Christopher Golden

by Codename Wolverine X-men

  But when she returned to Moscow, the Widow was going to have a little talk with her controller about the wisdom of such things. If she’d flown back, Cassidy would never have caught up with her. Mikhail would not be in the hospital on a respirator. And she wouldn’t have had to commandeer a vehicle in Warsaw.

  She knew what would happen. Comrade Turgenov would smile falsely, play with the band of his gold watch, and then speak to her in the soothing tones one reserved for children. But Natasha Romanova was not a child, and she was tired of being treated as one. She had married and suffered the horrible grief of her husband’s death. She had lied and stolen and killed in the service of her country. She was the Black Widow, and at the very least, she would demand the respect that her suffering and her efforts had earned her.

  The thought of the condescending smile on Turgenov’s face was made all the worse by her current situation. Even after all she had been through, she might not be so frustrated, nor anywhere near as exhausted, if not for the fact that the car had screamed in grinding agony and belched its final breath nearly twenty miles from the Soviet border.

  She’d been walking since then. Her feet were sore and the ligaments in the backs of her legs strung tighter than a high wire. She had taken nothing from the car that wasn’t completely necessary. A small zippered pouch at the belly of her jumpsuit held the disk that had been the cause of all her troubles. Over her black jumpsuit she wore a long peasant coat she had stolen in Warsaw. The old Walther P38 she had also acquired in Warsaw was in the right-hand pocket.

  Natasha trudged along in darkness and silence. The road was deserted this late at night, but even during the day there was little traffic. Most people had nowhere to go. In truth, most of those individuals who lived behind the Iron Curtain simply learned to enjoy their homes, their villages and towns, because they would likely never travel far beyond them. It was a simple life that Natasha wanted badly to protect from the depredations of the West.

  On the other hand, no nation was perfect. There wasn’t a place in the world without crime. And so, as she walked, the Widow did her best to remain alert. She was a young and attractive woman alone on a remote stretch of road in the middle of the night—it was probably at least midnight by now, she realized. It was best to keep an eye out for trouble, whether from foreign agents or from the predators who stalked such lonely roads.

  A light breeze stirred the tall trees on either side of the road. In the distance, a dog began to bark over and over again. A second joined it, and then a third from much farther off, as if they were communicating with one another. Natasha was momentarily fascinated by this observation, and appreciated the chance to think of something other than the soreness in her joints for a while.

  Natasha almost didn’t notice the way the trees atop the next rise were silhouetted against the night sky. Something drew her attention, though, and she thought perhaps it was that the trees themselves looked almost artificial, as if they’d been painted as a backdrop for a film. This eerie quality came from the unnatural light that shone on them from up ahead.

  Then she crested the rise, and there it was: home. Or, at least, the border guards’ gate at which her papers would be demanded and she would undoubtedly be interrogated by soldiers annoyed that their quiet night had been disturbed.

  Or that’s what would have happened if her contact weren’t there to greet her. But he would be, of that Natasha was certain. The KGB had proven to be less perfect than she had once imagined, but the importance of her mission had been stressed to her enough that she knew they would not delay in meeting her.

  In fact, her contact had likely been waiting at the border crossing for hours. He’d better not complain, she thought briefly. After the day she’d had, the Widow was afraid she might have to hurt the man if he complained about how boring it was to sit and wait for her.

  As she approached the guardhouse, with the gate that stretched across the road and spotlights on either side, Natasha had the momentary impression that the sound of dogs barking was coming from there, right up ahead. When she heard a male voice shouting at the dogs to be quiet, her suspicion was confirmed.

  Had the dogs smelled her already? she wondered. Unlikely. But if they’d been spooked by someone, Natasha realized, she’d better be ready for anything. It didn’t seem logical to think that Cassidy could have escaped, or that any of the other agencies’ operatives would have been willing or able to come after her this far, but she grew cautious anyway.

  Two dogs continued to bark—the one in the distance having gone quiet or its owner having taken it inside—and one of the guards continued to roar at them to be silent.

  Hands out at her sides to show she was unarmed, the Black Widow walked into the light at the center of the road, moving directly toward the guardhouse. For a moment, she wondered if they were so incompetent that they would fail to notice her.

  “Stop right there,” a voice said in Russian, off to her left.

  Slowly, the Widow turned to see where the voice had come from. A skinny man in Soviet uniform had a Kalishnikov pointed in her general direction. When the Widow turned back toward the guardhouse, the other guard—the one who’d been shouting at the dog—had emerged and also had her covered.

  Natasha was both perturbed and relieved that they had been able to get the drop on her. A part of her had been expecting idiots who had drawn border patrol because they weren’t fit for anything else.

  “Identify yourself,” the one at the guardhouse demanded.

  The Widow raised her hands and slowly began to walk toward the guardhouse.

  “Stop right there!” the one off in the trees ordered her.

  “I believe you’ve been expecting me,” she said loudly. “My name is Natalia Romanova.”

  The soldier at the guardhouse opened his mouth to respond, but something behind him caused him to turn his head. He nodded slightly, then returned his attention to the Widow, lowering his weapon.

