Gifted

  “Hmm,” he said, not sounding particularly perturbed at being alone and surrounded. “X-Men…you do not disappoint.”

  “This doesn’t have to go any further,” Cyclops warned him.

  He snorted. It sounded as if it was supposed to be a laugh of some sort. “I wasn’t aware it had begun.”

  “Whatever it is you want from these people…”

  “He got it already, Cyclops,” said Wolverine. “This was a test.”

  The behemoth nodded slightly. “Not a difficult one, it’s true. But you still performed admirably.” He glanced at Emma and added, almost as an afterthought, “And don’t meddle with my mind, Miss Frost. You could not hope to decipher my thoughts. Whereas yours…”

  And suddenly there was some sort of round device in his hand. It looked like the Chinese weapon called a wind and fire wheel. It was a flat, metal ring with long, vicious blades extending from the edges, like fangs, clearly capable of slicing anyone they struck to ribbons. The behemoth gripped the blade tightly by its handle, and it was suddenly obvious he had no intention of surrendering.

  Without a word spoken between them, but moving simultaneously due to long practice, Wolverine and Cyclops went for him from either side. Cyclops unleashed an optic blast as Wolverine leaped through the air, ready to hit hard and fast with his claws. Before the blast could strike home, the behemoth brought his armored right arm up and deflected it effortlessly.

  Kitty tried to shout a warning that there were still hostages about. She wanted to cry out that if everyone could just keep their testosterone in check for another minute or so, she could get the remaining hostages to safety—since it was obvious that the big guy wasn’t really interested in them—and then the combatants could proceed to beat the living crap out of each other in relative peace. She didn’t have the opportunity, however, as the deflected optic blast hit her broadside and knocked her off her feet. She lay on the ground, stunned, barely managing to remain conscious.

  The huge being spun out of the way of Wolverine’s attack, which wouldn’t have seemed possible given his size. He drove his left fist forward, catching the clawed mutant squarely on the chin. Wolverine’s head snapped back, momentarily staggering him. Pressing his attack, the behemoth swung the wind and fire wheel. It sliced directly across Wolverine’s gut. He went down, clutching at his stomach, trying not to think about what it was he was shoving back into place while waiting for his healing factor to return him to fighting condition.

  The behemoth sensed something coming in fast behind him and tried to turn to face it. This time he was too slow, and the hurtling Beast slammed into him from behind. The Beast struck the behemoth repeatedly in the side of the head and the upper shoulders, snarling in a voice not remotely recognizable as human.

  Across the room, Cyclops was taking aim, waiting for a clear shot. The behemoth didn’t give the Beast time to provide one. Instead he charged directly at Cyclops, with the struggling Beast still atop him. Then he leaped up, hurtling straight toward the team’s leader while twisting around in midair so the Beast would take the brunt of the impact. The strategy worked. Cyclops didn’t dare fire lest he hit his furred ally, and he wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. The three of them collided, Cyclops hitting the floor first, with the Beast crunched between Cyclops on the ground and the behemoth atop him.

  The X-Men’s adversary started to get to his feet, and something remarkably solid suddenly struck him in the face.

  Emma Frost came in fast and hard, maintaining her impervious diamond form. She battered him quickly, repeatedly, her fists flashing, her body gleaming in the light from the overhead lamps.

  Yet despite her incessant pounding, the behemoth managed to get to his feet and, upon doing so, grabbed her by the throat. Her eyes widened in astonishment, unable to fathom how in the world he had endured so much punishment at her hands without showing the slightest sign of damage.

  “Diamond,” he snarled with contempt. Keeping one massive hand firmly on Emma’s throat, he reached out with his other hand and snared her ankle. “I am Ord of the Breakworld. We stuff our pillows with diamonds.”

  And with that, he slammed Emma to the floor with such force that she went straight through it, waving her arms helplessly as she crashed down into the suite of offices below.

  The self-identified Ord of the Breakworld turned to face his erstwhile opponents, blood dripping from his weapon. “I was wrong. I am disappointed. The mighty X-Men. And not one of them strong enough to—”

  Something fluttered in the air just behind him. He turned, his face a question. “Wait—”

  His assailant didn’t wait.

  The next thing Ord knew, he was under attack by what could only be described as a dragon. Three feet long from tip of nose to tip of tail, purple-skinned with flapping wings on its back. When the dragon opened his mouth—which was exactly six inches away from Ord’s face—he belched out a massive blast of fire, which so thoroughly consumed Ord’s entire head that witnesses would later claim the party had been attacked by Ghost Rider.

  Ord screamed. He charged toward a window, batting at his own head, but the fire continued to blaze around his skull as if it had a life of its own. Without slowing down he crashed straight through the window—one of the few that had remained intact during the proceedings—and arced through the sky like a shooting star. It was impossible to determine whether he actually possessed a natural power of flight or if he had some sort of mechanism to propel him through the night sky.

  All that really mattered, though, was that he was gone, and the X-Men would live to fight another day. In their line of work, that was always the baseline for a mission’s success, much like the old saying that any landing you could walk away from was a good one.

