X-Mans Stix: It Go Down in the Woods

by D D

A shapeshifting assassin must betray her only son, who has joined the very family she was sent to destroy.

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X-MansPART STIX: It Goes Down in The Woods At two seventeen in the morning, the mansion finally shut the hell up. The television downstairs had gone silent. Pipes knocked behind the upstairs bathroom wall. Somewhere beyond a closed door, Reen snored with the determination of a man trying to pull a lawn mower out of a ditch. Across the hall, Jeanetta slept on her side, one hand beneath her cheek and the other resting against her stomach. Before bed, she had wedged a chair under the door handle. Reen had called it unnecessary. Cyrus had offered to purchase a proper lock. She had told both of them that knocking was free. The chair remained where she had left it. The window, however, stood open six inches. A small gray bird perched on the sill. It waited through another stretch of snoring, then dropped noiselessly onto the carpet. Its shadow lengthened beneath the moonlight. Feathers flattened into blue skin, thin legs extended, and red hair spilled across a woman's shoulders. Misty Teek straightened beside the curtains. For months, the assignment had been photographs, schedules, names. Which windows faced the street. Who stayed out late. When the lights in Professor Z's study went dark. She knew the back gate stuck in wet weather. She knew Stormisha sometimes came home carrying her shoes. She knew the man with the visor checked the front door twice before bed. Tonight, knowing was supposed to become doing. Misty eased the window shut behind her. Jeanetta stirred, then settled deeper into her pillow. The woman in the bed looked younger asleep. There was none of the irritation Misty had seen from a distance, none of the sharp gestures aimed at the two men who followed her around. There was only a tired woman with a glass of water beside her and a folded baby blanket on the dresser. Misty looked away from the blanket. She had been given reasons. Predictions. Promises about what would happen if the child lived. She had repeated them often enough to make the journey here. Now the room was quiet, and the reasons sounded like somebody else's voice. She approached the bed. Her fingers lengthened, nails hardening into curved points. In the hallway, a floorboard creaked. Misty froze. Nightwalka stood outside Jeanetta's door in socks and a faded T-shirt, listening. He had tried sleeping. Every time he shut his eyes, the unfamiliar house seemed to move around him. Eventually he had given up and wandered the corridors, learning which boards complained beneath his feet. Night walking. At least the name was earning its keep. He had been headed downstairs for water when he noticed Jeanetta's door. Nothing about it looked different, but the feeling beyond it stopped him cold. A held breath. The certainty of someone standing where nobody should be. He turned the knob. The chair held the door shut. Misty felt the handle shift against the chair and changed at once. Blue skin rippled into brown. Her shoulders broadened, red hair shortened, and her jaw thickened. By the time the knob stopped moving, Reen stood beside Jeanetta's bed. "Jeanetta?" No answer. He disappeared from the hallway with a soft rush of displaced air and reappeared inside her room. Misty turned toward him. For half a second, she forgot the bed, the mission, even the hand she still held above Jeanetta. Her son stood in the moonlight. Not in a photograph. Not somewhere she could pretend was safely distant. Here, within arm's reach of the thing she had come to do. She remembered him small enough to fit against one forearm, crying against her chest while footsteps passed outside a locked room. She had covered his ear with her palm, whispering that nothing would get him. Nothing would touch her baby while she was there. Her raised hand folded shut. She held Reen's shape, wearing an expression that did not belong on his face. "Reen? How the hell you get in here?" Nightwalka asked. "Checking on her. Get out." Nightwalka looked from the figure to Jeanetta. Her hand still rested against her stomach. The chair was still beneath the handle. "How you get past the door?" "Go to bed, Noah." He went still. He had explicitly told everybody in this house not to call him Noah. Reen had barely bothered remembering Nightwalka. But that impatient drop at the end of his birth name, the softness trying to hide underneath it, belonged to somebody else. A yellow flicker passed