Zephyr I Page 9

  “So it’s just coincidence the city’s seen Miss Black, Seeker, Vulcana, Gary Gray aka Animal Boy and Chamber all in the same fortnight?”

  “It was for the mayor’s sake we got together,” I mumble, as much as one can when having a conversation with a helicopter.

  “Is there some future news you want to tell us Zephyr?”

  “I don’t think so, Leeza.”

  “No thoughts about bringing the team back – or a new one?”

  “Well, I enjoyed my time with the Sentinels even if you could say the experiment was a broken one.”

  I have no idea why I give her even that much information.

  “The FBI are reporting your old nemesis – or one of them – The Tragedian, is coming up for psychiatric assessment after a possible radical new breakthrough treatment.”

  “Oh, they gave him a lobotomy, did they?”

  Leeza laughs. She loves it. Truth is we don’t get along. She told me she likes them dark and brooding, “like Nightwind”. It’s internationally-syndicated publicity all the same. For some reason I assume this is automatically a good thing, so I grin and let her come back to me.

  “Any chance of a reconciliation?”

  “With the Tragedian?” My response stumbles. “He . . . caused city-wide riots that left sixteen people dead. And that was just last time he was loose.”

  “I didn’t hear you say no?”

  “Um, no, Leeza.”

  The pilot makes a throat-cutting motion and the reporter does her thing with the rapid summary, the signing off, the business-like wave goodbye, and then the helicopter banks, descends, turns away, leaving me like any other ordinary guy who can hover half-a-mile above the street.

  Traffic below is in gridlock. A pigeon passing through the turning rotor blades explodes in a fine grey mist. The roar of a nearby flight bound for Heathrow fills the world. I think again of Courtney Love standing in the club’s foyer with a swaddled infant and am embarrassed that it only occurs to me now that I probably should’ve told someone at City Hall.

  However, I am not a hero who dabbles in the family courts, even if maybe those people need superpowers more than anyone.

  I am reminded of this fact only moments later as a red streak hurtles through the air towards me at just over the speed of sound.

  Although I detect his arrival through my barometric powers, Thunderbird still manages to greet me with a full-force body-check that sends me spinning end over end until I can counter myself. A roiling nimbus of quasi-combustible energy surrounds the other super like a smoky glow as he hovers where he’s halted, chest heaving, his heavy-lidded gaze settling on me like a stain.

  “Don Azzurro wants to speak, so you’re comin’ with me.”

  Zephyr 1.11 “Ensuing Loyalties And Medieval Fealties”

  TWILIGHT’S UNCLE ANTONIO is the head of the east coast syndicate. Although his nephew’s dalliances with the occult – and his emergence as a bona fide super-being in his own right – was often a source of friction between the two of them during the years, I have it from Twilight that their relationship’s now settled into an uneasy peace bordering truculent resentment. Again, as I understand it, the tension to a large part derives from Tony Azzurro’s refusal to accept his brother’s son does not have some manner of designs on taking over the family business, especially with the supernatural arsenal now at his disposal. Twilight’s father was the former don and the business, with all its ensuing loyalties and medieval fealties, only fell to Tony the Toecutter because Twilight let it happen. He let it happen out of lack of interest, but Azzurro’s seventh-generation Mafioso. Those people have a gene for paranoia hand-sculpted by natural selection.

  All the same, Thunderbird – one of a handful of the syndicate’s paid operatives – figures he’s here to remind me Twilight’s still family, as far as Tony Azzurro’s concerned.

  “I’m always happy to talk with Don Tony,” I say with an inclination towards the distant ground, assuming the big guy is stashed away in an armor-plated limousine somewhere.

  “Good,” Thunderbird says.

  “But I also have time to teach you some manners.”

  “Just come and try it, bitch,” the other guy says.

  There’s something in his accent, Puerto Rican or Cuban, maybe. I’ve never heard him talk before.

  I eye my imagined date with the wannabe Corleones down below and then Thunderbird. I genuinely have no qualms about taking on the city’s number one enforcer for the syndicate, and that’s why I guess I can let it drop.

  “You’ll keep. Take me to your dealer.”

