Celia - or the thing that was Celia - brought her fist down, and he just twisted his head out of the way before it slammed into the ground beside him, burying itself inches into the dirt. He pulled his claws out of her side, the pain and blood startling her, and kicked her off of him, rolling aside and quickly showing himself up to his feet.

He knew he was already healing around the knife, but he wasn’t ready to yank it out of his chest just yet. Not only would it fucking hurt, but it would reopen the wound, and the bleeding, weakness, and dizziness would leave him at a temporary disadvantage. And considering how strong she was, that could be fatal.

She got to her feet, but there was so much blood pouring out of her side the lower part of her dress was quickly turning black, and her left leg was already red with it. She stumbled a bit, but otherwise looked frightfully strong and alert. “You son of a bitch! What the hell kind of freak are you?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly, still horrorstruck at what he’d done, and yet angry at her at the same time. Why couldn’t she have told him? Why couldn’t she have trusted him enough …

But had he trusted her? Did he trust anyone enough to reveal his own secret? Maybe the thing that made him most angry was the simple fact that they were, at the end of the day, very much alike. Only he wasn’t clinically insane, to the best of his knowledge.

“I … put pressure on the wound, I’ll go get Doc -”

“Why aren’t you dead yet?” She snapped, pissed off, glaring at the knife in his chest.

“I ask myself that all the time.” He started to sidle off towards the forest, back towards town, but she moved in the same direction, parallel to him, as if trying to block his passage. “Celia, please -”

“I am not Celia!” She roared, and attempted to charge, but she only took two steps before falling to her knees, slipping in her own blood. “Fucker, stupid fucker, I’ll kill you …” She attempted to stand, but couldn’t, and fell back on her haunches.

He approached her slowly, aware that she still wanted to kill him, but the ability was rapidly bleeding out of her. Tears blurred his vision, but he wasn’t sure why he was crying, or which one of them he was crying for. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean -”

“Men,” she sighed, with weary bitterness. “You’re all alike.” Her arms were wrapped around her midsection, but she had already lost too much blood, and it didn’t do any good. She was fading away, he could see it in her eyes, and he knew even if left for Withers now, there was nothing he could do for her. He had been in war, and he knew that look, that faraway stare, knew that smell. She was dead - it was all over but the final shut down of the nervous system.

On top of that, the color in her eyes started to fade, the darkness slowly surfacing, and he knew Celia was coming back - however that worked. Still, he approached carefully, not sure if it was a trick or not, until she looked up at him with recognition she’d never had before. “Logan,” she said, almost questioningly, and collapsed to the ground.

“No.” He dropped to his knees beside her, but even as he reached for her, he knew she was dead; he could smell it. “Ceely no, please, not like this. I’m sorry …” Did you tell a dead woman that you killed that you loved her? Did it matter?

He heard a loud, dramatic gasp from the woods, and looked around sharply. Standing at the very edge was the tall, almost cadaverously gaunt figure of Doc Withers (he lived up to his last name), almost ghost white with shock, his mouth agape in abject horror. Logan thought it was the sight of all the dead and dismembered, all the blood, maybe even Celia herself, but then he noticed his wide, terrified eyes were focused on him.

He still had the knife in his chest, his shirt tacky and red with previously spilled blood, and he hadn’t retracted his claws. There they were, ivory blades smeared with blood sticking out of his hand like … well, like what? Cat claws? Since when did cats have claws this goddamn long? And what Human was related to a goddamn cat?

He met Withers’ frightened stare, and it felt like the pit of his stomach had fallen out, leaving him empty inside. It was so cold; he hadn’t realized how cold it was, or how lightheaded he was. He retracted his claws inside his hands, and Withers jumped as if he’d fired a gun. “It’s not …” he began, and then realized he didn’t know what he wanted to say. He wasn’t even sure he remembered how to speak, but he was doing it anyways. “… I don’t … she was … “

Withers finally found his voice, but remained tense, like he was ready to bolt. “What are you?”

He stared at him, not sure he comprehended the question correctly. “I … I don’t know.” The world was slowly tilting on its axis, gravity lightening, and he felt like he was slowly slipping between the cracks.

“Why … why did you do this?”

“I didn’t mean to kill her! It just … I forgot. Sometimes my control … things make it happen, I forget …” He started towards him, hands held out in supplication, and Withers tore back through the woods, running much faster than he thought a middle aged man still suffering from the after-effects of malaria caught way back in his Army days could.

