The Legacy Quest Trilogy

by Unknown Author

  Shaw took a deep, controlled breath, and resolved not to let himself be treated like a subordinate. He had entered into this business arrangement as an equal—and, even if his so-called ally wouldn’t address him as such, then at least he would act the part.

  “There’s been a change of plan,” he said.

  “The X-Men,” surmised his partner, with an unmistakable hint of contempt.

  “Indeed,” said Shaw, tightly. He recapped recent events, emphasizing the benefits of McCoy’s cooperation. But his partner was not to be mollified.

  “I told you what would happen if you involved Xavier’s whelps in our plans,” he snapped.

  “They’re prepared to let us finish our work,” stated Shaw, flatly.

  “Under their supervision! This cure is only half as much use to us if we don’t exercise sole control over it. You know that, Shaw!”

  The Black King’s temperature was rising now, as he turned his fear into resentment, which in turn became anger. Fortunately, he was used to controlling his emotions. But he could see his own eyes flashing dangerously in his reflection in the screen.

  “I took the necessary steps to ensure that a cure will exist at all,” he said, tartly. “I salvaged success from a project that was going nowhere.”

  “If you call this ‘success,’ submitting to the wishes of our greatest enemies. I raised an island for you, Shaw. I helped to fund your miserable operation—only for you to overreach yourself again. Your incompetence has brought down everything we’ve worked for!”

  Shaw’s lips curled into a snarl. “This game isn’t over yet...” He almost addressed his partner by name over the link, but that would only have riled him even more. “The X-Men might find I’ve still got a trick or two up my sleeve.” As might you, you imperious blowhard! he added silently, to himself.

  “You’d better, Shaw-for your own sake.”

  The shadowy face disappeared from Shaw’s screen, and another window appeared to tell him that the link had been severed from the other side. He stared at the message in disbelief, and felt a rare, uncontrollable fury rising inside him. He threw himself to his feet, overturning his chair in the process. He swept his arm across the desk, scattering papers and knocking his laptop computer to the floor. He picked up a paperweight and hurled it viciously across the room. Then, running out of targets upon which to vent his wrath, he turned and punched the wall repeatedly. His mutant ability didn’t protect him—because he was creating kinetic energy himself, and turning it outwards-and his knuckles became bruised. But the sharp pain helped him to focus, and his rage eventually subsided.

  He was relieved, at least, that nobody had been around to witness his outburst. To other people-most other people-Sebastian Shaw was a cool, collected businessman, a controlled force to be reckoned with. He had no wish to alter that perception.

  There were some sides of himself that he preferred to keep hidden.

  The rain had passed now, and the sky was clear again. But water seeped into Hank McCoy’s trunks and fur as he sat on the damp grass, leaning back against a tree-trunk and staring upwards. He was tired, and he wanted to close his eyes-but the night sky, untainted by the electric lighting of civilization, was a sight well worth a little effort to see.

  Hank marveled at the uncountable thousands of stars that freckled the dark void, each one a blazing sun, perhaps supporting life on its orbiting planets. He was luckier than most: he had been out there, several times, and had witnessed wonders far beyond the imagination of most earthbound humans. But, from this perspective, he could see how vast the universe was, and he knew he had glimpsed only the tiniest fraction of what Creation had to offer.

  There was still so much to see. So much to do.

  Behind him, he heard footsteps, climbing the metal steps from the underground base. He sighed. His moment of quiet solitude had been all too brief.

  The intruder walked through the clearing and straight towards him, even though he had thought himself concealed from the entranceway by the tree against which he rested. That told him who she was, even before he scented her gentle perfume on the fresh breeze.

  “Hello, Jean,” he said, without looking at her.

  “I bet Moira wouldn’t be too pleased with you if she knew you’d come out here alone,” said Jean Grey Summers, but the good-humored tone of her voice belied the admonishing words. “Aren’t you meant to be hooked up to all types of monitoring equipment downstairs?”