  The rendezvous is not on a street corner and badgered into the back of a long black as I imagined. Tony Azzurro is much more wise to the surveillance possibilities of our fair city and awaits me on the roof of the Deluxe Continental Hotel. It’s cold up there, even though the wind isn’t up yet, and he’s instantly recognizable among the dozen-or-so hoodlums the Cosa Nostra like to keep on hand for such eventualities. All the suits are Armani, which seems a little overdone to me. Talk about making the three-piece suit a uniform and they’ve gone and done it. Tony is a burly figure with the crew cut going silver at the sides, a grey Versace overcoat, Dior scarf and Colombian cigar completing his accoutrement. He also carries a walking stick with a mother-of-pearl handle and gilt grip. He leans on it more heavily than he wants to as I plop onto the roof sixty feet away at the edge of the venting ducts to ensure steam plays across our scene. The movie in my head just won’t let up man, sorry.

  “Mr Azzurro,” I say. “It’s been a long time since I had the pleasure.”

  “Zepha,” he replies, stomping across, cigar in one corner of his mouth. “You know there’s no pleasure in it. What have you done with my nephew?”

  Fanboy as I am for Twilight, it’s hard to adjust to thinking of him as anyone’s nephew. I size the Toecutter up for a moment and the scowl adds authenticity to my genuine reaction.

  “You need to explain what’s going on. Twilight is a friend of mine.”

  “So I thought,” tough guy Tony replies.

  I wind my finger around, say, “The explanation?” and the Mafia hoods grow angsty, more than three of them pulling out their heaters. I keep my eyes on Azzurro and do the spark thing, one of the tendrils reaching smack across the roof and taking the gun from a trembling hand.

  “Let’s keep this nice, huh?”

  “You was at the Island last week,” the don says. “What gives? Last anyone knows you visited, my nephew disappeared into that pinball parlor of his and now there’s a fucken mess and we ain’t seen shit from Frankie since.”

  “Define ‘mess’?”

  “A big mess of red shit and light and shit,” one of the neighboring goons says, apparently with approval.

  “If by ‘pinball parlor’ you’re meaning Twilight’s inner sanctum, that’s sacred space to him. I hope your men went in there for a good reason, Mr Azzurro.”

  I shrug, playing the mobster to the man himself.

  “Twilight’s a dangerous man. He walks in a dangerous world. You’d wanna know what you were doing before you go upsetting anything in there.”

  Azzurro sniffs and brusquely wipes at his nose. It’s cold. The mist steams from us, air-conditioning or not.

  “Maybe you need to have a look at it,” he says.

  “As a friend? Sure. Maybe I do.”

  The don nods. “Good.” And he motions with his cigar as he turns and trudges off across the roof.

  Thunderbird takes me by the upper arm and I frown, looking down, about to shake him free when I see my leather sleeve is coated in ice crystals – frost that would normally be impossible in such a short space of time, even in cold weather.

  At about the same moment my apparent weight skyrockets from something around two-eighty and into the six or seven ton range. I’m lucky I don’t fall through the roof. I am only just strong enough to turn my head and groan inwardly, played like a sucker as Gravitas and Frost emerge from concealment. The icy lady
, as always, gives a cruel smile, lips blue with the cold she cannot feel. Gravitas has aided and abetted his costume with a thick fur-lined coat and aviator goggles, something between the Han Solo on Hoth action figure and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine musical.

  The goons produce a steel trolley and I can hear a big chopper coming in to land. Right around that time a kind old man appears with a needle – a horse needle, in fact, to overcome my super-dense and thus extra-heavy flesh – and all Gravitas lets me do is groan.

  *

  ALTHOUGH MY ARM aches, it’s the freezing cold that bites through the narcotic fug my Mafia friends create for me.

  It’s dark in the room and my wrists and ankles are shackled to the four cardinal directions. Although I’m still costumed, my leather pants are half down and a skeletal brunette rides the erection I’m frankly surprised I can maintain. Molecules of frost coat my uniform and float in the air like motes.

  The woman grinds herself to a shuddering stop that returns no favors. In fact, I sense I’ve already made the donation as she slides noisily from my cold hardness, the silver highlights in her long loose hair a giveaway. It’s dark in the room, though I am sure we’re alone. My voice, when it emerges from the cavern of my mouth, croaks amid a locomotive cloud of steam.