through the eyes watching him. "Mama?" The figure's mouth opened. Jeanetta woke at the sound of his voice. She pushed herself upright, saw Reen beside her bed, and reached for the lamp. "What the fuck are you doing in my room?" Someone rattled the handle outside. "Who you talking to?" the real Reen demanded. Misty looked toward the door. Nightwalka took one step closer. "Wait." The door shook under a shoulder. The chair skidded, caught, then toppled as Reen forced his way into the room. He stopped at the sight of himself beside the bed. "Aw, hell naw." Misty lunged for the window. Nightwalka reached for her wrist, caught nothing, and flinched as glass exploded into the night. Her body struck the sloping porch roof below. A jagged piece of window sliced her forearm before she rolled over the gutter and dropped onto the lawn. Reen was at the broken frame a heartbeat later. "Stay with her!" He jumped. Jeanetta gripped Nightwalka's wrist before he could follow. Neither spoke. Outside, another upstairs window opened, and Cyrus shouted something about the front entrance being a perfectly viable option. Then came running footsteps on the stairs. By the time Cyrus reached the street, two Reens were already halfway down the block. "Which one are you?" he yelled. The nearer one looked back. "The one finna whoop your ass if you don't run!" That settled it. *** Misty ran past dark storefronts and a corner carryout with its security grate pulled down. Blood slid between the fingers of her borrowed hand. The wound had followed her into Reen's body. Changing its appearance could hide it; changing shape could not close it. Behind her, the real Reen gained ground. "Come back here wearing my damn face!" A man sitting on his porch lowered his cigarette as the first Reen passed, then stared when the second followed. "That's enough drinking for me," he said, putting it out. Cyrus rounded the corner several seconds later. His pajama shirt hung open over a tank top, and one slipper had already abandoned the pursuit. Misty heard a dog before she saw it. A thick-necked brown pit bull threw itself against a chain-link fence, barking hard enough to shake its tags. Its owner shouted from inside the house. Misty glanced at the animal, took two more strides, and dropped to all fours. Reen's shape collapsed into brown fur. The dog behind the fence abruptly stopped barking. Misty accelerated, nails clicking against the pavement. "She a dog now!" Reen shouted. Cyrus bent over beside a parked car, one hand braced against its trunk. "I can see that." "Then run!" "I am regulating my breathing." Reen left him regulating. Misty darted between two houses and cleared a drainage ditch. Beyond it, an overgrown service road led into the woods. She slipped beneath a fallen branch, leaving a dark smear on the pale bark. Reen crashed through the brush after her. By the time he reached the road, the sound of her paws had disappeared into wet leaves. He stopped, breathing through his nose. Damp earth. Standing water. Animal trails crossing in too many directions. Blood somewhere ahead, then nothing when the wind shifted. A twig snapped to his left. He turned with his claws out. A raccoon stared back at him from a stump. "Don't start." When Cyrus finally caught up, Reen was crouched beside a streak of blood on a stone. "Where did she go?" Reen looked into the trees. "That's what we gon' find out." *** Jeanetta refused to lie back down. Rougie brought her a robe while Stormisha stood near the broken window with her arms crossed. Scambit checked the adjoining room, then came back unusually quiet. Professor Z listened as Nightwalka described the false Reen, the familiar way she had said his name, and the flash of yellow in her eyes. "I think it was my mother," he finished. Jeanetta stared at him. "You think?" His fingers twisted together. "It was her. I just don't understand why she was standing over you." Jeanetta looked at the empty space beside her bed. She remembered the figure's hand tucked against its side, hiding something. She pulled the robe tighter across her stomach. "I got a pretty good idea." Monsta crouched by the window with a pair of tweezers and an evidence tube. There was blood along the edge of a shard still lodged in the frame. He removed it carefully, keeping the broken surface away from his fingers. "Nobody touch dis," he said. "She leave something useful." Nightwalka watched the glass disappear into the tube. For months, he had imagined finding his mother. Every version had included an explanation, maybe an apology. None had included