. V .

Remy sat in the motel room, a cigarette hanging forlornly between his lips. He hadn't smoked in weeks, and, judging from the expression on Rogue's face, she entirely disapproved of the fact that he was lighting up now. Either that, or she was still sore about the way he'd rejected her the other afternoon. He suspected it was both.

"I told you it weren't goin' t' work," he was telling Eileen with the dull tone of one who was repeating himself for the umpteenth time. "Dis guy, he's too smart. De cops were wastin' their time stakin' out de rivers. An' now you got dis missin' girl on your hands. So what you gonna do now, eh?"

Eileen was looking out of the window, her jaw tight, her arms crossed against her chest. For all her height, for all her inner strength, she suddenly looked defeated. Another missing girl was on her hands – a girl called Annie Walters. No one had noticed she was missing until she'd failed to turn up at the local old folks home. She'd been going to read 'Pride and Prejudice' to peevish old women. Imagine that!

"We'll interview our suspects, I suppose," she answered after a moment.

"Suspects?!" Remy stared at her in disdain. "You ain't got none, Eileen, admit it! No one's seen dis bastard, he's left no traces behind, it's like he don' even exist! So what you gonna do? Round up all de men in town and see whether they fit de killer's profile? Chere, by de time you do dat, he's gonna have killed again, do y' see de rate dis guy is workin' at?"

"Every two days," Eileen murmured. "That means he's going to kill again tonight. He can't stop until he's through."

"Damn straight!" Remy burst. "An' now he's bringin' me into it! Why de fuck is he bringin' me into it!"

"Because you can understand why," she replied, softly. He did a double-take, gaping at her.

"What?!"

"You share something in common – the cards," she retorted gently. "Symbols and weapons." She grimaced, turning to face him. "Like you said, he knows you Remy. Somehow, he knows you. Which leads me to believe we have a mutant on our hands."

"You mean a telepath?" Rogue asked from her seat cross-legged on the bed.

"Maybe."

"Den what's de big deal, woman?" Remy spat, stubbing out the cigarette viciously. "Part o' your power is t' feel other people's metahuman abilities! So snuff out de guy yourself!"

Eileen's expression clouded. "I gave up using my powers like that when I left the Brotherhood," she replied after a moment; remembering, for the first time in years, the touch of St. John Allerdyce and shuddering. "Using my powers the way you want me to isn't what my job calls for."

"It didn't stop you using them on us," Rogue pointed out coldly.

"That's different from going out and deliberately using them on a whole town," Eileen returned evenly.

"But this is to find a murderer," Rogue persisted heatedly.

"Can you imagine how many men are in this town, Anna? And you want me to go prying into their private lives, one and all?"

"Bullshit," Remy sulked, lighting up again. "For an ex-member o' de Brotherhood, you soundin' strangely like ol' Charlie Xavier."

Eileen actually laughed.

"Xavier? His decision not to impinge on the lives of others comes from his own trumped up sense of morality. And mine…" She trailed off, her eyes shifting to the window again. "Mine comes from the fact that I realised that nothing matters in this life but living – not fighting." She looked round at them again. "I do things the proper way now. I do my bit in society – I catch the baddies that plague everyday human life, not the lunatic supervillains like Magneto, or the Red Skull, or Apocalypse. They aren't the real plagues on this planet. It's the killer that's right out there at this moment that's the villain."

"So, you gonna find him or not?" Remy asked bluntly, unfazed by her speech.

"I'm working on it."

She moved to sit down by the coffee table, picked out the final Queen card from Remy's pack.

"One victim left, boys and girls," she spoke up wryly. "The Queen of Wands. That's Diamonds to all you tarot uninitiated," she half-grinned at Rogue. "The Queen of fire."

"An' what does your book say 'bout the Queen of Wands?" Remy asked, taking a drag impatiently.

