Chapter 1

Helen Purvis wanted to feed. The thirst seared her throat and kindled a fever in her mind. She studied her brothers and sisters, a dozen lean, pale shadows gliding restlessly about the nave of the derelict church, and saw that many of them were hungry as well. Their need was manifest in the crimson light that flickered in their eyes and in the way they bickered, snarled, and hissed at one another. Evidently the psychic summons had taken the entire coven by surprise, whereupon everyone had rushed to the gathering place without delay.

“And of course, now that we have, he leaves us cooling our heels for hours,” said Carla Spelvin. “Typical.” She was a lithe, lovely brunette with big green eyes, a former model who had no doubt been irresistible to men even before her transformation added to her allure. With her stooped, angular figure, lank, mousy hair, and pinched, sallow face, Helen had envied such beauties in her previous existence. But her own empowerment had rendered such feelings absurd, as irrelevant to the creature she’d become as her boring secretarial job, her cramped efficiency apartment, or her pet Siamese cat and only friend, named Mel Gibson, whom she’d tom apart to celebrate her metamorphosis.

She hoped to stalk and kill the human Mel Gibson someday. It seemed as if it would be a lot of fun.

She wasn’t particularly surprised that Carla had seemingly read her thoughts. Beings like themselves perceived all manner of things that were hidden from mere mortals. “Absolutely typical,” Helen agreed. “Another way of reminding us who’s boss.” She grinned, exposing her aching fangs, which kept trying to lengthen of their own accord. “I suppose that if we

wanted to show him that he can’t treat us so cavalierly, we could leave and go hunting.”

Carla laughed. “Good idea,” she said, “except that I like my skeleton where it is. Gordon certainly didn’t seem very happy without his. So I’m afraid—” Her head pivoted toward the front of the church. “Hey, he’s here!’’ Helen turned.

The grimy stained-glass windows at the rear of the apse still depicted scenes from the life of Christ, but the coven, acting under their master’s direction, had replaced the rest of the sacred imagery in the area with abominations. A reeking, maggot-infested corpse drooped from the big oak cross, which now hung upside down. Monstrous marble statues—scaly, tentacular figures so convoluted and alien that it hurt the eye simply to look at them—flanked the new altar, a massive basalt block carved with hieroglyphs and encrusted with the dried blood of human sacrifices.

Behind the altar stood the master, a figure as unholy as the furnishings, for he looked like the devil incarnate. A tall man in a scarlet tunic and cloak, he had reddish skin, stubby horns, pointed ears, talons, and a tail. A long, straight sword with a golden hilt hung at his hip. Even from thirty feet away, Helen could feel the dark magic crawling in the blade.

But despite the master’s infernal appearance, he smelled of human flesh, sweat, and blood, and one could hear the heart thumping away in his breast. Such telltale signs of life were one of the reasons that the coven had initially refused to serve him, obliging him to break them to his will. Afterwards, of course, they’d come to adore him for his power and his cruelties, though it was a tainted worship laced with envy and resentment. Such was the perverse devotion with which members of their kind generally regarded their lords, a feeling not entirely unlike the masochistic emotional bondage they sometimes imposed on their prey.

Despite the keenness of their senses, none of the sorcerer’s minions ever saw him come or go. Helen wondered just how long he’d been standing in the front of the church, and if, perchance, he’d overheard Carla and herself discussing him with less than utter reverence. His black eyes gazed directly at her, and he gave her a sardonic smile. Despite herself, she trembled.

But he didn’t command her forward for punishment. Instead, he scrutinized the members of the coven for another moment, then intoned, “Tell me of the world.”

“The world is broken,” Helen said in chorus with her fellows. The master had taught them this simple litany on the very night they’d surrendered to him.

“Why is it broken?” asked the sorcerer.

“The gods are in prison.”

“Who will free them?”

“We will:”

“Who will free them?”

“We will!”

“ Who will free them?”

“We will!”

“Yes,” the red-clad sorcerer said, his heavy golden wristband gleaming as he gestured, “we will indeed, and then the Dark Ones will reshape the Earth into the place that it was always meant to be. A world scoured clean of puling, craven morality. A realm where only strength and cunning matter. A paradise where the predators reign supreme, free to slake every craving and indulge every whim. A planet where you and I will be as demigods. We will stand above all others in the Elder Gods’ favor, for the sake of their liberation. A liberation we are now ready to effect. It begins tonight, and will come to pass in a matter of days.”

Helen gaped up at him in astonishment. The rest of the coven seemed just as surprised.

The homed man sneered at their reaction. “Why are you so amazed? I told you this night would come, and come soon. Did you think me akin to some pathetic mortal evangelist, prattling about apocalypses and days of judgment that never arrive? Rest assured, I am neither deluded nor a charlatan, and all that I tell you is true. The Dark Ones are real. I’ve walked with them in the dimension of their exile. It was magic that trapped them there, cast by a being not fundamentally different than myself. What one sorcerer weaves, another can unravel, provided he grasps the trick of it—and after seven hundred years of study, I finally do.” He stared down at his minions. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” Helen breathed. After all the ghastly miracles she’d seen him work, she did believe that he could change the face of the world. The prospect was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

“It is well that you believe,” the master said. “Your faith will be rewarded, just as apostasy would bring a swift and dire punishment. Now, two of you have a special role to play in the struggle to come. Helen and Carla, come to me.”

Helen jumped in surprise. Hitherto, the homed man had never so much as hinted that he regarded her as anything more than just another servant. Carla looked just as startled. But neither dared question the magician’s command. They rose from their pew and headed down the aisle.

Though they strode briskly, scarcely daring to do otherwise, the short walk seemed to take a long time, like an action in a dream. In passing, Helen noticed the faces of her siblings. Some looked relieved that the master hadn’t called for them; others, jealous at being passed over; and one or two, those who had lost their mortality most recently, betrayed a hint of pity. Mostly, however, she was conscious of the sorcerer’s fierce gaze.

Helen and Carla would have stopped beneath the altar, but the master motioned for them to ascend the steps to the dais and stand beside him. “Behold the anointed ones,” he said to the rest of the coven, “the chosen instruments of the gods.”

He looked into the women’s faces. “Are you afraid, my daughters?”

“No,” Carla said. Helen was certain she was lying.

“Yes,” Helen said, “but I trust you, Master—” that was almost true “—and I want to live in the world you promised, I want to be a demigod. I want more power. Power is the only thing that’s ever done me any good.”

The sorcerer smiled. ‘ ‘Well said, both of you. It pleases me that your resolve is strong, for your paths will not be easy. You will suffer, see your very natures altered, and very likely perish.” A cold thrill of fear sang along Helen’s nerves. “But you have experienced all these things before, only to rise in glory, and I swear by the Dark Ones that you will rise again. The gods will resurrect you in the world to come. A future that the slaves who serve our pleasure will curse as Hell on Earth, but which will be an Eden for creatures such as ourselves. Now kneel.”

The women obeyed. The hardwood floor, filthy with dirt, mouse droppings, and spatters of dried blood, felt cold and hard beneath Helen’s knees. The stench of the crucified corpse filled her nose and made her feel lightheaded.

The master drew his sword, the metal whispering as it emerged from the scabbard. There were runes graven just below the guard, and the razor-sharp blade shone with a sickly phosphorescence. “The Elder Gods themselves forged this weapon,” the horned man said. “Worship it,” He extended it to Helen, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she pressed her lips against the steel.

The sword was icy cold, and its touch sent a shock of nausea and revulsion through Helen’s body. Nevertheless, she managed not to recoil. The sorcerer then presented the weapon to Carla, who did just as good a job of masking her own repugnance.

The master gave a slight nod, as if his acolytes had just passed a test. “Rise,” he said, and when they’d obeyed: “Helen, you will be first. Lie on the altar.”

Once again feeling lost in a dream, Helen reclined on the bloodstained basalt. “Fix this moment in your memory,” the master told her. “This is the beginning of our triumph.” He lowered his voice, like a lover confiding a secret. “And just to make it all the sweeter, it is my greatest enemies who will furnish the key.”

Helen experienced another jolt of fear, one that had nothing to do with the prospect of her own mysterious transformation or the advent of a new world she couldn’t truly comprehend. “Do you mean—?”

The sorcerer shook his head. ‘ ‘No, little she-wolf, not him. Not the being whom you feel that you betrayed. I was referring to a band of self-styled heroes. Mortal fools, but formidable all the same. But this time. I’m ready for them. This time, they’re going to play my game.” He swung the sword above his head. “Brace yourself.”

The blade plunged down, the point driving completely through her torso and pinning her to the stone. She screamed in agony.

Ramparts of cumulonimbus cloud covered the night sky, masking any hint of dawn. Rain pounded steadily on the broad expanse of river far below, threatening to overwhelm the complex system of levees and spillways designed to protect the city beside it from harm. On the ground, engineers and crews of emergency workers were no doubt laboring desperately to buttress these defenses, but the X-Man called Storm knew that it would be only a matter of time until the Mississippi broke its bonds to flood Natchez and all points south.

Unless, of course, she could prevent it.

A willowy African-American woman with luminous blue eyes and a magnificent mane of long white hair, Ororo Munroe— who used the appropriate sobriquet of Storm—floated between the river and the clouds, the folds of her silver-gray cape billowing in the wind that bore her up. Frowning, she studied the turbulent air overhead with a sense that was not exactly sight. It was simply an aspect of her own gift, the power to command the forces of wind, precipitation, and lightning. She was bom with this talent; it set her, and her fellow X-Men, apart from the baseline of Homo sapiens. Ororo was a mutant.

Today, however, her gift seemed to be failing her. She wasn’t having much success against this particular storm. And now she sensed an updraft spinning counterclockwise about half a mile away, twisting itself around the zone of low pressure at its core.

The mutant wished she could simply ignore the isolated event and keep working on breaking up the entire system. But if she did, the whirling updraft was likely to turn into a tornado, a phenomenon just as potentially deadly as the impending flood. So she flew closer to the vortex, then willed it to dissolve. Gradually the spiral began to disperse.

Rogue flew to her side. Storm’s teammate was an athletic-iooking young woman clad in a green-and-yellow formfitting uniform and a brown leather jacket. Her face was as lovely as Storm’s but in an entirely different style. The saucy curve of her lips, the pugnacious set of her jaw, and the glint in her emerald eyes suggested a rebellious, impulsive, and hot-tempered personality, while the windrider’s features bespoke a nature that was ordinarily gentle and serene. The two friends were a study in contrasts, and rarely more so than now.

Rogue was too nearly invulnerable to feel much discomfort from the lashing of the wind and rain. But she didn’t have Storm’s weather-working powers to keep her warm and dry. Her brown, white-streaked hair was thoroughly soaked and tangled, inviting, her beauty notwithstanding, the customary comparison to a drowned rat.

“How’s it goin’, ’Roro?” she asked in her sultry Southern accent.

“Not well,” the other mutant replied, still concentrating on dispersing the last of the vortex. “I’ve tried blowing the clouds out to sea and making air rise from the land—rain can’t fall if you have a strong enough updraft. Warming the clouds so they could retain more moisture. Disrupting the static charges inside them to retard the formation of condensation nuclei.” It still felt a bit odd to explain feats in the language of science that she’d always understood and performed wordlessly, instinctively, but it was the only way to communicate them. “So far, none of it has helped. I admit, I’ve had difficulty affecting major weather systems before, just because the forces involved are so huge. But this is different. It’s like some power is actively opposing me, countering whatever I attempt.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to prevent a flood?” asked Rogue, a hint of worry in her voice. She’d grown up in Mississippi. That was very likely why she’d insisted that she be the one to accompany Storm on the mission, not that anyone had argued. The fact that she too could fly made her a logical choice.

“I don’t know,” said Ororo. She saw the embryonic tornado dissipate, and knew a pang of satisfaction. That was one small battle won, anyway. “With the Goddess’s help, I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will,” Rogue said. She smiled crookedly. “Don’t you wish we were on vacation right now? I still think Bobby rigged it when we cut the cards to see who had to stick around.”

