One More Day (23 page)

They truly had pissed Connor off, I guess. When I got to my teammates, I found Dani sobbing over someone on the floor.

“Oh, Christ,” I breathed. Monica lay on the floor in a pool of blood. My knees finally gave out on me then, and I sank to the floor, unable to tear my eyes away from Monica but seeing, instead, Mama lying there.

I couldn’t breath. I started shaking, and I covered my mouth with my hands, afraid that I’d either sob or vomit and not feeling like adding to the insanity by doing either of them. Amy knelt next to Dani, her arm around her shoulders, and Dani rested her head on Amy’s shoulder as she cried. Portia stood there like a statue. David and Jenson stood together, neither of them looking, for once, like they knew what to do next.

I just kept shaking. I jumped when I felt a strong arm around my waist.

“Okay. It’s okay,” Ryan said quietly as he pulled me up off the floor.

“How did you guys decide to come there today?” I asked him, determined to pull myself together at least a little.

“We got a bunch of anonymous tips that you and Dr. Death had been seen there, and that there were other villains around. So we went, figuring you’d need back up. When we got there, we didn’t see anything at first, other than you and Killjoy.”

I closed my eyes. “He wanted to draw you guys out of here. This was part of the plan,” I said softly. “David and Jenson,” I said.

“Yeah?” David asked.

“Can you guys go over the security footage? I want to see who he sent in to do this.” I already had a sinking feeling that I knew at least one of them, realizing that someone had been missing from our battle by the freeway.

David and Jenson nodded, then left, David patting Dani’s shoulder as he passed, Jenson leaning down and hugging her quickly before stepping away.

I spent the afternoon helping to put things somewhat back to normal. Portia was locked in her office with Amy and Dani, making burial arrangements, while Ariana, Ryan, and Chance worked with me organizing the med staff and fielding questions from StrikeForce employees who had been in other parts of the building at the time. I was just grateful, at this point, that they’d been focused on particular people, not mass slaughter. I remembered what Jenson had said, that in a world where people had super strength, someone with her low-level powers didn’t stand a chance. That was true for most of those who worked at StrikeForce.

Once things were somewhat calmed down, I made my way to David’s lab. He and Jenson were looking at the monitors over his desk.

“So. Lemme guess. Virus,” I said, and they nodded.

I closed my eyes, fighting back the nausea trying to come over me, the rage I had at myself. One more person in an ever-growing list of people I stupidly trusted once upon a time.

“Did he have help?” I asked. Jenson nodded toward the screen, and I watched. He’d come in with two guys. The first one used some kind of telekinetic powers to toss the receptionist across the room, and they left her lying where she landed. They made their way to the prison wing. The first guy kept tossing people out of their way, but the second did some weird little wave with his hand, and slices opened across throats.

“That’s Render,” David said quietly. “Until now, we all assumed he was dead. No one’s seen him in over a year.”

We watched as the first kinetic guy went after Marie. She was trying to block them out of Brianne’s cell, and he threw her. Her head hit one of the walls, and she went down. I watched as Virus started moving his hands, a movement, a gesture I knew well from when we’d worked together. Brianne’s door slid open, and, after a bit more gesturing from Virus, her manacles opened and she joined the group of villains, smiling and talking as they made their way out of the women’s wing, and toward the men’s wing.

I didn’t want to watch the moment Monica died, but I felt, in some weird way, that it was the least I owed her. I watched as the villains marched in, taking down guards as they did. Monica stood at the end of the hall. She used her powers to throw the kinetic back and into Render. They both stumbled, and she threw Virus at them. That happened three or four times. Every time they got up, she did it again, and I realized, sickeningly, that she was trying to buy time.

That she assumed we were coming to help her.

“Why weren’t we alerted?”

“Communications systems were all fried. They probably signaled for help right away,” Jenson said.

