No! No, it hadn’t! It had been a nightmare. She clutched at her temples as if she could break open her skull and pluck Helen’s spirit out.
“Wolverine attacked you with his claws,” the vision said. “That’s why your clothes are in rags. Cyclops battered you with his optic blast, and Phoenix with her telekinesis. None of it truly hurt you very much, but it drove you into a frenzy, and in the end ...” He waved his hand.
A circular hole opened in the air, and on the other side was the shadowy interior of the stable. Scattered about the floor lay the motionless forms of her friends, their features contorted with their death agonies, their bodies shriveled as if by some wasting disease.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to them, and then, to her horror, realized that she was grinning with glee at her victory.
The image vanished. “Please, come to me,” said the man in red.
“Yes,” she said heavily, “I will.” She certainly couldn’t go on like this, a mass murderer, a menace to those she loved and everyone else on Earth. Even if the angel meant her harm, even if he killed her, she’d be better off than she was right now.
But really, she knew he wouldn’t hurt her. Now that she’d made her decision, her doubts dropped away. She loved him, revered him, needed him, and could no longer imagine why she’d ever even contemplated flouting his will.
The phantom grinned. “At last.”
“How do I find you?” she asked.
“In the old church, of course,” he said. “You’ve been inching your way towards it since the beginning, so you must know the way.”
She realized that she did.
Storm and Wolverine crouched on the wet, slick, canted roof of a fast-food taco franchise which was supposed to resemble an old Spanish mission, clinging to the fake belfry to anchor themselves in place. Down the flooded street stood a five-story hospital which looked like a prime location for another massacre. Their fellow X-Men, Amanda, and Dracula had taken up positions elsewhere in the area to keep watch over other likely sites. Those who couldn’t move at superhuman speed had partnered with those who could fly or teleport them around.
Pelted by the wind and the rain, the windrider wished she still had her cape to wrap around her. “Why don’t you just make yourself dry?” asked Logan. Since he was looking in the other direction, peering through a small but powerful pair of night-vision binoculars, she assumed that he must have heard her tremble.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’m not sure that my powers have come back to maximum strength even now. I would prefer to save my energy.”
“Oh. Well, for what it’s worth, once we get home, the cold and flu medicine’s on me.”
“I should make that purchase, since it was my responsibility to stop the rain.”
“Don’t worry, we will, though I admit we’re cuttin’ it close. The river’s mighty high.”
She grimaced. “I hope you’re right.”
He lowered the binoculars and turned to look at her. “Hey, you’re not allowed to be demoralized now that Amanda’s taken Belasco’s whammy off us. As a field leader, you’re supposed to set a good gung-ho example for humble grunts like me.”
A smile momentarily tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I’ve seen you in many different moods, my friend, but I don’t recall ever meeting the humble Wolverine. I don’t mean to sound defeatist. But I can’t help thinking how elaborate Belasco’s scheme has turned out to be. How artfully he’s manipulated us, and how many obstacles he’s placed in our path. We want to believe that we’ve finally figured out a way to deal with him, but what if we’re mistaken? What if he expected us to do precisely what we’re doing? What if we’re still playing the game according to his rules?”
Logan shrugged. “You just have to have faith that the creep does make mistakes, and that we can take advantage of them. Otherwise we might as well go home to the mansion, knock back a few brews, and wait for Great Cthulhu—or whatever it is that Belasco works for—to show up and suck out our spleens. And hey, if we X-Men don’t have a right to believe in ourselves, who does? Look how many times we’ve beaten the odds.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Ororo said. Lightning flared, momentarily revealing a speck streaking across the sky. “Look there!” She pointed.
Wolverine quickly clasped the binoculars to his eyes. “Got her,” he said after a second. “It’s our girl, flyin’ like a bat out of hell.” He yanked a GCS Unit from his wide red belt. “Target sighted. She's cornin’ out of the west and probably headed for the hospital.”
“Roger that,” Scott responded.
“Understood,” said Amanda, a crackle of static breaking up her voice.
