Darkest Day (StrikeForce #3) (9 page)

I landed on the flight deck moments after Ryan landed the mini jet. I talked for a moment with one of the flight crew members as Ryan climbed down out of the cockpit, then I started to leave. I glanced toward Ryan and the flight crew members as I did, trying to catch his eye so I could give him a quick wave or something, but he was already watching me. He held a finger up, gesturing for me to wait a second as he finished talked to the mechanics. I stopped near the exit to the flight bay, and after a few more words, he jogged over to me, held open the door to the corridor beyond, and then we headed toward the elevator.

Once we were on the elevator, he looked down at me. “Okay. Now that that’s over with for today I can finally talk to you.”

“About what?” I asked him.

“You seem completely down in the dumps today. Last night, too, when we weren’t busy with the mission. So. Is there anything you want to talk about or is there anything I can do?”

I met his eyes. Warm, golden brown eyes. I shook my head. Debated whether I wanted to talk about it or not. And then, because somehow Ryan has managed to work his way past the way I keep a wall between myself and just about everyone else, I sighed. “Today would have been Mama’s birthday,” I said. And then I looked away because I felt like an idiot.

He reached for my hand. Both of our hands were still clad in our uniform gloves, but I could feel the warmth of his hand anyway when he gently squeezed mine. We didn’t say anything for a bit, and the elevator came to a stop on my floor. He kept his fingers twined with mine as he walked me to my suite.

“You know you don’t have to go through this alone. And you shouldn't,” he said as we came to a stop in front of my door. “Does Jenson know? You know she’ll be here if you ask.”

“Jenson and David are going out tonight, remember? And I don’t want to tell her because if I do, she’ll cancel and stay here with me.” He was about to say something, and I shook my head. “I’m kind of hoping they’ll get it together and realize how perfect they are for one another.”

“So, you’re playing matchmaker?” Ryan asked.

“I’m trying. They’re not making it easy.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “I never would have seen you in the matchmaker role before.”

I smiled behind my mask. “Well, ordinarily I don’t give a shit, but they’d be so cute and dorky together, whispering sweet nothings in Elvish or Klingon and crap like that.”

He laughed then, and I couldn’t help but laugh, too. “And besides that,” I continued, “Jenson doesn’t really open up to people, and David’s sweet, you know? I think she needs someone sweet. Someone who’ll treat her right, and he will because he’s completely nuts about her. I can’t believe she doesn’t see it,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“So, yeah. I’m not going to tell Jenson because then she’ll cancel and I’ll feel like a jerk.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I put my thumb to the print scanner on my door.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” he said. “What about Dani?”

I shook my head. “I’m fine. I’m just going to curl up and watch TV until I pass out. Hopefully I’ll sleep through as much of the rest of the day as possible.” I glanced up at him. “I’m fine,” I repeated.

“You’re sad,” he said quietly. “And you miss your mom and that’s normal. You don’t have to be fine right now, Jolene.”

I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked back up at him. “I really don’t have any other alternative. Not while the asshole who ordered her death is still breathing. I’ll see you later,” I said, and then I closed the door behind me.

I went to my bedroom and pulled off my uniform, slipped into some pajama pants mama had bought me a few years ago that had silly, cartoonish looking smiling suns on them. She’d joked, then, that she was trying to make me into a morning person. I pulled on a tank top and grabbed one of the blankets off of my bed.

I went back to the living room and settled myself into a corner of the couch. I pulled the blanket up over me. This wasn’t just any blanket. Mama had crocheted it for me when I was fifteen. Aqua and white stripes, because aqua was my favorite color at the time. It was warm and comfortable, and I could still picture Mama sitting in the recliner in our trailer, working on it as she watched TV in the evenings after work.

I kind of wished I could cry. Maybe that would feel more normal or something, but I just didn’t seem to have it in me to do it. It was more like a numb sadness that just hadn’t gone away since she’d died. No. Since she’d been
murdered
. Because while her death would have been devastating no matter how it came, the fact that she’d been murdered to get to me made it so I could barely breathe sometimes.

