Blood Ties Read online

  None came out.

  My nervous system had short-circuited, taken too much pain in too little time. Nothing was working anymore, everything was pain, the whole world was pain, my vision a black tunnel centered on the creature before me.

  Something hit it in the side of the head. Long, flexible, it shattered on impact, and those yellow eyes barely registered the hit.

  Oh, shit. West.

  I could see her, barely, behind the thing. My lips wanted to move, wanted to scream, wanted to warn her to GET OUT in the loudest possible voice.

  But I had no breath. No motion. My hands didn’t work, my legs didn’t work. Neither did my mouth.

  It lashed out with the hand that wasn’t buried in me, and West just disintegrated under the blow. The blood splatter was all I could see through the black clouding the edges of my vision.

  My neck started to sag, eyes fighting to close. The smell of blood, that tang of iron, was flooding through my nostrils, filling my mouth.

  “Enjoy the show,” the thing said, harsh and low. Was he talking to me? I couldn’t tell.

  A whisper like a blast of thunder seemed to shake me, as my eyes slid off those yellow pools staring into me. The beast’s hand grabbed onto something up in me, hard, and I jerked.

  He’d found new ways to hurt me, it seemed, and I shook as he ripped his hand free—

  I slid down the wall and fell over, looking up, the world almost totally black. The beast held something in its hand, something ovoid and oblong, dripping—

  My...heart?

  I tried to take another breath, to form a word, any word, but none came. The blackness clouding the edges of my vision puffed up, wider, into the center, and my breath left me...

  ...As I died.

  4.

  Xavier Holloway

  “Do we have eyes on the thing?” Holloway asked, slipping down the hallway of QuantiFIE, some tech company set up in Queens.

  “Not sure.” Kerry Hilton had one hand out with her drawn pistol, the other tapping her earpiece. They’d hooked into the local police chatter when they’d reached the scene—damned traffic had set them back ten minutes, and they’d gotten off light at that. “The locals are trying to establish a perimeter, but they’re still arriving and getting set up.”

  “Nealon and West have been here for ten minutes without backup,” Holloway said, straining as he looked at the torn-up walls. Something had ripped through here. It looked more like a monster movie than any normal crime scene he’d been to.

  That was the shitshow about this job. Metahumans were a disaster, always. Normal criminals didn’t leave this kind of a mess unless they were stealing the copper out of the walls.

  “It’s an industrial park, Holloway,” Hilton said, covering him as he sliced the pie, pointing his gun around the corner a few degrees at a time so he didn’t totally expose himself to enemy fire. “Lotta ways in, lotta ways out.”

  “Doesn’t help that half the park is abandoned,” Holloway griped. The hallway ahead was clear, but seriously torn up. He keyed his radio mic. “Nealon, West, you copy? Holloway and Hilton on scene. Following the trail of carnage. Oof, body.” Holloway saw the lump under the flickering light ahead, but didn’t bother to check as he passed. That sucker was dead, no doubt. Looked like the monster got them.

  “Think we’re getting close?” Hilton asked, moving up to just behind him as they reached another corner.

  “Why?” Holloway asked, setting up to take the corner. “You worried about your metahuman girlfriend? She’s fine, I’m sure.”

  Hilton let out a low grunt of impatience. “Then why isn’t she answering? And Nealon’s not my girlfriend, Holloway. Don’t get your fantasies tangled up in reality.”

  “A man can dream,” Holloway muttered, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm in it. Nealon would just as soon skin him alive as have anything to do with him in the bedroom department, and she’d made that abundantly clear in New Orleans. Mostly he was trying to avoid her wroth these days, which seemed fine by her. It was doubly fine by him, but hell if he was going to let a fellow agent go into danger without backup, even if she did hate his guts. He took the corner slow, and saw—

  “Holy mofo hell,” Hilton said, taking the corner behind him as Holloway slipped out before fully checking all the angles. He’d seen the figures on the ground, the blood everywhere—

  Blood.

  Everywhere.

