X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “That, I don’t believe.”

  He looked at her with a disconcertingly level gaze. “You know, outside of the circus, most people are afraid of me.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  He swallowed and looked away, and she could tell by the minute shift in the heat gradient of his cheeks that he was blushing. He took refuge from the moment in an examination of the cabin, his eyes taking in the sleek configuration of the interior hull and furniture while he ran his hands over the material of the chair itself.

  “You and Miss Grey—Doktor Grey—you’re both . . . schoolteachers?”

  “Is that so hard to believe?”

  He actually chuckled.

  “Yes,” she told him, “we are. At a school for people . . . like us. Where we can be safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “Everyone else.”

  “You know, outside the circus, most people I met were afraid of me. But I never hated them. I actually felt sorry for them, do you know why?”

  Storm shook her head.

  “Because most people never know anything beyond what they can see with their own two eyes.”

  “I gave up on pity a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  He reached up and placed his fingers against her cheek with a gentle caress that sent a burst of heat rippling beneath her skin, together with the surprised thought: He’s flirting with me. She didn’t move away, because along with that realization came the discovery that she liked it. She liked him. There was a serenity to his soul that was totally at odds with his outward features, as though a demon incarnate might have in him the makings of a saint.

  “Someone as beautiful as you shouldn’t be so . . . angry,” he said, simply as an article of faith.

  “Sometimes anger can help you survive.”

  “So can faith.”

  “What did you do in the circus?” she asked, remembering the posters from the church. Before leaving, he’d carefully taken them down and packed them away in his single case.

  “I was—” he began, and then both of them reacted to a shout from up front.

  “Storm!” Jean called. “I think I’ve found an active com unit!”

  Logan would have played things differently, but this was Bobby’s house, Bobby’s family; he let the kid take point.

  The kid then proceeded to tell his parents what he was.

  Now they were all gathered in the living room, and the general atmosphere would have put a session of the Spanish Inquisition to shame. The layout of the room put a couch on either side of a coffee table. Mom, Dad, and Ronny Drake sat on one, Bobby and Rogue on the other. John Allardyce hung out behind Rogue, his butt perched on the edge of an antique side table in conscious oblivion to the sharp glances that occasionally came his way from Mom. He had his lighter out and was, as usual, playing with the lid, as if the sound of the ticking clock weren’t intrusion enough.

  Logan stood in the doorway to the kitchen, nursing a new beer. His casual attitude was a deception. He was covering the room, ready to act if there was trouble of any kind. He’d expected Dad to be the flashpoint, but the man had proved to have a lot more in common with his eldest son than first impressions had suggested.

  “So, uh, Bobby,” Madeline said, utterly lost, “when did you first know . . . that you were a . . . um . . .”

  “A mutant?” John finished for her, flicking his lighter open, then closed, open, then closed, open—

  “Could you please stop that?” said Madeline with some asperity. This was her house, and she’d had enough of his insolent behavior.

  “You have to understand,” William said slowly, “we thought Bobby was going to a school for the gifted.”

  “He is gifted,” Rogue interjected, prompting a small smile of gratitude from the boy sitting beside her, who otherwise looked like someone en route to the guillotine.

  “We know that,” William conceded. “We just didn’t realize that he was—” Then, without warning, a flare of anger toward his son that was compounded in equal measures of confusion and a very real pain that bordered on grief. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us? What were you thinking, Bobby? We’re your parents, for God’s sake! How could you keep this to yourself, how could you not trust us—how could you lie?”

  “Dad.” Bobby sounded helpless, strangling on his own guilt and shame. “You don’t understand!”

  “Obviously.”

  “Dad!”

  “You lied, Bobby. Xavier lied. To my face. He kept your secret. What am I supposed to believe about him now, or this precious school of his? Or you? How many other secrets are there?” He turned to Logan. “Just what is it you teach my son, ‘Professor’?”

