It’s hard to describe my courtiers, especially since we are so close. Their hides are like what I imagine a mangy wolf or a giant bat might be like, yet they are closer to half-man, half-giant flies, mandibles slavering, rows of compound eyes glittering like dark jewels in the glow of the distant globes I’ve already processed as “suns”, though it soon turns out I am completely wrong, since the conduits all lead into them. Triple-jointed appendages ending in strong black knife-like claws hold me tight, and though I could resist more, I use the time to study these strange servitors instead. After a few barked questions I give up. If they speak English, or if they can speak at all, they don’t seem to want it.
By unknown means we are propelled forward through the ether.
*
WE HEAD FOR one of the distant globes. There’s more than just wings fuelling our propulsion and it’s not long before the light source looms up close and I can see the sphere is really made of the same yellowy fabric as the membranes, though it is stretched over an infinite network of disjointed frames, energy within permeating the whole thing with a sickly jaundice like a low-res light globe or like a sun tuned to another channel. In various places there are openings like tent-flaps and we are through the nearest one before I can say Jesus H.P. Lovecraft.
Clearly, parts of the sphere-hive are not translucent, no pun intended. As we enter, it goes dark, and I am dragged along a tunnel, close-fitting like a stocking made of skin, nauseating and unnatural. My captors have either forgotten I’m alive or trust completely in my surrender. When we emerge from the passage into a large, irregular, weirdly-lit space, I go weak as otherworldly repulsion fills me.
Twilight is here. So is a large, porous, gigantic, slothful, multivalent creature that is at once all around Twilight as well as within him.
By this I mean it looks like my friend is getting double- or possibly triple-teamed. Pressed amid transparent flesh with the consistency of play-dough, Twilight is spread-eagled across one of the vast Being’s many surfaces. His hands and feet have disappeared within its epithelial folds. Some kind of weird arrangement resembling a huge cock morphed into a gas mask has hold of Twilight’s face. At the same time his pelvis has also been absorbed into the creature. From second to second, the genital constellation near Twilight’s head seems to relax and the sorcerer-hero’s head dips, mouth slack, but grinning with a beatific smile, drool – or God, I hope it’s drool – pouring from within him. And then the thing refastens and there’s a sound like a stomach pump for the soul.
This isn’t good.
I flash fry the two fuckers holding me and turn and unleash hell on the two closest behind. Dozens of eye-like apertures open up in the weird beastie occupy the center of this grand, fleshy zero-g chamber and then my nausea acts up again as the whole orb in which we are held seems to rotate sharply. Twilight and his host now fill the ceiling above me like a pastry chef’s nightmare, and two quick strobing discharges from add a disgustingly sweet smoke to the air, followed shortly by Twilight’s screams.
“He must be –”
I resist the urge for further voiceovers, rationalizing Twilight’s responses without the help of boxed captions or fluffy white thought clouds. Although I’m wary of getting grabbed and force-fucked the same way, I swoop higher and get a hold of Twilight’s midriff and try to pull him free. As expected, bland pseudopods instantly break from the nearby marbled surface and its only super-speed that saves me. I turn and disintegrate the two feelers with more lightning bolts and again Twilight screams.
And then his eyes flick open.
The whole suffocating creature gives a wobble as Twilight shakes his head like a Doberman, eyes bulging, and a moment later he vomits out the end of the gag-like appendage. I swear I’ve never heard a sweeter sound than when he cries my name.
“Zephyr!”
He tugs violently at his embedded restraints without any success.
“This is a bit like that part in Pulp Fiction, except you’re not black and there’s no gimp.”
“I don’t remember any fucking muffin man scoring that role,” Twilight gasps.
I lay my hand over one of his buried wrists and set down a short charge. It’s enough to weaken the dough and Twilight pulls his hand free.
“Now,” he yells in a deep baritone laced by panic, “uYuatil-el-Awahya, let’s see what you’re made of.”
