45.
“Aww, hey, look, it’s Jaundice-Luc Picard,” I said, taking a step back as Grendel pulled himself up onto the glass panel directly below the huge, gaping hole in the side of Socialite’s pyramidal headquarters. “Just the dude I was looking for.” I treaded carefully to make sure I didn’t end up going ass over teakettle down the artificial mountain I was standing on. The slope was steep enough that any falls wouldn’t be pleasant. I glanced back and saw Friday had landed on the roof of a van. I couldn’t hear him groaning, but he was moving, at least a little, which gave me hope he might re-enter the fight later.
For now, though, I really needed to avoid getting into a clash with Grendel. I stared up at him, he stared back at me as he found his footing on the high ground, sneering down with teeth as yellow as the rest of him. The bone claws on his right arm were bloody, dripping onto the glass surface.
“So, I think we’re at the point in our relationship that we have ‘the talk,’” I said, as Grendel started to lurch toward me. He pulled up short, maybe because of what I said, maybe because he realized balancing his enormous frame on this slanted a surface was going to be a hell of a challenge. Either way, he stopped and looked a little unsteady. “You know the one I mean—‘What do you want?’”
Grendel’s head bobbed as though I’d punched him. “What?” His voice was rough and confused.
“Look,” I said, holding up my hands. “You’ve beaten my ass right good and proper two times. I’m not much the surrendering type, and I am a slow learner.” I took another step back. “But I do know when I’m backed into a corner. Figuratively speaking, of course.” I gestured to the open air behind me and the parking lot several hundred feet below. “Now, you’re tearing up a lot of shit here, big guy, and I’m the government’s official response. You’ve just taken out half my team for the second time in two days. I’m a pragmatist, I’m trying to minimize chaos, and I would like to see the violence end. What’s it going to take? Money? A written apology from someone? Clue me in here, big fella. I’m not really into getting gutted, okay?”
Grendel seemed utterly taken aback. “Are you...giving up, then?”
“Let’s not go using loaded language, okay?” I kept those hands up, took another step back. “I do have feelings, hard as that may be to believe, and the idea of surrendering? Well, it hurts me. Hurts my pride. Hits me right here, where it hurts.” I thumped my chest. “Some people might call that the heart. I’d call it the tit, because if you’ve ever been punched in one of those, you know it hurts, amirite?” I glanced as his strange physiology; his chest was somewhat concave. “Maybe you don’t. Point is, I’m just trying to reach an accommodation.”
Grendel rumbled a small laugh. “Because I’ve killed you before.” He leaned forward a little, shooting me a toothy yellow grin that was absolutely horrifying, the points of his teeth like weathered gravestones in his mouth. “Because I hurt you.”
“Don’t get carried away. Lots of people have hurt me over the years,” I said. “And you’re not the first to kill me, though you might have done it a bit more brutally than has happened in the past. Take your trophy on that if you’d like. Hell, take a victory lap, too, because to your credit, that’s not an easy thing for most people to pull off, and a hell of a lot have tried. But...” I tried to be as pleasant in my tone as possible. “You’ve killed a fair number of other people along the way. Innocent people. That didn’t need to happen. I don’t want it to happen anymore. Which is why I’m asking you—what do you want?”
“Why are you asking?” Grendel’s voice went guttural and harsh. “Do you think you could get it for me, you little princess?”
“I’m trying to be as amicable in this as possible,” I said. “Do you just want war? Chaos? Hell unleashed on the earth?” His eyes slitted, judging me suspiciously, but he didn’t say anything, so I went on. “Because I don’t think you do. You could do a lot more damage if that’s all you wanted. You could just shred people like those delicious dinner rolls at Texas Roadhouse.” I nodded back, mostly to check on Friday. He still wasn’t up, which was bad and good. Bad that he wasn’t up to help, good because if he had been I’d have tipped Grendel to it. Not my greatest move, but I was coming up with all this bullshit on the fly. “Because my read of this situation is that you want something very specific. It’s not money, because you could steal anything. And it’s not related to your firmly-held beliefs, because you’ve been mum about that up to this point. So...my gut is someone has pissed you off, and everything you’re doing is working toward satisfying that particular debt.”