Mere days before, a harrowing odyssey through time in the company of their sometime ally Spider-Man had left the X-Men thoroughly exhausted. Accordingly, Professor Charles Xavier, the founder and leader of the mutant super hero team as well as the world’s more powerful telepath, had decided that the group would stand down so that the team could take some sorely needed R&R.

But the X-Men were the world’s first line of defense against those representatives of homo sapiens superior who chose to use their talents for sinister purposes, as well as the primary protectors of any peaceful mutants endangered by the xenophobia of ordinary humanity. Their responsibilities were too important for them ever to stand down completely, and thus a skeleton crew comprised of Ororo, Rogue, and Scott Summers and Jean Grey—the senior X-Men codenamed Cyclops and Phoenix—had been chosen to stay in residence at their headquarters in Salem Center, New York. Everyone else was either about to depart or had gone already.

The four hangers-on had hoped that their duties would be limited to monitoring the world situation, maintaining equipment, and updating files, but it wasn’t to be. Not for Storm, anyway, not once she’d sensed a wrongness in the weather hundreds of miles to the southwest. The disturbance grated on her like a persistent toothache, or the roar of a jackhammer clattering on and on. She’d yearned to make the nagging sensation stop.

Using Professor X’s state-of-the-art communications system to access the National Weather Service, she’d discovered that meteorologists the world over were nearly as dismayed as she was, albeit on a less visceral level. Despite the preexisting pattern of warm and cold fronts which should have precluded such a buildup, cumulus clouds from across the continent were converging on Natchez, as if a colossal, invisible hand were reaching out and gathering them in to create a torrential downpour.

Ororo had immediately resolved to go to the site of the storm, to determine the cause if possible and in any case to prevent a flood which might otherwise claim hundreds or even thousands of lives. And as she’d pretty much expected, her comrades had insisted that at least one of them tag along. Not that any of the other X-Men could help her influence the weather, but there was at least a theoretical possibility that some supercriminal or outlaw scientist was responsible for the impending calamity, and they wanted her to have backup in case any such malefactor appeared.

I wish somebody would come out and fight, Storm thought sourly. Capturing a flesh-and-blood enemy and shutting down his or her rain-making gadget would almost certainly be easier than her current struggle. She drew more electricity forth from a towering jumble of clouds. The discharge blazed across the sky.

Helen rose into the air. It felt odd to fly simply by willing it, rather than by beating leathery wings. But the master hadn’t wanted the mutants to divine prematurely what manner of creature she truly was, and so he’d bestowed upon her the power to fly in human form.

But that change was trivial compared to the transformation yet to come. She wondered if the entity who was about to spring into existence would still be, in any true sense, herself, or if she was about to commit a particularly bizarre form of suicide. The latter possibility made her shiver as the pounding rain and the howling wind could not, but she told herself to trust in the sorcerer’s promises.

After ascending for half a minute, she spotted two women floating in the air. The one in the cape and thigh-high boots gestured, and lighting burned across the sky.

So these were the X-Men. Super heroes or super terrorists, depending on whom one believed. Like everyone else, Helen had heard of such people, but never expected to see one. They hadn’t seemed to have anything to do with her world of blood-thirst and endless night.

Now that she’d found them, she suddenly felt a hunter’s urge to pounce. But at the moment, they were drifting within a few feet of one another, and if they were as powerful as the master claimed, it would be prudent to wait at least a little while in the hope that they’d move farther apart. The sorcerer had also told her that Storm and Rogue’s eyes were no keener than those of ordinary humans, and so, confident that the two mortals were unlikely to notice her lurking in the darkness, she hovered and watched.

Rogue had never considered herself a hero. A decent soldier maybe, what her teammate Wolverine might call a warrior, somebody who was belatedly trying to do some good in the world. But she’d caused too much harm and fought on the wrong side too many times in her chaotic life to delude herself into thinking she was anything more.

Storm, however, was all hero, as valiant and self-sacrificing a spirit as Rogue had ever known. With so many lives and homes in jeopardy, it was easy to imagine her hammering stubbornly away at the storm until she’d exhausted her mutant powers completely. At which point she’d no longer be able to fly.

Which meant that as far as Rogue was concerned, her primary responsibility here was to preserve her friend from a fatal fall. She studied the black woman’s face and movements, looking for signs of fatigue.

What she saw was somewhat reassuring. Though Ororo clearly was tiring, Rogue had seen her looking considerably worse, yet still well able to command the wind. The brunette decided she could leave her comrade to her own devices while she flew another patrol, just in case some superhuman megalomaniac actually was planning to pop up out of nowhere and take credit for the storm.

“I’m going to look around again,” she said. Intent on her labors, Ororo merely nodded. Spiraling outward and downward, Rogue flew away from her teammate.

For the moment, the lights of Natchez were still shining down below. Rogue imagined floodwater raging across the city, putting out the lamps, smashing its way into homes, businesses, and the antebellum mansions in the heart of town, and grimaced. It was surprising how protective she felt of this country of bayous and pine forests, of soybean and cotton fields, considering how little she recalled of her time here. But maybe that was why. Her genuine memories were so spotty and tangled with those she’d stolen from others that it made her treasure her few surviving recollections of her childhood, of a happy, innocent time before she became a menace to everyone around her, all the more.

She glimpsed motion from the comer of her eye. Something was hurtling at her.

Rogue reflexively swooped lower to dodge. A rather small figure shot past, its outstretched hands snatching at the space her head had occupied a split second before.

You don’t know how lucky you are that you didn’t get a hold of me, Rogue thought. Cautious but unafraid—after all the tight scrapes she’d survived over the years, there was very little that scared her anymore—she flew toward her would-be assailant, who now hovered motionless as if to invite her approach.

Her attacker appeared to be a homely, scrawny, prim-looking woman in her late thirties, clad in a now-sodden, lacy blouse and navy suit. Sensible flat-heeled black shoes completed her ensemble. Overall, she reminded Rogue of a spinster librarian or teacher in an old movie. During her career as an adventurer, the X-Man had discovered that the unlikeliest looking people could sometimes possess extraordinary power, but even so, the newcomer, her ability to fly notwithstanding, didn’t look like much of a threat. She was certainly a far cry from standard-issue super-villains with their bulging muscles, garish costumes, gigantic guns, and miscellaneous hunks of body armor.

“Are you the lady who ordered up all this rain?” the mutant asked. “If you are, you took your time getting here. My friend and I had just about given up on you.”

The other woman grinned a feral grin, exposing fangs, and abruptly her appearance didn’t seem harmless or humorous at all. “No,” she said. “The master conjured the storm. I’m just the lady who’s come to kill you.” Her eyes gleaming red, she rocketed forward.

All right, darlin’, thought Rogue, closing her fists, let’s party. Take your best shot, I’ll knock you around a little, and then ’Roro and I’ll sweat some answers out of you. She calmly held her position until the crimson-eyed woman had nearly closed the distance between them, then shifted to the side and threw a punch, using only a fraction of her strength. She didn’t dare hit an opponent of unknown capacities as hard as she could for fear of killing her. If her attacker shrugged off this blow, then she’d slug her harder next time.

Midway to the target, her yellow glove burst into flame and burned away to nothing in an instant, as if the thin woman’s body was surrounded by a corona of invisible fire. Rogue felt no discomfort—her skin was far too tough for that, even if the blaze hadn’t flared up and died so quickly—but she experienced a jolt of horror nonetheless.

Because her true mutant gift was neither Herculean strength, invulnerability, nor flight. It was the power to leech away another person’s memories and capabilities whenever they touched skin to skin, even if she didn’t want to. It forever denied her the joys of physical intimacy. The assimilation of someone else’s thoughts and emotions, even when it only happened at an unconscious level, inevitably undermined her sanity and sense of self. Even worse, sometimes the transfer was permanent, leaving her victims damaged. When she was just a teenager and her power first manifested itself, her kiss had plunged her beloved friend Cody into a coma which lasted until the day he died. She could soar through the air, lift a fifty-ton weight, and shrug off bullets because she’d stolen those abilities from a woman named Carol Danvers, leaving her powerless and emotionally barrers

Thus she avoided using her talent except in the most dire emergencies, and now she did her best to stop her blow. But it was too late. Her bare knuckles still grazed the red-eyed woman’s jaw.

Even that fleeting contact was sufficient to initiate the transfer. Indeed, the other woman’s essence raged into her mind like fioodwater bursting through a breach in a dike, as if she wasn’t stealing it at all. As if her victim was forcing her thoughts and powers on her. Momentarily overwhelmed, it was all Rogue could do to keep herself aloft.

Meanwhile, stunned into unconsciousness, the crimsoneyed woman—a vampire, Rogue now knew, whose name was Helen Purvis—fell. That helpless, tumbling, thing is me, the X-Man thought in mingled horror and fascination. Or at least it was. And it’ll shrivel and die as soon as the sun comes up.

She realized that she didn’t want to think about that. Wrenching her eyes away before Helen struck the surface of the water, she began to take stock of herself, and what she found sent a thrill of elation singing through her. She was many times stronger than Helen had ever been, and her power to wrest away the thoughts and capacities of any victim made the other woman’s simple blood-drinking seem a paltry thing indeed. She’d never lusted to use her gift before—indeed, she would have paid any price to be rid of it—but suddenly such squeamishness was inconceivable. Now she hungered to devour someone’s else vitality.

Fortunately, sustenance was near at hand, in the form of prey whose superhuman energies would invigorate her as no ordinary victim’s could. Smiling in anticipation, her fangs lengthening even though she didn’t need them anymore, she pulled off her remaining glove and let it drop. Then she soared upward toward Storm, who was still concentrating so fiercely on undoing the master’s handiwork that she evidently hadn’t even noticed the confrontation unfolding under her feet.

Lightning flared, illuminating Ororo’s lovely, frowning features. Beholding them, Rogue halted her ascent in confusion and dismay.

Storm was her friend. She didn’t want to hurt her. She didn’t want to use her power on anyone. Or rather, she did— the urge seethed inside her—but only because something was wrong with her.

Though her mind was in disarray, she dimly comprehended what was happening to her, because she’d experienced something similar before. Helen’s essence was too strong. It was contaminating her own thoughts and threatened to possess her completely. If it succeeded, she would essentially be Helen, a merciless predator who hungered for the vital energy of others.

Ororo glanced down, and, seeing her teammate hanging just a few feet beneath her, floated lower, her silver tresses streaming in the wind. At her approach, Rogue’s hunger welled up inside her. She opened her mouth to warn her friend away, but simultaneously levitated to meet her.

“Your eyes!” Storm exclaimed in surprise, and then Rogue grabbed her right forearm just above the dark, steel alloy bracelet.

Ororo convulsed and went limp, while Rogue discovered that her power was working a bit differently than it ever had before. The transfer of energies seemed slower, yet even more powerful, powerful enough to wrest away a victim’s very life. The influx of energy felt so good that it set her to laughing madly.

But despite her ecstasy, a part of her fragmented self still loved Storm and loathed what she was doing to her, and after a moment that seemed to last forever, that portion clawed its way to a fragile ascendancy. She shoved her friend violently away, then turned and fled before Helen’s hunger could master her anew.

In her addled state, Rogue flew for several minutes before realizing that she’d just left her depleted, unconscious teammate to plummet to her death.

Chapter 2

Angus Graham advanced down the copper fencing strip with short, crisp steps, his knees deeply flexed, his arm straight, and the point of his electric epee threatening Kurt Wagner’s sword hand. The score was all tied up at four touches each, but Angus was smiling confidently behind the wire mesh of his mask, and Kurt wasn’t surprised. The Scot was an A-rated fencer and a force to be reckoned with, here at the Edinburgh Open or any other tournament in Britain.

Kurt let his arm droop, exposing his wrist, encouraging his opponent to take a shot, and Angus seemingly took the bait. Kurt spun his epee in a circle-six parry. But Angus disengaged, evading the defensive action, and his point streaked on toward the target.

