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He hadn’t been to see Erik Lensherr in a while, and when he walked into the white plastic room, it was with deep displeasure that he saw Erik and the redhead—Jean Grey—engrossed in a game of chess.
“Vishous,” said Erik, as though V had stepped into the private parlor of his club. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
The redhead nodded at him so dismissively that she might have been born and raised in the glymera. Then she leaned across the chessboard and kissed Erik on the cheek. “I should be going. You’ll remember where we were in our game, won’t you?”
“Always.” Erik kissed her cheek in return, with surprising gentleness for an evil mastermind.
V crossed his arms and leaned on the doorframe, waiting for her to leave, doubting that they were anywhere near finished with their game. “You talk to your professor yet?” he asked as Jean Gray passed him.
She gave him a smile that was closer to a baring of teeth. “You talk to your roommate yet?” she replied, and disappeared in a cloud of auburn.
“How marvelously diverting,” Erik said once the airlock had closed. “And who is this roommate of yours?”
“It’s not important,” said V, sitting down.
“Oh, I rather think it is; otherwise she wouldn’t bring it up, and you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me. But we’ll leave it for another time.”
That time will never come, V thought, but didn’t say. He looked down at the chessboard and studied the incomprehensible game laid out on it. “What the hell kind of chess is this?”
“Jean Grey Battle Chess. Invented by the girl herself when she was little more than a child. There are four people on this earth who know the rules.”
“You, Jean…?”
“Charles Xavier, and Jean’s spineless recently-ex boyfriend, Scott Summers. You’d enjoy it. It’s as close to bloodsport as one can get without actually bleeding.” Erik set the board to the side. “But you didn’t come here to talk about chess, did you?”
*************
Outside, Jean Grey took a deep breath and leaned against the side of the building—which was really the brick base of the western end of the Queensborough Bridge. Then she righted herself, walked away, and got as far as First Avenue before she turned back around. She stood by the door, which appeared to the world as a maintenance entrance, for a few seconds, then turned again, this time getting as far as Second before she circled back. She was mere blocks from the house Rogue—Marie, she corrected herself, Marie now—shared with Faith and Vern, and she should walk back, sit down, have some hot chocolate, and work on her job applications at Rockefeller and Metropolitan. She headed west again with good intentions—and ended up back underneath the bridge despite herself.
“Waiting for someone?” a deep voice said.
Infuriated with herself, she looked up to see Vishous closing the exterior door.
“It’s been a long day,” she said.
“No doubt. But that doesn’t answer my question. Waiting for someone?”
She was too tired and too bruised for anything but radical honesty. “I’m not sure. I was walking back and forth between here and First Avenue, trying to decide whether I wanted to talk to you or not.”
“My car’s right around the corner,” he said, touching the palm of one hand just slightly against her shoulder blades. It was nearly big enough to span them. “Come have a drink with me. You look like you need one, and you can decide then.”
“Where?” He was absurdly good-looking, Jean thought, so much that it was almost a caricature: the thick dark hair with tattoos disappearing into it, the Roman nose and full lips, the dark-diamond eyes, the Elgin-marble body underneath his button-down shirt and jeans. The last time she saw him, he’d been in head-to-toe leather, but tonight the only leather was his black jacket, the glove on his left hand, and a pair of thick black boots ornamented with what looked like steel.
He palmed keys. “Library Bar on Fifty-ninth, west side. Tabla’s not far from here. Or anywhere else you’d like to go.”
The voices in both seemed to multiply themselves from afar, as though she could already hear each voice and each thought in each place trying to intrude inside her head. She took a deep breath, pressing two fingers just above the bridge of her nose, an instinctive gesture from her younger years that had reappeared over the past few days. She’d started doing it when her telepathy had emerged, as a way of focusing herself to block out the multitude of thoughts and voices around her. Lately she’d felt as though she might have to walk around with her fingers there all the time.
She shook her head. “No people. I feel like I’m picking up half the city as it is.” She shook her head again, rubbed that spot again. “Maybe I should just go home.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be sitting in an empty house right now,” Vishous suggested in a casual but pointed voice.