her blood on somebody else's bedroom window. "She saw me and stopped," he said. Professor Z turned toward him. "Stopped doing what?" Nightwalka swallowed. "Her hand was up when I got inside. She already looked like Reen." The room became very still. Jeanetta's voice came low and steady. "So she didn't come here to see you." "No." "And if you hadn't walked in?" He could not answer. Rougie sat beside her. Stormisha moved away from the window and shut the bedroom door as far as its damaged frame allowed. Professor Z waited until Jeanetta looked at him. "You will not be left alone tonight." "I wasn't supposed to have somebody sneaking in tonight either." "You're right." The simple answer took some of the force out of what she had been about to say. She looked down at her stomach, then back at Nightwalka. "You saved us. I'm not blaming you for her. But don't ask me to feel sorry for her right now." He nodded. "I wasn't going to." In the laboratory downstairs, Monsta placed the sample beneath an analyzer while Reen and Cyrus reported where the trail ended. Professor Z stood beside the workbench, studying the neighborhood map. "Can you track her from that?" Cyrus asked. "DNA nuh come with a street address, bredren." Monsta brought up a magnified image. The cells on the screen changed shape, settled, then shifted again. "But hers unstable in a very particular way. Mi can teach the field scanner what fi look for. Find a stain, test it, know if we still following the same woman." Monsta handed the scanner to Cyrus and showed him the controls. "Monsta and I will stay here with Jeanetta," Z said. "The four of you stay together." Reen leaned against the counter. "Soon as it's light, we moving." "Bring her back alive," Z said. "We need answers." He looked directly at Reen when he said it. *** Morning found the woods gray and dripping. Professor Z, Monsta, Scambit, and Rougie stayed at the mansion with Jeanetta. Only Reen, Cyrus, Stormisha, and Nightwalka went into the woods. Before the search party left, she caught Cyrus by the sleeve. "Don't come back telling me you handled it if you don't know who sent her." "We won't." She looked past him at Reen. "That goes for you too." Reen nodded once. Now he led the others beyond the ditch, following the route he had lost in the dark. Cyrus wore proper shoes this time. Stormisha stepped around a muddy puddle, looked at the mud waiting on the other side, and gave up with visible disgust. Nightwalka walked beside Stormisha. He had insisted on coming. Z had allowed it on the condition that he did not disappear ahead of the group. Every few yards, Cyrus stopped to examine a leaf, a stone, or a rough patch of bark. The scanner chirped at the brown smear beneath the fallen branch. "Same blood." The trail crossed the service road and continued uphill. Prints in the soft ground began as paws, then changed into the impression of a bare human heel. Nightwalka stared at it longer than he needed to. Further in, they found a dark smear of blood across a sapling. Misty had braced her injured arm against it. More drops marked the leaves beneath the tree. Reen lifted his head. There was another smell beneath the damp leaves now. Familiar enough to make his shoulders tighten. "We got company." A heavy figure stepped from behind a pine tree ahead. Sabertoof rolled his neck and smiled, showing more teeth than the occasion required. "Still smell like cheap liquor." Reen stopped walking. "And you still following other men around, doing their dirty work." Sabertoof's gaze moved over the crew, then returned to him. "You need all of them to come looking for me?" "Ain't nobody looking for you. But you here now." A wet chuckle sounded above them. Stormisha looked up. A squat man crouched on a branch with his knees spread beside his ears. His mottled green-brown skin shone in the morning damp. He wore a sleeveless jacket with no shirt underneath and looked far too pleased with himself. "Y'all lost?," he said. Cyrus shifted the scanner behind his back. "And you are?" "Froggy." Stormisha looked at his bare feet gripping the branch. "Of course you are." Cyrus raised a hand before Reen could advance. "A woman came through here injured. We are here to--" "Shut up!" Sabertoof cut him off. "I should've killed you when I had the chance." Cyrus glanced at the bloodstained bark. Froggy's tongue snapped down from the branch and ripped the scanner out of his hand. "Hey!" The instrument struck a trunk and broke apart. Sabertoof lunged at Reen. *** They hit the ground together, tearing through wet leaves. Reen drove