"Hm." Eileen took out the battered book Jones had given her, The Book of Thoth. She felt stupid looking at it, such an arcane tome, and she, the quintessential scientist. "The books says: 'The characteristics of the Queen are adaptability, a persistent energy…kindly and generous, impatient of opposition. Immense capacity for friendship and love, but only on her own initiative. Pride.' And on the negative aspect we have ' can be easily deceived, stupid, obstinate…quick to take offence and harbour revenge without a good cause.'" She snapped the book shut. "Narrows it down a lot, huh?"

"It probably could be half the women in town," Rogue said.

Remy said nothing. He was looking at the single, upturned card lying on the table, staring back at him with that soft, insidious smile on its lips. The Queen of Diamonds. And listening to what Eileen had read, each word had leapt out at him as if the Queen of Diamonds had said it herself. Suddenly, he understood why the killer was working backwards. He was working backwards because he was working up to this – to the Queen of Diamonds. The Queen on her pedestal, crystallised, the thing that Remy could not bear to touch.

"He knows me," Remy suddenly blurted, aghast with the knowledge of his sudden epiphany.

"What?" Eileen was staring at him.

"Merde!" He leaned forwards, burying his face into his hands. This time, he had a way of stopping the killer, because he knew who the next victim was going to be. He just didn't know how to stop him.

"Remy? Are you all right?"

Normally Rogue would have gone to him, but this time she didn't. He was glad she didn't. He couldn't bear for her to put her arms round him.

"It's okay, chere," he said, looking up and smiling wanly at her. She didn't believe his smile. He could tell she didn't. The girl knew him too well.

Luckily, anything she could have said was cut off by the shrill beep of Eileen's pager going off. There was a dread look on her face as she looked at it.

"They've found the girl," she informed the two of them flatly when she had finished reading the message. "Drowned in her own bath. Same ritualistic pattern as before." She clipped the machine to her belt again and looked up at Remy coolly. "You were right. He was cleverer than us. Now if you don't mind, I have to go and attend to the crime scene."

She left, slamming the door shut behind her. Even if they had told her she had not failed, she would never have believed it.

"Ah should go an' get us some coffee or somethin'," Rogue murmured, when Eileen's heavy footsteps had died away. "There's no point in us mopin'."

"No," he ordered quickly. His voice was so hard that she was surprised.

"What?"

"You ain't leavin' dis room, y'hear? 'Sides, I don't want no damn coffee!" He stood up, and in a sudden surge of anger, swiped the pack of cards helter-skelter off the table, so that the Queen of Diamonds was lost underneath an avalanche of red and black and white. Rogue stared at the fallen cards, then back at him, chest heaving, standing there.

"Remy, what the hell is the matter with you?" she demanded.

"Dere ain't nothin' the matter wit' me, Rogue," he answered irritably, turning away from her. He plumped himself down in a nearby chair, rubbing the bridge of his nose tentatively. Without words she walked up beside him and laid her hands on his shoulders – he tensed instinctively at her touch. He knew how he should feel. That subtle tremor that every touch of hers used to give him, that pleasurable ache. The ghost of reciprocation taunted him. He struggled to feel it, but couldn't. On his shoulders, her fingers contracted and released, as if his struggle had somehow infected her, as if she too no longer knew how to react.

"It's to do with me bringin' you back, isn't it," she spoke at last, her tone low, accusing, almost; he felt her words, probing, beneath his skin. "You think ah shoulda left you there on the astral plane. You wanted t' die, you wanted your redemption, an' ah took it from you. That's why you hate me, isn't it?"

"You t'ink you know," he replied sullenly. "You t'ink you understand, but you don't, chere, you can't."

"B'cause you won't let me!" she exclaimed, suddenly frustrated. "B'cause you don't want me to!" He did not answer her. Desperation took her. Why wouldn't he tell her? If he hated her then so be it. She just wanted to know the truth. She wanted to know why. Of all things, she could not bear to love him and not know the truth. She released him and circled the chair, kneeling before him and pulling his face round to look at her, staring up beseechingly into his eyes. "Remy, please," she begged. "For God's sake just tell me."

