Emma Frost stood in one of the abandoned Weapon X buildings at ground level, looking out at the almost frozen river in the morning light. Her mind was turning over rapidly. She’d needed to come up here to get some fresh air, to let her thoughts breathe and roam. After Dazzler had asked about the bar where Magneto had last been seen, The Gilded Arrow, she’d decided to do some digging.
She had called a number that had proven fruitful over the years, but it was one she used sparingly. They had never exchanged their names, only large sums of money or important favors. Her contact asked no personal questions and neither did she. All she ever did was give this person a name and pay them, or undertake a mutant favor, and they would trace detailed information and all online activity of the name requested: bank records, travel records, and the like, to help locate the target or at least provide information as to who the person was, their purchasing history, and their latest movements. This contact had the ability to dig deep without restriction. She didn’t know how, and quite frankly she didn’t want to know. All she wanted was the information.
And when she’d asked for details on The Gilded Arrow, she’d been intrigued by the data returned to her.
The Gilded Arrow was owned by a company called The Bronzed Wing. The Bronzed Wing was one of the companies that Triage and Tempus had found connected to Sanderson Holdings, which meant there was now a direct link between the MGH and the bar from which Magneto had gone missing.
Emma’s source had provided ownership details of The Bronzed Wing, which was headed up by a woman named Cassandra Walsh. Emma had never heard of this person, so she’d arranged a secondary search on this name. And it was the response to this search that had left her intrigued, and quite frankly, stunned.
Walsh herself had a series of companies in her name, and Emma’s contact had supplied a detailed listing of each company’s board members. Having enacted searches for Emma over the years, this contact knew which names might be of interest to her, and sure enough they found one linked to Walsh that left Emma on high alert – a name that Emma was all too familiar with.
Shaw.
Sebastian Shaw.
Emma knew deep within her bones it had to be the Sebastian Shaw she knew, but she had to be absolutely sure. She immediately requested a third, specific search to confirm whether Cassandra Walsh was indeed linked to the Sebastian Shaw Emma knew.
The Sebastian Shaw of the Hellfire Club.
The man who called himself the Black King.
And it was this response she now waited for.
She paced the derelict building, her mind mulling over the possibilities. Could Sebastian Shaw, her old business partner and nemesis from the days of the Hellfire Club, be involved in this? And if so, what on earth was he up to?
Emma searched her own memories, wondering whether Shaw had ever mentioned Cassandra Walsh before, but she struggled to find any. Was this really the Shaw she knew? Was he involved, working deep in the shadows and staying out of sight? Or was this a crazy coincidence? Was Cassandra Walsh running her own game, alone?
Emma’s phone rang, startling her. She quickly enabled the signal scrambling she’d uploaded onto the phone, ensuring anonymity, then answered it.
“Yes?” she said expectantly, noticing her heart beating faster than normal.
“I managed to trace details to confirm his identity,” the computerized voice said. Her contact made every attempt to ensure they were untraceable. “It wasn’t easy. I had to do a lot of digging, but, yes, this is your old business partner. Sebastian Shaw, son of Jacob Shaw. It’s him.”
Emma stared at the near-glacial river.
“Anything else you need?” the computerized voice asked her.
Emma, much like the river, was frozen in shock.
“Is there anything else you need?” the voice asked again.
She blinked and managed to get her mind moving again.
“Yes,” she said. “I have one last trace for you to enact. I need to know where they are now and what they’ve been up to. I need to know everything about them.”
“I bet I can guess who it is.”
Her hand tightened around the phone. “Sebastian Shaw.”
•••
Dazzler managed to sleep a few hours out of exhaustion, but somehow still found the time to stare at the ceiling and think about all the ways she’d screwed up the previous day and all the mistrust she still had for everyone, wondered whether her father was dead and whether there was anything she could’ve done differently to avoid it, and contemplated how her life would never feel the same again if he was gone forever. Guilt weighed upon her heavily.
The thing that haunted her most, though, was Rachel’s comment on the X-Jet.
“You have allegiance to no one but yourself.”
She was right.
Part of Dazzler felt ashamed of this, but part of her knew she’d had no other choice. It was her base survival instinct. Her mother had abandoned her as a child. Her father had disowned her. She’d been used and mistreated by mutants, by S.H.I.E.L.D., by ex-boyfriends, by ex-bandmates and ex-band managers. She had good reason to be the emotional island that she was.
And yet, deep inside, she desperately longed to connect to the mainland.
To be like everyone else.
She wanted the friendships, love, and loyalty that others seemed to have. The happy families. But it felt so alien to her. With each betrayal and disappointment, she had learned to cage her heart. Despite being a strong mutant, the truth was she was just a fragile human underneath who hid behind her music. And if she didn’t protect that fragile human, there would be nothing left of her. All the light energy in the world could not revive her shattered heart if it was broken one more time.