Kurt frantically hopped backward and parried again in four, barely catching the other man’s weapon and sweeping it safely to the side. He whipped his arm, his blade bowed, and his point flicked down, catching Angus on the white nylon sleeve of his jacket. The buzzer in the scoring box brayed, signaling a touch.

“Halt!” the director barked. “Point left. Bout.”

The two fencers saluted one another, removed their masks, and shook hands. “Nice match,” said Angus, grinning, “but I’ll get you next time.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Kurt replied.

He unplugged his body cord from the cable that had connected him to the reel at his end of the strip, handed the line to the next fencer, wished him luck, and vacated the playing area. When he looked around the gymnasium, where a dozen bouts were being fought at once while other fencers looked on to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, he felt a surge of pure happiness.

Lord, but he loved to fence! He’d fallen in love with the idea of swordplay when he was just a boy, upon viewing swashbuckling movies like Captain Blood and The Mark of Zorro, and the reality had more than lived up to his expectations. He was grateful for Charles Xavier’s holographic image inducer, which allowed the mutant known as Nightcrawler— a blue-furred, yellow-eyed, three-fingered elf of a man with a prehensile tail—to assume the guise of Douglas Flynn, a devilishly handsome but otherwise seemingly ordinary human. Kurt preferred not to use the inducer for the most part, feeling it hypocritical to fight for acceptance of mutants among humanity while simultaneously hiding his true face. But without it, he could never have been accepted into events like this as just another amateur athlete.

A slender blonde of medium height sauntered up to him. She was Amanda Sefton, sorceress, his sometime comrade in the team of adventurers called Excalibur, and, despite some rocky times, the abiding love of his life. “Well,” she murmured in a voice too low for anyone else to overhear, her blue eyes shining mischievously, “doesn’t the mighty super hero look pleased with himself for beating up on a poor unsuspecting weekend warrior?”

Nightcrawler arched an eyebrow. “If I’m not mistaken, liebchen, Angus was Scottish national champion three years back. That makes him a relatively formidable ‘weekend warrior.’ And you know, it’s not as if I have inhuman speed like Quicksilver, or incredible strength like Hank. I’m no faster or stronger than a normal human.”

“Provided that the human used to be a trapeze artist, and has kept himself in perfect shape ever since.”

Kurt shrugged. “The point is, that while I can teleport and cling to a sheer wall, my gifts are such that I can choose not to use them, and compete with other fencers fairly.”

“I know that,” the sorceress said, relenting. “I was only teasing. Sometimes you get so puffed up when you’re doing well at these things that it’s hard to resist. It’s—” She winced.

‘ ‘Is something wrong?’ ’ asked Kurt.

“No,” she said, massaging her temple with her fingertips. “I mean, it just feels like the start of a headache. If I can’t rub or meditate it away, I’ve got some aspirin in my bag. I was starting to say, it’s noon-ish.” Her mouth tightened, as if at another twinge of pain. “Shall I run out and buy us some lunch? There’s a cafe right around the comer. I can be back in plenty of time to cheer you on through the direct eliminations.”

The mutant caressed her cheek with his free hand. “You,” he said, “are a ministering angel. I probably should eat something, especially since I still have the sabre competition after this. But before you go anywhere, why don’t you sit down and relax for—”

Amanda’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her knees buckled. Dropping his mask and epee to the floor, Kurt grabbed her to keep her from falling.

The young sorceress thrashed as if she were having a seizure, slumped, and then, to Kurt’s astonishment, calmly straightened up, shrugged off his hands, and gave him a contemptuous sneer that was utterly unlike any expression he’d ever seen on her face before.

“Nightcrawler,” she said. Like Kurt, she’d grown up among the Rom in Bavaria but spoke perfect English, generally without so much as a trace of an accent. Now, however, he heard one tingeing her voice. “Your disguise nonplussed me for a moment. But of course, you would have to hide those freakish looks of yours to mingle with the rabble. Otherwise they’d bum you at the stake.”

“What are you talking about?” Kurt asked, so bewildered and upset that he almost forgot to speak softly. “I’ve had the image inducer turned on all day, ever since we left the island. Don’t you remember?”

Amanda sighed. “You’re slow, X-Man. You’ve been keeping company with this sad excuse for a witch ever since I’ve known you, and you’ve walked with mages of genuine power. Yet, in spite of all your experience with the supernatural, you still fail to recognize a case of simple possession when it’s looking you directly in the face.”

In point of fact, Kurt had seen other people invaded and controlled by disembodied minds. Was that what had happened to Amanda? The possibility filled him with horror and rage. “Get out of her,” he said.

“Of course, you are the devout Christian of your ragtag band,” Amanda—or the being inside Amanda—continued, ignoring his demand, “and Christians are generally stupid. They have to be, don’t you think, to maintain their puerile faith in the face of all the pain and injustice in the world.” She smiled a malevolent smile. “Or have you maintained it? By now, you’ve seen enough horror to fill a hundred ordinary mortal lifetimes, from the genocidal madness of the ignorant masses to the boundless savagery of the N’Garai. Did your childish, blinkered beliefs weather each and every atrocity? Or have you, in your heart of hearts, begun to doubt?”

“Get out of her,” Kurt repeated, his voice a slow, dangerous whisper.

Amanda grinned. “What will you do if I refuse? Strike me? If you want your lover’s tender young body damaged, I’d be happy to attend to it for you.” With one fluid motion, she stooped and retrieved the fallen epee. “I could, for example, compel her to impale herself on this. And I will, unless you compose yourself and converse with me like the gentleman whom, judging from your sport of choice, you evidently imagine yourself to be.”

Nightcrawler drew a deep breath, to steady himself. “All right, we’ll talk. Who are you?”

“If you haven’t already surmised, I prefer to withhold my identity for the moment.”

Actually, Kurt suspected that he did know, though he fervently hoped he was mistaken. “Then tell me what you want.”

“Simply to parley face to face, both of us in our own bodies, about a matter of mutual concern. Meet me at nine tonight, on this Muir Island of yours, in front of your citadel. Bring your trollop here, along with dull, earnest Piotr, and impudent, meddling Kitty.”

Kurt felt marginally reassured, since at least the spirit evidently intended to terminate its possession of Amanda. “What about the rest of Excalibur?”

“I’m told you command the team, so send them away. I don’t wish to contend with a veritable mob of super heroes.” Her tone suffused the appellation with mockery. “I’ve learned the hard way just how excitable and unreasonable you upstarts can be. I also prefer to deal with people who are known quantities, and who have firsthand experience of the business before us.”

“Which is?”

“Patience, X-Man. Had I wished to enlighten you now, I would already have done so. I’ll make everything clear tonight.”

“What if I say that’s not good enough? That if you won’t give me some answers now, my friends and I will have no part of you.”

Amanda swayed drunkenly. “Possession under these circumstances is rather difficult,” she observed. “I wouldn’t have resorted to it to contact you if time were not of the essence. But rest assured that if need be, I can retain control for awhile longer, and I guarantee that if you won’t grant my really quite innocuous requests, then you won’t get dear Amanda back in anything approaching mint condition.”

“All right,” Kurt growled. He hated letting any enemy dictate to him, and his every instinct warned him that the possessing spirit was precisely that. But for the time being, he had little choice but to acquiesce. “Set Amanda free right now, come to our base tonight, and we’ll talk. But I warn you, one false move and we’ll take you down.”

“But of course,” the sorceress said. “That is to say, you’ll try. One more thing. Have your airplane ready for flight.” Without warning, she collapsed.

Caught by surprise, this time Kurt wasn’t quick enough to grab her, and she thumped down heavily onto the floor. Hastily he stooped over her, dropping into the crouch which was as natural to him as standing erect. She gazed blankly up at him for a moment, and then her face twisted into a mask of anguish. Sobbing hysterically, she flung herself into his arms.

Chapter 3

When the woman woke, she was hanging in a gray-black void. Everything was silent and all of it—the darkness, the emptiness, and the quiet—seemed to echo the hollowness in her head. At first she had no thoughts at all, not even the suspicion that such a vacancy was wrong.

Then a surge of raw, instinctive terror jolted her, shrieking that she was in danger, demanding that she focus. Peering wildly about, she perceived the broad expanse of the river beneath her and, after a fashion, her intellect lurched to life. She still didn’t know precisely where she was, how she’d come to be there, or even who she was, but she recognized that she wasn't floating after all. She was plummeting through a benighted, rain-swept sky toward a lethal collision with the surface of the water far below.

She wanted to scream, to beg the remorseless and impersonal powers of Nature for a mercy they would never grant, to shriek out her rage at the doom that was overtaking her. Yet some instinct implored her not to panic, insisting in defiance of all reason that she possessed the ability to save herself if she could only draw it forth.

When she groped for that capacity, she actually did sense it inside her, but the discovery failed to blunt the fear still clawing at her mind. The talent, whatever it was, had shriveled like a hand withered by palsy.

The Earth reached up for her. She was now low enough to make out pieces of flotsam racing along in the river.

She told herself not to worry about her mysterious power having all but crumbled away, to concentrate instead on recalling or discovering what it did.

Unfortunately, strain as she might, she couldn’t remember anything about it. Nor could she analyze its properties merely by concentrating on the way it felt, lying dormant and crippled in her mind and body.

But perhaps analysis was the wrong approach. The power wasn’t a machine, some instrumentality separate from herself. It was a part of her, just like her limbs, and a person didn’t have to exercise conscious, methodical control over her legs to make them walk. She simply had to decide to move, and her nerves and muscles did the rest.

The falling woman did her best to stop thinking. Instead she tried to trust the power, to feel and accept it as an innate part of herself, and then to exert it as instinctively as she might reach out and pluck an apple from a tree.

For a second or two, nothing happened. Then, debilitated though it was, her gift stirred. She perceived the atmosphere around her almost as if it were solid and she were touching every molecule of it at once. She willed the air directly beneath her to blast upward in a steady stream forceful enough to arrest her descent.

Overtaxed, her power strained while her muscles ached and clenched in sympathy with the struggle. An updraft gusted too feebly to do her any good, faltered, then blew again, this time more powerfully. Ever so gradually, her fall slowed, until at last she was floating about fifty feet above the river, the folds of her black cape swelling with the wind that held her up.

Then, abruptly, her talent died like a candle burning out. She fell again.

She could tell that for the moment at least, the power was gone beyond recall. Acting on instinct once more, she arched her back and straightened her limbs, arranging her body for a dive.

She entered the water cleanly, perpendicular to its surface, and plunged deep into its lightless depths. Strangely, the cold, smothering blackness brought the worst surge of terror yet, as if she’d been buried alive. The fear now was even more intense than at the instant when she’d first realized she was falling.

Frantically she kicked and stroked upward. At last, she broke the surface, and the hysterical dread abated.

Treading water, she took stock of her situation. She was a long way from shore and already weary, but even so, she thought she had a chance to make it to safety. That was because she now remembered that she loved to swim and was good at it. In fact, though the rest of the past was still a blank, she clearly recalled a moment from her childhood: splashing about naked and alone in a lake under a tropical sun, while several oryx, long since grown accustomed to her presence, ambled down to the water to drink.

Her cape would hinder her movements, and her alloy bracelets, light though they were considering their bulk, would weigh her down, so she left them in the river. She considered pulling off her high, skintight boots as well, but they were made of something so light that she doubted they’d be a problem. Like a wetsuit, they might even help to stave off hypothermia.

She started swimming, essentially moving right along with the swollen, muddy river, but trying to maintain a slight diagonal that would, theoretically, carry her to shore. If she attempted to reach her destination any more directly, it would mean fighting the current, and its power, vastly strengthened by the runoff from the storm, would very likely overwhelm her.

The rain made a sizzling sound as it pounded the surface of the river. Waterlogged strands of her long white hair plastered themselves to her face. I should have kept the mohawk, she thought wryly, then realized she’d regained another memory.

Suddenly some sixth sense warned her she was in danger. Glancing back, she saw the black bulk of a barge, laden with a pyramid of logs and broken loose from its moorings, come scudding out of the darkness, bearing down on her as if some murderous pilot were steering it.