  —and caution had gone to the damned wind. He keyed his mic—“Agents down, agents down!”—with all the urgency he had, breaking into a run into the disaster area ahead.

  “EMS is already on their way up,” a distant NYPD officer crackled over the radio. “Scene is not secure, repeat, scene is not secure.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Holloway said, taking it all in with a glance.

  Something had come through the wall ahead. Something big.

  Nealon was in a pile on her left side, slumped against the wall, glassy-eyed and staring. Blood covered her chin, her chest—hell, all of her. He looked down, then blinked what he’d seen away.

  “Holy hell,” Hilton said. “What happened to...?”

  Holloway didn’t feel the need to answer, because it seemed self-evident.

  Something had got her.

  A little ways beyond, that same something appeared to have gotten... “Shit,” he whispered. “West.”

  Georgia West was dead, too. Whatever had hit her had left only half her face intact. Enough to identify the body and that was it; she was otherwise shattered from the collarbones up on one side.

  Hilton gagged behind him. Holloway sympathized; he’d seen some pretty crazy shit in the war, but this was right up there.

  He keyed his mic again. “Nealon is down. West is down. Repeat, we have two agents down. They are dead. Repeat, two agents down...definitely dead.”

  Hilton retched again, but squatted next to Nealon, pushing two fingers into her throat and looking away.

  Holloway watched, unsure there was much point to that, but not wanting to call the junior agent out for it. “Anything?” he asked after a few seconds.

  Kerry Hilton just shook her head, rising to her feet. She looked at West for a second, then quickly away. “The perp...?” she asked, wavering a little. Probably still trying to get command of her stomach.

  “No idea,” Holloway said, listening. There was no noise other than some footsteps coming up behind them. The cracked floor tiles suggested to him that whatever had done this was big. Mammoth, even, putting the floor damage together with the shredded ceiling. “Cover our six while I deal with these guys.” He pointed his gun toward the corner the footsteps were coming from. Just to be safe.

  Hilton nodded and pointed her pistol past him.

  An EMT in a yellow vest came around the corner holding the front of a stretcher, hat pulled down over his face. As soon as he knew it was EMS, Holloway lowered the pistol. “Might as well just go back the way you came,” he said, keeping it at low rest in case this was some sort of ambush or trap. “Not going to be a need for your services here.”

  The EMT kept coming, though, and another emerged from the corner behind him, this one female, shorter, hair long, dark and pulled up under the brim of her hat. “Hear that?” she asked with a Texas twang. “Lawman says we ain’t got no reason to be here.”

  “Well, let’s just take a look anyway,” the man in the lead said as they jogged down the hall. He brushed past Holloway and went right for Nealon, ignoring West completely.

  “This scene isn’t clear,” Holloway said, scanning the hall behind them. “Whatever did this to them is still on the loose.”

  “I guess you’ll just have to watch our backs, then,” the guy said, already on his knees next to Nealon. He’d shaken the bag off his shoulder and was pulling out—

  The hell?

  He had a cooler of blood and was setting up an IV for a transfusion.

  “That’s not normal gear for a paramedic,” Holloway said, squinting down at
them.

  “It’s a field trial for new equipment,” the guy said. “Lucky us, we’re the guinea pigs. Or she is, I guess.” He chuckled as he nodded at Nealon’s corpse, but it didn’t sound very humorous. It sounded dry, actually, like the guy struggled to get it out. He said something else, but it was so low that Holloway didn’t catch it.

  The female EMT scrambled to grab something bloody on the floor, picking it up in her un-gloved hands and carefully shoving it back into Nealon’s gaping stomach, like she was putting a missing piece back in a plastic model.

  Holloway cringed. Sure, Nealon wasn’t feeling anything at this point, but what the hell was that EMT doing? And without gloves?

  “Sir, please stand back,” the male EMT said, holding up a hand. He had the blood going now, and turned his attention to her chest. “Start compressions?”

  “Sure, if that makes you feel better, sweetheart,” she said in that dripping Texas drawl.

  “Aren’t you a little old for this job?” Holloway asked, looking down at the lady EMT. She had a few lines on her face and a couple stray grey hairs peeking out from under her hat.