Twilight’s hand is infused with a sea-green glow that burns as bright as a speck of some distant star. After a good grenade count, he makes a fist and stabs it right back into the underside of the enormous creature. I take my cue to zoom across the other side of the chamber as dozens of the weird bat-fly-dog-men come pouring through the previous aperture. The mystic entity apparently known as uYuatil-el-Awahya pulses and explodes, splashing the entire space with steaming hot porridge. We’re lucky that when it hits the hordes coming in, they start sizzling and dissolving, tumbling towards the bottom of the spherical chamber like they are under the illusion of gravity where they splash down to merge with uYuatil’s soupy remains.
Twilight, head-to-toe with the mess, swoops down and slaps me on the shoulder. He looks pained, though he’s grinning.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“That was one helluva cumshot, baby.”
Like something out of Star Wars, we pour on the speed down the twisting black corridor, emerging from the sphere-city just as a stream of conscious goop pours out after us. Twilight is slightly behind me, being the slower of the two and weakened from captivity, and he weaves away from last-ditch grasping pseudopods, eldritch energy flaring from his palms to make sizzling noises within the gigantic pissed-off matter seemingly in hot pursuit.
“What the hell is this thing?” I yell, adding a little sizzle to the recipe and withering a whole section of the creature’s shaft so it resembles overcooked pancake.
“uYuatil-el-Awahya,” Twilight says unhelpfully. “He’s sort of a . . . mystic pen-pal of mine.”
Twilight struggles with another mass of tendrils, this time flinging the mighty appendage away by main strength alone. With no further agreement necessary, we speed away from the weakened entity’s remains.
“This way,” Twilight says, correcting our course slightly, and sure enough the red portal appears in the middle distance.
“I know it’s a cliché,” I say, “but if that’s a friend, I’d hate to see an enemy.”
“It’s his nature,” Twilight replies philosophically. “He just bit off more than he could chew.”
“I thought that was you,” I reply.
“I’d appreciate it if this remained between you and me.”
I return the serious sidelong look and nod.
“I owe you,” Twilight says.
“That might not be how your uncle sees it.”
*
BACK AT THE Playboy Mansion, Twilight does the arrogant nephew thing and refuses to talk to anyone except for me, at least until he’s had a chance to clean the ectoplasmic scum off himself. Feeling more than just a little like the teacher’s pet – and with the Mafioso hirelings no longer quite so sure about where they stand – I find a quiet spot near the fire and check my phone messages. Of the sixteen received, most feature increasingly irate calls from home.
I sigh, hanging my head, and think about what going home actually means.
Twilight emerges dressed the same way I saw him the previous week, costume on with the gloves and cloak removed, a robe over the top, hair tousled wet from the shower. He has a white towel, used, which he offers to me.
“I may have an answer to that problem we discussed,” he says.
I dab at a few dried pieces of magical entity. They simply drop onto the carpet once the toweling breaks them free and from there dissolve without trace.
“Man, you look beat,” I reply. “You sure you wanna talk about this now?”
“My research can get a little ‘hands on,’” he says. “And there’s no guarantees. If you’re sure you want to solve the rid
dle of your split life, then I have an answer.”
“You reminded me you were an anti-hero,” I surprise myself answering him. “Why was that?”
Twilight grins, three-quarters the high school quarterback with just a hint of serial killer.
“As you just saw, ‘consorting with demons’ isn’t just a catch-phrase. There’s no black and white about anything, Zephyr. Not even magick. It all comes at a risk.”
“Let me think about it then,” I say. “You look like you could sleep for a week.”
Twilight nods. His uncle approaches, Gravitas immediately behind, Thunderbird in the distance. Frost isn’t allowed inside the house.
“Uncle,” Twilight says. “I’m not sure I want to know how you treated my friend. Zephyr has shown you he can be trusted. I don’t want him troubled again.”
