And if she held on to Bobby for much longer, so would he.
With a cry, she pushed him away, collapsing onto the bed as he reeled back into the corner formed between the open door and the wall. She couldn’t bear to look at him. The glimpse of pain and terror on his face while he was in her grasp was haunting enough.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, feeling a different kind of ache through her body at how inadequate her words sounded.
“It’s—okay,” he said.
She heard him shuffle around the door with the moves of an old man. She stared at her hands, hating what she could do, hating how glorious it made her feel, hating most of all the fact that she couldn’t control it, that she couldn’t put back what she’d stolen. She sat there with the gloves on her lap, smoothing her palms across the sleek fabric over and over and over again, like she was ironing, desperately seeking something she could put right.
John heard Bobby stumble downstairs but didn’t bother to see if he needed any help. He was in the family room, flicking the lid on his lighter, staring at the crowd of pictures on the wall, on shelves, on the big TV. A happy family, just what you’d expect to find in any part of America.
He hated it.
In the kitchen, Logan knew everything that had transpired upstairs. Too late, he’d sensed what was about to happen, had been on his way to the stairs when he heard Rogue’s faint outcry and the thump of Bobby’s body against the wall. He held position for the few moments necessary to reassure himself they’d done each other no lasting physical damage, then turned away. He hadn’t a clue how to help either of them, and the only advice his own instincts and experience could offer was to give them space. Let them lick their wounds and regain their inner equilibrium in private, as he would.
What he needed, he knew, was a trained professional. What they needed was a real teacher.
He slid open the communicator he’d taken from John Allardyce in the car.
“Hello,” he said into its tiny grille, feeling like twelve kinds of idiot. “Hello? C’mon, Jean, pick up the damn phone! Where the hell are you, woman? You’re s’posed to be a telepath—if you can’t hear my call, what about my thoughts? Where are you?”
Nothing but static from the radio, silence within the confines of his head.
He found a beer in the fridge, that was good. Miller Genuine Draft, which was acceptable. He drained half the bottle in one extended swallow that brought forth a comforting burp.
He crossed to the sink and turned on the water, hot and hard, using dishwashing liquid to clean the blood off his arms and hands. He flexed his right hand and popped the claws to see if they needed any cleaning. At the same time, a house cat leaped up on the counter to see if he was offering any food. A big marmalade tabby, whose relaxed manner told him she ruled this roost. He held his hand still while she approached to give him an assessing sniff. She must have liked what she found, because she started licking up across his knuckles, cleaning him the way she would herself after a scrap. Her ridged tongue rubbed across his skin like a rasp, with the same kind of sound. This was why he liked animals, preferred the wild to civilization. Life was a lot less complicated; the animals either trusted you or they didn’t. If they didn’t, they either attacked or ran away. People could come at you every which way, whenever they pleased, for no reason whatsoever. They created entanglements, which wrapped you up so tight you couldn’t think straight or found yourself thinking about the wrong thing.
Case in point, as he realized with a start that another car had pulled into the driveway and three scents that carried common elements with Bobby Drake’s were approaching the front door.
He retracted the claws, which made the cat yowl in surprise and hiss as she sprang clear. A moment later, William Drake stormed over the threshold, followed by his wife, Madeline, and Bobby’s younger brother, Ronny.
“Who the hell are you?” Drake demanded.
Logan had no answer right away that would improve the situation. so he bought himself a moment by finishing his beer. Clattering feet from upstairs and the other rooms diverted Drake’s attention before any more angry words could be said, and Bobby led the three Xavier kids into the kitchen.
“Dad!” he said brightly. “Mom! You guys are home!”
His father looked from Bobby to Logan, and Logan knew at once the situation was more serious than ever. Drake had seen the circles under his son’s eyes and assumed that Logan was responsible.
“Honey,” said Madeline, “aren’t you supposed to be at school?”
“Bobby, who is this guy?” Drake demanded of the boy, indicating Logan.
“Professor Logan” was the reply. His dad didn’t believe a word.
Madeline wasn’t interested in Logan. She was glaring at Rogue, and especially at the white opera gloves that covered almost the whole of her arms.
“What is that girl doing wearing my clothes?” she asked. “And—are those Nana’s gloves?”
Bobby stammered a reply: “Mom, uh, guys, can I talk to you about something?”
Mitchell Laurio was whistling as he came on shift. He couldn’t remember many of the details of what had happened in the ladies’ can, but he’d never felt better in his life than he had after it was done. Just the memory of Grace’s farewell kisses was enough to stir his blood and put a spring in his step, and the fact that she’d left a whispered promise to meet him again tonight made him wish as he never had before for the day to end.
The guard at the final checkpoint was the latest to offer comment: “Mitchell Laurio, what is that on your face, man?
“Sa-tis-fac-tion!”
He’d heard the story and didn’t believe it any more than had the man who’d told it to him. Lard-ass Laurio actually scoring on a dame with a pulse? His trysts were few and far between—the man was such a piece of work the pros charged double for a quickie. He wanted more, they got a headache. And by all accounts, the broad had halfway decent looks, which made the whole thing even more incredible. Had to be drugs, was the general consensus, or somebody with a major twist to her psyche.