  She didn’t even spare him a glance. “Well bless your heart, son. You’re lucky we’re in civilized New York and not back where I come from, or you’d be in a lot worse shape than her pretty quick.” She looked at the male EMT. “Getting anything?”

  “Probability is dropping,” he said, just low enough Holloway caught it. “I need to restart her heart.” He rummaged through his bag and came out with a portable defibrillator. “You want to do it?”

  “I’m holding her together,” the lady EMT said, shaking her head. “You do it.”

  “He can’t shock her while you’ve got a hand up there, lady,” Holloway said. This was like watching the Three Stooges try and do emergency medicine. “Maybe you ought to retire.”

  “Sonny, I’ve forgotten more about healing people than you’ve ever known about harming ’em,” she muttered under her breath. “And I know just from looking at you that you’ve got experience harming people.” She turned her attention back to the male EMT. “Hit me. I can take it.”

  “Hey, can you get me that fire extinguisher over there?” the male EMT asked, looking right at Holloway.

  Holloway just gaped back at him. “She’s dead. What are you doing to do with it? Club her back to life?”

  The male EMT just smiled. “Listen, Agent...?”

  “Holloway.”

  “Holloway, right,” the EMT said. “Why don’t you let us at least try and do our job? What’s the worst that can happen if you do?” He arched his eyebrows. “She’s still dead, right?”

  Holloway just shook his head and turned to get the fire extinguisher. “Crazy-ass medics,” he muttered under his breath.

  There was a sound and Holloway spun in time to see—well, he wasn’t quite sure what he saw.

  But it looked like the male EMT had used the defibrillator with the lady EMT’s hands still inside the body of Sienna Nealon.

  That should have shocked Holloway, too. But...

  It got a little lost in the fact that Nealon was jerking and gasping for breath.

  “Hold her, hold her!” the male EMT said, leaning on Nealon’s shoulder, which was oozing blood.

  “Just settle on down, girl,” the lady EMT said, pulling her bloodied hands out of the wound canal. She placed one right on Nealon’s chin. “We gotcha. We gotcha.”

  “Holy shit, you brought her back,” Hilton said, standing in the middle of the hallway with her gun hanging in nearly-limp fingers like she’d been the one who’d gotten shocked. The smell of burning hair wafted through the corridor.

  “Shhhhh, shhhh,” the lady EMT said, hands planted firmly on Nealon’s chest as Nealon writhed. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s all gonna be okay.” That drawl was so thick.

  “I’ve got her,” the male EMT said, leaning all his weight on Nealon’s shoulders. “Pull back.”

  The lady EMT didn’t, at first. She kept holding on, looking Nealon right in the eyes. “It’s okay.”

  Nealon was gasping, trying to form words. She raised a shaking hand, ran her bloody fingers over the lady EMT’s face, leaving twin smears of blood down a slightly weathered cheek. She was mouthing something, but it was impossible to hear. “P...P...” was all that came out.

  “Damn,” Holloway said, coming back down the hallway to them on tottering legs, the requested fire extinguisher all but forgotten. “You really did it.”

  “Okay, we’ve done about all we can here,” the male EMT said. Nealon was gasping, looking up at him. Words still weren’t coming out.

  “Shouldn’t you stabilize her first?” Holloway asked. “Before moving her?” He caught a withering look from the lady EMT and held up his hands in surrender. “Never mind. I bow to your expertise at reviving the dead.”

  “This is as stable as she gets here,” the male EMT said, slipping the backboard under her. He and his female counterpart ran the straps over her, bolting her down. “She needs a hospital, now.” Nodding at his partner, they both lifted, and started carrying her down the hallway.

  Hilton eased up at Holloway’s side. “You ever seen anything like that before?” she asked.

  “No,” Holloway said. “Metahumans are a whole new ballgame.”

  The lady EMT almost ran into another team coming around the corner; she only missed them by dodging, pretty damn quickly for an old dame, at the last second.