  “Come ahead, Comrade Romanova,” he said. “I am sorry for the rude greeting. We expected you some time ago.”

  Natasha lowered her arms and strode gratefully forward, blissful at the thought of a cup of coffee and a long ride in the comfortably wide back seat of one of the dark sedans favored by the KGB. A moment later, the guard who’d snuck up on her from the tree line joined her, smiled an apology, and fell into step beside her.

  “Long night?” the man asked amiably.

  “Very,” she admitted. “Thanks for asking. You have coffee, I hope?”

  “Austrian,” he confessed in a whisper. “I hope you won’t report us?”

  “Not if you share,” she said, and felt a smile creep slowly across her face.

  She was home. Not Moscow, not yet, but this was still home. She could breathe easier now, could forget all about the stress of the previous twenty-four hours and start dreaming of a night she had planned at the Bolshoi later in the week. There were perks to joining the KGB.

  “Welcome, Oktober,” a deep voice said from just ahead.

  Natasha started. She blinked and peered into the shadows of the guardhouse, and could make out a tall, thin silhouette, but nothing more. Then the figure within stepped forward, past the soldier who stood there, and she recognized him right away.

  “Ah, Piotr,” she said, and her smile broadened. “Even better. Now I truly am home.”

  The Widow went to Piotr Bolishinko and nearly collapsed in the KGB man’s arms. Piotr’s cousin Oksana had been a friend of Natasha’s for years, and she had been relieved to find a friend already inside the KGB when she joined.

  “Thank you for coming out to get me,” she said.

  “Not at all, Natasha,” Piotr said.

  She stiffened slightly. Something about his voice wasn’t quite right, but obviously Piotr wasn’t prepared to tell her just yet what it was all about.

  “Where is your car?” she asked.

  Piotr only nodded in understanding. He thanked the guards for their company and the coffee they had sh
ared. The men were pleasant enough, and the one from the trees, who had blue eyes that Natasha found herself gazing at a moment too long, gave her his own Thermos filled with the forbidden brew of a Western nation.

  She thanked him, blushing a little at the way his eyes lingered on her face, and turned to follow Piotr to his car. Natasha was surprised at herself. As the Black Widow, she had learned to use her sexuality as a tool, to seduce the smallest or the largest things from the men with whom she came into contact. It was a skill.

  But it was a skill she was too tired to use, and it had not yet become second nature to her. She wondered if it ever would.

  Ahead of her, Piotr stopped, lifted his hands, then turned to walk past her.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I left my gloves in the guardhouse,” he told her. “I’ll just be a moment. Enjoy your coffee and wait at the car.”

  She watched him walk back up toward the guardhouse, then shrugged and continued along the side of the road. She saw the dark sedan parked another fifty or so yards up, then heard a loud cough of laughter behind her. Then another, as Piotr joined in the guards’ humor. She had the odd feeling that the joke was about her, but she brushed it aside. Piotr was not like that. He was a good man.

  At the car, she tried the doors and found them locked. Natasha wasn’t going to let that prevent her from tasting the Viennese coffee, so she walked to the back of the car and slid up to take a seat on the trunk. The rear tires seemed low, but she wasn’t surprised. These KGB vehicles got a lot of use and probably needed—and didn’t receive—constant attention.

  “Vehicles and agents too,” she mumbled to herself as she poured coffee into the cup/cover of the Thermos.

  Its aroma was enough to send a shiver through her. She sipped from the cup as she watched Piotr walk back down the road toward her. When he arrived at the car, he smiled and pulled his keys from his pocket. They jangled in his hand as he unlocked the front door, then reached around to unlock the back door.

  “I brought you a pillow,” he said.

  She could have hugged him then. But she didn’t. Even through her exhaustion, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something he was keeping from her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked bluntly, unable to control herself.

  His smile faltered. “You don’t miss anything, do you?” he asked. “Get in, and I’ll tell you all about it on the way to Moscow. You can fall asleep to my boring problems.”

  Natasha smiled and removed her coat, folded it in half and laid it on the floor inside the car. She ducked her head to climb into the sedan’s back seat. The door began to close behind her.

  She spun on the seat, lifted her leg, and kicked against the closing door with all her strength. The door slammed into Piotr, the window smashing against his hands and the gun that he had held aimed at her back. The glass shattered, the gun flew to the dirt, and Piotr fell back away from the car.

  By the time the Widow was out of the car, Piotr was gone. In his place was a beautiful woman with blue skin and red hair. Her yellow eyes blazed with pain and anger as she cradled her bleeding hands to her chest and rose quickly to her feet.

  “I don’t know how you figured it out,” the woman said in English, “but a bullet would have been much cleaner than what I’m going to do to you.”

  The Widow was exhausted, but fury urged her forward. She launched a kick at the woman’s head, and was surprised at how fast her opponent was. Her mind reeled with the knowledge that the creature who stood before her wasn’t completely human. It was like a legend come to life, a shapeshifter from mythology. But she knew that, more than likely, the woman—if woman she actually was—would turn out to be a member of the advanced race of humans called homo sapiens superior: a mutant.

  “You’re exhausted, Widow,” the blue-skinned woman said. “You can’t win. You’re a better fighter than I am, but even you have your limits. I think we’ve reached them, don’t you?”

