Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  When my head stopped ringing enough for me to concentrate, I realized I was smashed against the wall, and Cameron Wittman was standing exactly where he’d been before I’d touched him, a vibrato of energy surging around him in the form of sound waves that blurred the air surrounding him like an aura.

  He just looked down at me, cold, clear, his voice not moved an inch.

  “I told you...to take a step back,” he said, and I cursed in my head.

  Cameron Wittman was now a meta.

  And he’d just knocked me the hell down.

  80.

  “Well, well, well,” I said, brushing myself off as I stood up, “looks like somebody’s decided to take a sip of the good stuff since last we met.”

  “After you came crashing into my apartment in New York City, I decided I never wanted to be powerless, at the mercy of someone else, ever again,” Wittman said. His hand vibrated as he spoke, and I could feel the back of my teeth vibrate. He had a power like Eric Simmons; soundwaves that manifested as earth-quaking abilities. He’d shot them at me and I’d gone flying. My heart was still thudding slightly out of time thanks to what he’d hit me with. “Now I’ll never be at anyone’s mercy again.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” I said, keeping my distance. “Grendel comes after you, your little power is more likely to give him some tickles down there than send him flying.” I brushed a little more drywall dust off my jacket. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you want to tell me what’s up your ass?”

  “I gave you access to my mind before,” Wittman said, looking at me all steely, “for a specific purpose.”

  “To stop the bad guy,” I said. “Which I did.”

  “To bring ArcheGrey to justice,” he said. “Last I checked, she’s still out there.”

  “ArcheGrey did not cripple your brother, okay?” I massaged my neck where I’d impacted the wall. It stung. “And the person who did was hired by another party—Nadine Griffin.”

  Wittman’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell me any of this when I granted you access to my mind.”

  “I didn’t tell you that I removed your most humiliating childhood memory, either,” I said, “but it’s a fact.”

  He raised a vibrating hand to me. “You should leave.”

  “You should be real careful assaulting an FBI agent,” I said, raising my own hand up like a counter. It wasn’t like a baseline succubus could throw anything back at him, but it probably looked menacing. “Why is it that everyone in this town just assails me whenever they frigging feel like it? No respect for the law in this place. I’m starting to see why people shit and shoot up on the streets.” I adjusted my messed-up clothing and brushed down my hair. “I’m on a case, Cameron. One that’s hit your company already. One that involves a man who’s killed and who doesn’t seem to mind doing it again. You really going to kick me out of here, help revoked, now?”

  “I don’t trust you,” he said, back straight, shoulders flush, head held high. “I shouldn’t have trusted you then. I definitely don’t now. Get out. Don’t come back.”

  There was a creak of his door coming open, and two security guards just standing there. There were no words from them, but Kelvin looked all sanctimonious and prissy-lipped.

  “Okay,” I said, taking the hint. “Best of luck if Grendel comes your way, Cam.”

  “If he does, I won’t need you to help me deal with him,” Wittman said coldly. “I have resources. I can hire someone I’d trust to handle this rather than try and leave it to you and worry the whole time about what you’d come up with. Given your record and the problems you seem to bring to the table I simply...don’t believe you’ll look out for my interests in this.”

  One of his security guards made to take my arm as I walked through the door. “Don’t do that,” I said. “I’ll go peacefully—unless you touch me. Then it’s going to turn not peaceful very quickly.” I left the threat there, because what the hell was the point of ramping up the antagonism any further than it already had been?

  “You threatening me?” the security guard said, clearly with more mouth than brains.

  “No, I’m warning you,” I said. “I’m an FBI agent and a succubus. You touch me like that, you’re assaulting a federal agent, and if you hold on, you’ll lose your soul.” I cast one last look over my shoulder at Wittman. “Thanks for all your help. Best of luck with your Grendel problem.”

  “I don’t have a Grendel problem,” he called after me. “That’s all you.”

  “And you better hope it stays that way,” I said, not looking back.

  But I had a feeling it wasn’t going to.

