Christopher Golden

by Codename Wolverine X-men

  “Yeah,” Erika nodded. “She said, ‘Tell Logan Victor’s in trouble.’ “

  He paused imperceptibly, glass to lips, then slowly lowered the condensation-slicked pint to click down on the mahogany bar.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled, and immediately stood.

  Wolverine slipped two twenties out of his wallet and threw them on the bar. He grabbed his battered leather jacket by the collar in one hand, and his beer in the other, and started toward the redhead, on guard. When he was going into battle, he preferred his working clothes, the blue and gold uniform he’d had since his days with Canadian intelligence—Department H. But the clothes didn’t make the man. In faded Levi’s and rattlesnake-skin cowboy boots, Wolverine was no less dangerous, no less talented in his field of expertise.

  He had no reason to think there was going to be a throw-down, but when anybody mentioned Victor—whom he knew better as Sabretooth—he figured he ought to be prepared for anything. And he didn’t know this girl from Eve.

  Halfway across the bar, he realized he was wrong. He did know her. The scent had been blocked by hops and barley and broiling meat, but he had it now. Which didn’t mean he was about to drop his guard.

  “Logan,” she said, by way of greeting, as he slid into the chair opposite hers. “Nice boots, by the way.”

  Wolverine took a long sip from his pint.

  “What do you want, Mystique?” he asked.

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  “I got it,” he said softly. “So Creed’s in trouble. What’s that to do with me?”

  “It’s got a lot to do with you, since I believe you’re on the hit list,” she sneered. “Maybe you don’t want to hear about it. I’ll find Victor myself.”

  Mystique, in the guise of the gorgeous redhead, began to rise on shapely legs. She had no trouble at all with the spiked heels, though they were hardly her style. Wolverine calmly drank, and Mystique turned to leave.

  “Sorry about your boy,” he said grimly.

  She stopped, turned slightly, then all the way, and sat back down with him. Ironically, the fiercely antimutant lobbyist Graydon Creed was the offspring of two mutants: Mystique and Sabretooth. There was no love lost, though, either between the two parents, or between them and their son. For a moment, Mystique chewed her lip and didn’t look at him. When finally she did look up, she narrowed her eyes.

  “No, you’re not,” she said with nonchalance—perhaps feigned, Wolverine thought. “If you are sorry, it’s only because of the fallout from his murder. But you’re not any sorrier than any of the rest of us. Victor and I haven’t even discussed it, but I know he feels the same sense of … of relief that I do. It’s a horrible thing, to have wanted your child dead,” Mystique whispered.

  Wolverine only stared at her, surprised that she’d revealed so much of herself. Or apparently revealed, for Mystique had so many faces, so many disguises, it was impossible to know what was real with her. The two had known one another for a long time, sometimes as allies but more often as enemies. But for a man like Logan, such definitions were often situational.

  He glanced away from her, across the restaurant. Tourists laughed together at wooden tables. Two women who seemed very much a couple whispered together in a far corner of the dining area.

  ” ‘And death shall have no dominion,’ ” Wolverine whispered to himself.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Mystique asked. “Aren’t you even listening?”

  Wolverine met her questioning gaze with a wan smile.

  “Old friends are a royal pain in the behind, darlin’,” he growled, shook his head, and looked back toward the restaurant. “They never stay who they were when the friendship began, and a lotta times, you end up nostalgic for a person even though they’re still around.”

  “You’re talking about Victor?” Mystique asked, her surprise obvious. “He was always a savage. I’m surprised you can work up any nostalgia for him at all.”

  “You forget,” Wolverine replied without even glancing at her, “I was a savage once, too. We were friends once, though barely. More important, though, is that we were brothers in arms. I guess I was talkin’ about Sabretooth, but I was thinkin’ about another old friend. Used to sit right at that table over there and drink himself blind. One night he lined up so many shots that it killed him. He wasn’t even himself anymore at the end. The whiskey’d taken his nobility.

  “I was here the night Dylan died, and when it happened, it didn’t feel like much of a loss. I’d been grievin’ for him for years,” Wolverine said quietly.

