“Good to see you keeping up,” I say.
“Yeah, but I’ll wait here for you.”
“Really?”
“This isn’t my beef, Zephyr. I’m just the taxi.”
“There’s more guys with guns out here.”
Taciturn, Portal nods. “I can handle them.”
I leave him to it and throw open the door, at once flinching at the motion-sensing klaxon alarm as I move into a chic carpeted hallway, steel light fittings and luxurious cream color scheme, tasteful postmodern paintings hanging on the wall nearly identical to what you might get from an Ikea, except in a much more expensive frame. The corridor opens into a submerged, darkly-lit chamber, just the light of a television tuned to a dead channel on the far wall throwing the furniture into a darkened landscape.
The noise of the siren bleeds out behind me, then cuts off completely.
Then I notice the girl sitting in the middle of the floor.
At first I think it is the Demoness herself. A waterfall of thick black hair hangs from the lithe figure’s bowed head, pose like a dancer at rest on the wooden boards. Without the benefit of proper light, when she turns her face to me it remains all but featureless.
“Where is she?” I ask.
The girl has a sheaf of paper on the ground beside her. Looking at me, she lifts a paper airplane and throws it, my flickering grimace disappearing as it hurtles sharp as a thrown knife at me and I dart aside, the passing wing slashing the upper arm of my costume that immediately knits closed, the fabric oozing anticoagulants to seal the wound.
I’m still moving as I see the girl come off the ground as graceful as the ballet dancer she so resembles, a handful of the self-folded planes in her hand she throws almost languidly one after the other.
I dodge, duck aside, then take one of the planes right in the breast, the sharp point somehow piercing into me and eliciting a gasp as I wrench the tiny plane free and crush it, incinerated in my electrified grasp. I reply with an open-palm blast, but the girl performs a hands-free somersault to avoid my attack which disintegrates one of the low-rise sofas, and before I’m really able to track her, she runs up the nearest wall, backflips off like a big wave surfer, and collides into me with slender yet muscular thighs wrapped about my neck. By main force and sheer weight alone, I peel backwards under the assault as she twists and interlocks her legs into a flying choke hold that has me gasping on my back like a fish out of water, desperately snaking my hand around to clutch her ankle before channeling charge into her slim body.
Somehow, the girl is up and ready to go again, crouched in a feral pose with her black spider silk hair clinging to her bare arms and legs. I am reminded momentarily of my assassin Q, but with the changing light I get a glimpse into the Japanese features of the girl in front of me as my fist curls, grimace settling in for the winter.
Before I can warn her of my utter willingness to cripple her for life, another series of concealed lights flick on behind us, barely revealing an additional adjoining chamber elevated above the one we are in, a figure kneeling at the end of a low traditional Japanese table visible only in silhouette.
“Leave him,” Yoko Ono’s voice rings out.
“Leave him?” I tease, straightening as I note the girl’s obedience. “It’s your bodyguard here who just got a stay of execution.”
“She is not my bodyguard. She is my daughter . . . and your sister.”
Zephyr 18.7 “A Perfect Instrument Of Death”
MY EYES BULGE out of my head as I reassess the deadly black-haired nymph before me, then the Demoness’ tired but throaty laugh drifts down from the slightly elevated chamber.
“Ah, but I forget, you are not one of the Progeny after all, are you, Zephyr? Therefore Izuka is no sibling of yours. She is my one and only child. My precious.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, dismissing the girl with a look as I move through the dimly lit living space and mount the elegant tiered steps to the dining chamber, Ono still visible as little more than a silhouette in a kimono at the long table’s end.
“Why are you here, Zephyr?”
“You know why.”
“If I ask a question, it is not for my own amusement,” she says, rising in one fluid motion and moving into the subtle lamplight to reveal haggard and timeworn features beneath a huge elaborate pile of black hair carefully arranged atop her skull.
It is the first time I have seen her like this, the shapeshifter normally preferring to mimic youth to the degree it somehow comes as a shock to me to see her so old, like it pulls at a part of me who knows once this monster impersonated my dead mother.