And this was one of those times. And while I could admit that I kind of wished Jenson was around, part of me was relieved to be alone. I didn’t know if I could stand trying to be human when all I could manage to do was stare straight ahead without actually seeing what I was looking at.

I lay there like that for a long time. A few hours, based on the number of cooking shows that started and ended on Food Network, curled under my afghan, staring off into space.

I was eventually shaken out of my zoned-out state by a light knock on my door. I got up and looked at the small security monitor to see Ryan standing there.

I opened the door and he looked down at me. He’d changed as well, jeans and a dark blue t-shirt. He held up a thermal carafe and what looked like a bakery box.

I raised my eyebrow at him and waved him in.

“I don’t know what else to do at times like this, so I’m gonna do with my grandma and grandpa do whenever anyone seems to need comfort.”

I closed the door behind him and turned around. “Which is?”

“Feed you.”

He brought the stuff he was carrying into the living room and set it on the coffee table, and then he went to my kitchen and grabbed one of the plain white mugs out of the cabinet and set that there as well. I watched him the whole time, and I couldn’t help smile a little.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Coffee,” he said, “because I know that you’ll drink it,” he said and I smiled. “And some beignets and madeleines from that one food truck down the street.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. There’s probably something normal people do when someone they know is dealing with something like this, but this is all I know to do,” he said. “If I was my grandma, I’d bake you an apple pie so good you’d be sure she put some kind of magic into it. If I was my gramps, I’d probably deep fry something and keep it coming until you couldn’t eat another bite. This is the best I can do.”

I met his eyes. Warmth. I felt warm inside for the first time since Mama had died. Not perfect, not okay. But alive and not under an absolute fog of sadness.

“It’s perfect,” I said quietly, and we stood there for a few moments, eyes locked. And then I made myself look away. “There’s only one cup though. You like coffee just as much as I do.”

He shook his head. “You’re not in the mood to hang out. This was for you.”

“You can stay for a cup of coffee at least,” I said. “If you want.”

“Okay.”

He went to the kitchen and grabbed another cup, and I sat on the couch. He sat beside me and poured coffee into both cups.

“Half and half and sugar,” he said, and I nodded.

“How did you know I took my coffee like that?”

“Super senses, remember?“ he asked. “I can smell it when we end up in the dining hall together before our shift sometimes.”

I lifted the steaming cup to my mouth and took a sip.

“This is definitely not the coffee from the dining hall,” I said, taking another drink. It was smooth, rich, smoky with the teeniest hint of a fruity flavor. Nothing like the bitter stuff they served in the dining hall.

“No. The dining hall coffee is shit. I brewed this in my suite.”

I watched him as he took a sip.

“You’re a coffee snob, then?” I asked with a smile as I took another drink.

“Not a snob. Heightened sense of taste and smell. So when something doesn’t taste all that great normally, it tastes really bad to me. The stuff in the dining hall is bitter and metallic. And the coffee maker needs to be cleaned, because I can taste mold in the coffee sometimes.”

I made a face. “And now I’m never drinking dining hall coffee again.”

“Stop by my suite for it whenever you want. I drink almost as much coffee as you do,” he said. “Or we could get you your own pot and grinder for in here.”

I shook my head and he opened the bakery box and offered it to me. I took out a beignet, setting it on a napkin on my knee. We sat and ate and drank in silence for a bit. The weird thing about being quiet with Ryan was that it was never awkward. Usually, I felt like someone was supposed to be talking, or like either I or whoever I was sitting with was just waiting until it was polite to leave. Usually, that was me. But with Ryan, as I’d learned during our patrol shifts, we could not say a word and it was comfortable. It reminded me of that scene in
Pulp Fiction
, where Uma Thurman tells John Travolta that that’s when you know you’ve found someone special, “
when you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.”

Unless he was pissed at me, as he’d been when he’d found out that I’d kept the fact that Dr. Death had been negotiating for his blood, and had used it in experiments. That had been a shitty week.

