The growling snatches back my attention. Just in time. A humanoid blur makes good from the forest, arms outstretched like a vengeful Jesus, the claws a vision straight from Hell. I bring my forearms together and mentally push and an abrupt wall of solid air deflects the attack. Raveness emits a noise like apes rutting and goes down on the road. I spring into the air, dose her good and proper with my electrical powers. She twitches like a fish, but otherwise I sense all the volts are good for is keeping her on her back a moment.
Eventually I have to relent. Infernus is just a smudge on the horizon and Raveness lopes to the nearest conifer and rips it from the ground, fashioning it into a missile she then throws at me. Like the Tinkerbell I am, I flit out of the way and swoop down, back into her territory really as we slam together and my fist clatters against the side of her diamond-hard cheekbone. The villainess’s eyes roll around like they’re in danger of not coming back, and then, swift as you please, she headbutts me the proper way, the blow coming like God’s karate chop across the bridge of my now-shattered nose.
I can’t help but drop. The bitch grabs my hair a moment after planting her purple-suited knee into my face. And as she’s readying me up for some kind of fatality move that involves a combination of all six buttons on the controller, I dive back, escaping her grasp, and come up in the dirt and roadside detritus with my hands cupping electric fire.
“Your partner got away, lady, but you can’t fly,” I say hoarsely.
She spits sideways and wipes her jaw.
“Don’t need to.”
Raveness starts forward and lures me into her feint. Then she drops back with an evil, heavy-lidded grin that bespeaks gratification on some deep, animalistic and quite possibly sexual level. I feel skittish as a kitten facing a wolf, though Synergy’s amped-up power still bubbles away. Now she leaps and I swallow a huge breath, drawing down the inner calm as I open my arms as if to accept her. Except I don’t. My whole body is a conductor, radiant with power, and enough electrical charge to short-out a small city explodes from my front to catch the lupine woman in mid-air and even to my light-adapted eyes it seems she nearly disintegrates in the glare.
The force keeps her aloft. Slows her fall. When Raveness comes down, it is now before rather than on top of me. Her costume is a blackened husk that crackles free like old bark. A good part of her hair is gone. Likewise her eyelids. Big dark angry eyes stare at me from a face sans lips and eyebrows, her teeth like enamel spades just waiting to dig my grave. But she can barely move. I squat down and check her thumping pulse and when she starts to move I kneel on her chest and put my forearms around her neck and apply a choke hold. Strange to think such a fearsome force could be reduced to an invalid between one moment and the next. I gaze slow and melancholy into her unable-to-close eyes and watch them connote terror somehow as she realizes I could just throttle her. And God, though I am tempted, I know I have this one in the bag and she can go off to White Nine for a decade or two and trouble no one any more.
When I drop her back to the ground she is limp but breathing still. I sit on the road’s edge and draw the Enercom phone and make the call, all the while hoping No Man’s Land has no pet parahumans they can send to check us out.
I lie on my back exhausted and watch snowflakes fall until the shimmering grey stone fortress coalesces into co-existence with the spruce and pine trees and the ramp is down and my teammates stomp down scanning the battle zone with unamused faces.
*
J-LO IS ANGRY with me. She calls it my “prima donna moment”. I can’t really swallow the gall of the woman. It’s not my fault I can kick ass when the rest of the team is down for the count or lagging so far behind me our adventures feel like a game of Counter-Strike on a bad server or something.
Hotel Wallachia has done its TARDIS thing and we are in the middle of nowhere, metaphorically, metaphysically and probably literally. Smidgeon has been put into an induced coma and Mastodon has put himself into the rough equivalent thanks to some A-grade meds. The robot watches us like our very own pet Asperger’s case and Samurai Girl aka Jenny Lamb is still not answering her phone. Fucking Gen Ys. Of them all, only Connie remains calm, reading something on her iPad while eating a ham sandwich while Seeker fumes across the other side of the big interactive glass table and I resist the urge to pinch at my itchy crotch through the sweat-soaked gusset of my leathers. Well, I’m not sure my costume has a gusset, but hopefully you know what I mean.
“Well I thought it was a pretty good result,” I say to nobody after about fifteen minutes of frank and open silence. “That crazy Raveness bi-atch is on ice and apparently we solved the mystery of some Arkansas philosophy professor’s disappearance by bagging that Bugbear guy.”
I don’t mention my comrades letting Thunderbird get free with Gravitas and Frost in tow. Too many bruised egos.
“Shame we still have no idea exactly who we were fighting and why,” Vulcana opines.
“Mafia goons,” I say.
“Mafia?” Seeker lifts her head, the pout sliding sideways as I catch her interest. “What were the Cosa Nostra doing trying to break into White Nine?”
I forget sometimes that some of Seeker’s earliest work was busting heads on the waterfront, taking her into that shadowy world at least as much as any other mask I know excepting perhaps Twilight. And Streethawk. I give an eloquent shrug.
“Crescendo,” I say. “They were after Crescendo.”
“Explain, Zephyr,” Brasseye says.
“Before Raveness jumped me, Infernus said they were there to bust Crescendo loose because he knew the Kingmaker. Or Kingmaker. Whatever.”