“We’re on our way,” said Kurt.
Ororo spoke to the wind, and a howling updraft lifted her off the roof. She extended her hands to Wolverine, and then a searchlight blazed down from overhead and caught them in its glare. Despite the sheets of rain, it dazzled her, but, squinting, she could tell that it was shining from a SAFE hovercraft.
“Freeze, X-Men.” said an amplified voice.
“Perfect timing,” growled Logan as he grabbed Ororo’s hands. She lifted him, the phlanged rod on the nose of the airship glowed white, and the roof of the taco franchise exploded.
Nightcrawler and Dracula, the latter in his winged, half-bat form, crouched on a ledge two thirds of the way up the facade of an office building. The mutant supposed that they might well have been mistaken for a pair of gargoyles had anyone spotted them at all.
His shoulders hunched against the cold, steady rain, Kurt wished he could have kept watch with Amanda. She could have used the moral support that he was best able to give her. But tactical considerations had dictated that she partner with Piotr, whom :She could teleport at need. The Bavarian took what solace he could from the fact that Dracula wasn’t with her either, and was thus unable to taunt and tempt her.
“Are you afraid,” said the vampire unexpectedly, “that if Miss Sefton becomes a true adept, your paltry mutant talents will cease to impress her?” In his current shape, his voice had a snarling, bestial roughness, but was still perfectly understandable.
“No,” said Kurt, “I simply don’t want her to turn into anything that remotely resembles you.”
“Belasco was right about one thing. How little you know yourself. How blind you are to your own capacity for selfishness.”
The image of that other Kurt Wagner, Belasco’s depraved toady, came to Nightcrawler’s mind, and he did his best to push it away. ‘ ‘Whereas you revel in your dark side. For which I probably shouldn’t blame you, since it’s the only side you have.”
Dracula laughed. “Touche, Wagner. But superior men have the right and indeed the duty to pursue their ambitions, no matter what the cost to others. Where would the world be if Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar—’ ’
Logan’s voice spoke from Kurt’s wrist radio. He and Storm had sighted the impostor heading for the hospital. Nightcrawler tersely acknowledged the call.
The plan was to allow the fake to descend to the ground before closing in on her and attacking. That way, X-Men like Wolverine, Piotr, and Kurt himself, who could neither fly nor attack at range, could get at her. For the moment, the Bavarian mutant intended to teleport himself to a spot that afforded a good view of the hospital. Then, when the killer arrived, he’d make a final jump and have at her. If she was as powerful as the real Rogue, his efforts would only provide a distraction at best. But he hoped he could at least keep her from killing any innocent civilians until his comrades entered the fray.
Dracula would have to flap along to the battlefield under his own steam. Kurt was capable of teleporting with another person, but the effort not only drained his strength but, for some reason, that of his passenger as well, and that was no good when they were heading into a fight.
He prepared to displace himself, and Dracula spread his enormous black wings. Then a white light flashed across the rooftops of the city, almost like the flare
of the thunderbolts, but not quite. The boom of an explosion came a second later.
“What the devil?” Dracula said.
Two hovercrafts floated down from the sky, their searchlights catching the figures on the ledge. The vampire hissed, and Nightcrawler squinted and raised his arm against the glare. “We’re agents of the United States government,” said an amplified female voice, “and you’re under arrest. Stay where you are and put up your hands.”
Dracula’s wings beat, a sound like the crack of a whip, as he leapt from his perch and hurtled upward at the nearer of the two airships. The energy weapons mounted on the SAFE vehicles glowed.
Kurt refiexively teleported to the roof of a bank across the street. A split second later, brilliant beams of force spat from the hovercraft. One pulverized the section of ledge where he’d just been standing, sending chunks of concrete showering down into the standing water below. The other smashed into Dracula, hurling him back against the side of the building.