  “You’re talking about the poet, Dylan Thomas,” Mystique said as the realization struck her. “But that was in the early fifties, you couldn’t have been more than …”

  “Nineteen fifty-three, actually,” Logan drawled. “I’m older than I look. So’s Creed, and all the rest of the old team. Those that are still alive, that is. What I’m trying to tell you, Mystique, is that Victor Creed’s been dead to me for decades. I don’t much care what happens to him now. Someone kills the murderin’ psycho, I’ll be sad all right, but only ‘cause it wasn’t me who did it.”

  Wolverine downed the remains of his drink. When he stood, the heels of his snakeskin boots slapped the wooden floor in punctuation. He slid into his jacket and zipped it partway.

  “Nice to see you, Raven,” he lied. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  “Suit yourself, Logan,” she sighed. “But you’ll be seeing Victor, and me, again real soon. These guys don’t kid around. They’ve got federal connections and federal funding, enough firepower to blast one arrogant mutant, one little Canadian runt, into cinder and ash. Me, I’d like to find them before they find me.”

  Wolverine studied her, then sat back down and put his boots up on the table.

  “You’ve got about three minutes. Tell me what happened,” Wolverine suggested, then listened carefully as Mystique complied.

  When she had finished, he merely watched her through slitted eyes for several moments. He’d have been a fool to take Raven Darkhblme at her word, and she knew it. Wolverine had been many things in his long life, but never a fool.

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” he began. “You just hung out while Creed was being hauled off, even though you were close enough to hear these morons talkin’ about you, and about me and the rest o’ Team X?”

  “If I’d attacked them, you wouldn’t ever have known anyone was after you, and then we’d both be where Sabretooth is. Wherever he is—dead is only one possibility, and I can think of some worse ones,” she said ominously.

  “So you warned me, but why not bring your team in on it?” he asked. “My guess is X-Factor’s got a lot more interest in savin’ Creed’s hide than I’ll ever have.”

  “You know why,” Mystique insisted. “Why are you wasting my time? X-Factor would have to report its actions, meaning whoever snagged Victor would almost certainly be made aware of my plans and location. I might as well send up a flare announcing my position.”

  Wolverine didn’t like any of it. Mystique would do nearly anything for her own benefit, and rarely did anything that was not. But try as he might, Logan could not figure out what she might have to gain by lying about Creed’s abduction. If she wanted to be free of X-Factor, he had no doubt she could find better ways. And despite their enmity, he knew of no special grudge she might hold for him.

  If it wasn’t a setup, he reasoned, it had to be true.

  “We need to get to Maverick,” he said, and saw the surprise in Mystique’s eyes when she realized he had believed her.

  “What about Silver Fox?” she asked.

  Wolverine sucked in a shallow breath, and his lip curled back, a tiny rage growing in his gut, blossoming into something larger. He might have hurt Mystique then, if not for the sincere curiosity he saw in her eyes. She truly didn’t know.

  “How could you not know?” he asked. “How could you be with X-Factor, and be around the X-Men so much, and not know?”

 
; “What?” Mystique asked. “I’m lost here, Logan. Help me out.”

  “Fox was murdered years ago,” he said, his voice a low rasp. “Creed killed her with his bare hands.”

  Mystique put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes a moment. For a heartbeat, Wolverine thought there might be some humanity in the shapeshifter after all.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. If I had, I never would have come to you.”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said, as if the pain had receded with the passing of the years. Which was untrue. The void her death had left within him had not even begun to heal, despite the loves that came after.

  “For now, we gotta find out who snatched up Creed, and what it has to do with the rest of us. First, though, we really gotta let Maverick know somebody may be gunnin’ for him,” Wolverine explained. “And I think I know just where to find him.”

  It had been nearly a decade since Wolverine had been inside Maverick’s safehouse in Manhattan. But his memory of the place was still sharp. It was perfectly camouflaged in a stately brownstone apartment building on the Upper West Side, a haven for upwardly mobile twenty- and thirtysomethings.

