BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY INC. NEW YORK
BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK
INTRODUCTION
Stan Lee
Illustration by Joe St. Pierre
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE ^ $****■>'&***>
eluki bes shahar Illustration by Tom Grummett
GIFT OF THE SILVER FOX
Ashley McConnell Illustration by Gary Frank
STILLBORN IN THE MIST^*'6*'1
Dean Wesley Smith Illustration by Ralph Reese
X-PRESSO
Ken Grobe
Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg
FOUR ANGRY MUTANTS
Andy Lane & Rebecca Levene Illustration by Brent Anderson
ON THE AIR .
Glenn Hauman Illustration by Ron Lim
SUMMER BREEZE
Jenn Saint-John & Tammy Lynne Dunn Illustration by James W. Fry
LIFE IS BUT A DREAM 205
Stan Timmons
Illustration by Rick Leonardi & Terry Austin
225
Evan Skolnick
Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg
HOSTAGES
J. Steven York Illustration by Ralph Reese
OUT OF PLACE 287
Dave Smeds
Illustration by Brent Anderson
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES 309
Illustration by Joe St. Pierre
Illustration by Tom Grummett
roily miles north of New York City in the northernmost tip of Westchester County lies the small town of Salem Center, New York. Here vast tracts of gently wooded greensward cradle the sprawling estates; they are still mostly private houses, though one of the stately homes that once boasted a secret dock for smuggling Prohibition-era booze and still can claim an unrivaled view of the Hudson River has become a five-star restaurant, and another is now a thriving bed-and-breakfast. The town of Salem Center is the kind of place that driven Manhattan professionals like to escape to: surrounded by riding academies and private schools, all the grace notes of a life of wealth and privilege, it. is a community that values privacy, where secrets are jealously guarded.
Although some secrets are bigger than others.
On Greymalkin Lane the houses are set far back from the road. Their existence is proclaimed only by the pillars flanking the iron gates of the widely spaced driveways. On one gate in particular, as if identification of what lies within is particularly important, there is a small brass plaque: ‘‘The Xavier Institute of Higher Learning.”
Once I had a normal life. The running man clung to that thought as if it were a place he could go to hide. He’d had a normal life, a quiet life, a life where men with guns didn’t come to his door, and then—and then—
His foot hit an exposed tree root and he was knocked sprawling. He lay facedown, sucking the wet-earth-scented air into burning lungs and wondering where he was. His last ride had dropped him north of New York City somewhere; he’d thought it was safe enough to hitch again. The
running man had never heard of Professor Charles Xavier or his school, although he’d certainly heard of the X-Men. He had no idea that he was less than a mile from possibly the only people on earth who could help him. The running man had given up hope of help long ago.
He’d been standing at the edge of the road when he saw the black sedan with the government plates cruise past him In the southbound lane and then pull into the “Official Vehicles Only” turnaround. He’d taken off cross-country; when the landscape opened out into woods and fields, he was sure he’d lost them.
His breath rasped in and out of his lungs with a desperate gasping sound as he lay there. His throat felt as if he’d swallowed dry ice. Thoughts spun through his mind like angry hornets.
Have to get up.
Almost finished.
Get up, dammit!
But he couldn’t. He could only lie there. A matter of minutes now and Black Team 51 would have him.
If only he could be sure they’d kill him.
But they wouldn’t. That was the special hell of it. They wanted him to work for them. And he was afraid, afraid of what they would make him do. . . .
Once upon a time, the running man had possessed a name. He’d been David Ferris; twenty-nine, unmarried, and—according to his now ex-girlfriend Alicia—looked a lot like Fox Mulder on The X-Files. Until a week ago he’d been just another teacher at Penrod High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, brass buckle of the Corn Belt.
A normal life. Once he’d had a normal life.
* * *
It was August, and so it was hot, and the four men and one woman could easily have sought the sanctuary of the air-conditioning inside the sprawling mansion—or even the pool on the other side of the house. Instead they sat in a casual grouping upon the shady flagstoned terrace at the back of the house, concealed from accidental view with a caution that had become habit long since. The only sound on the hot summer air was the rattle of ice in the tall lemonade glasses and the desultory sound of relaxed talk among them. These five had passed through Life and Death together, and the most important things they could express to one another had already been said long ago.
They were all in their twenties, all at that peak of health and conditioning that marks the professional athlete, whose success or failure depends entirely on the educated body’s response to the demanding mind. But these five were not professional athletes, though one of them, at least, had arrived at that peak of fame and adulation that only sports stars and rock stars—and super heroes—know.
Once he’d stood with the Avengers, Earth’s mightiest heroes, in the days when there were no East or West Coast Avengers, no first or second team. But before that his allegiance had been to another assemblage, in the days now long past when that supergroup’s roster could be counted on the digits of one hand: in that twilight moment between their discovery that they were different from the rest of humanity, and the moment the world learned to hate and fear them.
His name was Henry P. McCoy, and he was the X-Man known as the Beast.
Of the five heroes gathered on that shady secluded terrace, Hank McCoy looked least human, though all five of them had been able to pass for human once—had in fact passed for human during one of those dark periods when the X-Men were driven underground by a prejudice so deep that even some of their fellow heroes turned against them, and Hank McCoy had left them to pursue his first love, biochemistry research. There, youthful pride and an experiment gone wrong had trapped him forever in a shape as bestial as his code name—the form of a burly blue-furred monster with long, gleaming fangs. Since his transformation Hank stood upright only with the greatest of effort, though he could bound along on his knuckles and toes faster than a racehorse could run.
At the moment Hank McCoy reclined in a specially reinforced lawn chair, the dark glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose adding a note of absurdity to his broad inhuman countenance. He perched his slippery tumbler of lemonade on the tip of one taloned finger and studied it meditatively.
“I hate to mention this, Warren m’boy, but you’re interfering with my tan,” Hank said.
Behind the Beast stood his teammate, bio-mechanical wings spread to block the sun. When Hank spoke, he spread them wider, then turned aside so that his shadow no longer fell upon the Beast’s blue-furred body.
“Oh, well, excuse moi,” Archangel said with a grin, making a big show of getting out of his teammate’s light.
Born Warren Worthington III, he had called himself the Avenging Angel when Professor Charles Xavier invited him to join the X-Men—and convinced him to shorten his name to simply Angel. But the man now called Archangel had drifted nearly as far from human as Hank had. Once great white-feathered wings had sprouted from his shoulder blades when the hormonal changes of puberty had brought his mutant gifts to flower—though those were gone now, irrevocably damaged in battle and amputated. In their place Archangel now bore glittering metal wings, as intricately feathered as his natural ones had been, and so bound into his nervous system that he could launch their razor-feather darts at will. The same dubious benefactor who had engineered this transformation had also turned Warren’s skin a cyanotic blue: stronger and tougher than ordinary human— or even mutant—skin, it provided a great advantage to Archangel in battle; at the same time it irrevocably marked him out from the rest of humanity. Different. Alien.
