.. think she suspects, Scott?”
The hammering of Pearl Scott’s heart, and the sound of her own heavy breathing in her ears, prevented her from hearing more. But she was sure now. She had always been sure, she realized. She had told the police, the special agents, the press, all about them, and no one had believed her. But she had always known she was right, and that they would come back.
Breathlessly, expecting to hear them behind her at any second, she tiptoed up the stairs and into the bedroom, the creaking floorboards seeming louder than they ever had before as she hurried to her husband’s bedside cabinet, opened the bottom drawer and retrieved the gun from beneath his vests. She held it in her hand and looked at it numbly. It was heavier than she remembered. She had thought it would give her a sense of security, but it felt like a dead weight in her hand, and she was more frightened than ever because its solid presence made all this feel more real somehow. Her hands began to tremble, and she dropped the bullets three times as she tried to load them. By the time she reached the top of the stairs again, at last, the handle of the gun was threatening to slide out of her sweat-slickened hand, and the old kettle in the kitchen was whistling insistently.
She was glad for the noise at first, because it masked her footsteps, but she couldn’t have been thinking straight because it hadn’t occurred to her that they would hear it too.
The man emerged from the living room first. His face showed only concern but, with his eyes masked by red lenses, Pearl couldn’t judge if it was genuine or not. He looked up to where she had frozen, halfway down the stairs, and he smiled when he saw her. “Mrs. Scott. I was worried that something was wrong. I think your kettle’s boiling.”
He saw the gun, then, before she could think of hiding it. He tried not to react, but he was taken by surprise and couldn’t stop himself. He cocked his head, just a little, to one side—an inquisitive gesture— and Pearl could almost feel his hidden eyes boring into her. “Mrs. Scott,” he said softly, gently, “what do you need the gun for?”
His words must have alerted his white-haired companion, because she appeared beside him in the doorway. Almost involuntarily, Pearl retreated a step. The gun felt heavier than ever, but she dragged it up to point at them, squinting along the sights but unable to keep them steady. A trickle of sweat dripped into her eye. “You— you won't take me like you did my Clyde,” she stammered, her throat dry. “You won’t! I’ll kill you first!”
“Mrs. Scott,” said the man, in the same level, conciliatory tone, “I assure you, we didn’t take your husband. We only want to find him.”
“You lied to me. They sent you, I know they sent you.”
The man and the woman exchanged glances.
“You aren’t from the FBI. Deny it! I dare you to deny it!”
“You’re right, Mrs. Scott,” said the woman. “We aren’t from the FBI.”
“But we don’t mean you any harm,” said the man. “We do want to help.”
Pearl didn’t know what to do, whether to believe him, and she was shaking so much that she couldn’t have hit either one of the strangers with a bullet if she’d tried. She was no threat to them, she knew that-but in that case, why didn’t they do something? Why didn’t they attack her, disarm her, do whatever they had come here for? Could she have been wrong? She was so confused, and she only wanted to put down the gun and cry, give vent to the dreadful feelings that had built up inside her over these past long weeks, but she didn’t dare, so she gave voice instead to the words that were burning in her breast: “I know what you are.”
And all the woman said was: “What do you think we are, Mrs. Scott?”
“You’re mutants," sobbed Pearl, and she burst into tears. “You’re mutants'. Mutants'."
Allan Coleman wanted to be sick.
He didn’t know how the demon had brought him here, to this dark alley where nobody would be able to hear his cries, but he felt as if it had turned his guts inside-out in the process. He tried not to think about the churning in his stomach. He was facing a brick wall, with a rusted fire escape ladder, which led only to a boarded-up window. There was only one way out: he could hear the faint sounds of traffic behind him. The demon had vanished-not in a puff of smoke this time, but simply melting into the shadows—and Allan made to run.
But, as he turned around to face the distant road, he found another monster behind him.
This second creature was blue too, but this one had fur. It squat-
ted on top of a dustbin, looking like a wild animal in humanoid form, And it smiled at him.
