Part Twenty-one: Picasso's blue period and jeune fille falling from the sky

So, I really should have guessed my luck would change sooner or later.

I'd hit Cairo Illinois like a hurricane; hitting the homes of crime syndicates with a speed that was just stupid…stupid for anyone but 'Gambit' the best thief that ever did appear out of nowhere.

The first couple months had been fun, I guess. Had a hard time accepting that, Catholic conscience and all, but it was fun to just kick up some dust and rob a bunch of murdering fuckers blind.

The Mafioso, the Cubans, the drug runners and the people traffickers, none of them knew what hit 'em. I never worked so fast, so good, so god damn smooth. Mon dieu, it was tres, tres, magnifique.

I felt alive again for the first time in too damn long.

Nak Nak told me it would help if I ply my trade among my own kind; rob from the wicked and give to the pathetic: that was my new motto.

Baby steps, Nak Nak said, told me that a body like me, pretty much steeped in sin and crime, not going to be able to turn my back on that. I got to learn righteousness at my own pace.

I said to her, I only mortal cherie, I don't got that long.

She said, do your best, no one expects miracles from you.

It helped. All my life people been expecting from me more than I can give. My Pere thought I was going to save the Guild (ha-ha, that worked out a treat, non?) and it seems to me like most everyone expect me either to be better or worse than I am and everyone I ever met knew more about me than I do. Not one of those bodies ever just told me what they want from me or what they know that I don't, but everyone punish me when I don't, when I can't, deliver to their expectations.

Nak Nak lets me set my own limits; we both happy about that.

Nak Nak don't over-estimate my basic intelligence either; she don't expect me to go out and save the world or nothing (can't imagine how fucked up the world got to be that it needs me to save it) all she tell me to do is steal, swindle, and basically screw with people that deserve it. Tres bon, that I can do.

Still on this day as I was standing before the Picasso blue (hate Picasso, the guy gets celebrated for making bug ugly pictures of things that don't even look like what they supposed to – I've seen five year olds with more talent) trying to figure out how to get the picture out of the frame (which is alarmed six ways from Sunday) and away with me when there's this almighty crash, like thunder, and then a child screams.

I knew that my luck was running thin when the kid fell in the swimming pool a few feet away from me. I knew that my luck was run empty when I found myself crouched at the edge of the pool (don't ask me what a pool doing in the middle of a living room, no accounting for taste for this Sicilian Don) trying to fish out the body.

I'm really hoping that the 'body' is still breathing.

Nak Nak told me that somewhere inside me, despite everything, I have a good soul. I might be good at evil but it don't mean I like being a monster. Nak Nak says if I don't think and just act my better nature should come out.

It's the thinking that gets me into trouble; apparently, I'm pretty fucked up in the head.

Quelle surprise, non?

So anyway, back in the moment when my happy existence as a better dressed Robin Hood started to get tres, tres complicated, I'm pulling the jeune fille out of the water. Flip her over so I can check her airways and shove all this thick white hair from her face.

These gorgeous blue eyes pop open like a doll to fix me with a real intelligent, but scared, stare; this fille has the weirdest eyes I've ever seen (and coming from me, le Diable Blanc, that's pretty ironic, non?). This girl's eyes are like a cat's, pupils not round but vertical and they huge, taking up most of her face.

All in all I figure out pretty quick that this chile gotta be a mutant. That kind of colouring, white hair, chocolate skin, weird blue eyes……those just not natural.

While I'm thinking to myself that I might have been better off not fishing this kid outta the water she starts fighting with me, struggling like a drowned kitten in my arms. She say something defiant like, don't know what, not really listening on account of the fact that I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on and how I'm going to get myself out of it.

'De name is Gambit, padnat, an' I don believe a word,' I tell her, not really paying attention as I heft the kid up into my arms and she more or less pass out, shivering and far too light for a kid her age.

I'm trying to figure out the best way of carrying the kid and wondering if I can grab the Picasso while I'm at it when something weird happens.

(I know….who would have thought, eh?)

The glass patio doors on the ground floor shatter as I'm passing them and….wait for it….this homme, all hunched over and gambolling on all fours, pounces through the shattered opening.

I drop the girl onto the love seat and pull out some of my throwing spikes; I don't know if this be a man or a shaved gorilla, all I know is that it's dressed in skin-tight leather and a spiked choke collar like an S&M party reject.

You would think, after all I seen, that weird shit like this would just stop bothering me, non? I mean nothing in my life has ever exactly been Vanilla normal, n'est pas? Still being attacked by a man in fetish clothing slavering like a dog is enough to raise the eyebrow of the most jaded of professional cads (and being that gentleman I know what I'm talking about).

After I perforate the homme-chien with my spikes and kick him to the curb (or into the swimming pool, if you going to be literal) I turn to pick up the jeune fille only to see the kid sitting bolt upright and her eyes all white like roiling storm clouds. She points one finger.

'Duck,'

I hit the floor and over my head, with the tang of burned Ozone stinking up the air even more than dog-homme in the pool, a streak of honest to god lightening shoots over my head and straight at a second Monsieur Fetishist.

