been there for me in ways that I never would have expected. They’d had my back, and I was determined to keep every single one of them safe.

  Chapter Three

  The next night, I was in my suite getting ready for my ops mission at Daemon’s place. I’d done my usual patrol with Ryan that morning and spent the afternoon locked in Jenson’s room with her and David talking about the equipment they’d put together for me.

  But now I was alone. I guessed I should have felt at least a little bit nervous, but this feeling, at least, was familiar. It was the same feeling I used to get before hitting one of the mansions I’d loved robbing so much. The adrenaline, the excitement. The thrill, the edge of danger. Knowing that I was about to do something I probably shouldn’t be. All of it made me feel centered and at home, somehow.

  I hadn’t been a good thief because I was exceptionally sneaky or better equipped than others. I’d been a good thief because I was obsessive. Because I watched for every detail. I’d lost some of that in my time at StrikeForce, first because everything was chaos and I was focused on just trying to get out, and then because I was sidetracked by the responsibilities I had once we’d taken it all away from Alpha. This felt, in a small way, like getting back to my roots.

  And, of course, there was that nagging little voice, telling me that maybe if I’d been more careful, more obsessive, Mama would still be alive.

  I shook it off as I zipped myself into the black body armor Jenson had managed to get from Equipment. All black, not like my gray and black official uniform. Armored everywhere, with a full mask that protected my eyes and had all of the bells and whistles my StrikeForce mask had: night vision, air filtration, sound deadening. I set the mask on the bed, then sat on the edge of the mattress to pull my boots on and lace them up. I had my stereo on. Eminem, which never failed to remind me of my time in the detention facility. Of Dani and Amy and Monica and Marie.

  In a small way, this was the first step toward avenging Monica and Marie’s deaths. And Mama’s.

  I bobbed my head a little as I finished lacing up my boots, then I stood up and pulled my crazy hair back into a messy bun that would fit under my mask. I clipped my bangs off of my face so they wouldn’t fall into my eyes. Then I double-checked the pouches on my belt. Dampener and cuffs, just in case. Emergency first aid supplies, again, just in case. Extra comm in case mine failed somehow, which I doubted would ever be a problem but Jenson was insistent. The last thing I needed was in a box in the closet in my bedroom. I rummaged through it and came out with the small jammer I had used so often to deactivate security systems and alarms. It had come in handy at the lab where Death had been cooking up his crazysauce and it would likely come in handy fairly often again. I was double-checking the jammer when there was a knock at my door. I walked through the living room and opened it, and Jenson, David, Ryan, and Dani were there. My apartment had been designated “mission control,” and David started setting up the laptops they’d be using to monitor me. Ryan handed me a comm.

  “That’s a direct line comm between you and Caine,” Jenson said. “You don’t have to press it. He’ll hear you.”

  I nodded and put it in my ear. “Testing,” I said after he put a comm in his ear.

  “Copy.”

  “Good. You’re loud and clear, too,” I said.

  “Okay. So Caine will be set up here at the laptop monitoring your feed. We’ll have it up on our screen as well,” David said. “Let’s test your cameras and all that again.”

  I nodded and pulled my mask on. They’d embedded several tiny cameras in the mask, as well as a bunch of other sensors.

  “Okay. Walk around a little,” Jenson said, and I did. They all leaned over, looking at Ryan’s monitor, which, I could see, showed a bunch of different angle views of my kitchen, which was where I was walking.

  “Environmental sensors are working as well,” David murmured. “I think we’re ready.”

  “The flight bay on ten is probably the best option now. It’s closest and that’s the one you usually use, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. So everyone’s pretty used to you taking your night time flights. We’ll just go with that,” Jenson said.

  “This is probably all overkill. I doubt I’m going to find anything.”

  “Probably,” Jenson agreed. “But in that case, we can consider it a good practice run.”

  “Right. Okay. See you all in a bit.”

  I let myself out of my apartment and took the flight of stairs up to ten, then to the flight exit there. These special exits were scattered throughout Command to make it convenient for those of us who could fly to come and go easily without having to get up to the roof. I got there, pressed my thumb to the pad so the door would open, and then took off into the darkness.

  The neighborhood where Daemon’s house was located was over on the East Side of Detroit. Not a long flight for me, but long enough to go over a few things, visualize how I wanted to handle it. It wasn’t long before I was over his neighborhood. His house was the fifth one off of the corner. No porch lights on, no lights on inside the house. The night was moonless and still, and I came in for a landing under cover of a huge pine tree near the back of his yard. It was a good spot. I could jam the security system from there and still be in decent cover. I dug the jammer out and powered it up and let it start doing its thing. It would take a few seconds. Once I was sure it had worked, I went to the back door, looking around for cameras or anything like that. Nothing.

  I picked the lock and pushed the back door open, and I was in. The kitchen had a sparse, unused look, but I took a moment to look through the cabinets anyway. A few cans of chicken noodle soup, a few dishes. I moved on.