  “Art,” he said sarcastically. “And it’s just Logan.”

  “You show up without a word of warning or explanation. Apparently without even clothes of your own to wear. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We still love you, Bobby,” Madeline said, starting to reach out to him but holding back right at the last, the same way people did around Rogue. She looked at her hand, at her son, at her hand again, as though it had suddenly become some alien part of her. The thought behind the hesitation was plain to the room. Am I suddenly afraid of my own baby? She tried to find some explanation, some rationale, in words: “It’s just that the mutant problem is very . . .”

  “What mutant problem?” Logan asked. She didn’t pay attention, she hadn’t heard him.

  “. . . complicated.”

  Rogue tried to lighten the mood.

  “You should see what Bobby can do.”

  Everyone looked. He stretched out his hand to his mother’s teacup, ignoring how quickly she snatched her own hand clear, and touched it with a fingertip. Instantly a layer of ice crystals formed around the rim and down the sides.

  He turned the cup over and the tea within, frozen completely solid, dropped onto the saucer with a quiet clink. The marmalade tabby wound its way around Rogue and him and used his thigh as a springboard to the table, where she proceeded to lick the tea.

  “I can do a lot more,” he said.

  There was a light in William’s eyes, a dad’s classic and instinctive My boy did that! What hurt him about all this was being cut out of the loop.

  Mom wasn’t anywhere near as amused, and she wasn’t proud in the slightest. As for Ronny, he got up from the couch and bulled his way out of the room, deliberately giving John a shoulder check as he passed.

  He made a lot of noise pounding up the stairs, and he shut his door with a slam that resounded through the house.

  Ronny Drake had a teenager’s obsession with privacy and personal space. He’d marked his territory accordingly, with a huge sign on the door that said RONNY’S ROOM. STAY THE F**K OUT! Mom had wanted to tear it down, but Bobby had defused the situation by hijacking a pair of anime panda stickers—so cute they made Powerpuff Girls look hardcore—and using them to cover the middle two letters. Ronny hated him for doing that, Bobby got to play the damn hero as always, but at least he got to keep his sign.

  All he could see, though, in the center of his room was a torn and bloody T-shirt. Not his. Not Bobby’s, ’cause he had his own room. That meant a stranger had been in here.

  The TV monitor caught his attention, turned to Fox News Channel—more proof that his privacy had been violated. This was a channel he had never watched, until now. It wasn’t the reporter, doing his stand-up from the White House lawn, that caught his attention, but what the man was saying.

  “. . . in the wake of the assassination attempt on President McKenna, there are unconfirmed reports of a raid on what is believed to be an underground terrorist mutant organization based in Westchester County, New York . . .

  “Authorities refuse to comment, but it’s believed that a national manhunt for several fugitives from the facility is now under way . . .”

  Watching, listening, looking from the screen to the sodden shirt on the floor, Ronny’s expressi
on changed. Bobby was his big brother, but he didn’t know anything about the people who were with him, except that they creeped Ronny out, big-time.

  He picked up the phone, hoping he was doing the right thing, terrified of what might happen if those other mutants found out. Half expecting his brain to be incinerated at any moment, he pressed 911.

  Downstairs, Madeline Drake put her head in her hands.

  “Oh, God, this is all my fault.”

  Before Bobby could even try to make things better, John Allardyce jumped in to make them worse.

  “Actually,” he said, “they’ve discovered that males are the ones who carry mutant genes and pass them on to the next generation, so I guess that makes it”—he jutted his thumb toward Bobby’s dad—“his fault.”

  William Drake ignored the comment, although his son looked ready to make the other boy eat the words.

  Madeline tried again to be the gracious hostess: “And you,” she said to Rogue, “you’re all gifted?”

  Rogue shot daggers at John, who returned them as a grin. “Some of us more than others,” she replied tightly. “Others who shouldn’t ever be allowed out in public.”

  “What’s that?” William said, reacting to a beep.

