Chapter 1
Setting: AU based around the universe of ‘What If... Wolverine had Married Mariko’ (What If Vol. 1, issue 43). It is also influenced and draws on elements of the first issue of Claremont’s X-Men Forever, and like that is set around the time when the original five ended their version of X-Factor and returned to the X-Men. Like X-Men Forever it takes place after the fall of Asteroid M and the possible death of Magneto. There won’t be any Gold or Blue teams, just Cyclops and Storm as joint team leaders, though that won’t really matter here. Another important aspect of the set-up of this AU is that Madelyne Pryor isn’t a clone of Jean Grey here. As originally conceived they just look alike, and Scott meant it when he said he loved and married her for herself. Like X-Men Forever, Nathan isn’t, or doesn’t become, Cable, and he wasn’t infected by Apocalypse with the techno-organic virus. They came down as a family when Jean was found, and Scott and Maddie have remained happily married. For the events leading up to where we are, please read the first two parts in the Shadow of the Horseman series Sublime Malice and Undercover Hearts.
Intro: With the shadow of Apocalypse’s attention fixed on them after the events of Sublime Malice and Undercover Hearts, mysterious deaths draw our couple deeper into his machinations to draw his old Horseman back to his side.
Genre: Romance/Adventure
Pairing: Logan/Jean
Rating: 18+
Further Info: For further information and background to this story please read the other stories in this series Sublime Malice and Undercover Hearts. Sublime Malice is under an M rating, but that largely applies to the end of chapter 14 there, so that intimate scene can be skipped. And the background at the beginning at least will explain such things as Logan’s “ghosting” ability and how it came to be.
Disclaimer: I don’t own or hold any rights to X-Men, Wolverine or any associated characters and properties. They belong to Marvel/Disney and their creators. Please support the original works. This is not written for profit.
Chapter 1
Logan woke to sunlight, warm sheets, and the sound of Jean Grey trying very hard not to laugh.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, from somewhere near his shoulder.
“Doin’ what?”
“Growling in your sleep. Like a very small, very offended engine.” Her fingers combed through his hair, slow and idle. “You’ve been doing it all week.”
“Huh.” He didn’t open his eyes. “That’s new.”
“It’s adorable.”
“It is not.”
“You do it when I steal the blankets. And when I’m too warm. And once, last night, when I moved my foot.” Her smile was audible. “I think it’s a form of speech. I think you’re saying mine."
He cracked one eye. Jean lay propped on her elbow beside him with the morning pouring over her bare shoulders and the sheet clutched loosely at her waist, hair a beautiful wreck, gloriously nude, looking so thoroughly and unrepentantly pleased with herself that his chest did the funny thing it had done every morning for a fortnight. They were home. The mansion was quiet. For the first time in a month, nobody was shooting at them.
“C’mere,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m gonna growl at you properly.”
She was still laughing when he kissed her, their minds reaching for each other and uniting across their bond.
It lasted almost forty minutes, which, by the standards of the last year, was a miracle.
Breakfast was a more public affair. By the time they came down the main staircase, damp-haired and suspiciously pleased, the kitchen was at full volume: someone had burnt toast, someone else was arguing about the last of the orange juice, and at the far end of the long table Kitty Pryde sat cross-legged on a chair, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl with the focus of a woman who hadn’t slept.
She took one look at them and put down her spoon.
“No.”
“Morning, Kitten,” said Logan.
“No. Absolutely not. I can see it. You two have the glow.” She pointed her spoon at Jean. ”You. You’re glowing.”
“I’m not glowing.”
“You’re glowing so hard I can read by it.” Kitty slid off the chair and went to pour coffee, muttering. “Thirty-six hours I’ve been up. Thirty-six. I’ve been staring at autopsy files and you two have been—”
“Sleeping,” said Jean, with great dignity.
“Sure you were.”
“We were resting. After a very difficult week.”
“Is that what we’re calling it.”
“Kitty.”
“I’m just saying, there’s a reason the walls in the east wing are being replaced.” She turned, a mug in each hand, and held one out to Jean with the pained expression of someone enduring a great personal sacrifice. “Hank wants you downstairs. Both of you. Ten minutes ago.”
Jean’s playfulness faded. She took the mug, and her eyes met Logan’s over the rim. “Is it bad?”
“It’s weird.” Kitty rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “That’s usually worse.”
The med lab was cold and bright and smelled of antiseptic and coffee. Hank McCoy stood at the long steel table in the centre of the room with his sleeves rolled up past a pair of enormous blue forearms, frowning at a stack of images and a half-eaten banana, and he glanced up as they entered with the particular guilty brightness of a man who had been about to say something very scientific and had decided to say something kinder instead.
“Jean. Logan. Forgive the hour. I know how you’ve both been, ah, recovering.”
“Hank.”
