She willed her feet to fall more softly as she passed the floor on which the mutant had concealed itself, but she didn’t dare slow down. She tried to hold her breath, but her lungs wheezed like bellows, taking in short, panicky gasps of air.
To her relief, the mutant squatter didn’t stir. She continued her flight upward.
Her mind screamed a warning to her as the hunters from the street arrived in the lobby below. She had prayed that, unlikely as it had seemed, they wouldn’t have seen which building she had ducked into. Or that they would have considered it not worth the effort to pursue her. They could have forgotten her altogether, fighting over the dropped cans, comrade turning against comrade as they so often did.
Those forlorn hopes were dashed now, leaving only one: the hope that, if she found cover in one of the apartments, then they might not find her. They might be too impatient for fresh blood to even waste time searching. They might—and God forgive her for thinking it, but-they might even find the squatter downstairs and be satisfied with taking a single life.
She left the stairwell on the fourth floor, resisting the urge to take the first door on the landing because it was too obvious. She took the second, which hung limply from its hinges, its wooden panels scarred by mutant claws.
The apartment had been trashed. The cupboards in the kitchen area hung open, and one had been wrenched from the wall. They were empty, of course. But furniture had also been overturned, and the walls spray-painted with misspelled slogans. The animals who had invaded this home had had more than food on their mind: they had delighted in destruction.
Personal papers had been shredded and scattered across the floor. Pearl only hoped that their owners had escaped, that their corpses weren’t lying here somewhere. To her relief, she couldn’t detect the familiar stink of decomposing flesh.
The bed in the smaller of the two bedrooms was still upright, its sheets in disarray and hanging down to the floor. She hid beneath it, taking little solace from the darkness. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own breathing and the rasping echoes in her burning chest. But she was aware of her pursuers drawing closer.
She wished she had never come here, to the city of the mutants. She wished she could have spared herself this hell. But she had been too weak. Too afraid to die, even though she had had no hope of survival.
She remembered that fateful day, when the mutants had come from the sky.
She had feared just such an attack for months, ever since the barrier had appeared around Manhattan Island and the mutants had come to live on her doorstep. Many of her neighbors—those with somewhere to go—had moved out, joining the busloads of refugees who had been forced to abandon New York City itself. Pearl would have left too, but property prices in her area had plummeted and she had felt trapped. Anyway, she had wanted to stay put for her husband’s sake. So that he would know where to find her. If he ever came back.
She hadn’t seen Clyde for over two months, even before that day. He had phoned her once, to confirm her suspicions that mutants had been responsible for his sudden disappearance. He hadn’t said much: just that he was working in a secret location on a cure for a mutant disease known as the Legacy Virus. He had told her that he would be home soon. He had been wrong. Slowly, Pearl had come to accept that he was almost certainly dead.
She had spent an eternity cooped up in her home, watching television coverage of the ongoing attempts to penetrate the barrier and praying that perhaps, somehow, they might find her husband behind it. She had had her hopes raised by reports of new technology, which had proved ineffective. The barrier allowed mutants to come and go as they pleased, but nobody and nothing else was allowed through.
Pearl had found hope again on the day that the world’s most respected super heroes, the Avengers, sent an all-mutant team through the barrier under the command of the Scarlet Witch. It had been a reminder of a fact that she had almost forgotten: that not all mutants were bad; that some were even prepared to fight for the veiy people who despised them.
The heroes had failed to return, and Pearl had soon stopped hoping.
But humanity is a resilient species, and New Yorkers more than most. It seemed incredible, but things had begun to return to normal, the barrier becoming almost a fact of life. Sure, the streets of Pearl Scott’s upstate community were a little emptier than before—but while nobody could forget what was happening eighty miles to their south, there were days when it all seemed a very long way away. In time, she had been able to put her fears, and her grief for her husband, aside. She had emerged into the early days of Summer and settled back into her old routines, although she had jumped whenever a car backfired and experienced a twinge of sadness each time she had had to purchase her lonely meals for one.
She had sensed the flying mutants before they had come into her sight. If only she had known then to trust her intuition, if she had turned and fled, then they might not have caught her. Instead she had tried to deny what, in her heart, she had known. She had told herself that she was being paranoid, that they couldn’t be coming for her. Hadn’t she suffered enough?
The mutants had descended upon the shopping center, and Pearl Scott had screamed and cried and tried to run like everybody else. To this day, she could not recall the monsters’ faces, just their feathers and their claws and the way they had circled and picked out their targets and dived, and the death rattles of her neighbors.
It had been like a game to them: picking off the few so they could savor the reactions of the many. Raking claws across their victims’ guts or lifting their bodies aloft to let them fall and be dashed against the flagstones.
They had targeted her, of course. At the time, it had seemed only natural-inevitable in a sickly sort of a way—like she was somehow destined to be plagued by their kind until she died. With the benefit of hindsight, she knew that one of their number must have had senses like her own. It must have known her for what she was, before she even knew it herself.