Only then did Logan realize he wasn’t talking about Celia, but all of them. He thought he’d killed them all - that’s why he left such a sharp stench of fear behind him. He had the briefest impulse to go after him, to explain that it wasn’t true, but then he gave up. What, they would believe mousy, fragile Celia was in reality a super strong, insane killing machine? Hadn’t Withers just seen weird things coming out of his hands? How did he explain that? Or the fucking knife in his chest?

Galvanized by sudden rage and a sorrow that was overwhelming, he grabbed the handle of the knife and ripped it out. He screamed and dropped to his knees as the pain sliced through him once more, dark motes dancing in front of his eyes and blotting out his vision as he took a moment to heal, the reopened wound sealing shut with an enviable efficiency, new blood making his chest seem warm for a minute. As soon as he could, he forced himself to his feet and stumbled towards the cave. “Matt, can you hear me?” His voice sounded slightly slurred to his ears, but he wasn’t fully healed yet, and was staggering slightly, his equilibrium seemingly angry that he was working with a bit less blood than before. “Matty, c’mon, she’s … she’s gone. You can come out now.”

He was feeling a bit stronger when he reached the tangle of brambles, scrambling over rocks and ignoring the vines tearing at his skin as he neared the opening …

… and there was that smell again. “No,” he moaned, as he slipped down into the opening, and was overwhelmed by the fetid scent of blood and death. He felt liquid squelching under his boots, and even in the dimness of the former lair, he could see a very small body crumpled up against the side of the den.

He made an inarticulate noise in the back of his throat, crouching down to reach Matt, but he put a hand on his chest and felt no movement at all. In fact, the blood on him was cold.

She made him promise to protect him, no matter what. Forget her, and protect him. Did she know? Did she know if her “sister” came back, she’d tried to kill her son?

He’d failed her twice. He hadn’t helped her, and he hadn’t saved her son. What the hell was he? What good was he?

He scrambled out of the cave, sobbing so violently he thought he might fall apart at any second, and started to stumble through the woods, away from town, away from all of it. He couldn’t go back anyways, even if he wanted to, and he didn’t.

He wanted the earth to open up and swallow him. He didn’t want to live anymore.

****

The bastard took so long to return, he wondered if he had left already. Except his scent was so strong and recent, he bet he was still hanging around.

As he thought, Malloy came back. Logan waited until he had shut the door before he moved. He grabbed Malloy and threw him against the wall before he even knew he was in the room, holding him by the throat and pinning him against the wall. He was so startled, his glasses almost fell off. “You,” he growled into his face. “You knew about her.”

He was squeezing his throat so tightly he couldn’t talk. He eased up, and Malloy tried to regain some of his composure. “Mr. Woods. After what happened in Frontier the other day, I thought perhaps you’d disappeared for go -”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He snarled, shaking him like a rag doll.

“I didn’t know she was there,” he wheezed. “I was looking for a gold eyed woman named Mary Greenhill, who was so insane I didn’t think it was possible for her to live among people. I didn’t know she could … alter her appearance.”

He wanted him to be lying, he wanted to pop his head like an over inflated air sac … but he was telling the truth, wasn’t he? Honestly, he didn’t know. He’d spent all night in the woods, apparently heading down towards Red River without realizing it, feeling completely dead inside. Numb didn’t even begin to cover the feeling; he felt like an empty husk, hollowed out, light headed and somnambulistic. He still felt that way, and didn’t even realize where he was going until he ended up on the outskirts of town, and knew instinctively he had to find that son of a bitch Malloy. And now that he had …

He kept smelling her blood, and Matt’s blood. It was still on him, dried to a brown crust, and he felt like popping his claws and ripping his own face off, except he was too tired to do so. How had things gone so wrong so fast?

He let Malloy go and collapsed in a chair, so tired and strung out he didn’t want to try and sit up. “They think I did it, don’t they?”

Malloy straightened his tie and smoothed his hair down before he answered, trying to regain his composure. “Killed Mar - Celia? Yes. They believe you were responsible for the other crimes as well. If it’s anything at all, your friend McClendon doesn’t believe it.”

He shook his head, knowing they would think that, but still unable to believe it. “I never hurt them. I protected them.”

“You’re a freak.” Malloy said it so baldly that it made Logan wince. “I’m sorry, but that’s how most people will see you if they know the truth. Although Withers is considered a little unreliable, and possibly hysterical. After all, he said you were moving around easily with a knife in your chest - a knife they coincidentally found. They’ve been searching for your body, but obviously they’ve had no luck yet. He also said something about knives coming out of your hands.” Malloy looked at him with a new interest, a sinister curiosity sparkling in his eyes. “Do you know what that’s about?”

