X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  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, though, 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 comp
uter 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.”

  Storm was just as concerned.

  “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.”

  “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.