Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  42.

  “Dammit,” I said, suddenly caught between two polarizing ideas. If Grendel was attacking Socialite’s offices, I needed—or at least wanted—to get over there ASAP.

  But...and this was a massive but, the kind Sir Mix-A-Lot’s anaconda would have loved...

  I’d gotten my ass kicked by Grendel not once, but twice, and he’d actually killed me, a feat only one other person had managed to pull off in my entire career.

  “You’re hesitating,” Mendelsohn said. “For good reason, of course—”

  “Yeah, I’m flashing back to my most recent death,” I said. His eyebrows raised over my choice of words. Or maybe because he didn’t know I’d died before. I didn’t bother to stop and explain, either way. “I’m also wondering if I should get Friday.”

  “Absolutely,” Mendelsohn said. “This isn’t even a question. If he crushed the two of you combined, plus your Gatling gun yesterday, what chance do you have with no Gatling gun and no Friday?”

  “I hate your logic and reason because it makes me realize that I’m not only going into a nigh hopeless battle, but I’m doing so with an idiot as my backup.” I kicked open the limo door, ready to storm across the parking lot into Friday’s impromptu concerto in the hotel lobby—

  But as it turned out, I didn’t need to.

  Friday came bursting out of the hotel’s sliding doors as I took to my feet, stereo speakers still strapped to his arms like he was some sort of sound rig for a stadium. The music playing through them spiked into my ears like icepicks as he cleared the lobby, song blaring as he sang along at the top of his lungs to Bonnie Tyler’s seminal 1984 classic, I Need A Hero.

  I glanced back at Mendelsohn for reassurance and he was poking his head out of the limo, fingers in ears, nodding along to the beat, which was still somehow the bass line from Friday’s own song, but mixed with I Need A Hero as though he were playing two different music apps at the same time through the speakers. Which he probably was. “You know, his voice isn’t bad,” Mendelsohn said.

  He wasn’t wrong, I reflected as I turned back to try and wave Friday down. He was standing under the hotel portico, looking wildly left and right, as though searching for—well, me, maybe? Still singing, though. Didn’t miss a single lyric.

  When his eyes alit on me standing in front of the limo, he bolted for me, still going at the top of his lungs, at a volume where they could probably hear it up in Seattle. Halfway across the parking lot he thrust his phone up into the air, almost losing the speakers strapped to that arm as he did so. “Socialite is getting attacked!”

  “I know,” I said, looking past him to his crowd of fans, now filtering out the front of the hotel. Some of them were pointing rather aggressively at me, a couple running after him.

  “We have to stop it!” Friday shouted, pounding the pavement and hurdling over a line of shrubs. “I just got my follower count on there over 100,000! If it goes down I might lose them!”

  I paused, cringed, and gestured for Mendelsohn to move back before I threw myself back into the limo. “His priorities are not quite aligned with mine, I don’t think,” I said as we both cleared the entryway.

  “Well, we all have our perspectives and priorities,” Mendelsohn said, rather charitably, I thought, as Friday leapt into the limo. He had shed his speakers steps before his jump, and was now shrunk small enough that he sailed in through the open door and bounced against the opposite seat, shaking the car.

  I snapped the door shut and Mendelsohn pounded the glass of the driver’s compartment. We lurched into motion, the front echelon of the crowd still surging toward us like groupies at a concert.

  Friday dove for the window, rolling it down and sticking his head out. “I have to go do battle with the forces of evil!” he shouted to the milling, running, shouting crowd. “Check my feed on Instaphoto for details on my next appearance!”

  We rattled out of the parking lot and away, the crowd receding in the rearview as the driver floored it.

  “How far away is Socialite?” I asked, barely settling back in my seat, fingers clutching at the nearest leather handrest.

  “Five minutes,” Mendelsohn said as we bumped onto the main road. Friday was already looking down at his phone, probably another post of some sort. I didn’t have the mental focus to address that particular hornet’s nest right now, because my mind was on the battle ahead, with the beast that had already wrecked me twice.

