“Nice trick flying right into a foreign surface-to-air assault,” I add. “You’re gonna win a Darwin Award by the time you’re done, boy.”
“Cut the shit, Zephyr. Let’s rock.”
At this he gestures, both wrists together, palms open like a rare exotic flower – one that spills burning liquid plasma over everything in sight.
*
WITH SYNERGY’S POWER amplification trick still hanging in there, it feels like almost nothing for me to switch into hyperspeed and dodge around Infernus’s attack. Without Quietus here to try and stop my vital organs functioning and Frost distracting me with doubts about whether I might technically be attacking my own unborn child or not, I’m free to manifest my powers to their fullest. The only real danger is starting the mother of all forest fires – but that’s all the more reason to close shop on this fucker quick and good.
I come in an arc around the flaming attack and my hard looping right emerges from hyperspace to connect with Infernus’s cheekbone like a hammer of the gods. Bones inside his head crack in a symphony of sickness and he goes sprawling across the road and into a tree. I follow up, still strangely half-in and half-out of my accelerated mode, and for every defense the red guy tries to mount, I am simply too fast and too strong. It’s just him and me now and unlike our encounter at Riker’s, and Mys-Tech before that, there’s no chance to emerge from this scenario with illusions intact.
He is a tough opponent. Tough and strong. But today is my day. I’m the storm god. I feel like goddamn Thor or someone, swinging tight uppercuts and hard jabs that land like thunderbolts, no need to resort to the wider array of my powers. Smoke hisses from my attacks. Black blood gushes from both his nostrils, his mask is askew, and at some point Infernus makes a stupid rush, tries to clasp his burning hands around my shoulders. Instead, I sweep him from the ground, pick him up over my head and twist and spin and hurl him back onto the hard-top where he lands with a heavy groan and goes chillingly still.
I stagger back toward him, adrenaline and power at war within. Infernus rolls over, spent, only half looking up at me. And when he does, it’s without much more than a divorced resignation, no actual fear beyond the immediate pain and discomfort.
“You got me . . . fucker. . . .”
“Tell me why Fuse is so important to you that you’d risk something stupid like this,” I ask.
“Not Fuse.”
“Fuse is in White Nine.”
“Maybe,” Infernus replies, hawking something up and groaning and starting to roll over before thinking the better of it. “Still wasn’t the target.”
I nudge him with my boot.
“Who, then?”
“. . . Crescendo.”
“You motherfucker,” I say and shake my head slowly.
He’s just named one of the people in this world who hate me most. Him and my wife.
“Why him?”
“He knows things.”
“Tell me.”
“Fuck you, Zephyr.”
“Pride’s good, Toby,” I say and look around.
It’s times like these I wish I smoked. It would help with the pacing of my impending monologue.
“Let you remind me we’re in the middle of Assfuck, Canada. I am not beyond going all Guantanamo Bay on your ass.”
Infernus looks at me all put out and shit, reminding me of the troubled youth he once was, stealing cars and other stupid stuff and always having the policeman knocking on his mother’s door.
“Shit, Zephyr. You’re getting’ lowly.”
He struggles upright and stands. Quite a lot of his movements seem to be about making sure his dominant features are still in place and he hasn’t lost too much blood.
“I tell you this shit and we’re square, OK?”
“What, until the next time you decide you want to toast me? I don’t fuckin’ think so, Tobes.”
“Zephyr, man –”
“Better idea. How about you tell me what I want to know and I won’t beat you to death with your own leg. Sound good?”
“Now you just talkin’ tough, white-ass motherfucker.”
“At least I’m not red, you fucking mutant.”
“That’s some racist shit, Zephyr.”
“Give me a break, ‘fernus,” I say and spit onto the tarmac. “You can’t have it both ways.”
I know this is a major filibuster for him, so I stand back and show I have little interest in his particular skew on the race debate. We stare off for a few seconds and then again Infernus reluctantly shakes his head.
“Crescendo knows Kingmaker,” he says and snorts a little blood from his nose. “That’s all we were told.”
“By who?”
“Man, you want dot-to-dot? It’s an inside job. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“But you’re hanging out with Cosa Nostra sluts like Gravitas and Thunderbird.”
“Make your own connections on that shit, Zephyr.”
I am certainly right about to do that – right about the same moment there’s a low growl and Raveness hits me hard from the side.
Zephyr 5.7 “She’s A Strong Girl”
SHE’S A STRONG girl. We go down together, clattering like store dummies dropped from the back of a truck, off the bitumen, into the trees, coming to a stop at last with my head against the base of a ginormous spruce. Raveness is hyperventilating and might possibly be having an orgasm, at least drinking in her feral countenance, black hair plastered in long strands across her face. I kick her upside her lantern jaw and watch her catapult backward, claws frantic at the trees like a motherfucking cat falling. The noise is much worse. I use the commercial break to get up and dust off my knees, glancing across panting as I note Infernus deciding self-preservation is the better part of valor. He’s half-a-mile into the sky leaving a plasma-heated vapor trail in his wake. I’d give chase, but I have madmen – nay, make that madwomen – enough on my plate.
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 e
ven 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 and 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.”
&nb
sp; 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.
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