Zephyr 4.4 “A Bad Wish On A Shooting Star”

I AM READING the Post with some disdain, my back to a girder in the otherwise fully translucent diner, trying to kid myself that I am flicking through the political and world news sections to get to the sports and not Nate Simon’s Tuesday column. The little fuck has been hinting at the breakdown in my friendship with Twilight for two weeks running now, but he hasn’t even tried to call to verify his information. Thanks to Christ he doesn’t know half as much as he could, even if he’s already spilled twice as much as I’d ever want the average Joe Public to know about how Twilight and I came to blows and sent half the city (actually just Rhode Island) into the Abyss. I am not presently accepting calls from the Mayor’s office for fear they might have some crazy idea about reparations.
            Fortunately the Post reporter has a new bag. Sal Doro covers the big fish (like me, normally), which is why I guess Simon is left speculating on the disappearance of some dude who works the south city and calls himself Crusader. Original. While I have barely heard of this guy before, I don’t think the fact some fruit in a costume fails to stop three daytime robberies and a laundry fire justifies a missing person report. If he’s anything like I was when I was starting out, a really bad zit was enough to keep me low for two weeks at a time.
            I flick through this trivia and check the other items. I see Eris has been at her own unique brand of chaos again, hospitalising a guard at the storage vaults attached to the State Museum of the Americas. Hebrew parahuman Allan Silverman has demanded an invite to an upcoming session of the City States Symposium in Atlantic City with predictable results. Mastodon and Cipher have teamed up to smash a Yardie drug den, which begs a far more interesting story given the old man’s pharmaceutical pursuits. An emissary from a parallel earth has apparently left Atlantic City in disgust after being refused entry to the Flyaway. The stock price for most major drug companies took a hit last week following rumours a German sorcerer had eradicated all strains of influenza. Turned out not to be true. Pity. Meanwhile a villain called Dragonmaster, a Brit, I assume, since I’ve never heard of him, has come out of the closet to a men’s mag. One look at the scaled leather costume the guy wears and you’ve got to wonder who was left to gasp in surprise at that particular revelation.
            Oh, and Windsong has been seen flying formations over Staten Island with a British super, the renowned bisexual beauty Shade. The thirty-something bisexual beauty Shade. I make a note to self and grit my teeth and barely look up at the sweet Minnesotan farm girl who delivers my espresso as a pizza delivery guy cutting up the sidewalk outside hits a dude in a suit and his moped goes hissing out-of-control toward a fountain. I snap the newspaper shut and patently ignore the chaos, my hand around the warm mug a pleasure to savour as I fight against the invisible forces that would otherwise suck my mood.
            Surprisingly the gossip pages have absolutely nothing about Seeker’s decision to form a new group of Sentinels. Considering it’s been the talk of the top end of town the whole week past, I find that amazing. Either someone has hushed the city’s reporters, they’re saving it for a special issue, or else Atlantic City’s costumed elite are keeping quiet for one rare moment in their lives, reasons unknown.
            Mickey Rourke enters the diner and I sink lower in my chair. I owe him thirty bucks and last time we got wrecked at Halogen I may have told him I’d pay him back with a hand-job. He’s just crazy enough to want to collect just so he can see me squirm. A disturbing individual.
            I snap the paper again to straighten the crooked columns and my phone, sitting on the table with more papers from my agent and my house keys, lights up and displays Seeker’s name.
            “Speak of the Devil,” I grin in answer somewhat inappropriately.
            “We need to talk.”
            “About the Sentinels?”
            “. . . yes, about the Sentinels. The New Sentinels.”
            I nod and smile to myself. “Where’ve you got that castle parked?”
            The door to the diner swings open and she is standing there with her phone to her ear in that ridiculous Paula Abdul outfit.
            “I brought a ride,” she says. “Come on.”

