The Jewels of Cyttorak Read online

  “Weird,” he said aloud.

  He stood and moved out into the open grassy area that had once been the farmhouse’s front yard. There he stopped, facing south, and took a third deep breath to calm his anger just a touch.

  Nothing. The pain continued, just like he remembered feeling from a bad toothache he’d had when he was a kid. His father had ignored his requests to go to a dentist for three days. Three days of intense pain that Cain remembered very clearly.

  Now he was feeling that same kind of pain again.

  And he didn’t like it today anymore than he did then.

  When the Juggernaut didn’t like something, he pounded on it until there was nothing left to pound on. Somehow, he’d find what was causing this pain and pound it like he’d never pounded anything before.

  He took another deep breath and turned to face west.

  He wasn’t sure, but it felt as if the pain might have increased slightly. It was as if the ruby was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t understand. He had never really gained any increased intelligence from the ruby, only massive strength.

  He quickly turned to the north and the pain went back to its original level. And now he could sense a little more. Something was interfering with the power into the ruby. Something was cutting at the bands of Cyttorak where his power came from. He knew that, but he didn’t know how he knew that.

  For the first time in a very long time, he was worried. If the power of the ruby was cut, he’d just be a regular human being again. Someone who could be hurt and killed. He’d been the Juggernaut for so long he could no longer imagine just being a regular human. There was no way he was going to let that happen without a fight, that was for sure.

  He faced east and the pain went down slightly. Inside his head he could sense that was the right direction, as if something through the stone was telling him so.

  So east it was.

  Without a look back at the abandoned farmhouse, he started off across the field, paying no attention to what was in his way ahead.

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  Nothing was going to stop him until he found out who or what was causing him this pain.

  And then he would stop it. Hard.

  Gary Service took a long, deep breath and stepped back away from his father’s death bed. The nurse had managed to calm the old man enough to stop the heart attack from being serious and give him some medication. Now he slept, his breath wheezing in and out, once in a while catching, making Gary wonder if that was the last breath for old man Service, or not.

  Gary felt numb inside.

  He forced himself to move out into the hall and down toward the darkened kitchen. What had happened to Robert was not something he could have even imagined. As always, Robert had been angry, defying their father at every turn. And Gary would have expected that if the old man said, “Don’t touch,” then Robert would touch.

  Gary laughed aloud and the sound echoed off the polished wooden floor and high ceilings of the hallway. Maybe the old man had wanted Robert to touch the gem after all. Maybe the old man figured it would serve Robert right, but it was clear the result was not what the old man had expected. Not at all.

  It was not a result anyone in the world would have expected, or believed.

  But it had happened. Robert had touched the emerald and been suddenly filled with a bright green energy of some sort that became so bright that it hurt Gary’s eyes to watch. Then Robert had simply grown in an impossible manner, from a normal five-foot-ten, to six-and-a-half feet tall. And muscled, as if he had been lifting weights for ten years. It was like something that happened only in a special effect on television, or to some New York super hero, not in the real world. People don’t just grow in front of your eyes.

  But Robert had.

  Gary slowly moved into the huge kitchen, shaking his head at the insanity of what he had seen. He retrieved a tall glass and filled it with milk, then grabbed some freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. Robert always snorted at Gary’s childhood habit of milk and cookies, but Gary loved it, and if it helped Robert continue to believe that Gary was weak and young and stupid, so much the better.

  Robert would soon find out different. He was in for a big surprise when the old man died and Robert discovered that Gary owned fifty-one percent of the Service businesses. And he would be even more surprised when Gary stepped in and ran the business with the intent of giving all the profits and eventually all the business to charity. That would make Robert see red. But there would be nothing the older brother could do about it. Nothing at all, no matter how big he got.

  Gary dropped down at the large kitchen table and gazed out the darkened window at the night beyond. The only light came from down near the garage area and filled the old trees with a faint glow. Otherwise, the estate was dark and quiet.

  His mother had made the entire family have breakfast together at this table every day. Gary had liked that, right

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  up until the day she died. Robert, of course, had hated it, and complained every day about the chore.

  And more often than not, he got hit by their father for his complaints. As far as Gary was concerned, Robert had usually deserved what he got. Granted, the old man had been hard on Robert when he was young, but the old man had been hard on everyone around him, including his own wife. The poor woman had died broken five years ago and it was on that day that Gary decided to take over the hard-earned and so-important business of his father and give every penny to charities, the very thing that his father would have hated. And his mother would have loved.

  It had taken Gary almost two years before he convinced his father to change his will and give him that extra one percent. And not tell Robert he was doing so. Two years of being nice to an old man he hated.

  Now the old man was dying. Gary knew his older brother wanted their father gone more than anything. For certain Robert would have been surprised to learn Gary did, also. Maybe even more than Robert.

  Robert Service Sr.’s death would not be one that anyone would mourn. And that was a pity. No one should die that way.

