Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  It did, though it was not nearly so brisk as, say, Minnesota, in December.

  I found myself on a dark street in the hills of Mountain View, on a well-manicured road that looked to be mostly isolated and abandoned—

  Oh. Except for the twenty or thirty cars parked just ahead on either side.

  “Somebody’s having a party,” I muttered to myself, taking care to shut the door quietly behind me so as not to send the noise echoing like a gunshot into the night.

  Early arrival element of surprise: foiled.

  The road on either side was lined with trees, and I strolled into the cover of them quickly as I heard a vehicle approaching from behind me. I took a quick inventory of the cars on either side of the street; some BMWs, Mercedes, Teslas. Looked like I was at a pretty swank party.

  I unlocked my phone, ignoring the torrent of text messages from Shaw. I’d get to those sometime when I wasn’t trying to sneak about in the night, trespassing and whatnot. I sought out the GPS and mapping app, inputting the address I was looking for, and it popped up.

  Bingo. A hundred yards ahead on the left. At least now I knew exactly where I was going.

  I stuck to the shadows, didn’t dare move when I heard the car behind me coming up. It sought out a parking space ahead, and I heard laughter in the wake of the driver killing the engine. It receded into the night, the driver and passengers walking up the driveway of my target at a leisurely pace.

  “Who wants to get this thing started?” I heard shouted in the distance, top of someone’s lungs. It was tough to gauge distance given the loudness of the shout, but it couldn’t have been too terribly far. There was a roar of agreement at a slightly less loud volume.

  What the hell was going on over there?

  I snuck up to the road and listened for any cars coming, scanning the front windshields of all the parked ones, making sure someone’s driver wasn’t lurking about inside. I crossed the road, trying to keep my face down and out of view until I was shrouded by the trees again. Then I stuck to cover and acted as casual as possible as I walked toward the house in question.

  The driveway was long, like this was a country estate of old. It took me about two minutes of hiking before I caught sight of the house, a Tuscan design with the tiled roof one might expect of a villa in Italy. There was no one out front, but the long drive was packed with cars, too.

  I stuck close to the treeline that veiled it on either side, meandering toward the house and trying to look like I was just another guest.

  I noted digital surveillance gear mounted close to the road. Cameras, motion sensors. I dodged them as much as I could, especially the cameras, but I had to have been seen given how dark it was and how unpredictable their placement could be. I just kept my head down and shuffled along. Blending in was my best defense.

  Coming up on the house, there wasn’t a soul in sight. No security, no dogs, just a bunch of parked and abandoned cars. I didn’t even see any valets or caterers, nor any hint that they’d been here. Which made sense, given that the road was stacked with unprofessionally parked cars.

  The house itself had to be in the tens of thousands of square feet, just shy of a mansion. In this area, I had to believe that sort of domicile typically would command a staff. But I didn’t see anyone, not even security personnel.

  That was odd.

  There was a steady noise coming from somewhere behind the house. Cheers, jeers, hard to say. Maybe both.

  I broke cover from behind the last tree, scanning the surroundings as I went. A rough cheer came from the back of the place, and I surveyed the ground in front of me. A slight slope and some fine landscaping separated the back yard from the front, where I was. It wouldn’t be hard to vault it or sneak through a gate, but a better strategy would be to sneak around—

  A scream of pain put an end to all my thoughts and plans in an instant, freezing me in place on the driveway. Another followed, then the sound of a wet slap, fist hitting flesh, pain being dealt, a sound I was all too familiar with—

  I broke into a run as another scream echoed over the quiet night, all caution forgotten as I sprang into hero mode once more.

  68.

  The sounds coming from behind the house were a chaotic wash of laughter, of cheers, of screaming—and a lot of other things I couldn’t ascribe to any one action. It was the chaos of many people, the sound of a mob. Like the laughter breaking out during a violent movie when the hero turns to the villain and says a terrible pun before shooting him the face.

  Violence was being done behind this house. Violence in the quiet of the Silicon Valley night, loud violence, violence without care for witnesses—indeed, it sounded like it was being perpetrated with the happy consent of many witnesses.

  Ideas blew through my head even as the wind whipped through my hair at the speed of my sprint.

  A group murder? With torture to start?

  A beating for purposes of discouragement?

  Some arcane, bizarre ritual out of Skull and Bones-like societies, fraternal and dark and intended to put fear into the intended victim?

  Too many possibilities. I leapt the fence and attendant shrubs and came down on the side of the house in a patch of darkness shrouded by trees.

  There were a lot of voices ahead of me. The house lay shadowed to my left, no sound coming from within it. The action was in the back of the place, and the action sounded...well, terrible.

  The wet smack of fist against non-compliant flesh came again, and this time instead of a scream there was a moan.

  Then a cheer from the crowd, lusty and terrible.

  This was entertainment.

  My blood boiled.

  There’s always a moment before I do something rash where something snaps in me. I’m naturally stubborn and wrathful, but when I see someone being purposefully hurt, it always pushes me that next mile to anger, to fury.