  The living room was actually decorated pretty nicely. Modern, clean. I started rummaging through drawers and cabinets. What I really wanted was some evidence of family or a girlfriend or something. And yeah, there was a weird little twinge of something that felt an awful lot like guilt that I was even considering using innocent family members against him, but they certainly hadn’t had the same concern when it had come to getting to me. I pushed it away and kept looking. No photos or anything in the living room. I rifled through the drawers of a table near the front entry, trying not to move anything too much. There was an envelope with a handwritten envelope. It looked like a child’s handwriting.

  I quickly flipped past it and looked for something else.

  “Jo, what was that last one?” Ryan asked over my comm.

  “We’re not sinking that low,” I said quietly. He didn’t answer. There were a couple of old utility bills and I made sure I held them up so our video capture could see. I didn’t think they’d help much, but it was something, anyway. I finished up in the hallway and headed toward the back of the house, where the bedrooms and bathroom were located. The bedroom on the left was empty, but I checked out the closet anyway. Empty. The other bedroom had a bed and dresser in it. Two nightstands. Everything matched, and there were no decorations or personal items of any kind on display. I went through the nightstand nearest to me. Two boxes of condoms, lube, a paddle.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said, still rifling through way more of Daemon’s sex life than I wanted to know about. Ryan laughed over the comm. I gave up on the first drawer after it was clear that it was nothing more than his own little personal arsenal, and opened the bottom nightstand drawer. At first it looked like more of the same, but I pushed aside some thing I didn’t want to think about too closely, and found a box underneath. I crouched and pulled it out. It was a dark brown cardboard box with a lid. Kind like a shoebox, but fancier looking, little swirly designs stenciled onto the lid. I opened it and set the lid down on the bed.

  Photos. Letters.

  “Jackpot,” Ryan said. I started looking through them, holding the photos up for a few seco
nds so my team back at Command could do screen captures of my feed. Some of the photos were pretty old. 1990s, maybe early 2000s from the look of it. It’s not like many of us bothered with printed photos anymore. Maybe moms did, I thought as I held up another one, a family at the beach.

  “Wonder if that’s Kid Daemon,” I murmured.

  “Could be,” Ryan said.

  The letters were… they kind of made me want to hit someone. Love letters. Lots of them, all in the same feminine hand.

  “Looks like maybe we found something he cares about. Keep looking,” Ryan said. I quickly put the box back and then put the whatever-the-hell-it-was back on top of it. The other nightstand held a few paperbacks, which I flipped through quickly. Tissues, aspirin. Nothing else of interest.

  The dresser didn’t turn up much more other than that Daemon bought expensive-ass clothes. I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Normal crap, a prescription bottle that I held up so they could see it through the feed.

  “Jolene, be still a second,” Ryan said, and the tension in his voice made me freeze. I stood silently, listening. I didn’t hear anything, but I stayed silent, knowing that even through an audio feed, Ryan could hear things I couldn’t.

  “There’s someone outside,” he said. I slowly put the prescription bottle back and closed the medicine cabinet. “More than one person.”

  Was it sick that I hoped they were someone I could fight? Someone other than a nosy neighbor or (ha) a burglar?

  What it horrible that I wanted somebody to hurt? In the weeks since Mama’s death, my sadness had slowly twisted into something easier to deal with. Revenge was beginning to cloud most of my waking thoughts, and my adrenaline spiked at even the possibility of being able to fight one of Killjoy’s people now.

  “Jolene, try to get out of there,” Jenson said. “They’re in the back. Our exterior camera died when they showed up.”

  “Which probably means Virus. If he fries your equipment, we won’t be able to monitor you,” Ryan added.

  I didn’t answer. I turned and quietly stepped out of the bathroom, crept down the short, narrow hallway toward the living room. If any of them were out there, Virus, Daemon, whoever, I wanted at least a chance of grabbing one of them.

  I heard a feminine voice, a soft laugh, and I stilled. They were at the back door. A moment later, a deeper voice.

  “That’s not Daemon’s voice,” Ryan said in my earpiece.

  I wondered for a moment if the woman was the author of all of the love letters. If so, it was possible we had the bait to make Daemon comply in hand. Even as clueless as I apparently am about the whole relationship thing, I could recognize the flirtatious note in her voice. If this was the object of Daemon’s affections, she maybe wasn’t as enamored and devoted as she’d seemed in her letters.

  “The girl sounds familiar, though,” Ryan said over the earpiece, and I had to agree. I was trying to think of where, but I got distracted by the sound of the back door opening.

  “Shit,” Ryan groaned. “Any point in reminding you that this is supposed to be a secret ops thing so we can hit them hard when they won’t expect it? If they know we’re there, they’ll start being more careful and then our job becomes harder.”

  He was right. And whoever the guy was, he wasn’t Daemon, or Virus, for that matter. I crept back to the bedrooms, figuring I’d sneak out one of the windows. I did that, pulling it closed behind me, then I slunk back around outside the house. A lamp was on in the living room, and the two people were sitting on the couch. I crept closer to the window. Daemon had blinds, which made it easy for me to see into the bright living room. I wanted to make sure Jenson and David could get a screen capture so we could figure out who these people were who just made themselves at home at Daemon’s place. They had to be someone who mattered at least a little bit.