Nightcrawler realized he had a decision to make. He didn’t know how SAFE had spotted him and Dracula, but given his powers of teleportation and near invisibility in darkness, it was a good bet that he could shake his attackers off his tail and go where he was supposed to go. With his ability to dissolve into mist, Dracula ought to be able to do the same, albeit considerably more slowly. But would he?
Evidently not. His wings shredded, but reknitting themselves by the second, the undead creature rose at the hovercraft, this time veering unpredictably back and forth to throw off the gunner’s aim.
Kurt grimaced. He supposed he could neither abandon his enraged ally to fight alone nor, assuming the vampire prevailed, to deal with his attackers as savagely he might prefer. And perhaps it would be better after all to knock out the hovercraft now, lest they find their way to the hospital and interfere with the operation there. He only prayed that he and Dracula could win this skirmish quickly.
One of the floating gunships pivoted in his direction. Evidently it had infrared or some other capability which negated his ability to disappear into shadow, at least at this distance. He teleported onto the vehicle’s dull gray rounded roof.
Since it wasn’t hurtling and jolting through the air the way the Midnight Runner had, he had no difficulty clinging to the ship. Smiling, imagining the frantic efforts of the agents on board to determine where he’d jumped to this time, he crawled toward one of the windows. Once he got a peek at the interior, he could teleport inside without fear of a bungled arrival.
Agony blazed through his body, while his muscles juddered, clenched, and locked. He’d underestimated his adversaries. Somehow they’d been able to discern exactly where he was, and also to electrify the hull.
He had to break free before the current incapacitated or even killed him. Though still unable to see his destination, he tried to teleport a third time.
At first nothing happened, and he was afraid that the pain was impairing his mutant power as much as his motor control.
Then, suddenly, he was safely inside the cramped confines of the hovercraft. Immediately, the occupants, a young man and woman in black bodysuits, spun around in their chairs, scrambled to their feet, and snatched for the pistols in their holsters.
Kurt was shaking uncontrollably from the shock he’d endured a moment before. He wasn’t sure he could even make a purposeful move, much less fight, but he had little choice but to try. He hurled himself forward, punching.
His first blow at the young man missed outright. Abandoning his efforts to draw his sidearm, the SAFE agent grabbed him, slammed him against a bulkhead, then seized his neck in a choke hold. Meanwhile the other operative yanked out her automatic and pointed it at Kurt’s face.
Nightcrawler frantically snatched for her wrist with his tail, snagged it, and jerked it just as the gun flashed and banged, the explosion painfully loud in the enclosed space. The bullet clanged into the bulkhead scant inches from his skull.
Maintaining his grip on the woman’s shooting arm, Kurt broke free of her partner’s stranglehold by simultaneously jamming his arms upward between his attacker’s and kneeing him in the groin. The male agent’s mouth fell open, and he stumbled backward. Kurt knocked him cold with a punch to the jaw, then pivoted and gave the female operative, who was still wrestling with his tail, the same treatment.
That, thought Nightcrawler, gasping, still twitching spasti-cally, was a lot harder than it should have been. He had no idea who in the U.S. government had come up with the idea of an agency whose only agenda was to deal with superhumans, but he hoped the officious busybody would lose the next election.
He wished he could simply slump down in one of the seats and pull himself together, but knew there wasn’t time. Scrambling into the cockpit, he quickly made sure that the hovercraft was floating in place and not about to crash into anything, then peered through the windshield to see how Dracula was faring against the other gunship.
The vampire was clinging to its hull, the talons of one hand sunk into the metal to anchor himself, the fingers of the other striving to tear open the hatch. Kurt had no doubt that the crew were currently doing their best to electrocute their assailant, but as far as the X-Man could tell, the current wasn’t even slowing Dracula down.
In another second, the lock broke, and the hatch swung outward. Dracula ripped it from its hinges and dropped it toward the street below. As he swung himself on board, he flowed into human form, perhaps because his huge wings would get in his way in the cabin.
Kurt waited for Dracula to clear the opening, then teleported aboard the other hovercraft, where the vampire was lunging at the crewmen. They in turn were frantically shooting him, to no perceptible effect. The creature in the cloak dropped one with a sweep of his open hand, then paralyzed the other simply by gazing into his eyes.
