Robert Crane - Family

She paused in her walk, stopping just in front of me. “Tapping Directorate communications so I could get Dr. Sessions’ results from her physical exam, after he’d run it, and Zollers’ psych exam results. I would also have loved to read the debriefing materials from after they questioned her – she’d have been a font of great information all around. Of course, I didn’t know she was dead, so when I explored my tap later, I got autopsy results, which weren’t what I’d hoped for.” There wasn’t an ounce of emotion from her.

“Why take Kat?” I looked at her, and she sighed, and started walking again. “Why take her with you? She seems like a liability, having to drag her along wherever you were going.”

My mom waved a hand at me. “When you can render someone unconscious with a touch, having a hostage that fits neatly in your trunk is never a liability; it’s an asset. Especially when your hostage is a meta, and your enemy is Erich Winter.”

“You’ve got a grudge against Old Man Winter?” I was following her still, and she didn’t say anything but I could see her demeanor change. “He acted like he didn’t even know you when I asked him about you before; like you two worked at the Agency but didn’t ever cross paths—”

She whirled around at me, eyes alight. “Did he now?” she asked, with a suppressed smile that was near maniacal in its intensity. My mother was not prone to displays of much emotion and I took a step back from her at the sight of it. “We knew each other. Of course we knew each other.”

“Enemies?” I asked, and she shook her head. “Friends?” She shook it again. “Frienemies?” I tried again, and she looked at me like I was an idiot.

“We were acquaintances,” she said. “But when the Agency was destroyed, we were two of the only survivors.” She smiled. “Tell me something – when you’re betrayed from the inside and your organization is destroyed, what do you think that makes the survivors?”

“I don’t know,” I said, not giving it a moment’s thought. “Does it matter—”

“Suspects,” she said, and I halted. “There were only three people that survived the destruction of the Agency. Me, Erich, and one other. And that makes every last one of us suspects. At least, in my mind.” She shook her head. “I know I’m paranoid, and that you never accepted that I locked you in the house for any good reason, but I did. I swear I did. I had to keep you in the bounds, had to keep you hidden, because there’s more going on here than you would believe.”

“Why not tell me?” I asked. “Why not just be honest?”

“Oh, yes,” she said sarcastically, “I should explain to my six-year-old girl that she can’t leave the house because someday she’s going to gain powers that will allow her to kill with a touch. I should tell her that any lifelong fantasies she might harbor about a normal life were a joke, a trick of a child’s mind, and that – oh yes, this is the best – powerful forces from within that world of superhumans would want to capture her, to take her away from me, and turn her to their own purposes.”

I let the silence hang between us. “Maybe if you’d given me a purpose of my own—”

She rolled her eyes and reminded me of Charlie again. “You didn’t need a purpose at six, or sixteen. You needed to be kept safe from monsters like Wolfe and Omega…and worse. I would have told you when the time came.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked. “Why did you just leave?” I looked at her, and I didn’t even feel anything as I asked questions that had been on my mind for months. “You locked me in the box and you left, just left, didn’t even say goodbye, or tell me what was happening, or—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and I saw genuine contrition. “I got waylayed by Wolfe, and I barely got away with my life. By the time I got free, I couldn’t—” She stopped, broke off. “I did everything I could for you, I promise. And I’m still working for your benefit, even though you might not believe that—”

I would have responded but something stopped me, the same something that caused her to break off mid-sentence. Sound, movement, something fainter than the sirens going off in the distance, warning us about danger that was supposed to be at the dormitory but instead was coming to us. The vampires, both of them, were moving toward us at speed.

“What the hell are those?” I heard my mother ask as she drew a gun from her waistband.

“Angel and Spike?” I suggested.

“Get behind me,” my mother said as she stepped forward to block me from them.

“Unless you’ve got some sort of miracle bullets in there,” I said, catching hold of her hand, “those will do nothing. They’re vampires, and they don’t take any sort of damage from guns.”

She turned, whirling her head toward me, but I caught a hint of fear rather than anger. “Can we outrun them?”

I thought about it for a second. “No. But…” I turned and saw the training building not far from us, in the opposite direction of the vampires. “…we might be able to beat them if we had some weapons.” I tugged on her arm and started to run. “This way!”

She looked for a second like she wanted to argue, but she didn’t, taking up with me as we ran for the training facility. I didn’t slow as we approached, and saw the vamps gaining on us. We came up on the door of the building, the glass front, and I wondered if it was unlocked.

My mother raised her gun and fired, bullets shattering the glass panes of the door. I flinched and hesitated, fearful that the bullets were going to ricochet back at me. After five shots the glass fell out, breaking into pieces that covered the ground. I flew through the hole in the middle of the door, slowing down to make sure I didn’t trip. Mother followed, the vamps only about a hundred feet behind us. “Over here!” I called to Mom, and dodged toward the practice room, opening the glass door and running inside, cutting across the open mats and stopping at the wall of weapons. I stared up and cast a look back at Mom, who was waiting at the door.

“Sword,” she said, nodding at the broadsword on the wall next to me. I tossed it to her and grabbed the katana for myself. I ran to join her by the door as we heard movement in the hallway. “You take the ugly one,” she whispered.

I was about to question her on which one was the ugly one when I noticed the smile creasing her lips. “Did you just make a joke?”

“It seemed the appropriate time.”

The glass window to the hallway exploded behind me and I turned to see Blondie enter through it, glass filling the air around me as a rain of broken shards was came down sideways. I held up an arm to protect my face and spun backward to avoid the worst of it. In that moment, I heard the door slam open and my mother spring to action against the second vamp. I heard a great exhalation of breath from her as she swung her sword and I heard it hit flesh. After that I was done listening because the first vampire was in front of me and I had a fight of my own to deal with.

I raised my blade as he feinted toward me, catching him on the wrist and opening it. Whether he noticed or not was open to debate, because he didn’t react at all, pushing hard against the edge of the blade and sending it back at me, knocking me off balance as he did so. I came up and got a good look at his jagged teeth, formed into a smile under blond hair that looked bleached, and a face that was so lacking in humanity it made Wolfe look like a compassionate school guidance counselor by comparison. He pursued me and I tried to step back, but off-balance as I was, it turned into a hop as I tried to buy time.

It worked enough to let me get my footing, but he was still coming, so I poked at him, at the chest, and the tip of my sword bit into his dark shirt and the flesh beneath. I turned it into a hard, ramming motion that again elicited no reaction, but I pushed and he stumbled back from the force, as though I had shoved him with my hand instead of a pointed blade. Still, he made no noise; the only sound in the room was my breathing and my mother’s, somewhere behind me.