Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  Flicking a quick gaze behind me, I saw the nearest side exit was at least thirty feet away. Grendel was half that, and starting to move as I briefly wavered on my course of action.

  Out of options, cornered again, I steeled myself and stood my ground...

  Because hell if I knew what else to do.

  50.

  Grendel had only taken one step toward me when a glowing ball of plasma shot past his face, missing him by inches. It seemed to me that Veronika had aimed well, but that he must have seen it coming at the last second and dodged, preternaturally fast. This tore his attention away from me for a precious second or so, which I used to rabbit.

  The plasma burst went flying past him and hit the side of the theater some hundred feet away. The theater walls were covered in some sort of faux-curtain, like this was an old playhouse instead of a tech giant’s employee lecture space. The minute the plasma contacted the cloth, WHOOMP! It all went up in flames and smoke.

  Seconds later, the fire alarm was blaring loud enough to give me an even bigger headache than I was already experiencing, trickle-down, courtesy of my arm pain. Less than a second after that, the sprinklers opened up overhead and a shock of water that felt like it was freezing cold descended on the entire auditorium.

  “AIGHHHHHHHH!” somebody shouted, awfully girlishly. It took me a second to realize it was Friday. Of course.

  “Did you have to do that?” Phinneus asked, sounding a little—maybe a lot—put off by the impromptu rain. Maybe he was concerned about his guns and rust, or something.

  “Dear Phinneus, I make and burn plasma,” Veronika said, loud enough I could hear it even as I hauled ass for the exit door. “I know it’s been a while since we’ve run together, but surely you recall this is a thing that happens with me.”

  “It’s so cold, though,” the metrosexual dude said. “Is it my imagination or is the temperature dropping by the second?”

  “I hope not,” Friday grunted from where he still sprawled on the floor. “Cold water causes shrinkage, you know. I was hoping to be looking my best for my nude selfies later.”

  Grendel chose this moment to weigh in, apparently having realized I was making a break for it and not caring as much about Veronika and her plasma blasts. He roared and chairs broke and the floor shook as he came for me. Veronika tossed another blast of plasma at him and it evaporated the falling water as it streaked through the air.

  Fully focused on my task—running—I did not see whether she hit or missed, but I assumed it missed since Grendel did not stop growling and didn’t break it with screams of pain. The sizzle of water contacting plasma filled the room.

  I made it to the exit ahead of Grendel by a little, but stopped because a chair hit the door and bounced off, clearly thrown by an angry, yellow, demonic fiend. It nearly took me out, and would have if I hadn’t heard Friday shout something almost incomprehensible and heard the whizzing of the seat through the air behind me.

  Smacking into the ground, this time there was no roll for me. I pancaked, too struck by urgency to make the right move. Instead I did a sideways roll out of my ass-thumping landing after I’d settled for a second or so. Which was fortunately timed, because Grendel brought a bone-clawed foot down right where I’d been a moment earlier, shattering carpet and concrete and adding both to the air in the form of flying debris. It made a strange combination with the water raining down on us endlessly. Now I was truly in the corner of the room, a furious Grendel staring me down with glinting yellow eyes.

  Almost out of breath—again—I managed to wheeze, “So...no chance we can settle this with something a little more collegial, is there? Maybe a spelling contest?” He threw a punch that missed me by a quarter-inch and put a hole in the wall behind me as I ducked it. He followed up with another short punch and buried it in the wall, and suddenly I was caught between his two arms, his yellowed, scary teeth grinning because he still had two feet that he could just lift and shred me with.

  I leapt straight up and over in another beautiful tuck and dive move that sent him into the stratosphere with rage. I heard him rip both hands out of the wall and turn on me, and he was after me again, spinning like a top.

  The thunder of rifle fire echoed through the rainy auditorium but didn’t really slow Grendel at all. A bullet spanged off his face with no damage done, though he growled like it had hit his eye. I completed my landing and roll, darting forward and up into a run toward the stage again. “Thanks for the covering fire, Phinneus!” I called. “Any chance you could land something anytime soon, Veronika?”