I watched her throw the kinetic again, and then a large red slice opened across her throat, and another down her chest, and she fell to the floor. It only took moments for Virus to get Daemon and Maddoc out, all of them laughing, shaking hands. They started walking out, and as they passed the camera, Maddoc looked up, grinned, and mouthed the words, “Later, Daystar.”

A small sound escaped me, and I barely refrained from blasting the monitor. I dug Dr. Death’s phone, which I’d hung onto since taking him, out of my pocket. “I know tracing calls can be tricky. Can you trace where this has been though? Some kind of internal GPS thing? Is that how it works?”

David nodded. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Gimme a minute.” He took the phone from me and hooked it up to one of his computers. Jenson looked at me questioningly.

“I’m working on something.”

She nodded and let it go.

“There’s some extra security on here. I think I can crack it, but it’ll take longer than I thought. Maybe by tonight,” he said. I looked at him, at the dark circles under his eyes, the bruises on his face from the fight.

“Get some rest. Work on it when you can,” I said.

David watched me for a minute. “I’ll rest later.” I nodded, then turned and left.

I took the elevator up to my floor, then let myself into my suite. I glanced at my phone automatically checking to see if Mama had called while I was out, then remembered that she was gone. I sank down onto the couch and stared into the darkness of my suite. If there wasn’t anything I could use on that phone, this had all come to nothing. Worse than nothing, because now we’d lost some of our people and we had to track our three former prisoners down again.

I leaned my head back against the couch and closed my eyes. I’d spent all day either trying not to think about what I had to do the next day or dealing with the chaos that Connor…Connor! I couldn’t think about that now… had brought into my life. But now I was alone and nobody needed me, and all I could think about was that tomorrow I’d have to see my mother in a coffin. I’d have to listen to well-wishers say how sorry they were. I’d have to sit through a meal after laying Mama to rest.

I didn’t feel strong enough to do any of it. And the thing was, there wasn’t any other way to look at the fact that her death was my fault. I’d trusted Connor, not questioned him when he told me he knew where Mama lived. I’d gotten involved in this superhero shit, ignored his demands. If I’d done just one of those things differently, Mama would still be alive.

He was going to pay. And it was going to hurt. But it wouldn’t change the fact that me and my shitty judgment when it comes to people was a pretty direct cause of Mama’s murder.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered into my empty suite. I drifted off, and I don’t know how long I was asleep when I woke with a start, taking a minute to realize that Jenson’s voice was talking to me over my comm.

“What. What? I was asleep,” I said groggily.

“He cracked it,” she said, and I jumped up. I got down to his lab as quickly as I could. They both greeted me, looking exhausted. David pointed to a map on the large monitor in front of him. There were several red dots on the map, of varying sizes.

“The larger the dot, the more often the phone was there, right?” I asked, and he nodded.

There was a large red dot over Detroit, which made sense. A few smaller dots elsewhere in the midwest and in Britain and Scotland.

And then there was a large red dot over what looked like an island off the coast of Mexico.

“What’s that? Can we get a satellite image of that?”

David nodded and after a moment, a sat image popped up. He zoomed in, showing a nondescript concrete building, roughly square. No windows. A chainlink fence and a single driveway leading up to the front door and parking lot.

“You’re a miracle worker. Thank you,” I said to David, and he shook his head, even if he did end up looking pleased. “Thanks, both of you. Now go get some rest.” I took the phone with me, unplugging it from David’s computer, then made my way up to Portia’s office. She was just coming out when I got there.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles beneath them.

“It can wait. You don’t have to deal with this now,” she said gently.

“No. I really do. I found something, and I feel like I owe you some information about Killjoy.”

She opened her office back up again and walked in. I followed her, and we sat down on opposite sides of her desk.

I started by filling her in on how things started between me and Killjoy. And, later, what he’d told me about his days of Raider. How I’d decided to stop seeing him and how his persistence had been both annoying and scary, all at once. And then I told her about the moment he stepped out of the shadows and killed Dr. Death.