Huh, guess I was right about the jeune fille. Not many thirteen year olds be doing that, oui?

It's at this point, as I'm picking myself up and the girl turning those blind white eyes on me, that two more of the leather-clad fetishists leap through the window and broken patio door.

I have time to think where are they all coming from? Before the brawler instinct in me kicks in. 'Course as it turns out, I'm not going to be taking on these sado-masochist B&E merchants on my own.

It happens so easy, like we been tag-teaming forever, but as I spin, pivot on my heel, and draw back my arm to throw my payload of spikes in one smooth movement, at the same time the chile with the strange eyes waves her hands in this real graceful movement and this huge gust of wind picks up my spikes and sends them, and the leather clad weirdos they sticking out of at the time, flying out into the darkness outside.

Nice, real nice; I tres impressed. This girl has power and she knows how to use it. Which is more than I did at her age, but then I've never been known as a fast learner, neh?

Still I'm not so shabby now.

My spikes slice through S&M homme number two….or is it three or four?....and his dance partner S&M fille. They fall squealing like stuck pigs to the patio outside, bouncing end over end painfully. As a nod to my attempt to clean up my act I not be charging my spikes enough to explode and tear them bodies apart, just enough to hurt like hell when they hit.

Of course if I was really ready to turn away from my bad old days I could just use the cards and retire the spikes……but I'm not that good yet.

Every little counts I guess….baby steps like Nak Nak said.

The girl is staring at me and my new brace of spikes, hand glowing nicely, with wide eyes, 'You….you are a mutant?'

I give the girl my patented jack-ass smirk (mostly because I haven't patented a polite smile that I could direct to the 'jeune fille with the lightning' so she don't fry me), 'Been called a lot of t'ings in my time, ma chou-fleur, mutant only one o' them.'

The chile obviously don't really look like a cauliflower, but I always found that French endearment tres amuser. Though on second thoughts what with the mane of white hair sticking up every which way from her head like she shocked herself with them lightning bolts, she do look just a petite bit like a cauliflower after all.

I keep this reflection to myself though, Gambit a charmer and a charmer don't tell a femme of any age that she looks remarkably like a vegetable. Mon dieu my thoughts are all over the place tonight, non?

'I am storm,' the chile tells me seriously with this tres proper pronunciation that make me think she learn English from listening to broadcasts of the BBC world service.

'Pleasure to meet you, ma belle Stormy, but I t'ink we need to be away now, non?'

I snag the shivering girl up and pull her from the loveseat, the girl struggles against my hand on her wrist, 'Do not call me that, I said my name is Storm.'

'Padnat, we got to go.' I can hear and I know she can, that there be movement above our heads; scrabbling feet, likely more of the S&M crowd, moving above our heads and headed for the stairs. They maybe even climbing the outside walls of the building, which, when you think about it objectively, has got to be a very strange sight. What are these things and what they want with the Jeune fille?

And more to the point, why is it that I always get myself into these types of situations?

Of course, Gambit, if you had two brains cells worth the name you could just be asking the girl these questions, non?

I cut a sideways glance towards the girl who is staring up at the ceiling in obvious panic, 'Who're you friends, cherie?'

Flashing blue eyes try to strike me dead where I stand, but it don't seem like the fille can shoot lightening from her eyeballs so I avoid being lit up like a Cajun Christmas tree.

'They are not my friends. They are the hounds of the Shadowking.'

I can literally feel my eyebrows clawing up my forehead and trying to make a break for outer orbit.

Saints……the hounds of the what?

'Dat right?' I murmur because Gambit too smooth to show that he is well out of his depth right now.

Shadow King, mon dieu, you have got to be kidding me……

'I will not be taken; I will not let him have me.'

The girl is shaking real hard now and I don't think it got to do with being soaked through either. There's real fear in her eyes, tightening her lips, her fists are clenched so tight pinkish stained water drips from her hands where she's cut into her own palms with her nails.

This is something I understand; fear, helplessness, running away from something that is bigger, stronger, smarter and meaner than you are. I know what it feels like to be a kid with no one to depend on but yourself and knowing, because you not completely stupid, that you going to lose.

Nak Nak said that sooner or later I'd get the opportunity to start a new life as something better. That an opportunity to do something good would just turn up right before my eyes.

Mon Dieu……..I hate that that femme is always right.

I reach out and pull the girl close and a little behind me as the 'hounds' come thundering down the stairs and through the broken windows, 'Okay-dokey then, Stormy, I guess we gon be barbecuing us some 'hounds', non?'

I flick my wrist to re-ignite the charge through my spikes, letting them burn white hot and feeling the power flaring in my own eyes. The girl watches me, face cast into lurid pinkish shadows by my power. She smiles, big and wide and just a little blood thirsty and lightning dances over her fingers.

Me and the jeune fille turn to stand back to back (though the petite fille's head only come up to my lower rib-cage). I guess tonight I found something way more valuable than a Picasso.

Gambit, he have the luck of the devil……never know what I'm going to get but I know I'm never going to be bored.