Darkest Day (StrikeForce #3)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “Or I’m weak,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

  “Nah. Never that,” he said quietly. I met his eyes for a second, then glanced away. “I know you wanted to go after them. Especially when we recognized the electro that you freed. But your initial plan was a good one. Learn their shit, then hit ‘em so hard they’ll wish they never stepped foot outside of their playpens.”

  “And you’re here to remind me not to lose it,” I said, grinning. “Because I almost did.”

  “I know. And I don’t blame you. You didn’t do it, though. You’re good at that sneaky shit,” he said.

  “Who knew learning how to steal stuff would come in so handy?” I asked, and he laughed. We sat and read through a few more of the letters.

  “If this is code for something, she’s really good,” I said after the third one. Ryan nodded. “I’m kind of thinking it’s not a code.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But, they’re old. The most recent one was like three years ago, at least that was the most recent I saw when I was flipping through them for the captures.”

  “Yeah. Last letter was just over three years ago,” he said swiping through the files to find the last one I’d captured. Daemon had kept them in order, oldest letters on top, newest on the bottom. I wondered if he read them, because that was a weird way to store them. You’d think you’d just put the newest one on top of the stack. I leaned over and started reading.

  “Oh,” I murmured.

  “Shit,” Ryan agreed. “Well, that explains some things.”

  The letter was about how it just wasn’t working out, that his activities had gotten too crazy, that the people he was associating with were too scary. About how she loved him more than she’d ever loved anyone, that she would have done anything for him, but that their child had to come first, and she didn’t believe their baby was safe around him.

  “Baby’d be four or so by now, depending on how old it was when this was written,” Ryan murmured. Based on the very large, scrawly writing I’d seen on that envelope, I had a sneaking suspicion that the letter had been from Daemon’s kid.

  “I’m maybe even dumber for not looking at it now,” I said. “Shit.”

  “Nope,” Ryan said, bumping his knee against mine. “We can do this without resorting to crap that’ll just make you hate yourself.”

  “I already—“ I broke off. He gave me a hard look and looked like he was going to say something, but I got up, muttering about needing another cup of coffee. Yeah. I already hated myself. I hated myself every time I pictured my mother dying, every time I thought through all the things I could have done differently.

  But I hated Killjoy and his crew even more, and I was feeling increasingly raw and lost as we got closer to what would have been Mama’s fiftieth birthday. The next couple of days were going to be hell. I’d been trying not to think about it, but when I wasn’t working (which was almost never, thankfully) it was all I could think about.

  When I went back into the living room, Ryan was thankfully focused on something else, and I went over to Jenson and the others to see what they’d dug up.

  “So far, we’ve clearly established his name and date of birth. Jenson’s going to run some searches on that and see what it comes up with in terms of family and his financials. The letters you let us get screen caps of make it clear there’s someone out there he cared very much for at one time, and possibly still does. We’ll see about tracking her down,” David said, and I nodded.

  “The electro that I let go showing up there is something we need to be looking at. How’s she involved with Killjoy’s people? Did she know Daemon before all of this or did she go to them because she was pissed at me? We need answers there. And maybe get some kind of tracking on her so we can see who she meets with.”

  “I have a mini drone in the area now,” David said, nodding toward the other laptop on the table. It was a live feed of the outside of Daemon’s house, looking into the living room window, where the electro and whoever the guy was were watching TV and eating out of white styrofoam takeout containers.

  “I had no idea you even had those,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Jenson’s idea.”

  “It’s a good one.”

  We stayed up late, mostly waiting for the electro to go somewhere so the drone could follow her. I sat on the couch next to Ryan, who had already dozed off and was snoring quietly with his head resting back on the couch. Jenson sat on my other side with the laptop with the drone feed resting on her knees.

  “You know, I set this to record,” David said finally. “We don’t have to stay up all night and watch it.”

  “I’ve watched this long,” Jenson said with a shrug. “If you’re tired, you should turn in, though.”

  I glanced up to see David watching Jenson with a blank look on his face.

  “Unless you want to be too tired tomorrow,” she said in a quieter tone, keeping her eyes on the screen.

  That seemed to get him moving. “Okay. Just leave that in my lab whenever you’re done with it. Night,” he said, then he smacked Ryan’s shoulder and Ryan jolted awake.

  “They’re insisting on watching the drone,” David told Ryan.

  Ryan stood up with a yawn, then glanced down at me. “So a late night for Jo means I’m in for a fun work shift tomorrow, then.”

  “Are you suggesting that I get bitchy when I’m tired?” I asked.

  “And I get to work with you first thing in the morning,” he said with a grin. “Try not to take my head off.”

  I shook my head, and he called a “night” over his shoulder. Once my door closed behind Ryan and David, I turned to Jenson.

  “So. What’s going on on tomorrow?”

  Chapter Four

  Jenson tried to avoid the question, but she really should know by now that I’m a stubborn pain in the ass when I want to be. In the end, she just shrugged. “We’re going to see a movie and probably grab something to eat.”

  “Like a date?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows.

