What could he do...?
An all-night gym was lit up down the street, and he flexed again. “What can I do...that plays to my strengths...and would impress an audience...?”
Duh! He smacked himself on the forehead, then bounded down the street toward the gym. Ignoring the big sign that said “Members Only,” he grabbed the door handle and ripped it open, ignoring the pesky lock as it yielded quickly in its pussitude. Maybe now they’d spring for a grown-up lock when they replaced it. It was like he was doing them a favor.
Inside, only a dozen or so people were working out, and most of them were on the treadmills. “Sup, gym bros?” Friday shouted across this holy space.
Only a few of them looked at him. Most of them were wearing headphones, running the treadmills. Friday scoffed, but sort of quietly. Though he was dissing them, hard, there was no point in stirring loud discontent. Cardio was for women who wanted to maintain their shapely figures, not men, who should be bulking up to deal with whatever troubles might come their way. He flexed again, mostly to impress the two hot-ish chicks on the treadmills.
Neither noticed him. Which was fine. He was here to work out anyway, not get blinded by the bling of a tight booty.
He made his way toward the weights section. Two guys were working out over here and that was it. “You and you,” he said, pointing at them as he threaded between two cages. “I need a spot, dudes.”
One guy took a single look at him and moved away like he could smell the herpes. Which he totally couldn’t. Friday knew this for a fact. Herpes didn’t have a scent. The astrologist had assured him, and what was she if not utterly trustworthy?
“Do you even lift, bro?” Friday shouted at his retreating backside, which was firm, but not too bulky. Clearly he had bought into the cardio myth. Probably ate a lot of soy protein, too, which was terrible for your testicles, testosterone and raw manhood. Friday turned his attention toward the remaining guy, who was reasonably bulked. Not womanly at all. “Looks like you’re the one spotting me today, gym bro.”
“I’m Robin,” the guy said, a little hesitantly.
“Cool,” Friday said. “I’m Friday, Robinson. It’s totally kittens to make your acquaintance and have you as my gym bro sidekick for this workout. You’re probably going to get a lot of exposure for this, and that’s kittens, too. Include your tag in my photos if you want.”
“I...uh...okay...?” Robin(son) said.
“Here’s your job, bro,” Friday said, unlocking his phone with the simple yet time tested password of 1111. Impossible to defeat. Or forget, thankfully. He handed the phone to Robinson. “Take photos. Then you’re going to be like a quiet voice helping me decide which are the post-worthy ones. Take some vids, too, of me doing sick reps. Then we’ll hashtag those bad boys and get my followers squealing for more. Because they’re probably mostly chicks that are into my hotness. We kittens?”
“Uh...sure,” Robinson said, taking the phone—and the position of supreme trust it entailed—in hand.
“Excellent,” Friday said. “Let’s do this thing.” He flexed, waiting for Robinson to take the pic. “And no kettlebells, you hear me? None of that New Age horseshit. We’re doing straight-up manly lifting.” He flexed again. “Now let’s make the bitches squeal with hot lifts and hotter hashtags.”
33.
Sienna
“I’d put those away before somebody gets hurt,” I said, eyeing Veronika’s glowing hands with my fingers already on my Glock. I didn’t want to escalate this, but I’d be damned if I was going to let Veronika and her new master come storming into my crime scene and cause a...well, a scene.
“No can do,” Veronika said, not backing off a bit. She kept those bad boys glowing, and brought them up in front of her face. If she needed to, she could project the plasma into a shield and keep my bullets from even kissing her lovely bone structure by melting them before they got to her. Which would suck for me, since Veronika was a total badass and I wasn’t quite sure how to kill her now that I’d been somewhat de-powered.
Though, as with everyone else I met in my life, I had a few ideas on how to do so if I needed to.
“I want you off my property,” Berniece Adams said with a muted grin, hidden behind her big lips. Her eyes were intense, and any hint of friendliness that had been present earlier had vanished.
“This is a crime scene,” I said, staring her down. “You can’t kick us out.”
“If I say there’s no crime,” Berniece said evenly, “then it’s not a crime scene.”
“Uh, not how it works,” I said. “In case you forgot, your security guards were murdered here earlier. Regardless of how you feel about prosecuting the Grendel for his theft of your property, he still killed people and murdered a federal agent before crashing in here tonight. If you don’t want to go after him for breaking into your systems, that’s up to you, but it doesn’t make this place not a crime scene.”
Berniece’s glare wavered slightly and she looked back to Veronika as if seeking advice. Veronika shrugged, but didn’t douse the plasma. Playing to her employer. Berniece tore her glare back to me. “Fine.”
I kept my hand on my Glock, for all the good it would do. “Fine,” I said. Because why not argue like teenagers?
“But I don’t want you combing through my systems for anything on the theft,” Berniece said, folding her skinny arms in front of her. “That is proprietary Inquest technology, and I don’t trust that your leaky bureau won’t ‘lose it’ to some of my competitive set.”
I frowned. “Beg pardon?”
She cast her eyes at Mendelsohn, who’d remained quiet throughout this exchange. Also, wisely, again behind me a bit. “You’re carting around one of my competitors right now, in fact.” She pointed toward the door. “I want him out of here. He’s not a federal agent.”