He met his gaze without emotion, unable to raise a single iota of reaction - but that was good, as it would make his lie more convincing. “Trick I learned during the war. I held a knife in palm, blade sticking out from between my fingers. She couldn’t wrestle it out of my hand that way, but …”

“She tried and you stabbed her.”

He closed his eyes, trying to will back the few tears he had left. “It was an accident,” he muttered, barely able to say it anymore. Maybe it wasn’t - did he even know anymore?

"Even if it wasn't, it was self-defense. Mary was a very dangerous woman."

He was so tired he wanted to collapse and never get up again. In fact, that sounded like a dream right now. "What ... why? What happened to her?"

"Ah, the big question. Well, her life, I'm afraid, was a tragedy from the very beginning. It's melodramatic to say that some people are doomed from the start, but she would fit that bill, if anyone did. Being a half-breed is bad enough, but she was abandoned, and ended up in a type of reform school, run by the church to "reform" the natives, teach them of the white man's god, and prepare them for lives as maids and janitors."

Logan groaned, rubbed his eyes. "God, I've heard of those places."

"Yes, well, this one was worse than most. It was run by a somewhat sadistic man called Father White, who it seems had a penchant for young girls -"

"Stop." He didn’t need to hear it; he could guess. ("You men are all alike.") "What about her ... her second personality, or whatever the hell it was. Her insanity? How did that come about?"

Malloy paused to consider his words carefully, and sat down on the edge of his bed, as that was the only seat across from him. "That's unclear. But it is documented that when her eyes changed color and she began to manifest unusual strength, after the onset of puberty, that she was considered demonically possessed, and some ... unfortunate things were done to her. Eventually she seemed to keep her strength in check - or so it was believed - but when she was sixteen ... "

He paused so long that Logan looked at him. "What?"

Muscles in Malloy's jaw tensed, and the enigmatic man looked disturbed for the first time. "She broke out of the school, dramatically. Eighteen people died."

Oh god. Logan closed his eyes once more, and wondered if that was why he felt he loved her. Unconsciously perhaps, he knew they were kindred souls.

"It was clear what the source of her rage was, as not all of Father White was ever recovered, but enough to suggest ... well, her strength wasn't as in check as everyone thought. She was assumed to be extraordinarily dangerous, but so unstable and loathing of humanity that she would never attempt to join it. We assumed she lived in the mountains somewhere - she had good survival skills - but not among people. If that had crossed our minds that that was a possibility ..." He trailed off, figuring the rest to be self-evident, and Logan supposed it was.

"Could you have helped her somehow?"

He sighed heavily. "Honestly, Mr. Woods, I don't see how. She was far too strong to contain - you must know that - and far too damaged to be reasoned with. I'm flabbergasted she had a child, but I'm not surprised she murdered him. I'm surprised she didn't do it sooner."

Logan rubbed his eyes, swallowing back tears. "She said ... she said he wasn't her son. Is that possible?"

"Well ... maybe. I doubt she'd kidnap a child, although as insane as she was, she has to be considered capable of almost anything. Look what she did to that logging camp."

He felt like he was swallowing back bile now. In retrospect, he must have picked up the scent of violets there, he must have ... but he ignored it. Because it didn't make sense, because Celia wouldn't and couldn't so such a thing. Women just weren't that strong ... unless, of course, they were a freak like him. He was so accustomed to thinking himself alone that the possibility of others just didn't occur to him.

"We can make this whole incident disappear," Malloy said quietly. "We can make sure you do not take the blame, and she is never mentioned. This will go down as an animal attack and nothing more. Mary doesn't officially exist. You don't have to either."

Why wasn't the earth swallowing him up yet? Why weren't the skeletal arms of the dead reaching up to pull him down with him? They should; he wanted them to. Quietly, softly, he admitted, "I don't want to exist anymore."

"Done," Malloy agreed briskly. He stood up, and said, "I'll get myself a new room. Why don't you use this one, clean up, get some rest - because frankly Mr. Woods, you look like hell, and don't smell much better. Then tonight, as soon as it's dark, we'll leave for Toronto."

He wasn't sure he wanted any part of what this weaselly little man had to offer - he didn't trust him - but he didn't know what else to do. If they could make him cease to exist, fine, but couldn't they take it all they way? Couldn't they just kill him? Maybe they would; maybe this was all a euphemism.  He could hope.

Joining this man, going back to the government, was suicide. He knew that … and he didn‘t care anymore. He would accept any form of suicide he could get. "What's in Toronto?"

Malloy smiled at him, but it was cold and tight, his eyes glittering like permafrost in the moonlight. "Your future."