She tried to flounder out of its path, then saw that she wasn’t going to make it. Desperately she dove beneath the surface, allowing the barge to pass above her. In her still-muddled condition, it was only after she came up again that it occurred to her that she might conceivably have grabbed hold of the vessel and hauled herself aboard, and by that time it was already lost in the gloom.

Gradually a chill crept into her flesh, while her muscles grew numb with fatigue. She started to fear that she wouldn’t reach land after all. At the end, she was laboring so desperately simply to keep her head above water that she virtually lost her bearings. She was surprised when the current swept her through an open gate in a concrete levee and down a diversionary canal.

A steel ladder, bolted to the wall on her left, appeared in the gloom ahead. She fought to steer herself toward it with all her failing strength, and, her arm outstretched, just managed to grab it before the water could sweep her by.

She pulled herself onto the ladder and clung with all her might, like a frightened child clinging to her mother. She wasn’t sure she could climb it, but she knew she had to try. If she simply stayed where she was, submerged to the shoulders in the rushing water, she would only grow colder and weaker until the current finally tore her from her perch.

So she dragged herself upward, one painful, faltering step at a time, while below her, the spillway hissed as if angry at being cheated of its plaything. Finally she hauled herself over the top of the ladder and onto a sheet of tarmac, where she sprawled, gasping and shivering, on her belly.

Eventually, when her breathing eased a little, she heard voices to her left. Wiping wet hair from her eyes, she turned her head in that direction. Several yards away, four men in day-glow orange slickers and yellow hardhats were consulting a set of maps and documents sealed in plastic to protect them from the downpour.

The white-haired woman tried to call to them for help, but her first feeble cry was too faint for them to hear. She sucked in a breath to try again, and then another flash of memory made her hesitate.

She had enemies—powerful, cunning, merciless foes who would love to see her perish. She could even picture a few of them, albeit not clearly: a white-haired man who generally wore a helmet, a creature who resembled a cross between a human being and a winged dinosaur, a pale man with metallic-looking skin. One of them might well have hurled her down from the sky. Until she remembered who she was and who they were, it would be reckless to trust anyone, particularly in her weakened condition. For the time being, she’d have to fend for herself.

She silently drew herself to her feet. The stealthy action felt familiar and accomplished, and she realized that whoever she was, she must have once trained hard to master the art of sneaking about undetected. Was she a hunter? Or a spy? Frustrated by her inability to recall, she tiptoed away from the oblivious men.

Lashed by the wind and rain, Rogue crouched beside a small satellite dish TV antenna mounted on the pitched, shingled roof of a two-story wooden house. She couldn’t remember how or why she’d come to land in that particular place. As near as she could determine, she was blacking out occasionally, a byproduct of her own personality battling for dominance with Helen Purvis’s inside her.

At least she hadn’t attacked anyone during the blackout, or at any rate she didn’t think so. If she had, surely she wouldn’t be so wracked with hunger now.

Below her, a door banged, voices sounded, and the front porch creaked. A heavyset man and a lanky teenage boy lumbered into view carrying a large television, wrapped in plastic and duct tape to protect it from the rain. They shoved it into the back of a battered blue Chevy pickup, then headed back inside, no doubt for more possessions too precious to abandon to a flood.

Despite the downpour, with her newly heightened senses, Rogue could smell the scent of the humans’ warm flesh marbled with its intricate network of arteries and veins, just as she could hear the thumping of their hearts. Even though it was no longer blood she craved, her awareness of the vital fluid pulsing through the mortals’ bodies still enflamed her hunger another notch. She clutched at the roof as if to anchor herself in place. Her fingertips shredded shingles and bit into the planks beneath.

Father and son disappeared back inside their home. Rogue resolved to flee before they returned. But as she rose into the air, a small woman struggled through the door, a pair of overstuffed, green plastic garbage bags in her arms. She’d cut holes in another such sack, then pulled it over her head to serve as a makeshift poncho.

Suddenly the hunger was in control. Indeed, Rogue only vaguely recalled that she’d ever had any qualms about indulging it. Leering, she landed in a crouch between the human and the truck.

The woman was in her thirties, with pink cheeks, a wide, full-lipped mouth, and a snub nose. Despite her improvised hood, raindrops had already spotted her wire-rim glasses. Startled, she gasped and lurched backward, still reflexively clutching her bundles.

It was always amusing to see terror in the face of the prey. Despite her hunger, Rogue decided to draw the moment out a little. Gliding forward, she tore open the garbage bags, partly to get their bulky contents out of her way, but mostly just for the fun of undoing the human’s work. Framed photos, diplomas, certificates, scrapbooks, a wedding album, and a huge

old family Bible all spilled out into the mud and standing water. The front cover of the Bible split away from the spine.

The mutant reached for her victim’s face, and then the mortal shrieked. Perhaps it was her cry that jolted Rogue back to some semblance of sanity. The X-Man wrenched her hands back, whirled, and staggered away, though denying her compulsion like this, at the last possible moment, brought a pang of frustration as excruciating as torture. “Get back inside!” she croaked.

The porch groaned, and the door banged. That at least put the mortal woman out of sight. But Rogue still couldn’t help thinking just how easy it would be to follow her inside. With her strength, she could smash down the door with a flick of her hand, then stalk through the house draining everyone, first the mother, then the father, then however many children there were.

No! She forced herself to fly up and away, leaving the helpless family far behind. She wondered if she should travel on to some remote location, perhaps the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, to distance herself from other people. But it took energy to defy gravity, and she was afraid that the more she expended, the more ungovernable the hunger would grow. Eventually, after some wandering, she settled atop a red brick winery, with muscadine grape vines growing on trellises on the hillside behind it. As far as she could tell, no one was currently on the premises, and the establishment was set well back from the street and away from other buildings, so it promised at least a measure of isolation.

The hunger welled up inside her, and she nearly sobbed. Lord, why is this happening? Stolen memories had overwhelmed her before, but the effect invariably faded over time. In contrast, the essence of Helen Purvis was growing steadily stronger.

Sometimes she perceived Helen as a distinct and separate entity inside her head, wrestling her for control, and that was

frightening and dangerous enough. But often the alien personality simply permeated her thoughts and feelings like silt suspended in water, and that was infinitely worse, because it was far more difficult to resist. At certain moments, it made it impossible to discern where she ended and the vampire began.

Vampire. She’d never met such a monster before—supernatural threats were by no means the X-Men’s specialty—but some of her teammates had, and Helen clearly matched the description. It was nauseating to think that Rogue had assimilated the persona of something not merely malevolent or even inhuman but dead. Given the predator’s nocturnal nature, the mutant had prayed that Helen and her murderous desires might fall asleep when dawn broke, but no such luck. The sun had surely risen by now, though, due to the rain clouds covering the sky, the world was nearly as gloomy as before. Yet the vampire’s spirit was as active as ever.

Rogue was all but certain that she’d been set up to absorb Helen’s essence. That was why her glove had burst into flame. It was as if someone had poisoned her with a toxin designed to kill not her body but her soul.

Overhead, thunder rumbled. The rain poured down. Off in the distance, their headlights gleaming and their tires splashing up water, cars jammed the major highways of the beleaguered city as people attempted to evacuate

For the tenth time, Rogue resolved to call the other X-Men for help. Her hand shaking, she fumbled the black plastic cylinder of her Global Comm-Stat Unit from an inner pocket of her jacket. Inside her, the part that was Helen crowed and capered in delight. The vampire wanted her to ran to her teammates, because, much as she hungered for the vitality of ordinary mortals, she craved the life force of superhumans even more.

How could Rogue subject her friends to such a danger? For that matter, how could she face them after what she’d already done to Ororo? Snarling in despair, she clenched her fist, pulverizing the apparatus in her grasp.

“Rogue,” someone whispered.

Startled, the mutant jerked around. No one else was on the roof. She wondered if Helen was speaking to her, and, in her muddled state, she’d mistaken the quasi-hallucination for a real sound.

“Rogue.” This time the voice was slightly louder. Loud enough for her to perceive it as deep, mellifluous, and masculine, and therefore probably not a manifestation of the malevolent spirit contaminating her own.

“Who are you?” the mutant asked. “Please go away. I’m dangerous.”

The newcomer chuckled. “Not to me, I promise.” Listening to him, Rogue suddenly felt a surge of elation, like a lost child sighting her mother, or a woman seeing the love of her life unexpectedly step from a crowd. She didn’t truly recognize the voice she was hearing, yet somehow she felt as if she did.

“Where are you?” she repeated.

“Directly in front of you. Well, not entirely, not in the flesh, but you’ll be able to see me if you gaze with the eyes of the spirit.”

Rogue peered as hard as she could, and eventually she did see him, a blurry, translucent image hanging in the air. His features seemed especially indistinct, as if mere mortals weren’t permitted to behold them in all their glory, but she could make out brown hair, a tall, imposing frame, archaic crimson clothing, a golden amulet and a wristband, and a long, heavy sword in a scabbard. His purple-lined cloak seemed to hang a bit unevenly, fuller on the left than the right, as if he had the arm on the latter side tucked behind his back.

“Who are you?” she breathed.

“A friend,” he replied, “come to help in your hour of need.”

Despite the hope that the figure in red inspired, Rogue’s eyes narrowed. “That answer’s a little short on detail.”

“I know,” replied the man with the sword. “But there are levels of reality where the inhabitants don’t use names, just as there are questions that don’t have simple answers.”

“Are you saying you’re an angel?” She realized she was jumping to conclusions, yet, the way the apparition made her feel, it was astonishingly easy to believe.

The caped man smiled. Rogue sensed it somehow, even though the apparition’s features were still veiled, and despite her distress, fleetingly smiled in return. ‘ ‘That, I suppose, is a question of perspective. Suffice it to say, I’ve been watching you for a long while. Don’t you sense that to be so?”

She did. The swordsman was a stranger, yet not. Somehow they shared a bond. ‘ ‘Can you cure me?”

“Yes. I can take away your pain. More than that, I can lead you to your destiny, a glorious culmination like no other since the advent of humanity. Your current state, noisome though it seems, has a higher purpose than torment. It will prepare you to remake the world.”

The phantasm’s words made Rogue feel proud and full of wonder. But they frustrated her as well, because she really didn’t understand them, though she felt that she should. If only she could clear the fog from her head! “What are you talking about? Tell me what you mean!”

The apparition sighed. “Once again, child, the explanation is long and involved, and as we dawdle here, your dark sister is enslaving you.” As if on cue, Rogue experienced a pang of hunger so keen that, shaking, she had to grit her teeth to hold in a moan. “Can’t you simply trust me?”

“I don’t know. I’m confused. I want to.”

“Then do it. Come to my sanctuary and let me take your pain away. Come swiftly, before the hunger masters you, and you kill again.”

Rogue flinched. “I—I really did kill Storm?”

“Yes.”

⁴ ‘Are you sure? I know I broke off the transfer before her heart stopped.” Actually, she wasn’t sure, but she’d been clinging desperately to the hope.

“Yes, but you stole her power and then you let her fall.”

“But maybe I didn’t take every bit of it! We’ve all cheated certain death a hundred times!”

“No one cheats it forever,” said the swordsman gently. “Remember, you went back to look for her and found nothing, because by that time, the river had swept her lifeless body far downstream.”

“Poor ’Roro,” whispered Rogue, her eyes stinging. “I’m so sorry.”

‘ ‘I beg you to put yourself in my hands,’ ’ said the swordsman. “While we still have time to avert another such tragedy.”

“All right,” said Rogue, “What have I got to lose? No matter who you are, there’s nothing you or anyone could do to make the situation worse.” The decision eased her anguished mind at once. Indeed, she felt a glow of profound satisfaction, as if she’d just completed a difficult and important task.

“Thank you,” said the figure in red. “Bless you for your faith. Follow this vision, and it will guide you—” His speech faltered, perhaps because Rogue had frowned abruptly.