David Ferris had always known he was different— get up you have to get up —but when he’d been a child a quarter of a century ago the world had been different, too—
get up it isn’t that hard they’ll be here soon —the superteams and lone costumed avengers that were so much a part of modern daily life now— you can’t let them take you —were a thing of the future, or dim past-era memories in the minds of those who had fought beside the more-than-human in World War II—Captain America, the SubMariner, the first Human Torch—then called the Invaders. The bitter enmity between homo sapiens and homo superior was still years in the future— come on; it isn’t that hard —in those days, growing up in rural Shelbyville, David
had known that other people bowed to the inevitable, accepted the fact that choosing one thing made all the others impossible—
if you can’t walk, crawl!
—realized that life was a process of choosing one thing and forsaking all the rest.
But David Ferris didn’t have to.
Years later, in his reading, he came across the words that explained what he had known, instinctively, from birth: that there wasn’t one reality, but millions—that every possible choice that could ever be made was made somewhere, in one of the parallel worlds that, to David’s mutant perception, were as tangible and accessible as the books on the rack at the soda fountain downtown. David could spin the wheel of fortune and make those different worlds real.
Worlds where Hitler had won World War II. Worlds where humanity had never evolved. Even worlds where humanity was the only known sentient species—no Atlanteans nor Kree, no Skrulls, not even Galactus to threaten sleep.
He might, with his mutant gift, have grown up to don a gaudy costume, taken a romantic nom de guerre, and gone on to fight crime and/or evil, as Benton Harper—Chicken-Man—used to say on the radio. But David just didn’t have a world-famous sort of nature, and when ultimate evil came to the Midwest, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four were almost always only half a jump behind. get up
hands and knees crawl
c’mon David you have to keep moving
No one needed him to save the world. Not when others were available to do it.
“Do you ever wonder why we do it? I mean, we could have had normal lives,” the young man said pensively.
And in fact, the speaker looked normal—a slight twen-tysomething with brown hair and brown eyes and a faintly mocking smile—save for the thick coating of frost that covered his hand and turned the liquid in his glass to gelid slush.
“That’s something you’d never have to worry about, Robert m’lad,” the Beast said. He regarded his glass meditatively, tossed it up, caught it, and drank.
Bobby Drake—Iceman to his teammates and enemies— slid his free hand unobtrusively below Hank’s line of sight. At a mental command, snow began to form in his palm, created from the moisture in the air by Iceman’s mutant power: the power to create ice and project the cold needed to keep it from melting under even the most adverse conditions—like a hot August day.
“Knock it off, Bobby.”
The snow turned to water before Iceman could consciously react. Save for his heavy dark glasses, Scott Summers looked ordinary enough to be Bobby’s older brother, but as Cyclops, he had been the X-Men’s first team leader, and after so many years, the habit of obedience that had saved Bobby’s life countless times was ingrained in the younger man’s mind well below the level of conscious thought.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Bobby protested, more out of habit than any hope of getting away with it.
“Yet,” the fifth member of the party finished for him.
Cool and eye-catching in white tennis shorts and sleeveless turdeneck, Jean Grey was a regal redhead, with a model’s poise and flawless skin. Both a telepath and telekinetic, she Was also now married to Scott Summers.
“Bobby, when are you ever going to grow up?” she asked with an amused, long-suffering sigh.
“When somebody makes him,” Archangel drawled in his silver-spoon accent. The sunlight threw flickers of light off the silvery metal of his wings. “And I think I just might— What was that?”
All of them had heard it. A short, sharp, odd sound, brief and loud.
Archangel turned in the direction the sound had come from, his wings mantling for flight. “Maybe I’d better—” he began.
“It was probably just somebody’s arugula steamer misfiring,” the Beast said lighdy. “Warren, old friend, you really should—”
“I’ll just go check it out,” Archangel said quickly. Stepping away from the others, he spread his wings to their full span, and, with one powerful downbeat, Archangel was airborne.
Hank sat up a little straighter in his chair and regarded the others quizzically from beneath furry beetling brows.
“Did it ever occur to anyone that we may be a wee bit too hasty in borrowing trouble?” he asked.
“There’s never any need to borrow trouble,” Scott Summers answered grimly. “They give enough of it away free.”
“Besides,” Bobby Drake quipped, “what else do we know how to do?”
* * *
The running man crawled now. He didn’t know what else to do. He was already half delirious with exhaustion; the image of a long-ago Indiana summer came to him, of a day on which any heroic dreams he’d had were quenched forever. He’d been eight years old, and his dog had died. . . .
The flashback came easily, pulling him back into the past when he knew that what he had to do was to get up, to run, even though there was nowhere to run to. Even if he Spun himself into one of those other worlds whose ever-shifting reality he could sense, Black Team 51 might be waiting for him in almost any of them, and he wouldn’t know they were there until it was too late.
Grimly, David Ferris forced his body forward, though the movie in his mind played on unchecked. He thought about little else, now, but that moment when his life had undergone an irrevocable . . . mutation.
It was August, and so it tuas hot. . . .
Penrod High School was a racially homogenous blue-collar Indiana high school, proud of its football team and with no more in the way of alcohol, drugs, firearms, and teen pregnancies than plagued most American schools these days. PFIS was an old building, dating from the early 1940s. Later architects could have told its designers of the unwisdom of putting such a tempting ledge outside the fourth-floor windows. Just six inches wide, purely ornamental.
Snow days had made the school year run all the way into July, and the start of summer school had been correspondingly delayed. It was twelve-thirty. Lunchtime. And David, who was teaching English Comp in summer session, had been heading for his car, thinking of nothing more exotic
than the local Pizza Hut cuisine, when he heard a girl’s shrill scream behind him.
He turned and looked, then looked where she was looking.
Up.
From inside the classroom the ledge looked wide enough to walk on. Until class cutup Martin Mathers actually got out onto the ledge, away from the refuge of the classroom window, and looked down—
David Ferris needed only a moment to take in the situation; he could already hear the distant wail of the fire engines coming to the rescue. They’d be here in a few minutes, only Martin didn’t have those few minutes. Already David could see him teetering at the edge of the ledge.
You can save him.
Was it some perfidious serpent that wrhispered those wwds in the depths of David Ferris’s mind, some lingering ambition to be a hero? Perhaps if David had dreamed bigger dreams, he would have had the skill and control when it mattered. Or maybe the tragedy had been foreordained from the moment that the baby Spun apple juice to orange juice in its bottle.
I can save him.
Was it some primal hatred of homo superior for homo sapiens? Was it the need to justify his existence to a world that saw his kind only as a threat? For two decades he’d been careful to hide his mutant power, until now. Until once again the stakes had been life . . . and death.
Was it an act of heroism? Or genocide?
ifi
No one would ever know. The only thing that was certain, on that bright summer day, was that David Ferris reached into the shadows of possibility to Spin a safer refuge for Martin Mathers—a ledge that was wider, a world in which the boy had never gone out the window at all—
And missed.
Because in all the myriad worlds of possibility, David had forgotten that there was one in which no ledge existed at all. . . .
Archangel lunged skyward with powerful beats of his deadly silver wings. Like some fearsome bird of prey, he instinctively sought the air currents that would pull him higher into the sky. Hank was probably right, Warren mused, catching a thermal that swept him a dozen yards higher in seconds. He felt the corresponding pull in the muscles of his back as his wings spread and cupped the rising air. Almost absently, his eyes searched the ground below for the source of the sound, picking out with ease the flagstoned terrace of Professor Xavier’s school and the four figures still seated there. It probably was an arngula steamer misfiring. Not a job for the X-Men.