  Logan had the little com unit in his hand. “That’s mine,” he said. “ ‘Scuse me.” And he slipped through the kitchen to the backyard porch, with Madeline’s next line to her son to speed him on his way.

  “Bobby,” she said, “dearest, have you tried . . . not being a mutant?”

  Bobby sighed. John laughed out loud.

  “Charley,” Logan said, and his face lit up at the voice that replied.

  “Logan,” cried Jean, “thank God it’s you! We couldn’t reach anyone at the mansion.”

  “No one’s left,” he told her bluntly. “Soldiers came.”

  Aboard the Blackbird, Jean sank into her chair. They’d speculated about the possibility of some kind of hostile action, they’d made what they hoped were adequate preparations, but none of them really took it seriously. In a way, they believed too much in their own press: Xavier’s was a school. How could anyone perceive that as a threat?

  But then again, she considered, Islamic madrasas were schools as well, and many in the intelligence community believed them to be the spawning ground for terrorists.

  “What about the children?” she asked.

  “Some escaped,” he reported, “but I’m not sure about the rest.”

  Jean created sparks as she shifted position, and she shot a warning glare at Storm, whose anger was supercharging the air inside the plane with electricity. Not a good thing, generating a bolt of lightning inside a plane loaded with jet fuel and other combustibles.

  “We haven’t been able to reach the professor or Scott, either,” she said. The conclusion was obvious to both of them: In all likelihood, they were lost, too.

  Storm spoke into her own headset: “Logan, where are you?”

  “Quincy,” he said. “Outside Beantown, with Bobby Drake’s family.”

  “Do they—” Jean started to ask, provoking a snort of amusement from the other end.

  “Oh, yeah!”

  “All right,” she said, leaning across to the center console to initiate the engine start-up sequence, “we’re on our way.”

  “Storm?”

  “Yes, Logan?”

  “Make it fast.”

  The two women looked at each other, both recognizing the subtle change in Logan’s voice.

  “Five minutes,” Jean told him as she locked her harness closed and mentally told Nightcrawler to grab his chair and do the same.

  “Make it fast,” he repeated, and signed off active audio, leaving only the carrier signal for them to home in on.

  The picture of nonchalance, he patted his pockets for a smoke, sighed loudly when he didn’t find one, and reentered the house in two quick steps. Without turning his body, he snapped the lock closed on the door and took the next two steps into the living room.

  “We have to go,” he said without preamble. “Now.” The kids took their cue from him and leaped to their feet.

  “What?” William asked.

  “Why?” Rogue echoed.

  “Now,” he said simply, as sound and scent told him they’d run out of time. One assault team at the back, another out front, boxing the house. Bobby’s parents jumped, William grabbing his wife into his arms, as Logan extended his right-hand claws.

  “Logan,” Rogue demanded, “what’s going on?”

  John mouthed an answer: “What d’ you think?”

  “Follow my lead,” Logan told them.

  There were two cops waiting on the front porch, flanking the door with guns drawn. They locked on Logan as the primary threat. A police cruiser was parked on the lawn, another partially blocking the street, its patrol officers taking aim from behind the cover of their car. Sirens closing in from the near distance told them all that more were on the way.

  Bobby’s face tightened with anger. He knew what had brought them here.

  “Ronny!” he fumed under his breath.

  Directly upstairs, Ronny watched the officers take position, anxiety quickly giving way to excitement. This was cool, better than TV.

  “You,” barked the cop to Logan’s right, “get down on the ground.”

  “What’s going on here?” Logan inquired calmly.

  The kids were scared, and rightly so. This was the second time in a day they’d been threatened by guns, only these didn’t fire stun darts. This was the real deal, 9mm, Glocks with fifteen-round magazines, and one of the cops in the street had unlimbered his shotgun. Logan heard the frantic click, click, click of John’s lighter. The cops heard it, too. They didn’t know what to make of it, and that made them even more jumpy.