Why should she feel satisfied, when all she’d done of late was kill Storm and threaten other innocent people? The emotion made no sense, which suggested that it rightfully belonged to Helen. Perhaps much of what she’d been feeling, her immediate inclination to regard the swordsman as some sort of exalted being and do whatever he asked, had flowed from the vampire as well. And if it was Helen who worshipped the stranger, then Rogue had every reason to distrust him.

“No!” she snapped. “Forget it! What kind of sucker do you think I am? I’m not following you anywhere until you give me some solid information. For all I know, you set me up to drain Helen just so I would hand myself over to you.” Once again, she could feel the apparition smile, but this time, there was nothing beatific or reassuring about it. “Bravo, X-Man. You have sharper wits than I gave you credit for. More resiliency of spirit as well, to resist the possession as well as you have. Alas, it won’t matter in the long run.” “That’s what you think. Whatever happens, I’ll never give myself up to you now.”

“Don’t be naive. Of course you will. Your mind will crumble until you no longer even remember this conversation. Your hunger will grow until you’re willing to do anything, anything at all, to rid yourself of the burden, and if by some fluke you resist me even then, Helen will still destroy your soul. I know, I envenomed her spirit with enchantments devised to achieve that very purpose. In the end, there will be no one left inside that pretty head but her, and then she will perform the sacred task that you were bom to accomplish.”

Rogue screamed as she hurled herself at the stranger. Laughing, the translucent image vanished.

Chapter 4

The short, muscular man with the black muttonchop whiskers regarded the articles laid out on his bed. His Stetson and fleece-lined jacket. A canteen. An extra plaid flannel shirt, a pair of faded blue jeans, socks, and underwear. A mess kit. A coffee pot and a packet of strong Jamaican java. A box of Fuente Fuente Opus cigars and a Savinelli lighter, a silver flask, and a paperback copy of The Pillow-Book of Sei Shotn-agon in the original Japanese. And his leather backpack to hold it all.

Since he was already wearing his freshly waterproofed hiking boots, it looked as if he had everything. Of course, most outdoorsmen would never have considered venturing into the wildest reaches of the Canadian Rockies without a number of other items: a knife, a hatchet, a first aid kit, rations, a compass, and a map, for starters. But a guy who could pop foot-long, razor-sharp claws out of the backs of his hands didn’t need cutting implements, and if he also possessed bones reinforced with the unbreakable alloy adamantium and a metabolism that could heal wounds and shed illnesses in a matter of minutes, he didn’t have much use for bandages and aspirin, either. As for the rest, well, the mutant called Logan could have survived comfortably if someone had dropped him down in the wilderness stark naked. He knew because he’d done it. For him, the meager collection of amenities he’d assembled was roughly the equivalent of a fully stocked luxury RV, and indeed, contemplating it now, he snorted and told himself he was getting soft.

There was one article he was especially eager to leave behind, and that was the yellow, black, and blue battlesuit he wore when operating as Wolverine. Not that he disliked being an X-Man. In his less cynical moments, he believed in Charley Xavier’s dream, just as he liked his teammates most of the time. They even liked him in return, and that, he often felt, given the more abrasive facets of his personality, could fairly be considered a minor miracle. But for the moment, he’d had his fill. The X-Men’s latest adventure saw him nearly getting mauled by velociraptors in prehistoric times, being charbroiled by a super-villain on a South Seas island, and staving off acid-bleeding alien slugs on a far-future space station. The animal that lived inside his skin was restless. He needed to get away by himself for awhile, somewhere where there weren’t any buildings, babbling televisions, rumbling motors, stinking exhaust fumes, or threats of any kind to the future of humanity and let the beast run free.

The phone on the night stand chimed. A scowl twisted his rugged, dark-eyed features into something that had more than once frozen would-be assailants dead in their tracks. Then he picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he growled.

“Logan,” said the baritone voice of Scott Summers. The senior X-Man, the first mutant Xavier had ever recruited, was a sober sort at the best of times, and when something was actually wrong, as it apparently was now, he could sound positively funereal. “I’m glad I caught you.”

“You didn’t,” said Wolverine.

“Excuse me?”

“It don’t matter that I ain’t hit the road yet. I already started my leave, and right now I don’t care if you got Magneto kidnapping the Commissioner of Baseball or Apocalypse at the front door delivering a candygram. Whatever’s going on, if it’s too heavy for the team you got left to deal with, hand it off to the Avengers. Let them earn their keep for once.”

“I wish I could, but this is about two of our own. We don’t know for certain yet, but it’s possible something’s happened to Rogue and Ororo.”

Logan sighed. If there was a chance that any of his teammates was in danger, then of course walking away was out of the question. “Where are you?”

“In the main computer room with Jean.”

“I’m on my way.” Wolverine dropped the phone back onto its cradle and headed for the door.

As he strode through the airy, spacious second floor of the mansion, past the doors to the bedrooms of his fellow X-Men, he couldn’t help noticing how quiet the building was. Periodically his hypersenstive nose caught the scents of his teammates. The musk of Hank McCoy’s fur. The tickling frozen smell-that-wasn’t-a-smell of Bobby Drake’s ice form. The gun-oil tang that clung to Bishop and the lavender sweetness of the bath oil Psylocke favored. But none of the smells was fresh, and for some reason, its immaculately maintained opulence not withstanding, the huge house felt not merely vacant but abandoned, as if none of his friends were ever coming back.

Grimacing, Wolverine strove to shmg off his sense of foreboding. He descended the curved staircase to the foyer, then stalked on through Xavier’s study, an oak-paneled room decorated with a set of delicate Venetian crystal goblets, Roman and Crusader coins excavated in Jerusalem, a Masai spear and wicker shield, an Egyptian scarab, prayer rug, and hookah, and other mementos gathered from around the world. Like Logan, Charley had done a fair amount of wandering in his time, before a battle with the alien marauder called Lucifer deprived him of the use of his legs. As in most other sections of the mansion, the furnishings here had been carefully placed to facilitate the passage of the crippled telepath’s hoverchair.

Beyond the study was the primary computer room, filled with gleaming gray banks of machines that were more than the equal of anything that NASA or the Pentagon could muster. Geniuses like Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Forge, and Xavier himself had designed the equipment, the capabilities of which had subsequently been augmented with the advanced technology of the Shi’ar, whose intergalactic empire the X-Men had saved from annihilation a time or two.

Scott Summers was tall, lean, and brown-haired, with a severe set to his mouth that sometimes made Logan think of black-clad Puritans shunning temptation in colonial New England. In contrast, Jean was a lovely redhead with bright green eyes, whose features generally reflected a sweetness and vivacity so endearing that they could often charm even her dour husband into relaxing and having fun, though she looked as worried as he did at the moment.

Like Wolverine, the pair were dressed in casual civilian clothing, with nothing to hint at their mutant powers but the heavy red wraparound glasses—more like safety goggles than an ordinary pair of spectacles—that covered Cyclops’s eyes. Scott had to wear some sort of covering made of ruby quartz over his eyes every moment of his life, to restrain the scarlet energy that would otherwise erupt from his pupils and blast anything in front of him, a concern that partially accounted for his sobriety. Logan supposed that the loss of his family when he was only a boy and his subsequent placement in an orphanage probably hadn’t done much to lighten him up either.

Phoenix was seated in front of one of the terminals, its monitor currently tuned to WNN. A steaming cup of herbal tea—comfrey leaf with lemon, by the smell of it—sat near the keyboard. Cyke stood beside her with his hand on her shoulder. When Logan had first joined the X-Men, the pair were already lovers but not yet married, and, smitten with Jean and chafing under Scott’s no-nonsense authority as field commander, he’d foolishly aspired to take her away from him. But that had been a long time ago. In the years since, he’d come to accept that the bond between them was unassailable, and even to regard the both of them as friends, or at least he thought he had. But now, seeing them so close together, touching, he felt a pang of heartache and resentment.

Man, thought Logan, disgusted with himself, I must be even more burned out than I thought. I have got to get away from this lunatic asylum for awhile. Struggling to quash the jealousy churning inside him, he said, “Tell me.”

“I wish there were more to tell,” said Jean. “What it comes down to is that we haven’t heard from Rogue and Storm since they set down in Natchez last night, so I thought I’d check on them telepathically.” She maintained a constant, passive psychic link with all the members of the team, and could activate it at will in times of need. “No matter how hard I try, I can’t reach them.”

“Any other time, that would bother me too,” said Logan, and that was no bull. He had the utmost respect for Jean’s psionic abilities. “But right now, you’re beat. You’ve been through the wringer just like the rest of us. Maybe you just don’t have enough juice left to reach a coupla minds hundreds of miles away.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not it,” said Phoenix, lifting her hand and placing it over Scott’s. “I am tired, but if I push hard, I can pick up everyone else, and they’re all a lot farther away. It’s only Ororo and Rogue that I can’t sense.”

“Could it be atmospherics?” asked Wolverine. “That’s a hell of a storm hanging over Natchez. That’s why they went there.”

“That wouldn’t usually interfere with telepathy,” the redhead replied.

“What would?” Logan said. Actually, he’d been working with mentalists long enough to have a pretty good idea already, but he’d learned during his years as a Canadian intelligence agent that this kind of methodical exploration, not skipping any steps, was the best way to make sure you understood the parameters of a situation.

“Some sort of psi shield,” said Jean. “Or perhaps something that altered or dampened Rogue and Storm’s brain waves to such a degree that I can’t recognize them anymore. Drugs could conceivably do it.”

Or death, thought Wolverine. Death dampens brain waves real good. Reminding himself that Storm and Rogue were two of the most powerful X-Men, about as capable of looking after themselves as anyone he’d ever met, he tried to push the grim notion out of his head. “Okay, I get the picture. But before we go off half-cocked, have you tried the GCS linkup? Rogue and ’Roro were packing their communicators, right?” Rogue typically carried her Comm-Stat Unit in her jacket, while the windrider, whose uniform had neither pockets nor a belt, had had hers built into one of her bracelets.

“They were supposed to be,” said Scott, “I was just about to try that when it occurred to me that I’d better call you first, to make sure you didn’t get away.” He sat down in front of the communications console and switched on the power.

It seemed to take a moment for the board to light up, as if the circuits were responding sluggishly. When the console was finally operational, Cyclops pressed the luminous, white plastic touchpad bearing Ororo’s name. “Storm, do you read me?” he said.

No one replied. Static crackled from the speaker.

“Storm,” Scott repeated, “this is home base. Come in.” Still no answer. Cyclops pressed Rogue’s touchpad and attempted to hail her, with the same lack of results.

“Try the Blackbirdsaid Phoenix, referring to the modified SR-71 their teammates had flown to Mississippi. “Maybe they’re still aboard.”

Scott activated yet another touchpad. “Blackbird, do you read me? Respond, please.”

Static.

“Atmospherics really could screw up the GCS,” said Logan, “but Jeannie’s psi and the communicators punking out at the same time is way too much of a coincidence for me. You were right, Cyke, they are in trouble. Maybe somebody ambushed them.” He leaned past Phoenix, grabbed her computer’s mouse, dragged down a menu, and accessed the National Weather Service. The monitor displayed a radar map of North America with a crawl of text—reporting rainfall, temperature, wind speed and direction, and other meteorological data—beneath it. An angry red blotch hung over the Natchez area. “Judging from this, I’m guessing that whatever happened, it happened hours ago. It sure looks like something took Ororo out of action before she even had a chance to put a dent in the storm.”

“This is my fault,” said Scott. “We all should have gone.” “Don’t say that,” said Jean, touching him on the arm. “There was no way you could have known.”

Scott shook his head. “Thanks, but that’s not true. Ororo warned us there was something unnatural about the weather.” “That didn’t automatically imply that somebody was going to attack her if she went out to fix it,” the redhead said. “It’s not as if some maniac like Moses Magnum had come forward claiming responsibility. It could have just been, I don’t know, El Nino causing the storm.”

