The list goes on and on. We’re a classic four-color team-up, heavy on the darker shades as we sweep through the waterfront’s riff-raff like the broom of the God of the Old Testament, though we can only break bones and throw people out of windows rather than turn them into pillars of salt, though more than once we do a pretty good impersonation of the Lord’s fiery sword.
In the evenings I fuck Loren until I have rope burns down the side of my glans, nasty-looking scars that resemble the things people do to cars to make them more badass. Then I succumb to my weird, quasi-dreamless sleeps where I wake to images of my father and a tired conviction we’ve spent the night arguing philosophy and pop music, though I can’t dredge anything to the front of my daylight mind. Meanwhile, Tessa tells me Beth has returned from England with photographs of a “darling” townhouse in snowy Manchester and the Post runs a retrospective on Zephyr’s greatest hits, the city is shaken by meteorites that prove to be intelligent transforming robots, and it’s the villain Metropolitan rather than any heroes who bring matters to a close. The date for Paragon and Jocelyn’s wedding looms ever nearer and the New (New) Sentinels are profiled in GQ and the FBI stops harassing my phone and I am aware we’ve stepped onto some kind of timeless merry-go-round barely keeping my sanity at a low ebb and the smooth momentum of everyday life from crumpling in on itself like a stale gingerbread house.
It can’t go on like this.
Zephyr 7.14 “Hide And Seek”
THE MOTORCYCLE FEELS like a super-power of its own, the engine a bass thrum between my legs as I turn it off the street and ignore the stares and the onlookers who stop to point at the masked figure in black as I kill the engine and flick the kick-stand and check the baseball bat is in place across my back as I push the bar door open and walk in and the biker types playing pool lift their long-mustached faces from the felt, but don’t make a move as I eyeball them and keep going down the end of the room.
On the other side of the counter, a cute guy in a leather cap with a chain connecting his ear to his nose finishes drying a wine glass that he puts down between two fingers, and then he begins to pour for the peroxide blonde in the leather chaps waiting patiently and close to me.
In Loren’s leather gear I certainly fit in, Tessa’s words returning to haunt me like the very best vintage karma.
“Barkeep,” I say in my best mock John Wayne. “Looking for Streethawk.”
The guy smiles with gold front teeth and indicates with his gaze around the corner of the bar to where clove cigarettes and the smell of cum waft from a half-dozen booths. I nod and the barman gives a fey little bow and I walk stiffly, imagining the eyes on my ass as I round the corner and the guy in the denim vest and dirty Mohawk stands from a discussion with two other men.
“Who are you?” Streethawk asks.
“Name’s not important,” I reply, emphasis on the graveled voice to help mask any similarities in appearance.
Streethawk looks at the two other fags and sniffs and they dismiss themselves as the veteran crime-fighter hooks a thumb into his belt and shifts his boxer’s feet slightly further apart, an expression of readiness on his hard face. There’s nothing queer-looking about the guy except his undeniable appetite for cock. The aquiline nose has been busted one time too many and pale blue eyes, free of any mask except Adam Ant-style Indian markings, scan me up and down for threats rather than the chance of promiscuous sex.
“You’ll need a name if you want to speak to me. Otherwise, fuck off.”
“I’m looking for Hawkwind,” I say just before he turns, his back to me the biggest insult to my own perceived threat level.
Obviously the name is a big hook. Similarities begin and end with the shared bird of prey motif. Hawkwind is about as gay as I am, which is just as well since he’s the guy who taught me how to fight when I first started out in this business.
“It’s a long time since I heard that name,” Streethawk says. “How do I know you’re not gunning for him or something?”
“No need to worry about that,” I reply. “I’m on old friend trying to get back in touch.”
“I guess I’ll just have to trust you on that,” Streethawk says and looks away slightly and I know he is accessing the data on me available through his uncanny rapport with the room, the building, the city around us.
“You’d know if I was lying,” I say.
“We’d be fighting by now rather than talking if I thought it was any other way,” the other veteran says. “What do you want the old boy for?”
“Call it nostalgia.”
“He’s not in the city. Last I heard he was working the homeless scene around Washington,” Streethawk says.
“Homeless scene?”
“The homeless are people too. They need protection. More, maybe, than everyone else.”
“A homeless superhero,” I say and sigh and realize in a parallel universe that could well be a definition for myself. “Great. He always did have some pretty far out ideas.”
“What, like training young punks with more firepower than brains in how to kick ass without getting caught?”
Streethawk eyes me up another time and sniffles and shifts slightly.
“Get yourself a new name, Zephyr, if you don’t want the old one to give you away. You’ve left your mark all over this city. It doesn’t just go away when you do. Now get out of here.”
Aware that to someone like him, the very furniture is spilling its guts about what it knows, I decide not to argue and simply turn and stalk from the room like the second-rate Nightwatchman I am. At the end of the booths, I stop and pause and hesitate and finally turn and look back at Streethawk with my “important business” face.
“The name Elvis mean anything to you?”
“Elvis?” He stares back impassively and slowly lifts a hand to scratch under one frosty eye. “No fucking idea.”