  And all I could hope was that this third time wouldn’t be the charm for Grendel.

  43.

  Veronika

  “Get your feet off the table,” Veronika said to Tyler, who was smiling at her in a leer the entire time she was speaking. “This is your employer’s safe room, not your mom’s filthy kitchen.”

  “I wish I was in my momma’s kitchen right now,” Phinneus said, running an oiled patch over his gun.

  “How long since the last time you were?” Veronika asked, watching Tyler pull his feet slowly off the table in front of him, watching her, challenging her the entire time. Once that was done she shot a look toward Berniece, who was sitting at a desk in the corner of the room reading something, but looking up as the conversation played out. Figured she’d take an interest.

  “Oh, ’60 or so, I reckon,” Phinneus said. “The war came, I left. She died while I was gone, so...”

  That comment prompted a frown from Berniece, and as if on cue, she asked the question Veronika had been hoping to draw out. “What war was going on in 1960?”

  “He means 1860,” Hollister beat Phinneus to the punch, not looking up from his work bench. “He was in the Civil War.”

  Berniece blinked a couple times, digesting that. “North or South?” she asked, eyes slitting suspiciously.

  “Union,” Phinneus, not looking up from his oil cloth. “I was from New Hampshire, so it wasn’t much of a question.”

  “Did you kill a lot of people?” Tyler asked, thin smile running across his face.

  “Yeah, I did,” Phinneus said. “A whole heap of ’em.” He finished running the oily rag over his gun barrel, tossing it into a nearby trashcan with unerring accuracy. As always. “Done the same in just about every war since.”

  “Nice,” Berniece said, turning back to her reading. She was on her laptop, which meant she was probably sifting emails. As she did so much of the day, even when in the office. Something dinged, and her face lit up. “Ooh.”

  “What?” Veronika asked. She cast a look at Chase, who was waiting over by Hollister, arms folded, taking in the whole exchange but evincing little other than a vague disinterest. She’d been around metas long enough to have met an old-timer or two like Phinneus.

  “Grendel’s attacking Socialite,” Berniece said with indescribable glee. Her eyes lit like she had ten-thousand-watt bulbs strapped in behind her irises. “That’s ten minutes from here.”

  “Time to ride,” Veronika said, looking over at Tyler, Phinneus and Kristina, who’d been sitting quietly, looking at Pinterest. “Chase, you stay here and guard the bosses. The rest of you—”

  “Yeah, we’re with you,” Phinneus said, slinging his rifle into the leather holster on his back. “All the way.”

  “Yeah, I’m with you all the way until the money runs out or the fun stops,” Tyler said with that same grin again.

  “So reassuring,” Veronika said, moving to open the vault door to the safe room. The atmosphere in here was getting stale. Not stale enough that she was excited about leaving to tangle with the thing that had ripped up Sienna twice, but still... “Let’s do it.”

  “Yeah,” Berniece said, popping to her feet with enthusiasm. “Let...uh...Let slam...no...” She turned to McKay. “Hol, what’s that quote I’m thinking of? Shakespeare or somebody? For—”

  “‘Let slip the dogs of war,’” McKay said, not turning around from his work.

  “‘Let slip the dogs of war,’ yeah, that’s it,” Berniece said, beaming at them. “Oh, and don’t come back without that thing’s head.”
>
  44.

  Sienna

  “That’s a hell of a headquarters,” I said, looking up at the Socialite HQ. Even among the opulent corporate palaces of Silicon Valley, this thing stood out.

  Socialite HQ was a friggin’ pyramid of glass, like someone had ripped the Luxor hotel right out of the Vegas Strip and plopped it down in the shade of the hills of the South Bay. Like the Pharaohs of old had just decided that, y’know, ancient Egypt was just a little too hot and dry for them and maybe the California coast was more their speed. But they brought their desert sands with them. Solar panels seemed to be interspersed with giant viewing windows across the surface, a photovoltaic hellscape that could probably double as some sort of anti-orbital energy beam projector on a really sunny day.