  “Frost . . . Proving you really can’t get any, huh?”

  The villainess purrs, blue lips black in the gloom as she steps into her PVC outfit and pulls up the arms, mesh over her small hard breasts, a black corset clipping into place. She flickers her hair loose of the catches before answering.

  “I’m making a baby,” she says.

  I feel a trill of fear when I think about it. A few seconds tick by to allow me to ponder the enormity of this revelation.

  “You’re mad.”

  “Aw, Zephyr, I thought you’d be flattered. You think I’m asking any of these clowns?”

  “It doesn’t seem exactly . . . workplace chatter . . . around the water cooler.”

  Speaking of chatter, my teeth clack together as she carefully tucks me away, eyes locked on mine – I can’t look back – and she refastens my belt, manner like the dominatrix she so much resembles, tugging hard until the loop’s closed.

  “I’m going to make a super-baby, Zephyr. A child like the world has never seen.”

  “You could’ve asked,” I stutter.

  “Really?” Her trilling laugh hurts my ears in the hard echoing confines of the room. “You might have said yes?”

  “Maybe you should’ve asked one of the others. What about Thunderbird? He seems like he’d fit the bill.”

  Frost laughs like a crow. “You think I would do this with just anyone?”

  “Speaking as the guy who’s clock you just cleaned?”

  She makes a face, glances at one corner of the room where I presume there’s a door – I can’t crane my neck that far – and then she adjusts her costume, producing a make-up mirror and doing the lippy-mouth thing for a few moments.

  “I don’t want any more children, Frost.”

  “How many do you have already?”

  She tries to sound nonchalant, but I sense a deep, possibly morbid curiosity. I snap my mouth shut and there’s the click of her high-heeled boots as she moves around the flagstone floor. Vinyl-encased fingers smooth back my hair, hard.

  “Tell me,” she hisses. “Do they have your powers? Do they do what you do?”

  “Leave me alone, Frost,” I growl in return. “I don’t think old man Azzurro tied me up so you could use me as your private sperm bank.”

  “Do you have any idea how powerful the combination of frost and your storm-powers would be? Our children will be super-conductors, Zephyr.”

  “Get off me, you fucking madwoman.”

  All I can do is toss her back with an elbow, but it’s enough. If she shows vulnerability in her confession, now Frost shores up her ego this with another of those godawful laughs, head right back. Despite her pallor and size zero dress, she looks beautiful – and completely insane.

  Light spills into the room as the door opens with the sound of a rifle-crack, ice breaking from hinges and frame as Tony Azzurro and a half-dozen goons stroll into the morgue-like chamber.

  “He awake?”

  “He is now,” Frost says in her low, sardonic voice.

  The Toecutter makes a motion and several of the young Italian guys move around the trolley and slowly reposition it. I no longer have Gravitas’s powers affecting my mass yet the restraints, tungsten steel I am guessing, are good enough to keep me in place for now. The trolley starts moving up a ramp and we’re through the door and out under the crepuscular sky, the irony of the actual frigging twilight lost on everybody as they wheel me, like I’m the madman, across from the estate’s helipad, leaving the Neo-Classical stone maintenance shed and going up the garden path towards the main manor house and my friend’s sacred laboratory.

  The reddish glow to the air isn’t the only thing that doesn’t look right. Once I’m able to crane my head to peer between my feet, I can see a huge, slightly crooked disc of red energy enveloping Twilight’s study. The surface of the void shows angry blood-red clouds moving slow as eels in a pond. The squat stone building is split in two by the presence of the disc. The front of the building with its studded oak door remains visible. The rear of the building is lost in shadow and red undercurrents.

  When next I look around, Thunderbird and Gravitas stroll along with Frost and Tony Azzurro. Perhaps nearly twenty mooks in total have joined us. I have a fair idea what happens next and I rattle my chains, calling for the key.

  “That shot the doc gave you should leave you a little weak,” Thunderbird says. “Don’t go gettin’ any funny ideas, leather-boy.”