  “I was weary of being poked and prodded and analyzed,” said Hank. “This might be my last opportunity to view the night sky, and to breathe in fresh air. I thought I’d take it.”

  Phoenix sat beside him. “I thought your first dose of radiation treatment went well?”

  “As well as could be expected, yes. There have been no unpleasant side-effects, which is something to be grateful for. The idea of a balding, blue Beast hardly bears thinking about.”

  “But your mutant gene-it is fighting back now, isn’t it?”

  Hank nodded. “The rate at which the Legacy Virus is corrupting my DNA strands has slowed considerably. However, the long-term prognosis is still somewhat uncertain.”

  “Well, Moira seems to think you might make a full recovery. So does Doctor Campbell. You ought to have more faith in yourself, Hank. I do.” '

  “I am simply being pragmatic, Jeannie.” With another heavy sigh, Hank wrenched his gaze away from the stars and turned to her. “Nobody can be sure precisely what this treatment will do to me. I have to face the possibility that I might still die.” He held up a hand to forestall her next words. “And don’t tell me not to think like that, because I’d rather be prepared.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jean quietly. “So, how do you feel right now?” “Exhausted. Fragile. Sick. Dizzy. My immune system is diverting

  all the resources it can marshal into an all-out war, win or lose. I feel burnt out, scoured clean inside. My body is failing me, and I feel helpless. I feel like William Montgomery must have felt, except that I’m the lucky one, because I still have some hope of being able to reverse my deterioration.”

  Jean didn’t say anything. Hank closed his eyes. He longed for sleep, but he feared that if he were to doze off now he might never wake again. If this was his last day on Earth, then he wanted it to last a little longer. He wasn’t ready to leave yet.

  “According to Logan, the Blackbird’s almost ready.” Jean’s attempt to change the subject was transparent. She thought it might help him to have something else to discuss, bless her. “We should be flying back to Westchester tomorrow.”

  Hank nodded. “Who's staying behind?”

  “Ororo and Bobby. And Moira, of course. Scott and I would have stayed, but he’s still so weak. It’ll take him a couple of days to recover from what Fitzroy did to him.”

  “How is Scott?”

  “Sleeping like a lamb. Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. Well, apart from a few battle scars—but we’ve all got them, I think.”

  “We certainly have,” said Hank, morosely. He opened his eyes and looked up at the stars again. “How did we get here, Jeannie? It seems like only yesterday that we were enrolling at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, the eager new students. The world seemed a much simpler place, then.”

  “I know,” sighed Jean.

  “It’s early afternoon on the East Coast of America. Sunday afternoon. Just over three days since I attended the funeral in Newhill. It’s one of the quirks of memory, I suppose, that whereas our halcyon school days feel so recent, it seems like a lifetime since I heard that William Montgomery had died.”

  “But you’ve achieved so much since then!” insisted Jean.

  “I just hope it’s enough.”

  “You’re prepared to sacrifice your life to cure the Legacy Virus! How can anybody expect any more of you than that?”

  Hank shook his head. “No, Jean. I wish that was the case, but it’s not. I’d die happily if I thought I could save others by so doing. But if I die
now, it will be because the project has failed, because a cure is still beyond us after all. I will have achieved nothing.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Which makes me wonder,” he continued, ignoring the interruption, “have I been misguided all along? By throwing in my lot with the Hellfire Club and then infecting myself as I have, have I acted in a rational manner? Or have I allowed my impatience and feelings of guilt to override my better judgement? Have I thrown away my life, and my chances of discovering a real cure for Legacy, on a foolish whim? Have I, in effect, committed suicide?”

  “You did what you thought to be the right thing,” said Jean, “in a difficult situation. Nobody will judge you for that.”

  Selene sat back comfortably in her cushioned throne, as the image of Phoenix’s concerned face faded into the milky white depths of her hovering crystal ball. Her conversation with the Beast had been recorded, some hours earlier, while Selene had slumbered through the daylight hours. Now, with a flick of her hand, she returned the scrying device to its dais and thought about what she had learned.