“This is really good. Thank you,” I said after a while.

“You’re welcome. I debated with myself for over an hour whether I should do it or not, because I know you would have preferred Jenson or that you wanted to be alone.”

“I don’t prefer Jenson, exactly. She’s my best friend. She gets me. That seems to be something the two of you have in common. I don’t feel like I have to constantly be acting like everything is just fine when you guys are around.”
“You don’t.”

“I hate feeling like this.”
“I know.”

We sat in silence for a bit, drinking our coffee. I reached into the bakery box and grabbed a madeline.

“You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” I asked after a while.

He sat back and looked at me. “What?”

“I keep thinking of everything I could have done differently. And not just if I hadn’t gotten involved with Killjoy. If I’d thought to protect her that day instead of assuming Dr. Death would stick to the way he usually did things, the whole mad doctor routine. If I’d made her move away from here. If I’d made her move in here with me so she was surrounded by security all the time. I could have done so much differently.”

He didn’t answer for a moment. “You could have done that stuff. Sure,” he said slowly. “Your mom had the same protection all of our families have. Her house was under surveillance and had security on it that would have prevented anyone other than you and your mom from getting too close to it. We had people watching her travel to and from work. We had algorithms scanning faces from the security feed at her work. None of us thought for a second that when Death said he was up to something, that it would be so personal. And if had been just Death, it wouldn't have been your mom in danger. None of us saw Killjoy turning into the fucking Devil Himself. You could have moved her away. And then what? How would we have gotten to her in time if someone had tracked her down? You could have moved her in here… do you think for a second that she would have gone for that?”

I shook my head.

“Okay. So what were you supposed to do differently? There is no one to blame but the motherfucker who ordered her death. We can second-guess every move we made that day. I know I have. But it came down to us sticking with what we knew, and we didn’t know much because none of us were trained for this shit.”

“You sound almost as pissed as I feel,” I said.

“I’m pissed,” he agreed. “I hate seeing you hurting like this. I hate that it happened to her, because she was really nice and every time I saw her when you were in the hospital, I’d think that you had the same eyes. And I heard her tell Jenson one time that she thought I had a nice butt,” he added, and I laughed.

“Jenson said Mama may have mentioned that.”

He flashed a quick grin, and then we went back to sipping our coffee in silence. I thought about him saying he’d heard Mama talking about him.

“So, the super sense thing. What’s that like?” I asked him. I’d learned when we’d first been introduced that he had super senses. It was easy to forget that when you looked at him, because he looked, to me at least, like strength was his thing. And he was strong. Excellent reflexes and strength. But I also knew that he could shoot a stun gun at a super-speed target from over a mile away, and hit it. I knew that he apparently could taste how long it had been since a coffee maker had been cleaned. “It seems like it might be distracting,” I added.

He shrugged. “It is. When I first got my powers, I was sure I was going to lose my mind. That call when we brought in Vivian earlier made me remember how insane it all felt. I could hear everything. Smell everything. Eating or drinking was a nightmare, because everything tasted too strong. I lost like forty pounds the first year I had my powers, because I just couldn’t make myself keep eating enough most days.”

I watched him. “So, for example… how far away can you sense things?”

He shook his head. “That depends on a bunch of stuff. Whether it’s windy. Whether we’re in a wide open space or a crowded building. Pretty far, though.”

“What about now?”

He closed his eyes, and we were quiet for a while. “I can hear your heart beating. The television. The heat blowing through the vents. I can hear Dani a few doors down filing her nails. On the next floor down, one of the cleaning crew guys is using that weird-smelling metal polish on the elevator doors.” He paused, still focusing. “Down in the dining hall, they just put out a fresh pizza. It has mushrooms on it, which is disgusting.”

I laughed, and he opened his eyes. “Really?”

He nodded. “You want more?”

I nodded.

“Okay. You never cook in here, because there’s no lingering cooking scent. You don’t use the shampoo and soap they provide us. Yours is more herbal. Lavender and vanilla.”