Day's End (5 page)

“They might still be around here—”

“Now, Jo. Don’t make me carry you, because I will.”

“What—” I stopped in mid-sentence as a squadron of soldiers from the Tribunal landed around us, surrounding the four of us as, of course, the news helicopters circled overhead. The head of the Tribunal, Eve, was at the front, and she started walking toward me. I tensed, ready to fight, still high on adrenaline from my too-short face off against Killjoy.

“Daystar, stand down. Not here,” Portia ordered.

Then she turned to Eve. “Not a chance in hell,” Portia said to her, stepping between Eve and me. And then she teleported us away.

In the next instant, all of us were back in Command. When we got there, Portia stalked away. “Goddamn, I need to start drinking or something,” she muttered.

“That sounds like a plan,” Max called. “I’ve got a bottle if you want to share, boss.”

Portia shook her head as she walked away, and Max excused himself, leaving me and Ryan standing in the corridor in the residence wing.

“Did you really expect me to stay behind?” he asked, and I rolled my eyes.

“I knew you were going to say that.” I walked over to the elevator and hit the button.

“The woman I’m pretty sure I want to spend the rest of my life with is out there getting attacked by a psycho. Yeah, I’m gonna say ‘yes dear, I’ll just stay right the fuck here?’ Not a chance.”

I stared at him as the elevator doors closed behind us.

“Don’t look so surprised. You know I want you forever. It’s not gonna be enough time.”

I just kept staring at him. My heart felt like it was about to pound out of my chest.

“Either you’re really happy or you’re getting ready to run,” he said. “Your heart rate is going nuts.”

“I’m not running. I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Well, I do.”

“Oh. Well good.”

He laughed.

“I want you forever too,” I told him.

“Thanks.”

I looked down, not knowing what else to say but grinning like an absolute fool behind my mask.

“Do you really have to meet with that dickhead now?” he asked me.

“I really do. And be nice. He’s currently the only one saying positive things about us and trying to calm everyone the fuck down.”

“I’ll be nice to the dickhead. It’s more than he deserves after all of the shit he said about you before.”

I shrugged. “It’s not like he was the only one saying it. I really don’t care anymore. They’re saying so much about me that at this point, I really don’t give a shit. There are seriously a handful of people in the entire world whose opinions matter to me. I know the PR stuff matters for the team and the city in general. But what people who don’t even know me decide to say doesn’t matter to me at all.”

The elevator stopped on my floor and he leaned toward me. I pulled my mask off, and he laid the type of kiss on me that makes you forget just about anything else in the world, the kind of kiss that says “I want you forever” and you know damn well that it’s the truth.

When he pulled away, his eyes stayed locked on mine, and then he lowered his lips to mine again, and I melted in his arms, against his big body; I felt my tension and anger over my confrontation with Killjoy falling away, replaced by something so much better.

We finally came up for air, he rested his forehead against mine. “I have another shift in an hour,” he said.

“I’ll probably be passed out by the time you’re done, but you should come by later anyway.”

“I bet I can wake you up,” he said.

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 region 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.”