“You two? You’re not like. . . ?”
“Ew dad, no,” she says sharply. “The rest of the team are sort of out of action.”
“That’s a shame,” I say. “I could do with a bit of face-time with the ol’ all-seeing eye.”
“Honestly, Zephyr,” she says more carefully now. “You and that table. You’re like a big fat sweaty guy surfing Redtube.”
“I do not even know what that is,” I say. “I need to find Matrioshka. I’ve created a monster – another monster – and I have to stop her before more people get hurt.”
Tessa doesn’t say anything, sipping on her drink and petulantly eyeing me as I decide to stop procrastinating as well and dig into the cheesecake. As I eat, silently rebuking myself for missing my daughter’s birthday, which you’d think would be hard to do when it’s only a few weeks before my own, Windsong fills me in on all the gossip in the superhero world, which mostly revolves around these so called self-actualization workshops Sting is running in Afghanistan, of all places.
“I guess that explains where he’s disappeared to when I needed him,” I say.
“It sucks that you weren’t invited. Sorry,” Tessa says with a girlish shrug.
She finishes the spider and pushes the glass aside, frowning at about the same moment I do to notice ice crystals clinging to the sides.
Growing alert, I probe the apple pie in front of me and feel its icy touch.
Somewhere in the diner a patron sneezes as the temperature plunges and I stand with a look of readiness as the double doors blow open and Frost strides in wearing a huge mink jacket she thrusts open to reveal the usual PVC corset and boots combo, hands on her sharp-bladed hips and her blue smile like a sickle. Or an icicle. You see what I did there?
“A father-daughter moment,” Frost says loudly. “How cute.”
“Careful, Betty Boop. You’re going to blow our secret,” I say a little less loudly.
Frost only laughs and Tessa stands, face darkening in concern and confusion as she rounds on me and raises her eyebrow.
“OK, Zephyr, who the hell is this?” Tessa asks.
Frost trots forward and extends her hand. “Hello, Honey. It’s Tessa, right? I’m an old friend of your dad’s. An old flame, I guess you’d say. We were nearly family once. Or a couple of times, I should say.”
I guess the theme for today is inappropriate conversations with my daughter.
Frost gives my daughter a knowing wink and Windsong responds with the requisite look of imminent projectile vomit expected of any teenager.
“Oh my god,” she moans. “Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”
“I cleaned his clock pretty damned good if I don’t say so myself,” Frost laughs.
“Ew! Jesus!” Tessa barks. “You just said ‘clock’ though, right?”
“I think that’s onomatopoeia,” Frost trills, despite the fact she is incorrect.
And it would all be funny and we could laugh about it years later if only Tessa left it at that.
*
THE WAVE OF force takes Frost by surprise. She makes a girly little noise as she and the contents of our table are flung against the nearest wall. I move as quickly as I can, which is to say pretty fucking quick, stepping between the two women before hostilities can escalate. Instead, I walk straight into Frost’s angry revenge ice attack, an explosion of freezing air and tiny flechette-like shards that have me covering my face to avoid the veritable hornet’s nest of stings as she steps up and vaults past me, one vinyl-clad fist coming down onto Tessa’s raised forearm before the two of them go crashing to the diner floor and sliding on the fast-forming ice on the tired linoleum and into and through the glass double doors and right outside.
“Holy shit,” I mutter under my breath, a hand of warning also meant to be a reassurance to the diner staff now we nutty super-folks are taking our troubles outside.
I storm out into a blizzard.
Between Windsong’s sudden gale warning and Frost’s refrigeration of the already Arctic conditions, I can barely see more than a few feet in front of me, but it’s enough to glimpse the dark curvy shape of my daughter lift into the air as she does a sort of languid flip to come down with both boots in the middle of Frost’s chest. The platinum-haired, blue-tinged woman crashes backwards into a parked delivery van that immediately erupts in a blaze of alarms, but Frost is having none of it. She flings her hands wide and the ground is suddenly sheeted with slippery ice she then skates across on her heels to backhand Windsong, flinging her into the nearby side street.