  Last he knew, Maverick had pretty much gone to ground and dropped out of the life. There were any number of such properties around the world where David North might be staying. But if he was in New York, the safehouse on Seventy-third Street was a sure bet.

  Wolverine guided his rebuilt classic Norton motorcycle north on Amsterdam Avenue, navigating through early evening traffic. Mystique, still wearing the shape of the gorgeous, long-legged redhead, sat behind him on the Norton, her slender hands wrapped around his abdomen, laquered nails digging into his leather jacket.

  Raven Darkholme was a dangerous woman for many reasons, but her ability to become anyone was a devastatingly powerful tool. It made her the perfect covert operative. If not for his own enhanced senses, Wolverine would never be able to pick Mystique out of a crowd. For the moment, though, keeping an eye on her was not going to be a problem.

  He left the Norton on Amsterdam and walked down Seventy-third toward Columbus Avenue. Halfway down the block, a small iron gate about three and a half feet high stood open in front of the apartment building. Maverick owned the building, which made it simple for him to install everything he needed to turn the top floor into a safehouse.

  “North has always seemed like such a cipher to me,” Mystique said, without a trace of irony in her voice. “I never could get much of a handle on him. Quite a warrior, but very insulated from the rest of your team—at least from an outsider’s point of view.”

  “He always kept to himself,” Wolverine agreed. “Maverick’s a good man, but very private. Still, I don’t know too many people I’d rather have at my back in a firefight. Even now, with his health failin’ him.”

  Despite the questioning look Mystique shot him, Wolverine did not elaborate. None of her business that he’s got the Legacy Virus, he figured. North had come down with the fatal disease that primarily targeted mutants. Finding a cure had been slow work, especially since the mainstream medical community wasn’t terribly motivated to cure such an illness.

  The foyer of the apartment building was dark beyond the locked glass and steel door. There were buttons with which they might buzz any one of the brownstone’s residents. Wolverine pressed the top one, the one that would tell Maverick they had arrived.

  No response.

  The darkness bothered him. He narrowed his eyes and peered through the door window into the shadowy interior. Like his other senses, his vision was extraordinary. Yet he saw nothing amiss other than the lack of lighting. He buzzed for Maverick again, and again there was no response. Once more, he studied the foyer, the stairwell, and the apartment doors in the first floor corridor, all visible through the glass.

  The door to apartment 1C was open six or seven inches. The tips of a woman’s fingers were barely visible past the doorframe. Whoever she was, lying there on the threshold of the apartment, she wasn’t just napping.

  “We’re too late,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Snikt!

  With a quick flex of muscles humans didn’t even have, Wolverine bared his claws—a trio of foot-long blades which erupted from the calloused flesh between the knuckles of his right hand. They were pure adamantium, the strongest metal alloy in the world, and totally unbreakable. He had a set housed between the ulna and radius in each arm, sharp enough to cut through anything. His entire skeleton was laced with adamantium as well, which, when combined with his healing factor, made him almost impossible to kill.

  The locking mechanism on the apartment door sliced like overripe fruit. There might have been easier ways to break in, but using the claws was instinctive for Wolverine. When they retracted back inside his arm, there were a few drops of blood from between each knuckle, and then the holes healed and disappeared.

  In practiced silence, Wolverine and Mystique rushed to the open apartment door. The woman lay inert just inside, but there were no obvious wounds and no blood.

  “Dead?” Mystique asked, and Wolverine realized she had reverted to her true face: the dark blue skin, yellow eyes, and auburn hair of Raven Darkholme.

  “No,” he replied after checking and finding a strong pulse on the woman. “Just tranked, looks like. More than likely, so are the rest o’ the people livin’ here. Except Maverick, o’ course.”

  They didn’t bother trying to keep quiet on the stairs to the fourth floor, where Maverick’s apartment and safehouse was. Whatever had gone down there had been done and the perpetrators had moved on. Sure enough, on the top floor, the vibranium-reinforced door to North’s supposedly secure quarters stood open; The door and the corridor walls were blackened with scars left behind by the firing of energy weapons.

