“Precisely what did you imagine was going to happen to you?” the vampire asked scornfully. “Did you think you’d wake from your trance a ravening beast, a stranger to yourself and those who love you? Did you fear that a chasm to Hell would open beneath your feet and swallow you? You would merely have emerged from the experience with one more spot on that oh-so-precious soul of yours, a stain nearly indistinguishable from all the others you’ve acquired merely by living and sinning as every mortal inevitably sins. A miniscule price to pay, given the potential benefit. Any genuine warrior would bear the scar gladly, and if you feel differently, especially considering what’s at stake, then you truly are a coward after all.”
“That’s enough from you,” said Kurt. “And if—”
“Hold on,” Piotr said. The others turned in his direction, which seemed to fluster him a little. “I certainly don’t know much about magic. But if Dracula really can help Amanda to locate Belasco, and teach her spells that will help us destroy him...”
“Petey!” Shadowcat exclaimed.
Colossus scowled. “Illyana learned a lot of her magic from Belasco himself. There couldn’t be a source more tainted than that. But afterwards, she used sorcery again and again without it turning her evil.’’
“But she always had to guard against the possibility,” said Kitty gently, “and there were times when she did come horribly close to losing her soul. You remember that as well as I do. It’s part of the reason you hate Belasco so much.”
“True,” the Russian said. “But in the end, Iliyana saved herself, and if she, a half-grown child, could manage that, then couldn’t Amanda cast Darkhold spells just once or twice, on this one mission, and still come out of it ail right?”
Dracula inclined his head. “My compliments, farmer. I never expected such intelligent thinking from you.” He smiled sardonically. “The need for vengeance clarifies the mind wonderfully, does it not?”
Ignoring the vampire, Kurt gazed steadily up into Piotr’s eyes. “Listen to me, mein freund. I dislike pulling rank on you, but I’m going to do so now. No member of Excalibur is going to endanger his or her immortal soul, if only because we don’t need to run that risk. We can defeat Belasco by other means.”
‘ ‘And what means would those be?’ ’ Dracula asked, sneering. “Praying to your Savior?”
“Perhaps,” Kurt replied. “That method among others.” “Despite the fact that, deep down, you question whether
He ever even existed,” mused Dracula as though astonished at the blue-furred mutant’s idiocy. “Even if He did, isn’t it plain from the chaos and misery you see all around you that He withdrew from the physical plane a long, long time ago? I would rather petition forces and intelligences that remain engaged with humanity, and judging from the path she has chosen to walk, Miss Sefton shares my preference.” He turned toward her. “Sorceress, you’re not this obstreperous lout’s chattel, whatever he believes, particularly in matters involving the Art, and thus his bluster is entirely beside the point. It is for you to decide whether, in these dire straits, to accept my gift or not.”
She imagined herself failing, letting Kurt down, Excalibur down, the world down, just when they needed her most, and for a moment, she hesitated. Then she lifted the amulet off and held it out to Dracula. “You mentioned my path,” she said. “Well, it’s never been the Left-Hand Path, or even the Winding Way of gray magic my mother follows. Like Kurt said, I’ll just have to muddle along without the extra power that this would bring.”
Kitty cried, “Way to go, Amanda!” Kurt smiled in satisfaction. Piotr’s somber expression was harder to interpret. Amanda didn’t think he was truly angry at her. Perhaps he was even a bit ashamed of himself for suggesting what he had. Yet it was obvious that a part of him was dissatisfied with this resolution, at seeing a chance to strike at Belasco slipping through his fingers.
Dracula took the onyx pendant and tucked it away inside his garments. “So be it,” he said. “Perhaps in time you will repent of your cowardice and selfishness. I hope that by then it will not already be too late.”
“This subject is closed,” Nightcrawler said. ‘‘You’re not to bring it up again, or hypnotize any of us, either. Instead, let’s talk about what we are going to do when we get on the ground. You must have some other thoughts on how to find Belasco.”
