Seeker provides the field hospital a muted radiance as she stands, her face a mask of concern, watching a civilian and three more ambulance officers tending to Constance Da Silva. Better known to the world as the former Sentinel Vulcana, she now thrashes on a blood-stained trolley while others struggle to keep her in place. Vulcana mutters, over and over, words I barely absorb as my eyes remain locked on the jagged stump of her arm.
“I can’t hold it, I can’t, I can’t hold it, oh God. . . .”
And just like that a flush goes through the blue-skinned woman and she’s just an ordinary woman, the sweating, dying sort, and the freaked-out ambos stab the dark with their wild eyes and the doctor looks at me and says something he has to repeat to get me to understand.
“This woman needs to get to a hospital five minutes ago.”
I nod. “Right.”
This is the part where I take the wounded heroine in my arms – I don’t know what we do about the severed arm – and fly in desperation to the hospital and where the city’s finest surgeons perform the night’s real miracle. Except Connie is a weeping, thrashing mess, and there’s blood everywhere as a rubber tourniquet comes loose.
“Oh shit . . . shit,” the doctor gapes.
“She has to come with me,” Seeker says and gently thrusts me aside.
In her hand is some small weird device, like a remote control fashioned by Hobbits. She gestures and perhaps it is telepathy that instructs me to bring the trolley. So I push Connie free of the desperate paramedics as Seeker goes ahead of us, walking toward the end of the ruined street and the river beyond, something like the keyless entry for a sports car in her hand. Blood is thick in my nostrils like off soup.
“This way,” Seeker says. “Come on.”
There’s a subsonic beep and the crowds, attentive now, gasp as an enormous stone castle materializes into wobbly view in a move so implausibly real that only the very dodgiest of 1980s special effects could truly capture it.
“What the fuck?”
Seeker turns.
“Zephyr, we have much to talk about. I’ll call you.”
With that, she takes the handles of the gurney from my fingers and starts pushing it up a vague slope I eventually realize is a drawbridge, and then Seeker, with Vulcana, is disappearing into the enormous black skull face of the strange ancient castle and after the vaguely intangible wooden bridge has drawn up once more, the whole thing fades like a spectral vision with the dawn.
Dawn, however, is still in fact some time away.
The supers chat animatedly about “Seeker’s awesome castle” for a while, circling like we’ve licensed an open-air nightclub just for freaks, small groups forming and reforming amid the emergency crews and the traumatized paramedics and the tired cops and the surly city council crews arriving in their yellow vehicles to start making head or tail of this mess, the international journalists filing for their prime time slots despite the hour, the autograph hunters back at the cordons calling for their favorite masks like there couldn’t be anything more important in the world.
When the cool air does start to glow with the first sign of day, a number of us make arrangements to catch up at the Silver Tower later on, drinks on Amadeus, and while Tessa fields a few invites half-heartedly, I know she is cluing in to the fact that this is the part where reality has to step back in and there’s no way on earth she’s going to be going with Cipher to the new Terminator series wrap party or the opening of a new restaurant called Crayons across town with Miss Black. And I have to ask myself if it is a school night until I remember we haven’t actually worked out the school arrangements yet, with George and Max offering to pay for the fucking Academy, much to Elisabeth’s chagrin.
I’m like a statue or something: a grinning, wry, admittedly exhausted homage to dads everywhere in my tattered red-and-white suit, Vulcana’s blood dappling my shredded cape as I wait through the lessening crowds until we are nearly alone and Windsong daintily treads my way in her expensive-looking boots. I don’t care if the dawn sweepers or the displaced homeless people or Nigel the Troll or the last psychotic fans are watching as I sling an arm around my daughter’s shoulder and we walk through the trampled wasteland where an hour or so previous an imaginary castle touched down or where, an hour previous to that, we vanquished the earthly incarnation of a living star, or something like it.
Windsong and I get to the river and I admit it feels not only good to be alive, but there’s a resonance of Old New York here as the grey clouds scud across the horizon and the city begins waking up, the smell of rotting garbage and fresh-ground coffee mingling into one heady mix as we inhale the brisk freshness of the breeze that lifts Tessa’s hair trailing and coiling like a scarf and my cloak flaps backwards like the flag I guess these things were made to imitate.
“That was one crazy night,” I say at long last, it almost being a profane thing to intrude on the meditative silence of daybreak and the weird intimacy of us being in costume together.
“Tell me it’s not always going to be like that,” Tessa replies.
“No,” I say and turn so she knows it’s serious. “It won’t be. Take it from me, you just got pretty much all the good bits without too much of the shit. I’d consider retirement.”
After a moment I let the grin break through and it conjures a levity in Tessa’s face I haven’t often seen, masked or otherwise, and we briefly hold hands and she squeezes my fingers and I concede she has a hell of a grip for a fourteen-year-old girl.
“I love you, dad.”
“Yes, baby. I love you too . . . Windsong.”
Tessa gives a giddy laugh, every inch the teenager.
By osmosis, we agree not to discuss all the shit things, not the least being the imminent divorce. Instead, Windsong adjusts her mask and winks at me and punches me in the shoulder and shoots up into the sky and I just stand there, watching for a moment as my daughter ascends in a blurry arc across the city where a bridge once stood, and then I do the crouch thing, and well, for a guy with the power of however many fucking light bulbs it’s meant to be, I don’t think I’m gonna catch her. Not today. Or at least not if I don’t want to spoil the moment.
CONTINUED IN ZEPHYR: PHASE TWO
For the further adventures of Zephyr see Zephyr Phase Two http://amzn.to/17kwmcy, Zephyr Phase Three http://amzn.to/Zs2K5A and Zephyr Phase Four http://amzn.to/19BC6R8.
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Zephyr I Page 30