“I’d invite you over to Marie’s—Faith’s—but they come bursting in at weird times. As much as I’d like to see you squirm, no one deserves the tripartite interrogation.” She paused. “You have a place in the city, right? Normally I wouldn’t invite myself over, but I put manners on hold right about the time I was told I have a split personality.”
“I have a place here,” Vishous said carefully, “but it’s not somewhere I take guests. Or you could say it’s somewhere I take only very specific guests.”
“I don’t care if it’s where you take your hookups.”
“That’s not—” Vishous started, but she interrupted.
“If the only furniture is a bed and a TV, fine. I don’t care. I’ll sit on the floor. I just don’t want to hear the voices of everyone in a bar.”
“There’s more than just a bed and a TV,” Vishous said, still in that same careful voice.
“Good,” Jean said. “So we’re agreed.”
He didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue, and she followed him to his Escalade. He unlocked and opened her door first, then went around to the driver’s side.
“Is it far from here?” Jean asked.
“No. Fifty-first, on the water.”
“Nice,” she said, and he shrugged.
“It serves its purpose.”
*************
The building was sleek and glass-fronted, its windows reflecting back the lights of the city against the night. The Escalade was whisked away by a valet in an underground garage, and they went up in an elevator that gleamed with brass and mirrors. Vishous took his keys out again and, instead of pressing a button, inserted one next to the highest number, some sixty floors up. Of course, Jean thought. Of course he has the penthouse.
“So you talked to your professor.” It wasn’t really a question.
“I assume you can’t say the same for your roommate.”
“The cop and I talk.”
“About what you’re thinking when you’re in the shower?”
He turned so quickly it was barely visible, the keys held like a weapon, the anger (and despair, Jean realized with a shock—it was also despair) on his face so naked it was terrifying. And then he melted back against the wall of the elevator, and everything was masked as quickly as it had appeared. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Vishous put his hand over one and gestured Jean in front of him without a word.
There was only one door outside the elevator. It looked like steel—done for security rather than elegance—and the outside was guarded by several bronze-plated locks. She was sure there were cameras, too, but Vishous was good enough with them that they were nowhere to be seen. He didn’t take out keys, just put a hand on each of the locks; she heard the mechanisms turning, and then the door opened. He reached past her with a long arm to turn on the lights.
It was a huge place—the entire floor of a skyscraper, of course it would be—and she could see across the gleaming hardwood floors to the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and the city sparkling on the other side. And then she saw the equipment, too.
*************
She looked archly from the table—no way could it be mistaken for something you’d use for dining—to the sling to the cage to—oh God—the rack of canes and paddles on the wall. One slim auburn eyebrow rose higher and higher at each sight until she turned back to look at him, uncowed, her arms crossed over her chest. He wasn’t ashamed of what he did, but, Christ, this was a female of worth, and she hadn’t asked for BDSM 101 via a glance into his living room.
Jean Gray leaned against the doorframe. There was no softness in her dark-amber eyes when she asked, “So, Vishous, do you like to hurt women?”
He let a breath in and then out, trying to formulate an answer. He hadn’t felt this awkward for at least a hundred years. “They’re the ones tied to the table,” he finally answered. “But I’ve never tied down a female or done anything to cause her physical pain without a lot of negotiation and a direct request.”
“Good,” Jean said, and swept into the apartment. She looked around again and said, “Is there anywhere to sit that someone hasn’t been handcuffed to?”
V actually had to consider that one for a second. “The kitchen counter, I think. And the deck. I don’t usually go out there.”
She walked over to the door facing the East River and then looked back at him. “OK if I go out?”
“Yeah,” V said, and unlocked the door from across the room. “Do you want something to drink?”
“What do you have?”
“What do you want?”
“Surprise me,” she said, and went outside.
She had a female’s body and a female’s emotions, but her game of cat-and-mouse wasn’t like anything he’d experienced with either sex. She had a mind that made his look like a joke, and enough power to destroy the world. The only other being V knew with that much power, he worshipped as a deity. He went into the kitchen and stared at the bar, thinking that alcohol, at least, functioned on a plane that was familiar to him.
