DC – I am Batman

Lilies. The foyer reeked of them, thick and sweet, and whoever had done the flowers had either not asked a seven-year-old's opinion or hadn't cared. Thomas's gala, Martha's execution. The catering was excellent, the guest list was strategic, and the floral situation was apparently someone else's department.

He'd gotten better at these events. Stand where Martha put him. Shake hands. Say "nice to meet you" in a voice that sounded like a seven-year-old being polite and not like a man being polite through a seven-year-old. Smile. Not too much. Eat whatever Mrs. Brennan put in front of him. Do not eat the strawberry anything.

By seven o'clock he'd met a city councilwoman, two surgeons, and a man who kept calling him "sport." He'd excused himself to the bathroom twice and spent both trips standing in the hallway reading the spines of the books in the second-floor landing case. One of them was in Farsi. He'd come back to it later.

The Zataras arrived late.

He heard them before he saw them. A voice in the entryway, warm and theatrical. Either an actor or a man who'd spent enough time on stages that the performance and the person had merged. Thomas laughed at something. Martha's heels clicked on the marble.

Giovanni Zatara came around the corner wearing a cape. An actual cape. Black satin with a red lining, thrown over one shoulder with the specific carelessness of a man who knew exactly how his cape fell at all times. He was tall, thin, dark-haired, with a mustache that looked like it had been drawn on with a fine-point pen. His handshake would be a single squeeze and release, the grip performers learned because they shook a hundred hands a night.

He knew all of this. He knew the name and the magic and the backwards spells and the daughter. He'd known it secondhand. A character from a movie he saw once at two in the morning. Just a shape, no detail. The idea of a person, with none of the actual person in it.

Zatanna was behind her father. Mostly behind. She kept drifting out to look at things and then drifting back, like a satellite that wasn't sure about its orbit. She was seven, maybe. His age, give or take. Dark hair cut blunt at her jaw. A dress that looked like it had been ironed recently and she had been wearing it too long. One side of the collar was bent. The sash was tied in a knot instead of a bow, and one sock had slid down to her ankle and she either hadn't noticed or didn't care. There was chocolate on her chin. A smear of it, dark, probably from something she'd gotten into in the car.

She was the first person he'd met in this world that he knew about. Had a file on, somewhere in the back of his head, with facts that didn't match the girl standing in front of him. Powerful magician, the file said. Fishnet stockings and a top hat. The girl in front of him had chocolate on her chin and one sock down and a dress that was losing a fight.

Thomas introduced them. "Bruce, this is Giovanni Zatara, an old friend, and his daughter, Zatanna."

"Zee," she said. She said it to him, directly, like the correction mattered and the adults could catch up when they were ready. "Nobody calls me Zatanna except my dad when I'm in trouble."

"Are you in trouble a lot?"

"Constantly."

She had a gap between her front teeth. It showed when she grinned at him, a real grin, the kind that used her whole face and didn't check first whether anyone was watching.

She did a coin trick.

They were sitting at one of the smaller tables in the dining room, the one near the window that Martha used for overflow seating, and Zee had produced a coin from her pocket. Or behind his ear, as she insisted later. She closed her hand around it and opened her hand and the coin was gone. She turned her hand over. Wiggled her fingers. Held both palms open.

He looked at her hands. Looked at her sleeves. Looked at the table. He couldn't find it.

She grinned again. The gap in her teeth. "You looked at my left hand first. Everyone looks at the left hand first."

"Where is it?"

"Magic."

"It's not magic."

"It's EXACTLY magic." She reached behind his ear and he flinched, because the touch was unexpected and his reflexes were still slightly too fast for a seven-year-old. She didn't notice. The coin was in her fingers. Quarter. Tails side. She flipped it in the air and caught it on the back of her hand with a smoothness that meant she'd done this ten thousand times.

"My dad's been teaching me since I was four," she said. "He says I'm a natural. Mom said I was a menace. I think it can be both."

And then she kept talking.

She talked all the time, which was all of it, all the time, every thought the second it arrived. But the things she said were interesting, which was the part he hadn't expected.

"Rabbits hate being pulled from hats. It's dark and cramped and they get scared. My dad uses illusion rabbits. They look exactly the same but they're made of light, and they don't have feelings, so it's fine. I asked him once if the illusion rabbit knows it's not real and he said no and I said how do you know and he said because I made it and I said well maybe the rabbit disagrees and he made me go to bed."