  I burst out of the bushes and into a beautifully lit backyard that could have been ripped out of Buckingham Palace and slapped into the middle of Silicon Valley. Strings of lights lit a courtyard scene below, a fountain bubbling serenely behind a crowd that surrounded a small pit of upturned earth beneath.

  And in the middle of that pit...were two people.

  Two men.

  One was on his hands and knees, partially shrouded by a crowd of dress-shirt-wearing dudes with the occasional dress or blouse-wearing lady sprinkled in. Half the circle of the crowd had their backs to me, the other half faced me, and no one looked at me because they were all focused on the action at the center.

  I was ten feet or so above them, at edge of a landscape feature, partially shrouded by the shadows of the trees around me. I had a perfect view of what was going on below, of the two men at the center of the circle.

  The one who was on his feet was pumping his arms in the air to loud cheers from the crowd, like some gladiator in the arenas of old.

  The other guy...well...

  He was bloody and near face-down, shirtless and scuffed up something fierce. Bruises had already formed across his back, his shoulders, his face. His mouth was just one bloody bubble, and he was on all fours, dripping crimson into the dirt.

  I only watched for a second as the standing victor worked the crowd for praise as he pumped his arms. They obliged, and he grinned, then turned back to his fallen foe—

  The poor bastard on the ground was helpless, and as the winner turned his attention on his fallen victim, the crowd roared its approval for him circling in like a shark. They were totally into it.

  I wasn’t.

  I leapt down and bowled over four, five cheering spectators from behind before the watchers across the circle fully registered that player three had entered the game. I cleared the path and leapt down into the circle, finding myself a solid four, five feet down from where the spectators were watching in a makeshift pit.

  “Yea!” the winner shouted, completely unaware that I had rolled his way like summer lightning and was about to strike him like the tallest buildin
g in the area. “Who wants to see me—whoaaaa!”

  “Fly through the air like a big dumbass bird who doesn’t know how to land?” I asked, grabbing him by the back of his pants and giving him a commanding wedgie as I used them as a grip with which to launch him into the air. He flew, plus his tightie whities snapped him as I let loose of them (and him). He shouted in fear as he shot off into the night. “I do,” I said, as I heard him land with a thud somewhere beyond the mob.

  There was a tension that ran through the crowd as they seemed to take stock of who I was and what had just happened. There were whispered curses, muttered exclamations, some naughty words bandied about, maybe applied to me, hard to say. I tried to keep an eye on what was going on with them since no one had fully reacted yet. I stooped down next to the wounded guy. “Hey, are you all right?” I asked, putting a hand on his battered body. Yikes; he was beaten all to hell. I hadn’t seen anyone this bruised since...well, since I’d done a self-examination in the mirror after fighting Grendel.

  “What...” His mouth was thick, speech gauzy. “What...?” He couldn’t get a full thought out.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said, trying not to touch him in any one place, skin to skin, for very long. I grabbed him by the pants, too, since they were the only article of clothing he was wearing. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  “What...what are you doing here?” he finally managed, speaking through swollen lips.

  “Saving your ass,” I said, taking up his weight carefully, ruining my shirt in the process. He was bleeding everywhere. A stuck pig being prepped for a barbecue would have been less bloody. “You can thank me later.”

  “B...but the fight...wasn’t done?” I looked right at him after he got the last bit out, and his eyes were lit with dawning anger.

  A rumble ran through the crowd. They parted in the direction where I’d thrown this guy’s sparring partner, and sure enough...

  Mr. Victor came waltzing back up to the edge of the fighting pit, looking none the worse for the wear (except his pants had been pulled up to almost his armpits by my wedgie throw).

  His eyes were dark like storm clouds, and his hands glowed with some sort of energy. He spoke, and it sounded like thunder, deep and angry and resonant.

  “You...are not welcome here.”

  “There’s a lot of places I’m not welcome, cheeseball,” I said. “More than I can count, mostly because of my former ability to burn off my clothes at a moment’s notice. Churches, synagogues, mosques, my local grocery store...I could go on—”

  He flashed a hand at me and it burned bright for a second, some green energy flung off it like a summer leaf. Except it hit me in the center of my chest and burned like someone had tossed a lit torch down my shirt, and I hit my back, dragging the loser in that fight with me.

  A meta.

  Eyes flashed around me. There was motion all through the circle. Hands burned into flame, into plasma. One lady blurred in a hard spin around us, an effect I’d seen speedsters use.

  They were all metas.

  And I was surrounded.

  Damn.

  69.

  “That’s assaulting a federal officer, jagoff,” I said, flipping back to my feet and straight into a fighting stance. Against a bum’s rush of metas, I wasn’t sure how much good my willingness to fight was going to actually be. So first, a bluff—

  The guy I’d tried to save smacked the back of my leg, cutting it from beneath me, and I went down again hard. I was fortunate in that I managed to land in a backward roll, but that set the tenor, I figured, for what I could expect here.

  If they wanted to mob me, they were going to get the full Sienna Nealon treatment, and I wasn’t one to go down without a fight.

  I propelled myself out of my backward roll and vaulted out of the miniature pit feet first. I kicked two spectators, one with each foot, spearing them as they gawked. Jaws broke, screams were let, it was a good old time.

