“Now we’re both flinching from each other,” I said, taking another few steps back. “I’d call that a mutually unhealthy relationship. We should just call it quits now and go back to our regular lives. Really, we’re better off apart. So...you first. On back to whatever it is you do when you’re not being murderously criminal, and I’ll go back to busting regular murderous criminals.” I paused, dancing light back and forth on the balls of my feet, trying to stay limber and nimble in case he charged again. “Except, you know, I’m going to get you eventually.”
“I ripped your heart out,” Grendel growled at me, and it was so full of spite it made my ears ache even more than they were already hurting. I could feel his hate, it came off him at a different frequency than a normal voice, and it made my bones quiver some. “Next time I guess I’ll have to eat it to make sure you don’t get it back.”
“You do and I’m charging you with cannibalism,” I said. “Even here in San Fran, where they’ve apparently decriminalized shitting in the streets, busting into cars, injecting drugs in plain view while criminalizing drinking from plastic straws, I’m betting eating people is still a crime.” I paused. “Probably.”
Grendel roared, coming at me again, inhibitions about getting burned apparently vaporized away with all his emotional restraint. I wondered in that moment if this was something to do with his power, like Friday’s decreased intelligence the bigger he got. Maybe Grendel got more rage-y when he was empowered.
Or maybe not. I have no idea why that thought came to me as the giant, bony creature came flying at me. This time, he’d leapt up, way up, his bone-clawed feet already up over my head as he arced toward me like a pouncing cat.
I swung the Gatling gun up, up and into the gap between his legs, trying to hurt him the way I tended to hurt any man who leapt at me with killer intent. The gat barrel slammed into his crotch and—
Did nothing.
The Grendel wobbled from the impact, and I tried to brace and interrupt his fall, but I failed. He came down in spite of my best efforts to keep him aloft, to keep him off me. He swung down, upper body rolling like a pendulum at me, the gat barrel keeping his lower body away as I shoved it, trying to push him away, the hell away from me—
I failed.
Hot pain streaked down my shoulder, my chest as his claws ripped into me at the left trapezius and tore down to below my collarbone, crushing bone and shredding muscle as he did so. I dropped the Gatling gun without thought, the pain just shorting out my central nervous system as I collapsed.
Grendel came down after me in a brutal landing, the two of us crashing into a heap, his hot, stinking breath stirring my hair, my clothing, his rage radiating out—
And I knew I was dead.
23.
An inarticulate roar was followed by a thump that jarred me. Friday crashed into Grendel and they both went flying, tumbling end over end into the rock in the center of the lobby with a thundering crash. I went halfway with them, snagged by one of Grendel’s bony, toenail claws, and felt a rib crack as I rolled across the hard tile floor of the Inquest lobby.
I raised my head in time to see Friday pounding away ineffectually at Grendel, his fists spraying blood with each hit. Friday did not seem to care, hands moving so fast that I could barely keep track of them as he rained blows down on Grendel with a speed that almost matched the spin of my Gatling barrel.
It didn’t last. Another roar, and Grendel hit Friday in the midsection. Friday’s back bulged, and he staggered back a couple steps, legs wobbling.
Blood dripped onto the white tile, then flowed in a geyser.
“No,” I muttered, trying to get back to my feet. I had a flash of remembering Georgia West, dying in front of my eyes to this thing. “No, no—”
I sprinted hard and slammed my unbroken shoulder into Grendel at waist level as he started toward Friday again. He let out another roar, making me wonder if these little boys I was in this battle with could use their damned words. My momentum carried Grendel a couple steps back and then I hooked a double leg takedown and whipped him, back-of-the-head-first, into the rock.
The sound his skull made when it smashed against the stone was epic, reverberating even through my damaged ears. He didn’t quite catch himself, arms wobbling, as he collapsed. I managed to throw myself to the side before he took me out, but only barely.
I was a full-on conflagration of pain, trying to hold it all at bay while I held myself together. It wasn’t an easy task I’d set for myself here; broken collarbone, slashed shoulder and chest, ringing head. I wasn’t exactly the picture of health.