Outside, I clamber onto Loren’s bike and get it fired up on the second try, and a plane goes by overhead and by the time the jet roar has dimmed I am fishtailing away down the street and out of sight.
*
ANNIE BLACK TAKES longer than I would fucking well like to arrive. I am standing near Walt Whitman’s tomb in the cemetery at Camden listening to the Best of Vanilla Ice on the mp3 function I’ve just recently discovered on the Enercom phone. With one earpiece in, I am discreetly throwing my shit down as Miss Black turns the corner in her Matrix-style trench coat.
She peers at me standing in the shadows beneath trenchant vines and hisses, “Zephyr? Is that you?”
“Yeah. You OK?” I ask, aware it’s pure diversion. “Thanks for coming.”
“Jesus Christ, Zeph. Why are you calling me? I don’t need this shit,” Annie says and comes closer. “Synergy hears I’m speaking to you and I’m getting a one-way ticket to the Panama field office, ya know what I mean?”
“Settle down, Annie. It can’t be that bad.”
“Let’s just say it’s not the Lord’s name they’re taking in vain around headquarters these days,” she says in that worldly wise and weary way of hers I’ve always found fairly appealing. “Synergy’s totally pissed you haven’t called in. And Vanguard’s got a total hard-on for pressing Federal charges.”
“Well at least we solved one problem for him,” I mutter.
“Isn’t it bad enough you’ve got the State troopers on your case?”
“Annie, I don’t know anything about that. Will you listen to me? I need help. I need to talk.”
“Shit,” the one-time teen mystic replies.
“What?”
“I figured it must be something pretty fucked up if you’re asking for help.”
I consider this a moment and nod.
“I agree. It’s pretty fucked up if I’m asking you for help.”
“Not sure I wanna know,” Miss Black replies.
“Hey, thanks for fuck all, kid.”
“Aw Jesus, Zeph.”
She sighs and looks away, running fingers like a comb through her flicked-out
blonde hair.
“Are you gonna tell me the problem or are we gonna fight like old times?”
“You seem to prefer making war to making love, Annie.”
“When it comes to you? Yeah. What gives?”
Having arrived at the critical juncture, I turn my back and start walking so my former teammate has to skip alongside to catch up. The festering tombs give way to slightly more pleasant grave sites, if you can use such a word for places where former people lay insensate, waiting for the heat death of the cosmos. We’re almost at the statue to Infinity, who fell in the Kirlian Invasion, when Annie loses her shit and grabs me by the shoulder.
“I’m not here to play hide-and-seek, Zephyr. What’s up?”
“I’ve lost my powers,” I tell her. “Had them stolen from me.”
“Jesus. Is that all?”
“All?”
My jaw works like a broken bicycle chain for several moments.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Yes, that’s why I asked to meet you. I need . . . advice. I was thinking there must be some kind of, you know, magickal solution.”
“And you called me?” Annie asks with uncalled for skepticism.
“Um, Annie Black, teen wizard-cum-FBI turncoat? Yes.”
“Whyn’t you call your pal, Twilight?”
“He’s, uh, probably not the right person for this one,” I tell her.
“Well, Zephyr. This one’s kinda out of my league, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” I respond. “I was kind of hoping you’d do that thing, you know?”
“What thing?”
“Did you, um, bring a goat with you?”
Annie Black rolls her eyes and that’s how I manage to deftly move the conversation on to Simon Magus.
Zephyr 7.15 “Not Saussure”
“IT’S JUST A fucking goat,” I tell her, and not for the first time. “If it means that much to you, I’ll take it home and eat it later.”
“Yeah,” Miss Black replies without much optimism. “Because you’d hate for it die for nothing.”
“Well I don’t think little Betty here’s gonna die for nothing.”
I smile and gesture to the goat I have tethered near the base of Infinity’s statue. The little thing rolls its eyes madly, typical to most goats, and I try and transfer my enthusiastic grin back to Annie.
“Jesus. I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” she groans.
“This is life or death to me.”
“No pun intended,” Annie says.
“That wasn’t a pun. I’m not talking about the fucking goat. Can we get on with it?”
“I guess I only have myself to blame for this,” Annie says as she produces a knife from the small of her back that I’d love to call an athame, but really it’s just a nasty-looking butterfly knife Annie cavorts into form as quick as some gangbanger from South Central.
“For someone who’s pretty fried, you’ve got a good memory, Zeph.”
“A pretty girl sacrifices a goat in front of you, it’s something you remember,” I say.
“Okay,” and she motions in vague annoyance. “You’re standing in the magic circle. Get out of the fucking way, Zephyr.”
We’re in Whitman’s tomb again (or should I say, yeah, we’re in Whitman’s tomb – it’s hard to get privacy in this town), and Annie has already cut the goat’s rump to get the blood needed for the pentagram. Everything about her speaks of reluctance, but I’m pleased to see her carrying through with my request.
“I can’t believe you gave the goat a name already,” Annie mutters. “That’s sick. It’s almost deliberate. Where the frak did you get a goat from, anyway?”
“That Portuguese place,” I answer vaguely.