He gave a yelp of fear, and shrank away from it-then, realizing that his only hope was to do the opposite, to get past it, he galvanized his jelly legs into action and propelled himself forwards. The creature leapt from its perch, too late. For a blissful, hopeful moment, Allan thought he had outrun it—until something blue passed over his head, and the creature landed in front of him, still smiling.
“Not intending to leave our company already, I hope, Mr. Coleman?” it said, in a voice that was surprisingly cultured.
“What do you want with me?” Allan stammered.
“I’m sure it’s not like you to make hasty judgements based on cosmetic appearances,” the creature continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I have to say, I would be extremely perturbed if I considered for a moment that you were a man capable of such unreasoning prejudice.”
“I’m not prejudiced, I swear I’m not. I’ve got nothing against mutants, honest!”
“In which case, sugar,” came a broad Southern American drawl from behind him, “you won’t mind doing us a small favor, will you?” Allan whirled around, to find a woman behind him. He had no idea where she had come from. She had either teleported in like the blue demon, or dropped from the sky. She was wearing a green bodysuit with a hood, which cast her face into shadow. She looked normal enough at first glance, but she had to be one of them too.
Allan backed away across the cobblestones of the alleyway, looking wildly from the animal-thing to the witch-woman and back, scared to take his eyes off either of them, until he felt cold brick behind him. ‘Boo!’ said a voice in his ear—the voice of the blue demon, although he couldn’t see it-and Allan actually screamed.
Don’t worry, Allan Coleman. We aren’t going to hurt you. Not if you help us.
It was the voice from before. The one in his head. A woman’s voice, he now realized for the first time. And, this time, an image came with it. The redhead. The one who had been seated along the bar, not looking at him. She was looking now. He could see her face in his thoughts, and she was smiling at him. She looked kind and trustworthy. He wanted to believe her, but he was frightened. Frightened of the demon and the creature and the witch, but more frightened still of this woman who could disguise herself as a normal human being, who could infiltrate his local pub, his world, his mind, without him even knowing it.
“What do you want with me?” he asked again, pathetically.
And, this time, she told him.
As Allan Coleman’s hurried footsteps receded into the distance, Phoenix stepped off the roof of the old warehouse building, onto which she had levitated herself after leaving the White Lamb pub. As she lowered herself into the alleyway, Nightcrawler emerged from the shadows beneath her to join the Beast and Rogue. He seemed to be in good health, which was a relief. Jean knew that teleporting with another person was a strain for him, although his endurance had improved with practice.
The Beast sighed heavily. “Chalk up one more example of homo sapiens who will never regard a mutant with anything less than mistrust again.”
“According to Jeannie,” said Rogue, “he never did anyway.”
“Rogue’s right, Hank,” said Phoenix, as she landed beside her teammates. “I don’t like using scare tactics, but Mr. Coleman’s mind was well and truly closed already. And if you knew some of the things he’d done...” She shook her head, trying to clear it of the images she had seen in the unpleasant little man’s memories. “A
nyway, the point is, we didn’t have time to be subtle. Moira could be in danger at this very moment, and our trail had gone cold.”
It had been a long, exhausting day for the X-Men’s resident telepath. It hadn’t been too difficult to trace Moira’s kidnappers back from the feny terminal at Ullapool, via a bus ride and a train ride, to Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. But, in the bustle of Scotland’s capital city, she had had her work cut out for her detecting even the most fleeting memories of the two men’s faces in the crowd. She had found a couple of people who had seen them on the street, and some more who had spotted one or other of them in shops. It was enough to confirm that the men almost certainly lived locally, but it didn’t tell her where.
Then, at last, she had found somebody who frequented a particular rundown, back-street drinking establishment, and had seen her targets there on several occasions. Many of the White Lamb’s patrons remembered them too, although Phoenix had been disappointed to learn that nobody knew much about them. They knew what the men did, but they didn’t know their names. As she had noted back in Stornoway, they were good at keeping their secrets.
She had waited in the pub for a while, almost choking on the ever-present haze of cigarette smoke, hoping she might be fortunate enough for the men to show themselves there tonight. When they hadn’t turned up, she had formulated an alternative plan.