"You want t' know de truth?" he asked her. "You want t' know, even if you can't understand?" He paused. His mouth contorted. She was too wilful, too stubborn to back away. They both knew it. "You don't know, chere," he continued helplessly, wishing she had said no. "You don't know what it is t' face dat light an' everyt'ing it stands for. It was so right. Don't you get it? Nothin' in dis fucked up life o' mine has ever felt right, Rogue. An' for once, what was right was starin' me right there in the face, an' I couldn't reach it, I just couldn't reach it because o' you."

Tears welled in his eyes. That hurt her more than anything else he could have said. To see his despair, his anguish, his torment – they all rent at her heart. She could feel his tears eat into the core of her. The pain in her chest suddenly sprang like a flower in bloom.

"No, Remy, you're wrong, an' you know it," she shook her head wildly, trying to catch his gaze, but he wouldn't look at her. "Ah know you've been hurtin'; don't think ah don't know that for so much of your life you've been in pain. But the two of us, we're right, an' we messed up so much before, but now ah know, ah know…" She stopped, wincing with the pain; but she cupped his face in her hands and made him look at her. "Please don't say it ain't right, Remy," she pleaded. "You tried so many times t' make me see that we were right, an' ah was so stupid… It was only when ah was losin' you for good that ah knew we were right, nothin's felt so right in mah life, just like ah know it hasn't in yours. That's why ah had to hold you back, Remy, not just for me, but for the both of us!"

"It was my time, Rogue!" he seethed at her, losing his temper, his eyes lifting to hers and glinting moistly in the morning light. "It was the way things were supposed t' end. Why did you bring me back, chere? Why'd you have t' do dat t'ing you always do, be so bull-headed an' impetuous, as if nothin' matters in this world but what you want?!"

"That's bullshit, Remy," she exclaimed, shaking her head obstinately, fury suddenly swelling inside her at his words. "You know it ain't true! If it were your time you wouldn't be standin' here now, with me. You got a second chance – why can't you be grateful for it? Why can't you be grateful for what we have? Why can't you fuckin' well accept that you love me?!"

"Don't you dare talk t' me 'bout love an' acceptance, Rogue," he seethed, standing up in sudden rage. "After all those years o' grief you gave me, you have no right to accuse me o' cutting you outta my life!"

"Ah have a right!" she yelled at him, grasping onto his shoulders with an iron grip and pulling him back violently. "Ah have right b'cause ah love you, an' so help me God, what ah did in Madripoor ah woulda done a thousand times over, b'ecause ah know you love me too! Under all that sulkin', under all that self-pity, you love me, an' you won't say it, 'cos you think ah should suffer the way ah've made you!"

"You don't get it, do you!" he roared, swivelling and pushing her away roughly. She staggered a few steps backward, amazed, undone; an odd sense of relish spiked through him, when he saw her hand go to her heart. It imbibed him with such a sense of cruel exhilaration that suddenly he couldn't even help the words from spilling out. "I can't love you!" he bellowed, both alarmed and excited by the voracity of his admission so that, suddenly, he wanted to laugh deliriously in her face. "I can't love you, because a part o' me's dead, Rogue, b'cause you left a part o' me to die dat day in Madripoor, just like you left a part o' me to die dat day in Antarctica! I can't love you, 'cos de part o' me dat loves you is dead!"

He flaunted the words like red flags in front of her, challenging her to fight back, all the while knowing what he was doing to her and hating himself. This was his coûp de grâce, his finishing stroke – she stared up at him as though he had utterly annihilated her, and when she moaned he thought for one terrible moment that he had killed her.

