Disclaimer: Marvel owns X-Men! Blah, blah, blah...
A.p.R. - Hola, my friend! I'm back with new CoA action! Sorry, I took so long to update, I was very busy. I'm going to try to get another chapter out by Thanksgiving, but that'll be hectic. And to Chaotic Jinx, Amara and Roberto have been together since Chapter 32...who's on crack now! Booya!
--------------------------------------------------"we burn a hot fire here"---------------------------------------------------
Kitty ran through the halls and went into Marc's room. He wasn't there. She made her way to Logan's room and banged on the door.
"Calm down, calm down, half pint." Logan grumbled, opening the door. "Now what is it?"
"It's Marc…he's been gone for, like, four hours now and it's getting dark out." she explained, urgently.
"Well maybe he just decided to pop into a strip club or something to…relax" he said sounding serious, even though the badger was really making a funny.
Kitty glared at him, angrily.
He raised an eyebrow, now thinking that he probably shouldn't have said that. "Easy there, we'll find him with Cerebro…don't worry, I'm sure he's fine."
Marc's eyes slowly began to flutter open, he raised his head from the ground and grunted, feeling a sharp pain in his left side. He looked down, and saw a large piece of metal, probably a chunk of the door, sticking out of his ribs.
Lying flat out on the forest floor, firmly gripped the piece of metal, closed his eyes and winced. "One…two….three." He pulled it out quickly and let out a scream of pain causing several birds to fly away.
After a minute of letting himself adjust to the pain a bit, he crawled over and grabbed the case with Kitty's present and put it back in his pocket. At least that was okay.
He stood up, using a tree for support and gazed at the aftermath, 'okay' was more than he could say for the truck and his cell phone...they were all totaled. His wounds were not a pretty sight and had begun healing, though the severity of them caused his healing factor to work very slowly.
Marc knew that he could stay here for several reasons, the two biggest being the cops and whoever cut his brakes. He started to walk, limply, along the road hoping for someone who could get him to a phone. Hitching a ride on the back of a fruit delivery truck was all he could get. It may not have been the best ride ever but it did make him smell like watermelons. Is that a good thing?
The driver took him to this small old fashioned mini-mall type place. It was nighttime now and Marc began to walk along the sidewalk looking for a payphone.
Suddenly, an arm appeared from the shadows and grabbed Marc by the collar, pulling him into a nearby alley. The arm's owner pinned Marc to a wall about two feet off the ground. The face came into the light. "Remember me?" Benny asked with a smirk.
"Hey Benny…" Marc said, wincing from the pain.
Just then Legna dropped down from the roof, like it was just the step off a curb, and landed on his feet. He wiped some blood from his lip. "Little girls blood is always so tasty. Ya gotta love 'em when they're scared…makes the blood sweeter."
Marc lunged forward at him but Benny grabbed his neck and pushed his head back against the brick wall. Marcia and Adelaide walked out from a corner with their arms around each others' waist. Marcia looked at Marc and licked her lips. "My fire."
"Don't call me that, we are not together anymore." hissed Marc. Benny pressed him to the wall harder causing Marc to groan in pain.
Adelaide sighed. "Aw, I was hoping that car wreck would have killed you. It would have been very fitting to die like your parents." he said with a chuckle.
Benny and Marc glared at him angrily; Adelaide backed away feeling a bit uneasy under their eyes. "Whaaat? I had nothing to do that - 'm just sayin'."
Marc's body began to heat up but then Benny dampened his powers. "Easy there, don't wanna melt that nice piece of jewelry you got there...oh yes we know about you and your precious girl."
"And I must say she is one hell of a kisser." added Adelaide, Marc glared at him.
"I know you guys didn't come down here to try to kill me, what do you want?" asked Marc, placing a hand over his wound.
"You are gonna do a little job for us...and you're going to actually do it this time…you got it…you see, we have something against you now…"
"Oh yeah, and what's that?" demanded Marc, in extreme amounts of pain.
"We'll kill your girlfriend..."
Legna couldn't help but interrupt. "Or I could see if I could make her into a vampire...I don't even know if I can do that. If I try, she'll probably die. So either way we win."
"We're not dumb, we know that we won't be able to take on all the X-Men, but if you don't do this we will bring the fight to the institute. Odds are we'll lose, but not before taking out some of them first, got that?" Benny explained.