“Well, let’s just hope our Mr. Coleman can heat things up for us,”
Rogue muttered. “From the look on his face, I think he might just skip town and never come back.”
“He won’t,” said Phoenix, confidently. “He’s scared of our marks, but not nearly as scared as he is of us now. He doesn’t doubt for a second that we could find him, wherever he hid.”
“Besides,” grinned Nightcrawler, “we got the telephone number off him.”
“Nevertheless,” said the Beast, “we stand a better chance of luring our friendly neighborhood guns-for-hire to a rendezvous if the initial contact is made by somebody whose voice they recognize, and whom they trust.”
Phoenix “listened” with her mind for a moment. Allan Coleman was still nearby, and she was familiar enough with his thought patterns now to pick them out of a crowd. She smiled. “He’s in a public call box,” she reported. “He’s dialing the number. With a little luck, we can look forward to meeting Moira’s kidnappers within the next hour or two.”
Scott Summers and Ororo Munroe sat in Pearl Scott’s living room and sipped at hot tea from delicate china cups with saucers. It seemed odd, Scott reflected, as he reached for an oatmeal cookie, that the woman had gone from threatening them with a gun to offering them such hospitality in the space of only a few minutes. But then, Mrs. Scott had been confused and upset and, after making her announcement on the stairs, she had simply buried her head in her hands and sobbed. When Scott had approached her and carefully taken the gun from her, she had acquiesced without a struggle. And, upon realizing that he and his colleague really did mean her no harm-that, indeed, they meant to find her husband, along with their own missing friend-she had been relieved and almost pathetically grateful.
This still left the question of how she had guessed that her two visitors were mutants, but Scott thought it best not to pry too deeply. Perhaps it was just women’s intuition. Perhaps it was paranoia: Pearl Scott had expected mutants to come and, by pure coincidence, had chosen today to believe it had happened. But it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that she might be a mutant herself, albeit not a strong one; that her power might simply be to sense when other mutants were in the vicinity. If so, it was probably best she didn’t know about it. Scott knew of far too many people who would do anything to get their hands on somebody with such a power, and Pearl Scott deserved to live a normal life.
She was still a little flustered. She had apologized repeatedly for what she had done, and Scott and Ororo had repeatedly assured her that it didn’t matter. “It’s not that I’m against mutants or anything,” she explained, “goodness, no. My husband, Clyde, was-is-a geneticist. He explained it all to me, and... and, well, hating somebody because they were born with a... a ... twist in a DNA strand, it’s about as sensible as hating somebody because they’re ... they’re ... well, because they were bom with dark skin, isn’t it?”
Ororo smiled encouragingly.
“But there are ... I mean, you know, there are ... evil mutants out there, aren’t there?” Mrs. Scott spoke hesitantly, looking at her two visitors to see if she had offended them. When she saw that she hadn’t, she continued, a little emboldened: “I mean, people like that Magneto one, and ... and ... what was he called? Onslaught.” Scott resisted the urge to wince at that particular name. “I mean, it’s not that... well, they’re ... you ’re the same as the rest of us, aren’t you? Some good, some bad, some in between.”
“And you believe your husband’s disappearance may have had something to do with mutants?” asked Ororo.
“There’s been no mention of it in the news reports,” Scott pointed out.
Mrs. Scott’s eyes flashed with a mutinous fire, which hadn’t been there before. “No. No, well there wouldn’t be, would there? It’s a cover-up!”
In Scott’s opinion, that wasn’t very likely. Typically, the media were all too quick to jump at the merest suggestion of mutant involvement in something like this. However, he kept his own counsel for now, as Ororo questioned their witness further.
After some coaxing—and after making it clear, three times, that she didn’t know anything for sure, she only had suspicions-Pearl told them her stoiy. She told them about the day, just a week before her husband’s disappearance, when two men in dark suits had come to the house and insisted upon talking to him, even though he had been busy. Mrs. Scott hadn’t heard their conversation herself, as the three men had gone into the living room and closed the door behind them-but her Clyde had related the salient points to her later.
