Yes, I actually look about. I mean, come on, it’s been fucking months, or felt like it anyway, since he invited me to the wedding that’s been put off twice already. You would think even someone with my thick hide would’ve got the message before now if this lug-head intended me to be in any way more than remotely connected to his nuptials. I’m more the stand-in-the-corner-and-eat-all-the-caviar, maybe bang-a-few-bridesmaids or maybe even okay-fuck-it-I’ll-shag-the-bride sort of guy. I might be the best man, but there’s no way I am the best man.
Paragon seems to think otherwise. I adopt a pained mien.
“Uh, hello. What?”
“Put it here, buddy,” Paragon replies, and when I reflexively go to shake his hand, he puts me in a headlock instead and grins, his cheek against mine like maybe we’re about to receive a double cumshot. I elbow him and press away, not sure whether I’m more appalled at the revoltin’ development or simply the easy familiarity of his voice.
“No. Explain yourself.”
“Aw c’mon, Zeph. Stop playin’ hardball. Say you’ll do it. Please?”
Ambushed.
*
I AM STANDING alone in the crowd, rocking out once again to the tangled skein of my life and the revelations, which if true, mean the man who spent most my life trapped behind my eyes and is privy to my every secret is in fact not my father after all. The real question is not who this Strummer guy is (not a product of my timeline, or what’s left of it, thanks to the extra-dimensional Editors), but whether the man I called “dad” knew the truth and played me like a fool.
“You had no idea about that, did ya?” a soft feminine voice sounds behind my back and I turn to face the dulcet laugh of a particularly well turned out Miss Black.
The one-time teen sorceress, now smashing her late 20s, wears the customary flanged open black collar, but for the formal occasion she’s fashioned it to a figure-hugging Vivica Allen black gown that achieves the double aim of leaving very little to the imagination while also showing how little there is to her petite frame.
Me like.
“Hey, Annie, what’s the news? You didn’t waste a spell reading my mind, did you?”
“It wouldn’t take magic, just the look on your face. Zephyr, you’re impossible.”
“Impossible, or adorable?”
“What, you didn’t hear me? Your hearing must be going, old man.”
She gives that trilling laugh again and struts past me in the direction of the buffet, slapping me on the ass as she goes.
I scratch my cheek and managed to disengage my eyes, swiveling about the chamber as the hubbub builds higher and higher. Somewhere in all this mess the bride arrives, but I am so totally over it all already and not exactly one of Lady Macbeth aka Jocelyn’s biggest admirers, finding it hard to put the time she nearly incinerated me during the siege of Seattle behind me. Everyone else seems to have conveniently forgotten the bitch was a mid-level villainess for years, many more years than she’d admit by dint of the lying about her age she’s been doing in the tabloid press, and it’s like everyone has become too addicted to the reverse fairytale about her impending-nigh-on-looming nuptials with Paragon to call a spade a spade.
Instead, I catch a glimpse of a surprise appearance in the crowd and spur into action.
Vanguard.
The FBI special agent moves with an insouciance belied by the heavy frame of the midnight blue steel armor he wears, so familiar to that I just saw unmade on my now non-existent son. I don’t know if he’s an invite or part of the security detail, but I round on him as he’s double dipping with the duck liver paté, tiny crumbs smeared like excrement around his handsome cake-hole.
“Vanguard. Fancy seeing you here.”
“Zephyr!”
He gulps, surprised, and I sense more than a little alarmed. Not sure why, but it’s a red rag to a bull for me.
“Paragon invited me,” Vanguard says. “We go way back.”
“Do you just.”
“Hell, you’re not . . . busting me, are you?”
I don’t have a clue what the hell he’s talking about, so I just give the big blonde-headed lug the hairy eyeball for a few seconds more and it is strange and curiously rewarding to see a supposedly veteran field agent crumple.
“Fuck. I know you’re the best man and everything. I didn’t mean anything by it. A few of us just really wanted to attend. Everyone always forgets we’re part of the community too,” Vanguard says.
“A few of us?”