I bit back an angry retort, but rolled my eyes by the time Mendelsohn put a hand on my shoulder. He’d come to the same conclusion I had: it wasn’t worth the fight. “I’ll wait in the car,” he said.
“Great,” I said, then focused back on Berniece as he carefully threaded his way between her and Veronika, avoiding the burning plasma hands as she stepped slightly to the side for him to pass. “You are going to cooperate on telling us what Grendel stole, though, as part of my investigation, aren’t you?”
Berniece stared at me very levelly for just a moment before shaking her head. “No.”
I tried to hold in my irritation. I probably failed. “No? You don’t want to help catch this guy after he killed your people and stole your shit?”
She scoffed. “Forgive me, but I just don’t think you have it in you to actually catch him, and even if you did, you really don’t have the juice to do anything about it anymore.” She made a mean girl face, giving me a snotty once-over as she did so. “I mean, really...you’re just not what you used to be. Without those other powers you had...you’re painfully average. I mean, what’s special about you now?” She waved her hands in front of her while making a wide-eyed, open-mouthed mocking face. “You punch super hard? Ooh. Grendel punches harder. Your little toy did nothing to him. I watched the footage. You’re about as useful as Bing. Do yourself a favor and clock out before you get hurt.” She hit me with a pressed-lip, sad-faced look. “Leave this one to the people who know how to solve actual problems, and you can just go back to chasing down muggers and bank robbers or whatever you do until you level up again—if you even have it in you to do that.”
It felt like the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees in two seconds, and Veronika couldn’t help but let her own jaw drop as her boss spoke.
Calm.
Calm.
Be cool.
I tried not to see red, really I did. It didn’t work.
But I didn’t swing at her, and I didn’t kill her, and that, I think, is really to my credit as a person.
I let Berniece Adams walk away with her spine still in her body and a condescending smirk still on her lips, and Veronika mouthed, “So
rry,” as she doused the plasma hands and slipped out, letting the security room door close behind her.
For about five whole seconds I steamed, burning inside as no one in the security room said a word. A buzzing on my hip brought me back to the present, and out of the sweet fantasy I was having about taking a page out of Rose Steward’s book and ripping Berniece’s soul screaming out of her body an inch at a time while she apologized and begged for forgiveness. She’d have been a good vegetable, and wouldn’t it have been nice to turn her into an empty thrall who occasionally made huge deposits into my meager bank account to make up the cost of living difference between what the FBI paid me and what it cost to live in New York City.
“Hello?” I answered my phone without looking at the caller ID.
“What are you doing?” Willis Shaw was at the other end of the line, and he sounded about as happy as I did.
“Practicing restraint,” I said. “Why?”
Shaw seemed to bite back something, but eventually blasted out with, “Do you know what your partner is up to right now?”
I frowned for a second, then remembered, oh, yeah, I was working with someone, and that someone was Friday, and—aw, damn—I’d let him wander off unsupervised. I closed my eyes and a stream of curses filled my head as I imagined all the horrible things he could get up to in the few hours since last I’d seen him. I clenched my teeth, took a deep breath, and asked the question: “What did he do now?”
34.
Friday
“Turn it up—this is totally my jam!” Friday shouted at Robin(son) mid-rep. He was lifting. Pumping iron. Pictures were being taken. Music was being played. A touch of lyrical awesomeness that never failed to impress.
And the chicks were totally digging it.
No, really. They’d shown up in force. He had a crowd watching him, phones out, taking pictures along with him.
“Watch this, bitches!” Friday shouted, lifting the entire workout machine in a military press. There were oohs and aahs, and someone screamed, “TAKE IT OFF!”
Or maybe it was, “You’re a hoss.”
No, it was probably the first one. He was like a stripper now, anyways.
Dropping the weight machine to more oohs and aahs and some awe, Friday flexed. “Look upon the specter of the perfect man,” he said, making his bicep look like a tractor trailer tire in its hugeness. “If you think that’s impressive, you should see my love muscle.”
“Turn sideways,” Robinson said, snapping another shot of him.
He was really turning into a useful sidekick. “You got it, Robinson.”
“My name is Robin,” he muttered, but took the picture anyway.
“Hashtag that one #fiercebitch,” Friday said, then headed for the kettlebell rack. Selecting the two biggest, one for each hand, he said, “Check this shit out. These are the only things these newfangled bullshit baby weights are good for—juggling.” And he tossed the first, then the second, then grabbed a third—
The first and second hit the ceiling tiles and shattered them, busting a light fixture in the process. They both came down a few feet away before he could even manage to compose himself and toss the third and fourth into the air. One of them hit the soft gym mat and bounced sideways, smashing the mirrored wall next to him and sending a cascade of glass across the floor.
Friday looked at all that, then the kettlebells in his hand. “Whoops. Okay, I’m calling a do-over. This time—”
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?!”
Record scratch. Everybody stopped like the DJ had quit spinning it, and Friday looked toward the source, the angry, shrewish voice that had snapped like a whip up in the middle of this joint.
Oh.
Whoops.
Man. She looked mad.
