Day's End (26 page)

Jarvis was working upstairs in her workshop. She’d been happy to come to work for me, more than ready to leave the official superhero team thing behind after what her family had been through. Both she and Lorne worked for me now, just as Sal did. I had allied myself with former enemies, people I should have hated, people I never should have trusted. Yet, here they were.

I was big on second chances, apparently.

Luther, my former fence, was talking to Jarvis, Jarvis telling her what kind of equipment they needed to get for the tech she was helping David design for me. Though they didn’t live with me, David, Jenson, Ryan, and Dani all spent as much time as they could with me. I’d kept close ties to StrikeForce. Portia had already called on me once to help them take down a particularly dangerous telekinetic, and it had gone well. I’d done the entire thing invisible. That would work well for the times I helped my old team.

I answered the front door, and Jenson stood there, holding a cardboard box. She wrapped one arm around me in a quick hug, still holding the box in the other, then we walked through the house and up to my bedroom, which had been Damian’s room back when he’d lived here. This was the room I’d been in when he’d confronted me the day I’d broken into his house. This was the room in which my life had taken a turn down the path I was now on. Irony.

I had a laptop open on the dresser, playing the latest Detroit UnPowered stream. So far, Justin, who I guess I should have remembered, but didn’t, had done a week-long series of shows, “Remembering Daystar.” His views were through the roof, and, according to Portia, he’d been interviewed by all of the major news outlets for his work on my story. Of course, like most of StrikeForce, he really believed I was dead, and that was probably for the best. It made thing simpler.

Wonder what’s under the mask, though
, one of the voices said. The only good thing was, no other voices answered. I was going to consider that a win, for now.

I glanced at the laptop, then tore my eyes away and looked at Jenson again.

“Is that the last of my stuff?” I asked her, nodding toward the box. She nodded and set it in the center of the bed, then sat down. I sat next to her and pulled the box over to me.

“There wasn’t a ton left. Mostly papers and notes and stuff. I figured you’d want any notes we could find.”

I nodded.

“I didn’t realize you’d been trying to track Eve yourself, before all that,” she said.

“Was I?”

She nodded and pulled out a few sheets of paper. One was a map, the rest were notes. “You saw some stuff we didn’t.” She pointed to a cluster of stars, then the notes I’d written. “You wrote here that you wanted to look into this cluster of missing kid cases, because they seemed different somehow. In all three of them, the kids in question took off on their own. They left notes, and they weren’t in our list of super powered kids. So how did you decide to include them?”

I looked over the notes for a while, trying to remember. “I don’t know. Did they have powers?”

“Well, that was the thing. As far as anyone who knows them knows, they don’t. Perfectly normal kids.”

“Unless they were hiding things.”

“Right. So we started looking into other kidnappings or runaways.”

I glanced up at her. “And?”

“We’re still looking. This could be worse than we thought.”

“Lovely. Send over anything you find, okay? And I’ll keep looking, too.”

Jenson nodded. I fished around in the box and pulled out a white envelope with my name on it.

“I was thinking you might want that. That’s the letter that Virus included with his will, when he left you all this. It’s still sealed,” she noted.

“Why didn’t I read it?”

“Well, it came like a day or two before everything went to hell, so you probably just never got a chance.”

I nodded, then pried the envelope open.

Jolene,

If you’re reading this, then I’m toast. I always figured it would end this way. Some asshole probably killed me, right? I pissed somebody off. I don’t doubt it.

I screwed things up for you, and I didn’t mean to. I was so goddamn greedy. You always asked me how much was enough, and I thought it was a stupid question, because my answer was always that there was no such thing as enough. You were a better thief than me. You never got caught. Not until you had the misfortune to partner with me, anyway. I’m sorry about that.

So some asshole killed me, most likely, and I’m leaving you everything. I don’t doubt two things, at all. One, that you’ll probably end up giving most if not all of it away, because that’s just the way you are and I think you’re nuts. And two: that you’re wondering why I left it to you.

I’m leaving it to you because I owe you. Your life isn’t the way you were planning on it being, and that’s at least partially my fault. You were a better friend to me than I ever was to you, and for that, I’m completely, eternally sorry. And, I guess, I’m leaving it to you because I know you always did all of your crazy Robin Hood-type crap. Maybe this is the one way my life will ever have a positive impact on this world. You’ll donate it, and it’ll help. It won’t be enough, but it’s more good than I ever would have done on my own.

For what it’s worth, you were a great thief. But I think you’re a better hero. It looks good on you.

Your Friend,
Damian Rutherford

Jenson and I exchanged a glance when I was finished reading, and I shook my head and put the note back in the envelope.

“Do you remember him?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“There’s news footage and stuff, if you want to look at it sometime.”

I nodded, and my gaze shifted to the closet doors, the letter, the person who wrote it, already floating away the same way most of my memories seemed to.

“Jarvis finished my new uniform. Want to see?” I asked Jenson, and she nodded.

I stood up and opened the closet and pulled out the new uniform Jarvis had created for me. It had all the same tech as my old StrikeForce uniform, but a totally different look.

“White? Really?” Jenson asked dubiously.

“Well, I’m a ghost, right?” I asked. I set the uniform down on the bed and we both looked at it. Crisp white body armor, a full white mask, the eye holes reminiscent of the eyes a child would draw on a picture of a Halloween ghost. Stitched into the cuffs of the sleeves in white thread, a repeating pattern of my old five-pointed star insignia, a nod to the woman I’d once been.

“You’re morbid,” Jenson muttered, and I laughed. She stood studying the uniform. “You’re not going to be invisible,” she said, thinking aloud. “Otherwise, why bother with a uniform at all?”

I nodded. “I’ll be invisible when I help you guys out. But for my own stuff… ” I nodded toward the white uniform.

“White is not very subtle. You won’t be blending in the way you did in your old uniforms.”

I smiled. “Good. I want the bastards to see me coming.”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. So, Ghost. What’s next?”

“Well. We know Eve is the one who took all of those super powered kids. We know she’s not just doing it for fun. She’s smarter than Killjoy, trickier than Killjoy, and she has an army of super powered kids. I have no doubt that she’s going to use them at some point. Probably soon, since the hero community is so weak after Killjoy’s destruction of all of the city teams.”

“Your memory is getting better,” Jenson said.

“Only sometimes. I read my notes like twenty times a day,” I told her, and she shook her head.

“And the voices you said you kept hearing when Killjoy had you?” she asked.

“Still there. There’s nothing like conversing with people who don’t exist to make you feel a little extra crazy.”

She looked at the uniform again. “Well. Let’s go hit a bitch.”

I laughed and pulled the uniform on while Jenson tested all of my monitors and other tech. I glanced at myself in the large mirror near the closet and saw a specter looking back at me. I smiled under my mask.

I wasn’t there quite yet. But I was becoming who I was always meant to be.

THE END

Jolene will return in
Haunted: StrikeForce Book Five
coming in late 2016.

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Cast of Characters

Letter from the Author

As we come to the end of the first arc of Jolene’s story, I just want to thank everyone who has taken a chance on my misfit superheroes. When I announced that my next series would be my own personal take on superheroes, some of you were excited, and some of you were completely unsure about whether you’d be into this series or not. I’m happy that over the course of this first story arc, I’ve managed to convince some of you that superhero stories are worth reading. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading, for loving Jolene (even at her worst), and for your enthusiasm. There are no words for how much I appreciate it.