It was just that Archangel couldn’t resist any excuse— even a lame one—for taking to the air. The others just didn’t understand. Couldn’t. None of the earthbound could understand the glory of unaided flight.
Warren’s train of thought abruptly broke off and he smiled wryly. Old habits died hard; in his teen years as a student at the school, such thoughtless musings would have earned him a severe rebuke from the X-Men’s mentor and taskmaster, Professor Charles Xavier. From the very first,
Xavier had insisted that his X-Men think of themselves as human, not homo superior, as Magneto and some other would-be mutant messiahs would have it. Human. Not better. Only different.
But some differences were basic—as fundamental as the difference between walking . . . and flying. His fellow X-Men didn’t really understand that their teammate’s need to fly was as basic as theirs to walk. Archangel banked, spreading his wings wider and gliding in a slow spiral. His overflight of Salem Center and its surroundings wouldn’t compromise site security; he was high enough up that anyone watching from below would probably take him for a kite or a plane. He’d stay up here long enough to be able to say he’d checked out the area and then go back. It was the least he could do, considering that his reconnaissance was really only an excuse for a little harmless exercise.
Then Warren looked down at the ground below, and what he sawr made him fling his wings forward, spilling the wind through his pinions and bringing his body to a shuddering halt in the warm summer air.
The Indianapolis police kept him for endless hours before deciding that they could not prove responsibility in Martin Mathers’ death; could not prove that he had actually been involved; could not even prove what everyone at the school now knew to be the truth . . .
David Ferris was one of them.
He came home to an apartment that had been violated, the furniture destroyed, the walls painted with slogans that had used to be familiar only from the evening news. Die
Mutie Scum—genejoke—read the letters in dripping paint, and in that moment David knew that his life was over.
But his dying had hardly begun.
This is it. I’m through. He’d finally managed to stand, clutching at a tree trunk for support, but he knew that forcing his exhausted body to run was beyond all possibility. And the part of David Ferris that wanted to pay for his crimes— rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft—welcomed the hunters who followed him so relentlessly.
Black Team 51. Their names were Gilman and Egan, and they’d come into his life a little over a week ago, while he was still staring helplessly at the wreckage of his apartment. They’d told him their names, but they hadn’t told him anything else. Except the most important thing.
“There’s a man who’cl like to meet you. He wants you to work for him. You’re special, David. He’s interested in your special abilities. And face it, after yesterday how many choices do you have?”
Come with us, and Spin dross into gold, into fire, into blood . . . And all across the Multiverse, a thousand David Ferrises refused and died.
But David Ferris knew more about choices than any other man alive. He’d played along, played for time, and when they’d let their guard down he’d given Egan and Gilman the slip and fled to New York—hoping to get out of the country—only to find that Black Team 51 had second-guessed him, just as they had at each step down the line. They’d been waiting at the airport.
He’d panicked and run, hitchhiked, anything to find a reality that didn’t place him in the back seat of that black sedan. And for a few hours he’d thought he’d won, but
every time he reached the road it seemed the car found him again within minutes. Content to follow, playing some sadistic game of cat and mouse, waiting for the moment when David Ferris could run no longer.
Waiting for this moment.
W?hy were they so cautious? Were they expecting him to fight back? David smiled without any particular humor. It was true that they didn’t know what he was capable of, but the real joke was: he didn’t know what he was capable of. And it didn’t look like he was going to live long enough to find out either.
There was a sound of tires on gravel on the road behind him. David turned on unsteady legs to face it. The black sedan’s side windows were tinted, and the windshield was some sort of one-way glass. The car might be full of Martians, for all David could see, but in some universes the windows weren’t tinted, and he knew it was Egan and Gilman. Who were through playing. David heard a faint hum as the powered side window rolled down and some monstrous and evil machine of chrome tubes, flashing lights, and wicked flanges poked out.
It looked as if it had been dropped here from some alternate reality, like something out of a Star Wars movie, something that could not possibly function. David stared at it in disbelief. As it sighted on him a thin keening grew louder, sliding out of audibility until it was only an ultrasonic pressure against his skin. And in a moment of despairing clarity, David Ferris realized that he did not want to die, that he would do anything to stay alive—and free.
He’d even do what they wanted him to do.
The Wheel that hovered at the edge of his consciousness
every waking moment came sharp. David reached for it, Spun it into manifestation with the last of his mutant stamina, braiding all the possible realities together as the power surged through him into the woi'ld. His body cracked like a whip as living flesh completed the circuit, and David Ferris reached out from What Was to What Could Be—
And in the blink of an eye, Could Be became Was.
The summer sunlight went flatly yellow, and the stench of burning sulphur seemed to hang on the air. Beneath the wheels of the black sedan, the asphalt pulled and turned to tar and stretched like hot taffy. . .
Until it burst.
Ropy tentacles the color of rotting eggplant slithered through the tarry chunks of broken road, writhing themselves around the car, tightening and beginning to pull. The hood gave a sharp ping! as it buckled, and under the unrelenting pressure the tinted windows crazed, then shattered, then spilled over the doors of the car like dangerous candy.
Someone screamed. The weapon in the car slewed crazily about, then fired, and for a brief instant David Ferris’s body was outlined in a corona of multicolored light.
“He’s been gone too long.” Bobby Drake’s voice was hard and decisive. He stood up, taking a step toward the edge of the terrace as though that would tell him where Warren had gone.
“Jean?” Scott said.
I’ll scan, the redhead answered through their psychic link. Jean Grey got to her feet and closed her eyes, search-
ing telepathically for the imprint of Warren’s thoughts through the background static of thousands of other minds.
It had been less than ninety seconds since Archangel had departed on his aerial reconnaissance, but the outcome of battles had been decided in far less time. Their former teammate Kitty Pryde had once said that being an X-Man was like wearing a psychic sign that read, come and kill me, and those who had been X-Men longest had that worldly wise paranoia burned into their very bones.
“Forget that. I’m going to look for him,” Bobby said.
like some illusion wrought by time-lapse photography, a puddle first of frost, then of ice, spread beneath his feet, broadening into a frozen wave that became an ice-slide sweeping him aloft.
“Bobby!” Scott snapped in exasperation.
“Wait!” Jean Grey said. Scott, there’s—
And then everything happened at once.
There was a blinding flash of sunlight on silver wings— Archangel’s return flight. There was wrarning in his very bearing, from the low, fast flight barely above the tree line to the way he kept looking behind him.
With a faint frosty crackle, Bobby Drake’s clothing froze into brittle glassy shards and fell from his body. Iceman’s body transformed into a glittering form of ice that melted and reformed a thousand times a second over his entire body, giving the unyielding ice the illusion of flexibility. The sun glinted from his frozen form in a heliographic display, and a wave of arctic cold cut through the baking August heat.