  His mouth still steaming, the dragon angled toward Kitty, who—still on the ground, recovering from the impact of the blast—nevertheless spread her arms out in joyous welcome. “Lockheed! You found me! You are the best X-dragon ever!” Lockheed settled onto her torso and she wrapped her arms around him.

  Wolverine was still on his knees, his arms crisscrossed over his midsection. “Hell, I think we should make him team leader,” he said through gritted teeth. He looked down and saw, through the shredded cloth of his costume, a crimson line across his stomach. It was still tender, and the deep red color of it was awful to look at. Fortunately everything that was supposed to be inside that dark line was properly situated. He knew from long experience that within minutes the deep red would fade to light pink, and then there would be no remaining sign of the gaping hole in his gut.

  Cyclops was at the window, watching the last flaming traces of Ord’s abrupt departure. “Looks like our friend’s gone.”

  The Beast sounded disappointed, even chiding. “Without so much as a ‘This isn’t over!’ There’s simply no etiquette these days as far as villains are concerned. Well…except for Doctor Doofenshmirtz. Not terribly competent, I’ll grant you, but ‘Curse you, Perry the Platypus’ is a keeper of an exit line.”

  “Would it bother you to know that I’ve no idea what you’re talking about?” said Cyclops.

  “It would not only not bother me, but I’d be astounded if you did. And speaking of not knowing things: ‘Ord of the Breakworld.’ Either of those proper names ring a bell with anyone?”

  There were mutual shakings of heads, although Kitty—who had managed to find the strength to sit up—commented, “It’s not on the Avengers’ list of known alien worlds.”

  “How do you know?” said Scott.

  “I was starved for reading material one day, so I hacked into their database and read it.”

  “You read and memorized their entire database?”

  “Only the things that looked interesting.”

  The Beast gave a low, impressed whistle, and Emma—who had transformed back into her more human-looking body—said in all seriousness, “I know I rarely show it, Katherine, but there are times that I’m relieved you’re on our side.”

&n
bsp; Kitty obviously couldn’t bring herself to say “thanks,” but she nodded in acknowledgment as she got to her feet.

  Cyclops glanced around at the remaining civilians, who were still hugging the floor, looking up at them nervously. They seemed to be wondering whether the X-Men were going to beat up on them for a while since the mutants’ other target had fled. Inwardly Cyclops sighed; this reordering of their public image was obviously going to take a while. “You can all get up. The danger’s over.”

  Kitty, with Lockheed still perched on her shoulder, reached down and helped a dowager to her feet, a woman with close-cropped, silver hair, a red evening gown, and enough pearls around her neck to sink the Bismarck. The woman seemed entranced by Lockheed, and she said to Kitty, “You were very brave, my dear.”

  “Thank you,” said Kitty.

  “You know, you look like a young Sigourney Weaver.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  Okay, well, at least the woman isn’t screaming at Kitty to get away from her, so that’s something. It was against his nature for Cyclops to look at the positive side of things, but the situation was compelling him to do so. “Zero casualties, which is good,” he said to Hank. Then his natural dourness took over. “But any way you slice it, we just got trashed.”

  He walked to one of the shattered windows and stared down forty stories to street level. The cops had set up spotlights and were flashing them everywhere, trying to get a clearer view of what was going on up in the penthouse. Barricades had been set up to keep people at bay, and even from this distance, Cyclops could see people he took to be police officials conferencing, trying to determine what had transpired and what their next move should be. Former hostages who had been rescued by the X-Men were down there as well, obviously telling the cops their view of what had happened. Cyclops could only hope that his team was coming out positively in the narrative.

  He turned back to the X-Men and, in a slightly louder voice, announced, “So now let’s do the hard part.”

  Minutes later they emerged from the front of the building. The people Kitty had already freed from the danger zone were all babbling at once to the police, the press, anyone who would listen. And from what Cyclops could make out from the babbling, everything they were saying was pretty much positive. Hell, this might work after all.

  The moment they came into view, the questions from the press started flying, fast and furious. The police tried to shout over the tumult, yelling to everyone to back off and allow them to do their job. The gray-haired woman with Kitty called out with a volume that an opera star would have envied, drowning out the orders being barked by the cops. “These people did your job for you!” she announced in a voice dripping with breeding and pearls. “So perhaps you are the ones who should be backing off.”

  Meanwhile the press continued pelting the X-Men with questions. “What happened up there?” “Is anybody hurt?” “Was this another mutant attack?”

  Cyclops put his hands up to try to silence the reporters so he could address their questions, but they didn’t stop shouting them. He realized that all he could do was throw out answers like water balloons and hope some of them soaked in. “Everybody’s fine, and no, this is not mutant-related.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Well, there it is, isn’t it? I was right. It literally doesn’t occur to them that we could be here simply as Samaritans. Time to educate them.

  “We came because people were in trouble,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. So obvious no one should even have to ask about it, but he would condescend to answer all the same. “We X-Men have always felt it is our duty to use our gifts to help not just our own community, but—”

  He was on a roll, ready to make all the salient points that had been rattling around in his head.

  Naturally the reporters stopped listening, plunging forward with their barrage of questions.

