“Now, Shaw,” she muttered, turning back to the brick wall, “let’s see what you’ve got!”
From the Beast’s point of view, it all happened in seconds.
Phoenix closed her eyes, and suddenly Tessa cried out and almost fainted. She leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. And then, Shaw let out a pained grunt through gritted teeth. He shifted his balance awkwardly, and Hank could see that he was making a Herculean effort to remain standing. Phoenix’s eyes flicked open, and they were an infernal red. For an instant, she and Shaw locked glares, each as intractable as the other, although Shaw was trembling and his forehead was drenched with sweat. Then Jean’s expression softened, and her eyes faded to their natural green color. Shaw’s eyes almost rolled back into his head, and he let out a shudder that was part dismay and part relief. He sagged like a puppet with its strings cut, but he recovered himself and rose shakily to his feet. He adjusted his black dressing gown and made an effort to regain his habitual composure-but when he spoke, his voice was a little hoarse and it sounded smaller than usual.
“You have what you came for, then,” he said. Dryly, he added: “Congratulations!”
Phoenix was staring at him with a mixture of disbelief and contempt. “I can’t believe that even you would countenance something so... so monstrous!”
Shaw turned his back to her. “You are trespassing in this building. Leave now, or I will be forced to summon the police.”
“What is it, Jean?” asked Cyclops. “What did you see?”
Phoenix was already heading for one of the exits from the ballroom. “Come on,” she said urgently. “We don’t have any time to lose. I’ll explain on the way.”
Cyclops followed her without question, Storm a footstep behind. The Beast hesitated for an instant in the doorway, and glanced back at Shaw and Tessa. The Black King returned his gaze with a dark stare, and Hank was certain that a smile was pulling at his lips. Almost as if he knew something that the X-Men didn’t.
He followed his teammates out of the room, and was alarmed to find that they were already out of sight. A corridor stretched ahead of him, its walls studded with doors and openings it irregular intervals. He could hear footsteps receding along the nearest side passageway, but how could the others have reached it so quickly? He had only been a second behind them.
Pushing that question to the back of his mind, the Beast loped after them-but by the time he had rounded the comer, the footsteps had stopped and he was alone again. He hurried along the corridor, becoming more and more worried as he passed each junction and saw nobody. He called out to his friends, but their names were swallowed by silence. He came to a halt, realizing that he was getting nowhere. “It’s high time I took a moment to apply some logical deduction to my predicament,” he muttered to himself. He paced the corridor in which he had found himself, pulling at his lower lip. The disappearance of his teammates was a physical impossibility—and the telepathic Tessa had been present when it had happened. It wasn’t hard to guess, then, that she had messed with his mind somehow, probably in that moment when he had looked back. But what exactly had she done to him?
He tried the nearest door, applying his strength when it proved to be locked. With a splintering of wood, the Beast gained access to a small but expensively furnished office, smiling grimly to himself as he found what he was searching for. A wall clock told him that the time was twenty past nine. Almost an hour had passed since the X-Men had faced Shaw, and he had been completely unaware of it.
The question was, what had happened to the others during that lost time?
The X-Men had run into more Hellfire Club agents on the stairs. They had seemed fresh and alert, their uniforms immaculate. Cyclops couldn’t imagine that they were the same people who had just been so comprehensively defeated in the ballroom. He had wondered just how many more mercenaries Shaw had stationed here.
Storm and the Beast had delayed their attackers, while Cyclops and Phoenix had cleared a path through them and headed deeper into the basement levels of the building. We can’t let the Hellfire Club set off that trident firework tonight, Phoenix explained in response to Cyclops’s telepathic questioning. We have to destroy it!
He was about to ask why, but then his wife threw open a door and they found themselves in a room which, to Jean’s evident surprise, had been decorated like a nursery. The wallpaper was patterned with block capital letters of various colors, and building blocks littered the floor. Somewhere, a music box was playing a tinkling lullaby.
Sebastian Shaw stood beside a small crib in the center of the room. Cyclops didn’t stop to question how he had beaten them here: a secret staircase or elevator, no doubt. He was more concerned with the fact that Shaw was holding a sleeping child in his arms. The boy was younger than when he had last seen him-no more than a year old—but Scott knew him all the same. “Nathan!” he gasped. The child stirred and gave a tiny gurgle at his father’s voice.
Shaw was looking at Phoenix, a smirk on his face. “I’m sorry, my dear—is this not what you were expecting to find? It would seem that Tessa is a more accomplished telepath than you gave her credit for, no?”
Cyclops took two steps toward him, but held himself back. He couldn’t risk harming the baby. “Get your filthy hands off my son!”
“I wondered if you would recognize him after all this time,” said Shaw. “But you are mistaken, I’m afraid. Young Nathan is my son now.”
Phoenix moved to Cyclops’s side. “What are you talking about, Shaw?” '
“Originally, it was to be a surprise for the boy’s mother. She missed him so.”
Scott’s stomach tightened at the mention of his first wife. He had believed Jean Grey dead when he had married Madelyne Pryor. She had reminded him of his first and only love—not surprisingly, as she had proved to be an imperfect clone of Jean. But when Jean had returned, when Madelyne had lost her child and her husband, she had become bitter and, in time, twisted. She had joined the Hellfire Club and seduced its Black King.