She had to protect that at all costs. But it was easier said than done. The biggest enemy she faced right now, the dark shadow that followed her everywhere, was mistrust. The fear of being betrayed. By humans, by mutants, by everyone. Mistrust was an enemy greater than any she’d faced before. And since waking, thanks to a dream she’d had, it was terrorizing her once again.
The dream had been strange. She just stood in that corridor in the subterranean depths of the New Charles Xavier School staring at Frost. Dazzler had been confused as to why she was there, and Frost merely smiled at her like the cat that got all the cream. And once Dazzler awoke, it was all she could think about: standing in that corridor, and Frost’s smile. What was it about that space that haunted her so?
When she got sick of thinking, she decided to get out of bed and get to work. She contacted both Frost and Bennett to see if there had been any other updates overnight. There was none from either, but something felt off about each conversation, like they were holding back. And Dazzler hated that. Was her paranoia getting the better of her? Could she trust her own mind?
When Bennett asked to confirm her next steps, Dazzler simply said they would infiltrate and investigate the bar. She didn’t mention their planned warehouse visit. In a way it was a test. The information on the warehouse had come from Frost, so it was assumed that S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn’t aware of this connection. But Dazzler wasn’t sure she believed that. Frost did scrape the information by mind-reading, so it could be possible that S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t know about the shipment. But then again, if Frost had discovered that Dazzler’s father had a connection with Rosenthorpe, Dazzler had to assume that S.H.I.E.L.D. with all its technology, data mining, and spies, would eventually stumble across this fact too. Especially if Rosenthorpe hung in the same circles as the man Dennis Stanton, who wound up in the hospital. Could S.H.I.E.L.D. have somehow traced the MGH to Rosenthorpe’s warehouse already?
But if S.H.I.E.L.D. knew this, Bennett hadn’t mentioned it. She couldn’t put it past them to have discovered the link and then intentionally excluded this information from her. Maybe they pushed an update through to her old phone, which was now back in Vancouver. Which was another strange thing because Bennett had not mentioned this to her at all, about her being back in New York, calling from a new number, and her old phone being in Vancouver. Was S.H.I.E.L.D. testing her? Her loyalty? Testing whether she would share information with them?
But what if they legitimately didn’t know about the warehouse? It would not be perceived well by S.H.I.E.L.D. if they discovered she intentionally withheld this information. She would burn the trust they had with her as Mutant Liaison. Was it smart to make an enemy of S.H.I.E.L.D.?
But trust had to be earned, and S.H.I.E.L.D. had not earned it yet.
She heard the door of the next room close, and she looked out the peephole to see Sage, wearing her cybernetic glasses, walking toward the elevator. Dazzler’s mind raced, wondering where she was going, and wondering whether those glasses had hearing capability. Could Sage, with her technology, be listening through the walls to Dazzler’s conversations? She tensed, suddenly wondering how much Sage was reporting back to Frost.
Or to someone else…
With Sage reporting to Frost, Polaris and Rachel reporting to Logan, and Dazzler reporting to S.H.I.E.L.D., they were most definitely a team of fractured alliances.
Which made it a difficult team to try to lead.
She turned away from the door, squeezing her eyes closed and taking a long, calming breath. She had to steady herself. She had to remain calm. Paranoia would keep her safe, but too much would screw up her mind and force mistakes. She had to find the middle ground, the balance in between the two.
•••
Dazzler and her team arrived at The Gilded Arrow right at opening hours – eleven am. Twenty minutes passed before the first guest arrived that Rachel could scrape the password from – a man in his mid-thirties, dressed in an expensive suit and styled very city-chic. As soon as Rachel had the password she gave it to Sage, and they set forth to infiltrate, having cobbled a ragged cover story together from bits and pieces Rachel had obtained the night before.
They located the bar’s rusted iron door, hidden from view of the street by some dumpsters and almost camouflaged against the surrounding brown brick. Unsurprisingly, they found the door locked.
Sage knocked, and a few seconds passed before a peep slot slid across and two brown eyes stared back at them.
“Can I help you?” a man’s voice asked. The words were polite enough, but his tone was gruff.
“The arrow flies south today,” Sage told him.
He stared at her a moment, then the others, then shut the peep slot. Dazzler looked at Sage questioningly before they heard bolts scraping on the other side of the door. It opened, and a large, barrel-bellied man with four-day growth stared back at them.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” he said, eyeing them suspiciously.
“No. We’ve been out of town,” Sage said, applying her Eastern European accent thickly. “But I’m very much looking forward to my visit.”
“Your membership is local?” the man asked.
“No,” Sage smiled. “I am with the London club, but I was told courtesies would be extended here for me and my guests. Was I informed wrong?”
He eyed them for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Of course not. Come in.” He stepped back and ushered them through.