Now I spot Tempo and Taurus either side of Keira Knightley like they might be angling for the double-team. At least Tempo has the good manners to look ashamed.
“FBI agents gatecrashing Paragon’s wedding? Now I’ve seen it all.”
“There are benefits to the badge,” Vanguard says.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“And you guys shouldn’t discriminate against us. We’re parahumans too. Just because we take a wage –”
“Exactly, mano,” I snap back. “You take the easy option and leave the rest of us fighting in the trenches. Fuck you. I never liked you much before now and I’m still shitty with you for letting Synergy get killed.”
“Me getting her killed?”
Vanguard positively sizzles.
“I said letting her get killed. I know who did it.”
“Damn straight. You led us into that death trap by withholding evidence, Zephyr. You could’ve saved her life and instead you saved your ass.”
My left hook cracks out of nowhere leaving Vanguard sprawled across the floor. Elegant guests stumble and slip about as the big guy’s armor clanks on Chancel’s precious polished flags. All conversation dies in the building. I can practically hear someone with a dust-buster six floors below. Then Vanguard sits up feeling his jaw and lifts a gauntleted mitt.
“I’m alright, folks,” he says and I lift my hand as well and give a goofy grin and you know what? We’re fucking superheroes. This is how we roll and people know it.
*
MINUTES LATER AND I have Vanguard up against the wall again, though the conversation has moved on, as have the spectators.
“Tell me about the armor?”
“What the hell have you been smoking, Zephyr? Leave me alone. I’ll go.”
“I don’t give a shit about you sneaking into this costumed freakshow, special agent Vanguard. I want to know who made your armor and where are they now?”
“My armor? Christ Zephyr. Is this the time or the place?”
Proving that the intruder Feeb is correct, Nocturne’s telepathic summons to the impending ceremony thrums through the admittedly poor showing of our collected minds. The sparkly masses at once start herding for the landing pad, which for some reason is where the couple want their nuptials held out in the open.
“Just tell me, Vanguard, and I’ll forget about this little incident, OK?”
The quarterback-gone-to-seed-looking farm-boy motherfucker dares roll his eyes at me, straining at the bit to go with the rest of the herd, which turns out to be my leverage.
“It’s not big secret,” he says. “The prototype was developed by a Japanese corporation my father worked for when I was a kid. He had this whole thing, you know, where he was developing this impervious power suit with particle weapons and then found out, you know, like, fuck, they wanted to use it in military applications, so he snuck in and –”
“Enough with the back story, Vannie, just tell me the company’s name.”
“Paladin Industries.”
“Paladin?”
And a name whispers through the back lots of my mind.
Demoness.
Zephyr 12.12 “Black Mass”
I’M NOT EXACTLY calm as I join the mob squeezing through the metal arches of the Silver Towers landing platform. Many of the lesser dignitaries are relegated to the upper mezzanine of the glass-and-silver building and look down on the red carpet lining the platform protruding from the edifice like a tongue laying in the great metal lower
jaw of some curious architectural beast. It’s mostly us costumed freaks and a few close “friends” of the community out getting a touch of the wind in our hair, benighted Atlantic City an admittedly pretty backdrop with the lights twinkling and intermingling way out to the ocean and its hidden rubbish gyres unguessed at like horrors spawning in the Lovecraftian deeps.
An expectant look summons me past the crowd of watching eyes, masks, antennae, helmets and other gizmos, the only normal-looking guy near me being the pervert inventor Prof Prendergast, so that’s really saying something. I join Paragon standing like grooms have since the start of time, looking pretty much friendless. It makes me grimace an apology, just fleetingly a little bit ashamed of myself, but not for long as we turn, shoulder to shoulder, two guys about the same height and dimensions as the hubbub parts back the way I’ve come and Jocelyn appears, belly straining the credibility of a silvery-white Vivienne Westwood gown, I begrudgingly admit almost as radiant as her husband-to-be, reddish-blonde tresses flicking out like a fashionable Medusa, a look at once insouciant and demure playing over the hordes assembled to adore her, forcibly striking me with the irony that for her this moment must represent some perverse circle-of-life to have the people who once feared and fought her now paraded like so many mindless teenage girls crushing shoulders for a look at the bride amid the wedding of the century.