But I was pretty sure Friday had been gutted, and that meant he wasn’t going to be much use anytime soon. I didn’t bother to look back to confirm it.
Grendel was on all fours just a few feet from me, shaking his head after I’d rung his bell. Nice to know that where a Gatling gun couldn’t hurt him, I could, if given the proper leverage.
And I figured it was time to pursue my momentary advantage.
With a staggering push, I got to my feet, bent double because my balance had gone to shit due to pain and inner ear wonkiness from firing the Gatling gun. I leapt onto Grendel’s back, ignoring the bony crests that jutted from his spine. They were just an inch or two each; if he fully stabbed them into me, they probably wouldn’t hit any vital organs.
How sad my life had become, that I now measured risk in terms of damage to vital organs rather than, y’know, avoiding getting stabbed at all.
I locked in a sleeper hold around Grendel’s throat, applying as much pressure as I could while he was down. I didn’t do the choke, I went for the artery, figuring blood flow to the brain was the thing I needed to stop more than his breathing. That would take approximately forever, or at least thirty seconds or more.
With Grendel, that’d be plenty of time for him to stop, drop, and roll all over me, impaling me with those spines. Even if I held on, it’d be a race to see whether I choked him out first or I bled to death. No, thanks.
I held my wrist on his carotid, ratcheting it tighter. I doubted it would pop his head off, but a girl could dream.
Also, mark the sadness of my life: I had taken to fantasizing about popping heads off rather than, I dunno, paying bills or finding a cute skirt that made my legs look good, or being mad at what the girls at work were saying about me.
“Die, die, die, die,” I willed Grendel to pass out, and then, hopefully, slip into death. Because I had my doubts suppressant was going to get through his skin, though I did have a couple syringes in a hardcase on my belt. If a gat didn’t get through at full blast, what the hell was a needle going to do? Bounce off, I was guessing.
Grendel did not cooperate with my wishes and fantasies. He stood, drawing to his feet as though I were nothing more than a light backpack slung on his shoulder. He growled, which was another bad sign.
Then he threw himself back into the giant stone in the center of the lobby, Sienna-first.
He had, by my count, eight spinal ridges jutting out of his back, each about an inch to two inches in length. Every single one of them stabbed me in the chest and abdomen, and I felt them all, surprisingly, at the time they pierced my flesh. Which was surprising, given the level of damage I’d already taken. I figured my nervous system would have said, “Aw, screw it,” and quit on me before I felt the full effect.
Yay for me, upping my pain threshold over the last several years. That’d come in handy if I ever decided to get into the less vicious and more lucrative career of being a dominatrix.
The spines stabbed me from just under my already-broken collarbone down to just above my pelvis, eight jagged, sharpened spear-tips. All the wind left me in one gasp of pain, otherwise I would have wasted that breath screaming. My grip on my wrist gave out, not that it was doing any apparent good anyway.
My head rang again, this time from cracking against the rock, though that was a far, far distant second to the eight stabbing pains, which sounded a little like a Sienna Nealon Chris
tmas song verse from hell. “Eight gouging wounds, seven broken bones, six pints of blood, FIIIIIIVE screaming painnnnnns.”
I dropped, another cracking registering in my tailbone as I came down. I was wheezing from my combo of wounds and lack of breath, gasping as I tried to get it back. My vision was hazy, limited to the yellow monster in front of me.
Grendel looked like he wasn’t at his best, either, hunched over slightly as though between Friday and me, we’d put some hurting on him. Not nearly enough, but he wasn’t standing straight. I was at eye level to his bony-protruding knees, focused on them, about two feet from me. All he’d need to do was sweep one forward and my head would splat like a thrown cream pie.
Game over.
Friday was down. I could see him just past Grendel, bleeding all over the floor. This was the result of my brilliant teamwork, then: I’d managed to get my uncle slain with me. I stared up at death, out of ideas, in so much pain my body wasn’t even working right, and marshaled my last defense.