But she was still breathing. And her eyes, he saw, now sparkled with what he mistook for life but was actually nothing more than saltwater. He was suddenly, inexplicably filled with horror. At that moment he would have given anything for her to tell him he was wrong, to fight for him with all the brazen devotion she always had. To stop his love for her hurting so much inside. But when she clutched her breast and said nothing, the only thing he could do was turn, and leave.

Outside it was humid, more so than before – but the sky had darkened, reflecting his mood. Dull, flat, slate grey clouds were gathering like a premonition, thick with the promise of rain. At the corner of the motel, he stood and inflicted his pent up rage upon the dumpster, until his knuckles were raw and his ankles ached with the numbness.

"Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you LeBeau!"

After screaming out the words he suddenly collapsed, entirely purged of all emotion. He sprawled there, against the wall, flooded in the feather-light, surreal sensation of neither being here nor there. The feeling perplexed him. It was the way he had been feeling ever since the morning he'd woken up in that hospital bed with Rogue beside him – the first thing he'd been aware of was the curious, crawling emptiness that came with the loss of his mutant powers; the second thing he'd felt was the bizarre impression of floating, of being utterly dispossessed of everyone and everything. Now his hands stung and his legs ached. But the very nature of his present existence was so nebulous, so confused that he couldn't even feel it. He felt like a man on a rack, stretched out over countless years, skin distended like butter spread too finely over thick bread until only bare molecules were left; molecules oblivious to pain or hate, to love or reason.

The clouds lurched overhead. The rain contained within caused them to buckle as if under some tremendous weight. But those fluffy, frail, ephemeral clouds held on. They held on.

He paused, considering. No: tell a lie. He could feel something.

The pain in his heart was as slack as an old worn rubber band. He wondered at it. Brooded. Usually, it was dull but omnipresent, like a cancer taken over his body, indefinable but there. When Vargas' scar was going to bleed, the pain would increase, tight and stabbing. But now it was flaccid, like it too had been stretched out over too long a time, or distance. He touched his chest gingerly. He felt nothing. He fancied he'd finally done it. He fancied he'd finally made Rogue feel all the pain she'd put him through, that the brutal physicality of it had been transferred onto her.

Now she'd know what it was to love her.

After Antarctica, things had never been straight between them, not until those last few weeks before she'd left to join Storm's team, and he'd gone on his own (less than merry) way. The parting hadn't exactly been to his taste, but he'd pushed her absence to the back of his mind, and had, as usual, found his pleasure in other, anonymous women. Inevitably, when they'd crossed paths once more – she like some brassy little angel in a cheong-sam dress, he on the run from the law, as usual – he'd fallen in-love with her all over again, the way he always did. (He had no idea why, but whenever she came along and graced him with her outrageous and agonisingly irresistible presence, it always had the effect of sending him into transports of frustrated, maudlin celibacy. This occasion had, of course, been no different.) Subsequently he'd got framed for murder (what was it with him and murders?); then he'd spent most of his time being tied down, spread-eagled and in his boxers, to some huge alien energy beam.

It was obvious she'd come to save him – at that singular moment in time when she'd come blazing in to his rescue, all he could think was that he couldn't be dressed more appropriately for her. And then somehow things had all gone wrong. Vargas had come.

He remembered that moment, remembered it because the very essence of it was lodged inside him. Vargas' sword, impaling them both in some sadistic consummation of both love and death, a marriage of cold steel and warm flesh. He remembered the way she had screamed out when he could not, her scream replaying along the blade as she pressed against him in some unholy lover's embrace. The sword, penetrating, impaling, joining them together more intimately than they had ever dreamed possible. Her heartbeat, irregular, fluttering like a bird, wildly, as if it was he who penetrated her; her blood, bleeding into him, his blood, bleeding into her – their blood, mingled.

Remy jolted, and suddenly he realised it.

That his scar was hers, and that hers was his.

That both scars belonged to both of them, and that each was the symbol, the anima, of the other. Somehow, Vargas' wound had connected them, body and soul; all he had bled he had bled for her.