“Still—”

Logan felt a pang of irritation. Scott second-guessing himself wasn’t helping anybody. “For what it’s worth,” the short man interrupted, “I didn’t have any kind of hunch that they were heading into trouble either. Besides, ’Roro’s a field commander the same as you, so if she thought it was okay for her and Rogue to go off by themselves, that was her call to make. Now what do you say you stop whining and we get to work.” For a moment Cyclops stiffened as if he’d taken offense. Then he grimaced and said, “Right. Sorry. At this point the important thing is to find them.”

“There’s one more thing we can try from here,” said Jean, turning toward a massive metal armchair surrounded by a ring of consoles. An oversized silver salad bowl of a helmet hung above the seat, attached to a jointed arm suspended from the ceiling. Depending on his mood, Logan had always thought the setup looked like it belonged either in a futuristic torture chamber or a beauty salon. “Cerebro.”

Cerebro was Xavier's greatest invention, an apparatus constructed to detect the presence of super-powered mutants anywhere in the world. Part of the brilliance of its design lay in the fact that anyone with the proper training could operate it, although, based on psionic principles that Wolverine didn't pretend to understand, it worked best for a telepath.

Ordinarily, neither Jean nor Charley would bother to fire up Cerebro merely to make contact with their fellow X-Men. The telepathic bonds they’d established made it unnecessary. But now, Logan realized, Phoenix might conceivably be able to use the gizmo to augment her innate power and punch through whatever interference was blocking her out. Assuming, of course, that that was really the problem.

Logan nodded. “Give it a shot.”

Jean walked over, sat down beneath the headpiece, and threw a switch on the arm of the chair. Cerebro hummed to life, and a series of icons blinked into existence on the monitor of the device’s housekeeping computer. The helmet came down to cover the top half of the telepath’s head. Another observer might have assumed that it had lowered itself mechanically, but Logan knew that his teammate had pulled it down with her telekinesis.

For half a minute, nothing happened, nothing perceptible to someone devoid of psi ability, anyway. Then Phoenix’s back arched and her arms flailed as if she’d received an electric shock. A red bulb glowed on the console before her, and an alarm buzzer blared.

“Jean!” Cyclops cried, scrambling toward her. Wolverine was right behind him.

Once again employing her psychokinesis, Jean flung the helmet off so forcefully that it clanged against the ceiling. Shivering, her face white, she panted, “I’m all right. But something's wrong with Cerebro. It started pumping raw psychic noise into my brain.” Her lips quirked into a wry, fleeting smile. ‘‘‘Loud raw psychic noise.”

Pivoting toward the monitor, Logan saw the message spectrum analyzer nonfunctional displayed in a little black box. He wondered angrily which of his teammates had been responsible for checking and servicing Cerebro last, and promised himself that when he got the chance, he’d let the pinhead know what he thought about his job performance.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” said Scott, touching Jean’s cheek.

She nodded. “I’m fine.”

“Then let’s see if I can fix this thing.” Crouching in front of the housekeeping computer, Cyclops called up a diagnostic program and started guiding it through its various routines. Looking on impatiently, Wolverine struggled to refrain from asking stupid questions and let his friend work. Scott wasn't a world-class scientist like Professor X or the Beast, but he had an abundance of mechanical aptitude, and was often pressed into service to repair any gadget that needed it, from blenders and toaster ovens to security doors with biomolecular locks and the presser beam projectors in the Danger Room.

Finally, frowning, he turned around. “I can’t tell what’s wrong,” he said. “Whatever it is, it could take hours to find and correct, and then there’s no guarantee it would solve our problem. We’ll have to go to Natchez and search the hard way.”

“Should we call back the rest of the team?” asked Jean.

Scott shook his head. “I doubt they could make it to Natchez in time to make a difference. Just talk to the Professor. Who knows, maybe he can find Rogue and Storm, even if he is a lot farther away. Meantime, Logan and I will get one of the auxiliary jets ready for takeoff.”

“I’m on it,” Phoenix said. Her green eyes widened and her face grew blank and still as her thoughts reached across the globe to Xavier, who was in Tokyo for a genetics conference, accompanied by Bishop and the Beast.

Logan and Scott left her to it. Impelled by a shared sense of urgency, by the time they reached the steps to the basement, they were running.

A concealed passageway connected the cellar to the first sub-basement with its medical facilities, pool, gymnasium, laboratories, and the high-speed magnetic rail system that linked the mansion to the hangars on the east side of the estate. Upon reaching the transport terminus, the two mutants scrambled aboard the first of the half dozen bullet-shaped cars waiting in line on the track. Scott hastily buckled his safety belt as proper procedure dictated. Logan didn’t bother with his, just hit the start button. Their vehicle shot down the tunnel. Acceleration shoved the X-Men back in their well-cushioned seats.

“Sorry about your vacation,” Cyclops said.

Logan made a spitting sound. “Don’t sweat it. It’s good I'm here. This is gonna be a rough one.”

“I expect so, if we’re going up against someone powerful enough to defeat Rogue and Storm, and neutralize Jean’s psi on top of it.”

“The situation could be even worse than that. What if Ororo and Rogue didn’t just draw somebody’s fire by showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time? What if the whole objective was to ambush them? I’ve got a nasty feeling that we’re up against someone so smart and so savvy about us that he’s playing us like a piano, and I don’t like it one little bit.”

Chapter 5

Fascinated, Carla Spelvin studied herself in the mirror of her little gold compact. Despite the loss of her reflection, she’d never quite brought herself to throw it away, and now that she could see herself once more, she was glad she hadn’t.

A touch on the shoulder made her jump. Lurching about, she met the master’s black, mocking eyes. “Do you approve of your new appearance?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carla said. Actually, it wasn’t that different from her old appearance. She and the X-Man called Rogue were both brunettes of nearly identical height and build and even had similar features. She supposed that was why the master had selected her for the task at hand. It had been relatively easy to magically transform her into the mutant’s twin. Easy for him, anyway—transfixed by his sword, she’d screamed and screamed as his power hammered and twisted her into a different sort of creature.

The sorcerer ran the talon on his forefinger lightly down her cheek. “I thought you would. The mutant is beautiful, isn’t she?”    ' *

Carla sensed that this was one of those occasions when it was safe to speak lightly to her lord. “Almost as beautiful as me.”

The horned man laughed. “Petty and narcissistic as ever, even now, when the gods are about to return. I’ve sometimes wondered, did you yield to your sire willingly, to preserve your youthful loveliness forever?”

Carla’s mouth tightened at the memory of the pain and terror of that night. “No. He jumped me outside a nightclub and drained me all at once. He never even spoke to me until after my resurrection.”

The man in the red cloak smiled as if the thought of her anguish amused him. ‘ ‘Ah. That was rather less than gallant, wasn’t it? You should have been pleased to exchange his yoke for mine.”

Carla thought wistfully that it might be nice not to be anyone’s slave, but she didn’t want to risk annoying him by saying so. “Yes, master.”

“Tell me, do you feel confident of your new abilities? Are you comfortable in Rogue’s skin?”

“Sure.” It was a half truth. She’d flown about, hefted and broken various objects, until she had a good sense of her new capabilities. But comfortable? Reshaped in the mutant’s image, she was so much stronger that it was intoxicating, yet sometimes frightening as well. As an ordinary vampire, she’d felt as if she were a being of cold stone and iron, indestructible and eternal. Now, at certain moments, her new power made her feel more like gossamer and glass, too frail to long contain the energies burning inside her.

She tried not to worry about it. No matter what happened to her now, the master had promised her life and glory in the world to come, and since she had no choice but to obey him in any case, that would have to be enough.

“Good,” the homed man said, “because it’s time for you to begin your impersonation. Rogue has taken the hook, but she’s still fighting. It will take a bit of time to reel her in.’’ And meanwhile, Carla knew, her job was to create enough turmoil and confusion to prevent anyone from interfering. “I won’t let you down,” she said.

“Of course not,” the sorcerer said. “You know better. And since you already have your instructions, I suppose that nothing remains but to give you my blessing.”

She knelt, and he pressed his hand against her forehead. A sharp sting, like a shock of static electricity, passed from his flesh to hers.

“Now go,” he said.

The vampire rose and, pulling on her brown leather jacket with the red and black X patch on the sleeve, walked to one of the tall, Gothic-style matchboarded doors in the vestibule. Beyond it, the wind whined, and rain drummed on the panel. She gripped the handle and then, despite herself, she faltered. In the end, it was her intense awareness of the master’s scrutiny that impelled her to crack open the door.

With mountainous black clouds blanketing the sky, the world outside was nearly as dark as the shadowy recesses of the master’s sanctum. Nevertheless, Carla could instantly feel that it was daylight spilling through the opening, hot and stinging on her face.

She flinched, but at the same time perceived that the adulterated sunlight wasn’t burning her. Transformed as she was, she could bear it, at least while the overcast endured, and she knew the master would maintain it as long as it served his purposes. Her fear fell away from her and she vaulted into the sky.

Rather enjoying the harsh, cold kiss of the weather, she flew back and forth across the part of the city to which her master had directed her, looking for a good place to begin her work. Below her, the river rose, traffic jammed the highways leading out of town, and mortals labored like ants to secure their property.-After a few minutes, a wailing siren snagged her attention. Emergency lights flashing and tires splashing up water, an orange and white ambulance had just pulled away from a fire station on Winchester Road.

Carla grinned. Everybody admired emergency workers, just as everyone was counting on them to help Natchez cope with the storm. If she wanted to rouse panic and outrage, she could hardly pick better targets.

She was some distance from Winchester Road, but th^was all right. In Rogue’s form, she could fly much faster than the ambulance was traveling. She streaked in front of it, then dove, fists clenched and extended.

The emergency vehicle loomed larger and larger. Back when she was a teenager, she’d once ridden in a car while the driver, her date, played chicken. For a moment, she felt much the same fear as she had then. The desperate urge to pull out of her dive was almost impossible to resist. But she was certain that her new powers would see her through the next few moments, and she wanted to make her debut as Rogue as spectacular as possible.

Since she was swooping down from above, the two EMTs behind the wheel didn’t see her until the last second. The driver froze, staring in horror. His partner opened his mouth as if to scream.

Then Carla smashed through the nose of the ambulance and the motor beyond. For an instant, the world was a chaos of crashing, crumpling metal dividing before her, and then she was clear. She’d passed completely through the vehicle, and, moving slower now, much of her momentum spent, was flying on down the street. Her body smarted from the impact, but as she’d predicted, she wasn’t injured.

Split nearly in two, its tires flat, the ambulance spun, then fell on its side. Carla flew to the front of it and peered through the cracked glass. The driver was unconscious or dead, bits of shrapnel protruding from his flesh, his entire body covered in blood. The sight of it made Carla’s mouth water, even though the master’s enchantments had taken away her hunger. Old habits died hard, she supposed. The EMT hanging in the passenger seat, a skinny young black man with a shaved head, struggled spastically with the buckle of his safety belt, but couldn’t get it open. It looked to Carla as if both his arms were broken.

When he noticed her leering in at him, he recoiled. “Don’t hurt me!” he whimpered.

“Don’t worry, sugar,” she said, putting on Rogue’s honeyed Southern drawl. Having grown up in Duluth herself, she had to fake it. “It’s only gonna hurt for one more second.” She rose into the air, pressed her yellow-gloved hands against the side of the cab, and then pushed violently downward. With a groan of tortured metal, the compartment collapsed, crushing the bodies inside.

Carla turned toward the red brick firehouse down the street. No doubt drawn by the noise of the crash, a dozen firefighters and EMTs stood gaping at her. She flew in their direction, and they scurried back inside.

By the time she landed in the driveway, the electric door to the station garage was rumbling down. Since it couldn’t possibly keep her out, she let it descend while she stood and recited her speech.

“I’m Rogue of the X-Men,” she called, “and I’m here to deliver a message. My teammates and I have spent the last few years protecting you Homo sapiens from super-villains and alien invaders. We did it to show you that mutants could be your friends. To persuade y’all to stop persecuting us, in America and all around the world. But no matter how many times we risked our necks for you, nothing ever changed.