At the same moment on the terrace below, Scott Summers got to his feet. From the table beside him he lifted
what at first appeared to be a pair of fancy sunglasses; a gleaming gold visor echoing the helm of a knight of old, bisected horizontally by a thin line of brilliant ruby quartz. A more delicate instrument than the blast goggles he had been wearing, the battle visor allowed him to wield the full force of his incredible optic blasts with the delicacy of a surgeon. Closing his eyes tightly, the wiry and supremely ordinary-looking young man first removed the bulky goggles and slipped the gold-and-ruby visor into place. As the cybernetic contact points touched his temples, the X-Man known as Cyclops opened his eyes, and the annihilating blood-red light of his destructive optic blasts washed over the inside of his cybernetically controlled battle visor.
“Let’s go, folks,” the X-Men’s team leader said.
Beside him, Jean Grey’s body began to glow, and she telekinetically launched herself into the summer sky.
As for Hank McCoy, he had no need for a flashy transformation or display. He merely set down his lemonade glass and removed his glasses as the shimmering figure came crashing through the trees at the edge of the lawn.
Assuming they’d still been alive and in a talkative mood, Egan and Gilman could have told David what had hit him— and was about to cause the X-Men such trouble. The Moe-bius Lance was, in fact, a weapon that had been specifically designed to subdue supernormals with powers classified as parapsionic, such as Gambit or the Scarlet Witch. It had been developed during experiments conducted on the mutant known as Angar the Screamer before his death, and was supposed to scramble a parapsi’s nervous system, setting
up a feedback loop that would render them the victim of their own power for a short but undetermined period.
There were only two problems.
The Moebius Lance had never actually been tested on the people it was supposed to control.
And its effects weren’t anything like the ones its designer had predicted.
Thoughts and memories spilled through David Ferris’s mind as his neurochemistry reconfigured, wiping memory and personality from the intricate architecture of his brain. All that he was drained away, the tangled skein of memory unknotting into smoothness once more.
Above the other X-Men, Archangel braked and veered groundward. He didn’t know what connection the glowing man below him had with the wrecked car he’d seen back on 9A North, but he did know that the car looked as if it’d been bear-hugged by the Hulk and that even in Westchester normal people didn’t glow in the dark.
Archangel and the former David Ferris broke through the trees at about the same time.
A moment ago he’d been hungry, tired, and afraid. Now he was none of those things. He no longer remembered that he’d been fleeing, or from whom. The running man stopped when he reached the edge of the trees. He didn’t, in fact, remember being David Ferris very well at all.
Probabilities cascaded through David’s mind like a winning hand of solitaire on Windows 95.
say something you have to
So many ways to go, so many paths to choose, and who he was had been lost forever, buried in a thousand might-be-maybes, and who was he?
you have to remember it was important you were—you were— “I am the Wheel of Fortune!” David Ferris shouted. “In that case, I’d like to buy a vowel, Vanna,” the Beast replied smoothly, loping forward. The glowing man was a threat, but possibly not the main threat. In torn jeans and ripped shirt, their little glowworm looked more like one of the victims than like the vanguard of an attacking force— but it didn’t pay to take chances . . .
“For God’s sake, Beast, be—” Cyclops shouted.
The glowing man flung out his hand.
—killme goingtokillme extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice—
And that was the last thing Hank McCoy saw.
In this world, at least.
“I said, ya gotta get over yerself, Torchy.”
Henry P. McCoy twitched ever so slightly as the unmistakable gravel voice of Benjamin J. Grimm cut through his concentration.
There was a crash from the room beyond and the sound of a rushing whoosh of flame. Hank sighed and pushed his glasses farther up on his nose. Working as Reed Richards’s research assistant wras a wonderful opportunity, it was true, and if not for Stark International’s continuing-education program, he wouldn’t have had it.
If only it weren’t so . . . stressful.
“Look here, brick-face—” Another crash.
Hank winced. He sincerely believed that violence was
the last refuge of the incompetent; he abhorred physical brutality and shunned strife in every form. He’d managed to forget that in addition to being one of Earth’s foremost scientists, Dr. Richards was a lightning rod for trouble. Usually super-powered trouble.
And me without a supemormality to my name, Hank thought mournfully. A litde agility hardly counted. In fact, it was a positive prerequisite for his current assignment.
The building shook. Hank leapt to his feet with a yelp of dismay. While he’d been distracted, the chemical he’d been timing had boiled over and was now foaming greenly across the lab bench.
What you need, Henry old son, is a guardian angel. . .
A thousand presents, a thousand worlds; each as real as the next. . . .
And the Wheel was Spinning. . . .
Cyclops was the farthest away of any of the team: Archangel, Iceman, and Phoenix were airborne and in all the years he’d known him he’d never been able to persuade Hank that a full frontal assault wasn’t the best way to assess a new and unknown threat. In the instant that the Beast disappeared in a flash of light, all the rules changed, and the glowing man calling himself the Wheel of Fortune went from potential victim to certified threat.
Making sure his teammates were out of the fire line, Cyclops opened his visor far enough to emit a thin ruby lance of raw power.
Split-second calculation raced through Scott’s mind:
Should, be enough to KO him if it hits; he looks human enough—
There was a grinding crash from above. At the same time a tree beside the stranger’s head exploded in a shower of splinters. Chunks of ice fell out of the sky. A dozen different things clamored for Cyclops’ attention all at the same time.
Bobby?
Missed!
How?
“X-Men—pull back!” Scott shouted.
Phoenix had chosen to come at the glowing man from behind. She heard Scott’s shout through the link they shared, and her automatic running assessment of the danger they were in spiked. Hank had vanished, but the clean abruptness of it told Phoenix that it was probably some sort of teleportation—
And if it weren’t, the years ahead would be time enough to grieve.
There’s something wrong here. And whatever it is, it’s getting worse.
When he’d first appeared, the stranger had been surrounded by a chatoyant nimbus of biogenetic energy, almost a halo. Now the area of affect began to spread; the figure inside it to blur, to multiply—and as it did, its psi-signatures did as well. The sensation for Phoenix was similar to being in a rapidly filling auditorium where everyone was talking at once. Ten, a hundred, a thousand: the force of his multiplied thoughts was drowning all other thoughts in a wave of telepathic static.
Hoiv does he—? There are more of him every instant.
Above and ahead there was the sound of an explosion; Jean Grey swerved groundward to avoid the flying chunks of ice. What had happened to Bobby?
What had happened to all of them? She could no longer “hear” her teammates, nor any of the ordinary human minds that made up the community of Salem Center—and in fact, she was no longer sure any of them were there at all. But above all things, Jean Grey was a professional, and the Mission Objective came first. Stop the intruder; shut him down.
Seconds before, Iceman had been twenty feet overhead. Trained always to fight as part of a team, he’d kept a running check of where the others were—Warren was above and on his left, Jean should be coming up from the bogey’s blind side. Hank and Cyke were somewhere on the ground; not in his attack path. Now was the time to put a set of ice handcuffs on their unfair unknown and have him wrapped up and ready to deliver.
Bobby angled his ice slide groundward—
—and smashed directly into Archangel below him, also coming in for an attack run.
But that’s impossible—he was behind me—
“Drake, you—moron!” Archangel shouted, silver feathers chiming faintly as he battled desperately to stay airborne.
But Bobby Drake had troubles of his own. The collision with Archangel’s wings had shattered his ice slide; Iceman was four stories up with no visible means of support.