Annie only shakes her head and growls and I check out her ass as she peels off the leather coat and gets the goat in a headlock and starts muttering Satanic-sounded verses.
“You’ll get his name right, won’t you?”
“Magus and I go a fair way back. Shut up and let me do the talking here.”
Betty gives a tiny squeal as her throat is cut and Annie clamps her bare forearm across the small animal as it kicks and its life-force gutters away, blood spattered across the diagrams adorning the dusty tomb floor. It only takes a moment for the mystical miasma coalesce and Annie returns to her vexed mutterings. I pick a piece of corn from the corner of one of my teeth and refrain from humming, checking the time on the Enercom phone as Miss Black releases the goat carcass and lifts her hands and the knife over her head and says Simon Magus’ name three times aloud.
There is a powder-flash explosion that is total vaudeville. A moment later, a well-groomed figure in a white suit steps from the pure darkness beside me and I emit a tiny eek! before recovering.
The light gives Simon Magus a ghoulish appearance. The malefic smile doesn’t help. Before I really know what I’m doing, I poke the magician in the lapel just to be sure he’s real. He reacts with a typical Englishman’s annoyance.
“Oi! What was that for? For that matter, what’s this all about? I’m not the talking clock, you know.”
Magus pauses long enough to draw air and only then notices Miss Black. His demeanor changes markedly and he wiggles his designer eyebrows and crosses the floor not at all deterred by the fact Annie’s wearing a few quarts of goat’s blood on her H&M singlet.
“Annie Black? Gosh, how long’s it been?”
“Too long, Simon. How are you?”
They air kiss and I mime throwing up, though perhaps mime’s not the right word since it comes with sound effects.
“Sorry, Simon,” Annie says and gestures to me like one might a particularly amateurish painting. “Zephyr asked me to summon you.”
“Note the word ‘summon,’ Zephyr. In the flesh. I’m quite real, you know.”
“Good,” I reply. “And thanks for coming. I’d hate to think you’re fake.”
Simon Magus snaps his arms away and fusses with his jacket sleeves like a man adjusting his cufflinks, except he’s not actually wearing cufflinks. Then he adjusts the plum-colored tie that is the only color in his monochrome outfit.
“What is it you want, Zephyr?”
“Right. Here goes,” I say and don’t quite manage a smile. “I need you to help me get my powers back.”
“And why would I do that?” Magus asks.
“Because I’m . . . I need my powers,” I tell him.
“Why?”
“What is this, fucking Twenty Questions?”
“And what is this?” the sorcerer says and gestures around. “I think you’ve mistaken me for the magic shop, old man.”
*
“I KNOW THIS isn’t World of Warcraft, Simon,” I tell the white-haired, trendy-looking motherfucker in a hurry. There’s an air of imminent departure surrounding the world’s foremost sorcerer and my desperation’s showing like a pink sock.
“The goat trick was cute, Zephyr. But as my father used to say, ‘Once is funny. Twice is a smack.’ Capiche?”
“Magus, I need help.”
“I get your air of ready pathos. The humility. I’m sorry. There’s an order to things, Zephyr, and I am a servant of that order. I won’t intervene.”
“Won’t? Or can’t?”
“I’m . . . not going to get dragged into this pettiness,” Simon says.
He runs bejeweled fingers carefully over his crinkly Spartacus-style hair-do, checking everything’s in place.
“I understand you’re disappointed. Deal with it.”
“I’m trying to deal with it,” I tell him.
“You’re a big boy,” the sorcerer replies in the most condescending tone possible. “You’ve been around the traps. You can handle it.”
“Some help from you and I won’t have to handle it.”
“Zephyr? Forget it. If it makes you feel any better, you’re right. Maybe I can’t do anything about it.”
He makes a snappy gesture and runs his hand down the air in front of me, starting at my head and sor
t of giving up around my balls.
“It’s an auric suppressant, if that makes you feel any better.”
“That’s not a lot of help.”
“Somebody’s messed with your biological energy signature,” he says.
“Others were hit too. And others seemed immune.”
“It can be done,” Simon replies.
“Will it . . . wear off?”
“Mate . . . Like I said, I’m not the magic shop, Zeph.”
“Christ.”
“Don’t be so dejected,” he says – he who is probably one of the most powerful men the world has ever seen, at least since Hitler. Or Charlie Sheen. “You need to look for the silver lining. Remember, the back door of a problem is often an opportunity.”
“Christ,” I say again, utterly dejected.
Simon puts his hand on my shoulder and winks to Miss Black while he thinks I’m not looking.
“Sorry my friend. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Who’s Elvis?”
“Ah,” Simon Magus smiles and puts his hands together. “The King.”
*
“ELVIS WAS NEVER born in this world. Not as far as I can tell,” Simon Magus regales us. “I’ve seen sign of him in a thousand other worlds. They call him the king, but of course that’s a title mankind has reserved for cryptonauts through all time.”
“Um, cryptonauts?”
“There are cryptonauts and semiophages,” the uh, well, wizard says. “Understand I am talking at the ideational level. These aren’t words you would’ve learnt at school. And I’m talking about world history and magic at a level that’s frankly probably above your head.”
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