“So it looks like we’re going to have to convince y’all another way. We’re starting up what my friend Cyclops calls a policy of retribution. That means that as long as y’all keep persecuting us, we’re going to persecute you back.”

The door bumped shut.

“Now, it would be nice if you flatscans would just take our word for it and change your wicked ways, but we know you better than that. It won’t happen unless we prove we mean what we say. So we’re going to make an example, and do some damage in this little ol’ town. It’s a shame, but it’ll also be just a drop in the bucket compared to what humans have done to our kind over the years.”

She smiled at the fire station. She couldn’t see any faces at the windows, but she was sure the people inside were listening. “Any questions, comments, or begging for mercy? No? Good, let’s have some fun.” She walked forward, bursting through the garage door as if it were made of paper.

On the other side were another ambulance, a gleaming red hook-and-ladder truck that reminded her fleetingly of her little brother’s favorite toy, and the traditional brass pole for the firefighters to slide down. Beyond them, a man in a yellow slicker and firefighter’s helmet was jabbering frantically into the phone mounted on the back wall.

As Carla advanced on him, she heard stealthy footsteps on the other side of the hook-and-ladder. Now that she was inside the building, someone was trying to use the truck for cover, sneak past her, and get out. She shoved the long, gleaming vehicle as hard as she could. It tumbled over the people behind it and crashed through an interior wall.

Evidently that particular wall had helped to support the upper story, because now the whole building groaned, and bits of ceiling showered down in her white-streaked hair. For a moment it seemed that the place was going to fall down, which, now that she thought about it, wasn’t such a bad idea.

The firefighter dropped the phone and turned to scramble through a doorway. Carla flew forward, grabbed him, and lifted him off his feet. “Did you tell the police I’m here?” she asked, holding him at the end of one outstretched arm. “Did you tell them what I said?”

A rather handsome young man in a wholesome, Norman Rockwell sort of way, her captive goggled down at her with a pair of striking brown eyes.

“Answer me, darlin’,” the vampire said. “You don’t want to be rude and make me cross, now do you?”

“Yes,” the fireman stammered, “I mean, no! I mean, I told them.”

“Then there’s that taken care of,” Carla said. “Thank you very kindly.” She gave him a shake like a cat shaking a rat. His neck broke with an audible snap.

As she dropped him, another firefighter, this one a beefy, grizzled man with a ruddy complexion, burst screaming through the door with an ax raised over his head. Caught by surprise, she was too slow to avoid his attack, but of course it didn’t matter. The ax bounced off her forehead and sent him staggering off balance.

Before he could recover, she struck him a backhand blow to the chest. He flew across the garage, smashed into the brass pole, which bent at the impact, and sprawled motionless on the oil-stained concrete floor.

No one else rushed forth to attack her. Evidently the other humans were all either scrambling to get out of the fire station or cowering in one hiding place or another. The runners had a chance. The hiders were out of luck.

She picked up the ambulance and used it like a battering ram, smashing one section of wall after another. She thought she’d be able to judge when the building was ready to collapse and have an instant to get clear, but it didn’t happen that way. The ceiling suddenly slammed down like a colossal fist.

The impact hurt fiercely, stunned her for a moment, but once again, lying in blackness, buried in rubble, she could tell that she wasn’t seriously injured. Thrashing, flying upward, she fought her way clear of the debris and on up into the sky. Inspecting her handiwork—a chaotic tangle of shattered brick in which she could glimpse a couple of mangled bodies—she felt a glow of satisfaction.

She knew that this phase of her mission had been the easiest. From here on out, the authorities would be looking for her. But even if they caught up with her, what could they possibly do to bring her down? Grinning, she hurtled away from the carnage, looking for a good place to go to ground until it was time to strike again.

Muir Island was a rugged crescent of rock jutting from the sea off the northwestern coast of Scotland. Generally Piotr Rasputin found a stark beauty in the place, in the gray-green waves battering themselves to foam at the base of the cliffs and the mosses, shrubs, and gnarled, stunted trees clinging stubbornly to life on the crags, a beauty he’d tried to capture on canvas many times. But now, listening to the moaning of the frigid wind and the ceaseless booming of the surf, he saw how black the night was with no artificial light shining anywhere except for what leaked from the sprawling high-tech research facility at his back. And he couldn’t help thinking how bleak and isolated the island truly was. A fitting site for ghastly events to happen, as they nearly had on more occasions than he cared to recall.

He was currently seven and a half feet tall, with a brawny organic steel body that gleamed in the moonlight, and despite the darkness, he felt conspicuous. He could almost envy Kurt, whose dark blue fur made him virtually invisible in shadow— Piotr knew where his friend was crouching just a few feet away, yet couldn’t see him at all. Or the slight Kitty Pryde with her curly brown hair and dark costume, whose ninja skills rendered her as difficult to spot as Nightcrawler. Or even Amanda, who, though clad in the bright yellow battlesuit she often wore when serving with Excalibur, was still less likely to catch an enemy’s eye than the towering man of metal called Colossus.

But actually, it was good that Piotr was by far the most visible, because once he’d shifted from flesh to steel, almost nothing could hurt him. If he and his friends had been set up, if someone was actually planning to attack them, then he wanted to be the one to draw the enemy’s fire.

He just wished—

“Where is he?” murmured Amanda fretfully, more or less completing Piotr’s thought.

“Patience, liebchensaid Kurt. Piotr saw the sheen of his comrade’s eerie yellow eyes, but no other hint of the contours of his body. If Colossus hadn’t known better, he might have thought the twin orbs were floating unsupported in space.

“It’s okay if you want to get out of here,” said Kitty to Amanda. “This creep has put you through too much already.”

“I agree,” said Piotr. As he understood it, after her possession ended, the sorceress had awakened with no real memory of what had transpired, but wracked with a sickening sense of violation. ‘ ‘Just because he said he wanted all four of us—’ ’

Amanda grimaced. “Thank you for trying to spare me, but I want to be here. To face my fear. I can’t go through life wondering who invaded me like that. I need to look him in the eye.”

“And so you shall,” said a deep voice with a trace of an Eastern European accent.

His heart jolting in his breast, Colossus lurched around. He’d never dropped his guard, yet he hadn’t sensed the intruder approaching, and his teammates obviously hadn’t either.

A tall man wrapped in a voluminous black cloak stepped from the darkness between the edge of the cliff and the round concrete helipad. The high collar of his mantle framed a haughty, aristocratic face, with pallid skin, an aquiline nose, bushy black brows, and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. Intelligence shone from his deep-set crimson eyes, just as there was cruel humor manifest in the quirk of his full, sensuous lips. The nails of his white hands were so long and pointed that, on a figure less imposing, they might have seemed effeminate.

Piotr felt his mouth turn dry. His friends occasionally chided him for what they perceived as a propensity for selfdoubt, and he supposed they had a point. But self-doubt was by no means the same thing as timidity, and after all he’d been through since Professor Xavier brought him away from his home among the grain fields of Siberia to use his powers in the service of humanity, few dangers could daunt him anymore. The being in front of him, however, was one of them. A demon in the guise of a man, whom the world at large believed to be merely a myth or a figment of a Victorian novelist’s imagination, but whom the X-Men had discovered to be all too real.

The cloaked man inclined his head. “Colossus.” He turned toward Amanda. “Miss Sefton.” He pivoted on toward Kitty’s place of concealment. Obviously her ninjutsu hadn’t hidden her from him. “Shadowcat.” He shifted once more, to stare directly at Kurt. “And Nightcrawler.”

“Dracula,” the German mutant answered coldly. Clad in his red, blue, and white costume, his razor-sharp saber sheathed on his back, Kurt emerged from the shadows. Superficially, with his pointed tail and other features, Nightcrawler resembled the popular conception of an evil supernatural creature more than the vampire did. But to Piotr’s eyes at least, the contrast between the two could scarcely have been greater. Kurt’s tone of voice and body language bespoke a staunch and thoroughly human determination to protect his teammates and himself, and, underlying that, an anxiety masked so well that only one of his closest friends could have sensed it. Dracula, on the other hand, radiated a diabolical malevolence so repugnant that he almost seemed to reek like the ancient, lifeless thing he truly was.

“I assume you were expecting me,” the vampire said. “Otherwise my opinion of your intelligence will decline yet another notch.”

“Yes,” said Kurt, “we suspected it was you. You gave me enough clues. You made it clear that you’d met us all back when we were X-Men, before the founding of Excalibur. You knew I was a Christian. You threatened to impale Amanda, your favorite form of torture and execution during the Middle Ages. You wanted to meet at night, to avoid the sun. And outside our home, because you would have had difficulty entering without being invited. I only doubted my guess because 1 thought you had to sleep during the day.”

“A partial misconception. I’m physically dormant—which was precisely why I had to possess Miss Sefton to communicate with you—but I can become psychically active if the need arises.”

“We also thought—and hoped—that poor Rachel van Helsing really did destroy you back in that castle in Cornwall,” Kitty said in her Midwestern American accent. Piotr knew that the gibe was her way of managing her own uneasiness.

Dracula gave her an unpleasant smile. “Oh, she did, but death isn’t the same for me as it is for one of you mortals. I’ve found my way back from the great darkness on several occasions.”

“You want to try it again?” Kitty asked.

The vampire sneered. “Brash as ever. You should guard your tongue, little girl. I remember a world where peasants who spoke insolently lost their tongues, and that was if their lord was feeling merciful. Rest assured, that world will come again.”

“Don’t count on it,” Nightcrawler said. “But we didn’t come here to trade threats. You said we have business to discuss, so let’s get to it. What could you possibly want from us, of all people?”

“I want you to help me destroy an enemy.”

“In your dreams,” said Shadowcat. “Any enemy of yours is good people as far as we’re concerned.”

“Indeed," said Dracula. “Even if the enemy is Belasco?” Piotr tensed. Belasco was the sorcerer who’d trapped his beloved younger sister Illyana in the mystical dimension called Limbo. For Colossus, only a few seconds elapsed before she returned, but for Illyana, seven years had passed, years of torment during which Belasco had done his utmost to corrupt her, to make her his willing bride and accomplice in his schemes to liberate the Elder Gods. Though she eventually won free, the horned man had stolen her childhood, left an indelible scar on her spirit, and, by awakening her mutant powers and magical ability, arguably set her on the path that ultimately led to her death. Piotr felt an instinctive loathing for Dracula, but he hated Belasco as he’d never hated any other foe.

“What do you know about Belasco?” the Russian demanded.

“Ah,” said the vampire, “I see I’ve roused your interest.”

“Answer him,” said Kitty, her pretty young face looking almost as grim as Piotr felt. Illyana had been her best friend.

“I intend to,” Dracula said. “I assume you recall the Mon-tesi Formula. It figured rather prominently in our last encounter.”

“The spell from the Darkhold grimoire,” said Kurt, “for killing vampires.”

Dracula inclined his head. ‘ ‘Later on, Stephen Strange used the ritual to obliterate every vampire on the face of the Earth. As you can imagine, after I rose from the ashes, my first priority was to roam the globe creating new progeny.”

“What does this have to do with Belasco?” Piotr said.

“Patience, X-Man, and you shall hear. 1 normally maintain a vague psychic connection with all my brood, but one such link, to a certain coven I recently founded, faded abruptly. When I investigated at long range, using various methods of divination, I determined that the vampires in question had renounced me in favor of a new lord.”

“Belasco?” Piotr asked.

“Yes.”

“But isn’t that impossible?” asked Amanda, frowning.

“So I had always believed,” Dracula said wryly. “According to the tradition of my people, the only way a nosferatu can repudiate the authority of his king is to challenge him to a duel, destroy him, and assume the throne himself. But it would appear that there are few absolutes in this world, at least where powerful sorcerers are involved.”

“What would Belasco want with your coven?” asked Kurt.