“Hold on for God’s sake!” I yell into the whipping wind.
Frost shoots me an aggressive and slightly sexy look of battle lust. Windsong recovers herself from her indignity and glares, but there’s just enough of my fatherly disapproval to tether her fighting spirit. Again I walk between the pair of vixens, more lion tamer than superhero right now.
“Calm down,” I snap. “What the hell’s got into you?”
“Me?” Tessa yells back. “What about her?”
“I put the word out I needed to talk,” I tell Tessa. “Frost’s answering the call.”
“Booty call if you want it,” Frost says.
Tessa immediately flares again, but I grab her by the front of her jacket and wrestle her into place, eyes close to hers, scowling, shaking my head to tell her this isn’t the time or place. Another one of my signature do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do moments. I already have grave reservations about Tessa’s whole superhero career and I’m not even sure she could take Frost, who isn’t exactly a Titan-level opponent. But if they want to go at each other like a pair of alley cats, they can do it on their own time.
With my daughter pacified briefly, I move closer to a flushed-looking Frost, as fiery as she ever gets with a touch of rose to her bluish angular cheeks.
There comes a distant booming like of a faraway detonation, and though I hear a few equally faint yells of panic, for now I remain in the moment, eyes locked on Frost. It’s hard to believe yet another distraction is going to kill the moment for me.
“Someone killed Sal Doro to get information on me,” I tell her in a voice of utmost seriousness. “As one blackmailer to another, I thought you might be able to give me a lead.”
Zephyr 17.2 “A Chorus Of Alarm”
THE CITY IS breaking into a chorus of alarm. Were it an organism, zoologists would be able to classify the type of disturbance by the nature of those noises: the bleeping of disturbed car alarms, the panicked shrieks of crowds, the tramping of feet into the refuge of the Atlantic City subway, the calls for calm from scattered and beleaguered police.
Even Frost registers the call to action, but I grab her by one narrow upper arm, the mink coat hanging down fetchingly and entirely by her not-so-innocent design.
“Why should I tell you anything, Zephyr?” she hisses. “Have you forgotten the last time we were close like this? Our child – or son – preferred to die than be the product of our union.”
“What does that tell you?” I snap. “He didn’t choose death,” I add slightly more soothingly, remembering strategy and a degree of kindness’s needed here if I’m going to get what I want. “He chose non-existence. It’s as valid a choice as any and less painful than suicide. Hastening the inevitable, if you will.”
“He was perfect,” Frost says, starting to break down.
I resist the urge to slap her into attention. I gently squeeze her arm instead.
“Focus, Frost. What do you know about Sal Doro’s murder?”
“I don’t know a damned thing,” she replies, wrenching her arm free.
I follow her a few paces down the side street and we see the first of the people streaming past at the end of the block, Tessa hovering behind me with growing concern at this other disturbance that as yet remains a mystery.
“You’re one of the only people who know my secret identity,” I yell after Frost’s back. “Knowing you, you aren’t the only one who knows that. Who’ve
you been shooting your mouth off to?”
“Manners, Zephyr,” Frost cautions, haughtiness the wounded woman’s only refuge as she wipes at tears that become frozen trickles the moment they form. “I might know something.”
“Then tell him!” Tessa yells, gesturing wildly at the growing crowds surging past our twenty.
“Jesus Frost,” I sigh loudly and take another deep breath. “You know I’d really appreciate anything you could tell me.”
“And what will you do for me?”
“No. You know I’m done with the whole inseminating-you-to-make-the-master-race thing you’ve been into the past few years.”
I look askance, catching Tessa’s pained face as she blanches. I shrug helplessly. Women dig a hero, what can I say? And some women are fucking crazy. Especially this one. I turn back to her expectantly.
“Someone approached me. Offered cash for me to spill.”
“Did you?”
“You’d be dead by now if I did that,” Frost says with a certain world weariness of her own that catches me off guard.
“Don’t bet on it,” I reply. “But . . . thanks. Who was it?”
“He didn’t identify himself, plus he was masked. Had a voice scrambler.”