She remembered the sensation of the world dropping away beneath her feet as talons dug into her shoulders. She hadn’t been able to hear much over the rush of the air, the louder rushing of blood to her ears and the sound of her own frantic sobbing, but she had been dimly aware of the mutants discussing her in hard, cackling voices. They had said that she was like them, but her brain had railed against the truth of that statement and, for a long time thereafter, she had believed that she must have imagined the words in her terror.
They had played with her, tossing her between them for what seemed like an eternity. Her head and her stomach had performed dizzy somersaults, and she had closed her eyes and whimpered and awaited the mercy of death. It had come—or so she had thought then— with a slash to her side, delivered as if by steel, spreading hot and cold pain across her body and stealing the light from behind her eyelids.
She had woken, to her immense surprise, in a hospital bed: the only person, she was later told, to have been picked out that day and lived. She had known then, with a creeping dread, that the mutants had chosen her deliberately, and that they had spared her for a reason.
Three months later, she found out what that reason was.
She had found it harder to recover, this time. She had shut herself inside again, relying on the favors of sympathetic friends and on Internet shopping to keep herself fed, becoming a recluse. Her husband had left her provided for, and there had come a time when she had found it hard to imagine venturing beyond her front door again. More people had moved away, and Pearl had entertained thoughts of doing the same, but never for long. It wasn’t the money any more: it was the certain knowledge that she was marked. The doctors had assured her that her wounds had recovered nicely, but she had itched inside. She had felt the mutant poison coursing through her veins and known that, wherever she went, they would find her.
She had known that they would return for her one day.
She had become afraid of the sky, afraid to even look out of her windows because every distant spec
k, each bird that wheeled above the rooftops, was transformed by her mind into a screeching predator. So, she had stopped looking. She had closed her drapes and lived in half-light. But sometimes she had woken in the night, sweat beading her forehead, for no better reason than that she had felt one of them pass overhead.
These days, she wished she had appreciated the sky more when she had had it. She didn’t know how long she had lived beneath the ever-shifting white energies of the barrier—the absence of sunlight meant that time had little meaning in the city-but she had come to long for even a glimpse of the stars.
Now, lying on her back beneath somebody else’s bed as the hunters continued their inexorable approach, Pearl Scott wondered if she would ever again see anything beyond the wooden slats and the threadbare mattress a few inches above her.
She remembered the kindly old doctor with his haunted face, falling over his words as he had broken the news to her. The stomach cramps, the flu-like symptoms and the weakness inside her had finally prompted her to reach for the telephone, to break her self-imposed isolation. She had learned only what she had already suspected.
The doctor had been surprised at how calmly she had taken his diagnosis. He had advised her to seek counseling but she had refused, accepting the inevitable with numb resignation.
Pearl Scott had contracted the Legacy Virus. But she had known exactly what to do about it.
She had learned all she needed to know from the TV. The disease was spreading, slowly but surely—and it didn’t only affect mutants now, as it had originally, but humans too. It was fatal. And Pearl Scott knew that, despite the best efforts of the world’s foremost geneticists, her husband included, nobody really understood it, let alone could come close to curing it.
And yet a cure did exist, in the hands of one person.
One of the major TV networks had smuggled a camera through the barrier once, hidden in the clothing of a mutant volunteer. Pearl had been given a preview of the world that, somehow she had known even then, would eventually become her own. She had watched in awe and horror as the freaks in their ragged clothing had supplicated themselves to their ruler—and she had seen the gleam in the Black Queen’s green eyes as her demons had handed out the elixir that they needed to stave off their symptoms. Not enough to cure them, of course: just enough to prolong their miserable lives for a little longer. Selene kept her subjects on a short leash. In a few days’ time, they would need her again.
Still, mutants flocked to Manhattan Island from all over the world. Many refugees arrived from the island nation of Genosha, despite the best efforts of its ruler to keep them from leaving: Genosha was in the throes of the world’s worst Legacy epidemic, and Selene offered the only hope of survival to its population of genetically engineered mutates.
An hour after the doctor had left, Pearl had walked out of her beautiful home for the final time. She had carried a plastic bag full of canned goods, and just enough money to reach the George Washington Bridge, and she had walked to the train station with her shoulders straight, her head up and her eyes fixed directly ahead. She hadn’t looked at the sky.
It was easy to get onto Manhattan Island. Easy, that was, for the right sort of person. Far harder to get off it again.
Pearl Scott felt as if Fate had been leading her here for a long time, like she had never had a say in the matter. She was always going to end up dying in this dingy room.
They came for her now, and she didn’t know if they had found her with their own mutant senses or because her footsteps, her whimpers, perhaps her heartbeat, had been too loud. One of them tore away her shelter, his abnormal muscles rippling as he flung the bed aside with ease. Two more took Pearl by the arms and hauled her to her feet. She saw their feathers and their talons, heard their cruel, spiteful laughter, and wondered if they were the very creatures that had attacked her in the shopping center. Not that it mattered.