“That,” Dracula said, “I could not determine. Naturally, I swore to punish the usurper and my rebellious subjects also, but I didn’t turn my hand to the task immediately. I had other concerns which seemed more urgent. But now, suddenly, I sense from certain disturbances in the ether that Belasco may finally be on the brink of freeing the Dark Ones, as he’s aspired to do for nigh unto seven hundred years. Someone had better deal with him immediately, or it may be too late. And although I’m the single most formidable entity in the world, in some conflicts even I require troops to help me crush the foe.”

“But why us?” Nightcrawler asked. At the base of the escarpment, the waves hissed and crashed. “Why not use other vampires?”

“Two reasons,” Dracula said. “Belasco has already subverted the loyalty of one circle of undead. For all I know, he could do it again, with a snap of his fingers. I also know you’ve vanquished the wretch before. Now, will you help me? If not, I must take my leave to make other arrangements.”

“We need to confer,” said Kurt. “Will you wait here?”

“If I must.”

The German mutant led his teammates back inside the entrance hall of their headquarters. Colossus realized that Kurt wanted to make sure that the vampire, with his inhumanly keen senses, wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on their conversation, but understanding failed to allay the impatience seething inside him.

“What is there to talk about?” he asked as soon as Kurt closed the heavy oak door with its core of nickel-titanium alloy. “If Belasco has come back, we have to go after him.”

“What he said,” Kitty added.

“Yes,” said Nightcrawler, “but is Belasco back? We only have Dracula’s word for it. He might be trying to sucker us into a trap.”

“Why?” asked Shadowcat. “Why even mess with us when we thought he was dead? I mean, really dead, not just his normal dead.”

“To avenge his defeats at our hands. To take us hostage and use us to get at Storm.” They’d originally met Dracula when he’d attempted to claim their teammate Ororo to be his undead queen. “To turn us into mutant-powered 'progeny.’ To kill us now because he figures he’ll have to do it at some point in order to conquer the world. The possibilities are endless.” Kurt turned toward Amanda. “Do you have any sense of his real intentions?'’

The blonde sorceress shook her head. “His aura is black with evil. Every time I look at it, I feel like I’m drowning in sewage. But that’s just his true nature showing. I can’t tell if he specifically intends to do us harm. I do know that no matter how powerful he is, I hate the thought of heading into danger with a creature like him beside us. We’d be better off tackling Belasco by ourselves.”

“I think so too,” said Kurt, “but Dracula would never agree to it. Assuming he’s telling the truth, he has a personal score to settle. And as things stand now, he’s indispensable, because he was careful not to give us the slightest clue where this rebel coven is. So unless you can sniff Belasco out...” Looking chagrined, Amanda said, “Considering that he could be anywhere in the world, and may well have cast spells of concealment, it would take me a very long time if it’s even possible.”

“Then we’ll have to work with Dracula or not at all.” “By the White Wolf!” Piotr exclaimed. “This is nonsense! I’m going to find Belasco whatever the rest of you decide!” Nightcrawler grimaced. “Calm down, mein freund, I remember the hellish wasteland Limbo was, and I suspect that was a tropical resort compared to what Belasco’s gods would

make of the Earth. Of course, we all have to go. But perhaps we can buy a bit of insurance first.”

Kitty quizzically cocked her head. “How?”

“To us, Dracula is a monster and a fiend. But in his own mind, he’s an aristocrat. A feudal warlord and a man of honor. Perhaps we can turn that to our advantage. When we get back out there, let me do the talking.”

They walked back into the night. When he and his companions came close enough, Piotr saw the king of the undead standing motionless, with only the inky folds of his cloak and stray stands of his raven hair stirring in the cold, damp wind. With his white face and hands, he looked almost like a marble statue that someone had dressed in real clothing. "Well?” he said.

“One question,” Kurt replied. “How do we know we can trust you?”

Dracula raised an eyebrow. “You insult me, X-Man. Do you fear that I’m lying, or that I’ll turn my coat? If memory serves, it was your doppelganger who gleefully embraced the chance to serve as Belasco’s groveling lackey.”

Kurt scowled. During their first encounter with Belasco, the X-Men had discovered to their consternation that he’d already crushed another incarnation of the team, one evidently hailing from an alternate universe. He’d slain some members, the other Piotr included, and displayed their remains as trophies. Even more horribly, he’d somehow degraded Nightcrawler’s counterpart into a willing, sadistic slave, a creature like the imp he so resembled.

“And you, Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin,” the vampire continued. Caught by surprise, the mutant gave a start. “You forsook the X-Men to throw in with one of their greatest enemies. Later you likewise deserted Magneto’s camp. Then you made your way here, and in a fit of jealous rage, savagely attacked a fellow champion of goodness named Wisdom, simply because he dared to love your little Katya here—” he leered at Shadowcat “—even though you’d cast her off long before.” “It... it wasn’t like you're making it sound!”' Colossus said, although in his heart, he often felt that it was. How the devil could Dracula know all the most shameful mistakes he’d ever made?

Kitty touched him on the arm. “Take it easy, Petey. You don’t have to defend yourself to him."

“Perhaps not,” Dracula said, “but the fact remains that for all your heroic pretensions, you X-Men are manifestly as capable of treachery as anyone else. Perhaps I should be begging assurances of you.”

“You can have them,” Nightcrawler said. “We promise to treat you as an ally for the duration of the mission. Will you do the same?”

“If I must,” the vampire said. “I swear on my honor as Domnul of Wallachia, Knight of the the Dragon, and King of the Undead that I will comport myself as your faithful comrade until Belasco is defeated.” He sneered. “Does that oath satisfy you, mutant?”

“I guess it’ll have to,” said Kurt. “As you asked, the Midnight Runner is ready for takeoff. Where are we going?” “I’ll tell you once we’re in the air,” Dracula replied.

“So much for camaraderie,” Kitty said.

Chapter 6

Scott, Jean, and Logan climbed from the X-Men’s newly acquired Cessna Citation X into the pounding rain. Despite the instant drenching, Cyclops was glad to be on the ground. Though the Citation lacked the VTOL capabilities of the Blackbird, it had been modified to take off and land in a fraction of the space required by any normal jet. Still, setting it down on a bumpy stretch of grass in foul weather was scarcely his idea of fun.

Bundled up in a blue poncho. Laurel Smith trudged out through mud and puddles to greet the new arrivals. A petite middle-aged woman with a wide, humorous mouth and brown, wrinkled, sun-damaged skin, Laurel was a mutant with a low-grade pyrokinetic talent, which, though the fires it kindled were no larger or hotter than those produced by an ordinary match, had nonetheless caused her no end of trouble until Professor Xavier taught her to control it. In appreciation, she’d joined the underground network of well-wishers who supported the X-Men in a variety of ways. In this instance, her contribution was allowing them to use her farm as a makeshift airfield.

“How was your flight?” she asked.

“Fine,” said Cyclops. In reality, landing hadn’t been the only dicey part. Battered by the storm and plagued by intermittent instrument malfunctions and an odd, worrisome undertone to the drone of the engines, he’d found the entire journey relatively nerve-wracking, even for an expert pilot who’d survived dogfights and antiaircraft fire in his time. But he didn’t want to waste time going into it when there was more important work to be done.

The wind gusted, and rain slipped down the collar of the

tan trenchcoat he’d thrown on over his blue-black and yellow uniform. He had the visored mask thrown back and a pair of his glasses on, so theoretically, he ought to pass for an ordinary civilian so long as people didn’t look too closely. Clad in his cowboy hat and an oilskin duster, Wolverine was similarly disguised. For her part. Jean was dressed entirely in what appeared to be ordinary clothing. But her garments were made of unstable molecules, and using her telekinesis, she could reconfigure them into her uniform in an instant.

“Have you heard from Rogue or Storm?” Cyclops asked.

Laurel shook her head. “Sorry.”

“There’s the Blackbird,” said Wolverine, nodding at the sleek jet, ninety feet long and twenty feet tall, gleaming like polished obsidian in the rain. “I want to take a look inside.”

They headed for the larger plane. A fork of lightning flared across the sky, and thunder boomed a second later. The wind tried to snatch Logan’s beat-up old Stetson and Jean’s broad-brimmed scarlet hat. He grabbed his headgear with his hand and she tugged hers firmly down with the power of her mind.

Scott pulled off one yellow synthetic leather glove, climbed the crew ladder, and pressed his hand against the bio-molecular lock. For a moment, nothing happened, and then the panel rather grudgingly slid aside. The X-Men boarded the jet with Laurel tagging along behind, rubbernecking.

Jean telekinetically switched on the cabin lights, revealing the electronic countermeasures station, the display monitors, and the rest of the futuristic appointments. Logan skulked toward the nose of the plane, sniffing. “Nobody but ’Roro and Rogue has been on board lately,” he said.

I could have told you that, Cyclops thought irritably. Whatever happened to them, it happened after they left here. But actually, he knew that Logan was right to check out every possibility, and chided himself for letting his irritability over the flight down creep into his thoughts.

Scott inspected the area around the pilot and copilot’s seats.

If Rogue and Storm had had some intimation that they were heading into danger, they might conceivably have left a note. But there was nothing.

He turned to lean, who nodded before he had a chance to articulate his thoughts—not surprising, since husband and wife shared a psychic rapport, a link far stronger and more intimate than the ones she’d established with the other X-Men.

For Wolverine’s benefit, she said, “Now that we’re actually in Natchez, or as good as, I want to start scanning again.” Her lustrous green eyes grew wide as she stared into space. Cyclops felt her straining, felt the worry and frustration she did her best to banish, lest they undermine her ability to focus. Finally she shook her head. “I'm not getting anything that way,” she said. “I’ll try it with the mini-Cerebro.”

She took the portable short-range unit from inside her raincoat. Ordinarily the mini-Cerebros interfaced with the master system back in New York, but in a pinch, as now, when the machine in the mansion was out of commission, they could function independently. Though that made them less reliable, it should at least protect Jean from another painful accident.

Yet as Scott watched her activate the little black plastic box, a marvel of miniaturization scarcely larger than a deck of playing cards, he was suddenly all but certain it was going to hurt her, and nearly dashed it from her hand. Lord, but he was tired! Why did Rogue and Ororo have to stumble into trouble now? And as long as he was pondering unanswerable questions, why did he always have to feel as if it was entirely his responsibility to make sure things turned out all right?

He knew it was irrational. Jean, Logan, and the rest of the X-Men were ever}' bit as dedicated and competent as he was. No one could ask for better teammates. Yet try as he might, he’d never been able to shake the feeling completely that it was up to him to fix everything. Maybe it had something to do with helplessly witnessing the deaths of his parents. Or going through life with eyes that could kill with a single unshielded glance.

Jean gazed at the mini-Cerebro for half a minute, then grimaced. “Still nothing.”

“Then we’ll just have to keep hunting,” Wolverine said with a growl, and Scott heard the thought from him: Is she going to be totally useless this time out? Normally, Jean tried scrupulously to respect the privacy of other people’s minds, but occasionally, especially when she was tired and her shields were a little shaky, she caught a stray flash of thought anyway, and that was what had happened now. The perception had even jumped from her mind to Scott’s.

He could feel that her feelings were hurt. He was furious, so much so that he nearly forgot that the short man was his friend. For an instant, it was as if they were all back in the old days, when Wolverine baited him at every turn, and sometimes only his commitment to providing the kind of leadership Professor Xavier expected restrained him from pulverizing the obnoxious little jerk with his optic blasts.

Take it easy, said Jean, mind to mind. He didn ’t mean it. I could feel that he was sorry as soon as he thought it. He's just worried and worn out like we are.

I guess, Scott replied, but for the moment at least, resentment still crawled inside him. He ordered himself to put it aside and focus on the mission.

The telepathic exchange had taken only a second. Oblivious to it, Logan turned to Laurel. ‘ ‘Of the three of us, only Jeannie can fly. She could carry us with her, but over time it would wear her out. It would help a lot if we could get our hands on a car.”

• Laurel pulled a key ring from the pocket of her fa
• Kitty was somewhat relieved that the Gypsy was bet
• C::>
• “I guess I understand,” said Rogue slowly, as matr