The wind was whipping around us at ten, fifteen miles an hour, enough that when Grendel answered in a murmur, I had to strain to hear even part of it. “You’re right,” he mumbled, eyes slightly downcast, like I’d somehow landed with my verbal volley of compassion and whatnot.
Hey, it was something new for me, kind of. But when all else fails and I’m backed into a corner, necessity is the mother of invention and all that happy horseshit, and my ass desiring not to get impaled by bone claws the size of summer sausages necessitated some new solutions to this problem.
“Okay, so,” I said, adjusting my steps back so they were even more slow and subtle, a gentle slipping back, two, three inches at a time. Distance was my friend if Grendel’s disposition went from abashed to warlike once again, and I wasn’t naïve enough to believe his current emotional state was going to be a forever thing. “What can we do to work through this problem? You know, more peacefully than we’ve done thus far? You’re clearly assembling some sort of tech...something. I’m probably not smart enough to grasp it, but...maybe we can work out a deal where you get what you want and don’t kill anyone else?”
“You’re lying,” Grendel said, and his hackles went up. Not enough to attack me on sight, but he was definitely questioning my turnaround. I couldn’t blame him; I wasn’t exactly known as the appeasing type.
“You beat me, okay?” I threw up my arms. “I can’t stop you. I’m not totally stupid, even for a blunt instrument. You have kicked my ass, killed my ass—” I let my voice break. “Yeah, you hurt me. Congrats. Well done. You win, all right? I yield to your right of way, because I’m a pedestrian and you’re a Mack truck with ten thousand pounds of weight behind you and all the momentum on your side.”
“The government doesn’t negotiate with people like me,” Grendel said, and I could feel his emotional state moving another few inches toward flat-out attacking me.
“The government is not stupid,” I said, trying to keep my posture and body language as submissive as possible. Which was a terrible feeling. I almost felt like the omega wolf beaten by the alpha, showing her belly to try and stave off being slaughtered. “If they can’t win, they’re not going to just stomp and scream and let people be slaughtered indiscriminately. We might not be able to publicize it, but there’s some leeway here—if we can come to a quiet arrangement.”
Grendel stared at me through slitted yellow eyes hidden by amber lids, and I realized not for the first time he was far from stupid, even in this form. He was weighing how much trouble he wanted to go through to achieve his ends, deciding whether making me into a skidmark and proceeding about his plans was going to continue being a winning endeavor for him.
“I don’t blame if you don’t trust me,” I said, “but think on this. I know you’re not in Grendel form all the time. And the government knows that, too. How long do you think it will be before the trail of chaos you’re causing—which is making you some very powerful, very influential enemies—results in the government parking a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over Silicon Valley and just watching until they catch you? Then following you to wherever it is you lay your head at night, and drone-striking you from a distance while you’re human.” I shrugged. “Because that’s the endgame if I can’t resolve this and you keep going. They will kill you. Take it from someone who made it on that kill list once upon a time.”
Grendel let out a rough, grunting breat
h, eyes darting back and forth as he considered. I took one last step back, keeping my hands up in front of me, sliding my back and front feet until I was perfectly positioned on the solar-cell-covered beam that marked the cutoff between glass panels. He actually brought up a hand and placed a finger across his chin as he pondered my offer. Thinking, thinking...
Thinking...
Finally, he grunted, shifted his weight—
“No.”
He tore toward me with clawed hands outstretched to either side. He telegraphed his move in the most obvious terms; he was going to catch me, swing them forward, cleaving and/or impaling me, thus ending the impressive and inspiring journey of Sienna Nealon in one hard swing. Once I was on the ground, he’d probably shred me like well-cooked pork, and that’d be that.