  81.

  Friday

  “I don’t care what’s happened, I am going to make this day be kittens plus dynamite,” Friday muttered to himself as he dug in the dirt. “There will be kittens and dynamite, and by God it will be great and sexy and not at all gross and explodey. It will not be absolutely Kardashians. I will not allow it.”

  He stopped his excavation project. He’d dug out a nice little stretch of what had been a grassy area, stopping when he’d unearthed dirt beneath the layers of topsoil and greenery he’d peeled back. He’d been trying to construct a setting that would look like beach sands when photographed at a close angle, but...

  This was dirt. Black dirt. Oh, wait, that was wrong. African-American dirt, Friday mentally corrected. He really didn’t want to set off anymore internet firestorms by elephant-stepping on unorthodox words and phrases.

  “I’m going to get ’em all back,” he muttered, trying to find lighter-colored dirt to mix in. There were some streaks of sandier brown in here. Maybe if he spread that out a little...

  No, it still looked black. African-American, rather. Damn. He really needed to work on thinking that right. No more lesbian fupas. No, wait...faux pas? Either way, no more.

  “I’ll say I’m sorry and they’ll see I’m sorry and I’ll make my apologies,” he said, digging again, huffing a little, dirt flying everywhere. “They’ll see. I’m worthy. Worthy of following. Worthy of...” He choked a little. “They’ll love me again. I’ll show them I’m good. They’ll see. They’ll realize I actually love lesbians, even if they are kind of angry, usually at me. But who can blame them? I’ve been known to say a stupid thing or two.” He laughed. “Maybe more than one or two. But who doesn’t?”

  Still African-American dirt everywhere. How the hell was he going to turn this into a sexy, high-angle, ‘Look-at-me-I’m-on-a-careless-happy-fun-vacay-on-the-beach’ selfie?

  “Excuse me, sir?” came a tinny voice from just outside his photo set. “You can’t dig here.”

  “Just chill out, Mr. Roboto,” Friday said, smoothing the dirt. It wasn’t the most beachlike he’d ever seen, but he’d make do. “I’ve got to snap a few photos to upload and I’ll be out of your hair. Which is robot-like, I assume. Maybe metal snakes, I don’t know.”

  “Sir, I’m not memeing, but this is literally an Arby’s.”

  Friday stared at the metal stand with the menu on it, just beyond the planter where he was digging. “I’m not stupid; I know that. But I need to borrow your lawn. I’ll order some roast beef sandwiches after I take these tasteful nudes.”

  “Excuse me, what?”

  Friday stripped down, hurrying, because roast beef sounded really good right about now. Plus, he needed to start making amends to all the angry people online. Sure, they were mad. Like lesbians. But maybe they just needed some vitamin D, too.

  In this, Friday had them covered.

  He spread out on the patch of dirt, posing as he held his phone in selfie position. He splayed out, tilting his head back so that it looked, artistically, as though he had partially fainted. He set his legs at right angles—no, deeper, tucked back beneath his beautiful ass. He angled his whole body.

  Someone honked as they went through the drive-through. He could hear the conversation as he worked on his pose:

  “Did you know there’s a giant naked guy taking a selfie
on your lawn?”

  “Yeah, the cops are on their way. If you want to pull through and order at the window, that’d probably be safest. We think he’s having a mental health incident.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Friday called to them. “And I’d like five roast beef sandwiches to go. Along with an order of potato cakes.” He lowered his voice. “Those things are totally kittens.”

  He snapped the first photo. Yes. It was very cute. Perfect for what he was looking to do.

  Friday rolled over, spreading out in a starfish pattern. Owning the land, the ground beneath his cheeks. Zooming in, he took a perfect dick pic, the paleness of his junk accented by the dark sands. “Excellent contrast,” he muttered as he reviewed the picture.