 

IT IS WEIRD in the cab, the feeling we’re both thoroughly disguised as we play-act in our secret identities. Seeker’s trying pretty hard to show she’s a street-smart and stylish broad, not at all the arch conservative, borderline religious psycho we’ve sometimes considered her over the years. Great jugs an’ all, but any time the old Sentinels tried to have the least bit of fun, either Seeker would blow up in a tirade reminding us of our higher calling, calling us all juveniles, or else she would go off in a sulk that managed to cast a pall over at least the majority of our worst excesses. Now if someone could explain to me why in the back seat of a yellow cab there’s more sexual tension than my junior high prom, I’d really appreciate it.
            “So, uh, it’s Loren, right?”
            “It seems like a million years ago, but yeah,” she replies.
            “You’re from . . . Atlantic City?”
            “Is anyone?”
            She gives a breathtaking laugh filled with only half the confidence she’s trying to project. I glare at the cabbie through the rear view mirror and make sure he’s got his eyes on the road.
            “My folks were from Willagee, Nebraska. Pa brought us to Atlantic City right after the Kirlians. He was a builder. Made his money in the upgrade.”
            “And so it’s here where you . . . ?”
            Seeker wrinkles her nose, acknowledging we don’t have the best privacy by giving just a curt nod. Adorable. Fucking hell. I nod to myself and stare out the window and am kinda surprised when she keeps talking.
            “I was fourteen,” she says. “The visions came first. Apocalypse. Death from Space. All very sci-fi. I woke up one night re-enacting that scene from Ghostbusters, you know, floating above the bed covers? Our family priest knew a pastor who knew a rabbi who knew a cardinal. I’m sure you can follow what I mean.”
            “And from there?”
            “Well, to cut a long story short: the Wallachian Brotherhood.”
            “The guys in the castle?” I ask.
            “Yes.”
            “The brotherhood.”
            “Oh, there’s women too. I never asked about that. . . .”
            “And they are, exactly. . . ?”
            “A fifteen-hundred-year-old secret society dedicated to keeping the doors closed between our world and the next,” Seeker says in a relaxed voice that does nothing to detract from her measured and careful pronunciation.
            “Okay. So they hunt monsters and stuff who sneak through?”
            “In the early days, that’s how it began,” she says. “It got complicated once they perfected their own technology on a parallel earth.”
            “And these are the guys who are offering to sponsor the New Sentinels a base?” I ask slowly.
            “Well we’ll need one.”
            “I thought Devil Betty. . . ?”
            “I don’t know, Joseph. As I said to you before, I’m not that comfortable with the, uh, demonic overtones of that name.”
            “So a kid makes a bad wish on a shooting star after listening to too many Marilyn Manson albums.” I shrug. “To paraphrase something I heard recently, just because she used to worship the Devil doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person.”
            “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Seeker replies.
            “Okay.”
            I stare out the window with the patented gaze of one of those small pampered lap dogs rich women like to take with them on trips across town. Through the glass of the taxi window the downtown area flicks past at a haphazard pace. Finally we get stalled in traffic again down near the harbour and for some reason I start chuckling about a joke in an email I got from Nautilus a couple of days back.
            “What’s so funny?” Seeker asks.
            “It’s nothing.”
            “Hmmm. By the way,” she says, “I meant to ask you, have you heard from Darkstorm in the past few days? I can’t get him to answer his cell.”
            “Hmmm no,” I reply. “Years ago he used to have this message drop at a laundry in Chi-town. That place secretly run by goblins or elves or whatever the hell it was. You want to stop by there?”
            “No,” Seeker replies. She stares out the window now, just in time to catch a homeless man introducing two tourists to his dancing chicken act. Loren’s pretty eyes flinch at the sight, making me wonder just how innocent can the girl be given some of the things we’ve seen in this life.
            “I’m sure he’ll turn up in the end,” she says, distracted.
            “How’s Vulcana doing, by the way?”
            The brightness re-enters Seeker’s eyes.
            “Better every day. This is one of the benefits of the Wallachian Fortress I want to talk about with you, Joseph. The Brotherhood’s clerics will have her fighting fit in no time at all.”
            “I wonder how Connie feels about that?”
            “Why in Heaven would you say that?” Seeker frowns. “Her arm was off. I’m sure she’s thrilled to get back to how she was.”
            I nod, inner turmoil defused as the frantically eavesdropping cabbie drives us to the rendezvous with the disappearing castle.
            It only takes Loren a moment to mindwipe the driver once we’ve parked, and since I’m a little short of change, I offer to pay and catch her up, leaving the disoriented cabbie parked in a tow zone as I scamper to eventually follow the hot brunette in the high-heeled boots disappearing into thin air outside the boarded up walls of the construction site.

~ by wereviking on November 9, 09.