"Daddy?"
Zatanna sat up in the bed, tangling for a moment in the white sheets and frantically shoved her long black hair out of her face. For a single joyous moment she could smell his cologne and her heart pounded hard in her chest, but then her pale blue eyes were all the way awake and it faded away like an old childhood hope. The cold white moonlight spilled through the small space between the heavy brocade curtains and revealed only a shadowy utterly ordinary generic hotel room.
And one which was entirely empty except for her.
The terrible grief and consuming loneliness hit her again unexpectedly in full black force, as if it were actually only yesterday her father had died instead of years ago now and it caught her off guard completely. She curled instinctively in defense against the onslaught of the overwhelming pain, suddenly the little girl she once was again, and jerked her knees protectively up tight to her chest and wrapped her arms around them to hug herself hard. But it didn't make the bitter adult knowledge that she was alone go away and Zatanna buried her face against her trembling body and wept with all the heartbreak of a daughter who had lost her entire world.
She didn't know how long she stayed that way in the dark, only that at some point her soul grew exhausted and at last she mercifully ran out of hot tears. When she could think again, she found herself staring wearily at the chilled silent moonlight as it crept its way across the hotel wall of her now quiet room again.
Zatanna carefully wiped away her tears with a corner of her sheet as she gradually rebuilt her heart's guarding shields and smiled sadly wry at herself as she sniffed. Here it was almost done and she was still acting as if it were that first terrible night. She breathed a long sigh softly into the night.
It had taken so very, very long.
Zatanna closed her tired winter blue eyes, letting her mind clear. The old familiar meditation technique allowed her to hear the city outside over the gradually slowing beat of her still aching heart.
Metropolis was actually quieter than a city its size should be. She knew because her illusion show hit all the big ones. There were fewer wailing police and ambulance sirens, fewer biting bursts of gunshots. She knew it had everything to do with the outrageous stories she'd heard laughed over by families in old plastic diner booths while they ate their sandwiches or whispered hoarsely over heavy drinks in nightclubs by less than savory nervous eyed men. Stories that sounded amusingly enough like the old superhero comic books or what you got with your over buttered popcorn at some matinee at one of the old theatres.
But these stories, however, were all too real.
This city was protected by costumed vigilantes and things were beginning to change. Becoming brighter.
It made her like the high towered city more.
Gave it the feel of a bit of magic.
Somehow that made her coming death seem not quite so . . . absolute.
And yet, the book was here.
Zatanna shifted a bit in the hotel bed, drawing up the blankets about her silk clad body and wrapping them suddenly about her as if they were fluffy security wards.
She had spent long grim years desperately hunting the precious old family tome down. Her progress had been frustratingly slowed by her own lack of true Magi training. It both alternately angered and agonized her endlessly to realize her father had deliberately restricted it for this very loving but completely infuriating reason.
He had wanted her to fail.
She was meant never to find the book.
Or ever to have the knowledge or skill to use it if she somehow did.
Yet, Zatanna could not help but have no doubt that her father's Sight would have warned him that his headstrong daughter would try it anyway.
She shivered in the darkness and pulled the blankets tighter.
Which meant he had still done it all even knowing this.
And either her father had gravely underestimated the staying power of his beloved daughter's will or . . . knew quietly sure that she would ultimately fail to save him.
Zatanna chose firmly to believe it was her will.
Because it brutally tore her already grief scarred heart to even think about the other.
She had to succeed.
She had to.
She owed him this.
With her Magi abilities deliberately restricted, Zatanna had been forced to go the mundane route to track the tome. Years of piecing together scraps of information as she carefully and patiently manipulated her show tour to help her follow the path of the book and cover her desperate quest from both magical and mundane enemy eyes that would only be too eager to prevent her father's resurrection if they learned what she was doing. She'd cautiously used some of the magnificent wealth from the ancestral Shadowcrest vaults to pay reluctant or greedy sources in both her worlds. And when gold did not work, Zatanna smiled sultrily and tempted them with the offer of something far more valuable.
Her ability to grant anyone a single wish.
In the shadows of her hotel room, Zatanna's finely manicured stage hands tightened harshly against the blankets.
Anyone's wish but hers.
Only the lost book with its vital resurrection incantation and its generations of Magi imbued Power could give her that.
So, Zatanna had discovered that the book had gone from its home in Shadowcrest and her father's white gloved hands to an actual mundane antiquities auction.
Clever, really of him, she had to reluctantly admit even as it maddened her with the years that decision had added to her search. Had it gone into magical hands instead, she knew she would have found it faster because no one who had those would have been able to resist using the Power within the Zatara tome.
Zatanna's mouth twisted and her eyes flared electric blue with magic.
Nor would they be able to deny themselves the choice opportunity to mock the last of the direct Old Magi Blood in one of the First Families for so tremendous a loss of such a treasured part of her Power heritage.
And she would have had to fight magically to get it back.
Zatanna grimaced and stared down at her hands.
And with the training she lacked . . . .
Her gaze softened slowly as a new quiet understanding came.
Perhaps there had been more to his decision to place it in mundane hands than she had originally thought.
He was, after all, the man who loved his child more than anything.
Zatanna's heart gave a sharp spasm at the all too familiar piercing twin hurts of grief and guilt that came now with every memory of her father and focused hard on the book.