“You’ve been trying to kill me,” I tell her with a sudden lump in my throat. “Here’s your chance.”
“Izuka is more up to that task than you might realize, Zephyr,” Ono says.
She moves discreetly around me, the gown in that best tradition of Japanese misdirection concealing her actual movements.
“She is my daughter, but she did not inherit my powers. She is a natural born killer. A perfect instrument of death. That is her ability, borne of her special bloodline. But I have not made any efforts on your life since you slew Arsenal and turned my own children against me.”
“Your children?” I scowl.
“The Progeny. You saved them from the android. Now they question everything they were raised to believe, the important lies we all accepted as the necessary truths to be ready for Judgement Day.”
I shake my head at her mysticism, knowing it must be like scrambled eggs inside her skull with the life she’s lived and the post-hypnotic strings Lennon still controls, despite having been vanished for most of the past year since escaping the confines of the prison of my skull.
“Don’t play word games, Demoness,” I say. “I know how you live on appearances. Whether you hired assassins or tried to kill me directly, I know it’s you behind these attacks.”
“Then you believe wrong,” she says.
Ono opens her palm and the room brightens. By that light I see how pebbled and awful her skin has become, reminding me of what I mistook to be lizard skin when last I saw her, here in Japan but four hundred years ago. She hasn’t aged well.
“What are you saying, woman?”
“I am no threat to you,” she says. “My life has played out. It’s over, for me. We each get one chance, and mine was misspent in service to a lie I never even knew I’d been told.”
Before my eyes, Ono shifts and becomes my dead mother George.
The trendy grey buzz cut, thick plastic-rimmed glasses – the detail is perfect, painful, even the angora turtleneck something forgotten from my childhood plunges back into the Real, triggering sense memories lost to dreams and moments of half-awakeness. My hand lifts of its own accord until I still it violently, vulnerability crushed into a fist knowing the girl Izuka watches.
“Joseph,” she says softly in George’s voice.
“Don’t do this to me,” I say. “Please.”
“I miss my little boy.”
Tears roll down the simulacra’s cheeks. I clamp my mouth and jaw in a hard line to avoid spilling into emotion like disappearing into a foreign country and shake my head curtly.
“Go to hell. You killed her. You said so yourself.”
“I killed her so I could become her,” Ono says. “I loved you. I had no choice. He made it so, for as long as I believed you were one of his brood I was to watch over you and keep you safe.”
“Well, I’m not one of his.”
“I know that, but in my heart . . . what’s left of my heart. . . .”
I try to remind myself this whole affair was blown open when Ono attacked my birth mother, at a conscious level masquerading as George only to keep Lennon’s whereabouts safe forever, like the watchdog he had set her to be. The two conflicting orders combined into one irreconcilable psychosis. Dangerously so. Just another dysfunctional family in a fatal double bind. But it was Arsenal who killed Maxine, incinerating her despite her own fire-control po
wers. I shake my head, conscious mind not quite able to focus on this area of deep trauma and my intuition knowing there are still too many missing pieces of the puzzle that don’t, can’t, shouldn’t or never can add up.
“I watched over you,” the shapeshifter continues. “On so many nights, I sat by your bed, watched you grow, admiring you, loving you. Stepping in and out of your life like a ghost.”
Ono steps forward. Even the smell is the same, transporting me to those vulnerable years. I barely fight as she presses into me, smaller now than she once was compared to the child I can never be again. Tears course down my face even as I shake my head at the stupidity of this moment, the Japanese girl watching slack-jawed yet inscrutable from the corner, memories of tearing Ono’s spine from her back on another world at one and the same time quenching yet plosio the anger I take out on her plush sweater like I am little more than a baby house cat, kneading at the fabric as small weak mewling noises escape my constricted larynx.
“I could kill you. Should kill you,” I stammer.
“I am dying, alone, in this house.”
“You have your daughter,” I say.
“No,” Ono gasps and replies. “Look closer.”
