Day's End (6 page)

“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.

“I know I’m first for you. Just like you’re first for me. But we have shit to do. Usually, it’s me bailing on you or falling asleep mid-sentence.”

“Yeah, but when you do that I just sit back and enjoy the view. I ever tell you you’ve got a nice rack?”

I laughed. “You’re delirious.”

“Nah. I think it at least twenty times a day.”

“Good night, Ryan,” I said, bringing his hand to my mouth and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. He kissed the back of my neck again.

“Night, Jolene.” He held me tighter, and I fell asleep grateful that, despite everything, I’d somehow found my way to this crazy, warm, loving partnership. My forever, I thought as I drifted off.

Chapter Three

I was cooling down from my workout with Jenson and reading through the reports from the incident with Mayhem and the follow-up stupidity with Eve. I had a paper map (mainly so I could scribble notes on it where I needed to) and was studying the locations of every place there had been a verified sighting or incident involving Mayhem and its members. I’d added Detroit to the locations (again) and was trying and failing to figure out any pattern or method to their madness, other than the fact that they were always either going after super hero teams or actively messing with StrikeForce. I took a gulp of water and started writing. My notes and theories on where Killjoy had his team hidden were an unorganized mess, but I kept thinking that if I just kept writing shit down, if I arranged and rearranged lists of places, something would hit me. Despite having zero trust for Crystal, I’d added England and Scotland to my possible locations as well. I had a second set of notes and maps, all of those covering the missing kids. Despite hoping for some overlap, some kind of hint, there wasn’t any between the two lists, other than Detroit.

I was still trying to make sense of any of it when my comm beeped. “All hands in uniform and report to the flight bay, immediately,” Portia’s assistant said over the comm. I jumped up, quickly grabbed my maps and notes, and hustled up to my room. I pulled my SF uniform on as quickly as possible and made my way up to the flight bay. Jenson and David were arriving around the same time.

“What’s going on?”

Jenson shook her head. “I don’t know. I just heard via the comm announcement.”

We walked on to the flight deck together to see Portia, Ryan, and a few of the others gathered already. Max, Lindsey, Dani, and Vivian all walked in shortly after us.

“Okay people. We have a goddamn mess on our hands. Someone set fire to a small private school in Grosse Pointe. Three floors, fires raging at all of the emergency exits. Kids trapped inside.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“We’re guessing our lady in blue or Mayhem. At this point, it could be either. There are several StrikeForce families who send their kids to that school. Kids with powers. We don’t know the status of those kids right now, other than that they’re probably trapped in the inferno with the rest of the kids and staff.”

“Or they’ve already been taken,” I muttered. “I’ll meet you all there.” I took off into the sky, and moments later, I heard the roar of jets behind me as the others started taking off. I knew which school it was from overhearing a few of the support staffers who had family members there talking about it. It was one of those little known secrets in the city, that this one particular school had slowly but surely become a safe haven for the kids of people with powers.

What had surprised most of us was hearing that the kids of powered people also seemed to develop powers. After the first Confluence, it had all seemed random. It didn’t seem to run in families, or anything like that. I knew now what I hadn’t known then, thanks to Daemon — parents of powered kids did their best to keep those kids’ powers a secret. Most of it was fear. Part of it was worry that organizations like StrikeForce would poke their noses in and want to monitor their kids to recruit or lock them up later.

This school, in particular, had become a haven in the last year when its principal found herself with powers after the second Confluence, which was the same Confluence in which I’d gotten my own freakish set of abilities.

I flew, soaring through the air at top speed. Soon, plumes of black smoke rose into the air ahead of me. Fire engines were parked all around, as well as police cars and ambulances. Media helicopters and drones circled above the site, and crowds of people stood behind the police barricades. I landed, and immediately heard the angry shouts, the jeers and boos from the crowd. I rolled my eyes behind my mask, gave them a one-finger salute, and headed toward the firemen who had gathered near one of the trucks.

“Are there people on every floor?” I asked them.

The shortest one, who I noticed had a captain’s emblem on his hat, nodded. He pointed toward the building. “We got kids on all three floors. We’re trying to knock down the flames in the stairwells but we can’t do it. Whatever kind of accelerant they used is kicking our asses. Besides that, whoever designed this goddamn building should be hung. Those windows are so goddamn narrow none of us can get in. We were looking at having a crane or something brought in to bash the walls in to create an escape route, but we don’t know where any of the kids are and we don’t want to risk it. We’d usually go down through the roof, but… ” he trailed off. He didn’t have to finish. They’d set the entire roof on fire too, a carpet of otherworldly-looking blue flames.

“Okay.”

“We got the kids out of the ground floor. Word is that one of the teachers has the, uh, special kids somewhere on the third floor. They’re the target, right?”

“Maybe. We don’t know for sure.”

He looked up at the building. “How the hell are we gonna get in there, Daystar?”

I took a few steps back, my eyes on the second floor. Time to see how heat-resistant these uniforms were, I guess.

“So?” Portia said, appearing next to me with the rest of the team.

“I’m going in. I should be able to bust through. Cover me. I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah?” Portia muttered, glancing around.

“Oh yeah. I can’t watch my back and do this.”

“We’ve got it. Be careful,” Ryan said. I bumped fists with him, then rose into the air, backing myself up about a dozen feet back from where we were.