  Landing atop them, I didn’t waste any time. Cardinal rule of being outnumbered and outgunned in a fight: you’ve got a lot of work to do.

  I got to it.

  I flung fists without regard for who I hit, because none of these people were on my side and none of them were particularly concerned with my well-being, so I concerned myself with seeing that theirs was poor. I threw a back kick, spinning into an elbow strike that took out two more of my (many) foes.

  With all my efforts, I’d created a little space around me. A woman came shrieking at me like a banshee wearing a cocktail dress and moving at meta speed.

  I planted a foot squarely in her midsection, heard the air rush out of her like a busted beach ball, and watched her sail into the pit.

  Without no one charging me just then, I spun on my heel and burst into a run, breaking for the house. I ducked low, a blast of fire or plasma or something hot shooting over my head as someone screamed behind me. A shrubbery caught the next burst, and I hurdled a railing that exploded into a shower of dust as it soaked up the energy projectile meant for me.

  Then I was in the house, the door frame exploding behind me with the force of a dozen beams blasting into it. It collapsed behind me and I kept running, figuring my best option was to get the hell out of here before I had to fight them all.

  “Hey!” A guy was standing at the top of a staircase to my left, apparently quite put out by my presence. I did a double take; he wasn’t standing there, he was hovering. Must have flown in the upper window.

  I snatched a vase off a nearby table as I passed and winged it at him. It hit him squarely in the face and shattered, and he came down like I’d cut his strings, thumping down as he hit each step.

  Not waiting around to see how he landed, I kept sprinting, bursting through an archway into a living room as the clamor of the mob behind me reached a crescendo. I glanced back to see people flooding in through open windows. They couldn’t make it in through the door, because some idiot had blasted it closed. The archway above it was showing some serious signs of strain, too, cracks in the plaster suggesting they’d taken out a support for the house.

  I could work with that.

  The room ahead of me was nothing but support beams, a grand hall with pillars encased in beautiful wood and stone. I shoulder checked my way through one, rolled up and popped through another one. I hit something big and steel in the middle and ripped it down like I was tearing a curtain off the rod. It landed with a clang next to me, torn free of its pretty encasement.

  There was a quiver through the house as the effects of all my rendered damage seemed to cause it to settle on its foundation. “Coming all up in here like Miley Cyrus,” I muttered, taking out another like a football tackle, sending the steel beam flying like I’d shoved it.

  “What are you doing?” someone shouted behind me. It was the guy with the energy beams, the one from the fighting pit.

  “The usual,” I said: “giving you a reason to make me feel unwelcome.”

  “Stop!” he shouted.

  I did not stop.

  I ran through another pillar, ripping the steel support out of it but this time holding onto it.

  The problem with acting in concert with a mob is that it forces you to move like a collective. They were coming at me now, too, as a crowd, a horde, really.

  I flung the steel beam at them.

  They caught it collectively.

  Which was to say some of them caught it in the face, some in the gut, a few in the hands. Others tried to break and run, but ensconced in the middle of the mob, this went predictably bad. Two people collided with each other at meta speed and conked out right there on the floor.

  “Like bowling for dummies,” I said as I watched my perfect strike clothesline and clean out a half dozen people in seconds.

  The Victor was caught in the crush of people falling, people screaming. There was blood everywhere now courtesy of the damage I’d done. “Stop!” he shouted again.

  “Make me,” I said, and kicked down another supporting column
, this time in their direction. The steel beam shot out of its stone surround, sending fragments blasting into a couple of the guys coming at me. They struck, and blood and screaming followed.

  Victor just stood watching me, horrorstruck. “You have to stop!”

  “Listen, bub,” I said, loving the fact that half the crowd was now injured, cowed, or just standing back like I was going to lay into them. “I don’t know what kind of reaction you’re used to in these sorts of situations, but where I come from, blasting an FBI agent with meta energy projection skills? That’s the end of the polite portion of the conversation. Bum-rushing them with a mob of meta fighters? We’re well past the ‘Give Peace a Chance’ stage.” I kicked loose another beam and sent it flying at him.

  He dodged. Other people did not. There was a lot more screaming, a lot more blood.

  “I bet this isn’t how you saw this going,” I said, ducking behind the last support beam like it was my hostage. Because it was. I drew my gun, pointing it around the pillar. I didn’t pick a specific target, just had it ready to snap to if needed. There was no sound but the moans and cries of the injured now. Victor had gone quiet, staring at me with an outstretched hand, like he could stop me from bringing down the house.

  “It’ll kill you, too,” he said. I had placed the pillar between us, and even though it didn’t completely cover my hourglass figure, there was a less than zero chance that him shaving an inch off my ass and hips on either side was going to stop me from bringing down the house on all of them.

  “Well, you’re already trying to,” I said, “so if I’m going to go out, I’m going out on my terms, not yours. How’s that wedgie feeling?”

  “If I’m being frank, everything feels very pinched down there,” he said, looking a little pained.

  “By all means, be frank about your frank and beans,” I said. “Thanks for sharing. Wish I’d done more to hurt them.”