  I got close to the window. “Got ‘em,” Ryan said.

  It took a second before it registered why the woman sounded familiar. The guy, I didn’t recognize at all. I stepped away, glanced around. The neighborhood was mostly dark and silent around me at this late hour. Still, I wanted to be careful about being seen flying off into the night. Once I felt confident that no one was watching, I ran back to Daemon’s back yard and rose into the air, then headed back toward Command.

  “The woman was the electro chick we let go after we took over from Alpha,” I said over my comm.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said.

  “Could you hear what they were saying?”

  “They were talking about what to order in and what to watch. And I’m probably stupidly paranoid because I’m trying to figure out what all of it might have been code for.”

  “Well, that makes two of us. We’ll be wearing matching tin foil hats in no time.”

  He laughed. “You did good, Jolene. I know you were tempted to confront both of them and demand answers. Getting the drop on them, snooping around without them knowing we’re doing it, is going to make all of this a lot easier. We’ll hit them hard later.”

  “I know. I just kept trying to remind myself of that.”

  “There’s coffee waiting. We have a long night ahead of trying to sort through all the stuff you found.”

  “Okay. Be there in a few minutes.” I flew over downtown. I could see Command shining in the distance, the river an expanse of darkness beyond. Cars snaked their way through the city below, and from up here, it was easier to see how downtown was laid out in a big circle, the streets almost looking like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. That ended once you got out of downtown, though. I guess the city had been planned, and the idea was to keep those spokes and that circular shape going forever, but at some point the concept of a grid of straight streets took over. I’m betting the original city planner, whoever he was, must have been pissed about that. Convenience ultimately rules, I guess. I’d found myself thinking more often lately about intentions and right versus wrong and shit like that. Things I never gave much thought to before, either because I didn’t care or because, once I started looking too closely, I might start to second-guess myself. But I was thinking about it now. Mama’s death had awoken not just a weird, simmering rage in me, but also questions I’d never bothered with before, such as who I was when it came down to it, and, maybe most of all, how I wanted to be remembered when I was gone. The one thing that kept coming back to me from Mama’s funeral was how so many people told me that she’d changed their lives, that she’d been there with an encouraging word, a shoulder to cry on, a hot meal, or advice just when they’d needed it most. And that was very much Mama. Even when we had nothing, she helped others.

  I wasn’t her. I could never be her, and if I tried to be the way she was, it would mean spending my entire life acting. Playing a part. I couldn’t be remembered for being sweet because I wasn’t. But if, when all this is over, I can be remembered as someone who kicked ass and kept people safe when things got bad? That would be a decent way to be remembered. I wanted to be less of a fuck-up. I wanted StrikeForce to be less of a mess. And in truth, we needed to be better. No more mistakes. No more running around waiting for the next shoe to drop. And, when the time came to act, we had to be able to act without second-guessing or triple-guessing ourselves. That was why I met with Jenson and the others. We all knew that we would need to do things that we couldn’t wait to be decided on by some committee. Portia knew the same thing, which was why as far as we were concerned, unless we were specifically on patrol or on duty with StrikeForce, she turned a blind eye to us. Which was good. The less she knew, the better.

  I gave downtown one final glance, then came in for a landing at the same exit bay I’d left from earlier, then headed down to my room, where Jenson and the rest of them were already going over the screen caps. Ryan was typing something out on another laptop while Jenson, Dani, and David gathered around a larger monitor, one of the love letters pulled up on the screen. I went to my bedroom and pulled off the new body armor and all of its tracking stuff, then headed out to the living
room to join them.

  “There’s coffee in there,” Ryan said, nodding toward the kitchen.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” I murmured as I headed into my kitchen. I poured a cup and grabbed one of the muffins someone had brought up from the dining hall. I plopped down next to Ryan on the sofa and leaned in to see what he was looking at. It was one of the love letters from Daemon’s nightstand drawer. I read for a few seconds, then shook my head.

  “I cannot imagine anyone fucking loving Daemon that much.”

  Ryan laughed. “Well apparently the guy gets fucked, at the very least. Or really wants to,” he said, alluding to the stuff I’d had to sift through to find the letters.

  “I am gonna have nightmares for years,” I muttered. “Any clues about who she is?” I asked, nodding toward the laptop and the image of the love letter on the screen. I took a sip of coffee and read a little more.

  “Not much. She signs every letter ‘D.’ So not a whole lot to go on. But I think of everything you found, this is the thing that has the potential to be something.”

  “That and the envelope I didn’t open,” I said, biting the inside of my lip. “I don’t know what the hell came over me. I just don’t want to get any kids involved. And I know they would have gone after a kid to get to me without a second thought, but—“

  “Jolene.” Ryan set the laptop down on the coffee table and turned to face me. “One of the things we need to remember in this business is that we can’t let ourselves turn into the kind of people we’re trying to protect everyone else from. It’s too easy to become the monster when monsters are all that’s on your mind. When they’ve taken something from you that matters,” he added in a softer tone. “So you don’t want to involve a kid in this mess? That just tells me that you’re the kind of person I feel proud to fight beside.”