I didn’t get a chance to use it.
Something bright and blue caught Grendel at the arm and made him squeal like a pig stabbed in the hindquarters. His arm was smoking when it was done, and a second later he leapt, up, up over the rock, and was gone, out of my sight. Thundering footsteps were followed by a shattering somewhere in the distance.
Somehow I knew he’d gone, and he wasn’t coming back. At least not now.
Veronika Acheron stood just behind the downed Friday, her hands still glowing from where she’d pelted Grendel with a plasma blast. Sirens echoed in the distance, breaking in over the painful ringing still in my ears.
“You couldn’t...have showed up...two minutes earlier...?” I asked, trying to staunch the wounds to my chest with my own hands. I finally caught that breath, gasping it out now that I was out of (fatal) danger.
“Saving the lobby—or you—ain’t my job, Nealon,” Veronika said coolly, making her way over to Friday. She rolled him over with her foot and stooped, taking a look before grabbing both ends of the mighty wound in his belly and yanking them together like a makeshift butterfly bandage. I wasn’t convinced it would help that much, but his bleeding stemmed, and then she lit up a finger like a miniature blowtorch to cauterize the wound.
Friday didn’t respond. He’d passed out long ago.
“Well, your help was kinda nice anyway,” I said, feeling the tension bleed out of my muscles. Consciousness started to leave me as the adrenaline purged from my veins. Along with enough of my blood to make me lightheaded and eventually pass out, entering the familiar darkness.
24.
I woke to searing pain, to screaming that was my own, to Veronika’s bored face and the smell of barbecued flesh mingled with a sweet perfume as she cauterized my skin together with one hand while slapping my other away with her own free one. She was wearing a thick jacket and gloves to keep me from draining her, and when I snapped at her arm violently but unthinkingly, she said, “Knock it off or I’ll quit and you can heal naturally.”
Consciousness now returned, I quit and gutted out the pain. I didn’t have time for the hospital right now. Not with Grendel on the loose.
“Get it together, Nealon,” Veronika said calmly, after the second, or fifth, or possibly five hundredth wound she’d cauterized on my behalf. The sizzling sound that filled my ears was the sound of my own wounds being burned closed. It hurt long after the nerves burned off, the phantom pain staying with me as she seared the injuries into a black line of skin that would heal on its own—eventually. “I’m doing you a favor here.”
“Thank you...so much...for the agony,” I said, caught somewhere between irony and genuine gratitude. She really was doing me a favor. If she’d wanted to, she could have left me lying here for the paramedics to deal with in the standard way—pints of blood through an IV and trying to fix through surgery what would heal naturally if they’d just leave it alone.
“You’re welcome,” she said. Just over her shoulder, Friday lay splayed out, flat on his back, in a puddle of blood. I could see his belly, though, and she’d sealed it up tight in a black line of burn. She caught me looking and said, “He’ll be fine. He never even woke up when I was working on him.”
“Lucky him,” I said, and gave way to screaming and whimpering as she ran a plasma-covered finger over an inch-long wound just over my rib cage. I blacked out.
When I came to again, she only had two to go.
“Unghhhh,” I said, groaning lightly. There were cops moving around behind her, and apparently I’d missed the part where she’d explained what she was doing, because no one was pointing guns at her or telling her to stop torturing me.
“What the hell is this thing?” I heard someone ask, distantly.
Veronika looked over her shoulder, then pointed at me. “It’s hers.”
A skinny cop with a mustache pushed into my tunneled field of vision. “What in the hell were you doing with a Gatling gun?”
“Trying to stop a real bad guy,” I said. Veronika paused for a beat to let me answer. “A real big, bad guy. I’m with the FBI, and I do have permission to carry...that.”
The cop looked at me, then over his shoulder, presumably to where my gat had come to rest. He chuckled, apparently oblivious to my pain. “That’s a real big gun.” He smiled at me like he thought he was the funniest bastard in the whole universe. “What, were you compensating for your total lack of a penis?”