“I thought I’d lost my mind. That I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I was seeing. At first, I thought, maybe he was trying to save me from Death or something, you know? Maybe he was still on my side. And then he started talking. He’s been behind it all along. The emails, forming Mayhem, working with Alpha… all of it.”

She sat there, looking pale, her face drawn and tense. “I never pictured anything like this when I agreed to lead this team,” she finally said. “I am so sorry, Jolene. I can’t even imagine what you’re feeling. I feel like I’ve landed in an alien world with no map and no clue how to speak the language.”

I nodded. It wasn’t a bad comparison. All it needed was the addition of soul-crushing loss, and she was dead on.

“There’s more,” I said.

“Of course there is.”

I went over what Jenson and David had found when they’d cracked the files, and she knew most of it, that Death was making a formula dealing with powers, and that Alpha had made a deal to give him samples from StirkeForce. “So when I had Death, he told me that they need my sample, and I kept refusing to give it to them, and they ended up… well, you know,” I said, unable to say the words, “to punish me.”

She nodded and put her hand on mine, leaning over the desk.

“Anyway. They were making this, with this overall scheme of ultimately controlling world governments, building their own superhero army. I assumed this was all Death’s idea.”

“And it was really Killjoy’s,” she said softly. I nodded.

“Before Killjoy killed him, Death told me that the formula and all of his notes were in a lab, one Death worked at all the time. He kept handwritten records. There are no computer files or anything like that, because he was paranoid that someone else would end up with his research if he kept it digitally. So if we can find and destroy this facility, this lab, that puts an end to Killjoy’s little injected army plot.”

She was watching me. “And? Did you find it?”

“I tracked the location from Death’s phone’s GPS.” I left David and Jenson out of it. She didn’t need to know that they’d been helping me all along. “The lab is located just off the coast of Mexico. We go there, we destroy everything, we arrest whoever is there, and we hurt him. Bad.”

She sat thinking for a few moments, then shook her head sadly. “It’s not that simple.”

“What do you mean? Yes it is.”

“You’re talking about going to an island in international territory and destroying it and arresting people who may not even be American citizens.”

“This has to be stopped.”

“It would cause an international incident,” she said. “And trust of superheroes is already at a major low. We can’t go marching or flying or whatever into a foreign country and just start breaking stuff.”

“So, what? We just sit here and let it happen?”

“I’ll take it to the international tribunal.” I started arguing, and she talked over me. “StirkeForce can’t make a move until we have their support. We do, we’re immediately on everyone’s bad side. We’re hanging on by a thread here. I know you want to make them pay, but we need to go through the proper channels.”

I still had my mouth open to argue, and I clamped it shut.

“Email me the information you have, and I’ll present it. Okay?” Portia asked.

“Fine.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. I know you wanted a different answer, but— ”

“I understand,” I said.

She nodded. “Okay. Let’s get some rest.”

We got up, and she patted my shoulder. We rode the elevator down to our floor together.

“She was a really nice lady,” Portia said as we stepped off the elevator.

“She was,” I said.

“She was proud of you.”

I met her eyes then. “Well. That was a mistake, huh? Considering that someone I stupidly trusted killed her.”

“Jolene.”

I waved her off and let myself into my suite. I paced and thought.

And a few minutes later, I had changed out of my uniform and was out, flying toward Hamtramck.

I’d tried handling this the official way. Now it was time to handle it my way.

I landed in a park, looked around to make sure nobody was around, which wasn’t likely due to the late hour and the rain, which had been falling since our fight against Killjoy’s team. It felt like a month ago, at least, with all that had happened since.

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my black jacket and walked down the street toward the big old house I’d visited so often, it felt almost like a second home. I went around to the back door, rather than standing under the porch light at the front door. I knocked on the back door quietly. A few moments later, I saw the kitchen light turn on, and then Luther’s face peered out the window at me. A second later, I heard the locks clicking, and then she opened the door.

“Didn’t expect to see you here again,
kotka
,” she said in her scratchy voice.

“I was thinking about you,” I said. “I need your advice.”