For all his bluster, Tony Azzurro looks embarrassed by Twilight’s words. It can’t be easy having a brat nephew with the looks of a living god and the power to match. Mustering his dignity, the Toecutter reaches inside his coat and produces a gold business card he passes to me.
“Any time,” he says. “Any time. Got it?”
I study the card like it might come with instructions. It’s a surreal moment and I lessen the effect because I can only nod.
“Sure.”
And then the two head honchos disappear to discuss business.
Nautilus has left me a message somewhere in between Elisabeth asking if I was alright and latercalling me a sonofabitch. I phone his message service and confirm lunch at the Silver Tower, which is pretty much the only semi-secure space we supers can eat in public. There’s a few more messages from the little people in my life, one from Sky Blue, though I don’t know how he got my number, wanting to talk about me putting a team together, and there’s a message from the Enercom PA discussing my next contractual appearance at the Motor City Expo next month.
I’m out in the yard and walking in the direction of the cliffs by this time, expensively upholstered sentries discernible as cigarette dots in the dark. The wind is buffeting from the east and it’s all sweet gain as far as I’m concerned. Frost approaches from behind and it’s only the tingle of a chill across the back of my nape that alerts me to her presence.
“Zephyr.”
She looks lonely and thin, standing in her dark costume in the near total blackness, the moon hidden behind clouds and the radiance of the distant seaboard muffled by the pines and poplar running along the cliffs.
“Ah, my rapist. Fancy seeing you here,” I say. “I wonder what the Toecutter will say when I tell him about your extra-curricular activities. Or do you have that sort of thing in your contract?”
“Oh Zephyr, you wouldn’t do that?”
“If that’s a question, then yes. Yes I would.”
I turn my back and start walking and she lunges after me, an icy hand on my shoulder attempting but failing to spin me around.
“Zephyr, please, wait. We could make beautiful children. . . .”
“Are you out of your gourd?” I snap. “Lady, I don’t fuck the enemy, OK?”
“I’m not the enemy, Zephyr.”
“Last time I checked, you weren’t exactly clobbering bad guys and saving the banks on their insurance bills like the rest of us.”
“That doesn’t make me evil,” Frost replies.
“Whatever, Frost. I don’t have time for this.”
I’m thinking of Twilight’s proposal and want to say yes, even though I don’t have a clue what it means.
“I’m out of here.”
I crouch and let loose, Frost thankfully unable to follow, and I arc over the city wrapping myself in clouds and trying to close my eyes, but there’s no putting it off any longer.
I head for home.
Zephyr 1.13 (coda)
I’VE MISSED AT least two meals and I’m busting for a piss when I arrive back in the wallspace, but I have to wait in the shadows as the shower runs and one squint through the peephole confirms it’s my daughter in the bathroom. We’ve showered together since she was a few days old and it’s as normal as watching my own arm being cleaned to stand a moment and note how she has grown, pondering her weird, possibly off-balance lunge into womanhood, the thighs I know she fears will never become womanly, her grandmother’s large breasts and beautiful ears, the muscles of her stomach and arms hardened from judo, a pair of overlapping love hearts tattooed just above the dark riot of pubic hair I try not to take in, all news to me, the snub nose, the bicycle-scarred knees, long tawny hair plastered wet across her supple back. There’s no sign of mutations or manifestations. She’s an ordinary girl who needs a fatherly response and instead, the red eyes and her lingering long after the soap has gone down the plughole tells me Elisabeth has been at her feral best.
I can’t imagine what Beth’s thinking and I realize I am genuinely afraid to find out. This is neither a good thing, nor a high point in our marriage.
Later, after draining my bladder, I slip into the passage and bang the front door shut and walk in, carrying hiking boots I’ve never even worn, the heat on and compensating for the slightly damp black t-shirt I now wear.
Elisabeth steps into the hallway and openly rolls her eyes at my charade.
“She’s in her room.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what made me late.”
“This isn’t late, Joe,” Beth replies. “Consider this early for the next crisis, OK?”