“Yes,” I said, steeling myself as Veronika lit her finger again. “Because I don’t have one to do my thinking for me, I reasoned that I’d need a big gun to protect myself against the bastard that did this. You f—”
Veronika stabbed a super-heated finger into my stomach wound and I let loose a stream of obscenities which did not quite jibe with the setup I’d done to insult that dickhead cop, but which worked to send him scurrying out of my face nonetheless. When she finished, I opened my eyes to find her smiling. “Nice one.”
“I get so tired of morons who question the way I do my job, really I do,” I said, breathing heavily through tightly gritted teeth. I was pretty sure I’d broken a molar or four, but they’d heal. Just like these cauterized stab wounds. “Did he really think I would have brought a damned Gatling gun with me just for shits and giggles if I didn’t think I’d need it?”
Veronika made a show of thinking it over. “Honestly, you, Nealon? Yeah. You probably would.”
I laughed and it hurt. “Okay. Okay, that’s a good point. But I didn’t! I needed it. I needed it and it barely worked to keep him off me, and only until the damned ammo ran out.” I coughed, tasted blood in my spit. Didn’t matter if it was from biting my tongue during the pain or some internal injury. It’d work itself out.
“So that was your brilliant plan to deal with that thing?” She readied her finger one last time. “Shoot it in the face?”
“I know that’s not a popular solution in our overly-sensitive society these days, but let me make the unpopular argument—as a solution to life’s problems, shooting that which vexes you squarely in the face? Works damned well most of the time.”
“I’m not arguing against it,” Veronika said. “Brace yourself. Count of three—”
“Oh, now you’re giving me a count?”
“Three.”
“Shit! YOU—!”
Once the merciless anguish was over and I’d caught my breath again, having exhausted my entire vocabulary of obscenities, I looked Veronika right in the eyes. “Thank you,” I said. Sincerely.
“You’re welcome,” she said mildly, then stood.
“Now...any chance I can borrow you for fighting that thing?” I asked. “Because it’s heat sensitive, and you—you throw the heat like no one’s business.”
“Yeah, I bet you’re really regretting the loss of Gavrikov now, huh?” She stood looking around the lobby. Her jacket’s sleeve was just covered in blood. Mine, surely. “Like I said before, Nealon—I don’t work for you, and saving your ass ain’t my job. Anymore.”
She shrugged. “I got ’em out. Next time this thing comes, though, I’m guessing it isn’t going to be here. And out there—” she waved vaguely at the world beyond this bizarre, postmodern architectural nightmare “—ain’t my problem.”
“I miss you, Veronika,” I said.
She puckered her lips and blew me a fake kiss. “I miss you, too, Nealon. I loved working for your little do-gooder squad. But I love money more.”
“I can respect that,” I said, back against the stone. I touched my ribs. They made noises like Rice Krispies with milk poured over them, and I cringed and bent nearly double. That didn’t help, so I slowly stood back up. “Even though it might be the death of me.”
“We all gotta go sometime, sweetcheeks,” she said. “You want the paramedics to take a look at you?”
“So they can threaten me off to the hospital and I can tell them to bugger off so I can leave AMA? Let’s just skip that.” I grimaced. “I didn’t get to finish my talk with your bosses.”
“And you won’t, now,” she said. “They’re in lock-down until this thing blows over. I’ll be joining them shortly.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, irritated and pained all in one shot. “That’s bullshit and you know it. Hoping this all blows over when you could help stop it?”
She shrugged. “Here’s what I know, and what I’ll be telling them: ‘Sienna Nealon shows up at your office. This thing shows up ten minutes later and causes a deadly ruckus. Would you like to see Sienna Nealon again?’” She cocked her head at me. “What’s their answer going to be, y’think?”
“Up yours,” I said. “I had nothing to do with this. Grendel’s after something, something tech-related. Your bosses could at least Skype with me to try and answer what that could be.”
Blood Ties Page 12