  Gary finished his milk and cookies and stood. He put the glass in the sink and then headed back for his father’s room. His first inclination was to go see how his older brother was doing with his new growth and muscles, but after a moment, he decided that really didn’t matter. What was important tonight was making sure the old man didn’t change a thing in his will or his business until his death.

  And to do that, Gary had to stay at his side and keep smiling.

  There would be more than enough time for celebrating later, after the old man was dead.

  The French Quarter in New Orleans is layered over and over with history. Every building, every courtyard, every park or street has a special history. The people who lived and worked in the French Quarter used that history to draw customers in any way they could. And it was also rumored that the streets and buildings of the French Quarter were filled with the ghosts of the people who had made all that history.

  Remy LeBeau had never seen a ghost in all his years of growing up on those streets. And on this late night, he didn’t expect to run into one. What he did expect was to discover who stood like a ghost in the shadows of a doorway across the street, listening to his private conversations.

  Now one full hour had passed and Remy continued to stand, unmoving, in the shadows of the building where he had stepped after York left. He hadn’t moved and neither had the person watching him across the narrow street.

  Around Remy, the dark night of the French Quarter in New Orleans only flickered with life. At one point a young couple had walked past his position, not even noticing him. They had continued on past his watcher, also not noticing anything different on that side of the street.

  A half dozen taxies had passed by, rushing through the moist, damp air to get to drunken fares, most likely tourists who would be too drunk to realize until tomorrow morning that the cabbie had charged them five bucks too much. But the cab’s lights h
adn’t illuminated Remy’s watcher any more than Remy had allowed them to light him up.

  One hour and it was still a draw. The guy was good, but Remy was better.

  He waited for the moment when a cab had just passed his position, then stepped onto the sidewalk. Walking away at a normal pace, he turned the comer and started toward the lights and drunks of Bourbon Street three blocks away. He knew before he turned the comer that his shadow was following him.

  Good.

  Remy made sure he was far enough down the street for the guy watching him to get around the comer. Then slowly, as if he was just strolling, he turned into a small space between two buildings, actually a dark entrance to an interior courtyard, blocked three feet in by a high, vine-covered gate.

  With two quick running bounds he was over the gate and into the courtyard beyond. Quickly he doubled back, moving silently through the shadows, so silently that he stepped over a sleeping cat at one point and didn’t even wake the animal.

  The courtyard was like an open plant-filled park in the center of the block, with dark windows fronting on it from all four directions. An old wooden staircase led up the side of one building and Remy headed up there, quickly gaining the roof of the three-story building and moving back toward the street.

  He eased carefully and slowly up to the edge of the building and studied the street below. It took him only a moment to spot the guy who had been following him standing in a shadowed alcove across the street, watching the entrance Remy had entered.

  Remy almost laughed aloud. Slowly he moved back from the edge, then quickly back down into the courtyard and out a door that lead back to the street they had started on. Then he went out and around a half block, coming up from behind the guy standing in the shadows.

  “You lookin’ for de men’s room?” Remy asked, stepping in front of the guy. In his hand Remy had two playing cards. He could charge them and flick them before the guy could even turn, if he needed to.

  “No,” the man said, glancing at Remy without a hint of surprise or smile at the fact that he had been caught. “But I hear you are looking for Mr. Toole.”

  Remy studied the guy’s face and eyes. He stood Remy’s height, with pale, almost translucent blue skin that seemed to shine in the darkness of the street. His gaze was sharp, the dark black of his eyes almost painfully cold and unblinking.

  “You hear good, mon ami,” Remy said.

  “Mr. Toole would be interested in meeting you, Mr. LeBeau. Please follow me.”

  Remy stepped back as the man moved forward. “Y’ask nice,” Remy said, holding out his hand to stop the man, “but de answers come first.”

  the jewels or cyttorak

  However, what happened next was something Remy would have never suspected. His hand went right through the man’s shoulder.

  “What?” Remy said, jumping back, cards in his hand out in plain sight, charged, and ready to flip.

  The man stopped, then laughed like a small barking dog, the sound bouncing off the nearby buildings.

  “You have taken the fun out of the evening, Mr. LeBeau. That is too bad. I so enjoy a good evening.”

  With another laugh the man simply shimmered and then vanished.

  Remy stood staring at the position the guy had been in a moment before, then glanced quickly around.

  The streets of the French Quarter had returned to normal on this hot summer night. In the distance, a jazz band still blared out a tune. Cabs lined the curb two blocks up near Bourbon Street. The too-loud laughter of a drunk drifted over the buildings.

  No one stood with Remy on that dark side street.

  The guy had vanished.

  More likely, he had never been on the street in the first place. Maybe it had been only a projection of some sort. It certainly hadn’t been a ghost.

  “Cute trick,” Remy said aloud. “But de last laugh will be mine.”

  An hour later Remy could still not find the slightest trace of any projector or any other way the image of the man could have appeared on the streets of the French Quarter.