“Nathan was taken to the future for a reason,” insisted Scott. “He was suffering from a techno-organic virus. We had to accept that he was gone.”
“Or perhaps you didn’t love him enough to fight for him. Perhaps he was inconvenient. He got in the way of your aspirations, your dreams of saving the world.”
“That’s a lie!”
“You remember Fitzroy, of course: another former associate of mine. With his ability to create portals through time and space, it was a simple matter to locate young Nathan and pluck him out of his timeline, to give him a second chance of life here.”
“You can’t do that,” said Phoenix quietly. “We spent time with Nathan in the future. We watched him grow up. He has a destiny to fulfill.”
Shaw shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him. “When Madelyne left me, of course, I had no further use for the boy. Nevertheless, after the considerable effort I put into obtaining fake documentation-birth certificate, vaccination records and the like, all of which confirm Madelyne and I as his natural parents—I think I’ll keep him.”
“Over my dead body, Shaw!” growled Scott, starting forward again. “I don’t think it needs to come to that.”
Phoenix laid a comforting hand on Cyclops’s shoulder. “You know you won’t get away with this,” she said, addressing Shaw. “We’ll demand a DNA test!”
“And it will mitigate in my favor,” said Shaw. “You are forgetting, my friends, that in this world of ours, money is the only universal language.”
He’s trying to provoke a response, telesent Phoenix. Don’t give him the satisfaction. She was telling Cyclops nothing he didn’t know-but her calming influence helped him to believe it. He took a deep, cleansing breath and tried to overrule his emotions. He had always possessed self-control in ample quantity: without it, his mutant power would have been a danger to everybody around him.
“Oh, I don’t doubt your persistence,” continued Shaw. “You may even take the boy from me in time. But how l
ong? Five years? Ten? Certainly long enough for Nathan to learn the values of my organization, to become the worthy heir that Fate has denied me.”
“Why are you showing us this?” snapped Cyclops.
“I am not a heartless man,” said Shaw, turning away as he lowered the child into his bed. “I thought you might wish to spend a few minutes with him—to say goodbye.” -
Scott knew there was more to it than that. Shaw wouldn’t have shown his hand like this without good reason. Or perhaps it was just that he couldn't enjoy his victory over his long-time foes unless he could tell them about it. Perhaps he enjoyed the anguish in Cyclops’s expression, the ache that Shaw must have known was in his heart. Now that he was no longer holding Nathan, Scott wanted to punch him, blast him, return some of that hurt. But his son was awake now, and reaching through the bars of the crib to him.
“You have ten minutes,” said Shaw as he passed Cyclops on his way to the door. “And be advised that this room is surrounded by armed mercenaries. Should you attempt to take my son, then their orders are to shoot him first!”
That was the final straw. Cyclops whirled around, swore at Shaw and opened his visor. A full-strength eye-beam struck its target in the back, but Shaw was unfazed by it. He would have absorbed the con-cussive force of the blast, Scott realized; its energy component would have caused him some pain, but not nearly enough.
Shaw paused in the doorway and looked back at Cyclops with one eyebrow raised in mild amusement. Ashamed that he had let himself be pushed over the edge, Scott made no further move until after the Black King had left and there was silence in the nursery.
Then, Jean linked her arm gently with his, and they approached the crib together.
The Beast had retraced his steps to the ballroom, planning to confront Shaw and Tessa. But as he approached the open doorway, he was greeted by a sight that filled him with horror.
The morning sun shone through the ballroom windows and fell upon three bodies. They lay in a heap, unmoving, and their blood was soaking into the deep pile carpet.
Hank ran to them with a despairing cry. Cyclops and Storm were already dead, their throats tom out by the claws of some wild animal. Phoenix’s eyes fluttered open, but they widened in fear when she saw the Beast. She took a sharp intake of breath and tried to ward him off with a feeble hand, tried to ciy out for help. “It’s all right, Jeannie.” Hank was so distraught that he hardly knew what he was saying. How could this have happened? It still seemed like only minutes ago that the X-Men had had the upper hand. “It’s only me. It’s Hank. It’s all right now. I’m here. Everything will be all right.” But Phoenix’s fear didn’t fade-and even as the Beast watched, the light fled from his dear friend’s eyes.
It was too much to take in. It had all happened too quickly. He felt numb. There were claw marks on Phoenix's throat too. He thought about her reaction to him, and was hit by a dreadful realization. He didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to look down at his own hands, didn’t want to face the proof of what he already knew. But he had no choice. He had to see.
An eternity seemed to pass as the Beast stared at his tom nails, at the blood that matted his blue fur, and everything else was blotted out by the awful truth of what he had done.
“Your worst fear, is it not?”
He looked up, shaken back to reality, only dimly recognizing the voice of Sebastian Shaw.
“Ever since your mutant gene manifested itself,” said the Black King, “ever since you coined your own ironic code name—all these years, you have dreaded the next stage of your evolution. You immersed yourself in science and literature, exercising your intellect for fear of losing it. You always knew that your body chemistry could change, that your mind could snap at any moment-that you could become a Beast in deed as well as in appearance.”