Where’s Hank? Bobby wondered as he fell. He didn’t
want to nail him with an ice pylon if Hank was moving into position to catch him, but at the same time, he didn’t want to crash—
Snow. Just the thing on a hot day. With reflexes honed in a thousand Danger Room sessions, Iceman flung out both hands, making the air beneath him cold, colder, coldest. . .
It was only too bad that what was beneath him wasn’t ground at all.
No! That’s impossi—
The rest of his life was going to be measured in seconds if he didn’t time this just right. Bobby Drake drew a deep breath and launched himself into space. A terrifying moment of free fall, and then the crossbar smacked into the palms of his calloused hands. He was glad he’d taken the time to apply the extra coat of rosin to his hands; it was August, and sweat and high-wire acts didn’t mix. He pulled himself up and over, taking a moment to steal a glance at the audience in the seats far below.
The Big Apple Circus was one of the few tenting circuses still working. Five years ago Bobby Drake had signed up as a rigger. It was exciting to work a hundred feet above the ground, but Bobby craved excitement the way a couch potato craved junk food. He was always looking for the next thrill.
Case in point. Bobby Drake, boy aerialist. He launched himself from the trapeze to the slack wire ten feet below. To the ringside audience, it looked as though he were jumping to his death. Angel bait, the others called him.
Bobby Drake always worked without a net.
* * *
It was the unexpectedness of the sound that made Cyclops turn toward it. What he saw made his eyes widen with disbelief behind their ruby-quartz firewall at the sheer . . . idiocy of it. Funny. I didn’t remember the swimming pool being on this side of the house, Cyclops thought inconsequentially. But if it hadn’t been, it was now; Scott could even see the place on the concrete lip where Wolverine had etched graffiti years before.
But what was by far the most interesting thing about the swimming pool at the moment was the fact that every drop of water it contained had been turned into a filtered, pH-balanced, chlorinated block of solid ice. And Iceman was frozen into the middle of it, entombed like a fly in amber.
Chipping him free would have been a delicate task at the best of times, but as Cyclops turned back from his split-second assessment, he realized that time had run out.
He was alone, facing the Wheel of Fortune.
And then he wasn’t there anymore.
And the Wheel of Fortune was Spinning.
I know every sound my ship makes. Scott Summers looked out across the bridge with the satisfaction that came from the awareness of being in his proper place. All around him, overlapping holographic screens showed him images of a starfield adjusted to compensate for redshift distortion and modified with the data feed from the navigational computers.
What season was it at home? Scott shook his head, smiling at the foolishness of wondering about a homework! he’d left while still a child. The glory of that day was something that would burn in his memory like a nova until the day he died: Alex, the orphanage, the great golden god dressed in polychrome buccaneer’s leathers, striding in to claim them both, take them away. . .
Christopher Summers. Their father.
Still, Earth was his home; Scott had been born there, in the Midwestern United States. He might go back there someday. It was summer there now, he thought. What was the name of the month? August, that was it. . .
“Shi’ar raiders detected by long-range sensors, Captain!” the helm said.
Scott Summers brought his mind back to the present with a jolt.
“Battle stations, everyone—go to Condition Red. Okay, Starjammers, it’s time to break up this little party—”
A moment before, there had been five of them; now Phoenix was alone. She reached out for the mind of the intruder. A moment later she realized her chosen tactic was wrong, and four seconds after she began her intervention, Jean Grey knew that she’d just made a potentially fatal mistake.
In her years as an X-Man, she had probed the minds of aliens, madmen, and demons, linked together members of the team across both years and light-years, travelled from the far side of the galaxy to a future that never was.
This was different.
This was like all of them at once.
With a dim, fading part of her mind, Jean Grey could feel the earth beneath her feet, the warmth of the sunlight beating down on her shoulders, the roughness of the tree bark beneath her fingers. They were part of one reality.
But not the only one.
* ❖ *
“If I had the wings of an angel—” The melodious baritone came to a distracted halt as the singer tried and failed to remember the next line. Oh, well. Hardly matters, Warren Worthington III told himself philosophically.
Below him the green of the Hudson River Valley unrolled in an immaculate carpet, and Warren almost felt as if he could taste the wind on his face. This little flight up to Albany was just what the doctor ordered to chase those boardroom blues away.
Making a small adjustment, Warren maneuvered the Piper Cub into a showy sideslip. He’d always loved to fly . . .
I’ve always loved to fly. Why did that simple statement fill him with panic? Of course he did; been flying since he was sixteen; his father had bought him his own plane for his twenty-first birthday. Sailplaning; hang gliding; Warren had always loved anything that would take him into the air.
My wings! He could feel his heart hammering in his chest, racing faster and faster. Black spots danced before his eyes and the Piper Cub’s stick slipped forward, taking with it the nose of the small plane. Falling forward in an uncontrolled dive, the small plane began, lazily, to spin.
Where are my wings ?
The scream of air past the Cub’s cowling roused him to his immediate plight. Frantically Warren clawed at the controls, trying to pull the plane out of its deadly dive. He heard the singing in the guide wires as the ailerons snatched at the treacherous air. The surface of the Hudson rushed closer with each passing second. Only the wings of an angel could save him now.
But Warren Worthington III didn’t have wings.
He never had.
And as the surging tides of David Ferris’s mind closed over her, Jean Grey was linked to a universe in which every possibility was just as real as every other.
Every one.
August in New York, and even in the 1990s, some addresses are still more fashionable than others. Submitted for your approval: a particular Park Avenue penthouse, somewhere in the East Seventies.
She called herself Jeanne Grey, having changed the spelling of her first name to the more exotic French form when she reached adulthood. She was born with the power to read people’s minds—and cloud them too. She grew up in a small town—Annandale-on-Hudson—knowing what people were going to say before they said it.
Sometimes it was an advantage.
“Mrs. Byrne, how lovely to see you again. I’m so glad you’ve heard from your son—didn’t Kra Tho tell you everything would be all right?”
The regal redhead took the arm of the older woman, and led her from the vestibule of the lavish penthouse to the drawing room where the others were waiting for their Wednesday-afternoon sitting. She smiled inwardly as Mrs. Byrne’s surprise and awe reverberated through her mutant senses. Amelia Byrne believed absolutely in the power of Kra Tho, a disembodied being from ancient Atlantis who spoke through his contact, Jeanne Grey, to bring messages of hope and purpose to the modern world.
Kra Tho did not exist, though he was a very lucrative fiction. And an easy road to travel, for a young woman who had never heard of either Professor Charles Francis Xavier or his unique private school.
No. That isn’t me.
Although she knows it is.
I have to change it.
But how do you change the present?
That isn’t me. . . . Thrust into an alternate universe, her ego merging with her body double’s, Phoenix fought desperately to free herself from the trap of David’s thoughts. But she was only one person, trapped in only one possible present. The Wheel of Fortune turned for them all. . . .
He’d been sorry to have to leave the party, but he’d promised Barry he’d put in some hours this weekend. Too bad he hadn’t been born rich instead of so good looking.
Scott Summers smiled at his own feeble joke and shifted the briefcase to his other hand. Among his other regrets was that there wasn’t a subway stop nearer to his job than West Fourth Street; it was a long walk in this heat. Too bad he hadn’t been born lucky instead of smart; luck would at least have arranged things so he didn’t have to go in to work on a Sunday afternoon in August. But the presentation to the client hadn’t gone at all well, and Barry had promised an entire new ad strategy by Monday. And that meant overtime. A weekend full of it.