  “You are such a goof,” she said, laughing. “It’s not a date. We’re friends. We’re going to hang out away from work and do friend-type things.”

  “Do friend-type things include anything to do with tongue?” I asked, and she tossed the pillow from her end of the couch at my head. I ducked, laughing.

  “You are the worst,” she muttered, but her face was a deep pink. “It’s not a date,” Jenson repeated.

  “Okay.”

  “If what David and I are going to do tomorrow counts as a ‘date’ then you and Caine are practically married,” she said with a smirk.

  “We are not.”

  “Uh huh. You work together, hang out together, eat together, train together—“

  “Yeah, I do all of that with you, too. Are we married?”

  “I’m just waiting for you to pop the question and run away with me,” Jenson said in a wry tone, and I shook my head.

  “Okay. So has one of these not-a-dates happened before?”

  Jenson shook her head. I wanted to keep her talking about this or anything, really. I didn’t want to think. Didn’t want to go to sleep.

  Stupid as it was, didn’t really want to be alone.

  “I wonder what she’ll lead us to,” I said, looking back at the laptop screen.

  “I wonder mostly how she knows Daemon,” Jenson said. “How can she already know him well enough that she has a key to his house and can just make herself at home? Unless she was already working with Death and the rest of them,” she finished.

  I nodded.

  “And what about your search?” she asked after a few moments.

  “What search?”

  “We both know you spend most of your non-work time looking for Killjoy,” she said, meeting my eyes. “And no, I haven’t shared that with anyone else. I understand. You want to find him. You want to make him pay. And that’s something that you want for yourself. Maybe if I was a better friend, I’d tell the others so they could keep a be
tter eye on you.”

  I didn’t answer. Just closed my eyes.

  “But we both know that, if and when you find Killjoy, you don’t want any witnesses to what happens next.” She paused. “Am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do when I find him,” I said. “Right now everything in me screams that I’d do everything in my power to end him, as painfully as possible. But then there’s this little voice, and it sounds an awful fucking lot like Caine, actually, telling me that I’m better than that, that I shouldn’t do the things they’d do.”

  Jenson set the laptop on the coffee table and rested her elbows on her knees, then rested her chin on her hands. She seemed to be thinking. We both watched the scene on the laptop for a few minutes. The electro and the guy on the couch were kissing now, the movie completely forgotten.

  “I really wasn’t hoping for this much of a show tonight,” Jenson muttered. We were quiet for a while longer. “For what it’s worth, nobody who actually knows you at all would judge you too harshly if you followed your instincts on Killjoy. And you don’t care all that much about that. You’re going to do what you need to do.”

  I nodded. “Superheroes aren’t supposed to say shit like that.”

  She sighed. “Well, this stuff we’re doing,” she said, gesturing at the laptop, “this isn’t anything StrikeForce would ever do. I don’t know that we can call ourselves superheroes when we do this. It reminds me more of the special ops stuff I was involved in when I was with the Army. It’s the kind of stuff that makes most people a little uneasy, but, at the same time, they don’t need to know about it. All they need to know is that their life gets to go on the way it always has.”

  Jenson didn’t talk about her past much at all. The edge of bitterness in her voice just then was not something I was used to hearing from her. She was usually straightforward, businesslike. She had a decent sense of humor, but most people never saw it. I’ve never seen her cool demeanor crack other than at Mama’s funeral when she’d cried with me. But anger wasn’t something I associated with Jenson.

  And it struck me that I was probably holding her up to some kind of ridiculous standard. Everyone gets mad. Everyone loses it eventually. Jenson was just really good at keeping just about everything to herself.

  Poor David had his work cut out for him. It would take more than a few not-a-dates to get her to start opening up to him.

  “You don’t talk much about that part of your life,” I said, and she shrugged.

  “It’s in the past. That’s the only thing worth remembering about it.”

  I nodded. I guess I could relate to that attitude. There was a whole lot I’d like to leave in the past.

  Or, barring that, in a nice deep grave nobody would ever find. I shook the thought away.

  “Oh, Christ,” I muttered when I glanced at the laptop. The electro and the guy were mostly undressed and going at it. Jenson laughed and we both averted our eyes.

  “Yeah. We are total professionals. I’m this close to covering my eyes,” I said, and Jenson laughed again.

  Jenson sighed. “I haven’t done that in years.”

  “What?”

  “Get laid.”

  “Oh.”

  She glanced at me. “Did you and Killjoy get that far?”

  I shook my head. “Thank god, no. I’d have to try to steam clean my girlie bits if that had been the case.”

  She laughed again.

  “It’s been years here, too. The burglar lifestyle didn’t leave much time for guys. At least, not the way I did it.”

  “Obsessively, you mean,” Jenson said, and I nodded.

  “I guess I’m kind of reverting to that mindset with all this,” I said, gesturing toward the laptop and other equipment on the table. “It’s so much easier to obsess over trying to track down Killjoy and his crew, to plan how I’ll kill him, or, when I’m trying to be decent, how I’ll turn him over like the criminal piece of shit he is. It’s sick, probably, but the thought of him begging me for mercy gets me through some of the worst of it.”