  She threw a punch that caught Natasha in the side of the face, threw her off balance, and forced her to stumble back against the car. But the glass shards in her hand made the Widow’s attacker grunt loudly in pain, and took away the advantage of the blow.

  “You should have killed me when you had the chance,” the Widow said. “Killed the guards before I got here and caught me coming up the road. You used the codename Oktober, which is top secret. Piotr would never have done that. He never called me ‘Natasha’ either, but Natalia, which is my real name.

  “I was almost too tired to notice such things,” she admitted as the two women faced each other again, circling like wolves fighting to lead the pack. “But then you mentioned driving to Moscow. That’s home for me, but it isn’t where we are headed next. You should have killed me first, then you would have the disk now.”

  “I only just got here myself,” the blue-skinned woman said. “But if the offer’s still open, I’ll be glad to take you up on it.”

  “Look at you,” the Widow said, and lifted her arm to fire her widow’s bite at her attacker. “You’re in worse shape than I am. You—”

  Then the woman started to change. It was over in a heartbeat, and the Widow found herself staring at her mirror image. Natasha Romanova smiled back at her as shards of glass fell to the road with a sound like a snatch of distant music stolen by the wind.

  Then the assassin lifted her hands to show perfect, unbroken skin. No more blood, no more wounds.

  And while Natasha was distracted, the woman kicked her in the face.

  The Black Widow stumbled backward, slammed into the car again, and then the alarms screamed in her brain. This is it, she thought. The woman really meant to kill her.

  Natasha flipped backward across the hood of the car just in time to avoid another attack. She was surprised the woman hadn’t gone for the gun, and then realized that in the darkness, she had lost track of it herself. And her own gun was in the pocket of her coat inside the car.

  Not that she needed it, of course. Hand to hand, she was more than a match for the shapeshifter. The woman had admitted as much.

  She looked across the car, saw that the woman had changed back. Her flesh was blue again, and a light breeze stirred her long red hair. She was eerily beautiful, but savage as well. Natasha moved quickly, taking two steps to the right and firing her widow’s bite. The shapeshifter ducked out of the way.

  Fast, she thought. Very fast. The Widow couldn’t be certain what kind of abuse it would take to defeat a shapeshifter. What kind of wounds would she be capable of simply shaking off? No, it was death or unconsciousness, whichever came first.

  She prepared for the blue-skinned woman’s next move, gauging her position though she was clearly hidden behind the car. She glanced down, just in case the shapeshifter might try to squeeze under the car.

  A huge shape leapt in the darkness, and the Widow raised her arm and fired the widow’s bite at the figure. There was a roar of pain and as the Widow leaped from his path, the man known as Sabretooth thundered past her, and fell onto the road. Already, “Sabretooth” was changing, the shapeshifter turning, preparing for another attack.

  “In case you were wondering, your friend is in the trunk,” the blue-skinned woman said.

  Natasha lunged, screaming. Despite her exhaustion, she was as swift as she had ever been. Her widow’s bite flashed out and bit into the pavement, and sparks flew to either side of the shapeshifter. The blue-skinned woman had a moment to decide which way to bolt, or if she should attack, but she hesitated for just a second.

  The Widow backhanded her across the face and the assassin dropped to her knees. Natasha kicked her, hard, in the ribcage, and all the air went out of the shapeshifter.

  The widow’s bite kept her down and nearly stopped her heart. Natasha wasn’t certain if she was happy to see that her attacker was still breathing—particularly after she had killed Piotr—but she wasn’t about to kill her as she lay there on the road. She looked around until she found the woman
’s gun, dropped it on the front seat of the sedan, then took the keys from the unconscious woman and started the car.

  As she turned the car toward Minsk, hoping she could make it without falling asleep at the wheel, she thought of the grisly contents of the vehicle’s trunk. Her friend. So much for the Bolshoi, she thought. Instead, she would be at Piotr’s funeral.

  Warm tears slipped down her cheeks, making it difficult for her to see the road. But Natasha did not try to wipe them away. Tears were good.

  Tears had made her what she was, had kept her alive time and again. Tears and grief and rage were the only life she knew and the only weapons she would ever need.

  The KGB interrogator was named, of all things, Igor. Only Creed had been in a good enough mood to make a joke about it. But that had been hours ago. The truck had made it all the way to the Russian border, not far from the town of Brest, but over the past fifty miles or so it had protested loudly. Still, each time they were certain it would die for good, the vehicle had simply kept chugging along with Igor at the wheel, and Logan sitting beside him ready to shoot him in the head if anything happened that wasn’t part of the plan.

  Igor had been eager to tell them whatever they wanted to know. That, in itself, had been grimly amusing. The man was an interrogator, skilled at getting answers from others, however painful that process might become. Logan would have thought a few years on that job would have taught him how to keep secrets to himself. Instead, it had apparently taught him that his own tolerance for pain was about nil.

  But other than answering their specific questions about the Widow’s destination, Igor was gravely silent. He gave directions when asked, and kept his eyes on the road, and, Logan imagined, thought about the tortures he wished he could inflict upon Team X.