Except he wasn’t going to get me on the ground here.
He’d get me on the glass paneling that made up Socialite HQ.
I sighed as he charged onto the panel between us. Lifted my foot, knee almost to my chest, then drove it down— “In case of emergency,” I said as I struck it, “break glass.”
Grendel’s eyes went wide as the glass panel beneath his feet dissolved, shattered, and he fell into the abyss below. His considerable reach wasn’t quite enough to catch the support beam I was standing on, and he disappeared into the shadowy interior of the building.
I let out a long, sighing breath as I heard him crash down with the ton of glass far below. I inched forward to look inside as an explosive grunt bellowed out from inside—
Something struck the panel/support beneath me, and my own footing dissolved as pieces of solar panel and concrete blasted up from the impact—
And I tumbled down, down into the darkness of Socialite’s HQ as I left daylight behind and fell into the same abyss where I’d just consigned Grendel.
46.
Friday
This was a perfect artistic opportunity, and Friday never missed those sorts of things, because they came around all too infrequently.
He was splayed out atop a Toyota Prius, one of the girliest cars in the history of femmedom, his cell phone extended to the heavens. He’d managed to pull it out of his rear pocket just before impact. Death may claim him, but his photo roll needed to live in posterity. And hell if he was going to pay for Cloud storage. That was an idiot’s game.
Friday lined up the selfie, trying to capture the true wretchedness of his state. There was some blood seeping out of the back of his head onto the tan paint, rolling through the creases where he’d landed on the car.
Sure, he was in a lot of pain, but suffering was what one did for their art. He didn’t have to work particularly hard to channel an agonized look as he clicked a couple of selfies of him lying atop the car. This was pure photojournalism right here, almost pornographic in its beauty and how he composed it to capture his suffering all in the frame.
“I’m going to call this...‘That Friday Feeling’,” he grunted, choosing the best one and uploading it, then adding a few of the usual hashtag suspects through a macro and putting in that bold, tasteful, amazing, totally kittens caption for the photo. “This should win a Pulitzer if the academy hasn’t lost their mind.” He dropped the phone to his chest, utterly spent.
Casting his eyes up the shining, reflective surface of the Socialite pyramid of success, Friday sighed. A little blood drizzled out of his lip. Internal injuries, definitely. He wiggled his big toe, then the others on each foot. Not paralyzed. That was good news, because dancing was such a key part of his act, and while he probably could perform from a wheelchair and still put on a hell of a show—maybe even get some additional press attention for being so plucky in the face of terrible adversity—it was better if he didn’t have to steer around that particular obstacle.
Tires squealed somewhere nearby and Friday lifted his head. A van had pulled up, and out came four people. One was an old guy with an old gun. Another was a young guy with no guns, looked like a little bitch and smiled like one, too. Then there was a chick with a small afro, hot, great ass, decent rack—
Oh, and there was Veronika. And she looked pissed as ever, her eyes on him.
“Friday, you okay?” she asked, not bothering to get any closer.
“I don’t know if I can walk,” he said, trying to make himself sound as pathetic as possible. Weirdo hippie chicks like Veronika were into weak men like Reed. Well, maybe not Veronika, because she was into chicks. But maybe that meant vulnerability was the key to her panties? Either way... “Please...help me?”
“I don’t really have time for that right now,” Veronika said, still looking at him, but walking backward with her other friends. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“No, I can’t feel anything below the waist,” Friday called after her. “Please. Come over here. Touch me down there, like only you can, with your sensitive lesbian hands. Let’s see if I’m still alive. Only your touch can bring me back to life. Seriously, Veronika...only your stately—and slightly standoffish—beauty can save me from the crippling pain of—”
Veronika rolled her eyes and broke into a run, disappearing into the front entrance of the building.
Friday just sat there for a moment, then rolled off the Prius and hit the ground with a thump. “Okay, fine. Maybe I wasn’t weak and femme enough for her. Noted for next time.” And he looked up, up, to where Sienna had been a moment ago.