  Meanwhile a short, older man, his bow tie askew, sweat beading on his bald pate, was trying to slip through the crowd without being noticed. He didn’t succeed. A voice said sharply behind him, “Mister Langford.”

  It brought him up short, and his bow tie bobbed up and down in tandem with his nervous Adam’s Apple. “My, uh…my dear Emma. How, uh…how pleasant you were able to make it…”

  “Really.” Emma stepped in close to him, speaking in a voice so low no one else around could hear her. “I cannot help but notice that your foundations and interests have benefited from my family’s extremely generous support for many generations. And the very year it becomes public knowledge that I am a mutant, I am—for the first time—left off the guest list. Tell me, Mister Langford…would you like to spend the rest of your life obsessed with the works of Leroy Neiman? I mean…sexually?”

  He gulped even more, as if he were gasping for air. “I…uh…no. That would be…no, I wouldn’t. It was…Emma, it was purely an oversight.”

  “Oh, I think your sight was fairly clear when you did it. But if that’s the story you want to stick with—with the understanding that I could pluck the truth out of your little brain like a raisin out of pudding—then it’s my feeling you had better spend the next day or so thinking very hard about how you’re going to be making this up to me. Do we understand each other, Mister Langford?”

  “Ab…” He cleared his throat. “Absolutely. And please, call me ‘Walter.’”

  “All right. And you can call me ‘Miss Frost.’” She turned away from him with a swirl of her white cape.

  Cyclops was still trying to sort out one reporter’s question from another.

  “Will you be charging the city for your services?” “Will the taxpayers have to cover your fees?” “Are you aware the Avengers do these things for free?” “Are you American citizens and are you willing to provide your birth certificates?” “If it wasn’t a mutant, then who led the attack?”

  Cyclops seized on the last question he heard. “We don’t yet know who attacked…”

  “We heard shooting! Did you start the shooting?”

  Beginning to feel irritated, Kitty suggested, “Why don’t you ask the people we saved what happened?”

  “Who flew away?” “Was that Storm?”

  Kitty gave the questioner an incredulous look. “Oh, please! Did it look like Storm?”

  “What are you called, Miss?”

  Cyclops was about to warn Kitty off. But then he remembered that he wanted her to serve as the public, non-threatening face of the X-Men. He took a step back to allow her to field questions, hoping she would have better luck than he had.

  “Uh, well…” Kitty seemed a bit thrown by the question. “I…mostly ‘Shadowcat’ is what I used to—”

  “Do you have a license for that bat?” They pointed at Lockheed. “What is your relationship with the bat?”

  The Beast and Wolverine were standing off to the side. “I bet right now she’d like a bat to smack them in the head with,” said Wolverine.

  The Beast nodded slightly. As the reporters continued to ask skeptical questions, he sang in a low voice, “You can seeee by our outfits that we are all heeeroes…”

  Wolverine grimaced. “Being hated and feared by a world that doesn’t understand us beats this circus any day.”

  “Oh, you’re always so grouchy when you get cut in half.”

  “Doctor McCoy,” one of the reporters said, “do you have any comment on this so-called ‘mutant cure’?”

  Wolverine and the Beast exchanged confused looks. “I’m sorry. ‘Cure?’”

  “Yes.” The reporter, a burly man, pushed his way forward slightly and continued, “Doctor Anita Rhodes from Benetech claimed at a press conference today that she had a cure for the disease that causes people to become mutants…”

  “Disease!” Wolverine snarled. His hands trembled with fury; it was clear that he was fighting to keep his claws from snapping out. Video of Wolverine disemboweling a reporter wouldn’t exactly help with Cyclops’ plan for reforming their public image. r />
  The Beast put a quick hand on Wolverine’s arm to steady him. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never heard of any…” Then something suddenly clicked into place. “Wait…are you talking about Kavita Rao? Doctor Kavita Rao?”

  “Right, right, that’s it,” said the reporter. “Are you familiar with her work? Do you believe this is the genuine item? Would you make use of it?”

  “Oh, we’d use it, awright,” said Wolverine. “We’d use it to shove it up her—”

  “No comment,” the Beast said quickly, overriding Wolverine. “We have no comment at this time. Thank you. Wolverine,” and he indicated with a nod of his head that Wolverine should follow him. It was a crapshoot whether Wolverine would do so, and the Beast breathed an inward sigh of relief as Wolverine indulged him.

  Cyclops and Kitty were still vainly trying to field questions while Emma just looked on imperiously. Coming in close behind Cyclops, the Beast said in a low voice, “We have to leave. Right now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Something’s come up. I’ve already been asked about it and my guess is that within thirty seconds or so, you will be, too. And we don’t need footage of all of us standing there with stunned expressions saying, ‘What are you talking about?’”

  “Hank, I don’t—”

  “A geneticist that I’ve known for years—Kavita Rao of Benetech—claims that she’s invented a cure for that terrible disease called being a mutant.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cyclops said, stunned.

  “See?”

  Cyclops didn’t hesitate, calling in a loud voice that interrupted Kitty’s attempt to explain just what it was that was sitting on her shoulder. “Thank you very much for your questions, ladies and gentlemen. We have to take off, and I mean that literally.”