Shadow of the Past

by Unknown Author

  After all, Lucifer’s minion enjoyed a wide array of powers, including almost all of Xavier's psionic abilities... and had none of the professor's scruples about using them.

  Had Xavier been at the helm of some other body, his options would have been pitifully limited at that moment. However, as Jeffrey Saunders had demonstrated, he was in excellent physical condition. If life had been kinder and he had become a professional athlete, his reflexes might have been the envy of his teammates.

  So when the professor urged him to dive to his left, he did so with remarkable quickness and agility—and narrowly avoided the bolt of ionic energy hurled at him by the doppelganger. But even then, Xavier and his host were far from safe.

  The energy duplicate loosed a second bolt on the heels of the first. This time, the professor had Jeffrey dive to the right—and again, they managed to escape the imposter's assault.

  Rolling to his feet, Jeffrey eyed the doppelganger and awaited additional instructions. Xavier scanned Lucifer's puppet from his position in the Nameless Dimension, poised to send Jeffrey tumbling again at the first hint of another bolt.

  But the imposter was laying back. Apparently he was dissatisfied with the results of his strategy.

  Changing tacks, he gazed at the ground in front of Jeffrey's feet. Abruptly, it began to shudder and groan. Then, with a deafening, leviathan roar of protest, the leaf-strewn earth cracked wide open.

  Jeffrey gaped at the yawning, black chasm before him and staggered backward, charged with an almost irresistible desire to run. But the professor anchored him, steadied him— and chased what had to be a mere illusion from the young man's mind.

  Look, he told Jeffrey with all the force of his conviction. Look hard. There is no chasm here. There never was.

  Jeffrey stared at the crack in the earth ... and struggled with Xavier's contention that it didn't exist. How could it not? After all, Jeffrey could see it. He could smell the earthworm odor of decay coming out of it.

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  And if he came too close, wouldn't he plummet to its unseen bottom and break his bones?

  No, the professor assured him. It is not real, Jeffrey. And it if it is not real, it cannot hurt you.

  The youth knew that Xavier wouldn't mislead him. Depending on the mutant's ironclad certainty, he held his breath and took a step forward. Then he knelt and extended his hand toward the chasm ...

  And felt hard, solid ground instead of empty air.

  You see? said Xavier. There is no crack. It was only an illusion created by our enemy.

  Jeffrey looked up at the energy duplicate, whose features had twisted into a distinctly unXavierlike mask of anger and frustration. Balling his fingers into fists and raising them in front of him, the imposter launched another barrage of ionic bolts.

  The professor was ready for them. After all, it was precisely the tactic he himself would have chosen. He sent Jeffrey tumbling this way and that, eluding one blast after the other.

  But this time, Xavier didn't merely keep Jeffrey out of harm's way. With each maneuver, each narrow escape, he moved his host a step or two closer to his tormentor.

  Suddenly, the sky began to gather into something dark and fearsome, something that roiled like molten rock... and from the midst of it came a seething, unnatural rain of fire. Jeffrey became frantic as hissing balls of flame fell around him, searing the ground wherever they landed.

  Stay where you are, Xavier insisted. There's no darkness in the sky, Jeffrey, just as there was no chasm a moment ago. The balls of fire cannot hurt you. It's all just another illusion.

  IS!

  But it was a better illusion, a more dramatic and compelling one. And it had the professor's host cringing, his hands raised against the horror, his mind a red flood of panic.

  Look up, Xavier told him. Look at the sky. It’s blue, Jeffrey. It's the most pleasant day of the entire year.

  Jeffrey couldn't look. He wanted to believe the professor, but the pit in the sky and the fireballs were too real.

  Listen to me, Xavier said, seeing that the situation was rapidly deteriorating. If it went on that way much longer, it might become imposible to salvage it. There isn't any rain of fire. I'll show you.

  And with all the force of will he could muster, he compelled Jeffrey to stomp on one of the fallen fireballs. His host cried out as his foot came in contact with the thing, convinced that it would be consumed in agonizing flames.