Marc hung his head, not proud of what he had to do. "I'll do it, just…just, don't hurt them…"
"Good…meet us at the this address in three hours. It's a gray warehouse" Benny added with a smile, slipping a piece of paper into Marc's bloody pocket. "See you soon…don't tell anyone." With that, Benny threw him like a rag doll, about ten feet away, into a stack of crates and The Gang left the alley.
After about fifteen minutes Marc came to. He then crawled to find a payphone; once he found one he wobbled to his feet. "I just gotta phone the institute, tell them I'm fine and then-- and then……I'm gonna need a doctor…" He reached for the phone, passing out immediately.
After a few minutes, Professor Charles Xavier's eyes reopened and he gently set the helmet down on the control panel of Cerebro. "I found him. He's at the Gala Plaza near Seventy-eighth Avenue and Willow" he explained. Logan nodded and began to leave. "And Logan…hurry."
In about twenty minutes flat, Logan arrived at Marc's location. He parked his car near the curb and quickly got out, heading towards Marc. "Hey kid, wake up." he said lightly smacking the side of Marc's face. Logan rolled him over onto his back and now saw the large wounds Marc had suffered.
Marc coughed and slowly opened his eyes. "They said they'd kill everyone…Kitty..." he said, slowly remembering what had happened. Logan helped him off the ground. "Thanks, they want me to…or else X-Men would die...they'd kill." he explained almost incoherently, still injured from the crash and the attack.
"You know what? They're easily pissing me off." Logan growled, helping Marc into his car. He got into the driver's side and drove off to the mansion. "What happened to the truck… and why do you look like shit?" he asked, with a raised brow.
"Thanks..." Marc said grimacing. "It's totaled, the brakes were cut, it rolled for a while, then I woke up outside of it." Marc lifted up the side of his mangled shirt to reveal the, still slowly healing, hole in his side.
"Damn! Kid, we need to get you to the infirmary." he said taking a quick glance at Marc's gaping wound. "Who are they?"
"They knew...they knew everything. They've been following me for weeks; waiting for the perfect moment to strike. They wanted to toy with me for a while...then they saw Kitty and decided that's the way to start." he explained, holding his wound. "Basically…they just wanted to make my life miserable."
Once at the mansion, Logan rushed him to the infirmary to be treated by Hank. Marc was slipping in and out of consciousness, even with his healing factor these wounds weren't going to heal any time soon. He had fallen asleep as they were hooking him up to an IV line.
He awoke sometime later and looked at the clock, two hours had passed. Marc sat up in bed but fell back and let out a groan from the pain. He tried again, and slid off the bed into a standing position and listened to see if anyone was coming. There was no way he'd ever get out of the mansion like that… there had to be another way.
Marc reached for the IV cord and ripped it out of his flesh. "Ouch…" he sighed in a higher voice.
A window in the center of the room caught his eye; he called a cab before climbing out through it. He tried making a run for it but out of nowhere Jubes came running over and stood in his way. "And where do you think you're going?"
"Jubes…move." he said, trying to go around her but she shuffled her feet in front of him again. He started to go one way and the quickly went the other and got past her and kept walking towards the gates.
She watched him painfully walk away on his bad leg. "Are you going to that address?" she asked, he stopped dead in his tracks. "I saw it when me and Bobby came to check up on you earlier…so are you?"
Marc patted himself down to see if he still had it; he did, Jubes hadn't taken it. "Jubes…don't tell anyone I'm going, please."
She reluctantly nodded and Marc went through the gates and into a waiting taxi cab. She bit her lip, uncertain of what to do. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a napkin that she had written the address down on along with some other things.
Marc had the cab driver drop him off a block from the location. He paid the man and headed off to meet up with them. He arrived at the address and sure enough, the warehouse was there. He approached the entrance when Legna dropped down from the roof behind him. Marc jumped. "Geez…you gotta stop doing that."
"Get in there." Legna hissed, baring his fangs and pushed him into the warehouse.
"Okay man, no pushing…geez, someone woke up on the wrong side of the coffin this mornin'?" Marc said, each sudden movement caused him to feel an extraordinary amount of pain.
He walked in and saw Adelaide, Benny, and Marcia standing in the center of the concrete floor of this old warehouse. Marc kept a cold glare focused upon them. "I'm here…now remember our deal…you don't hurt my friends…"
"Yeah and I plan to follow through with that-" Benny started but his sentence was broken up as the side wall blew out and The New Recruits stepped through the opening.
Tabby smirked. "Guess who?"
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