  The inside of the safehouse was completely trashed. It looked as if a small fire had begun to burn in one corner, and been hastily doused by Maverick’s abductors before they left with him in their custody. All of it was in keeping with Mystique’s recounting of Sabretooth’s abduction. Seeing it now though stoked the flame of rage that always burned deep within Wolverine. Most of the time, he ignored it. This time, he let it come on, welcomed it.

  “We’ve got to find these guys, Mystique,” he growled. “And soon. Maverick put up a good fight, but he’s in no shape to be anybody’s captive. If he dies because o’ them, the feds are goin’ to need a battalion o’ reinforcements.”

  Their eyes met, and Wolverine could see clearly that Mystique was with him. Despite their differences, this mystery threatened both of them, as well as people they had both cared about once. But there was more to it where Maverick was concerned. And Mystique knew that now.

  “He’s got it, doesn’t he?” she asked softly.

  Wolverine nodded. “He came to me a couple o’ months ago, wanted me to punch his ticket for him. Since then, I’ve only seen him once, but he seemed better to me. Like he’d learned how to live with the Legacy Virus. Maybe it’ll kill him, but he’s not goin’ down without a fight. On the other hand, we don’t know who’s snatched him and Creed up. Whatever they’ve got in mind, I don’t know that Maverick’s in any condition to deal with it.”

  “He’s a warrior, Logan,” Mystique said. “He’ll hold on until we can get to him.”

  Mystique said a few other encouraging things, but Wolverine had stopped paying attention. He was listening, instead, for the sounds of danger. Something had distracted him, a sound, a shift in the air. Then it came again.

  “Company,” he said in a gruff whisper.

  He crouched a bit and took several silent steps toward the open door. There he waited, prepared to spring on any attacker. Another sound intruded: the near-silent whoosh of a stealth helicopter. A scuffle from above told him that their enemies—agents from some federal agency or another, but not necessarily on any government-sanctioned mission—were dropping from the chopper to the roof of the brownstone.

  “They’re risking a lot coming
at us so openly,” Mystique whispered.

  “It’s dark, and they’re very quiet,” Wolverine replied. “Just not quiet enough.”

  Then the first gunman appeared in the doorway and opened fire.

  * * *

  In front of a high arched window that overlooked the grounds of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, Sean Cassidy lit his pipe. He knew it’d probably kill him eventually, and he smoked rarely. But when he truly wanted to relax, he still returned to his pipe now and again. It was a bad habit, but Sean believed in that old saying about teaching old dogs new tricks. And he was getting to be an old dog, wasn’t he? Well, perhaps not all that old, he thought. But still, it amazed him the way life changed, and the world moved on. Sean was a man of action, not prone to frequent contemplation. But with Emma Frost, his fellow headmaster at Xavier’s School, having taken their young mutant students into town for the afternoon … well, it had been a long while since Sean had any real time to himself. And it was good to be back on the grounds of the school after the recent cross-country jaunt Sean, Emma, and the students had taken in a pair of recreational vehicles.

  He enjoyed the view of the pretty patch of Massachusetts ground outside his window. If he tried very hard, it was possible for him to pretend the landscape was an Irish one, that he was back in his homeland. Make-believe. He was still capable of make-believe, so perhaps he wasn’t that old after all.

  Maybe it just seemed like a long time ago, those days in Ireland. He’d lived in Cassidy Keep, his family’s Irish estate, with his cousin Tom until the love they both felt for the rebellious beauty Maeve Rourke had created a rift between them that had grown ever wider over the years. In the end, Sean had won Maeve’s heart; it had been the greatest gift he had ever received. Later, Sean had followed his life’s dream, become an agent of Interpol. It hadn’t been a simple task, but it was a fulfilling life.

  There was a brief, glorious moment where he had everything he had ever wanted out of life. Then it all ended in a single blast, an explosion that took the life of his Maeve, and took his heart and soul for far too long. He had been injured on an Interpol operation, was laid up in a hospital thousands of miles away when it happened, and it tore his heart out.