Scott sighed, welcoming the coolness in the lobby as he went through the revolving doors at 375 Hudson. August in New York wasn’t for sissies. The guard knew him and waved
Id
him through, proof that he was putting in too many hours at the job. And for what? Athletic shoes. An account as ordinary as the rest of his life . . .
Everything about him was ordinary, Scott Summers thought to himself.
Horror lent her strength. He’s shuffling us farther and farther away—into realities where mutants don’t exist at all—I can 7 let him blot us out this way—David! David, listen to me! We aren’t the enemy. We don’t zuant to hurt you . . .
. . net profits down every quarter for the last six years, eaten alive by Korea and Japan; what did I expect?” Bobby Drake sighed.
Not this. He scanned the “Help Wanted” columns of the Sunday New York Times again, although he knew he wouldn’t find anything there. The available jobs for obsolete middle-management former programmers were few to nonexistent, but nobody’d thought that IBM would make the cuts it had.
Now he was out in the cold. Despite the August heat, Bobby Drake shivered. He wasn’t even thirty yet—his life couldn’t be over.
Could it?
Deliberately closing her mind to Ferris’s perception of the world, Phoenix turned her thoughts away from the present, sinking deeper into Ferris’s psyche. Into the only place that help could come from. Into the past.
* * *
His name was Davey Ferris, and he was eight years old. Starbuck had been his companion and best friend for as long as Davey Ferris could remember, which was, why, it was years and years. Starbuck was no particular kind of dog—a Heinz, as Davey’s father liked to say, because he contained fifty-seven varieties of dog within his rangy frame—but that didn I matter to Davey.
And then one day Starbuck died. Hit by a car.
“Daddy, where’s Starbuck gone?”
“Fm afraid he’s dead, son,” Davey’s father told him. But in hundreds and hundreds of universes right next door Davey’s dog was still alive . . .
“But he doesn’t have to be, Daddy!”Davey Ferris had tried, for the first time, to explain.
“Hush, son. No one can bring back the dead. ”
“But, Daddy, he isn’t all dead. Not everywhere. ”
Davey Ferris wasn’t quite sure why his father said Starbuck was dead, when Davey could see him, alive, in the universe next door. He supposed that Starbuck had tracked mud in or broken something, and as he was a good boy, he thought he wouldn’t bring Starbuck back until they’d gotten over being mad. But he was only eight, and eventually he forgot. . .
His father’s fear had bridled David’s use of his mutant power more effectively than any prohibition could, but he hadn’t been able to bear to give it up entirely. Instead he’d only used it for little things.
Until it was too late.
In his mind ... the car. . . Black Team 51 ? Another government agency or private corporation that desires to enslave the supernormal for their own purposes? Weariness and anger threatened to break her concentration: when would governments and
would-be governments stop treating paranormals as mindless puppets to be exploited for some nationalistic agenda? All we want is our own lives . . .
But David Ferris hadn’t been given the luxury of autonomy.
The Moebius Lance—energy weapon ? Drug-delivery system ? Whatever it is, David didn’t mean to fight us at all—now, if I can only make him see that!
Phoenix’s battleground was a world where will and desire were weapons; where passion took all and good intentions were the best defense. She no longer knew where she was at all, in this psychic realm where every possibility was as real as every other. All she knew was that she must succeed.
Come with me, David. Come back with me—
But the lure of Might Have Been was strong. . . .
Let’s get this over with so I can go home.
Parts of Long Island were scenic and pleasant and delightful to visit. Stark Industries wasn’t built on any of them. Though it had been years since this location was a particularly important manufacturing plant—or even the main one, Morgan Stark having moved most of Stark Industries assembly overseas—most of the administration for the Stark financial empire was still located here. Despite the fact that the corporation had been deprived of its guiding genius with Anthony Stark’s death a decade earlier, Stark Industries continued to hold thousands of lucrative patents, and a number of top-secret industrial processes too confidential even to patent.
That was why she’d come.
It’s too bad my telepathy is so short range, Jean Grey thought as she made her clandestine way as close to the fence as she dared. If I had more range, I could do this from a hotel room in Montauk and avoid all this mess.
But the fact of the matter was that telepaths were in short supply in the competitive world of industrial espionage, so as she sent her mind out to tap the minds of others and began to speak her findings quietly into the small tape-recorder she carried, she reflected that this truly was the best of all possible worlds.
The helicopter that hung motionless in the sky over the mansion on Greymalkin Lane was the same one that had been following David Ferris all morning. It was stealth configured, sonic suppressed, and transparent to nearly every form of tracking and monitoring device that could be matched against it by the major players in the field, but in the end, technical superiority had come down to a simple matter of looking out the window and keeping in radio contact with the chase car below.
Sometimes the old-fashioned methods worked the best.
Ashton and Keithley were the sort of faceless professionals who populated the field arms of an uncounted number of alphabet organizations from SHIELD to A.I.M. to SAFE. It didn’t matter to them whether they were sent out to retrieve David Ferris or a quart of milk from the corner deli; they did what they were assigned, collected their security clearances, and, if they were lucky, their pensions.
As Egan and Gilman would not.
Ashton and Keithley’s first warning of trouble had been the mirror flash of light that zeroed every bean counter in
the bird. They didn’t see what happened to the chase car, but when the light was gone, it was easy to see that the car below had been crushed like a paper cup and sunk into the roadway.
“Did they use the lance?”
“Do I look like a mind reader, Ash?” his partner said.
Once the sensors started mapping again, Techlnt told them there was no one left alive below. Their quarry was gone, but, flying a standard search configuration, they found Ferris again without trouble—rather too easily, in fact.
“Who’s that guy with the wings?”
“Wait one . . . congratulations, Mr. Ashton,” Keithley drawled. Like his partner, Keithley wore a dark suit and dark glasses, his only concession to individuality being the silver gargoyle earring dangling from his left earlobe. “You’ve just won yourself your very own Archangel. Known to be affiliated with both X-Factor and the X-Men, the database says; also known to operate solo.”
“You mean there’s more of them,” Ashton said resignedly.
“Look down there, off to the right,” Keithley said helpfully. “One, two, three more that I can see. We’re blown.”
“Time to phone home.”
A shielded zip-squeal transmission to base, and a few moments later the surviving members of Black Team 51 had their new orders.
“It’s over. Shut him down.”
Slowly the blurring of possibility faded, leaving Phoenix alone in her own mind once more. And with the lessening
of that psychic din, the sound of other minds that was a normal part of Jean Grey’s daily existence became audible once more.
The sense of deadly purpose from the craft hovering above her was unmistakable.
She looked upward through the trees, and instinctively stepped away from David Ferris. When she used her powers against the helicopter, she didn’t want him fried by the backlash.
“Shut him down. ” She shook her head at the weird doubling effect of hearing the words and hearing someone hear them. Where were Scott and the others?
Then the helicopter fired, and she had her answer.
The bolt was as instantaneous as light and as colorless as air: a carbon-dioxide laser, enabled for only one shot. Not really that powerful—it wouldn’t even have slowed Rogue down—but powerful enough. There wasn’t even time for a scream.