The only thing that couldn’t be denied was that it had actually happened. The bartender was a witness, his oath to God.
Now of course Laurio had to provide his own chapter and verse of the evening. It wasn’t a bad story, even the way he told it, which was why neither man noticed a blip on the scanner that indicated the presence of metal. It wasn’t a significant glitch; it barely lasted a fraction of a second before the system registered clear. If the guard had been paying attention, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. But he wasn’t, and from that moment Mitchell Laurio’s fate was sealed.
“You’re clear,” the guard said, and cycled the umbilical out to the cell in the center of the room.
Eric Lehnsherr was asleep until Laurio stepped over the threshold. Then, just like that, he came completely awake with a rush he hadn’t felt since his capture.
“Sweet dreams, Lehnsherr?” asked Laurio, his mockery plain. Just because he’d had the best night of his life didn’t mean he was going to pass on the morning beating. The one gave him just as much pleasure as the other.
Laurio set the tray on the table. Lehnsherr hadn’t moved, beyond sitting up on the bed. There was something different about his expression, though, like there was a big joke being played here that only he was privy to. But at the same time, there was a predatory cast to his eyes that made Laurio suddenly wish the internal monitors were active and that he were somewhere else.
As was usual for him when he felt ill at ease or threatened, Laurio got aggressive. This time, he decided, he wasn’t going to stop until the old man begged him.
“There’s something different about you, Mr. Laurio,” Lehnsherr said with a slight question to his voice, as if he couldn’t quite credit what he saw.
There was something different about the old man, too. They’d done variations on this dance before; Lehnsherr had to know what was coming. Before, he’d faced it with a stoic resignation. Today, thou
gh, he was alert, watchful—almost amused. Where his strength had presented itself in his passive endurance of Laurio’s beatings, now it was active, a coiled spring tensing inside his body. It occurred to Laurio that maybe this time the old man intended to fight back. That would give Laurio sanction to do pretty near anything in retaliation, which would make his day.
He said as much in reply: “Yeah, I think I’m havin’ a pretty damn good day.”
Lehnsherr came to his feet with a grace and ease he hadn’t shown in months, that belied the age apparent on his face.
“No,” he said, “no, it’s not that.”
“Sit down,” Laurio told him. He didn’t like the way this was going, that he and his prisoner seemed to be reading from two different scripts. He made a show of putting his hand on his billy club. Lehnsherr knew firsthand how quick he was with it and how formidable. One snap of the wrist to the gut would have a prisoner doubled over, gasping desperately for breath; after that, it would be Laurio’s choice, his pleasure, where to administer the follow-up hits for maximum impact. Every word, every gesture from Lehnsherr would only make matters worse, yet the old man clearly didn’t care. He wasn’t afraid of Laurio. He’d never been afraid of Laurio.
They’d put the tiger in a cage, but they hadn’t broken him. They hadn’t even come close.
“No,” Lehnsherr said.
Laurio started to move. . . .
“Sit your ass down, or I’ll—”
And then he couldn’t.
“Well, well, well,” Lehnsherr said in a tone of detached bemusement, a professor considering a problem.
He flicked his fingers, and the billy club dropped from a numb and nerveless hand.
“What could it be?”
Laurio wanted to call for help, but his jaw wouldn’t work, either. His whole body had become frozen. And with the monitors disengaged, nobody outside had the slightest clue anything was wrong. The guard in the monitor room at the far end of the umbilical wouldn’t have a clue; from his perspective, he’d just see the two of them standing across the cell from each other, and he’d be looking at Laurio from the back.
Laurio wanted to beg for mercy. Lehnsherr knew that.
Instead he made another slight upward motion with his fingers, and Laurio rose six inches off the floor.
“Ah.” Lehnsherr had found what he was looking for. “There it is.”
Like a conductor summoning his orchestra to play, Lehnsherr made a sharp, slashing gesture toward his body, and Laurio arched as much as was possible against his invisible constraints as a fine scarlet mist exploded from every pore of his body.
“Too much iron in your blood.”
For Mitchell Laurio, it was as if barbed hooks had been sunk into every square inch of his skin to flay him naked, then salt scattered on the raw and exposed nerves of his body to sear him as fiercely as acid. He wanted to die right then and there, anything to stop the pain, but Lehnsherr wasn’t in a forgiving mood.
The mist fell away to form a glittering film on the floor of the cell, leaving a cloud of metallic silver behind in the air.
Lehnsherr made a fist and the particles of iron coalesced into three perfect spheres, each the size of a marble. The Nazis had taught him to make ball bearings; it seemed only fitting to adopt them as the talisman for his power.
Their size was deceptive as the last few droplets of Laurio’s blood were squeezed out of them by pressure. Lehnsherr used his power to bond the atoms together far more tightly than nature would have, so that they massed as much as depleted uranium. Unaided, he doubted a champion weight lifter could pick up even one.
The balls began to move, forming small orbits over his upheld palm.