The pang in his heart was Rogue, now he couldn't feel her anymore.

Remy scrambled to his feet and ran.

Rogue was sitting naked in the shower, lifeless as a broken marionette, her skin the pigment of steeped flour, pale as muddied snow but for the runnels of diluted blood that ran down from her scar to her stomach and thighs and gathered round in a pool to swirl, round, round, round, down into the drain.

He had the fleeting, horrific notion that he had walked back in on Lizzie Brown, but this was far more macabre; for now he walked in on a scene of his own creation – she, the victim and he, her killer.

All at once he had splashed forwards into the pink water, fallen to his knees alongside her and pulled her limp body into his arms. He wailed and whimpered. His voice was dismembered from his thoughts, drowned out by the deafening crash of the water. He neither knew nor heard what it was that he said; he only knew that he implored her, and that she did not answer.

"Rogue, Rogue, mon amour, I'm sorry, please don't leave me, don't leave me…!"

His hands, trembling, squeezed her clammy, pale cheeks, willing her into life, a flicker of the eyes, a twitch of the mouth, a spasm of the brow. Her head, unwilling, lolled sideways, puppet-like. From somewhere deep within a memory resurfaced; his heart swelled, as it had done in his old life – he choked, bursting into tears. And suddenly he was feeling again, he was burning again; he cradled her to his breast, burying his face in her bedraggled hair, rocking her softly.

"I don't hate you, Rogue, I don't hate you," he sobbed. "I don't hate you, I love you."

He clasped her to him, saying the words over and over, desperate to dispel the awful knowledge that he was both lover and murderer. And then she moaned. She moaned ever so slightly, he might not have heard it, but that he felt the lightness of her laboured breath upon his neck. Stunned he drew back and stared into her white face and she moaned again, this time louder.

Wonder, hope, relief filled him. Scooping her up into his arms he went and laid her out on the bed, hovering about her, helpless as a caged animal.

"Rogue, you're alive, wake up, say somethin', please, ma chere…"

Since he had laid her onto the bed her breathing had become quickened and was now coming in short, ragged gasps. Again panic took him. Her face, once white, had become the hue of jaundiced yellow, the pallor of buttermilk. The water had washed away all the blood on her skin, but for a few dark, half-congealed beads that had formed on the edge of the scar and had began to bleed again. Remy cursed, pressing his hands over the old wound; her naked flesh was as cool and damp as a mermaid's. She had never been made of stone – that had been a notion of his own creation, a fallacy; what she was now, he had made of her.

"Stop bleedin'!" he howled, when he saw the sticky red liquid begin to seep through his fingers. "I ain't hurtin' no more, chere, I wantcha here wit' me, please stop bleedin'!"

She said nothing. The only notion he got of her was their connection, the faint, thrumming interplay of invisible connective tissue, like magnetised gossamer. Through that link, she pulled him to her; he, on the other hand, pulled her to her death.

Eileen walked the corridor back to their motel room, and not knowing why, halfway there she increased her pace. Afterwards, alone, in the quiet of her own humdrum life, she would wonder on this moment of walking and increasing her pace – whether it had, in fact, all been down to coincidence, or something far more blasphemous to her nature, the thing called Fate.

One of her mutant abilities, one amongst many – she was talented as the multi-dextrous, after all – was that she was able to feel and manipulate the electrical currents around her. Unlike her other gift of being able to discern other people's mutant capabilities, sensing electrical currents was a daily occurrence to her, and something that she had to live with 24-7 whether she liked it or not. She could not help then, feeling the scene inside that small room and experiencing it with every fibre of her being.

Over the years, one thing she had learnt was that dead people were easier to cope with than dying ones – all that remained of the dead was the residue of the short, electrical impulses that gave them life, and after a few hours, even that would be gone, like a light slowly flickering out. What she understood, as she entered the room and felt Rogue fading, was the harsh realisation that she had not left the Brotherhood out of her own noble convictions. The real reason lay in something more brutal, more personal, and thus far more harrowing. It lay in the fact that she had no longer been able to bear the feeling of St. John Allerdyce, the man she had loved, decaying, day in, day out, minute by cruel minute.