She'd eaten three cookies during this speech. There was a crumb on her lower lip that she hadn't noticed and he kept not mentioning it.

"Do you have any pets? We can't have pets because Dad says the house moves sometimes and it's bad for animals. I wanted a cat but he said cats don't like unstable architecture. I don't know what that means but I think it means the walls do things."

"We don't have pets."

"You should get a dog. Dogs don't care about walls."

He didn't have an answer for the wall thing. He also didn't have a reasonable way to explain that he knew exactly what unstable architecture meant when your father was a Homo Magi who lived in a house called Shadowcrest that existed partially outside normal space, but a seven-year-old Bruce Wayne wouldn't know any of that, so he just nodded.

She took another cookie. A waiter walked past carrying a tray of champagne flutes and she tracked the glasses with her eyes for about two seconds, and then she was back.

"Your house is really big. Do you get lost?"

"Sometimes."

"Our house has a room that's only there on Tuesdays. Dad says it's the study but I've never seen him study anything in it. I think it's where he keeps the good snacks."

She taught him a card game. She dealt from a deck she'd pulled from her father's coat pocket at some point during the evening, and the rules involved something called a "royal dragon" that beat everything except a pair of threes, and if you drew a seven you had to put a card on your head, and if your card fell off you lost.

The rules changed twice during the game. He was fairly sure she was making them up as she went. He didn't mind. The card on his head fell off because she made him laugh by doing a voice for the jack of spades, deep and gruff: "I am the JACK, fear my MODERATE AUTHORITY." The card slid off the back of his head and she slapped the table and said "HA" loud enough that two adults turned around.

"That doesn't count, you cheated."

"How did I cheat?"

"You were funny on purpose."

"Being funny isn't cheating."

"It is if it makes my card fall off."

She considered this. "Okay. New rule. No being funny during royal dragon."

"You just made that up."

"All rules are made up. Mine are just newer."

He was going to argue the point but Alfred set something down on the table between them. A bread plate with two rolls on it, except the rolls had been arranged with a butter knife and a sprig of parsley into a face. A not-quite-a-smile. The mouth was a curve of butter, slightly crooked. The parsley was hair that stuck up on one side. The eyes were two olive halves, placed too close together in a way that made the face look skeptical.

It was the stupidest thing he'd seen in this house. It was exactly the kind of thing Alfred would do. Bone-dry and barely visible and aimed at exactly one person.

Zee laughed. He did too.

The real one. Short and surprised and out before he could stop it.

He looked up and Alfred was across the room, pouring wine for Madame Leclercq. His hand paused on the bottle. The chess piece. The linens.

Then he finished pouring and moved to the next guest.

Giovanni Zatara told Thomas that the boy was welcome at the Shadowcrest estate anytime. "If he has an interest in the arts," he said, and the word arts left room for more than card tricks, "I am always glad to teach."

Thomas said something polite about schedules. Martha said something specific about the third week of March. She was already booking it. A man in a cape who made coins vanish and had a daughter who could make Bruce Wayne's actual son laugh was getting invited back whether Giovanni liked it or not.

Zee was at the door when he caught up to her. She was putting her coat on wrong, both arms in but twisted so the front was at the back, struggling with the zipper. She didn't seem to mind.

"Your coat's backwards."

She looked down. "Oh." She didn't fix it. "So. Third week of March?"

"I think so."

"Good." She fished the coin out of her pocket again. Quarter. She put it in his hand and closed his fingers over it. Her hands were small and warm and slightly sticky from the cookies. "Practice. I'll show you the trick next time."

He looked at the quarter. It was from 1979. There was a scratch on the eagle's left wing.

"Bye, Bruce."

"Bye, Zee."

She left. The coin was warm in his palm. He stood in the foyer with the lilies and the marble floor and the sounds of adults cleaning up. The woman in the photograph didn't exist yet. There was just a girl with chocolate on her chin and a gap in her teeth and a card game with rules she changed whenever she was losing.

He closed his hand around the quarter and went upstairs.

The quarter was on his nightstand. 1979. The scratch on the eagle's wing. Orange glow from the bat nightlight on the baseboard. One year.