  It had always been difficult to spy on Sebastian Shaw; he knew what precautions to take to foil her efforts. However, he had not yet learned that, for the Black Queen, nothing was impossible. As soon as she had met Doctor Henry McCoy, she had known he was searching for information that she too might appreciate. And she had known he would find it. It had been a simple matter for Selene to combine her dark arts and her mutant powers of the mind, and to cast a spell upon him surreptitiously.

  She could see through the Beast’s eyes now-and, from his unique point of view, she had witnessed much that had interested her.

  “So, my ‘dear friend’,” she muttered to herself, “my Black King, Sebastian. You thought you could keep this project from me, did you? You couldn’t bring yourself to trust me. Well, perhaps you had good cause...”

  Selene had never worried overmuch about the Legacy Virus. She had thought of it as something she would deal with, in time, if she had to. But the possibilities of a cure ... and of being the only person to possess that cure....

  She smiled, as ideas began to form in her mind. But there was no sense, she knew, in acting hastily. She would monitor the situation on Shaw’s Pacific island, bide her time, and strike only when the opportune moment presented itself.

  In the meantime, she had plenty to occupy her thoughts. The sounds of torment from the catacombs below had been mystically amplified to echo through her sanctum. They called to her, and she answered them, drifting serenely out into the corridor and down into the depths.

  The night was still young, after all.

  UTANTS.

  The African-American woman could sense them. They were all around her. She saw their shapes behind her eyelids, could almost taste the foul creatures on the back of her tongue. She knew that, despite appearances, she was not alone on this darkened street. She knew where they lurked. They thought themselves unseen behind their comers and their grime-streaked windows, but she knew they were watching her. She knew that they had surrounded her.

  She knew they were closing in.

  Pearl Scott’s heartbeat quickened. She tried to conceal herself in the shadows of the sidewalk, but she felt their evil eyes upon her like laser beams. They were on the rooftops too, high above her, almost touching the roiling white sky that cast this nightmare place into the perpetual, uncaring gloom of twilight. Like vultures, they were ready to swoop.

  “No,” she moaned to herself. “No, no, no ...”

  She had always known that this day would come. Each time she had been forced to venture outdoors, to look for food or to collect the precious serum that prolonged her life, she had been aware of the street gangs and the lone lunatics around her. Their footsteps echoed in her ears as their sadistic intentions echoed inside her mind. She had learned to rely upon her instincts, to let them guide her through the empty streets and alleyways. Deep down, she was aware that those instincts made her a mutant too, but she refused to accept that truth. She didn’t—she couldn’t-hsve anything in common with the misfits, the freaks, the cold-blooded killers who preyed upon the carcass of this once-proud city.

  She dropped the three dented cans with their peeling labels—all the food she had been able to scavenge on this foray—and broke into a run. But Pearl Scott had never been an athletic woman even at the best of times. She was approaching middle age, weakened by starvation rations, and the virus was eating away at her insides.

  And there was nowhere to run to anyway.

  Once, maybe, not so long ago, she could have found shelter among the crowds in Grand Central Station, only a few blocks away. But there were no crowds now. This place, once her favorite in the world, had become a ghost town, a hollowed-out shell of its former self. There were no trains left to whisk her away from the madness, no way to return to her comfortable, suburban home upstate and her doting husband.

  Her husband was dead. And she hadn’t seen her beautiful home in almost three months.

  Not since the mutants had taken over New York City.

  Selene could taste their fear. She feasted on their desperation.

  Her body rested against velvet cushions on an ornate throne, the literal seat of her power. Her eyes were closed and her hands formed a spire in front of her nose and mouth. Her long, white fingers protruded from black leather gloves, and their perfectly manicured red nails rested against each other. But her mind was tethered to her body only by a slender thread.

  Selene’s astral self flew unseen beyond the Fifth Avenue mansion house headquarters of the New York branch of the Hellfire Club. It swooped between the skyscrapers and soared along the streets of her domain. It drank in the hopelessness, the all-pervading despair, exulting in the odd sweet moment of terror and the beautiful release of death that so often followed it.