  “Quick reminder: I’m not here for you, Nealon,” Veronika called back, but she did hurl a plasma blast at him, and it sizzled through the air and hit the wall, slowing Grendel just a step and kicking off a ton of steam that made him disappear.

  I kept running for it, knowing that even if she was trying to help me, Veronika was keeping her distance for a reason. If she got close to Grendel, he could easily gore her the way he was intending to do to me. That probably wasn’t high on her list of things to do, so better to let him chase me all over kingdom come while she sniped at him, keeping at a safe distance. I had to admire the elegance of her plan, even if the raw facts of it ran totally counter to what I might have hoped for.

  “Hang on, Sienna, I’m coming!” Friday shouted, hurdling over the seats, his gooberously huge form way too bulky to effectively navigate the rows between us, especially given that the sprinkler system had saturated the carpets in this place and everything was getting incredibly slick. He tried to straddle two rows as he ran, but lost his footing about fifteen, twenty yards from me, and came crashing down sideways in a heap of muscle and limbs.

  “This is what happens when you don’t hire the best, Nealon,” Veronika called to me, adding insult to possible death. Another plasma blast vaporized through water then struck the wall behind me. I could hear Grendel back there, but the plasma bursts were fogging the area so much that I couldn’t see him. I just kept booking for the stage.

  Grendel roared, and something flew over my shoulder yet again. Cued in by the rush of motion behind me, I hurled myself sideways into the wall to my left at the last second. Something hit me in the back of the right arm, which was fortunately already numb, but it impacted with such force that it did spin me around.

  I crashed into the wall and bounced a few times, my meta speed translating into a massive crash, because going from thirty to zero in a car with brakes was manageable, but doing so without any brakes or a chassis or restraints to save you?

  Well, it was like being in a motorcycle wreck where you flip it.

  I sprawled in the sodden carpet, coming to rest some twenty feet from the stage as Grendel stomped along in the mist behind me.

  I couldn’t see Friday, Veronika, Phinneus, Kristina, or the emo guy with the half-Cobain haircut for that matter.

  All I could see was the shadow of Grendel, looming in the mist just ahead of me, growing larger by the second.

  51.

  Friday

  Wiping out while trying to hop a row of seats might have been embarrassing to lesser mortals, but to Guy Friday, Influencer extraordinaire, if there was no camera, it never happened.

  He popped to his feet, slightly less fresh than a fresh daisy, the room clouding with mist and the smell of dead flowers—maybe that was why he was thinking of unfresh daisies—the stink invading his sinus cavities like uninvited party guests come to drink his super Influencer beer, which was surely going to be a super awesome beer.

  “Okay, let’s try that again,” he said, shaking off the daze that seemed to be inhabiting his head. The world was foggy around him, and when he took a step, he nearly toppled over again. He managed to land a hand on a seat back at the last second, though, and like a cane for an old and pathetic man, it saved him from the humiliation of falling. Again.

  But it was so hard to see! Water was spraying down everywhere, and his body was chilled like Cristal. Maybe he’d get to try that stuff now that he was going
to be famous and rich.

  He shook that thought off and tried to ignore the biting cold. Could you get hypothermia from spraying water?

  Friday put that thought aside, too. He couldn’t worry about this right now. There were things that needed doing.

  A bad guy that needed to get his ass kicked. Now where was...?

  Oh. There.

  A shadow was moving, looming, just ahead of him, darkness slithering through the fog and rain of this indoor auditorium. “This is like one of those awesome detective stories where it rains for days,” he muttered, ripping a seat out of the middle of the row and almost slipping and falling again. He managed to steady himself, taking aim at the shadow—

  He released just as a blue light appeared in the mist, emanating from the shadow as the chair flew true and struck—

  And the blue light faded as the chair cut through the mist and caught Veronika right in the face, wiping her out. She took it hard, hit the ground with a thump, the chair bouncing onward after colliding with her.