  “I don’t know much about their CEO,” Friday said, “but he must be a man of extreme style, mighty ambitions, and an enormous set of bofa.”

  “‘Bofa’?” Mendelsohn asked before I could stop him.

  “Bofa deez nuts,” Friday said, thrusting his pelvis. “But his.”

  “The CEO is Jaime Chapman,” I said, eyes still closed because I had been partially traumatized by the sight of Friday’s pelvic thrust. “And I don’t think any of that is true about him, except maybe the ambition part.”

  “The police perimeter is ahead, ma’am,” the limo driver’s voice crackled into our compartment.

  “Pull off and let us out before you get there,” I called back, and the limo immediately pulled over. He must have driven us right up to it. “Friday, we need to be smart about this.” I looked right at my uncle. “We can’t go charging in like lunatics again or Grendel will tear us apart again.”

  Friday nodded. He was probably the least swole I’d seen him thus far, which meant hopefully his brain was working at near peak capacity rather than pea-sized like it seemed to get when he became huge. “We need to use our superior numbers to outflank him and the superior audacity granted by bofa to divide and conquer him.”

  “Kind of, yes,” I said, throwing the door open. The police perimeter was, indeed, just ahead, at the guard gate locking off access to the Socialite parking lot. “Let me do the thinking, though, okay? Especially if you’re going to Hulk out.”

  “I don’t really love strategy, but I recognize a need for it because I don’t want to have another hellacious, bloody bowel movement selfie in a coffee shop bathroom like yesterday,” Friday said, making me wonder why Shaw hadn’t mentioned that when he’d called me to bitch about Friday’s social media sins.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that hurt a lot,” I said, trying to get way, way past what he’d just said. “So we should—”

  “No, the pain wasn’t that bad,” he said, straightening himself out and swelling a little as his feet touched the pavement once he was clear of the limo door. “I just really don’t want to tread the same artistic ground in my selfies again, you know? I need to plunge into some new frontiers. I was thinking of doing some tasteful nudes. Push right up to the line on Instaphoto’s standards. Maybe make a social statement about breastfeeding by showing my nips—”

  “Dear God, I’m so glad I don’t have an Instaphoto account,” I muttered.

  “You should totally get one; it’s the best way to communicate with your fans in photo form,” Friday flexed and swelled more. Alarmingly more. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go do this thing.” He pulled out his phone, dipped down next to me, and snapped a selfie of us both before I could react other than to frown and open my mouth to tell him to stop. “Awesome pic.” He hit a button.

  “Do not upload th—” I started to say, still fighting to wrap my brain around him doing that.

  “Oops,” he said, and flipped the screen toward me. It already said UPLOADED, and there was my picture, mouth open, my bitch face not even resting, but fully active and engaged. “It’s set for real time uploads, see? I just add the text and hashtags in edits now.” He tapped away with his shrunken fingers at the screen.

  “Arghhhh,” I said, turning toward the police perimeter. “Wait here,” I shouted to Mendelsohn, who called back some sort of agreement before slamming the limo door closed. Friday pounded along, slightly slower, behind me, still fidgeting with his damned phone.

  The cops at the perimeter made a hole so Friday and I could charge through, no one saying a damned thing to us as we entered the combat zone. The parking lot was filled with cars, and the closer we got the more I realized that the Socialite HQ was just enormous. It played a sort of perspective trick wherein when we’d first pulled up outside the gate I’d guessed it was ten, twelve stories high. Now that I was leaping over cars in the parking lot toward the edge of it, I realized we had about a mile to cover before we even reached the base of the building, and that it was probably more like 20-25 stories tall. For all I knew, by the time I reached it I’d revise that estimate up to 50, though that seemed improbable.

  “Let’s rock!” Friday leapt past me, not quite at maximal size but a lot closer to it than I wanted from him. He was easily wide enough to be bursting the seams of a subway car if he found himself on one. “My fans are going to love this!” He thrust his phone up and some sort of angry, Germanic chanting echoed tinnily across the parking lot. First responders and cops were crawling all over this place, trying to usher escaping employees beyond the safety of the perimeter line. However safe that actually was, with Grendel on the loose, was a matter of some debate.