“I’m only saying that I wouldn’t summon you if I didn’t think it vital.” He slid two photographs across the table. “Four weeks ago, a retired hospice nurse named Margaret Ellison was found dead in her bed in Poughkeepsie. Natural causes, they thought. Eighty-one years old.”
Logan glanced at the first photograph, and something small and cold stirred at the back of his neck.
The woman in the picture was ancient. Not simply old, but wasted, her skin like tissue paper, her eyes sunk deep into a skull that seemed to have collapsed in on itself. Her hands, folded on the quilt, were shrivelled to bone.
“That’s what eighty-one looks like?” he said.
“It is not.” Hank’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Mrs. Ellison was sixty-three. Her son had spoken to her by telephone that evening. The medical examiner estimated a physiological age somewhere between one hundred and ten and one hundred and twenty.”
Jean went very still.
“In a night,” she said.
“Within minutes, by my reckoning.” He pulled a second set of images from the pile and laid them side by side. “That was the first. There have since been six more. A palliative-care physician in Albany. A hospital chaplain in Hartford. A funeral director in Providence, a night-shift nurse in Boston, two more hospice workers in Connecticut. All of them withered in the same fashion. All of them dead within a few hours of dusk. And none, so far as the police can determine, showed any signs of forced entry or struggle.”
“Hospice,” Logan said slowly.
“Death’s attendants.” Kitty had followed them in, and was leaning in the doorway, arms folded, face pale. “Every single one of them spent their working life sitting with dying people. The funeral guy’s the only outlier, and even he used to do pre-need counselling. They’re all people who were there at the end."
“A pattern,” said Jean.
“A very deliberate pattern.” Hank adjusted his glasses. “Which brings me to the part that I wished to show you personally.”
He moved to the microscope at the end of the table, and Jean bent to look. Logan stayed where he was, watching her face. He saw her stiffen. He saw her hand tighten on the edge of the steel. When she straightened again, her skin had gone chalk white.
“What?”
“The cells,” she said. “They look like...” She stopped. “Logan. They look like the dust. From the cavern. The original Death’s body. The same pattern.”
The room went quiet.
That is not mine.
It came from behind his eyes, calm and flat and absolutely certain, and it stopped his breath for a heartbeat. Not the silk and mockery he was used to. Not even a threat. Something closer to distaste.
What?
Look closer, Wolverine. Look at the margins. A cold, thoughtful pause. The withering is similar. The mechanism is not. That was not done by my red fire. It was done by something that drinks. It is a counterfeit. Another pause, and under it, very faint, something he’d never heard from Death before. Somebody has copied my signature without my consent.
Logan stared at the photographs.
You mind repeatin’ that?
No.
Death.
I said no.
He turned his head, slowly, and found Jean watching him. She hadn’t needed the words. She had felt it ripple through the bond, the ghost of a voice and the shape of a thought, and she was holding herself very carefully.
“What’s he saying?” she asked, very low.
“That it’s a fake.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his jaw. “I do. An’ that’s what scares me.”
Kitty looked from one to the other. “Hang on. You guys have the stare thing going. What’s the fake?”
“Death’s saying the withering isn’t his,” Logan said, “that someone’s copyin’ it. That whoever’s doin’ this wants it to look like Death did the killin’. Me.”
“To frame you?” said Hank.
“Not frame,” said Jean, slowly. “That’s too crude. This isn’t a trap for the police. It’s a message.” She turned from the microscope, and her eyes were hard and bright. “Seven attendants of the dying. Seven bodies, aged to dust. Left where anyone could find them. Someone’s calling him.”
“Calling who?”
“Death.”
Silence.
“Well,” said Kitty, after a moment, with an unconvincing attempt at brightness, “on the plus side, that’s very tidy. Bad guy wants Logan’s attention. Logan gets to punch bad guy. Everybody goes home.”
“Kitty.”
“I’m coping."
They went to see for themselves.
The seventh victim had died four nights before, in a small stone hospice on the edge of a Hudson Valley town, and the building still had the strained, hollow quiet of a place that had been robbed of something it couldn’t name. A police tape fluttered over the front door. A single patrol car sat in the drive. The garden behind the chapel was green and well kept and heavy with late roses, and in the middle of it, on a wooden bench, someone had left a vase of fresh white lilies.
“Ms. Grey?”
The detective who met them at the gate was a wide, weary man in his fifties, with a sagging brown suit and the eyes of someone who hadn’t been sleeping well. “Detective Marsh. Dr. McCoy said you’d be coming. He didn’t say much else.” He glanced at Logan, whose leather jacket and general demeanour did not inspire confidence. “Is this your...?”
“Colleague,” said Jean smoothly.
“Partner,” said Logan.
