A New Day (StrikeForce #1) (11 page)

“It’s you they want. Drop me and go. I’m weighing you down,” Damian said.

I kept flying. As if I was going to risk letting them grab him. They might have technically wanted me, but he would make a good prize, too. And he knew too damn much.

“Now. Do it and get yourself out of here,” Damian shouted up at me.

“Fuck this,” I snarled. I set Damian down on the roof of one of the stores below us and bulleted back up into the sky.

In the opposite direction of where I’d been heading.

I met Nightbane in midair, coming in fast, and he barely stopped in time to avoid crashing into me.

But my fist had no problem managing to crash into his face, and he went hurtling back through the sky. He shook it off, charged me, and I ducked under, hit him hard in the throat, then the face. Before he could get his bearings, I grabbed him, lifted his flailing form over my head, and hurtled him.

I didn’t wait around to see how or if he landed. I dove down, grabbed Damian, and took off, faster than I’ve ever flown in my life. I knew there were others around. It was past time to make ourselves scarce.

A while later, we landed in Eastpointe. I dropped Damian near a car he’d planted there earlier, on a dark dead-end side street behind a laundromat. He got in, keeping the bags with him.

“What the fuck was that?” he demanded when he turned back to me.

“What?”

“I told you to go. He’s made it clear on the news that it’s you he’s interested in. You’re the power behind the operation. You’re the one who has everyone afraid, oh, she-who-tears-down-motels.”

“And if they’d taken you, they would have had the one person who knows everything about me. No. I don’t trust you. We’ve been over this,” I added when I could tell he wanted to argue.

He stood there in silence for a minute, then gave a short, irritated shake of his head and got into the car.

“See you around,” he muttered, and I nodded, watched him drive off. I took to the air and watched his car for several minutes, making sure nobody was tailing him. Once I was satisfied that he’d make it back to his house all right, I took off in the opposite direction. Time to unwrap my face, find a coffee shop or restaurant or something on the southwest side to rest up in and get some distance between myself and the scene of our crime. Then I’d make my way home.

And try not to piss anyone else off before then.

I landed a while later near Corktown and found a little coffee bar. Hipster areas were always good for that kind of thing. I went in, sat down for a while nursing an over-priced shitty coffee until I felt ready to move again. I made a point of talking to the barista, a few guys at a table next to mine. Being seen nowhere near the scene of a crime was a good thing. I mean, yeah, they knew I could fly, but they also still thought I was a guy, so… it couldn’t hurt to help Jolene Faraday’s identity stay as far away from the burglar’s as possible.

After a while, I left. I’d catch the bus back to my apartment, which would give me a chance to think a little, and ensure that more people saw me out and about on the complete opposite side of town. I walked down the street. It wasn’t crowded, exactly, but there were a decent number of people around, due to the bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. I figured I’d been seen enough for one night. There was a cemetery to my left, and I knew that the bus stop was on the other side of that. It was one of those old cemeteries, surrounded by a low stone wall. Paths wound through it, beneath tall oaks and the arching branches of weeping willows. Really, I just kind of had a thing for cemeteries. So peaceful. They were usually empty, and even if there was someone around, they rarely cared about what was going on with anyone else who happened to be visiting. At night, though, it was even better because I was the only one around.

I was almost out of the cemetery when a large figure stepped out from behind a gravestone with an old, kind of ridiculous-looking gargoyle on the top. I drew back, and then got ready to punch. Or fly.

He was enormous. Tall. Six four, six five, maybe. Muscular, but not in the way most people think of when they hear “muscular,” that kind of narrow-waisted muscle magazine look. He was just solid, shaped like a barrel, with muscles bulging at his shoulders, arms, and thighs.

He was dressed head to toe in black. It kind of looked, maybe, like body armor, but I couldn’t tell in the dim light. Black pants, black long-sleeved shirt, head and face completely covered in a black mask, not a single speck of flesh showing through. Black gloves on his hands.

Actually, his outfit wasn’t all that different from mine.

He held his hands out as if trying to calm me.

And I could admit that I didn’t scare often, but his sudden appearance freaked me out, but I didn’t want him to see that.

“Go ahead. Say it. You know you want to,” I said, running my mouth, which was my standard nervous reaction. It was better than standing there feeling unnerved.

He tilted his head as if asking me what the hell I was talking about.

“Go ahead. ‘I’m Batman.’” I said in my best deep, husky voice. “It’ll be our little secret.”

He shook his head, and a small sound came from him. A sigh. Maybe a laugh. It was impossible to say.

“You could do so much better,” he said, and his voice was low, raspy, like something from a nightmare, maybe. Way scarier than any version of Batman I’d ever heard.

“What?” I asked, still ready to react.

“The shit you’re doing. Who you’re doing it with,” he said. I thought I could maybe detect a slight accent, but I wasn’t sure.

“I think you’ve got the wrong girl,” I said.

“I think I’ve got just the right one.”

I took a step back, and he stayed still.

“You’ve got crazy amounts of power. Don’t you think you could be doing something more with it?”

“I—“

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, darling,” he said, and there was that sense of an accent again. Irish. Or Scottish? Not strong, barely there, but it flavored his words, and that plus its raspiness had me wondering what the man looked like under the mask.

Which was totally stupid. I didn’t need to know. Jesus.

“Word to the wise. You want to stay away from the guy you’re working with. Don’t make me have to take you in next time.”

“What, are you with StrikeForce?”

He laughed, a low, rough laugh that sent shivers down my spine. “Not likely. But I recognize that it may be the only place for guys like your partner. You… I think you can do better.”