  Then Jeffrey saw that his foot wasn't harmed at all. And once he came to that realization, the illusion was no longer quite so terrifying. It no longer held any power over him.

  No doubt, that was why the energy duplicate dropped it. To Jeffrey’s relief, the rain of fire vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and the sky brightened again. But that didn't mean the professor and his charge were out of danger.

  Thwarted at every turn, the imposter resorted to barrages of ionic bolts again, hurling them at Jeffrey with redoubled fury. As before, Xavier helped his host dodge the duplicate's attacks, moving him closer to his adversary each and every time.

  Unfortunately, Jeffrey was only made of flesh and blood. His journey from Westminster House had taken a lot out of him, and fighting for his life was taking even more.

  As a result, each ionic blast was coming closer than the one before it. If the professor was going to take the battle to the doppelganger, he was going to have to do it quickly. That much was clear to him.

  Then, with heartbreaking suddenness, Xavier's opportunity was lost. In trying to dive to his right, Jeffrey slipped and took an ionic bolt dead on. It made his bones shudder and shocked his nervous system, blackness eating hungrily at the edges of his vision.

  But it was the second bolt that knocked him flat on his back, his head aching as badly as if it had been smashed with an aluminum baseball bat. The pain was so bad it was an effort for the professor just to open the young man's eyes.

  And when he did, he was sorry—because all he could see was the doppelganger hovering over him in his anti-gravity chair, a smug smile on his all-too-familiar face.

  Get up, Xavier urged his host. We cannot let him beat us.

  Jeffrey clenched his jaw and did his utmost to comply. Muscles quivering, perspiration streaming down the side of his face, he managed to prop himself up on an elbow.

  However, he had absorbed too much punishment at the hands of the professor's duplicate to support himself for long. After a moment, he slumped to the ground again, weak and helpless.

  In the Nameless Dimension, Xavier felt a lump in his throat. After all, it wasn't Jeffrey who had failed him-it was he who had failed Jeffrey. And now, unless the professor could think of a way out, Jeffrey was going to pay the penalty for his failure.

  "Is this the best you could do?" the imposter asked scornfully. “In all this overgrown, overpopulated world of yours, was this the best ally you could possibly find?"

  Xavier had no answer for him. And even if he did, his host didn't have the ability to deliver it.

  “Pitiful," said Lucifer's puppet, smiling wickedly.

  And to the professor's horror, the doppelganger began gathering his ionic energies for a death blow.

  Lucifer’s energy duplicate had been correct. When the Quistalian saw Jeffrey approaching Xavier's mansion from his vantage point in the Nameless Dimension, he wasn't happy.

  Not at all.

  Fortunately, his servant had managed to neutralize the threat the mutant posed to them. And in a matter of seconds, as soon as the doppelganger built up sufficient power for a lethal blast, he would make sure that threat never reared its head again.

  Do it! Lucifer cheered inwardly, unable to wait another second. Pound the wretch to paste!

  Suddenly, something caught Lucifer's attention-some-thing he could see only out of the corner of his energy pawn's eyes. A flutter of blinding white feathers. A flash of blue and white ...

  “No!" the Quistalian screamed miserably in the murky confines of the Nameless Dimension-an
d turned with the

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  imposter to see the mutant called Archangel alighting gracefully on the grass.

  The X-Man's expression was one of surprise and concern as he took in the sight of Jeffrey. "Hey," he exclaimed, "that's Jeffrey!"

  “It is indeed," Lucifer responded through the mouth of his doppelganger, doing his utmost to contain his anger and frustration.

  The Quistalian's mind raced as he struggled to absorb this new development. Clearly, he had been too busy dealing with Xavier's puppet to take note of the winged man's approach.

  But why, had Warren Worthington decided to return to Professor X's estate? And had he done so on his own, or were his mutant teammates on their way to join him?

  Abruptly, at least one of his questions was answered, as Hank McCoy came bounding out of the mansion on knuckles and feet. His furry brow was knotted with apprehension.

  "Is he all right?” Hank asked.

  Through his doppelganger's eyes, Lucifer watched Scott, Jean and Bobby catch up with their teammates. Their reaction was much the same as that of Warren and Hank.