******

When he drove up to his home in Laurel Canyon, he noticed the living room light on, and figured Skyla had dropped by for a visit. A good thing too, as he’d had a really long day and could really use a massage. But if she was here, where was her car?

He didn’t worry about it as he walked up the path to his front door, loosening his tie and cursing his stupid fucking employers. Something majorly fucked up was going on, some kind of “gang war”, and he had been warned to beef up security at his office until he could move, and be wary of Japanese men.

They were insane. He had a successful practice, and he wasn’t about to move it. And be wary of Japanese guys? What the fuck? It was L.A. for Christ’s sake! Did they know how many Japanese men there were around here? His message service office operator was a Japanese man! Not only was he too old for this stupid fucking shit, but in too high a tax bracket.

“Skyla,” he called as he walked in, tossing his infrared “key” on the side table in the entryway. The overhead lights were on in his sunken living room, but she wasn’t draped over his brushed suede sofa like he expected. “Cupcake, I’m not in the mood for games.”

The kitchen lights were also on, allowing him to see a shadow through the opaque glass bricks that made up the dividing wall. Curious, as he didn’t smell anything cooking, but he wasn’t perfectly sure she could cook. Maybe she just ordered in.

He ripped off his tie and threw it aside, belatedly realizing that there was something wrong with the way she was walking. Also, the shadow was too big to be her - she was like Lara Flynn Boyle, but with tits.

He felt an anxious twinge in his stomach when a man stepped into the archway, nearly filling it with his bulk. He was broad shouldered - maybe that’s what old time writers meant by “barrel chested” - and wearing a tight, cheap olive drab tank top that showed off precisely how hard bodied he was, his arms just thick enough with muscle to be frightening. But hey, at least he wasn’t Japanese.

“Skyla had to go,” the man said, his voice a low rumble.

He could run, but he had a feeling this gym maniac would catch him pretty fast. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothin’. It seems she got upset when she found out you had a secret boyfriend.”

What was that old t.v. show called, Twilight Limits? Something like that? Well, he felt like he had been dropped straight into an episode. “What?”

“You don’t call, you don’t e-mail,” he said mockingly, raising his voice an octave. “I thought we had something special, David. How could you just use me like that, and dump me for some anorexic bleach blonde skank?”

This was un-fucking-believable. “Who the fuck are you?! Get out of my house!”

The guy smirked at his own joke, and raised his hand so he could get a good look at his fist for some reason. He had hazel green eyes that seemed to impale him, filled with a smoldering hate that he wasn’t sure he could ever honestly earn. “You’re Doctor David LeClare, yes?”

He scoffed. “Well, obviously you know that. Why else are you here?”

“A plastic surgeon who specializes in body modification, and is the personal bitch of the demon mob.” Muscles seemed to move abnormally beneath the skin of the man’s fist, and three metal spikes shot out from between his knuckles, so suddenly that he jumped. “You have a personal talent in working with metal. You’re going to tell me all you know about adamantium, and about people working with adamantium, or I’m going to modify your body with my adamantium. Are we clear?”

David tasted something sour in the back of his mouth and thought about offering him money, but just one look at the embers that were his eyes told him there wasn’t enough money in the world to make him go away.

19

Scott found himself wandering the grounds, but at some point they stopped being known territory and became unknown. Unknown and odd.

A hedge maze popped out of nowhere, topiaries of odd figures dotting its out edges. He thought one looked kind of like a large bird, like a hawk, but it had an unnaturally elongated beak pointing towards the sky, while the forms beyond it started to become more and more grotesque. There was something like a scorpion body with a human head, a human head with long, curving ram’s horns, and a dog with a nightmarish head, something triangular, wrong, and indefinable, and all of these things were wrought out of ivy a nauseating shade of greenish-black, like decay. Something dark and shiny was glistening between the leaves, and on closer inspection, they were beetles; big black beetles that clung to every inch of space beneath the greenery. He though he saw antennae move, but otherwise they were so still - waiting? - that he couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead, and honestly he didn’t want to know.

It was a nightmare garden, something created by someone deeply disturbed, and when Scott turned to go back to the mansion, he found himself inside his room, standing in front of his bathroom sink. The location shift was disorienting, but not nearly as disorienting as what he saw in the mirror.

His eyes.

No visor, no glowing red orbs that would obliterate the mirror and everything behind it until it hit open air. Just plain blue eyes, like the kind he stared at every day before … well, this; all of this. But his face was not the spotty mess of a gawky teenage boy, but that of an adult. But still, he had no idea he looked like that exactly - when had his cheekbones started standing out? Were his cheeks sinking in? He was so enrapt studying his own face, trying to make sense of what had happened, that he realized he wasn’t alone as an afterthought.