Nightcrawler reached beneath his tabard for the crucifix. “Dracula!” he said sharply.
The king of the undead turned, and, noticing the position of his ally’s hand, smiled sardonically. “You trust that trinket too much. But have no fear. I know I don’t have time to feed.”
“Good,” Kurt replied. Once again, he made sure the airship wasn’t about to crash. “Let’s go rendezvous with the others.” They moved back to the open hatch.
A third hovercraft dropped into view.
“Fighting these fools isn’t helping us catch the impostor,” Dracula said. “Go. PH elude them and follow as quickly as I can.”
“Right,” said Kurt, hoping the creature spoke the truth, and teleported.
Scott, Jean, and Kitty had stationed themselves atop a flat rooftop, sharing it with what Cyclops considered to be a rather cryptic billboard. It didn’t have any writing on it, and a person might actually have to study it for a moment to make out the shape of the dromedary hidden in the psychedelic green and yellow swirls. As he and Shadowcat kept watch, passing his binoculars back and forth, and Jean doggedly scanned with her telepathy, he wondered idly just how many cigarettes this particular ad campaign had actually sold.
But when Logan’s call came in, all such extraneous thoughts instantly vanished from his mind, and no doubt from the minds of his companions as well. He’d barely acknowledged the message when Jean lifted him and Kitty in her psychokinetic grasp. Although the younger woman could walk or run on air, she couldn’t do so any faster than a nonmutant could move on the ground, and thus needed the assistance to reach the hospital in a timely manner.
Several blocks away, a white light blazed. “What’s that?” Kitty cried.
Thanks to their psychic link, Cyclops felt Jean investigating with her mental powers. “A hovercraft is attacking Ororo and Logan,” the redhead said after a moment. “Do we keep on toward the hospital?”
“Yes,” Scott replied grimly. “We absolutely have to catch the impostor, which means that we’ll have to trust Wolverine and Storm to manage on their own.”
“Right,” said Jean. They streaked on through the rain, and more flares lit up the night. Judging from the
direction, Scott surmised that SAFE was attacking Kurt and Dracula too.
“It’s not fair!” Kitty said. “We're fighting to save the world, and they’re trying to kill us!”
So what else is new? Scott thought sourly, and then Jean spun him around to face the hovercraft that was swooping silently down from the darkness like a huge metal owl.
The flanged rod on the ship’s nose glowed, and Cyclops reflexively fired at it. His scarlet optic blast caught it dead on and shattered it, jolting the entire hovercraft in the process. The stub of the weapon exploded an instant later.
Nice shot, said Jean across their psychic link, just as flaps in the hovercraft’s belly dropped to reveal twin banks of missiles, which instantly hurtled from their mountings.
Snapping his head from left to right, Scott swept his optic blast in an arc which detonated half the rockets midway between the hovercraft and himself. Meanwhile, Jean created a telekinetic shield to block the rest, grunting as if she’d been punched when they slammed into the barrier. Kitty, whose powers were of limited application in the present situation, simply became intangible, protecting herself and relieving Phoenix of the burden of supporting her.
The exploding missiles rocked the hovercraft. Before it could recover, Jean’s telekinesis carried Scott under it and then behind it, as he raked its jet assemblies with his optic blast.
Crippled, the airship fell. Straining once again, Jean shoved it, shortening the drop considerably by dumping it atop a roof. Thanks to her effort, the men inside had presumably survived the impact.
Phoenix looked at Kitty. “Ready?”
“Yes,” the younger woman said. Becoming solid once more, she dropped an inch, and then Jean’s psychokinesis caught her. The three mutants flew on.
A pair of snipers fired from upper-story windows. Cyclops knocked out one and Jean stunned the other with a mental bolt. Elsewhere in the night, white flares pierced the downpour and the gloom. Explosions roared, and automatic weapons chattered.
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