a knee between them and rolled free as Sabertoof's claws gouged the soil beside his head. He got upright just in time to take a shoulder to the chest. The impact hurled him into a tree hard enough to shake water from its branches. Across the clearing, Froggy sprang from one trunk to another. Cyrus followed him with his visor, unable to get a clear line while Nightwalka stood beneath him. "Feeling Froggy lil nigga?" Froggy called down to Nightwalka. "Then Jump!" He spat at him. Nightwalka teleported out of the way just in time. Stormisha got hit with the foul splash instead. "Oh, you nasty little bitch." Stormisha wiped the spit off her arm. "Why don't nobody else say nigga around here?" Everybody paused and shrugged. Then the fighting resumed. Wind ripped through the clearing. Froggy lost his grip and slammed into a curtain of hanging vines. Before he could fall, his tongue wrapped around an overhead limb and swung him back toward Stormisha. Nightwalka vanished, appeared beside Stormisha, and pulled her out of the path of Froggy's kicking feet. The two reappeared several yards away, stumbling but upright. "I had him," Stormisha said. "He had your face lined up." "Then he better hope he miss." Froggy landed on a low branch and folded his legs beneath him, preparing to spring again. Nightwalka appeared on the far side of the trunk. Froggy twisted toward the sound, giving Cyrus a clear line. "Cyrus, now!" A controlled red burst clipped the branch beneath Froggy's feet. He fell into the brush with a shriek. Nightwalka seized a fallen limb and pinned the thrashing vines around him while Stormisha kept a tight circle of wind moving across the ground. On the other side of the clearing, Reen was bleeding through his shirt. Sabertoof wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A cut across his cheek had already begun closing. "You slowing down." Reen flexed his fingers. "Come check." Sabertoof came at him again. Reen stepped inside the first swing and drove his claws into Sabertoof's stomach. Instead of pulling away, Sabertoof leaned into the strike and clamped a hand around Reen's throat. He grinned inches from Reen's face. "You know that ain't enough." Reen's boots scraped backward. His free hand caught Sabertoof's wrist, but the grip tightened. Sabertoof was already recovering around the injury, confident he could outlast whatever Reen did next. Reen looked past his shoulder at the fallen tree behind him. Then he stopped resisting backward and drove forward. Sabertoof stumbled, surprised by the change. Reen put everything into the next step and slammed him against the trunk. Rotten bark burst beneath their weight. Sabertoof's elbow struck an exposed knot, loosening his grip just enough. Reen tore free, dragged in a breath, and struck once across the neck. Sabertoof's head separated from his body. Both fell on opposite sides of the broken trunk. Reen stayed where he was, claws extended, waiting for movement that did not come. The clearing went quiet except for the wind around Froggy's hiding place. "Reen," Cyrus said. Reen looked at him, still breathing hard. "He wasn't stopping." Cyrus stared at the body, then at Reen. "So decapitation was your only available response?" Reen touched his bruised throat. "You see him holding me?" "I saw you abandon any attempt at restraint. Professor Z has repeatedly explained that we cannot behave like the people we're fighting." Behind Cyrus, Froggy slowly unwound his tongue from a root. The wind shifted as Stormisha turned toward the argument. Beneath the vines, his legs folded against his chest. "Cyrus," Nightwalka said. "There is a difference between defending yourself and being a cold-blooded—" Froggy burst from the brush with both hands aimed at Cyrus's neck. "Behind you!" Cyrus spun. His hand struck the visor control too far open, and a violent red blast caught Froggy square in the chest. The blast carried him through the narrow trunk behind him. Wood cracked across the clearing. Froggy landed beyond it and did not move. Cyrus snapped the visor shut. For several seconds, everybody stared. Nightwalka hurried over, crouched beside Froggy, and checked for a pulse. When he looked up at the others, his expression answered before his head shook. Cyrus swallowed. "I was aiming for his leg." Reen looked at the broken tree. Then he looked at Cyrus. "Who's the cold-blooded killer now?" Stormisha's eyes moved from one man to the other. "Oooh, y'all in trouble." "That was an accident," Cyrus said immediately. "Explain it to him." Reen nodded toward Froggy. "Both of y'all