  Jenson didn’t answer for a while. “I think wanting to hurt him badly is normal. And I think that whatever helps you hold on and get through this, whatever helps you hold it together, isn’t a bad thing. But you should know that it’s not just you. I’m here to listen to you talk or to be here with you when you cry or to take off with you if you ever need to get away and just scream until you let some of this rage out. And if not me, then you have to know that Caine’s here for you.”

  “He’s a good partner,” I said, nodding.

  “Yeah.” Jenson seemed like she was about to say more, but she didn’t. “You can come out with us, if you want.”

  I nearly laughed. I was sure David would just love that. He’d been crushing on Jenson since I’d known him, and probably longer than that.

  “Nah, I’m good.” We watched the feed some more, and then Jenson finally rolled her eyes and stood up.

  “What is this guy, the freaking Energizer bunny?” she asked. “I think I’m going to turn in. We can watch whatever the drone records in the morning. Unless you want to watch some more?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, and she laughed, picked up the laptop, and closed it.

  “You did a good job tonight. I was impressed by how calm and orderly it all was. No wonder you drove the police crazy for so long.”

  I smiled. “It felt good. Not that I plan on robbing houses for a living again, but I felt in control. I haven’t felt that way in what feels like forever.”

  Jenson nodded. “Get some sleep.”

  “I will,” I said, knowing I had no intention of doing that.

  After Jenson left, I put on my sweats and a grungy old t-shirt and made my way down to the training room. I lifted a little bit. I was still convinced that if I could keep myself strong, eventually I’d get some of my physical strength and reflexes back. I knew it was a long shot, but it was better than sitting around hoping. And, working out tired me out, and I needed it. You’d think after spending my days patrolling, fighting with super-powered jerks, volunteering for extra shifts, trying to find Killjoy in my spare moments, and working with Jenson and the others on our little secret information gathering missions that I would sleep like a baby every night. It never seemed to work out that way, though. Usually, I stay up late watching whatever crap is on TV and trying not to think too much. And then eventually, I go to bed once my eyes start getting tired and I feel like maybe I’ll sleep. And I usually toss and turn in bed for a long time, and that’s when all of the thoughts about things I could have done differently start up, along with anger at myself for not being smarter, for not being better, for getting Mama into that situation in the first place. And eventually, I’d fall asleep amid the self-loathing, and the nightmares would start. Lather, rinse, repeat until my alarm went off in the morning.

  So, I stayed up as late as I could, and I’d been finding that coming to the training room was a good way to at least try to work through some of my anger in a productive way. Once I finished with the weights, I moved on to the punching bag. With no one else around, I didn’t bother worrying about how slow I was, how clumsy my movements were. I just focused on trying to make sure that my fist connected with the bag eventually. I focused on accuracy, on making contact, and I hoped that if I did that enough, I’d get back some of what I’d lost.

  I punched until my arms were aching and sweat rolled down my face and I was breathing in rough, ragged gasps. I’d found a bit of a rhythm, and stuck with it. I’d hit the bag more often than not, and it was a small victory but I’d take it. Once I couldn’t punch anymore, I took the elevator back up to my floor, stood under a searing-hot shower for a while, and then collapsed into bed. My phone dinged on my nightstand, and I reached over and grabbed it. There was a message from Ryan.

  Did you know Jenson and David are going out tomorrow night?!

  I laughed, and typed my message back. You are such a gossip.

  Not always. When did that wh
ole thing start?

  It’s just now starting, if Jenson will let it go anywhere.

  What was it you said the other night? About them speaking elvish to each other?

  I laughed. I don’t know that they do that. But I could totally see it happening.

  Hm. Yeah, we are a scary bunch of superheroes.

  You should have seen me and Jenson watching that feed from Daemon’s. Totally unprofessional.

  Why? What happened?

  Daemon may want to have that sofa cleaned, that’s all I’m saying.

  There was no response for a bit, and then my phone dinged. I did not need to know that.

  You’re my partner. If I suffer, you suffer.

  I don’t remember agreeing to that.

  A few seconds went by. And then my phone dinged. If you’re staying up, you should check out this English cooking show on streaming. You’d probably like it. He sent a link, and I grinned.

  You just made my night. Thanks.

  You are a strange woman. Enjoy. Night.

  I turned on my bedroom television and found the show he’d mentioned and then I settled in to fall asleep to two older English ladies riding a motorcycle and making food I’d probably never be brave enough to try. I stayed awake a long time, and when I finally fell asleep, I was too tired for nightmares, and that was a blessing in and of itself because the next day and the extra dose of memories and loss and guilt it was already making me feel would be a nightmare all on its own.

  Chapter Five

  My alarm started screaming at me at the usual ungodly hour. I hit snooze and pulled my blankets up over my head with a groan. I lay under the blankets, my stomach twisting, my eyes burning, my throat closing up on me as I tried to fight back the sobs, screams, or whatever the hell it was that wanted to come out. I’d barely slept the night before, wavering between exhaustion, giving myself pep talks about facing today, and complete overwhelm. When I’d finally managed it, it felt like mere seconds before the fucking alarm clock went off.