In the mirror‘s reflection, he saw her. Standing in the bathroom doorway was Jean.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me to give you your eyes back?” She asked.

Okay, now he knew he was dreaming. Still, he could feel his heart pounding double time in his chest, and he was afraid to look away from the mirror, afraid that if he turned around to see her face on the landscape would shift again, slide away beneath his feet. He gripped the edge of the sink, almost feeling the porcelain, and stammered, “Y-you didn’t -”

“- have the power?” She finished for him, a strangely cheerful lilt to her voice. “Oh, but I do now, sweetheart. So why don’t you ask?”

“Are you - are you really here?” Why was he asking? This was a dream. He would hear whatever his mind decided he should hear. So why was he so damn excited, and so damn frightened?

She gave him a slightly patronizing half smile, a smile he had seen a couple of times before. It wasn’t anything he thought about often, but Jean was not only older than him, but far more experienced in nearly every way that counted. Telepathy be damned, she did her residency in a hospital in the middle of New York City, one that had a history of fights and even gunfire breaking out in the middle of triage. Sometimes she would tell him horror stories about gangbangers who would come by the hospital to settle scores while the victim was still getting the first bullet pulled out of him, junkies with needles in their eyes, nine year old kids wired on crack, but she stopped when she realized how much it horrified him. She knew stuff he would never know, stuff he didn’t want to know. “I never really left. You know that now, don’t you?”

His mouth was dry, and he didn’t know if he could answer her, even if he knew what to say.

Suddenly he knew that something was wrong in the other world, the waking world, and the dream - if it was a dream - shattered.

He woke up tangled in his own blankets, groggy as hell, but vaguely aware that someone had said his name before he woke up. “Jean?” He asked sleepily, reaching up unconsciously to make sure he had his sleep goggles on before he opened his eyes and sat up.

The room was pitch black. It was still night, and all he could see was the glowing numerals of the alarm clock on the nightstand - 4:27 am. His eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and he realized the shape of his armchair was wrong; someone was sitting in it. A lighter flared, almost violent in the gloom, and he could see Logan’s face in the reflected glow. “Now I thought you were a mornin’ person, Scooter.” He flicked the lighter closed, making his face fade away.

He must have heard him say Jean; there’s no way, with his bat like hearing, that he couldn’t have. But he was clearly choosing to pretend he hadn’t, a rare act of kindness on his part. Why? This was something else he decided he didn’t want to know, but he refused to be grateful. “What the hell are you doing here, Logan?”

“It’s time.”

It probably wasn’t a continuation of the dream, simply because there was no way he could be this irritated and not be awake. “What? What the hell are you -”

“Mirror Lake,” he interrupted, his voice a low, intense whisper.

Now he knew what the hell he was talking about, and his stomach burned with anxiety. “Logan, I’m not sure -”

“If you’re going to pussy out, fine. But Saddiq’s comin’ with me.”

“I am not pussying out. I’m just not sure about this...”

“They’re planning to do this to others, you know” he said, levering himself to his feet. In the early morning twilight, he looked like a rogue, distorted shadow. “The brainwashing, the adamantium injections if they can find someone capable of withstanding it. It’s not going to stop, but just maybe we can slow them down, and spare someone else from going through what we went through. Are you in or out?”

He sighed, shaking his head, wondering why his head was pounding and his eyes felt as dry as sand. Logan may have - only may have - had a point, but he just knew this was a horrible idea, no matter how many people he gathered. Hell, Bob could be with them and he still wouldn’t feel good about this. But he knew that Saddiq very much wanted a chance to even the score with the Organization, and he was eager to go. Scott knew he’d have to go along, if only to keep an eye on Saddiq - that last thing Logan needed was a protégé. “I’m in. But this sucks.”

“Yeah, well, so does life. Get over it.” He left his room as silently as a wraith, so quickly that Scott couldn’t ask why that statement sounded so strangely bitter, even for Logan (which was saying something).

What was he going to tell the Professor? As he slid to the edge of his bed and slowly got up, he groaned and stretched, hoping that the bad feeling settling like a stone in the pit of his stomach was just a consequence of being in proximity to Logan.

“Jean, honey,” he muttered under his breath. “If you’re listening, consider yourself on stand by. I think we’re going to need you.”

He wondered if she was really watching them, always there but never quite, and then he wondered why such a comforting thought could scare him so much.

To Be Continued …. (Of course!)