"I know what could be done to find her," Stark suggested, and he looked to Nate. "She's a Mutant. Like you. Have your Professor X do his thing to find her."

"You don't think that crossed my mind?" Nate asked him, giving him a look. "How do you know about that?" For a brief moment, he looked like he was worried about what could happen next. He talked about that to Birdie, and I knew I would've worn that same look if I was in the same position. "It won't work."

"What do you mean?" I asked him. "I thought that machine was pretty straight forward."

"It only works on Mutants," Nate explained to me. He appeared to have reluctant to say anything to us. That was a problem with breaking a promise to a friend.

"She's a Mutant," I told him. "She said so herself."

"She thought so," Nate said. "Until recently."

"What is it, then?" Steve asked Nate.

"One of those things she promised to never tell anyone considered to be an Outsider," Nate said. "Even I couldn't get the details, and I'm a telepath."

"You know the writer," Wade said. "She probably thought Mutant was the way to go and then tried something else." He paused for a moment. "I'm not ruining the big reveal. It needs drama. . .and there needs to be the type for the writer to figure that one out."

We came up with some kind of a plan that would have been able to lead us to wherever Birdie had been kept. There was a slight hope that she had been at that old church, though the others shared a look, not wanting to tell me the odds of what her survival could have been. I didn't need to hear about that.

Not then. Not ever.

I wanted to make sure she would be safe and alive. I wanted to spend more time with her. She was my life.

I walked into the empty building in Hell's Kitchen, and Damian had been walking with me. He made the effort of covering his face with a black hood. That was something he had insisted on doing. He was carrying a case that held his sword, understanding that could draw too much attention to them. Even in New York City where the weird was starting to become more commonplace.

"Since the raide," Damian said to me when we were in the church. "No one had been here. Ever."

We walked around the main sanctuary of the church, and the decay was evident. Dust. Cobwebs. Debris from the weather glowing through the city. No sign of human presence in that building. Except for the direct path to the empty altar.

"There was no squatters here," Damian said as he carefully walked towards that altar. "It was like they were avoiding this place."

There was no denying the cold chill of the place. There was more to it that that it had been abandoned. It came from all over the place. Whatever had happened to the people of that church colored everything about that place. It really was a terrible place. It could cause the strongest of people to feel a cold kind of dread.

I could see why they would have completely avoided that place.

"I can't blame them," I said out loud. Even I could feel the slight sense of evil and foreboding that was coming only from that place.

"You can always feel that," Damian agreed. "Wherever his presence would have been."

"Experience?" I asked him.

"Not me personally," Damian said to him, and he was reluctant for what he was going to say next. "My father had been looking into this. If it was me, I would not have been able to get through it under my own power. From what little father had told me, that type of darkness could take advantage of fear, anger, hate, and hopelessness and influence them completely. They all would become as one will with that Darkness."

He pulled out a tablet, which could have been out of place with our surroundings. It looked too new and clean to have been there for a long time. That had to do with what we were looking for.

"They must have left this for us," Damian had said to me. "To give you a message."

I walked over to the boy to see what that message could have been like. He pressed play on the device, and the video had started with a blood-red Omega symbol, making everything seem to dark and foreboding. Then, it showed two hooded figures. One was in blood-red robes, and the other in what Birdie had been wearing before she was taken. Had to be Birdie in appearance, though. . .

"Captain," the hooded man was saying in the video. His voice had a slight accent to it. An accent I had never heard before in my life. "The Man Out of Time. As a world, we are at the crossroads to go to the greatest of ages or the harshest fires of Hell. It is my job. . .as for others like. . .to make the greatest of the ages to appear. We must make sacrifices. . .as I am sure you know and could understand. This woman here could cause too many problems. She would lead them into the harshest of hells. She believed she could help the whole world. . .and in her death, she would."

With those final words, the hooded man pulled out a hooked knife, chanting in some kind of language. He plunged the knife into the skin of the hooded woman's stomach, slashing across it. The cuts would have been too deep for the woman to have been able to survive. I quickly covered Damian's eyes and looked away from the scene. Though, I knew what was happening and who that could've been for.

It was more difficult to drown out the dying screams. Those would always stick with me. No matter how much time would pass.