He made her a Hendrick’s and tonic, with cucumber as garnish, the way it should be. He poured himself Grey Goose on the rocks and went onto the deck.
Jean Grey had disappeared.
He nearly dropped the glasses when she surfaced again—literally, her body floating in the air beside the deck’s ledge. She was resting her hands on her stomach, so casually that she might have been lying on her living room couch. She rolled over twice—in midair—until she was lying on the ledge in the same position.
“Jesus,” Vishous said, his voice louder than he’d intended.
“I can do that now,” Jean said. She might as well have been discussing baseball stats, from the inflection in her voice. “I could always move small objects, but now I can move myself. Other people. Cars. Small buildings. I picked up a shed the last time I was in Westchester, just for practice. I moved a Hummer that was blocking a fire hydrant on Faith’s street. And from what the Professor has deigned to tell me, this is just kid stuff. I’m just getting started.”
He set her drink on the ledge. “So you did talk to your professor.”
“I talked to him, and I talked to Magneto. I’ve been talking to Magneto a lot, actually. I won’t ask you how know him. I’m not even surprised that you do. Did you know that Erik didn’t want the Professor to split me like that? I’d assume that Erik was lying, except that the Professor told me the same thing. Erik thought it was a bad idea. That I’d be angry when I found out. When, not if. And he was right.” She sat up a little and took a sip of the drink. “This is good. What is it?”
“Hendrick’s. Made with cucumber and rose petals.”
She took another sip, and an appreciative sniff, and lay back down. “If you’d asked me two weeks ago what I’d be doing this evening,” she said, “I’d have shrugged and said that I’d probably do some research in the lab, then have dinner in the school and watch some TV with Scott. I would not have said, ‘I’ll be levitating myself outside a penthouse bondage suite belonging to a vampire, and then I’ll drink a cocktail made out of rose petals.’”
“How’s Scott taking all this?” Vishous asked. He wasn’t sure if he should sit—but the two chairs were on the other side of the deck—and he felt strange standing there next to her. What the fuck am I turning into, he thought, Zsadist?
“Oh,” Jean said, and turned her head to look out at the water, “oh, he’s not. He swore up and down that he loved me no matter what I could do, no matter what I was. Then he saw me levitate myself, and then I made a little rainstorm for one of the student gardens, and he didn’t even need to broadcast the fear: It was right there on his face.”
“Levitation and a rainstorm, and he’s so scared, he’s out of there?”
“With the levitation, the Professor told me I’d be able to do it, so he and Scott and I went out into the yard to practice. It was after school hours, so a bunch of the kids were out, and they came over to watch. I did it, and then I figured out I could move in the air, and I was twirling and spinning around—it was so much fun, it was like flying. Here—” She paused, and suddenly an image was in V’s head: Jean laughing and pirouetting in the air, the kids clamoring in a circle on the ground below her. “And a couple of the littler kids were saying, ‘Do me! Do me!’ so I lifted them, too. They were laughing and waving their arms, and Pyro was standing down there with his lighter singing ‘I Believe I Can Fly,’ and Bobby was telling him to shut up, and it was just—it was fun. I had found out this awful, unbelievable thing—but now I could fly! Who doesn’t want to fly?” Another image: The two children laughing gleefully in the air, a dark-haired boy on the ground waving a lighter and singing, a blond boy punching him in the arm. Even the man in the wheelchair was smiling, and the two children drifted down from the air and came to rest gently on the grass.
“Then that night, Scott and I were in bed, and I thought, well, this levitation thing, it could provide some possibilities. So I lifted us up while we were, um, entangled. And he freaked out. I should have asked first, I know; I should have. And maybe if I had, he wouldn’t have been so scared. But he started shouting at me, and I put us down, and he got out of bed and didn’t talk to me the rest of the night. And then a couple of days later—”
“Wait,” V said. “Slings—they’re not inexpensive. People pay a lot of money just to approximate what you were doing.”
