One More Day (6 page)

“Yeah.”

“How awful,” I said as we stepped onto the elevator.

“You have no idea. Because then I’d have to be nice too, and we both know I’m not exactly Mr. Congeniality.”

“Is there a point to this?” I asked, and he gave a low laugh.

“I’m just saying, you’re not a bitch. You’re you. That’s all.”

I studied him. He kept his dark eyes on the numbers above the doors.

“Well, you’re not a bitch, either,” I finally said.

“Thanks. I was worried,” he said wryly.

“I know it was keeping you up at night.”

He shook his head and got off on his floor, and I went downstairs and grabbed a quick bite to eat in the cafeteria. I was thinking I might catch a nap after my crappy night’s sleep the night before, while everything was quiet

I was about to hit the button for the elevator to go back up to my floor when I glanced toward the weight room. It was usually pretty empty — these weren’t exactly gym rat superheroes on our team. Beta was in there, and I’d run into him while working out before. I shrugged and walked into the weight room. I could nap later.

Probably.

“Hey, Daystar,” he said, blowing out a puff of breath as he pushed the barbell above him again, doing a bench press.

“You know you’re supposed to have someone spotting you,” I said.

“Never had anyone around here other than Caine who set foot in here before. Besides, I don’t think there’s much risk of getting hurt,” he said, lowering the barbell.

“Still. It hurts like a bitch if it falls on you,” I said. I went and stood near his head, ready to take the barbell if he had any trouble with it. He was lifting a lot. Not as much as I could, but a decent amount for a non-super strength type. His face was flushed, and he was sweating, his short hair sticking up at crazy angles.

“You ever had that happen?” he asked.

“Yep. In the first gym I used to go to, where I started lifting. Scared the hell out of me, too. I was sure I was going to die there. I had this bruise across my chest for weeks afterward.”

“You probably cracked something,” he grunted.

“Probably,” I agreed.

“You didn’t go to the doctor?”

“Yeah, right. Tell my mother I hurt myself lifting weights at the gym where they trained boxers? She would have had a conniption fit.”

He chuffed out a short laugh, and I held my hand out as he settled the bar on the stand. He sat up, grabbed a towel, and wiped some of the sweat from his face. “Daystar, I — ”

“Why do you still call me that? You know what my actual name is,” I pointed out.

He gave me a small smile. “Because we all call each other by our code names. It’s a habit and now it’s weird actually knowing someone’s name.” He stuck his hand out toward me. “David Fendrath,” he said.

I shook my head. “Jolene Faraday. Which you already knew,” I reminded him. We shook hands, and I motioned for him to get up so I could do a set. I added some weight to the bar, and he grimaced.

“Seriously?”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s a good thing I’m totally confident of my manhood,” he muttered as he watched me add more. “Mostly,” he added.

I laughed and settled myself onto the bench. He stood near my head, where I’d been standing for him. This reminded me of the camaraderie I’d found at my old gym. Most of the guys there either teased me, flirted with me, or aggressively suggested that I find a “lady gym” to work out at. But the few who were decent to me had been a lot like Beta…. David. It was going to be hard to remember to call him that. We’d talk, or not talk, and it was all fine.

“It hurts just looking at that,” he said as I lifted a second time. I glanced at his face to see him watching the bar, tense, ready to grab it.

“You know, if I drop it, I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Still. It’ll hurt. Uh. Right? I mean, you feel pain.”

“I do,” I said, straightened my arms to lift it again. I did a couple more, then settled it on the stand and sat up.

“So, Jenson and I have been working on going through those files she found. She’s still sure Alpha was up to something. We’ve found a few files that had extra levels of encryption on them, and I was able to crack a couple of them after a while.”

“Anything important?”

He shook his head. “Mostly scouting reports on people he wanted on the team. Including you.”

I nodded.

“We’re going to keep looking. I don’t know what she thinks she saw or heard, but Jenson’s positive there’s more out there and that he was up to something bad.”

“He’s your cousin, right?”

He nodded.