  Obviously, they were worried about Jeffrey. But then, they would have been worried about anyone who was stretched out on the ground a few yards from the professor's mansion.

  Jean knelt at Jeffrey's side. "He's hurt," she observed.

  Lucifer took a closer look at Jeffrey and noticed the bruises on his face-a result of his battle with the doppelganger. He didn't have a good explanation for them, so he simply feigned ignorance.

  "So it would seem," the energy duplicate remarked, agreeing with Jean. “However, I don't know how it happened.”

  "How did he get back here?" Bobby asked.

  "I'm afraid I don't know that either," the fake Professor X lied. “Clearly, he escaped the police somehow. I wouldn't be surprised if they were on their way to retrieve him.”

  "Me either," Scott muttered, his face obscured by his mask but his tone full of sympathy for Jeffrey.

  Lucifer decided that it would be a good time to change the subject. Besides, there was something he very much wanted to know. "What made you all return?" he asked through the doppelganger.

  "Engine trouble," Hank responded absently. “But nothing horrendous." Like Jean, he knelt alongside Jeffrey. "We can effect repairs," he said, "then start out again."

  "I wish he could speak to us," said Scott.

  “Same here," Bobby added. "I mean, who knows? He might be hurt even worse than we think."

  As far as Lucifer was concerned, the mutants were paying entirely too much attention to Jeffrey's injuries. That could lead to trouble, he reflected-the kind he couldn't afford.

  "The more I think about it,” he said through his energy duplicate, “the more I believe it would be imprudent to wait for the police. We need to get Jeffrey to a medical facility."

  "I could fly him there," Warren suggested.

  "No," said Lucifer-a bit too quickly, he realized, and cursed himself for it. "As Bobby points out, Jeffrey may have suffered internal injuries. An ambulance would be a preferable form of transportation."

  “Wait," said Bobby, dropping down to his haunches. "Jeffrey looks like he’s trying to tell us something."

  Indeed, Jeffrey was staring up at Jean and moving his mouth. He was having difficulty making any words come

  ME!

  out, but Lucifer knew that was merely a temporary setback. Eventually, Xavier would find a way to reveal to his X-Men what had happened to him.

  Unless Lucifer's doppelganger did what he was about to do before the team showed up ... and destroyed Jeffrey with a powerful ionic bolt. That would put an end to Xavier's scheme once and for all.

  With the mutants' attention focused squarely on Jeffrey, Lucifer mustered the explosive ionic energies at his disposal. Then he focused them, intending to unleash them in a single devastating blast.

  One which no one but Xavier would ever notice.

  But before he could finish his task, Jean looked up at him with a wide-eyed expression of alarm on her face. Pointing at the energy duplicate, she cried out, "Bobby was right!"

  Seeing that the other X-Men were staring at him, Lucifer had his doppelganger retreat a couple of feet in his anti-grav unit. "Right about what?" he asked innocently.

  “About you,"said Warren.

  “About your not being who you appear to be," Scott added.

  “Not what I... that's insane!" Lucifer stammered through the mouth of his energy puppet.

  Then it occurred to him that Professor Xavier would never have sputtered like that. He would have remained calm, even-tempered, even under the most nerve-wracking circumstances.

  "What's insane," said Bobby, “is that you were able to get away with it for so long."

  "Easy, Bobby," Hank told him. “Don't be so hard on yourself. After all, it was you who first became suspicious of this scalawag."

  Reining in his turbulent emotions, Lucifer made the doppelganger shake his head from side to side. "You’re making a mistake,” he told the X-Men solemnly. "A terrible mistake."

  “No,” Bobby insisted. “It's you who made the mistakes. I suspected something was wrong from the moment I saw Jeffrey show up here, but I didn't know who was responsible for it. Then I saw you call the police to have them take Jeffrey back to his institution."

  The mutant frowned, frozen vapor issuing from his mouth. “He was your friend's grandson-a guy you showed a lot of kindness back at your pal’s funeral-and yet you didn't offer to take him home yourself. That got me thinking about you. And suddenly, I began to see a motive in the way we were attacked the other day.