But now, even as the cold reality swept over her, if you had asked her the truth, she would never have been able to admit it to you.

"Remy, what the hell is going on here?!"

He was sitting beside Rogue's inert form, hands pressed against her bare chest. He barely looked up as she suddenly raced up to the bedside and saw the blood between his hands. Eileen had seen many grown men cry in her line of business, but never in the way he now wept so openly.

"Eileen, t'ank de Lord you're here!" he whimpered.

"What happened?!" she asked, quickly getting to business and pressing her fingers against Rogue's wrist. She felt the faint patter of her pulse flutter against her wrist like light rain beating against a tin roof. It jumped, skipped and faded in turns. The intervals between each breath she took became longer and more tremulous. Eileen's face went grim.

"Remy," she began as calmly as she could. "Tell me what happened. Tell me how this happened."

"It's de scar," he cried, trying desperately to explain what he could not. "It just started bleedin', an' it's all my fault, it's…Shit, woman, tell me what's happenin' t' her!"

Eileen didn't look at him. "She's gone into shock," she answered, suddenly hesitating. She couldn't move, couldn't do anything for the strangeness of what she felt. Her initial reaction had been to send Remy away, to get him to call 911. But now she saw what he could only feel as some tenuous, indefinable connection; and what Eileen experienced was something far more complex and peculiar than he would ever come realise. What she felt was their shared physical bond, the raging intercourse of their electrical fields, bursting, fluctuating, flaring, rearranging itself. Rogue was pulling, sucking on him. For now, Remy was her life-support, and if Eileen removed him, she knew Rogue wouldn't make it.

"What're you doin' standin' dere!" he roared at her, breaking her from the trance the dancing molecules had cast upon her. "Tell me what I should do!"

"Nothing." Eileen regained her voice on a breath. "You do nothing."

"Nothin'?!"

He would have lunged at her and shaken her, if he hadn't been so busy trying to stem the bleeding; the desperation and fury leapt out of his eyes like a physical thing, red and hot, so that his eyes, too, seemed to bleed. For a moment Eileen thought he would have attacked her; but then Chase was suddenly in the doorway, evidently having heard the shouts from within. His face, already gaunt and sallow, had eroded in on itself until he appeared positively cadaverous.

"Mah Gawd, what's happened to her?" he exclaimed, hovering, face etched in horror. "She's bleedin'…"

"It was me," Remy garbled, holding onto Rogue's hand while Eileen quickly bent over and examined the wound. "It was all my fault, I could've killed her, I could have…"

"You did this?!" Chase's face went even more pale than it was already was, his face shrivelled and shrunk until it might almost have not even have existed at all. There were only his eyes, cats eyes, wide as saucers.

"Mr. Beddows," Eileen interrupted, her voice once more that comforting aria of urgent, indomitable calm. "I need some clean rags. Go and get me some. Now."

Chase raced off, and Eileen turned back to Rogue, her face suddenly strained, her teeth clenched.

"I understand now," she stated gruffly. "I'm not sure how it happened but the wounds you received altered you both, yet somehow connected you. You've got to calm down, Remy. Are you listening to me? You've got to calm down. She's going into shock and her pulse is erratic. If you don't calm down she's not going to make it."

"I've killed her!" he wailed.

"You haven't killed her!" Eileen snapped. "For God's sake, Remy, listen to what I say and clam down!"

He quietened with an effort as Chase came running back in, a bundle of cloths in his hands, slamming the door shut vigorously behind him. Eileen grabbed the rags and pressed them against the wound, then instructed Chase, in very simple and concise terms, exactly how to hold them. The older man did so, his teeth digging into his thin bottom lip, his brow trembling as he now regarded Remy with awe and dread. Remy ignored him, his hand clinging fast to Rogue's. Eileen pried one green eye open. Her face went as hard as steel.