“Hey, Para . . . You know, all the best with everything,” I say.
“Gee thanks, Zephyr.”
“No, it’s the least I could do.”
“I really appreciate that,” he says.
“No, literally, I think that’s the very least I could do. I couldn’t do more.”
Paragon turns and makes a you’re-just-kidding face and we shake hands. I nod curtly. Poor fucking Paragon looks so choked up. Still clasping my hand, he pats me on the shoulder seemingly unconcerned that the only part left of my official costume I’m wearing is the pants and boots beneath the weather-and-gore stained sleeveless black tee with the ensorcelled-looking Zephyr symbol now inside its scrawled anarchist symbol circle.
“I guess she, uh, really has reformed, huh?”
The gratitude vanishes from Paragon’s face as he throws down the emotional iron shutters, scowling.
“Shit, Zeph. You still on about that?”
“Well she was, like, you know, a major villainess at one time or another.”
“At least she didn’t get the appointed protector of the Earth killed.”
“You’re comparing what happened with Seeker with that?” I say, appalled, just a few notches shy of giving him the Vanguard treatment. “Lady Macbeth caused the death of any number of costumed heroes. Remember Iron Lad?”
“Iron Lad’s here. I invited him.”
“Yeah, but you know, before, he died that time, remember?”
“But he got better,” Paragon says, puzzled, clearly nonplussed by my continued badgering. “Let it go, Zephyr. I asked you here because there’s no one I respect more. You gotta understand that, dude,” he says, getting weepy again.
“But if you get between me and my woman, that’s the end, OK? Don’t do it. Please.”
I sigh and shake my head, muttering “it’s all on you, asshole,” not exactly under my breath, but Paragon’s selective hearing has always been pretty good and now he uses that to his advantage, elbowing me in the ribs to join him turning as the reformed Lady Macbeth starts on her progress towards us.
“Shouldn’t there be a priest or something?”
“Just wait,” Paragon says, glazed-eyed grin returning like a dog left staring too long at a meal cooking in an oven. “We’ve got something special planned.”
And there’s a nagging feeling like there’s something I should remember, but I’m damned if I can. Like all the other sheep, I turn to watch Jocelyn’s approach.
*
JOCELYN’S EYES FIND mine down the red carpet. She’s escorted by the Chancellor himself, resplendent in his mostly ornamental armor, but in that moment time slows and it is like she and I are the only people in the cosmos. Her shy smile melts into a bold, almost bloody grin. I am astonished at her beauty, the vitality leaching into the air around her, so much so that I almost struggle to retain the loathing I’ve felt ever since I first heard those fucking words, “The lady’s turned,” the summer before last. The crowd noise boils away, my own heartbeat in my throat as I watch her succulent lips slowly form two simple words.
“I win.”
My slack face turns into a snarl and I look askance to Paragon, unaware of the exchange, when there is a smoky vomiting noise beside me and suddenly Twilight is there in full regalia, including the funky-ass wizard’s cape I know he only wears for special occasions, ceremonies like this I guess as well as black mass and, um, the orgies.
“Twilight. What the fuck?”
“Hey Twilight,” Paragon adds. “What gives, man?”
The chiseled-jawed mystic gives me his best ornery leer, clearly as put out as the rest of the attendees responding in waves of concentric shock and astonishment, the first inklings that this might be more than just one last late wedding guest.
“Did you forget, Zephyr, what I told you?”
“Forget?” I frown. “Forget what?”
“You fucking doofus,” Twilight replies. “I left this up to you. The ball was in your court. Are you telling me you overlooked the conversation we had where I told you Ras Algethi impregnated itself in Jocelyn when we destroyed it at the Hell Gate Bridge?”