Her tears had dried. She was surprised to find that she wasn’t even frightened any more. She accepted her death, as she had accepted so much in her life, with quiet resignation. She let the mutants play with her, tossing her between them, digging claws and teeth into her skin, and she knew that this had been their plan all along. This was why they had taken the risk of flying through the barrier, of attacking her community in the first place. This was why they had infected her: to bring her here, to their world, so that they could enjoy this moment.
They didn’t even care that she had nothing to give them, because she had given them what they wanted already.
In the Black Queen’s city, the mutants didn’t only hunt for food and shelter.
They also hunted for sport.
An electric hush seemed to settle upon the world as the appointed time approached.
Selene sat upon her throne and smiled quietly to herself, her icy confidence fed by the charged atmosphere. Her Black King stood at her right hand, and attendant demons lined up behind the royal couple in their incongruous blue and red Hellfire Club uniforms. It had been a long time since they had worn formal dress, but the Black Queen had commanded it of them today. Many of the costumes ill-fitted the grotesque shapes of their wearers, and several were bloodied and torn and only hung together by threads. But on such a momentous occasion, decorum had to be observed.
She didn’t need a timepiece to tell her when the moment was near. She sensed the ripples in the magical field, the delicious buildup of energy and a thrill that was almost sexual. She rose from her golden seat, her black cloak tickling the floor. She took one step forward and waited, the smile still poised upon her red lips.
Framed by the grand archway was the wood-paneled door, small and unassuming: the one part of the room that had not been enlarged and improved upon in the past year.
A demon began to snicker, breaking off as it realized how obtrusive the harsh, whispering sound of its laughter was in the silence. Selene would have it flogged later. Or rather, she would have a demon flogged: she had no idea which one was which.
For now, she was counting down the final seconds in her mind. Three ... two ... one ...
The door was flung open.
A gust of stale wind blew through her long, silken hair, and a burst of black light turned the world momentarily inside-out. And suddenly, where there had been nobody before, there appeared eight figures in colorful costumes. They hurtled across the threshold of the throne room as if ready for combat, although the state of their clothing, the bruises upon their exposed skin and the tiredness that they couldn’t conceal in their postures betrayed the fact that they had fought long and hard already.
They took in their new surroundings and faltered.
Selene’s smile broadened. They had not expected to find themselves here. They had not expected to find their foe so prepared for them, backed up by the very demons that they had thought defeated. They had already been battle-weary; now they were confused and disoriented as well. The sight of Blackheart must have been especially dispiriting for them.
One of the new arrivals-a short, feral creature clad in yellow and blue—made to press the attack anyway. The man whom Selene knew to be the leader of the group held him back with a gesture, his expression advising caution even as his eyes flashed fire behind the red crystal lens of his golden visor.
They knew that something had gone wrong, but they didn’t know what yet.
Selene knew them, of course. They were old acquaintances. Cyclops, Wolverine, Phoenix, Storm, Nightcrawler, Iceman and Rogue: collectively, one permutation of the outlaw team known as the X-Men. They were mutants. Unlike her, they dreamt of a world in which humans and mutants could live together in peace, and they were prepared to fight unselfishly for that dream. To this end, they had clashed with Selene-and set back her plans-on more than one occasion.
But standing with the self-professed heroes was a more interesting individual by far: a member of the Hellfire Club himself, no less. Perhaps its most infamous member.
She almost didn’t recognize the middle-aged man at fir
st. She was used to seeing him in the deceptive guise of a Victorian gentleman: the traditional “uniform” of the club’s Inner Circle, a symbol of allegiance to times past. Indeed, he still wore his black hair in an old-fashioned style, pulled back into a ponytail and secured by an elaborate red bow, his sideburns allowed to grow thick. Right now, however, he was dressed for combat: his dark green, padded, one-piece boiler suit remained in pristine condition despite all he must have been through to get here.
He had already recovered from his surprise. He was alert, prepared for whatever might come next. His shrewd eyes probed hers, and Selene could almost see his calculating mind working on a way to turn this situation to his advantage. She half expected him to offer her an alliance. She would have relished the opportunity to laugh in his face.
The gentleman’s name was Sebastian Shaw—and once, long ago, he had supported Selene’s bid for Hellfire Club membership. He had been her first Black King.
But like the others, he had been gone for a long time—and a lot of things had changed.
“'Good afternoon,” said the Black Queen, unable to prevent her smile from widening. “As you can see, I have been expecting you.”
One year earlier:
SELENE’S DREAMS of power were still just that: dreams. But she never doubted that, one day, those dreams would be realized. She __ had possessed great power in the past-many centuries ago-and she would do so again. Its acquisition was a game to her, and she played it well, prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for the sake of ultimate gain.
The game had become more difficult as humanity, despite its shortcomings, had advanced and evolved. It often seemed to her that there were too many players now, too many forces lined up to oppose her, to seek power for themselves. Even so, she had maneuvered herself into a good, strong position. She had control over the New York branch of the Hellfire Club, which meant that she also controlled its affluent members.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 26