  "I began to wonder," said Bobby, "what if the professor had actually been kidnapped while I was lying there unconscious? What if he had been replaced with someone else?”

  “Someone like you," Warren said, finishing his comrade's thought.

  "But I didn't tip my hand right away," Bobby continued. "I didn't know what kind of mental surveillance you were capable of, or what kind of listening devices you might have hooked up. So I kept my suspicions to myself until I got a chance to talk to my teammates alone."

  Scott jerked a thumb over his right shoulder, indicating the Blackbird's underground hangar. “Right after we took off on another of your missions," he noted bitterly.

  “By then," said Bobby, "I knew you couldn’t be monitoring us. That's when I told my friends here what I was thinking."

  "At which point," Hank remarked, "we decided to turn back and evaluate the evidence firsthand.”

  “And found you hovering over Jeffrey," Warren said, "looking like a spider picking over his prey."

  Lucifer saw there was no use in denying it anymore—no use in pretending the doppelganger was really Xavier. On the other hand, there was still a use for his energy construct

  Using the ionic force the imposter had gathered, he began to direct it at Jeffrey. After all, without Xavier's living link to this world, the X-Men could never learn where the professor was imprisoned or who had abducted him. And if they remained ignorant of such information, Lucifer could still find a way to salvage his scheme.

  But before he could reach Jeffrey's mind, something got in the way of his assault. It was another telepathic presence, one that no less powerful than his own.

  Perhaps Xavier himself could have penetrated that presence, forced his way through it. However, the doppelganger was not Xavier. At best, he was only a faint copy of the original.

  "No!" groaned Jean, her features contorted suddenly with concentration. "No, I won't let you!"

  "What's going on, Jean?" Bobby demanded of her, his faceted brow creased with concern.

  "Let her be, Bobby!" said Scott. "She's fending off an attack!" He pointed to the doppelganger. "From him!"

  And with that, he started to open his visor.

  Knowing what was going to happen next, Lucifer gave up on Jeffrey for the moment and had the doppelganger stab the controls on his anti-gravity unit. The vehicle lurched sideways-and Scott
's ruby-red beam missed its target by inches, carving a furrow into the ground instead.

  But before Lucifer could recover, he heard a rush of air and felt something hammer the doppelganger's chin. He sprawled backward out of his anti-grav chair, stunned. And as he lay there on the grass, trying to gather his senses, he felt himself pinned by something hard and extremely cold.

  Ice, he thought. A great mass of it.

  Lucifer was unable to move the doppelganger's head, unable to catch sight of his enemies much less attempt to strike back at them. But a moment later, two of them appeared in front of him anyway.

  "That should hold him,” said Bobby, expelling a wintry breath from his crystalline countenance as he loomed over the energy duplicate. “At least until we can get a containment cube ready for him.”

  Hank was standing next to his teammate, examining the doppelganger's icy bonds with a long, blue finger. He looked down at the false Xavier with an almost bestial wariness-one that seemed to be the result of instinct as much as experience.

  "So it would appear," the furred mutant agreed.

  Hank McCoy watched Scott Summers tap commands into a black computer console in a large, brightly lit chamber.

  A titanium cube with a small, reinforced window on each side took up more than half of the enclosure. Located beneath the professor's mansion like so many of the team's other resources, the cube had been designed to restrain hostile mutants.

  Of course, even a material as durable as titanium was no match for some of the X-Men's worst enemies. That was why Xavier had further equipped the cube with a complex configuration of wave and particle emitters, each one capable of producing several different forms of energy in an array of tight, intensely focused beams.

  As luck would have it, ionic energy was one of those forms.

  Lucifer's doppelganger was sitting inside the cube, still restrained by a thick, doughnut-shaped band of blue-white ice. He glared at Jeffrey and at the X-Men, no doubt plotting his revenge on them.

  However, Hank reflected, it was unlikely that the duplicate would ever escape to deliver on his plot. He was about to be imprisoned by the very principles that had given him his limited life.