She slams the bedroom door and I hear the lock scratch into place. So I walk on, stopping at the next white door and gently tapping, head down. Even at average height I’ve got nine inches on my daughter. When the door opens a fraction, my eyes meet hers rimmed with tears, and even though she must’ve known it was me, she tries to press the door closed and I put my bare foot in the gap and am surprised to feel even the slightest suggestion of pain as she grows angry all of a sudden and puts her shoulder to the task.
“Tessa, for fuck’s sake let me in,” I squeal, easily pushing back the other way.
My daughter turns her back and walks to her bed and lies down, her back to me. She wears tartan pajama pants and an old Ministry t-shirt. I carefully close the door without another noise and hover, metaphorically at least, over the bed.
“Are you OK?”
“What do you care?” she snaps back and then blows her nose.
“I care, Tessa. Come on.”
“You weren’t even there,” she yells, rounding on me, angrily tugging down her t-shirt and wiping furiously at eyes and mouth.
“Why weren’t you there, dad?” she moans. “Why did you have to make her come?”
I sit on the bed and even though she’s angry, Tessa drops her head on my shoulder and the tears come and I hesitate before finally putting a firm arm around her shoulders. I mumble something about it “being alright” and Tessa hisses that she hates her mother and I say nothing, feeling her pain, experiencing her emotions like it was a super-power in its own right.
*
IT IS JUST after noon. My cell phone is ringing for the third time in as many minutes. I stop again on my brief trip across the city, the roof of the Helides Building good enough.
“Zephyr? This is Captain Tegan O’Halloran from Commissioner Journey’s office. How are you?”
O’Halloran sounds hard as tacks and just as sharp. I vaguely recall her as a formerly statuesque blonde grown tough as an old tree in service to the city. Although she heads up the public relations wing of the city’s force, it’s more forthrightness than charm working in her favor.
“Captain, I think we’ve met,” I hazily reconstruct, police types always appreciating to know they are more than just empty shirts to the masks who nab most their glory. “After the Think-Tank thing?”
“The Cohen Laboratories fiasco, that’s right,” she replies.
Fiasco. Huh, OK. On that occasion my erstwhile nemesis escaped from routine testing out at White Nine – the super-powered prison in the bay – summoned a back-up version of h
is mechanical alter-ego and proceeded to ransack a genetics lab in Old Town. If you can imagine a murderously insane lunatic from the waist up and a cross between a giant spider and a Sherman tank below, you have maybe half an idea of what destruction he could cause. I saved the day on my own, though Nightwind and Paragon were filmed in the vicinity.
“It’s actually about White Nine,” the older woman says. “I’m relaying a message there for you from Steven Zahn.”
“Steven Zahn? I take it that’s an inmate.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, captain. I’m not always . . . intimate with my prisoners’ secret identity.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything secret about this one,” O’Halloran says. “Steven Zahn is the man you helped capture when he was trying to . . . make off . . . with the Federal Bank.”
“Oh,” I ope. “The, uh, Terraformer?”
“You’d be telling me. Apparently he’s emerged from his medically-induced coma quite rational. You’d know that putting them under for a time is pretty standard procedure for the carceral techs out there. Psych evaluation’s showing high lucidity, a degree of reasonableness.”
“So?”
“He wants to talk to you.”
After a minute I capitulate and she regurgitates the details and then rings off like an ex-girlfriend, making some vague allusion to an inevitable future encounter we can’t possibly predict. Feeling inexplicably moody, I stroll across the roof-top disturbing pigeons, watching choppers maneuver through the clear sky. A man in green spandex leaps from one building to the next, but I don’t recognize him. The older, retired heroes like Mastodon and Hawkwind are in my thoughts, possibly thanks to the garish costume of the unidentified leaper. In my leather digs I’m the epitome of the new breed, even if I’m past veteran status myself.
Zephyr I Page 10