The giant roars, arms flailing like a toddler unable to get off his back, which means the ground floor entries to the buildings lining the street are collateral damage.
I dive, throwing a lightning bolt of my own as I see Frost, having abandoned her fur coat, leaping and springing through the lovingly restored and now falling facades of the office buildings, stone and glass crashing around her as she uses her ice blasts to artfully deflect the most deadly debris until I come along, sweeping her into my arms and up to alight on the gargoyle-encrusted corner of a nearby overlooking tenement.
“Whew!” Frost says, eyes sparkling as she slithers from my hold, her long arms still wrapped around my neck. “You know how to get a girl going.”
“You came to help,” I say, begrudgingly aroused by the proximity to her cold firm flesh. “Least you deserve is equal treatment.”
I forcibly disengage and move to where we can see Hubris shrinking down to normal human size as weakness and semiconsciousness overwhelm him. I pat Frost on the ass, effectively leaving her stranded for now as I leap down to the sidewalk.
Police and other emergency workers stream into the area, seemingly pursued by live news camera crews, a handful of civic-minded civilians patting me and trying to shake my hand as I wade with the rest of them towards where Hubris lays.
The bruised and battered-looking demigod rolls onto his side panting and looks at me through the pressing throng he ignores to stab me with his piercing black gaze.
“Twelve years, Zephyr,” he says. “We’ve both aged, but you’ve lived your life. Mine’s been taken from me!”
“You threw yours away, you fool,” I growl, looming over him with my fists clenched in case he gets a second wind.
But it’s not exhaustion or pain that defeats him. He expels another furious breath and lies back on the freezing bitumen in a surrender not so much to the authorities as to the void itself. A pair of cops quickly wrestle Hubris’ bullish arms behind his back and cuff him, not realizing the big man, still with a few inches on me, could break free of them any moment if he chose.
*
THE EMERGENCY HAS taken a little out of me too, which is all the excuse I can really muster for why I am still standing, finishing up shooting the shit with the news guys for the cameras, smug-as-a-bug grin still in place when Annie Black and agent Taurus step through the tape-strewn area and corral me.
“Well looky who we have here,” the real life minotaur Taurus says.
Apart from the thick mat of hair, his biceps look like Hubris’ thighs – more muscle than anyone sensibly knows what to do with. His small brown eyes pick over me with that ever-present sense of street smarts if not outright intellect, but I look away, interpelated into the juvenile delinquent’s role yet again by his federal presumptions.
“Thought I smelled something bad,” I say. “Didn’t know the circus was in town.”
“You’ve got a hide calling us the circus,” Taurus says.
“I’ve got a hide? I can’t believe you just walked into that one.”
“Zephyr, shut the fuck up,” Taurus snaps.
I grin, the rebuke like a badge of honor, turning my mischievous gaze in the more palatable direction of Miss Black, who finishes up flashing her official parahuman affairs division badge in a couple of cops’ faces.
“Hey Annie,” I nod to her. “Long time no see.”
“All the same to me,” she says. “You solo on this one?”
“Jesus Annie, where’s the love?”
The question clearly discomforts her. The female agent looks askance to her partner and moves off into the wider crime scene leaving Taurus and me together.
“There’s an alert out for you Zephyr and I am glad it’s me who gets to serve it. Here,” the minotaur says, offering me a folded slip of printed officialdom I stare at like he’s just offered to share boogers.
“What the hell is that?”
“Lab Camp order,” Annie says from about ten yards away, crouched just like a real detective using a pen to lift chunks of asphalt broken into big scab-like plates by Hubris’ fall to earth.
“Lab Camp? What the fuck?” I say in a voice dripping with childish ire.
“Consequences of registration, Zephyr,” Taurus says. “There’s the little outstanding matter of you freeing four omega-level villains from federal custody.”
“I don’t see what the two’ve got to do with each other.”