As an X-Man, Phoenix had seen death too many times to count, but murder never lost its power to horrify her with its very casualness. At the same moment that the laser pulse reduced David Ferris and all his spectrum of possibility to a smear of greasy ash, Phoenix launched herself skyward. Intent on the copter and its cargo, she barely registered the reappearance of the other X-Men or the reestablishment of the psychic rapport that allowed her to brief them in the space of a heartbeat on what she’d gleaned from David Ferris’s mind.
It seemed wrong that it was still afternoon, still summer. To live so many different lives should have taken more time than this. But that didn’t matter now. She was nearly there.
The skin of the helicopter was so close that her outstretched fingertips almost skimmed it, and Iceman and Archangel were only a second or so behind her. She’d tear the helicopter apart; they could catch the passengers. A maneuver the teams had rehearsed a thousand times in every possible combination of heroes.
But Ashton and Keithley—and their faceless masters— had other ideas, and the black budget toys to implement them.
The ultrasonic whine of the warp-gate enabling skirled up past the range that bats and dogs could hear, crossed the threshold of pain, and vanished into the hydrogen song of space. The skin of the black copter began to crackle with heat as its fusion generator ran flat-out, powering up for Jump. The amount of energy that had to be wasted into the environment when space-time was folded made the warp-gate of very little use except as a last resort.
Or a weapon.
She felt the radiant heat of the helicopter’s skin on her hands and face, and intuition deep as instinct made Phoenix recoil. It’s a trap! she cried mentally, just as the chase copter gave up its local space-time referents in an incandescent pulse of energy.
The shock wave gathered Phoenix into its superheated embrace and flung her backward. Protected from physical harm by her telekinesis, she nonetheless crashed through Bobby’s already-melting ice bridge, sending him flying as
well. Disoriented, she couldn’t see where her teammates were, or even be sure in which direction the ground lay.
But Phoenix had shielded Archangel from the brunt of the explosion. With less than five seconds to intercept both his teammates before they hit the ground, Warren spread his wings wide, angling each pinion for maximum drag as he surfed the wave of sweltering air, and reached out to snatch Iceman’s falling body out of the sky.
One.
Reaching out with the blind instinct of a seasoned aer-ialist, Bobby grabbed Warren’s reaching hand.
Two.
Muscles and wings both creaked with the strain of absorbing the momentum of Bobby’s helpless plunge, and in a moment more both men would fall.
But the air was Archangel’s element.
Three.
“Heads up, Hank—catch!” he shouted. Using Bobby’s own momentum, Archangel made his own body a fulcrum to swing his teammate over and down into the Beast’s waiting arms.
Four.
Converting the braking maneuver into a forward glide, he slid forward with a raptor’s casual grace to intercept Phoenix’s falling body less than a dozen feet above the ground, carrying her safely to earth.
Five.
Down and safe.
“It’s wonderful to have wings,” Archangel said fervently. He straightened out of his landing crouch, setting Jean Grey
lightly on her feet. She smiled at him and reached up to brush back a stray curl of blond hair from his forehead.
“I know,” she said gently.
“How come I end up with you and Warren gets the girl?” Iceman complained to the Beast.
“Because, Robert m’lad, some things never change,” Henry McCoy said absently. He set Iceman down and stepped back, staring skyward with a frown and absently brushing melting frost from his coat. He looked toward Cyclops, brows raised in puzzlement.
Scott Summers glanced at his watch. It was a quarter after three; less than five minutes had elapsed since Archangel had gone to investigate a peculiar noise.
And then. . .
And then whatf
Cyclops looked around, but as far as he could see and hear, the threat was over. He allowed himself to relax slightly; Bobby and the others were all right. None of his team killed—this time, the ever-present fear reminded him—no one captured, no one hurt. As fights went, that was the best the X-Men could expect these days. The only definite casualty of the engagement was one might-be innocent man, the so-called Wheel of Fortune.
The faint wail of a siren in the distance warned that the alarms and excursions at the mansion on Greymalkin Lane hadn’t gone unremarked by the citizens of Salem Center.
“Just another Pleasant Valley Sunday,” Archangel said derisively. “Business as usual for the X-Men, the Hard-Luck Harrys of the super hero trade.”
Scott Summers glanced toward the edge of the trees,
where the only evidence that anything had happened at all was one splintered tree and a charred spot on the ground.
No. Not the only evidence, Scott corrected himself. With a profound sense of unreality, he stared at the swimming pool, now located inexplicably at the foot of the terrace. The water was liquid—had Bobby really fallen into it, or had that been some bizarre sort of hallucination? He shook his head in bafflement.
“Come on, team, let’s take this inside before the authorities come looking.” He turned his back on the unaccountable swimming pool and started up the steps. The others followed as he opened the French doors and went into the house.
The welcoming quiet of the mansion’s interior told Scott that any alarms triggered by the intruder hadn’t disturbed the mansion’s other inhabitants. The flash had been visible for miles, though, which meant he’d better have some kind of an explanation ready for any of the teams that were heading home because of it.
“What the hell was that?” Bobby Drake demanded indignantly, breaking into Scott’s thoughts. “Another nutty government agency? A crazed multinational? Girl Scouts?”
“We’ll probably never know,” Cyclops answered. “Go and change, Bobby,” he added out of habit.
“Not if we’re lucky,” Iceman muttered under his breath. He headed for the stairs to find his room and a change of clothes.
The other four looked at each other.
“It’s a strange world,” Archangel said finally. The words sounded hollow even as he spoke them.
“Maybe,” the Beast answered, as if Warren had said more than he had, “but it’s a wonderful life.”
Illustration by Ralph Reese
The swirling mist off the Mississippi gripped the narrow streets of the French Quarter in a deadly blanket of silence as her body was dumped out onto the black, damp cobblestone like so much garbage. The last of her blood dripped from the slash across her neck, adding only slighdy to the bloodstain on her white prom dress.
She rolled once, ending up against the shallow curb, eyes open, staring unseeing up at the moss- and vine-covered buildings around her.
“Hurry,” a hoarse whisper said from the driver’s seat of the black insides of the dented old Caddie.
“Done,” another voice from the black interior said. “Go.”
The rear door on the passenger side of the old car slammed, sending a hollow echo down the narrow street. Then, tires spinning on the damp surface, the car fishtailed forward, disappearing into the mist like a fleeing ghost, leaving behind only the echo of its passing.
The mist swirled in the faint light over the young woman, closing down over her white face and dress as if trying to protect her from being seen in the night. Only the blue orchid corsage still pinned to her new dress marked her location like a flower on a grave.
Two blocks away Remy LeBeau walked almost aimlessly through the mist, not seeming even to notice the pre-dawn night around him. His long brown raincoat was pulled tight across his chest, the collar up as if protecting his neck from unseen rain. A black headband held the long, unruly brown hair out of his face. A lit cigarette drooped from his lips, the orange glow of the ember giving his face sharp, deep
shadows. In his left hand he carried a long staff, using it almost as a cane.
His eyes seemed blank, as if he were walking the street at a different time. In a sense, he was doing just that. He was living the time of his youth. The time of his marriage. The time of his banishment from this, his hometown.