“So you know him. Do you think he was up to more?”

He sat beside me and shrugged. “We were never close, you know? I mean, you’ve dealt with him. He’s an asshole of the highest order. He always has been.”

“Yet he brought you on here,” I pointed out.

“He always got a kick out of bossing the rest of the family around. And his dad was the rich one in our family and he never let anyone forget it. Everything had to be at their house, on their schedule.”

“And you all went along with that?”

He let out a short laugh. “Our grandma was a formidable woman. Any sign of infighting, any sign of schism between any of us, and we’d hear about it. For the most part, it wasn’t a big deal. Some people just like making everyone around them feel less, somehow, and he and his dad were both like that.”

“What about his mom?”

He shrugged. “They didn’t talk about her. I was always under the impression that she took off on them shortly after he was born.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. “But there’s more. You actively fought against him with us. That’s not just normal family bullshit.”

He grabbed a pair of dumb bells and started doing curls. He was silent for a bit, and I was starting to think he wouldn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t even know why he’d done it.

“When we were ten, a stray cat got hit by a car in front of us. We were in his front yard playing. We saw it happen. I had nightmares about it for weeks afterward. I’m a cat person,” he added, and I smiled. “Anyway. We saw it happen, and he laughed. Just cracked up, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. And when he saw how upset I was, he went into the street, picked up the body, and started making it dance. Laughing the whole time,” he said. He met my eyes. “I’d like to say that he changed. That he grew out of that kind of lack of empathy. I thought he had. We weren’t in contact for several years, not until we both ended up with powers. And I thought he was different. He started this. I thought it was for all the right reasons. He was putting his money to use for something good.”

I could see the self-disgust on his face, that he’d been involved. That he hadn’t done anything to change the way things were done. That he hadn’t seen what was happening right under this nose. “I didn’t know that he had Caine and Toxxin collared that whole time.” Caine, Toxxin, and a few other prisoners under Alphas’s reign had been dampened, wearing thin metal “collars” that interfered with the ability to access their powers. He’d done the same thing to me. The difference was that I had always been dampened, whereas Caine and Toxxin’s collars had been a threat, a way to easily control them if they looked like they were about to do anything other than what Alpha wanted.

“I didn’t know he was doing that shit until you,” he said quietly, meeting my eyes. “And then when I started cracking some of those files…” he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jolene.”

“I’m glad you didn’t know,” I said. “You were nice to me my first day here. I would have been really pissed off if the whole asshole thing had been something that ran in the family.”

He laughed a little. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Well. I don’t think anyone knew what to do. Even those who did know what he was doing, you know? I mean, Jenson sort of knew and she didn’t do anything about it. Portia knew. I don’t think there’s a protocol for what a superhero team should do when they realize their leader is the type of thing they’re supposed to be fighting.”

“Yeah. But you stepped up,” he said, watching me.

“Well. I’m not a superhero,” I said with a smile, and he shook his head. “Keep me updated on anything you find, okay?”

“I will.” He paused, then kind of ducked his head, like he was embarrassed or something.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I kept watching him, and he finally shook his head and laughed. “Fine. I was wondering if I’ve done something to piss Jenson off.”

“Jenson?”

“I can’t get her to talk to me lately, like, at all. And I’ve tried.”

I studied him. “Jenson isn’t the most talkative person in the world. Unless she’s telling my ass off about something.”

“Yeah, I know. But we’ve gotten pretty close in the past few years and we’re usually great. But lately she seems to actively avoid me.”

“And are you actively not avoiding her?” I asked with a grin.”So cute.”

“I’m trying.”

I laughed.

“She doesn’t realize it, does she?” he asked.

“No. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t,” I said.

“Good.”

“Why?”

“She’s a good friend. We work really well together. We pretty much know what the other one is gong to say before it’s said. I don’t want to lose that, and she’s not looking for a relationship. She steers clear of that kind of thing.”

I nodded, remembering Jenson telling me pretty much the same thing. I patted his hand. “Well, it’s too bad, really. I think you two would be ridiculously dorky and adorable together.”