Marsh looked between them for a moment, and something in his tired face softened. “Right. Well. Whichever.” He unlocked the gate. “I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been doing this job twenty-six years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. We got a call from a patient’s family. Said the night nurse hadn’t answered the door. We found her in the chapel. Sitting upright, hands folded.” He rubbed his eyes. “Looked like she’d been dead a century.”
“Was anything left behind?” Jean asked. “Anything unusual?”
“Just the lilies.” Marsh nodded toward the bench. “We found them in the chapel. Someone brought them in after. Nobody saw who. We’ve dusted them for prints and there’s nothing. Not one.”
They went into the garden. Logan walked the chapel steps alone, slowly, nostrils flaring.
The scent hit him on the third step.
It wasn’t one scent. It was five, tangled together in the air like threads. Hot iron and green wounds. Something salt and sharp, like struck lightning. A cold, hungry thing like an empty room with the window open. A reptile musk, dry and old. And one that made his hackles stand up, a thin sweet rot, like fruit left too long in the sun. Under them, fainter, almost not there, was the absence. A void where a scent should have been, and the coldness of it was achingly familiar.
Jeannie, he said.
I feel it. She was at his shoulder. Five minds. They’re... trained. Disciplined. But there’s something wrong with them. They’re like the Hand. Closed up. Blank.
Not blank. Tuned. He crouched at the bench, and touched a single white petal with the tip of one claw. The lily crumbled, instantly, to grey dust. They’re loyal to the same thing. Same chord. Same song.
Apocalypse.
Yeah.
Death stirred. For the first time since the island, Logan felt the bars flex. It wasn’t a push. It was a lean, very slight, like a sleeper turning in his sleep toward a sound.
They are near, said Death, with a thin note of something Logan couldn’t place. They have been near for some time. Look to the roof of the chapel.
He looked.
“Jean.”
“I know.”
“Don’t turn round.”
“I won’t.”
The sun dipped behind the trees, and the shadows in the garden grew long and sharp, and from somewhere high above them, very softly, a voice began to applaud.
“Beautifully done,” said the voice. “Really. I had my doubts.”
It was a woman’s voice, low and pleasant and perfectly unhurried, and it came from the peak of the chapel roof, where a slim figure in a charcoal greatcoat was perched at ease against the gable with her ankles crossed. She was lean and dark-haired and somewhere in her middle years, with a long, pale, clever face and a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, and in her gloved hands she held a slim black case that might have held a scalpel or a violin.
Her smile was the single most polite thing Logan had ever seen.
“Mr. Logan. Ms. Grey. Forgive the theatrics. I did try to arrange a more civilised meeting, but your people are very hard to reach.”
“Lady,” said Logan, “you’re about three seconds from bein’ a lot harder to reach.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” She stood, unhurried, and stepped off the roof.
She didn’t fall. She settled, weightless, to the grass, her coat swirling around her ankles like smoke. Detective Marsh, at the gate, made a small, strangled sound. Jean flicked a hand without looking and a gentle wave of force folded him into sleep on the garden wall.
“I am the Magister,” said the woman. “Themis, if you prefer a name. I have the honour to serve the Master of this age. And I have come, on his behalf, to conduct an examination.”
“A what?”
“A test, Mr. Logan. An assessment of a promising subject.” She adjusted her glasses. “He was so pleased with the island. He has been pleased for days. You have no idea how rarely that happens. I thought the least I could do was to bring him a little more.”
“The people in that morgue,” Jean said, very quietly. “The nurses. The chaplain. They weren’t an experiment.”
“Of course not. They were invitations." The Magister’s smile didn’t waver. “One cannot simply knock on Death’s door and expect him to open it. One must arrive with the right sort of courtesy. A signature. A scent. A trail of small, tidy offerings, all in the proper style.” She nodded to the lilies, now a heap of grey ash. “He taught me that. The Master. Though in fairness, the signature itself needed some improvement. It was a rather rough copy. My people did what they could.”
She dares, said Death, very softly. She dares.
Logan felt something huge and cold lift behind his eyes. The red fire licked, once, along the edges of his claws. Not drawn up. Not called. Offered, the way a hound offers its throat to a hand it knows.
Jean’s mind closed around his, bright and warm and fierce.
Home, she said.
Home.
The fire died back. Slowly. Reluctantly. The bars held.
“Interesting,” said the Magister, watching him with bright, clinical, scholarly interest. “Quite interesting. You keep him leashed. The Master said you might.” She tilted her head. “I confess, I wasn’t certain it was possible. Most of his Riders were never leashed. They were fed."
“I’m not one of his Riders.”
“You’re the best of them.” She said it gently, almost kindly. “That’s rather the point.”
“Where’s your circus, lady?” said Logan. “’Cause I can smell five of ‘em, an’ they’re a lot less polite than you.”
“Ah.” The Magister sighed, and closed her case with a small, definitive click. “Yes. I thought you might have noticed.”