“In point of fact,” said Dracula, “I do. I know my rebellious progeny. I know their lairs, favorite hunting grounds, and habits. It should be relatively easy to locate one of them, whereupon we can either follow him to his new master’s hiding place or capture and interrogate him.”
“A reasonable plan,” said a new voice, male, seasoned with a hint of one of the Romance languages, from the back of the plane.
Startled, Amanda jerked around. Her companions did the same. Before them, his figure slightly translucent, stood a man dressed in a scarlet cloak and tunic, with a heavy, golden-hilted sword hanging from his belt. His skin was nearly as ruddy as his garments, horns sprouted from his brow, and a tail shaped similarly to Kurt’s dangled behind him. But the most alarming things about him were the cruel mockery of his smile, the ruthless intelligence of his obsidian gaze, and, visible to any other sorcerer, the blaze of demonic magic that surrounded him like the corona of some black sun.
“Belasco!” Piotr breathed.
“I trust this resolves any lingering doubts as to my veracity,” Dracula said dryly.
“Reasonable, but futile,’’ the magician continued. “I’m afraid you won’t find any of the vampires of Natchez infesting their usual haunts, Your Grace. They’re all with me, awaiting the death and resurrection of the world.”
Chapter 8
Peering at the sky, her eyes narrowed against the cold rain that lashed her upturned face, Jean Grey watched another hovercraft pass over her head. Judging by the frequency with which she was spotting them, she suspected that SAFE had at least a dozen of the flying gun platforms in the air. In the gloom produced by the storm, visibility was so poor that she wouldn’t have been surprised if the agents on board had decided to sweep the ground with searchlights. But no doubt they had more sophisticated surveillance systems—infrared, sonar, and the like—for penetrating the murk. But since they had yet to descend on Scott, Logan, and herself, they must not have any mutant-detecting gadgets analogous to Cerebro.
Or else, she thought glumly, they had one, but at the moment, it wasn’t working any more effectively than the X-Men’s own technology. Now seated in the back of the Blazer, Scott was trying to rectify that. An array of tiny tools—screwdrivers, tweezers, a can of compressed air, a circuit tester, and a soldering iron among them—laid out on the seat beside him, he’d opened the black case of the mini-Cerebro and was fiddling with the works inside.
Like Jean, Logan had climbed out into the rain, perhaps to study their surroundings in the forlorn hope of gaining some clue as to Rogue and Ororo’s whereabouts, or maybe just to smoke and stretch his legs. At need, he could muster the patience of a tiger lurking in a blind, waiting motionless for its next meal to come down the trail, but it was likewise true that he hated being cooped up in close quarters for long. Despite the miserable weather, he would almost certainly have preferred to comb Natchez on foot, or astride his motorcycle.
The shoulder cape of his oilskin duster flapping in the wind,
Wolverine abruptly pivoted toward Scott's partially open window. “Well?” he demanded.
“As far as I can iell.” said Cyclops, brushing a strand of his wet brown hair off his forehead, * ‘there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“So much for your hunches,” said the shorter man. “Let’s go, and you hold down the back seat for a while. I’m sick of you drivin’ like an old lady.”
Through their psychic link, she felt Scott’s surge of annoyance. Suppressing it, he said, “Not yet. I can’t work with parts this small if the car’s in motion.”
“You just said there’s no problem to work on.”
“I said tha
t I haven’t found anything specific. That doesn’t mean the unit’s operating at peak efficiency. Let me clean these contacts up, and make sure everything’s screwed down nice and tight.”
“Great,” Logan said. “Ororo and Rogue could be dyin’ right this second, but no sweat. You have fun tinkerin’.” He wheeled, stalked away across the empty supermarket parking lot, and halted under a lamppost.
Watching him withdraw to sulk, Jean experienced a startling pang of dislike. She felt much as she had during the Canadian’s early days with the team, when she’d not only considered him gratuitously nasty but sometimes feared that he was a bona fide psychopath. Frowning, she reminded herself that she didn’t really feel that way, not anymore, not for a long time now, and walked over to stand beside him.