“Hey, Sienna,” Friday said, hiding the kettlebells behind his back. “Whassup?”
35.
Sienna
Crowds are almost my least favorite thing in the world, running just behind politicians. So when we pulled up in front of the all-night gym that Friday had tagged himself at on Instaphoto, I was nonplussed when I saw a crowd visible through the front windows.
Shaw had made his displeasure over my lack of supervision of Friday known, and had voiced his irritation that Friday was presently violating the FBI’s social media policy by apparently trespassing on private property and putting on some sort of metahuman weightlifting exhibition of the sort that wouldn’t be out of place in Venice Beach, maybe, but was hardly normal for a Tuesday night in Palo Alto.
“Get his ass out of there and keep him under control,” Shaw had said in no uncertain terms. “Keep this contained.”
“It’s on the internet,” I’d said. “How the hell am I supposed to contain that?”
He’d been cheerfully nonspecific and vocally profane, and so I’d dutifully charged off to deal with the (current) Friday problem.
Which brought me to the crowd buzzing at the entry to the all-night gym.
The door lock was broken, and the entryway was crammed with people all brandishing their cell phones to get a closer look/video of whatever the hell Friday was up to, so I just started shoulder-checking my way through the hipster crowd, politeness be damned. “Coming through. Move. Get a shave and a haircut, will you? You—shouldn’t you be hanging out at Haight Ashbury, circa 1967? Out of the way, lumberjackoff,” I said, sending a dude with a full beard and a flannel out of my path with a hearty shove. “Go tap a maple tree or something.”
There was a rumble of recognition that started to run through the crowd as I made my way through. I heard someone mutter, “Slay Queen!” but quietly compared to the sudden—and terrible—crashing of glass that came from beyond the crowd.
Shoving through the last couple hipsters to make my way to the front, I found Friday standing with two kettlebells, one in each hand, looking like he was about to try and juggle them or something. Two more kettlebells were already creasing the gym floor, laying in a pile of glass that made the place look like it had experienced a bombing.
I bellowed out something loud and furious and probably unimaginative but hopefully non-profane (the cameras were rolling, after all), and sort of blacked out for a second from rage and distress. When I got my senses back about me, I found Friday grinning through the mouth hole of his mask, and fought back the urge to cram a kettlebell in there to keep him from speaking...well, ever again, actually.
“...just trying to keep up with my growing fanbase and milking my role as an influencer,” Friday was saying, as though any of that was supposed to mean something to me.
“What...the hell are you doing?” I asked, the only sound in the place other than the electronic sound effects from half a hundred cell phone cameras clicking rapidly.
Friday’s eyes darted left, then right, like he was considering my question. “I literally just answered that.”
“I couldn’t hear you over the sound of my own internal screaming.”
“You should get that checked out,” Friday said, oh so helpfully. “That sounds serious. Like cancer. Or impotence.”
I rubbed my forehead with all my fingers, because I had facepalmed without intending to. It just happened, like my earlier blackout. “Why are you—what are you—”
I couldn’t form words. I’d lost my capacity to express...well, anything.
“I am because I am,” Friday said, apparently taking my sentence fragments as serious queries. “And what I am...is a Studmaster of Total Hotness.”
A couple guys cheered at that.
I tried to form a thought, but somehow between the beatings I’d taken the last few days, the sleep I’d foregone when I’d been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, and the distress I was feeling because of realizing that the only help I had with stopping a seemingly impossible meta was my idiot uncle, well...
Mentally, I was tapped out.
“The cure might just be worse than the disease,” I muttered, mostly to myself.
“The Cure is amazing an
d you need to learn some proper respect for music history,” Friday said, feathers all ruffled. “I don’t know who ‘The Disease’ is, but I assure you they’re an inferior band.”
“Put your shirt on,” I said, looking up at him again. He was bare-chested and fuzzy, and it was a horrifying sight to behold for anyone other than maybe a furry. “We have to get out of here.”
“Why?” His voice held a tone of innocence that was probably caused by the fact he was roughly the size of a circus tent.
“Because our target struck again tonight,” I said, trying to keep the details light given there were probably a million people watching the various livestreams of this moment. Sure, I could have gone meta-low, but it was questionable whether he’d hear me over all the hubbub.
Friday stiffened, all business. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his shirt and camera from some poor guy who’d apparently been a receptacle for all his crap. “Later, Robinson.”
“My name is Robin,” the guy muttered under his breath. Friday took no notice, heading for the door. The crowd cleared out of the way for him...
Mostly because their cameras were all on me, now.
Yay. I was doing a great job with the company social media policy. I may not have had an account of my own, but I was all over the major social networks tonight.
I stared into the face of about a hundred cell phone cameras, and I just couldn’t contain my irritation. “Don’t you people have lives of your own? Or do you just watch other people’s unfold online?”
That quieted things down. Before any of them could answer, I followed in the path Friday had made, hurrying outside after my idiot uncle.
36.
“This is a swank ride,” Friday said to Mendelsohn as the limo thrummed along, all of us sitting in silence up to that point. We’d gone probably five, ten minutes without speaking, and I felt like we were all the better for it.
Blood Ties Page 16