  “Slow up; we need to figure out where he is,” I said, trying to pull the reins on Friday before he went busting in to little effect, or, worse, great terrible effect. “This building is huge, and if we just go charging into the lobby and try to follow the path of destruction—”

  “We’ll find the destroyer,” Friday said. He’d stopped just ahead of me, but was bouncing like a gorilla about to fight or climb a tree. “Duh.”

  “No, we’ll likely run smack into trouble or waste time with—” I started to say.

  I was interrupted by a crash and a scream as one of the windows some ten or more floors above us exploded and a body was hurled a hundred feet out, far beyond what a human could have jumped had they taken a running start and leapt. The flailing figure, already bloody as hell, came crashing down in the middle of the parking lot ahead, and I didn’t need to see the landing to know they weren’t getting up again.

  “There,” Friday said, and he bounded off again toward the edge of the building. “The villain is up there, I’d stake my bofa on it!”

  I couldn’t really argue with his logic, though I did want to take exception to his choice of words. I followed him at a sprint across the rest of the parking lot, and any questions I had about why people didn’t try climbing the surface of the pyramid were answered when I got close enough to the building’s edge—it was a sheer surface for at least a floor and a half, a perfectly normal horizontal wall that didn’t begin the pyramidal slope until about twenty feet up.

  Friday leapt it, of course, before I could shout a warning. I managed to get it out while he was in mid-air, too late by far. “Don’t! You’ll break through the—”

  He landed with a thump on the glassy surface, and not so much as a crack showed up when he did. I shut my mouth, awed into silence by the fact that the glass had taken the landing of a two-hundred-, three-hundred-pound man jumping on it without shattering completely. “Well, okay, then,” I said, and did a leap myself to join him.

  I landed a dozen feet away, careful not to hit the same panel as him for fear our combined weight would do what his alone hadn’t. As I came down, I heard an ominous crack and looked down to see small spiderwebs radiating out from beneath my feet for about a yard.

  “Really?” I muttered. “You take swole goombah’s landing no problem, but for me, this?” I shook my head. “Figures this would happen at the HQ of the biggest internet troll site on the planet.”

  “Less bitching about the laws of physics, more running,” Friday called, already hauling his immense ass up the side of the building at a run. />
  “Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, breaking into a sprint to follow him, taking care to keep my feet on a separate glass panel from his. “I bet you landed on a support beam, that’s all. If you’d hit bare glass like I did, your ass would be sitting on someone’s desk right now, legs up in the air—”

  “Like a hooker on the job,” Friday called back. He was really moving, already halfway to the immense hole where the Socialite worker had taken flight.

  “Something like that,” I groused. I was breathing a little heavy, mostly because I wasn’t used to this sort of incline in my runs. Still, I was gaining ground on Mr. Muscles, and figured we’d reach the entry point seconds apart, at most. “When you get there, wait on me. We want to look before we—”

  “Hey, I got a new battle cry,” Friday said, not looking back and not slowing down as he approached the hole in the building. “Ready?” He did not wait for my answer or for me to catch up, just sprinted to the hole and leapt in, shouting, “LEEEEEEEEEROYYYYYYYY JENKINNNNNNS!” the whole way.

  “Well, it fits,” I said, bounding up the last few yards to the opening to follow him through—

  Something stopped me, though. A big something.

  Friday.

  Launched back at me as though Gravity herself had tethered him to the sky, Friday came flying out of the hole, sending me ducking and rolling. I slipped down two stories before I caught myself on the glass, cold fingers sliding as I skidded down the angle of the building’s surface until I stopped.

  Looking up, I saw what had thrown Friday out. As if there was ever any doubt.

  “I’m glad you showed up for this,” Grendel said, yellow face rising as he stepped out onto the solar panel just below the hole with the slight crunch as his bone claws bit into the surface of the building. “Because I was really hoping we could conclude our business together before I finished my own.”