  “Oh, no!” Friday shouted into the mist, hurrying forward to confirm, yep, he’d pretty much knocked her clean out. Her ample chest was still heaving up and down, though, so at least she wasn’t dead. “I just knocked out my favorite lesbian! And that’s a long list, including some of my favorite actresses in pornographic cinema!” He tore at his clothing in the rain, the picture of angst. He shredded his shirt, storming around, trying to find a light in the dark.

  But there was no light.

  There was only anger. And cold rain.

  “GRENDELLLLLLLLLLLLL!”

  52.

  Sienna

  Friday’s lamentations about whatever he’d done to Veronika penetrated my consciousness at a very low level, because I was really focused on staying alive in the face of Grendel advancing through the fog and spraying water.

  That had caused me to belly crawl away from the potential trouble, unwilling to risk hurling myself through the air by trying to use my left arm at full force to attempt to stand. Besides, the fog forming in the room was great cover, and the closer to the ground I was, the more I was able to take advantage of the poor visibility.

  Another piece of a chair shot by over my head, clueing me in that Grendel wasn’t sure where I was right now. Whew. That would probably last a good five seconds or so, and then he’d be close enough to stomp my back at full force, which would probably send my entrails flying out both ends of me. Honestly, that sounded kind of like a perfect capper given how this day had gone so far.

  “There you are!” Grendel’s voice cracked out behind me, and this time I was under no illusions about him BS-ing me. He was close enough to see, and the sound of breaking concrete and bending metal followed as he tore off another section of seating to toss at me.

  Man, Socialite was going to have to hope their next corporate meeting was low on attendance, or else they’d all be sitting criss-cross applesauce or whatever polite term they were using these days for Indian style.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I muttered, taking a chance and flinging myself up with a one-handed pushup. I was on my feet in a second, right arm limp at my side. “Did you think I was hiding? Because I totally was. Mostly because you’re the kind of party guest that everyone wishes would leave, but never does.”

  Grendel drove toward me in a fury that probably wasn’t helped by my taunt, and I backpedaled, pretty sure that one-armed I wasn’t going to have a lot more luck beating him down than I’d had with both hands back in Queens.

  “It’s ironic that we’re at a place called ‘Socialite’ given that you’re probably an incel who doesn’t actually socialize,” I said, still trying to retreat backward while flinging insults forward. There wasn’t a lot I could do to avoid getting caught at this point, and there also wasn’t a lot I could do with my vanilla succubus powers to cause him harm, physically.

  But it wasn’t in my nature to get run down by a villain without trying to dig my psychological teeth into him. By gum, I was going to leave some scars on him in this regard, ones he’d spend years trying to work out with his therapist, hopefully.

  “I’m going to impale you,” Grendel said, raising up his bone claws and waving them in front of him.

  “You should,” I said, “because that’s the only way you’ll ever be able to say you boned a woman.”

  He flinched from that one and actually stutter-stepped, like he was going to trip over his own feet from shock.

  Never one to quit while I was ahead, I hit the double down button. Because when you’ve already been threatened with disemboweling and skinning, what do you have to lose? “I bet the closest you ever got to getting laid was when your mother pushed you out.”

  Grendel’s yellow eyes went wide at my complete lack of reluctance to go there.

  That only lasted a moment, though, and then he flushed a darker yellow and raised his boned hand.

  “You know when you blush, it looks like someone pissed on your cheeks,” I said, pointing right at him. I was still subtly backing away, but subtle wasn’t going to do a hell of a lot against this bastard.

  His eyes looked like ice was spreading out from them, his gaze was so cold.