“What do you know about me?” I asked, annoyed and thrown off by his words, the sound of his voice.

“Your neighbors think you’re a saint. Your mother is proud of you. You’re the perfect daughter, the kind of woman who gives to charity and never turns her back on someone who needs her. Where does this shit fit in with that, Jolene?”

I froze, and he held his hands up again.

“Secrets are safe with me. You are safe with me.”

“Not feeling so safe just now,” I said.

“Because you’re smart. Think about what I said, smart girl,” he said, and then he moved into the shadows. When I looked behind the gravestone, there was no sign of him, and there wasn’t a single sound to give away which way he’d gone. It was as if he’d never been there at all.

I stood there, feeling my heart pounding, my palms sweating. I hadn’t been that unnerved in maybe forever. He knew me. Knew even more than Damian knew about me.

I shook myself out of it, and sped up so I could catch the bus in time. Once I was on, I felt like I could breathe again. I debated with myself whether I should tell Damian about whatever the hell it was that had just happened, but I ended up deciding against it. I’d keep my little convo with the masked stranger who knew too much to myself, at least for now. For some reason, it was something I didn’t feel like sharing.

Chapter Eight

I looked for a place to land, glad that my meetings with Damian always took place at night. It was a lot easier to find a place to land inconspicuously, and his house wasn’t located in the sort of area where people wandered around outside a lot at night. His immediate neighborhood was nice, and it was monitored by a security patrol, but the area around it was not that great, other than the Waldorf school I’d landed near that first night and the Detroit Archdiocese headquarters. In between, there were neighborhoods of old houses, in varying states of habitation or decay. It was weird. One block would look perfect, neat, welcoming. And the next might look like the set from some post-apocalyptic movie or something. Either way, it made it easier for me to land and then walk to Damian’s house. I always used the back door now, and the key he’d given me just made it that much more straightforward. I always knew I could find him in his library.

We hadn’t done any jobs in the two weeks since our little confrontation with the police. Whether it had finally been too close for him, or he was respecting my wish to be involved less, I was glad for it. It gave me a chance to think.

My thoughts were a mess, unfortunately. My situation with Damian just kind of kept going in circles. I could trust him. No, I couldn’t. Yes, I could. I could stop any time I wanted. No, I couldn’t… it was stupid.

But it was nowhere near as stupid as the other subject that filled my thoughts at odd moments, haunted my dreams, and made me wake up with my heart pounding.

Him.

The guy in the cemetery hadn’t been far from my thoughts since that night. It was ridiculous. I had no idea what he looked like, who he was. All I had was that impression of ridiculous strength, along with that low, deep, raspy voice.

It wasn’t just that, though. It was his repeated assertion that I could do so much better. It stuck with me, made me start questioning my life and where it was going. The thing was, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that. What? Go back to school, get a job, go the community organizer route, the way I’d once planned? I couldn’t see doing that now.

I didn’t know how to be anything but a thief and a liar. And I liked it that way, damn it. I was caught between being angry with him for planting whatever doubts he had in my mind, and fantasizing about what was under the mask at odd moments.

It was seriously screwing me up.

I tried not to think about it as I walked up to the back door at Damian’s house. I wondered if he’d start nagging me to start doing more jobs again. He’d been good about respecting what I’d asked of him so far, but he wasn’t exactly the most patient person I knew.

In the kitchen, the small television that was mounted over one end of the counter was on, and I stopped and watched it as I pulled my gloves off. Not as part of a disguise, this time, but because Michigan in November can go from sixty to thirty in a matter of hours. The news was on, and they were covering a powered person who I guess had been causing trouble near the Michigan-Illinois border for a while. Not anyone I knew. Alpha was on screen, standing, once again, outside of StrikeForce Command.

“Alpha, John Jalen from Channel Seven. I was wondering if you could tell us what happened? Does the vigilante known as Killjoy work for StirkeForce?”

“No, he does not,” Alpha said icily, and I had to smile at the pissy look on his face.

“So Killjoy is not a member of your team?”

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” Alpha growled at the middle-aged reporter, who merely held his microphone out and patiently waited through it.

“Can you tell us then, Alpha sir, why it is that he continues to get to these super powered troublemakers before you and your team, what with all of your top of the line equipment and—“

Before he could finish the question, Alpha turned and stalked away and two guards dressed in dark gray and black uniforms stepped forward to block him from view. I let out a short laugh, shook my head, then started to make my way upstairs.

I took the stairs two at a time. I was ready for this job. I was convinced that the thrill of pulling off another heist, the money I’d bring home, would banish all of my stupid questions and doubts from my mind. All I needed was to get back in the game, but on my own terms. It wasn’t until I had already opened the door to the library that I realized I’d heard other voices, focused as I’d been on my own thoughts. By the time it registered, I already had the door to the library open.

Damian sat at one end of the table. Three other men sat with him, and all four of them stopped and looked at me when I walked in.

I took a step back, catching Damian’s eye.

“Hey. I forgot you were coming over. Uh. Well, you’re here now,” he said, standing up. He looked tense, but he was also trying to look like he wasn’t. I knew his moods well enough by now to see that much. “There are some people I want you to meet.”

I didn’t answer, stood where I was.

“You might already know these guys by their code names. That’s Daemon,” he said, pointing to a pale, acetic looking man wearing all gray, right down to the gray leather shoes on his feet. He just nodded his head at me.

“You probably know him as Dr. Death,” Damian went on, pointing to a short, almost comical looking man with a bad haircut and blotchy skin. I honestly would have been laughing if those two particular people’s reputations hadn’t already been right out in the open. Instead, I felt my palms sweating, my heart pounding.