She raised one gloved hand.
The roof of the chapel exploded.
They came down in a shower of stone and slate. Five shapes, five trajectories, and every one of them landed already moving.
The first hit the ground in front of Logan like a falling anvil. Green-skinned and enormous, with a mouth full of needle-fine teeth and a grin like a split in a mask, he carried a long, ugly, humming weapon in the crook of one arm, and his eyes were strange and very sharp, tracking Logan the way a hawk tracks a field mouse. Gauntlet, said some part of Logan’s mind, a name from a file he couldn’t remember reading anymore.
The weapon swung up. There was a flat crack of kinetic force, and the charge hit Logan in the chest like a wrecking ball and threw him back across the flagstones.
Something red and quick hit him before he’d finished landing.
It came over the garden wall in a single bound, all scales and fangs and whipping tail, taloned hands raking for his throat. Spyne. Logan got both forearms up, took the claws across the leather and the flesh beneath, and drove a knee into the reptile’s ribs. It was like hitting a bag of knives. They rolled across the grass in a snarling tangle, and the thing’s tail lashed round his ankle, and Logan ripped it loose and came up swinging.
Something black and thin rattled in the corner of his vision, a living skeleton wrapped in a glowing green haze, plucking a rib from its own chest like a knife from a block and flinging it at Jean’s throat. She caught it in mid-air, spun it back at the skeleton, and it stuck in his shoulder with a wet crack. He pulled it out and regrew it in a breath, and grinned, and began to gather another.
Deadbolt, she called. Bone throwers. Careful, they regrow.
Noted!
A scream of rushing air tore overhead, and Logan looked up in time to see the garden roses ripped from the earth in a roaring spiral, a man in a pale coat hovering inside it with both hands upraised. Hurricane. Behind him came a woman in black, pale and sharp as a razor, her bare hands outstretched and glowing a sick, dim green. Lifeforce. She was moving toward Jean, and every plant she passed withered and went grey.
Five of them. Five trained killers, on a quiet afternoon, with a lady in a greatcoat watching it all like a woman at the opera.
Jeannie.
Busy. She was. A wave of force tore Hurricane’s vortex out of the air and slammed it into the chapel wall. Lifeforce dodged it and kept coming. They’re good.
Yeah.
They’re really good.
Yeah.
Logan, they’re not trying to kill us. Her voice sharpened. They’re herding us.
He saw it then, a half-second too late. The five of them had spread in a loose, deliberate arc, driving him and Jean back toward the chapel steps, toward the dark doorway where the withered night nurse had been found. Toward a single narrow place with no way out.
Spyne came at him again, claws flashing. This time Logan didn’t block. He ghosted, pale and thin as smoke, and the reptile’s talons went straight through him with nothing to catch.
It was the opening Gauntlet had been waiting for.
The big weapon came up, its hum climbing to a shriek, and the blast that left it wasn’t the clean kinetic hammer of the first shot. It was something else, something that rang, a bright, strange, high-pitched pulse tuned precisely to the frequency of the thing Logan was doing. It hit his ghosted body as if it were solid, and the world turned to white pain. His phasing tore away like wet paper. He crashed back into the flagstones, fully solid, ribs screaming, flesh knitting around the wounds as fast as it could.
They built that, Logan thought, through the haze. They built that for me.
Gauntlet laughed, a boom of delight, already levelling the weapon again. Logan rolled to one knee, ducked the follow-up shot, surged inside the big man’s reach, and ripped two claws across his chest. Sparks flew from the armour beneath his skin, the polarized armour plating’s energy field only just holding against the glancing adamantium strike.
"Like the Master said!" Gauntlet roared, leaping back, grinning round his needle teeth. “Like the Master said! Come on, Wolverine. Come on, Death. Don’t be shy.”
Logan’s lip curled back.
Do not, said Death.
It was sharp, and sudden, and so unlike anything he’d heard from that voice before that he missed a step. Spyne’s tail whipped out of nowhere and clipped his shoulder, and spun him halfway round.
What?
Do not call me. Not for them. The cold, vast thing in the dark seemed to recoil, very slightly, like a man touching a hot stove. It is a trap, Wolverine. A good one. They want the fire. They want the merge. They have built this whole afternoon to coax it out of you in the open, where he can see.
Who?
You know who.
Logan’s blood ran cold.
Jean, he said, and heard the flat, deadly calm in his own voice. Jeannie. Stay in the circle. Don’t let it go. Whatever happens.
I’m in it. She was beside him, back to back, a glittering storm of force and fire holding off Hurricane and Lifeforce together. Her hand found his, quick and fierce. Whatever happens. Together.
Together.
Across the garden, the Magister stood in the long evening shadows with her hands folded, smiling her polite, patient smile, and lifted her black case, and began, very gently, to open it.