"Chase, the bleeding…?" she began, her voice cracked.

"It's stopping," he replied, strained.

"Den why ain't she gettin' better?" Remy protested, the panic rising in him again. "Surely if the blood stops…"

"It isn't the bleeding that'll kill her, it's the shock!" Eileen spat. Her face had gone a more deathly shade of grey than Rogue's. Her own admission had stunned her into helplessness.

"Den you help her!" Remy cried. "For fuck's sake, woman, you manipulate electric currents, don't you?!"

She understood immediately what he meant, but for some reason, she hesitated. The culmination of years of self-pity, arrogance and denial stared her in the face for one split second, and she saw the irrefutable evidence of all her pride and conceit, the crumbling of that one last thing she had held so dear and thrown away with such contempt. The ugliness of it, of her, appalled her. If she hesitated, it was for nothing more than that one split second when she saw, clearly, that she was a just a woman. Without thinking Eileen Harsaw pressed her fingers against Rogue's heart and freed that one burst of energy she vowed she would never use for the sake of one lost love.

Hell hath frozen over, she thought, as the old familiar tingling coursed through her fingertips. She almost laughed.

Rogue jolted, once. Inexorable silence followed; Eileen fell onto her knees beside the bed and buried her head against the pillows, but she did not weep.

Not even when, after what seemed like minutes, she heard the soft, regular sigh of Rogue's breathing once more.

"You're muties," Chase said, an indeterminable amount of time later. Eileen lifted her face from the pillows and began to laugh hysterically, neck bent back like a wolf raising its muzzle to the moon and howling. Remy kept his eyes on Rogue. A wave of nausea had come over him.

"Mu-tants," he corrected the older man quietly. He stood and gently pulled the bedcovers over Rogue. A slight tinge of colour was coming back into her pasty cheeks. Eileen had stopped laughing. Her face was sober again – the werewolf become human.

"You tell anyone what happened here…" Remy began darkly, addressing Chase, his eyes burning malevolently. Chase interrupted, laughing coldly.

"Mistah, ah don't even know what the hell just happened here anyways. 'Sides, you think ah'm gonna give myself any more of a bad press than what ah have already?" He paused, his eyes flickering over to Rogue's now peaceful figure on the bed. "So long as you tell me that what you did to her wasn't on purpose."

Remy could only shake his head. He was too exhausted to talk about it.

"Will she be okay?" he asked Eileen instead.

"Her blood pressure's probably still low, but if she rests she'll be fine," she replied, standing up slowly. He looked over at her, both confounded and surprised. For the first time he had seen a spark of real, unadulterated life in the woman, but now she looked as staid and stoic as ever, as if what he had witnessed had only been a morbid reflection in a distorting Hall of Mirrors.

"I guess I should say t'anks," he said after a moment. "If you hadn't come when you did…"

"Actually, I came here because I had something to tell you," she interjected in a low, flat voice. She looked down at Rogue and her face twisted deprecatingly. "And, I suppose, for an appointment with fate as well."

He saw her grave expression; his gut lurched.

"What is it?" he asked, his voice thick with foreboding.

She looked up at him, blue eyes clear.

"He's left you another message."

Remy said nothing, understanding her words, his heart falling. But he cast Chase a long, sideways glance, knowing that he couldn't give anything away.

"Where is it?" he queried at last.

"At the scene," she replied evenly.

Remy turned, and held onto Rogue's exposed hand. Another message from the killer. He understood that Eileen could not have brought it to him – most likely it was being classified as evidence. He'd have to go for it himself. But he couldn't leave Rogue. Not now.

"I can't leave her," he stated firmly.

"Remy," Eileen began delicately. "The message…It's rather important."

"Can't it wait?" he asked.

"Under the circumstances… I think not."