  And every so often he thought he heard the sound of

  a man laughing like a small barking dog. The sound gave him the chills, as if he were hearing a ghost laugh.

  And it also made him mad. And Gambit was not a good person to make angry, even by a ghost.

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  Slowly the sun broke over the edge of the deep valley, the light oozing down the rock and pine-covered hillside like someone had poured a bucket of thick, orange and yellow paint on the top of the ridge. It filled the cracks in the rocks and drove the morning mist higher into the air, where it swirled and then vanished.

  Albert Jonathan had always loved sitting on the front porch of his small log cabin, watching the morning creep down into the deep Idaho valley he called home. For one hundred and sixty-three summers he had loved watching that sunrise. But this morning, for the first time, he dreaded the coming day.

  Albert appeared, to the few who met him, to be the very picture of an Idaho mountain man. He had a long white beard and white hair. His face was rough and red from the sharp wind and bright sun. In the early years, he’d only worn animal skins, but since the turn of the century, and the first real gold mining rush into this area, he’d worn regular clothes, bought at the store a week’s walk away in the little town of Yellow Pine. He only went into town once a year. He never talked to anyone and no one had paid him any attention. Fifty years back, he had reported to the authorities that Albert Jonathan had died and left his land to his son, Albert Jonathan Jr. He had no son, but the little ploy had covered the fact that he was living so long.

  During the mining rush in the 1890s, he’d filed the first official homestead claim for his land and the eighty

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  acres around it. During those early years he had been forced to defend it from all trespassers. There were three bodies buried down the hill a ways on a ridge overlooking the river. Back before the West got civilized, all three thought they could take his cabin and supplies.

  The thought had gotten them all killed.

  But mostly during the last eighty years the outside world had left him alone and for that he was glad. Since that very first trip into this wilderness area as a trapper in 1840, he had loved the steep mountains, the wild rivers, the unforgiving beauty of the Idaho back country, and he just wanted to live alone with that beauty for as many more years as he was going to live.

  Five years after first trapping along the river that ran through this steep-walled valley, he had returned and built his first log cabin. He had been thirty-six and had fully expected to live out his last days trapping and doing a little mining, living alone in the mountains he loved.

  He had not expected to live this long, not even after finding and picking up the large emerald that had cured his aching back, given him new teeth, and cleared up his fuzzy vision. But something about that large emerald had been very special, and for a long, long time he hadn’t questioned it, only just lived and enjoyed, keeping the emerald tucked away in a very special hiding place.

  But last night that had all changed.

  He didn’t know how he knew everything had changed, any more than he knew how he had lived for such a long time. But early last night he had felt another person crawl into his head with him, like an unwanted stranger entering a dark house.

  An evil person.

  And there was nothing Albert could do to kick this stranger out.

  He knew that he was now connected to this evil force and it would soon come looking for him.

  And for his stone. He knew that, too. The evil wanted the stone and to get the stone it had to kill Albert.

  And like the three men down buried down on the ridge, it was going to get a fight.

  No clouds broke the blue morning sky. The day was going to be hot and dry, as many summer days were in these mountains. Albert sat quietly watching the morning sun creep down the side of the valley wall, the Springfield .30-’06 rifle he’d bought in 1923 a
t his side. For a century and a half, Albert had lived in this valley and he knew every rock, every tree, every path and game trail in and out. And he could stand so still that even deer walked past him without knowing he was there.

  He was a mountain man and these were his mountains. Mountain law would apply. He would defend his homestead.

  Let the evil monster come. He would be ready.

  Professor Charles Xavier sat alone in his study in the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning, waiting.

  The stone fireplace crackled with a low fire even though the temperature in the Westchester area of New York was predicted to be in the high eighties. The Professor had discovered years before that a small fire took

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  the chill off the marbled walls and hard floors of his study. He knew that the chill was mostly imagined, since his hoverchair covered his legs and kept him very comfortable. But for the most powerful telepath in the world, imagined comfort was almost as important as real.

  Maybe even more so.

  The Professor slumped slightly in his chair, his bald head reflecting the yellow flames of the fire in the dark room. Lately he’d come to like the study dark, even during the bright, summer days. Heavy drapes covered the tall windows and he never had them pulled open. The sameness of the dark study, day or night, kept him better focused on events outside the room. And lately there had been a lot of events.

  It seemed there always were.

  And now there was another.

  Not as important on the scheme of things as some of the tasks his X-Men had handled lately, perhaps, but still one that needed to be dealt with.

  There was a knock at the door and Scott Summers and Jean Grey entered. They both moved across the study to face the Professor as he turned around.

  “You wanted to see us, sir,” Scott said.

  The Professor smiled. Scott had been with the team for a long time and he still sometimes acted like a young boy called into the principal’s office when summoned. It was one of the countless things that the Professor liked about the leader of the X-Men.