And I break away, staring back at the girl embracing the corner of the room, cold black eyes regarding us, studying us like might an alien entomologist, the pin with which she will nail us both to her specimen table concealed behind her back.
Slowly, Izuka reaches to her chin and there’s a subtle movement before her face splits down the middle and each half shunts aside to reveal circuitry and fiber-optics, two camera-like eyes nestled in the poly-alloy orbits of her facial structure.
“My girl died when she was still young,” Ono says. “My little child. For many years, you were my comfort, Joseph, until we could remake her. Until we had the technology.”
“Jesus Christ,” I exhale softly.
Georgia’s doppelganger reaches out for me again, but I bat her hand away.
“I killed you once already. That was enough for me. You stay here and rot and we don’t have any need to cross paths again. Keep away from my family, or you’ll wish you died much earlier than now.”
I exit the chamber with a brutal certainty I certainly don’t feel.
Izuka’s face plate slides back together and she turns to watch me go, a product of the very best technology Paladin Corp can obviously muster – and just another potential thorn in my side going into the future.
Portal lurks in the garage, pinned down by a squadron of hesitant, heavily-armed goons. I pat him on the shoulder and nod and hope he can’t see I’ve been crying, and we alight back to Atlantic City.
*
IGNORING THE FRIGHTENED Japanese security guard on the roof, but staying him with my glare, we move to the roof’s edge back in the real world and the undeniable brightness of day. I test the roof-top door of the Flyaway, but it’s locked, the crowds departed, the day staff taking to the night’s excess with disinfectant and linoleum knives.
“Thanks for the lift,” I say to Portal.
“Any time,” he replies, more enthusiastic than before, a look on his face like I’ve seen on skydivers after the big jump.
I scoop out my phone and check the errant message from Tessa: Got 2 talk 2 u abt the BOOK OK pops? I grunt and delete.
I look back at Portal and he’s still there. I give him my best “what?” shrug and he catches himself on.
“I’ll be going then,” he says.
Hovering still. He digs out a business card and gives it to me, looking away like the cheap act shames him.
“You have a card?”
I squint, looking at the number, stopping myself tossing it away like a chocolate bar wrapper before sliding it into my belt instead.
“Yeah, it was this idea we had . . . at one point . . . you know, for the career.”
“Uh-huh.”
“OK well, thanks again, Zephyr.”
He nods, making a portal at about the same moment as he probably wonders why he’s the one thanking me, but then he’s gone to parts unknown and my gaze falls on the frightened security guard. I stride over and snatch the weapon from his hands and snap it in three and nod, salute him farewell, then vault in the sky twisting and away just as my phone starts ringing once more.
Zephyr 18.8 “To Admit The Day”
THE PARTY CONTINUES at Twilight’s inner city crash pad, apparently. Unlike the disused digs the big guy has afforded me, the wannabe Mafioso owns a tasteful three-story brownstone in a largely unscathed part of the old outer boroughs, the smell of the river close by, and not necessarily in a bad way.
It’s a strange place in which to find myself, soaring above the gentrified streets with their dappled street trees, museum piece street furniture, and at nearly midday, a languid vibe as well-upholstered mothers return from morning yoga and chai and various other denizens of the secretive, well-to-do arcology go about their daily routines. If I hadn’t just had the address shouted at me somewhat salubriously above the noise of wind shear by the man himself, I could track the debauchery by its soundtrack, not just the sound of carousing, but lounge music with an insistent pulse shaking the antique brickwork and drawing the wrathful yet heads-down gazes of the other tenants coming and going from nearby buildings.
There is an atrium roof yawning open to admit the day, or maybe just to release the fumes as I swing in and spy Twilight lounging on a Turkish divan in the white-tiled space, arm casual around Mariah Carey’s shoulder as Katy Perry and Ray Parker Jr try to work a huge bong in their clearly befuddled states. Also in the buzzing boudoir: Tony Sabato Jr, Eminem, Rebecca Black, Marky Mark, several models in bona fide school girl outfits who are way too old for that look, plus a few assorted other hangers-on. The only mask is a pissed off-looking Sun Man, who I haven’t seen around in literally ages, slumped in the corner in close cahoots with a beautiful black girl with dreads down to her rear end. I give a fey wave and the prick practically snubs me, a reluctant nod as much a fob off as anything as I stand there huffing and puffing in the middle of the room, the literal straight man for once.
Eminem catches my eye and gives me that wannabe tough guy nod. I smile all non-committal and amble over to Twilight, who takes about thirty seconds for his eyes to find their way up to mine.
“Zephyr, you’re here at last,” he says.
“You only called me about ten minutes ago. Remember?”
“Is that all? Sorry. We just did some Special K.”
I sigh, knowing which way this is going. There’s a copy of yesterday’s paper on a marble-topped side table I snatch as I pass through the room with metaphoric storm clouds rumbling around my shoulders.
“I’m going to take a shit,” I say, opening the door and finding my own way out.
*
LATER, I HAVE cooked and eaten pretty much anything and everything edible in the apartment’s kitchen, a huge traffic crash of pans and plates in the sink like evidence of a massacre, a thin blue layer of smoke clinging to the underside of the ceiling, the kitchen CD player gently shuffling through a jazz remix of the latest Britney Spears album.
I raise the blinds, checking out over the darkening neighborhood, a filmic blue presaging the night like the superimposition of a dream over the affluent precinct.
The kitchen door crashes open and Twilight stands there in full regalia, seemingly leaning for support on a diminutive actress who has an unmistakably flushed, fresh-from-fucking look on her Aryan features despite my suspicions Twilight himself has remained hard at work trying to achieve a world-class narcotic stupor.
“I’m ready,” he says with enviable gravitas.
I nod. “Can we do this without the peanut gallery?”
“I just need my adepts,” he says.
“Adepts?” I sigh. “Really?”
I follow him glumly, avoiding the atrium chamber where the various two-bit celebrities are either passed out, fornicating, or have departed, moving instead up a carpeted back stairway
to the next floor and the ubiquitous private reading room, electric candles forever at half mast, furnishings decorated like from a story by Poe, just a whiff of hashish, incense, cologne, semen and lime juice, not necessarily in that order. A huge portrait of a gent I do not recognize and eventually learn Twilight doesn’t know either dominates the far wall above a wooden desk engraved with gargoyles and various other bas relief carvings the master of the house obviously feels is necessary to underscore the vibe. Almost the moment we enter, a walnut-paneled door beside the huge painting opens and three barefoot hooded figures enter wearing black crushed velvet robes, the last one giggling to herself and stumbling in her addled state.
Between various over-stuffed couches and divans across from the desk and the claustrophobia-inducing bookcases, I realize we are standing in the middle of a chalked-out magickal circle of even greater-than-usual eccentricity. Trying not to sound like sighing gruffly is my only setting right now, I nod with impatience to my idiot savant pal and move to one side, extricating myself from the strange ritual as the three models-cum-school girls each grab a brazier, an athame and a candlestick and proceed to circle the circle several times, the last and cutest of the nearly middle-aged women still stumbling as she goes. Twilight, meanwhile, wears a maddeningly benevolent smile I know is only possible by dint of his heavy self-medication, and after a few beats he peels off his cloak and discards it and starts to undress.
Completely.
“Is this really necessary?”
“Do you want the augury to find Matrioshka or not?” he asks.
“Can’t we do it without, you know, you getting naked and shit, dude?”
“No. No we cannot.”
He grins and pulls the girl with the ceremonial dagger out of the circuit and lifts her robe at the same time as she acquiesces to kneeling on all fours in the middle of the circle, whereupon Twilight promptly mounts her like a seasoned professional, going the crouch rather than the kneel, if you get the picture, a quick professional dab of spit gaining him access that frankly doesn’t look like it’d be too difficult anyway, and then he ruts away while the other two ex-models continue their laps.
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