“Crimson . . . Cowl? No,” I say as quickly. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Wasn’t anyone I’ve seen before,” Frost says. “Whoever they are, they’re pissed.”
“They?”
“This was just a front guy. You had anyone try and take you out in public in the past few months without any apparent reason?”
I think immediately to the clockwork ninja attack and then my visit from the mysterious woman assassin Q. I nod. Awareness dawning.
“Jesus,” I say slowly. “Someone really wants me dead.”
“And they’ve failed to take you out in public. So they’re making it personal.”
I look back at Frost slowly and nod and one of the short-order cooks emerge from the diner and rushes up to us waving a smart phone showing an image of what looks like God Almighty himself kicking over buildings and destroying a goodly portion of downtown.
*
WINDSONG AND I vault into the air, as much of a farewell today as Frost is going to get. True to the intelligence online, we can immediately see an enormous burly head and shoulders projecting above the eight-storey roofline several streets over. Long tangled grey-streaked hair merges with a gruesome beard and furrowed brows that turn our way like searchlights plosi by darkness, though at first we’re little more than pinpricks emerging out of the fallow midafternoon sun.
“I recognize this guy,” I call to my daughter as we fly in two-person formation and I signal a curve away from a direct confrontation.
“I don’t,” she yells back, which I know is significant for she who prides herself on an encyclopedic knowledge of the super set.
“Before your time. Name’s Hubris.”
“Where’s his costume?”
Indeed the big guy appears to be wearing nothing more than a vast pair of elasticated white shorts. It is years now since I saw him last, but he’s in pretty good shape despite the evident signs of aging. It’s how he’s going up top that is more the worry as he opens his cave-like mouth and howls like a neutered beast, turning at the waist to smash his giant fist through the top floor of the closest building.
In the streets below, cops and firefighters erect hasty barricades, but they are waiting – whether for superheroes to swoop in and save the day or some better unknown option, I cannot say. For now though, it’s clear all the city has between him and them is us.
Tessa hovers behind me and my gesture of caution.
“Hang back. I’m gonna try and talk some sense into him.”
“You don’t see a mask do that every day,” she sniggers.
“Hey, I’m not the one who just tried to start a bar room brawl with a Mafioso super-villainess for no reason, OK?”
“It wasn’t a bar. It was a diner.”
“You get my point.”
I jet across the intervening distance and deliberately buzz under Hubris’ nose. He used to wear a brown and gold costume, and while he looks nothing like his former self compared to the uncanny likeness he now bears to the pissed off god of old Israel, those preternaturally black eyes and the distinctive power mark him for my past foe.
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” he roars as I flit past, fist taking out the top of the opposite roof, bricks and plaster and part of a billboard raining down on the thankfully now abandoned streets below.
“Hubris! Settle down. It’s me, Zephyr.”
“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND I DON’T CARE!”
I’m about to deliver a witty rejoinder (it’s still coming to me) when his huge hand effortlessly snatches me out of midair and I have half a second to contemplate the terror of being trapped before he powers up and hurls me like a badly-designed baseball.
Tumbling out of control, I only just manage to kick in my powers before I smash into the domed upper floor of a nearby reconstructed pre-Kirlian city library a quarter-mile from where the cranky ex-villain continues to rampage. As he brings down both fists on buildings in what can only be described as a petulant and almost childish rage, his emotion-malformed rant echoes across the city undercut by sirens and police instructions dopplered on klaxons.
“I want to live!” the huge man bawls. “I want my freedom! I don’t want to be trapped you bastard piece-of-shit cunts! I want my time back!”
I angle back towards him, moving more cautiously as Hubris trudges around the next side street and catches a glimpse of a police roadblock. His swarthy face cracks into fresh fury as he lumbers forward, crouching to pick up and flip a double-deck tour bus press-ganged into the barricade. In horror, I watch as glass and others bits and pieces rain from the flying bus as it arcs towards surging masses of civilians gathered what they believe is a safe distance from the disaster zone.