  Finally, he rolled over and posed, kicking up his legs like a schoolgirl wearing high heels and pretending to be a hooker. “Yes,” he muttered, “you are a sexy bitch. You could rock a bikini bottom like no one else. They’ll all see. Soon enough, they’ll see.” He swelled his butt just a little more, a little sop to the Sir Mix-A-Lot crowd who were definitely into those things. “I do have an LA face as well as Oakland booty, because I was just at both yesterday.” A few more snaps...

  “And I’m spent,” he said, rolling back over to his front. He tagged the pics, prepped them for upload, and hit the button, already thinking of sweet roast beef—

  ACCOUNT SUSPENDED.

  The message popped up before the first photo even uploaded, and Friday was left staring at it, blinking in the sunlight. Wondering if this was some error.

  “No,” he said, poking at the phone. “No, this can’t be right.” He felt his eyes grow teary. “I was going to get them all back. I was going to make them love me again with these.”

  His racking sobs rang out over the Arby’s parking lot as he let loose all the pent-up frustration with a dripping run of tears that turned the ground around him muddy.

  “There, there, big, uh, naked guy,” the speaker chirped. “You want some curly fries to cheer you up?”

  Friday stopped sobbing. “Hell yeah I want some curly fries.”

  “All right, we’ll get you some curly fries. But you’re going to need to put on some clothes if you want to come to the window and get them. This isn’t White Castle, after all.”

  “That’s fair,” Friday said, reaching for his discarded clothing. “That’s totally fair, Mr. Roboto.” It was worth putting on pants to bury his grief in potato cakes and curly fries.

  Still...cut off from his Socialite/Instaphoto account...how could things get any darker?

  82.

  Sienna

  “I am an FBI agent and I am commandeering your phone,” I said, snatching a phone out of a Wittman Capital employee’s hand as I passed them, just outside the front entrance. The security guys watching me looked like they might make a move, but I flashed my badge and my middle finger at them, and they wisely kept their distance as I stalked off across the parking lot, trying to remember the New York office number from memory.

  I hit it on the third try, and was treated to the automated menu that answered for us. Getting past the boilerplate menu required a code, which, fortunately, I did recall.

  Ten seconds later, Shaw answered. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Nealon.”

  “Nealon! What the hell happened during that conference call? And why are you calling from a California number?”

  “Friday lost it and broke my phone,” I said, mentally adding a DUH! “Sans phone, I couldn’t call you back right away. Also, apparently my location in Silicon Valley is a bit of a hike from the nearest phone store.”

  “They have phones in hotel rooms, Nealon,” Shaw said, voice trending toward a yell.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s a good point. I must have been too frazzled to consider that. Might have had something to do with Friday leaping out my window.”

  “He what?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m guessing someone’s on the hook for those damages, and I can only be thankful it’s Cam Douchenozzle Wittman who rented the room and not the government. Anyway, about the case—”

  “Do you not hear yourself speaking?” Shaw sounded about ten miles past aggravated, and definitely past the point where tact was a thing in his consideration. “You ditched out on a conference call with the Director and her crisis manager—”

  “I didn’t ditch, my phone got destroyed by a prideful ape. You try and rejoin a conference call with a shattered phone, I defy you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Shaw said, regaining a modicum of control. “We need to address this crisis.”

  “Look, I needed to talk to you without Chalke or that clown Bilson on the line,” I said. “I know you’re bent out of shape about Friday’s social media antics, and I’m not saying they’re not bad, but I’m a little more focused on the events that include the consequence of people actually dying than the ones where people get butthurt about Friday being dumb and saying—probably unintentionally—hurtful things.”

  “This is a serious issue, Nealon.” Shaw had hit yelling. “The bureau is the nation’s leading law enforcement agency. We operate on trust and—”

  “I don’t believe anyone thinks that because Friday, who does not actually work for the FBI, posted something dumb on Socialite, they think the entire FBI are a bunch of bigots,” I said, surprisingly cool given the level of fire I was under. There was a strain in my voice, though, and it was rising to match. “My job is to save lives from threats like, oh, I don’t know, A GIANT YELLOW INVINCIBLE MONSTER SMASHING ITS WAY THROUGH THE BAY AREA! Not try and corral a stupid freaking moron who I couldn’t control if I had ten gallons of tranquilizer, a thousand feet of paracord and five hundred feet of duct tape!”

