“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 industrialist 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.”
*
I HAVE THE fortress drop me downtown, and from there I quickly bust a move to Johnson and a little egg noodle place I know where I wolf down three quick serves along with a couple of cups of scalding Chinese tea. Almost immediately I hit up a street dealer for a chili dog and a Coke and I am still slurping these when the phone reverts to It’s Raining Men on my belt.
I swear, splashing cola in the rush to silence the cell.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“I thought you might want to ask me that,” Tessa says. “That bitch dropped me in the middle of the Renaissance.”
“Really?”
“It’s not cool, dad. I had to show the Pope my breasts to get home.”
Words cannot express my shock, so my tongue simply flails around until Tessa continues.
“Good thing my hunch paid off, anyway. I don’t know where else I was going to find time travel technology in the early sixteenth century.”
“Are you OK?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” Tessa says. “Did you sort things out with Seeker? Did she really think you were making a move on me? Yuck.”
“Uh, yeah, no, things have settled down a bit with her,” I stammer. “Actually, I might be out of the Sentinels for a while. It’s probably for the best.”
“Really? Wow. Is Seeker taking over full-time then?”
“Um, no. Seeker’s probably stepping down as team leader too. . . .”
“How does that make sense?”
“Uh, look,” I say and eye the street knowing there’s way too many people looking at me standing with a ketchup dribble on my gold zed. “There was a letter from your mom’s lawyer. Has she said anything else about her plans to move?”
“You haven’t called her yet?” Tessa half-asks, half-groans.
“Well, there was this little thing called a worldquake. . . .”
“Jesus, you’ll use anything as an excuse, won’t you, dad?”
“I’m on the case, honey. Trust me.”
“OK. And what are you doing now?”
“I’ve got to pop in on an old family friend.”
I hang up and clip the cell away. A gentle shower starts falling and then ceases immediately as clouds cross the sun and disintegrate high above the towers of Atlantic City. In a quick move, I bound into the air and veer sharply south.
Zephyr 6.6 “Wet Dream Masterpiece”
I’M NOT SURE exactly what I was expecting as I cross the Keys and motor for one of the big reclaimed island estates, but a yard littered with FBI agents wasn’t even close on the list.
Tom Hilfiger’s place is a deep south plantation wet dream masterpiece with a vague Tuscan influence, big white plaster-slapped walls around the yard topped by iron spikes and security cameras. The technology obviously wasn’t enough. A double-ended FBI helicarrier menaces on the mansion’s palatial grounds and there’s twenty-odd guys in suits along with the usual crowd of technicians and hangers-on that just screams crime scene. Before I’ve even really eyeballed the vicinity, my paranoid inner voice starts shrieking for me to jet clear of the area, but taking off would mean the answers I seek will remain even more elusive than they already are. Reminding myself I haven’t done anything wrong, I head straight for the main building and slap down in my leathers before a few astonished agents who flex like cats as they go for their guns until they realize who I am.
“Morning,” I smile and gesture with my hand like I’m holding an invisible coffee.
My chuckle falters as I look at some of the close details of the lawn. Pixelated from the sky, the colors made little sense, and nearer to the ground it still takes my eyes several seconds to comprehend the cartoonish aspect to the violence. Technicians are still putting coronial sheets over some of the corpses. The foam suits of the dead cartoon mascots are only mildly gore-splattered. I can’t tell how they were killed. The closest guy is entombed in the costume of a popular TV cat with
a magic bag, only his tricks seem to have finally run out. I also don’t think an Uzi was part of his normal routine. A gaudier, blue-clad mascot from Yo Gabba Gabba lies on his side, the headpiece off, a surprised expression on the tough-looking corpse’s face eclipsed by the white canvas as it slips over him.
I turn back to the suits with a wry smile I don’t feel.
“Boss around?”
“That would be me,” Agent Synergy says like the cool glass of water she is, stepping down the faux Eighteenth Century steps from the mansion doors gaping more like the entrance to an ancestral tomb than someone’s house. The tall woman wears the customary gauzy white gown over her white lycra, her badge of office clipped above one of her fashionably dissembled breasts.
“Synergy,” I say in what just passes for a badly scripted moment. “What’s going on?”
“I think I should be asking the questions, Zephyr. Why are you here?”
“I know I didn’t bring doughnuts or anything, but we’re on the same team,” I say right back to her. “Remember?”
Remembering is obviously an unpleasant thing, judging by the face she pulls. Vanguard steps down from the manor house in his high tech yet anachronistic armor and looks about to say something utterly procedural until he glimpses me. The blonde footballer’s face turns from business to a scowl, but like usual, he keeps his mouth mostly closed as he orients himself to the unexpectedly fluid situation.
“Zephyr, please,” Synergy says. “This is a crime scene. Why are you here? Surely it can’t be coincidence.”
“I’m pretty keen on the old coincidence,” I say, but my disarming grin backfires and Synergy casts her glare around like she might corral someone into trying to cuff me. So I give my conciliatory Han Solo grimace and add, “I came to see this Tom Hilfiger guy about something personal. Is he dead?”
The two agents stare at me with reluctance for a short moment. Whatever professional computation needs to take place happens and I feel myself ticked off against a long list of possible suspects. Synergy’s face softens, almost crumples, and she speaks as she looks away.
Zephyr II Page 26