“Thanks. I think.” He stood up and went to the door, and I followed him. “We’ll get this all worked out. It’ll be fine,” he told me.

I nodded. “About Jenson… get her involved in helping you with those files. She loves that kind of stuff, and maybe if you’re working on something together, she’ll open up a little. Or not. She’s not the most open person.”

He nodded. “Thanks for the tip. And for not saying anything.”

“Sure.”

I got up and started to leave. “If you’re able to crack any more of those files, let me know.”

“Not if. When,” he said.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, grinning at him.

“You should get some sleep. You look exhausted,” he said, and I nodded. We walked out of the training room and I headed up to my suite. I did get into bed, but then I ended up thinking, unable to turn my mind off, thinking about all of the crap Connor had told me the night before. I got back up, kicking off my covers, and grabbed my laptop from the living room.

I crawled back into bed and did a search for “Raider.”

A lot of what I found was the current Raider, of course. She was vicious, vindictive, and, from the articles I read and what I’d already heard about her, she got a kick out of causing pain. Of scaring her prey, of messing with them the way a cat toys with a mouse.

I tried not to spend too much time wondering how it was that Connor had been married to someone like that. People change.

Right.

After a while, I found older articles about the original Raider. Newspaper articles, blog posts. Official dispatches from law enforcement. The first newspaper article had a full color photograph of Raider… Connor. The uniform was similar to the one the current Raider wore, midnight black with slashes of blood red across the arms and torso, a black mask that left the mouth and chin exposed. Two long, deadly-looking swords were sheathed at his hips, blades glinting in the glow of a nearby street lamp. In the photograph, Connor as Raider stood over a body, the line of his mouth grim, angry, fists clenched like he was hoping the guy would get up so he could hurt him again. I looked for the caption.

The super villain known as Raider moments after killing London’s Marvel, who was the leader of the city’s superhero team, Legion.

I felt sick to my stomach. I clasped my shaking hands in my lap and stared at the caption. “Damn it, Connor,” I whispered. I sorted through more articles. Lots of articles about how hated Raider and his team were, about how they’d singlehandedly destroyed entire neighborhoods in parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland. After a while, I set my laptop down on the bed, rested my elbows on my knees, and stared at the screen without seeing it.

How did I reconcile this? How did I put this sadistic super villain together with the man who watched over my mother when I couldn’t, who sent me ugly socks and pestered Jenson, politely, until she let him see me when I was in the hospital? Someone who could cause that kind of damage with the man who kissed me in a way that made me feel like I was flying without ever leaving the ground?

I stared at the photo of him as Raider. To believe it was possible, I had to believe that people could change. I didn’t know if I had it in me to believe that. I’ve certainly never seen anyone change that much, especially not over the course of just a few years. And his demeanor the previous night hadn’t exactly made me feel much better about it.

This. This right here is why I’ve been single for so long.

I sat there for a while longer, until I heard someone knocking on my door. I got up and looked out to see Jenson in the corridor, and I opened up.

“You look exhausted,” Jenson said in greeting.

“I am. Lot of crap on my mind.”

She sat down and I sat on the couch next to her. She was still in her full uniform, which meant she’d probably just gotten back from a patrol shift. “How’d it go?” I asked her.

“We had a Daemon sighting.” Daemon was one of Dr. Death’s teammates. Another of the several villains who just kept slipping away from us. “Amy actually did a good job trying to capture him, but he got whisked away by their teleporter again.”

“I hate that,” I muttered, and she nodded.

“What’s bugging you? Why so tired?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Bad dreams. Stuff on my mind.” Killjoy, mainly, but I didn’t feel like talking about that, like telling Jenson, who had her shit together more than anyone I’d ever known, that I’d gotten myself involved with a former super villain and I was still trying to figure out how okay I was with that. Then I remembered Connor’s advice. “Do we have anyone who can teach me some wrestling holds?”

“Yeah. Your partner. He has training in all of that stuff.”