  “What the hell?” one of the new EMTs asked as he almost struck a wall trying to avoid her. “No one told me another crew got this call. Where’d you guys come from?”

  “A warmer place than this,” the lady EMT said, turning the corner and disappearing from sight, leaving Holloway wondering what the hell had just happened here.

  5.

  Sienna

  I awoke in pain and coughing blood, tubes sticking out of my collarbone and wrists. White was everywhere, filling up my vision.

  A hospital.

  Owwww.

  “Whoa, take it easy there, cowgirl,” the slightly panicked voice of Agent Xavier Holloway intruded into my unpleasant wake-up, and suddenly there was a slight pressure on my arm. Not enough to keep me from thrashing, but enough that it was almost reassuring.

  “Lose the hand or lose the hand,” I said. His spray-tanned face came into focus as my eyes adjusted.

  “Sienna, it’s all right,” came a more soothing, female voice at my other side. Her mocha skin was a haze into which formed two dark eyes, rimmed with concern and boring in on me as I came back into the world. Agent Kerry Hilton. “We got you.”

  “Somebody damned sure did,” I said, and my voice box sounded like it had been roughly sanded before being shoved back into my body via my stomach. Which also felt like someone had pounded it until it exploded. My head felt hazy, like someone had poured concrete in both my ears and let it harden. “What happened?”

  “You clashed with some unidentified thing out in Queens,” Holloway said, his hand long gone from my arm. Smart move. “The fight doesn’t look like it went to split decision. Seems like your opponent pretty much did a KO and then kept going.”

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds, hoping the cobwebs—no, scratch that, these were full-on Shelob webs—would clear. “I remember going there. The hallways.” I opened my eyes. “What happened to West?”

  Hilton and Holloway exchanged a look that told me everything I needed to know. Even in my bleary, muddled state, I couldn’t have missed it. “Damn,” I whispered.

  “Shaw is talking to her family right now,” Holloway said, and his tone was soft, conciliatory. “Honestly, when we got there, I was pretty sure he’d be doing the same with your brother right now.”

  “He wouldn’t need to bother,” I said, stiffly, remembering through the haze the lie I’d been repeating for months now. “My brother and I are on the outs. Way out. I’m sure he wouldn’t give a damn.” Super lie. Reed was probably sitting by a TV set right now, chewing his finge
rnails to nubs if this was being reported.

  “That’s a hard outs you’re talking,” Hilton said. “Is there anyone else we can call for you?”

  Even in my addled state, I knew I had to toe the planned party line. “No,” I said quietly, averting my eyes. “No, there’s no one.”

  “Whew,” Holloway said, almost under his breath. “Well—”

  “Excuse me,” came a familiar female voice from the door, past a white hanging curtain. It was loud and forceful and unyielding as hell, umbrage just dripping from it. “You can’t be in here. She hasn’t been cleared for visitors.”

  “Sorry, doc,” Holloway said, looking over his shoulder. “She’s FBI, and she damned near died. She gets a protective detail whether you say—”

  “Get the hell out of here so I can talk with my patient in private or I’ll have our entire security force physically throw you out of the building,” the doctor said, and her voice was, predictably, like iron.

  “I’d like to see you—” Holloway started.

  It was my turn to grab his arm. “Go,” I said when he looked down at me. “Just step out into the hall. I’ll make a loud yodeling sound if the doctor attempts to murder me while you’re gone.”

  Holloway just blinked. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea—”

  “This is me reminding you that you’re a terrible judge of great ideas,” I said. “I mean, you probably bought a Snuggie at some point off a television ad.”

  “It was a good deal,” Holloway said weakly.

  “Out,” the doctor said, making her appearance at the edge of the curtain, dark hair lightly curled and hanging down to her shoulders, look of stern irritation and oh so familiar storm clouds expressed through the narrowing of her eyes.

  Hilton went without a peep, but Holloway lingered, shooting me one last look. “You sure?”

  “I’ll probably be fine with her,” I said, and Holloway took his exit, albeit reluctantly.

  The doctor watched him go until the door clicked closed behind him, then she turned on me.