“Magneto?” Logan gasped and shook his head. “No, that’s not possible.”
“You seem to think a lot of things aren’t possible,” Wanda scathingly countered.
Logan ignored her. “Magneto had nothing against Rogue; in fact after the years...after Liberty Island he was the one who was afraid of a possible vendetta. When Rogue left the X-Men he saw it as a benefit to his cause.”
“Yes, but Rogue never joined the Brotherhood,” Pietro stated. “She despised him. And she doesn’t take being told what do very well as I’m sure you know.”
Logan snorted. “Anyone leaving Xavier’s fold and Magneto sees it as his own victory.”
“The man’s ego knows no bounds,” Jaime interjected with a shrug.
“We do not believe Magneto was directly responsible for her death,” Pietro spoke up. “But whatever Rogue was involved in before her death he was very interested in.”
“And still is,” Wanda remarked with an edge.
“Why?”
“We don’t know,” Pietro supplied with a defeated sigh.
“What we do know is that Rogue isn’t out of the woods yet.”
“We have contacts in the mutant underground and there’s a nasty little rumour that Magneto has sent a mutant on the run after us,” Jaime explained.
Logan glanced at the three of them noticing how extremely tense they all were.
“What has you all on edge?” he asked suspiciously. “I’m willing to understand why you wouldn’t want her body to be vandalized somehow but your concern or should I say paranoia seems somehow out of place.”
“Not if you knew who the mutant was,” Wanda replied.
“Logan,” Pietro started. “Magneto desperately wants to know what Rogue was up to, what she knew...at any cost.”
“How is it that none of you knew what she was up to?”
Logan snapped.
Wanda stepped forth and glared at Logan. “Things started to change about four months ago.”
“Around the spring time,” Jaime added.
“Rogue started to act very differently. She was on edge, she was stressed and she was isolating herself from us. She’d disappear for a few days and return looking even worse than when she had left. She was snappy and when I tried to confront her about it,” Wanda paused. “Things didn’t go over to well.”
Logan looked concern. “No idea what brought on the sudden change?”
Wanda shook her head no. “She was getting various private phone calls. I knew confronting her would be pointless so I snooped around a bit. I wasn’t able to find much but what I did find wasn’t very comforting.”
“What?” Logan snapped.
“She was using.”
“Using?”
“Drugs, Wolverine. But I don’t mean the shit you can get on any back alley in any city. It was high class stuff. Never seen it in my life. A bag full of green viles that were to be injected. I mean there are plenty of up and coming drugs specifically marketed towards mutants but I couldn’t be sure.”
Logan shook his head quietly as he began to pace.
Wanda eyed him and continued on. “I was waiting for things to get worse after finding the drugs but surprisingly things didn’t, in fact Rogue seemed to realize we were catching on and she confided in me as much as I suppose she thought she could,” she finished bitterly. “Told me she had to go away for a while. She had something important to take care of and that she couldn’t tell me or any of us because she didn’t want us to be put in any kind of danger. I objected. The mere fact that there was actual fear in her eyes, that she was unable to hide it did nothing but make me refuse more. After our argument she reluctantly consented and said she’d wait for us all to be able to back her up.” Wanda suddenly laughed bitterly. “I should have realized she’d agreed too fast. She was gone the next day. Slipped away before we even had a chance.”
“We tracked her down to Detroit but it was too late,” Pietro finished for his sister who had suddenly turned away to face the wall.
Logan was silently glaring at the door where Rogue’s body lay behind. His body was taunt with a sense of distraught rage and grief. The animal in him wanted to be running, wanted to be hacking into a tree trunk with his claws; somehow trying to figure out a way to dispel this energy from his body. The feeling of regret and utter helplessness was soaking him up and it was too much of a sudden reality for him. Abruptly, the world he had been living in had been thrown off its axis and he was forced to wake up in a much more harsher world, a world he’d tried to forget three years ago because suddenly once again he was in a world where he didn’t have Marie.
“That’s all we have to go on,” he gritted through his teeth.
“We know nothing about why she was killed, Wolverine,” Pietro answered. “But what we do know is the basic facts of the reality we face now and that is that we are on the run. Magneto has sent a mutant after us whose power is to be able to reanimate the dead.”
Logan’s head snapped around quickly as he eyed Pietro. “Then why the hell are we running. If this mutant can bring Rogue back,” he demanded.
“Would you be looking forward to fucking a corpse then?” Wanda began darkly. “He didn’t say ‘bring back to life’, he said reanimate the dead. Make Rogue a fucking zombie, a fucking shell of what she use to be, to be controlled and manipulated by this mutant.”
Logan’s face fell. “That bastard,” he seethed as he turned around and punched his fist through the wall. “Even in her death he can’t leave her be.”
“I see Magneto is a bit of a sore spot for you as well,” Pietro remarked dryly.
Wanda carried on. “The mutant he has sent after us is a woman. She’s simply known as Dead Girl and she’s a hired hand, not Brotherhood. And that’s why we need you Wolverine, because this mutant is already dead and she has keen senses. She won’t be an easy one deal with. We need your senses to match hers.”
“Already dead?” Logan remarked.
“Hence, the name Dead Girl,” Jaime added.
Logan scowled at him.
“There is an upside though,” Pietro interrupted.
“Really?” Logan snapped in disbelief.
“Dead Girl’s abilities to be able to reanimate a dead body and be able to retrieve the specific information from the host before they died is limited. She only has a window of five days to be able to accomplish the task.”
“Why five days?”
Pietro shrugged his shoulders. “I do not know. I don’t know what there is after this life, perhaps it has something to do with the belief of one’s soul but all I know is the basic facts. It’s been two days and counting since Rogue’s death, which leaves us just under three days. If we are able to hold Dead Girl off for that time she will no longer be a threat.”
“This is ridiculous,” Logan yelled in frustration.
“Ridiculous, but true,” Wanda yelled back. “And since it’s true we don’t have time to wallow in our grief. Rogue still needs us, so the question is Wolverine, are you willing to step up to the plate once more?”
“I don’t really like you and I don’t fuckin’ trust you people.”
“That’s not what she asked,” Jaime pointed out.
Logan glanced once more at the door before letting out a breath and sighing. “I’m in.”
Pietro smiled. “Good.”
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