shut up," Stormisha said. "We still got somebody to find." The little smile disappeared from Reen's face. Cyrus lowered his hand from his visor. Cyrus looked toward Froggy again. With nothing moving and nobody attacking, the force of what he had done seemed to reach him all at once. Reen retracted his claws. He did not apologize. Nightwalka stood a little apart from them, staring into the trees. His mother's blood was somewhere in this clearing. Two men had just died keeping them from going further. He wondered whether she could hear any of it. *** They searched for another hour. Cyrus salvaged the scanner's sample cartridge, but the instrument itself was ruined. Reen found one more drop of blood on the underside of a fern, then nothing. Their own footprints and the fight had churned the clearing into mud. Nightwalka called for his mother twice. The second time, he used no name at all. "I know you out here. Just talk to me." Only water falling from the branches answered. Cyrus stopped near a low mound covered in ivy and examined the broken scanner once more before putting it away. "We will need different equipment." Reen stared at the ground. "She ain't just run off. Somebody had this place ready." Stormisha looked around the clearing. "Then we come back prepared. I ain't walking into another ambush." Nightwalka wanted to argue. Then he remembered Jeanetta waiting back at the house and the two bodies behind them. He followed the others out. Beneath the ivy-covered mound, behind a hatch masked with soil and roots, Misty watched their shapes retreat across a security monitor. She had heard her son calling through the ventilation shaft. Her hand still rested against the ladder. For one reckless moment, she had climbed three rungs. She could have opened the hatch. Said his name. Let him see her without somebody else's face covering hers. Then she had looked at the second monitor. It showed Jeanetta's mansion from across the street. Misty had not placed that camera. She stepped off the ladder. *** The bunker smelled of concrete, hot wiring, and the antiseptic she had poured over her arm. Misty sat at a metal desk beneath a fluorescent strip. Her borrowed shapes were gone. She was nude in her natural form, her blue skin bare except for the bandage around her injured forearm. On the wall, a screen woke from black. A broad figure sat beyond its dim light. The image revealed neither a face nor enough of the room to place him. Misty straightened before she could stop herself. "You failed." She pressed her good hand flat against the desk. "My son is there." The figure did not move. "You were assigned to the woman." "I didn't know he'd found them. He walked into the room." "Then you should have removed him." Misty looked up sharply. "He's my child." "And you understood what hers could become." She remembered the blanket on the dresser. Jeanetta sleeping with her hand against her stomach. Noah standing in the moonlight, looking at her as if the word mother still meant somewhere safe. "You told me," she said. "You told me what the baby would become." The silence lasted long enough for her to hear the ventilation fan change speed. "Choose your next words carefully." Misty's fingers curled against the edge of the desk. "I can't go on with it. Not with my son in that house." The figure leaned forward. The screen adjusted to the movement, then darkened again before she could make out his features. "You do not leave my service because an assignment becomes uncomfortable." Misty shook her head. "If you refuse, I will kill you. Then I will kill every X-Mans sheltering in that house. Your son will not be spared." She stared at the screen. "Leave him out of this." "You brought him into it when you chose him over your orders." "You could've had Sabertoof and Froggy do it!" Misty shouted. "I assigned those dumbasses to keep the X-Mans away from this bunker. And now they're dead. But their failure does not excuse yours." The connection ended. For a long time, Misty did not move. On the smaller monitor, the search party returned to the mansion. Nightwalka paused on the front steps and looked down the street, searching faces that were too faraway for her to see. Her hand rose toward his image, then stopped short of the glass. Beside the keyboard lay the photograph she had carried for months: Jeanetta leaving the house, one arm curved protectively around her stomach. Misty sat between the photograph and the screen, unable to reach for either.

X-Mans Stix: It Go Down in the Woods

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