The greying sky blackens in an instant and familiar thunder rumbles overhead as a flash of lightning carves out of the gloom to strike the bus in midair, halting its deadly transit and slamming it into the side of a nearby building, embedding the damned thing nose-first three floors above crouching and completely hapless pedestrians. The worst they get is a rain of debris. I see a woman literally defend herself with an umbrella before wrenching my gaze back in pride at the figure of my daughter Windsong floating above a nearby rooftop.
“Good catch,” I tell her, beaming.
Tessa almost blushes at the compliment, but still I warn her to hang back as I swoop towards Hubris who continues to mewl about his woes and the years robbed from him in cold storage at White Nine.
The cops open fire with a barrage of what almost seem like pop-guns as Hubris kicks one, then another police cruiser so they hurtle through the air down the corridor between the high rises towards Tessa and me. I catch one, not so much taking the weight myself as acting like a midair fulcrum to toss it onto the closest roof, but the second one caroms down onto the street and explodes in shards of scrap metal and glass and it might be all over for a huddle of cops and pedestrians led by a Catholic priest if it wasn’t for a sudden wall of ice that leaps into being as a last line of defense. The cruiser smashes to a halt in it at about the same time Frost emerges from a corresponding alleyway, the adulation of those nearby not an easy fit on her haughty, angular mug.
I nod to my platinum-tressed nemesis and hurtle back towards Hubris.
“Hey!” I yell at him. “Time to sit the fuck down and come quietly or we’re going to have to drag you back to prison the hard way.”
Zephyr 17.3 “Senior Management”
HUBRIS’ DARK BROWS furrow in disbelief and anger at the impunity of the tiny man daring to defy him. More than a decade’s rage swells in his meaty fists as he swings at me in the air, but like the gnat I am, I backflip and cartwheel out of the way and follow up with a hundred thousand volt rejoinder that practically lights up his skeleton. All the same, they come this big, it
means when they fall it’s all the more impressive. It’s getting to that point that’s the challenge.
Frost advances through the police barricade almost like she has a special pass, and as she approaches, the rain-splattered streets around her become icy and cold. At once Hubris struggles to stand on this treacherous footing and when his feet slip out from beneath him, he clutches the nearest nine-floor office block and almost crushes it like a beer can in his panic.
Being unmanned this way doesn’t sit well with a guy who always fancied himself a living god. Sneering angrily, Hubris throws huge chunks of masonry and internal wall. I dodge and dive out of the way of the worst of it, ignoring stray bricks that bounce off my arms as I disintegrate what looks like a senior management office desk barreling towards me in a mahogany streak. Down below, Frost skates away across the rink of her own creation as bricks and other construction crap rain down like a broken space shuttle on re-entry. I see her get into the shelter of the porte-cochere of a nearby Neo-Classical-inspired architectural con job.
“Snap,” I say to myself, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden for actually using that word aloud. “Gotta do something, man.”
Windsong flits by. “What do you say, chief?”
“Thunder and lightning, baby,” I cry back. “Give this fucker some shock and awe. Oops, sorry honey. Gotta watch the potty mouth.”
But Tessa only laughs, veering away and upwards on an air current under her control as the skies darken a tad further and a steady pelting rain starts up.
It’s good news for Frost. By default, the pooling rain turns to freezing slush and soon the rain is snowing down at a falling height of about ten foot off the ground. Thunderstorm in the heavens and a blizzard at street level, or so it would appear to the naïve eye.
This leaves it to me to play attack dog.
With Hubris in my sights, I streak directly for him, crossing my forearms to drive my elbows forward as I come as close to hitting Mach as I can at such a short distance.
The collision is like a close-range round from a tank – for me and Hubris both – and he staggers backwards, slips on the ice and trips as I recoil away, spinning to slow myself as I twist upwards and avoid his gigantic grasping fingers in my wake. If I had a cloak right now I’d be doomed. Instead, I am up and punching through Tessa’s hastily conjured cloud cover, catching a glimpse of cold blue skies before I pause at the zenith, gravity drawing me back plunging through the brimming thunderheads in time to see a veritable battery of lightning strikes pummel Hubris from head to reclining toe.
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