His stomach dropped because now there was another hole in the side of the building where she’d been with Grendel just moments before.
“Shouldn’t have gotten blinded by poontang,” he said, and broke into a pained run toward the side of the pyramid. “Family before hoes and all that.”
47.
Sienna
Hard landings had become kind of a specialty for me since I’d lost my powers of flight.
By the time my eyes adjusted to the decreased daylight inside the Socialite headquarters, I’d already fallen twenty, thirty feet. A dark carpet lay below, surging up toward me at breakneck, alarming speed.
I waved my hands in front of my face, unable to quite gauge the distance but well aware that this was going to hurt regardless of what I tried to do to stop it.
And it did.
A lot.
My right arm broke from the impact, I bounced a few feet and came down again, this time managing to Aikido roll successfully given the slightly more forgiving angle of my fall after the bounce. The first had been like a straight up-down drop. This one was a bit more sideways and I managed to tuck and roll it out, coming to a stop about ten feet from my secondary landing point.
All the breath went out of me during the first landing, partially from the impact, partially from the shock and pain of my right arm making a sound like a fortune cookie being busted open by an impatient rageaholic. It really was like that, especially in the sense that how badly I was hurt was going to have a real bearing on my own fortunes over these next few minutes.
Lying there, staring up at the gaping hole in the glass, I had to take accounting of a few things.
One, I needed to catch my breath, because I was gasping like a fish tossed into a boat.
Two, my broken arm needed to be set into some kind of workable, out of the way position, because a fight was coming.
Three, I cross-drew my Glock off my hip, holding it in my left hand as I tried, tried, to get the first two problems sorted out. It was the only line of defense I had, and no matter how pointless I figured it would be, it was better than trying to fight Grendel one-handed with the wind knocked completely out of me.
I don’t know how I managed that second and third feat, but somehow I did, a little voice whispering in my ear, Do it or you die, reminding me that all the pain I was experiencing in the moment—and, oh, there was a ton of it—was fleeting, but that the death that was almost certainly hunting me even now in the darkness beyond my field of vision was going to be a hell of a lot more permanent.
I pushed up to one knee, brandishing my Glock, breaths coming raggedly
as I tried to slow down my gasping. The noise I was making was like a beacon for Grendel to home in on my position. Not that he probably needed much help.
Once I’d somewhat gathered my wits about me, and my eyes had adjusted to my surroundings, I realized I was in a space that reminded me of a convention center. The wall to my left was the dark, tempered glass side of the HQ, stretching out in front of and behind me for several hundred yards in either direction. I appeared to be in a tiled, open area with doors split wide to an auditorium at my right. A few tiled planters with trees growing in them along with couches, tables, and little conversation pits were speckled in throughout the concourse.
Of Grendel, I saw no sign on this level, so I looked up. Above me there was a balcony, which I’d apparently missed in my fall by only a foot or two. Also a bummer, because that would have been a softer landing, or at least broken my crash down to a more manageable fall.
Grendel had to be up there somewhere. I could see the place where he’d leapt up after his own landing and tore the support beam from beneath my feet. Sunlight was streaming in from overhead, but in here it was strangely silent, as though he’d just...left.
I shook my head even though there was no one here to see it. No way was he going to have that little clash with me and then just scamper off. He was still here, somewhere, above me probably, maybe trying to figure out where I went.
I did not want to be standing here when he did, so I bolted under the cover of the balcony as lickety-split as I could, then plunged into the open doors of the auditorium beyond. A moving target was, after all, harder to hit.
The chairs inside were bolted to the ground, fancy seating not quite worthy of one of those fancy new movie theaters with the electric recliners, but about a step down from that. They had a foot or so of space between the bottom of the chair and the ground, but I doubted my ass was going to fit through the sideways margin offered. Which sucked, because belly crawling my ass underneath them would have been a wonderful way to avoid Grendel.
Blood Ties Page 20