A jagged fork of lightning flared, and thunder boomed an instant later. The bolt must have struck somewhere nearby. “Every time that happens, I look up hoping to see Storm,” she said.
Logan grunted.
“You know,” she continued, “it's possible that Scott can get the mini-Cerebro working better, and if so, it’s worth investing the time. You said it yourself. Today my psi seems to need all the help it can get.”
Logan turned to face her. The rain had glued his bushy side whiskers to his face. “I’m tired and I’m frustrated,” he said. “Turns out that animal senses and spook training don’t help much when you’re hunting for somebody who just vanished out of the sky.”
Jean lifted an eyebrow. “Was that supposed to be an apology?”
Exhaling a plume of pungent smoke, Wolverine shrugged. “More or less.”
“In that case you should say it to Scott. You’ve been riding him a lot harder than you have me.”
“On the up side, at least I didn’t shoot him.”
“That was an accident.”
Logan snorted. “He was aimin’ at me. He meant to knock me flyin’. That ain’t an accident by my definition.”
“He thought he was saving you from yourself.”
* ‘Which means he doesn’t even trust me to keep my head in a penny-ante tussle with a couple cops and a civilian. Great, now I feel like he’s a real pal.”
“Fine!” she snapped, her patience abruptly exhausted. “If you want to hold a grudge, go for it, and why don’t you go to hell while you’re at it!’*
She could see that she’d startled him. His dark eyes narrowed in concern. “Hey, Jeannie .. .”
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Aren’t I supposed to lose my temper? When you’re surly or fly into a rage, everyone makes allowances. They say, oh, well, that’s Wolverine, that’s just the way he is. When Scott gets all brusque and morose, or Ororo has an attack of claustrophobia, or Bobby’s moping around feeling insecure, it’s the same thing. But no matter what happens, you all expect me to be sweet and calm. A voice of reason. Well, guess what? I never volunteered to be the surrogate mother of the X-Men, and I’m sick of feeling that I’ll be letting the rest of you down if I don’t behave as if that’s what I am!”
Jean! said Scott, mind to mind. She could tell that he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, but he had sensed her surge of bitter resentment across their psychic link. What’s wrong? If Logan ’s harassing you—
The loving, worried touch of his essence took the edge off her anger, leaving her feeling dismayed and ashamed of her outburst. It’s all right, she answered quickly. Just keep working. Please.
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, Okay. Whatever you say.
Phoenix turned her attention outward again, toward Logan. “My turn to apologize,” she said. “I don’t know where that came from. It isn’t how I truly feel, not most of the time, anyway.”
Logan smiled. “Don’t be sorry. You’ve got a point. The other X-Men do sort of count on you, Chuck, an’ Scott to be perfect. Though in Scott’s case we’re talking about a drill-sergeant pain-in-the-butt kind of perfect. Guess it’s because the Prof’s a genius and the founding father, Cyke was the very first guy to sign on with him, and you, well, hell, Jean, you’re you. You are pretty close to perfect far as I’m concerned. Still, I can see how it would get old to have everybody leanin’ on you all the time. I don’t mean to make your life any tougher.”
“I know that,” she sighed. “Let’s just all try to get through the rest of this mission without driving each other crazy, all right?’ ’
“Sounds like a plan to me.” He shot her a wicked grin. “Maybe we should head back to the car before your old man starts worryin’ that I’m making time with you.”
By the time they reached the Blazer, Cyclops was just finishing screwing the mini-Cerebro’s case back together. “Would you like to try it now?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, whereupon he climbed from the car and handed her the instrument. She thumbed on the power switch and the miniature display lit up with a flicker of green. As a telepath, she seldom had occasion to refer to it. The device would feed data directly into her mind.
She’d never actually liked scanning with her psyche linked to a machine. It took a process which, for her, was as natural as breathing and turned it into something cumbersome and artificial. But there was no denying that a Cerebro, whether the master system back in the mansion or one of the portable models, could on occasion enhance both the range and the accuracy of her innate abilities.