The Beast didn’t stop to wonder how Shaw knew so much about his innermost feelings. He lunged at him, hoping to take him by surprise. “You made me do this!” he cried.
And then he was in hand-to-hand combat, but his foe was unmoved, simply absorbing the kinetic energy of his blows. The Beast tried to unbalance Shaw with leverage rather than force, but he only found himself staring into his eyes and seeing the harsh gleam of triumph therein. “Tessa tells me,” said the Black King smugly, “that you were easy to manipulate. You were so close to becoming a savage already.”
“I’ll kill you, Shaw!” he roared. But his blows had added to Shaw’s own strength, and he was outmatched. The Beast’s hold on his foe was broken, and he was hurled across the ballroom by an almost casual sweep of an energized arm. He managed to turn his flight into a flip and land upright, but he was crouching beside the corpses of his colleagues now, and he could feel their blood, wet on his bare feet. His stomach performed a nauseating pitch and he could no longer think about fighting back. He could only think about what he had done, what terrible part of himself had been unleashed by Tessa, and he wanted to roll himself into a tight ball and shut out the rest of the world until the pain and the guilt had gone away.
“He’s all yours, gentlemen,” said Shaw-and the Beast became aware of the fact that four more people had entered the room. Police officers. They approached him warily, their guns trained upon him, but he made no move to resist them. One of the officers hauled him to his feet, wrenched his arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists together. Another read him his rights, but Hank wasn’t listening. All he heard was the charge that had been laid against him: murder. That one word echoed through his mind, and chilled his blood.
But as he was led toward the exit, a defiant spirit rose within him. He was no good to the remaining X-Men, no good to anybody, if he was locked in a prison cell. And Shaw had to be stopped: Phoenix had said as much, even if she hadn’t had time to fill in the details.
It was the work of seconds for the Beast to wriggle free of his handcuffs. But one of the policemen saw that he was free, and shouted a warning to his fellows.
As Hank made for the exit, gunfire exploded around him.
The Hellfire Club building was closing in around Storm.
Its walls and its ceilings were shifting, but never when she was looking directly at them. She just knew that the corridors were narrower and lower than when she had first entered them. She tried to tell herself that she was imagining things, that there was no need to panic. But each door she opened, every corner she rounded, only led her into another corridor, identical to the last but for the fact that it was almost imperceptibly smaller. Even when she tried to turn back, she found that the layout of the passageways had altered behind her. She was walking round in circles—and she was certain that the lights had dimmed.
“Cyclops?” she called, her voice more timid than she had intended. “Phoenix?”
No sound came back to her, but for that of her own heavy breathing.
She could place her hands flat against the ceiling now, or against both walls at once. The building was definitely shrinking, like a living thing, trying to smother her.
She offered a whispered appeal to her deity. “Bright Lady . . .”
Ever since childhood, Ororo Munroe had had a fear of enclosed spaces. She kept on moving, kept on hoping, because she couldn’t afford to stop, couldn’t let herself think too hard about what was happening. She couldn’t think about being buried again.
A part of her railed against the unfairness of it. She had come to terms with her claustrophobia; at least, she had thought she had. She knew that it would never go away, but she had reached a point where she had felt able to cope with her problem. Until recently.
Recently, her resolve had been sorely tested. Three weeks ago, Storm had been trapped in a cave-in at an underground installation. A week before that, she had been buried alive. Or rather, she reminded herself, she had been forced to believe that she was buried alive by another of Shaw’s telepathic associates. Not that it made any difference. The all-consuming darkness, the stale air and the cramped confines of the coffin still haunted her dreams.
It was typical of the Hellfire Club to zero in upon the weakness of a foe and to exploit it for all it was worth. Storm bitterly resented what Madelyne Pryor had done to her. She resented the anguish that she had been put through simply for having the courage to stand up for what was right. And her resentment manifested itself all around her as the temperature began to drop and a buildup of electricity made the air itself sizzle.
“I am not prepared to play your games, Shaw!” she shouted, sure that somehow her tormentor could hear her. She lashed out with a lightning bolt: it stabbed into the wall where the corridor turned, some way ahead of her, leaving a jagged hole in the plasterwork and in the bricks behind it. Storm soared toward it, carried by the wind, and climbed through.
She found herself in another corridor, identical to the one she had just left—but now she had to stoop to keep from hitting her head on the ceiling. She turned, and caught her breath as she saw that the hole she had made had sealed itself up, leaving no sign that it had existed.
She was panting now, on the verge of hyperventilation, and she could hear her heart beating. “Goddess,” she muttered to herself, “this cannot be happening!”
And suddenly, unexpectedly, Ororo found a fragment of hope to cling on to: the hope that this really wasn’t happening, that it was another of the Hellfire Club’s mind tricks. And once that hope was born within her, it grew, and it comforted her with its perfect logic. Closing her eyes, she tried to forget the walls around her, to concentrate on the hope, which she repeated like a mantra. “This cannot be happening, this cannot be happening. . . .”
And slowly, she drew herself to her full height, and nothing stopped her.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 55