  Okay, I might have yelled a little. Calm, begone.

  “Get yourself under control, Nealon!” Shaw shouted. “You work for us!”

  “Not anymore!” I shouted. “To hell with you, and to hell with everyone! Go fuck yourself, bureaucrat! Here!” And I tossed the phone back at the person I’d taken it from.

  “He—hello?” the person I’d stolen the phone from talked into the microphone, then looked up at me all confused. “Uh...he still wants to talk to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to him,” I said, and broke into a run across the parking lot.

  I didn’t care where I was going, so long as it was the hell away from that phone, away from Shaw and his stupid voice and effed-up priorities.

  To hell with it, really. To hell with them all.

  I didn’t need this shit.

  83.

  I stomped like Godzilla through the green space surrounding the Wittman Capital campus. It was genuinely pretty out there, though I’d have died before acknowledging it in the toxic mood I was in. In my own internal world the skies were black and grim, my anger like dark clouds across the sun.

  “To hell with everyone,” I said again, still stomping like a child. I was aware I was being childish. Keenly aware.

  But I did not give a damn. I felt justified by this onslaught of abuse I’d done roughly nothing to prompt. I hadn’t wanted to hire Friday; I’d been killed by a superior enemy and forced to go with whatever help I could get.

  None of this was my idea. None of this was my fault.

  Have you ever felt so wronged that you hit a point of DGAF where nothing actually mattered to you anymore? Where you were so emotionally spent by bullshit going on around you that even the important things just faded into the background?

  I remembered feeling that way, quite strongly, for about the first month after I’d gone on the run following President Harmon framing me. I’d hidden out in a small town in Utah, and kept my head down, letting the world pass me by.

  I’d come out of it eventually, of course, and returned to doing what I do best—kicking ass, taking names, ridding the world of metahuman threats.

  But for that month, the villains had some freedom to maneuver in a way they might not have been able to if I’d been on
duty.

  Already my anger toward the FBI was fading, the memory of Grendel shoving his claws in my guts coming back like a fire. It wasn’t the first time someone had gutted me, of course. Wolfe had done it a couple times. As pain went, it was about the top of the scale, near as I could recall. Tearing my heart out afterward?

  Well, I’d hadn’t been conscious for it, but dammit, my hand shook thinking back on it now.

  “Damn you people,” I muttered under my breath. Why the hell did this have to be so hard?

  I cursed Harry Graves for telling me to bring Friday along on this. What the hell was he thinking?

  I cursed Shaw and Chalke, too. How could they possibly have their priorities so damned out of whack as to worry about image and damage control when we had a murderous killer on the loose? He’d literally thrown people to their deaths out of Socialite HQ, killed security guards at Inquest, even murdered an FBI agent and they were like, “You know, our real concern here is people on the internet seeing this temp moron we hired to help you as representative of the entire FBI.”

  How could that be a bigger problem than people dying? I wasn’t, by any means, condoning Friday’s moronics. Far from it. But him making an utter ass of himself online seemed, to my admittedly inexperienced eyes, to be less of a crisis than people literally being murdered and a big bad villain who seemed to have an evil scheme in mind. Because if Grendel was cool with murdering people as he went about acquiring the pieces of his scheme, I didn’t have any faith that the endpoint of his plan was going to result in anything other than more death and misery. Certainly more death, at least, than Friday’s statements about the general temperament of gay women, asinine as his words were.

  Suddenly I was left reflecting on the FBI’s handling of this entire crisis. They’d put me out here without even paying, left me to Cameron Wittman and his largesse, sent me without backup and—if I hadn’t gotten aggressive in talking to the FBI armorer—without anything more than a couple pistols. To take on Grendel, who had proven himself immune to gunfire.