Once in mundane possession, the tome had then curiously and unusually changed hands over and over, moving from one private collector to another, back and forth all across the country. No one kept it for long. It had made scheduling her covering show's travel route insanely difficult to manage believably and had cost her more time when she couldn't and had to wait. She would have found this almost unwantedness ridiculous for a book even a low end test lab could joyfully identify as being centuries old and instantly worthy of honored placement in any museum of history, even if one was completely abysmally ignorant of the incredible Power magnitude of the arcane treasure bound within its pages.
At least, she would have found it ridiculous if she had not learned in her search that it held its own protecting wards.
Wards that would make it unconsciously . . . uncomfortable . . . should it fall into non-Powered hands. It was part of the 'built in safety features' most Magi put into the creation of their greatest magical artifacts, as it never went well ultimately when magical things came into non-magical possession.
Her father may have wanted to make the book difficult for her to take ownership of, but fortunately for her no one else would find it any easier either.
And so the tome had found its way at last here to Metropolis.
A small time rare book collector who ran an Urie's Antiques on Main had purchased it back along with the rest of the prized library of an old closing estate. She knew from the Metropolis Public Library's digitalized archives that he, strangely, usually only kept rare books himself in particular old languages, selling the lower valued ones in his store and the higher at one of the city's large auction houses.
Which meant the odds were it had gone to auction.
She needed to get that name from him.
Tomorrow, he would find a Magi on his doorstep who would not take no for an answer.
She would have the book and she would have it soon.
She must.
Zatanna felt like ice and nestled deeper in her surrounding protective blankets, even though she knew this cold came from within her own soul and could not be warmed even if she used her own Power.
Because she was tiring at last.
The years of carrying the combined awful weights of her father's selfless loving sacrifice and the bile tasting knowledge of her own coming death were slowly crushing her beneath them.
She desperately wanted to rest.
She just had to stay strong for a little bit longer.
Find the book, girl, and then you will have forever to rest.
Zatanna shivered almost convulsively hard in the dark.
Find the book.
Oh, if only it would at last be that easy.
Zatanna truly loathed whoever had the ancient original 'brilliance' to put a locator spell block on the tome.
She knew intellectually that it had been done wisely in theory to prevent unauthorized magical searches, to avoid sly attempts to steal it away from the Zatara line. But living the years of the actual reality of having to work around the block by tracking the book the brutally slow mundane way had made her want to curse someone as she was feeling cursed. Only now that she was in the very same city as the book and the fact that the book belonged to her bloodline, could she at last manage to even feel something. But that was it.
The Power in her knew it was in Metropolis because she could feel its general proximity, but she simply couldn't pin point it any narrower than that.
And would not be able to.
Zatanna shook her dark head ruefully.
Unless, of course, someone intended harm to the book.
Then the same protecting wards which made it so difficult for mundanes to keep the book would awake and override the locator spell block to save the tome they were magically bound to preserve.
The moment they did that, her Power would be able to find it instantly.
And once she teleported and arrived in visual sight of the book, it would only take a simple kinetic magical pull to bring the book into her hands.
Zatanna dragged a feather pillow into her arms so she could have something to pretend to hold to comfort her against the cold and the dark.
Unfortunately, she rather doubted she would have that sudden mercy of finding someone insane enough even amongst the most criminal of mundanes to want to do deliberate harm to so dear a treasure that they could sell and profit handsomely from instead. Or try and use for their own Power.
It just wasn't that common outside of Gotham.
Sure, she longed for such a wondrous break but wearily did not even bother hoping for it.
Fate had been less then kind so far to the Zatara line.
Zatanna closed her black lashed eyes tightly.
Out in the hotel hallway she could hear two young people at last dragging themselves in probably from a wild night spent in Metropolis' clubs and Zatanna felt a quiet wistfulness listening to them laugh and giggle too loudly and try drunkenly to work their pass key card.
While she did not envy their coming morning, she could admit somewhere in the most hidden recesses of her exhausted and pained heart that she did envy their simple ordinary mundane life. Jobs. College. Weekend parties. Trips taken for fun. Falling in love.
They were just getting ready to actually begin living their lives.
They weren't getting ready to see their lives end.
A quiet noise sounded deep in her throat that was very much like the start of a sob and she clenched her jaw against it, fighting for control.
Zatanna had long ago accepted the heavy price of saving him.
And she truly still did.
Even now that she was in Metropolis and everything was almost done.
But that never meant Zatanna wanted to die.
Or that she wasn't deeply afraid.
Or that she didn't utterly grieve the suddenly too fast feel of the closing of her life.
It just meant that she loved her father more than all of it.
In the shadows, Zatanna abandoned her pillow and held herself fiercely tight, feeling as if she were freezing solid gradually from the inside out.
It was almost done now.
She was almost done now.
The cold white moonlight faded to grey as the hours slowly passed away to dawn. She could see the brilliant pinks and hot oranges of the waking sky through the space between the heavy brocade curtains of her window. Outside, the city began to come alive. She could hear the noise of morning traffic beginning to pick up, taxi horns blaring and the slow gathering rumble of buses. From the hallway she could smell coffee percolating in someone's room and hear the rushing noise of a shower starting.
Not more than two or three days left at the most.
Then she would at long last get her own wish.
She could smell his cologne again.
Zatanna gave in and wept hot tears once more in the emptiness of her hotel room.
"Daddy . . . ."
He had been her whole world and they had been happy.