He glanced over at her again, seeing how in earnest she was. He sighed, then turned to Chase.

"I've got t' go take care of somethin'," he said quietly. "I want y' to watch Anna while I'm gone."

Chase went pale.

"Oh no, no, no. Look Mr. LeBeau, ah'm already involved knee deep in whatever the hell jus' happened here, an' ah ain't getting' any more involved than ah have t', know what ah'm sayin'? 'Sides, ah've got a motel t' run an' business t' do an'…"

It was Remy's turn to transform into the wolf. He crossed the room with the wordless stealth of the predator, then picked Chase up off the floor by his collar and glared at him so fiercely that Eileen swore his eyes could have burst into flame.

"Fuck your motel!" he hissed, shaking the balding man violently. "An' fuck your business! You're gonna stay here, an' you're gonna watch over her, and if anyt'ing happens to her – anything! – so help me God, I'll kill you! Understand?!"

The fear and awe in Chase's eyes was almost infectious. On the bed, Rogue moaned softly in her sleep, as though complicit in all that was said and Remy's words had filled her with the same sense of dread. Chase heard it: for some reason, he nodded.

Outside, unbeknownst to them, it had begun to rain. It was the type of storm that Ororo would have conjured up – midsummer rain, abrupt and torrential, the kind that knew it may never get a chance again before the fall. Eileen shuttled the car through it, cursing at the fact that visibility was hampered by that thick mantle of rainfall; Remy however, sat in the passenger seat staring at the old book lying on the dashboard, that obnoxious old book named The Book of Thoth, a relic from another world that had so inexplicably collided with his own.

It only took them little less than ten minutes before they arrived. The cops weren't swarming the way they were often liable to – the storm was probably to thank for that. Eileen shooed away the remaining officers from the room itself; Remy caught the murmurings of dissent, the irate insistences that if another girl died they'd have to bring the bloody FBI in. Some of the men stared at him suspiciously as they filed out. To Remy, it was merely the angled bigotry of a lifetime and he ignored it. He felt utterly displaced. He could not escape the feeling that he should not have left the motel.

In a matter of seconds they had the room to themselves. Annie had just recently been vacated, since she no longer held a claim to anything in the house, let alone the building itself; but the sweet, fetid aroma of her dead body still lingered, imprinted, on the air.

"She was just a kid," he noted quietly, seeing the various photographs on the dressing table and the wall. How long they would remain there, no one knew. No one would pilfer anything so personal, so precious, so entirely inconsequential to anyone else but their owner. Someone would sort them. Someone would keep a few as souvenirs. The rest would be burnt collectively in an unknown backyard. Annie did not even have a claim on her own image any longer.

"Sixteen years old," Eileen confirmed from behind him. She had picked up a brown envelope that had been lying amongst several others on a nearby table. Remy heard the snap of her disposable gloves as she put them on. He only turned away from the bed when she had pulled the message out of the bag. He wanted to go back to Rogue.

This time, there was no note to accompany the message. Instead of a tarot card, as he had expected, he saw that it was a normal playing card – the murderer, that clever bastard, was now writing in his own language. Remy looked at it, emotionless. Eileen, however, did not need eyes to see the sudden tremor that shuddered through the entire length of his body.

"We found it underneath the Queen of Cups," she informed him softly. "Jones knew it was for you, but I told him to keep quiet until you'd seen it for yourself. News travels fast in this town; not a few people know that you called her by this name."

The Queen of Diamonds stared back at him implacably, with the gaze of one who knew that he had condemned her. Nothing needed to be written. He understood what it meant, so ambiguous to all but him. His stomach spiked. He knew with a dread certainty that he should not have left Rogue alone. Eileen stared at his lack of reaction, her heart suddenly going cold.

"But you know, don't you," she breathed, eyes wide, lowering the card and gazing at him. "You already know that Anna's going to be the next victim."

He turned to the door, jaw set.

"Take me back," he said.