I stop, frozen like a statue as the tiny percolations of memory do their thing and I recall in fact perhaps that wee nugget of information was indeed provided some time ago, though admittedly in distracting circumstances.
“Shit,” I remark.
“Shit,” he mocks me.
“Look, to be fair, our reality was invaded by a vast non-Euclidian parasite moments later and your uncle was killed right in front of me at about the same time. The worldquake, remember?”
“I’m glad you remember something.”
Paragon’s looking at us with puppy dog eyes and the guests kenning to our bickering start a hubbub of their own. Jocelyn halts midway down the path, hands by her sides, Exorcist smile on her face as she tilts her head at us.
“Shit,” I say again for no particular effect. “Here we go again.”
Zephyr 12.13 “Once More Into The Breach”
THERE IS AN eruption of flames. They billow outward from Jocelyn like the mother of all firestorms, the air incinerated, vaporized. It is shock alone that makes the parti-colored crowds rear back along either arm of the protruding jaw of Amadeus Chancel’s glitzy tower, some of them perilously, a dozen or so toppling off the admittedly unsafe platform to hurtle toward the street many floors below. Fortunately, two or three of them are fliers and a half-dozen more quick-thinking aerial types and teleporters spring into action at first flush, but the story isn’t so rosy for Iron Lad, who even with his titanium-encased puppet body will spend the next year in and out of traction and the care of specialist xenopathologists.
My first instinct is to bend the air in front of Twilight and I so the backdraft kills the forward momentum of the burning gas cloud. Good news for us. Not so much for the crowd gathered to left and right, but the flames have barely died down from their first expression before the city’s assembled motley forces of derring-do take evasive action, most resorting to their playbooks. I am perversely pleased to see Mastodon declare a loud “Fuck it” and stamp into full-size, the first costumed hero to try the direct option and charge at the formerly Lady Macbeth.
The bitch turns, eyes rolled up like boiled eggs inside her head, and one haphazard swipe of her hand deflects the ‘Don into a gaggle of teenage heroes puzzlingly called One Direction. Two are flattened, one critically. The darker of the group misguidedly aims his laser-beam eyes at Mastodon instead of the hierarch at the center of this calamity and its only when Devil Betty teleports a whole swathe of that portion of the crowd, including the ‘Don, to her p
et pocket universe, that the surging crowd on the dangerous platform balances out.
As in any gathering, there’s only a dedicated core who are really there to party. With Twilight and me step Miss Black, Vanguard, Nocturne and Manticore.
I glance at Vanguard.
“Aren’t you meant to be keeping a low profile?”
“It’s a bit fucking late for that.”
I concur.
Somehow Paragon gets past us and steps shaky and blathering before Jocelyn, who now rises in thrall to her possession, head for all intents and purposes pan-fried from within except for where her demon-child animates it. I can smell if not practically see the glowing fetus within her ellipsoid midsection pulling the strings.
“Baby? Baby? Why’re you doin’ this? It’s our special day!”
“Get Para out of there,” I hiss.
Stiletto is there like a black streak, neatly taking him out with a tackle, one arm coiled about the groom’s midsection as he “Oifs!” and disappears from view in an explosion of weepy breath as Jocelyn mercilessly unleashes hell on the spot where he was just standing.
“Got any bright ideas, Twilight?”
“Each time it manifests, Ras Algethi commands mastery over a natural element. Not prizes for guessing which one it is this time,” he intones.
I feel genuinely awful for Paragon, clutched in loving restraint by Silhouette and Manticore. His outstretched hand reaches for where the bride-no-longer-to-be hovers above the scorched carpet. She, which is to say he, which is to say it, doesn’t look askance. There’s some splosions and shit as armored types like Chancellor, Chamber and Vault open up with their weapons, but somehow the interloper’s super-heated plasm blocks their attacks. The air is acid with heat and tastes like ash and metal filings. The platform weakens, the metal starting to slough amid more screams as the bulk of the remaining masks get the hell out of Dodge.
Twilight and I share a look.
“What about the medallion-thing?” I ask. “It worked on the other guy.”
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