  “Put the knives down slowly,” the same cop said. “Slowly. Then down on your knees, cross your ankles, and raise your hands in the air. You kids do the same. Right now!”

  “Hey, bub, this is just a misunderstanding,” Logan replied.

  Inside, Bobby’s parents were only just starting to comprehend what was happening on the porch when the glass of the kitchen door shattered under the impact of a nightstick. They barely had time to turn their heads before a trio of uniformed officers rushed into the room, guns leveled, all of them yelling at the top of their lungs: “Police!” “Nobody move!” “On the floor, on your knees, keep your hands where I can see ’em!”

  Madeline screamed, William tried to protest, Bobby reacted like any son. He turned to help. The cop on the left shifted aim. His partner screamed louder: “Put down the goddamn blades!”

  “I can’t,” said Logan, and raised his hands to show they were a part of him.

  The gunshot took them all by surprise.

  The left-hand cop had fired, straight to the temple. The point-blank impact blew Logan off his feet, twisting him as he fell so that he landed on his face, partially sprawled down the steps.

  Rogue screamed and the three kids all dropped, Bobby trying to shield Rogue’s body with his own, yelling as loud as he could for the cops to stop firing. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”

  A crowd had begun to gather on the sidewalk across the street, drawn by the flashing dome lights and the commotion. The sharp report of the officer’s gun startled those close enough to see what had happened. They ducked as well. But mostly, folks kept milling about, confused, intrigued, like rubberneckers passing an accident, blissfully oblivious to the danger.

  The cops were just as startled, just as scared. The one who’d fired had made himself a statue, his weapon centered on Wolverine like he expected the man to leap up and charge him. Or maybe he was praying for him to do precisely that, to take back the action of the last half minute.

  “Easy,” his partner yelled, in a voice meant to be heard inside the house as well as out to the street. “Everybody take it easy. Get a grip!” That last was directed mainly at the shooter. His partner knew this was bad, every shooting is for the officer involved, but u
nder his breath he thanked God and all the saints they hadn’t popped the kids as well. After that kind of mess, there’d be hell to pay.

  “Okay, kids,” he told them, “same as before. Stay cool, we’ll get out of this just fine.”

  “We didn’t do anything!” Rogue shrieked at him.

  “On your knees, girl!”

  She yelled at him some more, partly to purge her own terror, but most of all to keep attention away from Logan. She knew the adamantium interlaced with his skeletal structure meant that his bones couldn’t be broken. All that bullet had likely done, aside from breaking the skin—which was decidedly messy—was give him a royal headache. More importantly, though, his healing factor would be speedily dealing with both the wound and the headache. She didn’t know what he could do once he recovered, but it would be one more asset than the kids had right now.

  Bobby gave her a hand as they both did as they were told. John had other ideas. He stood up.

  “Don’t be stupid, kid,” the left-hand cop said. “This is no time to flash attitude. We don’t want to hurt you!”

  John’s attitude was plain: Like I care, he seemed to be saying. Like, you could?

  “Hey,” he said, “you know all those dangerous mutants you hear about on the news?” He paused a moment to let the implications sink in.

  “I’m the worst one.”

  He popped the lid on his Zippo, but this time, he ignited a flame.

  From the wick grew three distinct streamers of flame, which whirled sinuously around him like the fearsome salamanders of medieval tales. One shot right, the other left, the third burned its way through the door to scorch across the main floor of the house.

  The cops on the porch dove desperately for cover as flame roared past, close enough to leave their uniform shirts smoldering. Those inside weren’t quite so quick, or so lucky. One was struck head-on, with force enough to hurl him into his companions, who had to scramble to save him as his clothes caught fire.

  John turned his focus to the cars. It all happened so fast, the attack was so savage and shocking, that the cops on the street didn’t know how to react. Those news reports notwithstanding, none of them really believed in mutants; they couldn’t believe a kid was doing this.