One More Day (27 page)

I looked up at him and met his eyes. “Thanks. Take care, okay?”

“You too.” He stayed there for a moment, his eyes locked with mine, and then he sort of seemed to shake himself and turned and walked down the stairs. I watched him get into his truck and drive down the street.

I skipped down the stairs. Ah, well. It never would have worked, even without me grieving over my mom and dealing with my psychotic super villain ex-whatever-he-was. He was too nice. Too normal.

And I have that whole “terrible judge of character” issue. So… yeah.

I ended up walking for a long time, bypassing several bus stops as I made my way back toward Command. I felt lighter, but also emptier. I had the feeling that as much as everything hurt now, I was still not quite over the shock of losing Mama. I wondered how long I could hold onto burning rage, because I wasn’t especially looking forward to the crushing sadness phase of mourning.

Chapter Twenty

Two Weeks Later

I flew.

Detroit sprawled far below, like a crazy quilt of concrete and grass, a border of blue where the river cut the land, separating Detroit from Windsor.

I flew north, finding myself, eventually, over the neighborhood where our trailer was. The trailer park came into view, glimpses of the roofs of the trailers between the gray clouds below me. My eyes were drawn to the end of Perdition Lane, the little yellow and white trailer. There was a ratty old car in the driveway, but it was the wrong one. Not Mama’s. Someone else lived there now. The world had moved on, but it felt like I never would.

I circled around twice, three times. There were thirteen trailers on Perdition Lane. Four roads intersected the trailer park. Three blocks down, there was a church with two steeples.

Goddamnit. Now even the counting was starting to stress me out.

I closed my eyes and flew. I let the air soothe me, let the silence of being hundreds of feet above everyone else numb me, just for a little while.

After a while, I ended up at the cemetery. Mama’s grave with its newly-installed enormous limestone angel loomed below. I came in for a landing, and sat on the grass near her grave. I rested my chin on my knees, wrapped my arms around my legs. I never understood people who went to the cemetery to “visit” with loved ones. But I’d found myself coming a couple times per week since the day of the funeral, to sit here and talk. I guess I wanted to believe that Mama was somewhere where she could hear me, see me. That she wasn’t really gone, because that was a little too much to handle. I had to believe in a heaven of some kind, for now, at least. It comforted me when nothing else could.

I had to believe she was looking down at me. So I came, and I talked. And, sometimes, I even felt a little better afterward.

“He killed you… at least part of why he killed you was because he believed you were what was keeping me ‘good.’ Because I was doing the hero thing, trying to make you proud.” I paused, looking at her headstone without seeing it. “At first, I was a hero because they forced me to be. And then I played the hero because I thought it was a way to fool them into letting me out. Then, after Maddoc, I did it thinking you’d be proud, that maybe I could leave my old self in the past and you’d never find out about her. But, after a while…” I took a breath. “I started doing it for me. Which is probably selfish. I mean, I should want to be a hero for everyone else. To save them or some lofty shit like that. Sorry,” I said automatically, as if she was even there to raise her eyebrows at me the way she usually did. “But I do it for me. Because it makes me feel alive and like something I’m doing matters. Even though we’re so bad at it.” I rested my chin on my knees again. “He thought that, now that you’re gone, I wouldn’t have any reason to try to be a hero. But he doesn’t realize that by taking you away, he did the one thing StrikeForce never managed to do. He made me decide, fully, to do this hero thing. I’m probably not going to be the hero most people want me to be. But I think, if you happen to be looking down from where you are… I think you’ll be proud.”

I sat there for a long time, not seeing anything, my mind a million miles away. Memories, mostly. Mama teaching me how to ride a bike. Mama comforting me with a warm hug and my favorite chocolate ice cream after a rough day at school. Mama, telling me she was proud.

I heard a rustling sound behind me and turned around. Jenson, David, Ryan, and Dani were there, and Dani held up a brown paper bag. “Tonight, we drink in memory of your mom and those we’ve lost,” she said. They came and sat with me, fanning out around Mama’s grave. Dani passed me the bottle, and I took a gulp, passed it to Jenson.

“And tomorrow, I make the bastard pay,” I said.

“We have your back, Jolene,” Jenson said. “You get that, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

“Seeing what they had planned… we were talking about some things,” David said quietly.

“What things?”

“I think we all understand here that the things that need to be done to end this… they’re not things we can do wearing official superhero costumes,” Jenson said. “You proved that with the lab. If we want this over, if we want him stopped, for good, and if we want to save people without messing around asking the tribunal if it’s okay first, sometimes it’s just not possible to do it the way Portia wants to. And I know you’re already thinking this, but I’m telling you that you’re not alone.”

“This is my fight,” I said.

“It’s all our fight. You’re not the only one who lost people because of him,” Dani said.

“You are superheroes. Keep being that.”

“We will. But for once, we get to decide what that means,” Ryan said. I met his eyes, and neither of us said anything for a few moments. “I choose this. I’ll put on the StrikeForce uniform and do what this city needs me to do. And other times, I’m fine with doing the things nice people don’t want to think about any of us doing.”

“We all know this is going to get worse before it gets better. StrikeForce needs to have a strong public image to reassure people that everything is okay. That they’re safe. That’s why it’s important. That’s why we all keep wearing the black and gray,” David said. “But the fact is, no one will really be safe unless those behind this shit are taken care of. I think we all know he’s somewhere licking his wounds. And I think we all know he’s not done.”