“A word of advice, Mr. Laurio,” Lehnsherr said with a smile, as though their relationship had been a genuine pleasure, “a little something . . . else to remember me by. Never trust a beautiful woman. Especially one who’s interested in you.”
He cut the ties of power that held Laurio aloft and the big man collapsed, a limp and bloody heap in the corner.
Lehnsherr flung the balls at the plaster wall of his cell and watched it shatter under the impact.
He heard alarms, he knew they’d be trying to track him with the defensive remote-controlled miniguns mounted in the cavern walls, knew they’d be flooding the space with nerve gas. But it was a huge space, and the guards had grown lax over time. They assumed he was no longer a threat. That gave him more than enough time.
The umbilical retracted immediately. He paid it no notice.
He concentrated on one of his spheres, and it obediently flattened itself into a paper-thin silver disk that was easily wide enough for a man to stand on, which he did. Under his direction, it rushed him across the chasm to the main exit. He could see the guard in the monitor room calling for help. One sphere for him, the other for the door itself.
They struck with the force of armor-piercing cannon shells. He stepped over the guard’s ruined body into the monitor room and found the hardwire link that led from his computer into the prison’s central network. He bared the cable and set his spheres to spinning until they produced an electrical field worthy of a mainline generator, and then, backing it with all the passion and rage and hatred he’d kept ruthlessly in check all these wretched months, he pushed that power into the cable. Sparks galore exploded all around him, and every monitor screen in the room dissolved into static, then went dark. The lights went out as well, although they were replaced at once by the emergency spot lamps.
This place was controlled by computers, and with this surge of energy Lehnsherr had just killed them all. The electronic doors wouldn’t work; neither would the electronic sensors, or the defenses. They wouldn’t know where he was until he revealed himself, and then they’d have precious few resources to try to stop him.
They liked to mock him with the name he’d chosen for himself. Now he would remind them why Magneto was a force to be reckoned with and an adversary to be respected, and especially feared.
Chapter
Ten
Jean Grey wasn’t a happy woman.
“Professor Xavier, come in, please?” she spoke aloud, repeating the same call, far more loudly, with her thoughts. “Scott, are you there, are you receiving, over?”
Static.
She tapped a new number on the speed dial, switching functions on her headset from radio to cellular phone, and tried all the lines at the mansion.
Static.
She tried Scott’s cell and the phone in Xavier’s Rolls-Royce.
Static.
For the hell of it, she ran a full-spectrum diagnostic on the Blackbird’s communications array, wondering if a day’s immersion in the water of Boston Harbor had somehow degraded the antennae. The computer told her everything was fine, just as it had the previous two times she’d executed the program.
She changed channels and listened a minute to WBUR, changed them again and eavesdropped on local and federal law enforcement frequencies.
End result, they were sending and receiving perfectly. The problems lay at the other end. Nobody was picking up, not even voice mail.
She covered her face with her hands, then swept them up and over her head, smoothing her thick, occasionally unruly hair into momentary submission before clasping her fingers together behind her neck and bending her head forward to rest her chin on her collarbone. She flexed her shoulders outward and stretched as long as she could up the full length of her spine to ease the aches that tension and worry had planted there.
She caught a wisp of a thought, a sense of movement, that told her Storm had stepped up to the flight deck, and then felt her friend’s hand cover hers from behind. Without opening her eyes, Jean clasped Storm’s hand in both of hers and held it, smiling as a cool breeze insinuated itself through the collar of her uniform and washed all over her.
“Ohhhh.” She groaned in delight. “If you could package that in a bottle!”
“It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun.”
“How long has it been?” she asked.
“Too long. No land lines, no cell, no radio, no indication from the news of any disaster in the area.”
“Send an e-mail?”
“Too risky. Anyone capable of knocking the mansion so completely off-line could back-trace a computer link. I’m pushing our luck with the com devices.”
“No telepathy, either? From the professor?”
“Nope.”
“So?”
“I was going to wait till dark before heading home. I’m starting to reconsider.”
“This may be the ultimate in stealth aircraft, Jean, but we can still be seen.”
“That, Ororo, is where I figure you come in.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks. Whatever it is, make it quick, okay?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“By the way, how’s our passenger?”
Nightcrawler was praying.
He’d tucked himself into one of the highback chairs in the passenger compartment, legs folded into lotus position, hands clasped in his lap, eyes closed. Storm half expected to find him hanging from the ceiling. He stood six feet tall, but you never noticed because he spent most of the time in a crouch, rarely straightening to his full height. He seemed just as comfortable upside down as not, using his big toes or his tail, or both, to anchor himself in place.
He had a good face, especially now that Storm could see it relaxed, in repose. Much younger than she’d first suspected. Now that she could get a closer look at him, she saw that his indigo skin was covered with a series of tattoos.
“It’s an angelic alphabet,” he told her, and she raised her blue eyes to meet his yellow ones, “passed on to mankind by the Archangel Gabriel.”
“They’re beautiful,” she told him truthfully, even though the black etchings on blue-black skin were almost invisible, like the man himself when he stepped into shadows.
“How many are there?”
“One for every sin. So”—a quirk of his full lips that might have been a smile—“quite a few.”
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