“Call it a compromise,” Annie says from the side. “The powers that be don’t think we can prosecute you for your actions given the civic interests involved, but we can and will invoke the powers of the Mirror Act to compel you into month-long participation in our scientific research.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No one does revenge like a bureaucracy-heavy Government law enforcement agency, Zeph,” Annie all but laughs at me.
“Hang on, hang on,” I say, mind stalling. “What if there was something else I could give you?”
The two agents swap reluctant but curious looks. Taurus sniffs, leaving it to Annie to voice their question.
“It’d better be good.”
*
SO I OUTLINE Atlantic City’s new super-powered drug problem – about which I am pleased to see the Fucking Big Idiots know nothing. As I talk, I even start to turn myself on to the idea, threading a plot that goes from the streets of Atlantic City to the bedrooms of Twilight’s Cosa Nostra and back to the raid on Riker’s Island a year ago.
“OK, you’ve got some breathing space,” Annie says after a quick confab with her partner and about six hurried phone calls. “You bring us some solid leads on this Glow stuff or help enforce prosecutions and you may just earn yourself a stay of execution from spending the next month with thermometers in every hole. But this has to pay off, Zephyr. Almost every reigning committee member in the agency wants to see you strung up by the balls and you don’t have a lot of sympathy left with us ground troops either, got it? So it’s this, or the Lab Camp is just the start of the retribution these guys can dream up for a glamour puss like you who’s gone too long in the public eye without the . . . requisite consequences.”
She finishes with a cruel smile.
“Jesus Annie, what got into you?”
“You did, you self-absorbed piece of shit.”
Annie whirls on her heel, irritated beyond belief as she nods to Taurus and they depart, me belatedly realizing who really wears the pants in that relationship.
Zephyr 17.4 “One Clean Sweep”
I DON’T WASTE time soliloquizing about my fate, hoping instead that unlike my daughter, Frost didn’t do a runner the moment the Feds arrived.
I find her skulking in an alleyway trying to wipe soot from her fur coat. She looks up at me barely batting an eyelash, like a woman who thought our next meeting in a deserted alleyway was always imminent.
“Your friends say hi?”
“My friends at the FBI have a strong interest in you from that job you pulled at White Nine, Frost. Lucky for you I just talked ‘em out of a kill order.”
“A ‘kill order’? They don’t have those, surely?”
“You want to bet on that?”
“I’m not the betting type,” she answers sulkily. “I don’t like to lose.”
Shrugging back into her coat, Frost asks, “What’s the deal with your big biblical friend back there? I thought all your little super pals would’ve come running.”
“City seems to be in low supply at the moment,” I say. “Ironic when non-costumed super-powered freaks are only a hundred bucks a pop, right?”
Frost gets a cagey look she can’t completely expunge before I pounce on it.
“Tell me what you know, toots.”
She stares at me a moment, aggrieved. I don’t know if it’s because I called her “toots” or she’s about to break some secret Cosa Nostra life code. Turns out its neither.
“Fine, but not here,” she says, and starts off down the alley.
*
I HAVE BARELY any money and I’m racking up a line of drug credit with the Mob to the tune of a hundred dollars per day, but Frost still insists on me buying her lunch at Crayons. Fortunately, we get ushered past the waiting line by dint of our elevated status. A waitress who I think once gave me a handjob here serves us chilled white wine barely flustered as Frost eyes down the menu, taking her time with it and me, teasing out this tense little tête-à-tête that refuses to unfold the way I want.
“Listen honey, last time I ate out there was an attempt on my life, so hurry up and fucking order,” I say unfortunately loud enough that the other patrons get an earful and draw quite wrong conclusions, in my opinion, about Zephyr being an unconscionable ass.
Frost demurely orders the salad and I go a steak now I know at least Frost is a cheap date. Another bottle of wine arrives, the waitress telling me it’s courtesy of Senator Keenan, who I later glimpse fairy-waving at me from the bar. I grin and bear it, downing the bubbles faster’n they can pop as Frost tries to make small talk despite reducing the air temperature in the restaurant to below chilly to an ensuing slew of customer complaints.