“And there are other issues too, which StrikeForce has been afraid or unable to touch, which I think will come back to bite us if we continue to ignore them,” Jenson said.

“Such as?”

“Super powered people going missing. Including one that went missing when Killjoy and his people were fighting our team and infiltrating our base. Which suggests to me that the disappearances aren’t him.”

I nodded.

“You already knew about the missing heroes,” she said quietly, a note of surprise in her voice.

“I wanted to believe it was him. Still could be,” I said, and she shrugged.

“Maybe. But it’s something that needs to be looked at, and nobody’s doing it.”

We sat in silence for a while. I hadn’t planned on this. On having them with me for this, but even I had to admit that having David and Jenson’s smarts and tech skills and Ryan’s recon and sniper abilities would make it all a lot more straightforward. I didn’t quite know how Dani’s screaming powers fit into secret ops missions, but I also knew that I had no business turning her away, not when she’d lost a loved one as well. I nodded, slowly. Jenson took a swig from the bottle and handed it back to me, and I took another drink.

“We’ll get him,” Dani said.

I nodded, and the five of us passed the bottle and sat there late into the night. After everything that had happened, it made me a little queasy to think about putting my trust in anyone, and I didn’t know if I’d fully be able to do so. I knew that Jenson, David, and Ryan had been with me through the worst, even if I didn’t understand why. Dani was someone I’d once saved and we now shared a common enemy. For now, I’d see how it all played out, but I doubted I’d be able to fully trust them, and that was one more thing to hate Killjoy for.

But for now, they were here with me, and it meant a lot. It meant that I wasn’t alone and I’d never realized before how much that could mean to me.

I looked back up at the angel over Mama’s grave. Ryan bumped his shoulder against mine.

“You okay?” he asked softly.

“Not yet. But I will be.”

It was all I knew how to be. If there was one thing I learned from my mother, from watching her support me on her own and keep us both clothed and fed, it was that you never let anything keep you down. You get up, and you make yourself do better. You don’t stop fighting for those you love, not until you take your last breath.

I could wish all I wanted that I’d had just one more day, but in reality, that’s something that isn’t guaranteed for any of us. All we can do is make the most of what we have.

And what I have… all I have right now, is a hell of a lot of rage. That, and friends who are willing to face the darkness by my side.

It will have to be enough.

Epilogue

“We need more hands on deck,” Portia said as she and I stood at the end of the training center, looking over the couple dozen StrikeForce prospects who chatted or demonstrated their powers. “We had these people working here in other capacities. I think it’s time to give a few of them promotions to full-fledged team members.”

I looked around. “We can trust these people?”

She sighed. “About as much as we can trust anybody. We can’t be picky at this point. I’ve worked with some of these people for almost ten years. They stuck with us through the craziness of taking control from Alpha, and several of them fought and were injured when Killjoy’s people came to bust Maddoc and those guys out.”

I guess it says a lot about my trust level that as I watched them, I was looking for those with the weakest powers to recommend for the team. That way if they did betray us, we wouldn’t have too much of a fight on our hands. I shook my head, knowing I was being paranoid and that having a bunch of weaklings on our team wouldn’t really help anybody.

“Well. Who’s making the final choice again?”

“Jenson, David, and I,” she said. “I asked Caine but he doesn’t feel comfortable getting involved in the team management side of things. And you don’t know any of these people,” she added, as if she thought I might be offended that I hadn’t been asked or something.

“Okay.”

“It’ll be okay,” she assured me. “I’m thinking we’ll bring two or three up to start with and once they’re fully trained and we feel comfortable with them on the team, we’ll look at promoting more.”

I nodded, and we watched our prospective team mates for a while longer. We had some useful skills there, I had to admit. Several with enhanced speed, which was always handy. A couple of fire starters, one guy who could freeze things with his breath. A telekinetic, like Monica had been, I realized with a pang.

“We all know this is going to get worse,” Portia said quietly as we looked at them. “You pissed him off now, and we actually kind of held our own against them when they attacked us. The tribunal is looking into not just our charges against Alpha, but also into your possible involvement in blowing up a lab in Mexico.”

I took a deep breath, trying to keep myself calm.

She went on. “And the thing is, they have no goddamn proof of that, so I’m not too worried. Whoever did it was stealthy as hell about how they went about it. Kind of scary, really.”

I smiled.

“The local media and that damn Detroit UnPowered guy are all over the fight between us and Killjoy. They’re split on trying to decide if we were the heroes or the villains in that fight.”

“Well. We’ll train your new people. Suit them up in the gray and black, and we’ll do better. Eventually they’ll get their heads out of their asses and realize that we’re the only ones who give a damn about this city.”

She nodded. “Amen to that. All right. Let’s get to it.”

I left Portia to join up with Ryan for our patrol shift. I’d kept almost stupidly busy since Mama’s funeral. I took extra patrol shifts when I could, monitored the detention wing fairly often because I just couldn’t shake the idea that eventually, they’d have to come back for Alpha. His money had clearly been important to Killjoy, and Killjoy had some rebuilding to do. I watched as Jenson and Portia worked even harder to make StrikeForce’s reputation stronger, watched David step up and do more public super hero stuff. I watched them all trying to convince the world that we could be trusted to keep them safe. And, in spare pockets of time, I met up with Dani, Jenson, David, and Ryan behind closed doors, trying to figure out the next non-official move we’d make to ensure that the promises StirkeForce made publicly would be upheld. And underneath it all, I burned with one overriding goal: