“Right,” I snap. “So if one of us has been actually on a mission of global significance, then maybe we could reschedule waffle night?”
The silence that greets this comment has not existed on the Earth since men cowered in caves from saber-toothed tigers tracking the smell of the mammoth hunt. Smidgeon swallows audibly and one of the hangers-on at the back of the room teleports out (Portal, apparently). This draws my attention to Black Honey’s little group and I punch my finger at Nightwind, who for a change doesn’t seem to have anything cocky to say.
“I’ve been up to my fucking tits in an alien bloodbath trying to avert the destruction of the whole skein of this fucking universe and you let guys like this fucking jerk in?”
I shake my head, hands on my hips and going with the flow for this particular performance because the others are clearly giving it up, avoiding my gaze and shuffling backwards to let the black vinyl-clad chump fall into the natural center of the room.
“Frankly, I thought the Sentinels were a better class of hero than this.”
I turn away from the bit players and step up the mezzanine so I’m closer to my so-called co-captain Seeker, who has lost some of her icy resolve in the face of my verbal battering.
“I thought we were going to make a difference, but you guys can’t even figure out where the fuck your own teammate’s gone missing.”
I gesture over my shoulder to the lingering news holograms.
“Too busy lapping up the glory and leaving it to me to clean up the real cause of the worldquake.”
“You found the reason for the quake?” Windsong gasps, God bless her.
I nod, the gesture acidic, if I can mix descriptors like that.
“That’s right. And I don’t know why I was defending you people. Clinging to you people. Worried for one fucking second about you people, when there are others on this planet doing all the heavy lifting and asking for zero fucking credit.”
My fury spent, like some sociopath or something I only now begin to register the hurt and the train wreck of recriminations hurtling through space-time towards me. And so like any truly superior combatant, I turn and sweep from the room before any of this shit can pile up.
Zephyr 6.4 “A Better Class Of Hero”
I DREAD THE sound of clattering footfalls behind me, but it is only Windsong, who of course is exempt and excused from my wrath. She comes alongside me like the junior that she is, replete in our public identities and prevented from anything other than the comradely show of affection I gift her as I throw an arm around her shoulders.
“Dad, is it true you tracked the worldquake to its source?”
“Howdy, sugar. Sorry I didn’t return any of your calls.”
“Calls? I haven’t been calling you.”
“Oh,” I say and frown, agog momentarily at what this might mean. “I just assumed. Weren’t you worried about where I’d been?”
“Jesus, dad. You’ve been flaking out like this my whole life.”
I clear my throat and pull back my arm as the corridor twists and turns before us without our input.
“If by ‘flaking out’ you mean ‘saving the fucking planet again’, honey, then yeah, I’ve been keeping busy. I could say the same for you, I gather, hanging with these god-damned glory hounds?”
“Dad, it’s not like that.”
“I think we should keep it formal, honey.”
“Zephyr, then.”
She says the name like a turd’s attached.
“You tell me how it is then?”
“Jeez, they’re real heroes, you know? Just ordinary heroes, trying to help fix the city.”
“Honey. Windsong. We very nearly had a vast alien consciousness try to lay its eggs down our throats and these clowns are running around posing outside hospitals. And don’t think I didn’t see you in there.”
“I’m fifteen years old, dad. I’m fast. I’m super strong. What can I do? I can shift fucking rubble, so that’s what I was doing.”
“Easy with the potty-mouth, hon’.”
“Christ, you’re so full of shit,” Tessa hisses.
“Like I told you when you were a baby, uh, Windsong, you can say all you like about Jesus, but keep me out of it.”
The fetchingly made-up heroine shakes her unruly hair and we turn into my suite within Hotel Wallachia.
“I brought you something, by the way,” she says. “I guess there’s no better time than now, might as well give it to you.”
She produces a bundle of envelopes and other junk mail wrapped in elastic bands and hands them to me. I recognize, amid the rubbish, the gold crest of my wife’s law firm and toss the parcel onto the bed.
“I think things are more complicated than you give them credit for, dad.”
I sigh. I can’t explain why I foment these arguments I have no time or energy to resolve. I sit on the edge of the cot and steeple my head in my hands until I realize how uncomfortable that is. Then I stand again, pacing, as much as that’s possible in an eight-by-ten space.
“You gotta understand what I’m going through, bub.”
“Hey, whatever you’re going through, it affects me too, alright?” Tessa says.
“Hey,” I say right back to her and enfold her in my embrace. “I’ll never group you in with those assholes, alright? I know you’re young and starting out. I just want to see you set up as a better class of hero, if you’re really going to do this thing and it’s not too late for me to talk you out, still . . . ?”
“Oh, what,” Tessa says, “these ‘assholes’ who are just trying to do the best with their powers they can in a random, God-less universe?”
I laugh and shake my head, reprimanded, and squeeze her tight. And I could easily slip from there to down the bittersweet maudlin well if it weren’t for the gasping astonishment as the door eases open and I look through wild strands of Tessa’s auburn hair to see Seeker standing crucified in the entrance.
“My dear God. Mister High-and-Mighty,” Seeker says in her best admonishing school-ma’am voice. “Blow off your teammates and then take the nearest little teenage mask to your bed that you can? Some hero.”
Windsong and I unlock arms and I hold up one hand as if to say “steady on”. I’m still trying to plot through the Pac-Man maze of my own thoughts and Tessa is likewise stammering when Seeker speaks again.
“Castle: eject Windsong. It’s for her own good.”
A flush of panic shoots across my daughter’s masked face as she swivels to me and promptly vanishes with the vaguest of sucking noises.
“Hey!” I roar. “You better make sure she’s safe.”
“Oh really, Zephyr,” Seeker says and slams the cell door closed with herself still inside. “I didn’t really think any of us mattered to you that much. Who was she but another warm body to feed your already godless, overwhelming bloody ego?”
I stare at Seeker as the invisible wheels and cogs of the universe grind on towards the inevitable. But today, even to save my sorry skin, I don’t feel like playing along.
“She’s someone important to me,” I say in a low, surprisingly calm voice.
“And you’ve read the situation completely wrong.”
*
I TURN MY back to Seeker and eyeball the bundle of letters and bills on the bed reminding me of my former life. The angry woman’s presence is as palpable as the burning bush.
“I want you to leave the team,” Seeker says. “I think maybe this was ill-advised. It’s not working out.”
I turn around to face her without really thinking, motivated not by her surprise statement, but the wistful rather than forceful tone in her voice.
“Yeah,” I confirm to her without thinking. “That’s probably for the best.”
Seeker shakes her head like a grieving widow, the long loose tawny strands swishing like a broom over her white bodice as she lifts a curled finger to wipe back tears.
“You can use the fortress until you find somewhere else to live, of course.”
/> “I don’t think that’s gonna fly with the rest of the team.”
“No,” Seeker says in a concession to her own honest feelings. “Probably not.”
I keep looking at her a moment, aware of all the tangled emotions and my various lies from over the years that have complicated our strained relationship. Ironic that in this severing of ties, things don’t seem any simpler. I see the woman beneath the mask – or in her case, beneath the radiant nimbus that fuddles ordinary people as well as security cameras – and wish at a very basic and also very male level to cure her hurt.
“I’m really . . . not . . . sure . . . how someone who matters so little, in the grand scheme of your universe, has come to hurt you so much, Loren,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t call me that,” Seeker says, repressing another sob. “It makes this so much harder.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
Of course I make no moves to do anything. Seeker hangs her head a few seconds longer before the predictable explosion. Light rebounds from the dull walls as she makes a fist and steps towards me.
“How can you look so down on us?” she yells. “Don’t you realize some of these people damn well worship you?”
I know my response isn’t helpful, but I laugh.
“These guys? Worship? I don’t fucking think so, honey.”
She’s close enough that she puts her angry, shaking palm in the middle of my chest and I tense for whatever powered trick she might be planning to pull. I don’t expect her to look up from beneath watery lashes and say the words that could well doom us all one day.
“Damn you, Joe. Don’t you understand I love you?”
*
I AM A weak, weak man.
This woman, who is like a goddess among us mere mortal beings (and as I understand it, I mean this perhaps quite literally), is also the most beautiful, tender and vulnerable of ripe peaches. And like low-hanging fruit, she falls into my hands with barely a flicker of resistance even though I know the tension that has existed for months between us has its origins in a moment so drenched with supernatural energy that I’m surely just taking advantage to give in to my base human lust as well as sate her own need for the physical completion her evidently rich spiritual life lacks.
Seeker has explained her deal before: that there were Seekers before her, and her powers are tied to her mental as well as physical purity, and I understand well enough what it means for her and her role as we push the bedcovers aside and I lay back, kissing her as she straddles my leather hips with her hand sliding beneath the cunning zipper to divide the golden zed with my bare chest. Her mouth tastes like my idea of some rare, Amazonian wildflower with life-preserving properties in its nectar. The pressure between us is as primal as it is overpowering and since I have no idea regarding the artistry of her costume, I simply slide my rough palm along her back and up to her nape and take hold and tear the thing from her, releasing the woman from its constraints in an avalanche of flawlessly tanned flesh.
My cock aches like a tenderized steak and I snap my own buckle getting free, and like the beacon it appears to be, judging by the intensity of my body heat, with her white costume peeled open around her like the very petals of the flower I have tried to describe, Seeker slides hungrily to her knees and her cold hand and warm mouth drag me into a carnal pleasure that I have surely never experienced before – though what else could account for my perennial satyriasis, I couldn’t say. Within moments I have her up again, deflowering her and her costume in the one fell swoop as I lift her up and over me and we latch our mouths to each other’s privates and there is an explosion of golden light and the castle shakes and the Wallachians pause and look up from their endless prayers and I do not frankly give a damn.
Zephyr 6.5 “Strange, Dystopian”
THE HOURS PASS slow and monolithic as the orbits of the moon and the goddess in my bed is just a woman. Loren is Loren Stevenson, she tells me. We lay in bed spooning, her long hair like a dark shotgun spray across the pillow. With the rupture of her maidenhead goes the passing of her powers. Yet the golden heat remains, weaker than in my memory, but present nonetheless.
She is Seeker no more.
After the tears have come and gone, she clutches the arm I have curled under her neck and wrapped across her collar and tells me her secrets, of the prophecy I’ve now freed her from, and how another will take her place, and a strange but not entirely unfamiliar chill creeps through me and it isn’t just my filling bladder that has me thinking how to extricate myself from the bed.
I fear I may have done it again.
She is a delight. The word beautiful loses its luster when you use it too many times, but Loren is a creature for whom such terms should be exclusively reserved. In making her a woman (this is a crass and unforgiveable phrase, but bear with me), I seem to have released the child within as she speaks quietly and smiles and plucks at the hairs on my arm and gives me the answers to questions I would’ve never thought to ask.
“You will need to lead them, still,” she says eventually, bringing me back from my reverie begun sometime around when she began listing the names of her ill-fated childhood dogs.
“Lead them?”
“The Sentinels. Now. I can’t do it.”
“Jesus. I don’t think so,” I say and roll back and Loren twists about so she is curled into my side, magnificent breasts crushed against my invisibly scarred ribs broken and healed so many times.
“I’m not Seeker any more,” she says. “I can’t do it.”
“You’ve got years of experience in the field,” I say. “You might need to change your handle, but heroes do that all the time.”
“Do they?”
“Sure. You’ll need a weapon, too. You’d look hot with a katana.”
“I’d probably hurt myself, Joe. I’m not a brawler like you. Never have been.”
She gives me a look of such inconsolable loveliness that the guilt is sure to follow like the madman cuffed to a policeman’s wrist.
We lapse into a one-sided comfortable silence as we each contemplate our own ineffables. I review some of the facts Loren has told me and place the pieces together slowly.
“There’ll be a new Seeker?”
“Yes. She’s out there now already, though she doesn’t know it yet.”
“You can . . . feel her?”
“Don’t get any kinky thoughts.”
“I’m not.”
“Good. One is enough of Earth’s primal guardians to deflower.”
“Guardian against what, exactly?”
“Even now, I don’t think I am allowed to say,” Loren says. “There is a being. A force. My kind were created centuries ago to prepare for the day, whenever it might come.”
“And when’s that?”
“They cannot say,” she tells me with a whiff of sadness.
“Will you miss your powers?”
“No,” Loren says.
And her hand slides over my stomach and continues down.
*
FINALLY SHE SLEEPS and I dress in jeans and a t-shirt because they’re less noisy than my leather costume, and I move like a dream walker through the strange, dystopian castle until the ready room resolves as a glowing doorway before me.
The air smells of stale waffles, spilled drinks and sperm, though the latter could be me. The table is free, once I remove a few empties. I sit by the edge and gently shiver, aware I could’ve dressed warmer. The castle’s a bit drafty. The black smoked glass of the table slowly wakes.
I place the strip of film on the surface and the images of the yacht with the eldritch design become bigger, illuminated just beneath the top layer of glass. Text, sometimes whole newspaper and magazine articles, flows down the side like a Terminator’s hit-list. At my spike of interest, a mugshot appears, flowering into dozens of colorful head shots from a range of sources, each of them showing the same man at various ages.
I have never heard of Tom Hilfiger, a wealthy industrialis
t and billionaire. Born in 1951, the clean-shaven, silver-haired man has surprisingly little history given the complex web of companies he controls. Starting with a modest clothing store in New York, Hilfiger now moves everything from biotechnology to missile guidance systems. The yacht in the footage was his and the symbol a design he fancies as his personal brand, according to available data streaming from more than fifty million parallel worlds. Why he would have anything to do with my father is anyone’s guess, but the mansion he owns in the Florida Keys should hold some further information.
It’s not the only place I need to hit in my never-ending search.
“Computer, restore the data from my search on Yoko Ono. List schematics and associated data for the Paladin Corporation.”
The company’s Tokyo headquarters explodes across the screen in a series of magazine photographs and then architect’s blueprints. After having the table sift the scant clues left from Ms Ono’s public appearances across numerous possible worlds, the resulting pattern implicates the Japan-based, worldwide corporation that secretly funds a range of social institutions, charities, political causes and arts organizations frequented by the one-time reclusive Japanese actress and sometimes doppelganger. If I am going to find Ono, I figure it might require going straight to the top.
I return to my room and stand by the door, mixed feelings a dead weight in my chest as I look at Loren and she wakes, tousle-haired, looking up at me with a wry, oops-what-have-we-done smirk.
“Hey, beautiful,” I say. “I’m just heading out for a bit.”
*
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