“Tell me about Glow.”
“It’s new. A guy called Leech is heading up the operation. Limited supply right now while they test the market.”
“Jesus, sounds like you studied marketing or something.”
“I actually did, once, in another life,” she says wistfully. “The substance was volatile in the early days. There was a scientist working on one of the first incarnations. Dr Martin Thurson.”
“That name’s familiar somehow,” I say.
“Guy took the drug himself. Inspired by Barry Marshall I guess.”
“Who?”
“Anyway, he went missing for a few weeks and later we found out he’d turned into some kind of human bug-guy and that’s the last we heard of him,” Frost says. “After that, order came down from the Toecutter to find the Kingmaker.”
“Azzurro’s dead now.”
“But his legacy lives on . . . in drugs,” Frost says crisply and downs the contents of her wine glass as her salad arrives and then remains untouched. “It was his half-brother Stan Vinci, Plastic Stan, calling the shots. Kingmaker’s who we were trying to get to when we went to boost Crescendo from White Nine. Didn’t work. Never got the prick’s trail after that.”
“So?”
“There’s a mutant called Farmakon,” Frost says. “A human drug distillery.”
She stares off into the distance like she’s lost interest in the conversation, which of course she has, perhaps the fact playing over and over in the lonely theatre of her mind we’re only sitting pretty together like this because I want this info – and not her and her little line of potential blue-skinned offspring.
“This Farmakon guy made the drug?”
“Initially,” Frost says and sighs, irritated briefly that she has to pour for herself as she refills the glass and then mine. “The drug lab, it synthesizes the formula from the stuff he made to order. He’s missing now too.”
“Farmakon?”
Frost nods.
“So tell me,” I say to her slowly. “What does Twilight know about all this?”
*
THE BIG GUY says he’ll be out later, holding court as he likes to at the Flyaway.
As always when it comes to Twilight, I’m angrier than I really understand. Maybe it’s my repressed issues to do with him masquerading as a hot chick to clean my clock eight ways from Sunday. (Yes, I said clock.) Maybe it’s having my big brother issues betrayed. Hell, maybe it’s daddy issues. He’s got enough for both of us though with his father leaving the east coast’s biggest criminal syndicate to be governed in Twilight’s name by his now dead uncle. Not easy for a young Wop kid growing up with an interest in black magic and glam metal. Hell, what am I even saying?
I hit the Flyaway too early for Twilight, who would be called Midnight if judged on his clubbing habits alone. Sunday night and the trade is steady for a horse market in human flesh, though nothing like the wall-to-wall hardbodies it’ll be by end-of-week. In the club tonight I spy Bono and the Edge, a young hero called Mandelbrot and the chameleon huntress Calliope, though tonight she is definitely cruising rather than hunting, and elsewhere I recognize Jerry Seinfeld, Edward Norton, Chow Yun-Fat, Melissa Leo, Drew Carey, Art Garfunkel, Katy Perry, Naomi Campbell, Naomi Klein, Warren Hately, Marc Lepine, Hugh Grant, John Malkovich, Ken Watanabe, Rick Astley and Fergal Sharkey. I am a huge fan of the latter two and make sure I get some elbow time, trying to maintain my cool remembering I’m the one who can (mostly) bend metal bars in my bare hands, buying a round of drinks and politely declining Rick’s offer of some cocaine in the men’s room while managing to sound somehow like a confused Japanese businessman offered a blowjob by a homeless dude.
I linger close to this Mandelbrot guy for a bit too, scornful but restrained when it comes to his snappy black cloak and the sorcerous-looking red glyph in the middle of his chest, the gold chain between the labia of his cloak (I can call them that, right?) giving off the young wizard vibe beneath a face which I can’t tell if it is more James Dean or Morrissey. He’s intent on chatting up that black girl from that show about the spoiled young Hollywood college kids who are all secretly a coven of serial killers, so I don’t get the chance to ask him how come he’s here and not in mystical Afghanistan with apparently more than half the city’s other supers. I wind up back at the bar and down back-to-back Stolis and swallow a pill Fergal Sharkey slips me that I later realize was probably a suppository. Works a treat all the same as a serene fug slides behind my eyes like a force field slipping into place between the world and my sense of giving a shit, effectively disarming me just before the man himself arrives.
Twilight ostentatiously appears from a flaming green seven-pointed star which promptly sizzles out of existence despite the air smelling like burning seagulls, smoke curling off the scorch marks on the filthy pitted carpet. In about three strides he’s at my shoulder, deliberately bumping into me with a comradely grin, his shiner healed up at last as he stabs two thick fingers in the air and the barman comes back with two bottled absinthe spritzers. I take mine and sip it, only the mildest of frowns as I breathe in the green gas emerging from its freshly opened neck.
“Hey bud, how goes it?” Twilight asks.
“You’re travelling well tonight,” I say, motioning in the direction of the now vanished magical gateway.
“I couldn’t be bothered flying in from the island. Snow and fog.”
“Fair enough.”
Twilight sucks his bottle dry and sets it on the bar, gesturing again before burping green gas with a heady grin, nudging towards me with that big chin of his.
“You wanted to talk or are we off-duty?”
“No, we need to talk.”
“Shit, Zephyr. Sounds serious. Do you want to fight?”
“Not particularly,” I say. “It’d be nice to skip that step for once.”
“OK then,” he nods, mock serious, his eyes playing over the fillies in the crowd like a one-man laser scanner. “Shoot.”
“I want to talk to you about Glow.”
“Glow? Who’s that?”
His eyes don’t cease their incessant tracking of the female wildlife. I scowl gently in disbelief, waiting for a look from the big antihero that never comes. Into that pregnant silence I quaff the absinthe, nose tickling.
“You’ve been summoning demon muscle for your lieutenants,” I say at last.
“What? No I ain’t.”
“I saw them, Twilight. Your handiwork if ever there was.”
“I told you I dunno what you’re talking about, Zephyr,” Twilight says with the sudden belligerent air of a man unkeen to talk about anything. “You got questions about the Mob, you talk to my uncle, Plastic Stan. He’s running the show now.”
“I thought the evil empire fell to you when the Toecutter was killed?”
Twilight looks at me, gives one of those wha
t-do-I-know-and-what-the-fuck-do-you-care looks, suppressing irritability mayhap as he snatches the next drink from the barkeep behind us and all but forces a second bottle into my hands.
“Drink up,” he says. “Me wants to get wasted and laid, and not necessarily in that order.”
“Twilight,” I say slowly. “Your uncle’s using demon muscle to back a new drug operation that gives people fucking super-powers, dude. You’re involved in this whether you ‘wants’ to be or not.”
Twilight turns, perhaps only inadvertently looming over me as he stares a long moment, but I am relaxed because I know the look that comes a moment before the big guy starts swinging. Instead, he slowly wipes the corners of his mouth in a nervous gesture I long recognize in the repentant Catholic schoolboy he once was.
“I’ll take care of it,” he says. “Consider ‘em gone.”
“They’re already gone,” I tell him, “because I had to smash the fuckers into paste. Your uncle’s got a nasty piece of shit called Leech working for him and people are gonna get hooked on this stuff. It won’t be pretty. I know you have a hard time walking the line between your family business and your more . . . esoteric pursuits,” I say. “But this time you can’t shirk the ties that bind, pal.”
“Leech?” he says, pronouncing the name like it might be in some little known Slavic sub-dialect. “Who willingly calls themselves something like that?”
“The name’s pretty apt, from what I’ve seen.”
“Leech, huh,” he says again, meditating now.
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