  The body shifted on its comfortable throne in response to the ecstasy felt by the mind. Tight muscles beneath Selene’s pale skin drew her red lips back into a thin smile.

  But today of all days, she couldn’t fully lose herself in pleasure. She couldn’t quell the tingles of anticipation that ran through her. Nor could she ignore the deeper, more unsettling feeling of anxiety, much as she tried to deny it. And so her green eyes flicked open, and her senses began to readjust themselves to familiar surroundings.

  The Black Queen’s throne room had grown in accordance with her stature. The tiny office on this first basement level had never been opulent-nor indeed decadent-enough for her tastes, but it had been close to the nightmare chambers and the catacombs beneath them. In the ground floor ballroom, Selene had been the perfect host to the elite of society, charming and vivacious. Down here, hidden from the sight of all but the chosen, she had always been able to reveal her true self. But the office-if it could still be called such-had grown impossibly beyond the bounds of its external dimensions. Now, slight air currents played with the candle flames as they carried the scent of brimstone up from below, and invisible creatures scratched in the shadows beneath the dusty tapestries and the crumbling cornices.

  Slowly, Selene’s eyes brought a figure into focus. Her current Black King stood patiently in the entranceway beneath the great stone arch, at the top of which was inscribed the Hellfire Club’s upturned trident symbol. Clearly, he hadn’t wanted to disturb her trance.

  Blackheart had confined himself to his humanoid shape and size, squeezing his corporeal form into a neat black suit. But his charcoal eyes still glowed red in the pits of his stony face, their hue matched by his red shirt and by the folded handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket. His petrified hair, too, detracted from the image of the dapper businessman: it was swept up away from his goblin’s ears, but it grew in wild spines down his back.

  “Today is the day, my Queen,” he said in a voice like grinding rocks.

  “I am aware of that,” she told him, a little more shortly than she had intended.

  “When will they arrive?” Blackheart was unfazed by her rudeness, a
s content as always to defer to her. The fact that Selene had such a notable demon-the exiled son of Mephisto himself-in her service never ceased to excite her. Nevertheless, she was under no illusion as to the true power of this creature. He remained with her by choice-which was, in itself, a matter of pride to her. They were kindred spirits, both interested in the corruption of innocents and the torture of the human soul. Blackheart was also confined to the underground levels of the Hellfire Club building as a result of a spell cast by a rival: the half-demon, half-human Daimon Hellstrom. It suited him to play the role of Selene’s Black King, for now.

  She forced herself to calm down, to ignore the anxiety that spoke in its tremulous, taunting voice into the back of her mind. She nodded past Blackheart. “They will come through that door in precisely three hours, thirty-two minutes and seventeen seconds.”

  “Should I summon the rest of our Inner Circle?”

  “No, Blackheart. That will not be necessary.”

  “They will fight.”

  “I welcome their attempts to resist me. They have already been defeated. My sole regret this past year has been that they do not yet know it.”

  “They will learn,” rumbled Blackheart.

  “Indeed they will.” Selene’s voice had become lower now: she was talking more for her own benefit than for that of her partner. “And once we have dealt with them, our hold on this once-human city will be undisputed. Nobody will remain to defy my Hellfire Club. We can begin to extend our power base. We can set our sights upon the next prize...”

  The apartment block had already been looted. It was just as well: Pearl Scott had neither the time nor the strength to shoulder her way through locked doors. There were tears in her eyes, and she could hardly see as she ran up a stone staircase that smelled of neglect. Each step felt like a sheer cliff face, and her heart was pounding fit to burst out of her chest.

  Her special senses probed ahead of her, telling her that there was a lone squatter in one of the rooms above. A predator, perhaps, lying in wait for the lost and the doomed. Or, like her, a lonely, frightened outcast, cowering from a fate that couldn’t be avoided forever.