  There’s a click, and when I look at my wrist, Frost is there, smiling, something intimate retained in her gaze.

  “Trust me,” she whispers.

  It’s perhaps the craziest suggestion I’ve heard so far.

  Zephyr 1.12 “Cigarette Dots In The Dark”

  IF THEY’D JUST told me Twilight was missing and his den was engulfed by eldritch forces, I would’ve been here at Mach 4. Instead, this whole charade has led to the east coast syndicate having a pretty good tie-in to my secret identity, while I’ll be the one scrambling to explain if any blue-lipped, lightning-throwing teenagers turn up in a few years’ time. God knows why, but I bet they’ll be angry at me.

  Gravitas, Thunderbird and Frost form an arc. Behind them, Tony Azzurro’s bodyguards tote enough heavy ordnance to keep the Israeli economy healthy for a long time to come. True to their word, as I rub my wrists to help along my circulation, I feel shaky-legged from their chemist’s poison. I need something to eat and a change of boxers, and I can already feel the headache coming on when I explain to Elisabeth why I wasn’t there at Tessa’s school.

  I surreptitiously feel for the phone at the small of my back and Azzurro chuckles, tossing me the small dark object, like a hi-tech ladybird redesigned by Gieger, the Zephyr color scheme emblazoned on the back.

  “You may wanna check the messages on that thing,” the mobster laughs.

  I look down and light up and see sixteen missed calls.

  “Get on with it,” Thunderbird growls.

  I flex my fingers again, arthritic from the cold, and push open the sanctum’s door.

  Although I expected the red void would’ve penetrated within, I am surprised by the deathly glow and the palpable sense there’s something extremely wrong with this picture. Twilight’s study is hardly the alchemist’s laboratory, with a widescreen TV and DVD player set up on a shelf containing dozens of occult books as well as a rack of burnt CDs, yet it’s not just the enormous, complicated magical symbol inscribed in the marble floor that clues me in to the eldritch nature of my friend’s home away from home.

  The pulsing rift bisects the room over the middle of the huge floor symbol. It roils and boils like a witch’s cauldron, only vertical instead of horizontal. Occasionally the surface bubbles and I wonder wha
t might lurk within.

  Clearly, I’m not going to get any answers without finding out.

  Crossing over is like stepping through a light rain, except with me, I would prickle as my powers absorbed the friction of thousands of drops impacting my skin. There’s no such feeling here. Instead, only the absence of light. I squint, stepping through, glad for the millionth time I can fly as the ground dips away from me and I plunge wholly into this new astral other-space, a black void lit up with a scene of such complete otherworldliness that I’m at a loss for long moments making sense of what I see.

  Night’s tarpaulin stretches dark, black and infinite against the backdrop of what might otherwise be a familiar scene. This is not the night sky I spent so many evenings watching, sitting in the branches of the tree in my moms’ backyard over the years of my growing up. Between me and the perils of space are stretched strange and unusual constellations, and of course there is nothing like a ground to reassure me to the normalcy of the place.

  First, like an enormous yellow intestine, a thick irregular membrane runs at an indeterminate distance from down into the deep, rising up past and beyond me, and stretching far into the upper heights of this weird universe. Several spheres, filled with light and yet less bright than the enormous sinew itself, are dotted across the tableau increasingly far away suspended in the nothingness. With nothing to compare anything to, it’s hard to work out the scale until I begin drifting, drawing close enough to the yellowish membrane that I can see vague figures travelling within it, and more such conduits at weird angles off further in the deeps of this hollow realm.

  I am outside the membrane. When I finally draw close, I can see muted forms of an alien nature traveling within. They move fast, their winged, clawed, proboscised forms unguessable as they flit by. The conduit itself is huge, though it feels so frail I could rip it with bare hands.

  I don’t have the chance.

  The ushers come for me without warning. One moment I’m watching the membrane like a kid at his first adult movie, the next, large, winged, bloated creatures descend all around me, clawing and grabbing, everything suddenly airless. I let loose with a charge and the first of them floats off with smoke churning from its chest, and then I let the others pinion my arms and take me with them. I figure it’s the most likely treatment the big wop himself received and thus it should be my conduit to a swift reunion.