“They wanted to hire him, freelance like, to do some work for them. I didn't really understand the details, but it was something to do with mutants ... with studying mutants’ DNA and working on some... some ... well, I don’t know what it was. But Clyde said they were very insistent. And he couldn’t help them; he was in the middle of a project for the government—but when he told them this, they started asking all kinds of questions. Was he prejudiced against mutants? Did he think they didn’t deserve his help? That kind of thing. I mean, my Clyde, he didn’t—doesn't— have a prejudiced bone in his body. He just couldn’t help them, that’s all, but they took it really badly, and they... well, they didn’t get nasty exactly, but I remember Clyde saying ... he said he didn’t much care for their attitude. Like they didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer, you know what I mean?”
Ororo nodded, understandingly. “Do you know who these two men were, Mrs. Scott?”
Scott chipped in: “Do you have any reason to believe they were mutants themselves?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Mrs. Scott assured them, “nothing like that. No, no, I think they were normal... well, I mean ... they weren’t mutants. Not that I’d know. They didn’t seem like mutants. It’s just that they talked about mutants, you know? And they did say their names, but I can’t remember them. I wish I could. But I do know who sent them.”
“You do?” Scott raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’ve told the police, I’ve told the FBI, I even told a nice young gentleman from the TV news. But, as soon as I say the name, as soon as I mention that... that organization, they just look at me as if I’m stupid. They say I’m being paranoid, that these are respectable people and they’d never do anything like kidnap my Clyde, and I keep thinking, perhaps they’re right. But I just keep coming back to it in my mind, and ... well, all I know is, I didn’t trust those men. And nor did my husband.”
“We don’t think you’re being paranoid, Mrs. Scott,” said Ororo. Pearl Scott looked hopeful, but she was still nervous, still fidgeting with her hands and talking quickly
. “Sometimes I think it’s a big conspiracy, you know. It feels like they’ve got friends everywhere, like you can’t say anything against them because they’re too powerful, and part of me knows that’s stupid, like it’s something off the TV, but it’s how it feels.”
She faltered again then, and Scott could guess what she was feeling. She didn’t want to give them the name, because they might react like all the others. She was holding on to the hope of this moment, the hope that they might believe her as nobody else would. She didn’t want to face the fear that they might not.
He reined in his impatience, and let Ororo do the talking. She assured Mrs. Scott that, as mutants, she and her friends had come up against conspiracies before, and that they would listen to any theories she had with open minds. The conversation became sidetracked, as Mrs. Scott sympathized with some of the X-Men’s experiences, although Ororo resisted going into too much detail. Eventually, the woman could find no more excuses to stall.
She took a deep breath, and told her visitors the name of the organization; the people whom she believed responsible for the kidnapping of her husband. It was a familiar name, and Scott Summers couldn’t help but smile and shake his head at the logic of it all.
He believed her without question.
The meeting had gone well.
The thin man and the bearded man had turned up at half past ten, right on time. They had recognized Jean from Allan Coleman’s flattering—if somewhat sexist-description of her, and had sat with her at a small, circular table in the White Lamb’s darkest corner. The Beast, disguised by an image inducer, had pretended to bury himself in a newspaper nearby. Having originally picked up The Independent, he had had to be talked into swapping it for The Sun, the better to blend in. Nightcrawler had concealed himself on the roof, while Rogue had begun the long flight back to Muir Island, under her own power, to fetch the Blackbird.
Jean had given the two men a false name. They had declined to give her their names at all, but she had picked them out of their thoughts, along with their addresses and plenty of other information about them. She had put on a bashful act, as if she had never done anything like this before, as she related her cover story to them. By the time she was halfway through her sorry tale about the fictional no-good husband whom she wanted put out of his misery, she had already learned everything she wanted. She had continued to talk, though, to allay their suspicions. They had become impatient, and the thin man had begun to wonder why Coleman had thought this woman worthy of their attention. Picking up those thoughts, Jean had had to assure him that she could be very persuasive. No matter how she might feel about her reluctant informant, he didn’t deserve to be hunted down and murdered.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 6