“Who on Earth is that?” Seeker asks.
“A parahuman powers pimp,” Vulcana replies and I nod. “Hasn’t been seen for a while.”
“More than a while,” I add.
“And the Mafiosos are part of this?” Seeker reiterates.
“Seems like someone’s after juicing,” Vulcana says.
I can only shrug. I haven’t connected the dots on this one. I have evidence the Toecutter’s paid bodyguards might be pulling a swifty on him. That’s about all I can offer, but I keep the observation to myself and wonder whether I remembered to grab the gold business card Azzurro slipped me from the wallspace. And from there I can’t help thinking about Azzurro’s nephew, the ubiquitous Twilight.
The hair on my arms stand to attention and then my cell gives a ribbet. It’s a message from Tessa.
*
“FOR CHRISSAKES DAD, where are you?” my little honey asks.
“Uh, hovering somewhere in time and space and, uh, the history of ideas,” I reply. “You were trying to call me before when I was flying. Then there was this thing. What’s up?”
“I saw it on FTV,” Tessa says. “Look I am sorry dad, but the police have called about the fire. About the . . . about the body.”
“Oh shit,” I say and, because I am in a section of stone-walled passageway and not Avengers HQ, I grab my mouth and stare off, gaunt-eyed for several seconds before my tongue and brain co-ordinate again and I remember my fifteen-year-old is still on the other end of the line.
“What – what happened?”
“Mum’s pissed.”
“My . . . my mother’s dead and Elisabeth is upset?”
I can hear Tess automatically shudder.
“Oh God I hate it when you talk about each other using your names.”
“Tessa, tell me what happened, please?”
“The police called because they couldn’t find you,” she says.
“Oh crap. Just the police?”
“Well, actually they were FBI.”
“Oh crap. What did they say about . . . you know, about your gran?”
“They’re looking for you, dad. They need someone to ID the body.”
“So there is a body,” I say again just to be clear.
It’s no secret and I’m not ashamed that in my heart of hearts I’ve still been hoping they would find the house an ashen waste an
d empty. To be confronted with evidence otherwise is like a knife in the heart: like that phone call you dread will one day come, inevitably, about someone close to you.
Tessa’s reply is almost as stilted as my yammering heartbeat. The needless confirmation, when it comes, is even more heart-breaking yet.
“Jesus, honey, I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t around again, dad.”
She says it softly, more observation than rebuke.
“At least you know why,” I say in a similar sotto voce. “For years I was out there risking my freaking neck and breaking my goddamn back and I couldn’t tell anyone. I thought at least . . . I thought at least your mum understood.”
“Elisabeth.”
“Yeah. Her.”
“You want me to get her to call you, dad? The Feebs left her their card.”
“No,” I say with a voice blending resentment and exhaustion. “Leave it with me.”
I pause, run the fatherly checklist.
“You OK, kiddo?”
“Seen a lawyer yet?”
I gulp.
“Waiting for an appointment, you know?”
“I hope so, dad. I hope so.”
I ring off, afraid I might end up sinning worse than just lying to my kid if we continue. I am wishing I hadn’t watched Rocky Balboa again last night because it really played a number on me with all the wife and kid issues I’ve got.
Tucking away the phone, I catch Seeker glaring at me from the other end of the corridor. She looks at me like something dragged in on the bottom of her shoe. I raise my hands in my best Tony Danza shrug and say, “What?”
Seeker only shakes her head and I mutter, “I’ve got to return some videos,” and turn and stomp off in the opposite direction.
Zephyr 5.8 “Appearances”
ONLY A SHORT while later, the Enercom phone starts up again and I answer without checking the caller ID since there’s so few people I’ve actually bothered to program in.
“What?”
“Zephyr, it’s Agent Synergy from the FBI. We need to talk.”
Sounds official. Despite our recent malingering, I feel a chill to the bottom of my bowels and after a staccato discussion I go through for a quick shower and then I get the castle to drop me off in Florida so I can have a few minutes to fly and think before my rendezvous athwart the crystal tower that is FBI headquarters in Jefferson, Atlantic City. I can’t help eyeball the blackened spires of Manhattan on the flyover and the grim reality of that set piece informs my mood as I alight in the main square, startling black-suited careerists like pigeons at a fountain as I stalk toward the security array at the main doors.
Upstairs, Synergy and half-a-dozen other clowns work out of an open plan rabbit warren of dividers secured by a trio of soundproof, ultra hi-tech interview rooms as well as an express elevator to the helipad on the roof. It’s an incongruous sight to catch the power-armored Vanguard with his gauntlets off, deftly touch typing into an iMac as he glares at me from the other side of the room. I also get a glimpse of Annie Black from the back and while I’m positive the self-described sorceress and former teen witch is aware of my arrival (or at least my appointment), for one reason or another she scuttles away like some urban lifeform adapted precisely for the paperless office of tomorrow.
Synergy greets me once the two nervous men in black deposit me in the doorway, unwilling to trust to my muttered reassurance that I’d find my own way up. There’s a flicker of perhaps six or seven contrary emotions that run like a stampede of pretty horses across her caramel features before she lowers the professional mask as hard and impersonal as old Darth Vader himself, stiffly guiding me to one of the sealed chambers.