  “The girl’s not wrong,” came a voice from just above him. Kristina dropped out of the shadows like a black goddess swooping down from on high. A knife of pure ebon punched into Grendel’s back where she struck—

  Grendel screamed and bucked, swinging around to get her—

  But Kristina had already faded into the shadows and fog. Which was smart.

  Not terribly fortunate for me, though, because Grendel looked for her for about 2.4 seconds and then wheeled back around on me, twice as pissed. Pissed-er, even. (Which is a word I am entering into the lexicon now.)

  “Uh, hey, shadow lady, any chance of a team-up?” I asked as Grendel took a stomping step toward me.

  “Sorry, hunny, you know I work alone.”

  “Uh, no, I don’t know that,” I said, launching myself in a futile backward roll that got me under a long, powerful lateral swing from Grendel that would have cleaved me in half if it had hit. As it was, it whiffed with enough wind force that it threatened to tear my shirt off. Even Reed would have taken a step back from that whiff, and not just from the sickly dead flowers smell. “You literally came here with a team!”

  “Yeah, but they ain’t with me, you know,” she said, and her voice sounded far off and thus of no help. “You keep him busy for a bit longer, baby, and I’ll come in and avenge you, how about that?”

  “Sounds like it’s par for the day I’m having,” I said, going sideways this time. The mist was hanging pretty steady in here, and probably the only thing keeping Grendel from curb-stomping me into a puddle of gore in two seconds flat. Well, that and the constant distractions.

  I saw something move to Grendel’s right, and boom, he swung around a hand without looking and caught the shadow coming out of the mist at him. Friday made an “OOF!” noise and a little blood sprayed, and the shadow disappeared into the mist, crashing down in the distance. I listened, and a low whine told me Friday was alive and probably wounded more severely this time.

  Great.

  A quick mental inventory revealed my only ally was down, I was terribly wounded, Veronika was out, and the three remaining members of her team were definitely not going to be white-knighting for me in this. Hell, I didn’t even know where the other guy was.

  I’d reached the edge of the stage and was out of room to run. I thumped a hand down on it, then squatted for a second, touching the ground there. I drew a few deep breaths, trying to keep my head down. Grendel was just beyond my sight, and I really would have loved him to stay there—

  Aw, hell.

  Who was I kidding?

  I didn’t run from fights. At least not for long. Running stuck in my craw, and I was not having any more of it.

  “Screw it,” I said, pretty much at the end of my patience. I stared at Grendel, who was stepping out of the fog and shadows, water pour
ing down around him.

  He wore a leer that should have chilled me, but I was so far beyond that now. A growling chortle fell out from between his hideous teeth. “Nowhere to run, now.”

  “No desire to run, now,” I said, staring him down. “Let’s do this, bony.”

  “Yes,” he said, grinning, “let’s.”

  He raised his left arm, ready to strike, and something emerged from the shadows behind him. Kristina stabbed down with an ebon blade of pure shadow, and Grendel jerked at the impact, spinning on her like he wanted to swat down an invisible fly.

  “Pay no attention to the lady behind the shadows,” she said, melting away before he’d even completed his turn.

  Grendel’s arm hung limp, like she’d hit a nerve and paralyzed it. I stared at him for only an eyeblink as he raised the other, closest to me, following his instinctual reaction to swat down the thing that had stung him.

  Now it hung in the air just a few feet in front of me, uncommitted as he searched for the one who’d hurt him to little avail.

  I knew an opening when I saw one.

  Leaping, I threw my whole body at his still-functioning right arm, grabbing him at the wrist with both hands and dragging him down as I threw myself around him, twisting my legs to bring myself up. I got his arm in a joint lock, straightening it and applying pressure as I braced both feet against his rib cage.

  It took Grendel a moment to react to what I’d done. I was hanging from him like a kid using him as a jungle gym, and he stared down, disbelieving, and even asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Letting myth be my guide,” I said, planting one hand on his shoulder, the other locked on his wrist and both feet sideways along his ribcage.