The memories of those days swirled around him, mixing with the mist, filling the streets and buildings with his past life. This was his first night back in New Orleans in a very long while, and he wasn’t sure why he was even here now. Somehow, he just knew he was needed here. Over the years he had learned to trust that feeling.
So now he walked in the mist through the streets of the Quarter in the hours just before sunrise, the only time le vieux carre ever was truly quiet, thinking of the past, of his life as it had been, and paying very little attention to the present.
Suddenly he stopped and glanced around. A few blocks to his right a group of drunk tourists on Bourbon Street laughed too loudly, sending echoes of their party through the sleeping Quarter. Otherwise, the streets were empty.
Yet suddenly the present called to him, pulling him from his memories of his wife and his family. He didn’t know how, exactly, but he knew something was happening.
He turned away from the tourists and toward the edge of the quarter where it was bordered by the projects. At a fast run he followed his instincts, his raincoat flapping behind him like wings.
It was only moments before he found her.
“Oh, no, chere,” he said, kneeling beside her.
He ignored the gash across her neck and gently picked
up her head, looking into her open, staring eyes. Again his memories took over and he went back to the moment he’d last seen those eyes, beaming from the radiant face of a sixteen-year-old girl standing beside her father while they waited to board a plane back to New Orleans.
Cornelia Hayward, daughter of Julian Hayward, the most powerful man in New Orleans, and one of the ten most powerful people in the country. Rumors were that he controlled the powers of the night, as well as the businesses of the day. Even the assassins’ and the thieves’ guilds didn’t cross Hayward and he in turn left them alone. But Remy knew him and had helped him a number of times.
That day in the airport Remy had taken Cornelia’s hand and kissed the back of it, and she had almost blushed. Her father had smiled and shaken Remy’s hand. He had invited Remy to visit, even though he knew Remy was an outlaw in his own hometown.
Remy would never have guessed he had been drawn back here because of Cornelia.
As if picking up a rag doll, he lifted Cornelia’s thin young body from the damp street. Her head started to roll back, exposing the huge slash across her neck, and he quickly braced her head against his arm, making her seem more like a lover passed out from too much drink.
He didn’t know how, but some way he needed to get her to her father. Hayward owned a large home in the Garden District, near where Remy used to have a home. A home he had hoped to settle in with his wife. A home he lost when he lost his city.
“Put her down, LeBeau,” a voice said from behind him.
He spun and again her head lolled back, showing the huge gash.
His hand under her quickly grasped the cards in his coat pocket and waited as a figure stepped from the shadows of a courtyard door.
Remy almost staggered back as the face of the intruder came into the faint light.
Julian Hayward stopped a few feet from Remy, never taking his gaze from the Cajun X-Man.
“Your daughter?” Remy said, lifting the light weight of Cornelia slightly.
“I know, son,” Hayward said. “But you are not the prey we hoped to catch with this bait. Now put her down and step in here with me. I will explain.”
“You killin’ your own children, hommeV’
Hayward laughed. “Corey, honey. Reassure the poor man.”
Suddenly in Remy’s arms the girl’s body moved. It so startled him, he almost dropped her.
Somehow she lifted her head, closing the huge gash across her neck as she moved. “Thanks for caring,” she said in a whisper. “You are a dear and I would enjoy staying in your arms, but I can’t. Now please put me down.”
Then her head rolled back and she was again the body of a dead girl. No pulse, no blood, no life. A huge gash sliced across her neck.
Remy stared at the now lifeless body in his arms, his mind not believing what he had just seen. Yet, it had happened. He glanced at Hayward and the father nodded, indicating that Remy should put her down.
Carefully, Remy placed the body of the young girl back in the gutter and stood.
“Now, quickly,” Hayward said. “Come with me.” He turned and moved back into the courtyard and the black shadows beyond.
Dazed, Remy followed through the courtyard door. There had been a number of times over the years in New Orleans when he knew someone he had once thought dead to be still alive. His wife, Belle, was one. But he had never had a corpse come to life in his arms. At least not until tonight.
And Hayward had used the term bait? His own daughter as bait? And what was he trying to catch with a dead girl? Who or what would want a dead girl?
Too many questions.
Remy, with only a glance at the body in the mist, stepped through the dark courtyard door and was instantly blinded by intense white light. One hand came up to shade his eyes while the other went inside his pocket for his cards. He had the ability to change the potential energy in an object to kinetic energy, creating an instant bomb.
Crouching, he blinked hard and fast, forcing his eyes to focus on his surroundings more quickly than natural.
There seemed to be no danger.
Slowly, he turned around. The door he’d stepped through was nothing more than a black archway. He couldn’t see anything through it, let alone the cobblestone street and the girl’s body that he knew was only a few feet away.
“Over here, LeBeau,” Hayward’s voice said.
Remy hesitated while glancing around. The huge room
was filled with thousands of computers and machines and at least fifty people, all wearing white lab coats. Only Hayward and Remy and the computers broke the stark whiteness of the room. Every person in the room seemed to be focused on their own task. No one paid him the slightest attention.
With one more glance at the blank door into the street, Remy moved over where Hayward stood behind a row of white lab coats sitting in front of computer screens. On the one directly in front of Hayward, Remy could see Cornelia’s body in the street.
Other screens showed the road and the surrounding buildings. It was clearly a very sophisticated surveillance system, one Remy bet even Wolverine would have been interested in studying.
Remy was about to ask Hayward what in the hell was going on when a white-faced man in a white lab coat at the end of the row said, “I have contact from the east.”
“Good,” Hayward said.
Remy leaned forward as out of the corner of the screen a shadow moved. And then another and another.
“There are nine of them,” another white-faced man in front of a screen said.
Suddenly, figures appeared out of the shadows around Cornelia, almost as mysteriously as Hayward had appeared. Remy had been raised in the thieves’ guild, trained in not being seen. And he was impressed.
“Who are dey?” he asked.
Then he saw. They were children. The oldest didn’t look more than sixteen; the youngest he guessed around ten. They were all dressed in black and moved smoothly, almost
as if they were floating. But he knew they weren’t. They just knew how to move silently and quickly.
They surrounded Cornelia’s body and one of them picked her up, her stained white dress a stark contrast to their black bodysuits.
One of the older children motioned that they should go and almost as quickly as they had appeared, the children and Cornelia’s body disappeared into the shadows.
Beside Remy, Hayward let out a deep breath, as if relieved. “They took her. Good.”
“You wanted dis?” Remy asked.
Hayward nodded, glancing away from the screen and looking directly at Remy. “You look as if you could use a drink. And I know I do.” He put a heavy hand on Remy’s shoulder and turned him away from the monitor toward a door on the far side of the room. “I will explain. But only after a drink.”
Hayward’s private office looked nothing like his lab. Oak shelves filled with leather books covered two walls. Expensive paintings under spotlights dominated the other two. A large desk filled one corner, but Hayward directed Remy to the overstuffed couch and then asked him for his choice.
“Nothin’ ’til I get a few answers.”
Hayward nodded and punched a small button. A panel and picture slid back and a well-stocked bar slid forward. In silence he poured himself a Scotch and took a good portion of it straight away. Then he refilled his glass and turned to Remy.
“You almost destroyed my plan tonight, son.”
“I was t’inkin’ I was helpin’, me.”