“This is the part where I throw you across the table and we have our way with each other at last?” I say pretty much divorced of humor and just for the sake of breaking the ice. Appearances.
“I’m sorry to call you in here on such short notice,” Synergy replies.
“I’m sorry you’re sorry.”
“It’s about your mother.”
Suspicion confirmed, I swear. While I look at the view, Synergy drops a manila folder that spills crime scene photographs I really don’t want to have to see.
“Where are you keeping her?”
“The body? Rikers.”
“Rikers?”
Synergy has my attention again. She spreads her fingers in apology like a woman performing an invisible card trick.
“Policy. We got pretty strong trace elements for parahuman genetic material. That would be right, wouldn’t it?”
I sigh. It sounds like the noise a very tired person would make at the end of the world. And I shuffle across and pick up the deck of photographs and stare unmoving for nine or ten seconds looking at the blackened husk twisted into the familiar crouched position common to fire death victims.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I tell no-one in particular. “She controlled fire.”
I lift my gaze, aware of a certain degree of gumminess around the inside of my mask.
“She was Catchfire,” I say.
“Really? Shit.”
Synergy catches herself in a moment’s unprofessionalism and straightens her posture.
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“You understand what I mean though, don’t you?”
“Super powers work in unusual ways, and she was getting on in years.”
“Maybe,” I concede and gesture obliquely at the photograph. “This is like any number of corpses you people might see after a house fire. The extreme heat causes the muscles to contract, resulting in the fetal position you see here.”
“Death by immolation is the most likely outcome from the post mortem,” Synergy says.
“That’s what I’d expect to see at an ordinary crime scene,” I tell her. “You must get dozens of these. The death of Catchfire though? I’d expect something a little more out of the ordinary than this.”
“If you’re thinking this isn’t your mother or something, Zephyr, I’m very sorry. Forensics tested positive to augmented genetic material and the tests are exhaustive. Are you sure you’re not just wishing so bad this wasn’t happening?”
“You don’t know the half of it, lady.”
I flick through the next few images. Photos of the house in various angles of decline. They move on from the corpse to show how fire damage to the house exposed the safe room. The last few pics are the superhero memorabilia in the garden shed. Turns out the Aston Martin is Titanium Girl’s old rig. God knows what it was doing there. Undamaged still, the thing must be worth a fortune, but I am uncharacteristically distracted by the lure of filthy lucre by the sudden brain fart that hits me as I stare at the images, superimposed as they are by my own childhood memories.
If my half-brother Julian is the Crimson Cowl and the Cowl killed Titanium Girl’s own child more than twenty-five years ago, how the hell is that possible? By Julian’s own admission he was crippled by the Doomsday Man less than a decade back. Presumably he only invented the Crimson Cowl then. Either that or he’s lying. Or he’s got a time machine.
Or, of course, both.
*
AFTER LETTING ME get my shit together for ten minutes, Synergy returns to the room with two steaming mugs of coffee. I take mine, and once relieved, she places her hand over mine and gives me such a look of controlled empathy that I feel vaguely nauseous. It’s about the least sexy look I could imagine on those fine features and frankly I like my ladies to stay their best and not get too wrapped up in trying to be human beings. If I want to vent, this is why God invented Internet forums.
“I get it,” I say, pulling away and taking my coffee to the far side of the room.
“For a veteran like you, I am still surprised you don’t give us more grief about exposing your secret identity,” Synergy says with an ongoing smile.
“What’s the point?” I shrug. “You’ve got files on everyone. Registration Act demands it. You know I never fought the government on th
at one. Not much need to. Everyone knew it’d be one thing to establish the Act and quite another to enforce it. I mean, you guys couldn’t even catch the dude who killed JFK.”
“Still, we have detailed files. And this will only add more to yours.”
I shake my head and laugh like the supers community grandpa that I am.
“Don’t go getting too ahead of yourself, Agent Synergy. It’s one thing to have a big shiny database full of top secret info. It’s another to do something with it. You know the saying: bullshit in, bullshit out.”
“But now there’s a major connection between our file for Catchfire and the one for you,” Synergy smiles.
She still wants to make her point.
“Well for a starter, Catchfire’s dead. That’s the point of this meeting, right?”
The lady pales.
“Second thing,” I say, and I can feel myself only warming up. “You want to know why they brought in Registration?”
“The explosion of costumed identities in the 1970s –”
“Baloney. I’ll tell you what it was: tax dollars.”
“Tax dollars?”
“And Micro Man. Remember him?”
“Well sure,” Synergy replies. “He was, like, everywhere when I was a kid.”
“The six million dollar man, that’s what they used to call him. Started out working the Bronx and wound up the face of Yves Saint Laurent, Cartier watches, Citroen – the fucking guy had a record deal in France that sold twenty-five million units. There weren’t twenty-five million people even in France at the time.”
“Okay, so what’s your point?”
“The secret identity allowed Micro Man to reasonably claim his life and the life of his loved ones would be in danger if he filed a tax return on his earnings in costumed life.”
Zephyr II Page 18