She melded her mind with the program running inside the plastic and metal box. The rich psychic landscape perceptible to her telepathy became simple and abstract, as if she’d exchanged the complex images of normal sight for blips on a radar screen. The mental signatures of all nonmutants dropped from her awareness instantly, while Scott and Logan burned as brightly as the lightning flaring overhead.
“I think the machine may be working better,” she said. "I’ll see what I can do with it.” Scott and Logan watched her intently. Praying that she wouldn’t let them down, she pushed her awareness outward, through Natchez and the surrounding area.
For the first minute, nothing happened, and once again, as she had on several occasions since the start of the mission, she wondered if she couldn’t find Rogue and Ororo because they were dead. She sternly told herself that it couldn’t be so, then scanned even harder, pushing her power to the limit.
Soon she was sweating. Her muscles twitched, and her head throbbed. Loath though she was to admit yet another failure, she knew she mustn’t overextend herself, lest she render her telepathy useless for the duration. She started to relax, to uncouple her mind from the mini-Cerebro, then sensed another mutant presence.
When she tried to zero in on it, the mindscape seemed to disintegrate in a blaze of mental static. She stabbed at the interference with the force of her will, driving her awareness through it like a dagger. On the other side of the barrier, dim and wavering in the psychic murk but unmistakable nonetheless, she discerned a familiar mind, albeit with some troubling alterations to its basic structure. The mini-Cerebro compared the mutant’s energy pattern to those stored in its memory and confirmed her identification.
“I’ve found Rogue!” she gasped.
“Where?” Logan asked.
“Just a few blocks west of here,” Jean replied. “So close that I should have picked her up long ago. But some force is shielding her. I could feel it trying to block me out just now. And her mind is different than before. That made it harder to recognize.”
“Is she moving?” Scott asked.
Jean winced at a fresh pang of pain. But now that she finally had a lock on one of her teammates, no mere headache would break her concentration. “Not at the moment,’5 she said.
“That’s one piece of luck, anyway,” her husband said. “Let’s go get her.”
They scrambled back into the Blazer. Wolverine put the vehicle in gear and sent it hurtling back on to the street, driving with a reckless disregard for the slick streets and poor visibility. Until, cresting a rise and peering down an incline, he saw the flooded declivity ahead. Snarling in frustration, he stamped on the brake ped
al, and the Blazer squealed to a halt.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jean, willing her clothing to reconfigure itself into her uniform. The dancing sparks crackled and prickled against her skin. ,i!Just suit up and get out of the car. I can get us to Rogue faster than it could anyway.”
Are you sure? Scott asked her across their telepathic link. I can feel how hard you ’re working just to stay in contact with her.
Then why are you putting one more demand on my psi by talking to me this way? she wondered crossly, but didn’t project the thought. Hoping that he hadn’t sensed her annoyance, she replied, Don’t worry. I can handle it.
Fair enough. He jumped from the car, discarded his trench-coat and crimson glasses, and pulled up his cowl.
Meanwhile, Logan, moving with a feral quickness and fluidity, completed his own change. “Ready when you are,” he said.
Phoenix glanced skyward and was pleased to see that no hovercraft were floating in the immediate vicinity. She levitated with her telekinesis, then picked up Scott and Wolverine. When she’d first learned to wield the power, she sometimes imagined that she possessed extra hands, invisible extremities with which she could move objects about, but it had been a long time since she’d needed any such crutch of the imagination. These days, the psychokinesis was simply itself, a faculty she employed with automatic ease.
Or generally speaking, she did. When she was already straining to maintain a telepathic interface with the mini-Cerebro and a lock on Rogue, when her head was already pounding, juggling three human-sized objects became rather more difficult. Still, she tried not to let the strain show in her face, or to let it bleed into Scott’s mind. No point in worrying him or Logan, either.
Gosh, she thought with a flicker of amusement, / guess I do want to be perfect for them after all.
They soared through the driving rain, over the rooftops of the city. It was late enough that the sun must have been sinking directly in front of them, but she couldn’t see any sign of it through the mountainous black clouds.
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