Jean Gray shrugged. “Well, I guess Scott wouldn’t be one of them. Or he would be, but having his fiancée lift him into the air is just too kinky. But yeah, so a couple of days after that, one of the grade-school girls was showing me the garden she was growing for science class, and telling me how she was having trouble because it had been too dry lately. So I thought, if I can move molecules, maybe I can move some moisture around and make it rain a little bit for her. So I rearranged some water molecules and some ions and I made her a little rainstorm. Nothing big, just for her garden, nowhere else, and I gave it some thunder and lightning, too, just for effect. She thought it was the best thing ever and brought all her friends over to see.” And another image: a little girl with cornrows, staring with openmouthed delight as a thundercloud about the size of a throw blanket formed a few feet above her patch of garden and began to rain. “I looked up at Scott, and the only thing he looked was scared. Pure, elemental terror. I let the storm go on a while, then put everything back like it was and asked Scott to come inside with me. I asked him why he was so afraid. He accused me of invading his mind. I said that I hadn’t even needed to, that the way he felt was plain on his face. And we had some words, and I moved out that night. The professor offered me a room in the school—Scott and I live—lived—in a cottage on the grounds—but I didn’t want to stay on campus. I called Marie, and I took the train down, and she and Faith and Veronica met me at Grand Central.”
V said something in the Old Language, then stopped, realizing. “There’s not a direct translation for what I just said,” he told Jean Grey, “but more or less it means that he has balls the size of a ferret’s and deserves to have them shrivel and fall off.”
She let out a bark of laughter. “Thanks. But I think I can sort of see where he’s coming from. Almost all our lives, he’s known me one way, and then suddenly I’m this completely different being. I can see how it would be hard to adjust.”
Vishous shook his head in disgust. “Everyone changes during the course of their lives. And any male of worth would support his female as her life changed. You would have had him for your hellren, yes?”
“My what?”
“Hellren. It translates as ‘husband,’ I guess, but stronger. The male who is the one male on this planet for you.”
“Yes,” Jean said quietly, “my husband. My hellren. It’s what I’d wanted since I was fourteen years old. I wanted to marry Scott and be a doctor.”
“My kind are very old-fashioned in many ways,” V said after a moment. “Males protect their females.” He laughed slightly, bitterly. “Males always go with females. But we…strength is prized among us. And your ex spurned a woman of beauty and grace and strength?”
Her eyes were still away from him, turned towards the dark water and the lights on the opposite bank. “Scott likes rules,” she said. “And the rules changed.” She turned her head and focused those deceptively soft eyes on him again. “And what of your rules?” she asked. “I can’t imagine that a culture where males protect females would approve of”—she made an expansive gesture towards the interior—”all that.”
“I don’t advertise what I do,” Vishous said.
“Then how do you find your partners?”
He shrugged. “The females find me.”
“And what sort of women come to you? They want…they want to be whipped and beaten and locked up in cages?”
“Sometimes,” V said. “Sometimes that’s exactly what they want. And it’s all sorts of females—some barely out of transition, some old enough that their young have youngs. Some are from the glymera—our aristocracy—and some are from the lowest classes. And everywhere in between.”
“But they all have one thing in common.”
“Not exactly,” Vishous said slowly. “I’ve found that there are two types. There is the type who want to be tied down, blindfolded, gagged—who want to be bound with rope and metal so that they has no control. And then there are others who want their hands tied gently so that they can finally give up the control they’ve had to take on.” He put down his glass and looked at Jean Grey. “Which one are you?”
“You’re assuming,” she said crisply, “that I wouldn’t be the one doing the tying.”
“I think normally you might,” V replied. “I think that’s what you’ve been doing—just not literally—since you were fourteen years old. And maybe you won’t admit it out loud, but you need a break.”
Jean’s voice was soft but steady. “Is that an offer?”
“It’s a statement.”
He was about to pick up his drink again, but her hand closed firmly over his. She set his palm on her belly, resting her hand over it, and he felt the warmth of her skin and the faint rhythm of her heart through the soft cotton of her shirt. Her eyes met his. “Let’s see what you can do.”
V reached underneath her knees with one hand and behind her shoulders with the other, and picked her up to carry her inside. She was tall for a human female but slightly below average for a vampire, and slender, so she didn’t weigh much. She didn’t resist and, if anything, seemed to settle into his arms.
“How very butch of you,” she said, and he forced himself not to react.