They stepped into the dimly lit bar that looked like it was right out of the 1920s. With mosaic tiled floors, dark wood bar and booths, gilded lightshades and tap fittings, it was a rich man’s dive bar. Behind the bar itself, the walls were mirrored and lined with row upon row of bottles, and at the far end was a straight staircase, leading to the second floor. Based on the security to enter and its hidden location, Dazzler wondered just what was up that staircase. And more to the point, she was starting to wonder whether this place was more than a membership-only, exclusive bar. Was this place some kind of secret society?
The ultimate question, though: was Magneto a member? Or was he merely a guest on the night he disappeared? And if Squires was a member, who else might be? Who was inside the night it happened?
As they moved across to the bar, Dazzler noticed smooth jazz playing through the speakers, the sound of trumpets tingling her veins. The bar was empty except for the doorman, an attractive, expensively dressed barmaid, and the guest they’d followed inside, who sat in a booth alone, reading a tablet.
They ordered a round of sodas from the barmaid, who stared back at them. “Just soda? That’s all you want?”
Dazzler nodded. “We’re here for a meeting.”
“Oh.” The barmaid smiled, glancing at the guest in the booth. Like the doorman, her eyes were suspicious of the new faces.
“Is the owner around?” Dazzler asked brazenly. “That’s who we’re here to meet.”
The barmaid glanced to the doorman. “Davis? She says she’s here to meet the owner.”
“Well, that can’t be,” Davis said, stepping forward. “Because they tell me when they’re expecting someone, and they didn’t mention you.”
“It was a last-minute thing.” Dazzler gave her bombshell smile. “May we speak with them?”
He studied her carefully. “You’re here for a meeting and don’t know their name?”
“It was recommended I speak with them,” Dazzler said. “Time was of the essence. I was only given the bar name.”
“And yet you’re supposed to be members?” he said accusingly to Sage, who smiled back, but her face was otherwise vague. Dazzler figured she was already looking at something through her glasses.
“May we speak with them?” Dazzler asked him.
“You can’t waltz in and expect their time,” Davis said, mistrust flaring in his eyes now. “If you knew them, you’d know that.”
“We don’t know them personally, no,” Dazzler said, “but you could say they’re a friend of a friend.”
“And who’s the friend?” he asked.
Dazzler leaned her elbows back on the bar, as a saxophone poured through the speakers now, warming her veins. “Magneto.”
The barmaid stilled. Davis stared at her in silence.
“I take it you know who that is,” Dazzler said.
Davis took a deep breath, and then he looked to the guest in the booth. “Excuse me, sir, but would you mind adjourning upstairs for a moment?”
The guest looked at him, then the women, then collected his tablet and did as asked, disappearing up the stairs.
Dazzler watched him go then turned back to Davis. “Let’s cut to the chase. Magneto’s missing, and I think you know that. He was last seen entering your bar. Did you think that no one would come looking for him? I mean, it’s Magneto we’re talking about.”
“What makes you think you’ll find him here?” Davis asked.
“Oh, we don’t think he’s still here,” Dazzler said. “We just know that he was last seen here. So, you know, we’d like to find out what happened here that night.”
“If you’re members of this bar, then you know we offer discretion,” Davis said. “So, I’m afraid we’re legally bound to confidentiality.”
“The law would suggest otherwise in the circumstance of a missing person,” Dazzler said.
Davis chuckled as he ran his eyes over her leather jumpsuit. “Well, see, you don’t look like law officers, so we don’t need to say squat.”
Dazzler gave another bombshell smile. “Don’t let this jumpsuit fool you. I know a thing or two about the law.”
“Until you can show me a badge, sweetheart, you got nothing.”
Dazzler displayed her S.H.I.E.L.D. credentials. “Heard of these guys?”
He looked at it. “Yeah, they were powerful once,” he said, then smiled, “before they were disbanded.”
“Heard of mutants?” Polaris said, slicing her hand through the air and scraping a metal table against the door, blocking it.
Davis spun around at the sound, saw the blocked door, then looked back at Polaris. He quickly regained his carefree composure. “Well, you’re definitely not members of this bar then, because we don’t allow your kind here.”
“No, we don’t,” a woman’s voice said from the top of the stairs.
They turned to see a woman in her forties, expensively attired, caramel-blonde hair, her face cast in shadow from the overhead lights. Dazzler couldn’t see her eyes but noted her sharp cheekbones.
“Magneto was here. He’s a mutant,” Polaris said.
“And the person who brought him inside has been penalized,” the woman said.
“Who brought him inside?” Dazzler asked.
“Our membership information is private,” the woman answered. “Regardless, if we don’t allow mutants here,” she continued, her voice polite but threatening, “that means you used illegal methods to gain the access phrase for today’s entry. Which means” – she smiled – “if anyone is going to get in trouble with the law, it’s you.”
“How much does Senator Earnest pay for his membership?” Dazzler asked, leaning off the bar and turning toward the woman. “He’s a member, right? Like his legal aide, Toby Squires.”
The woman stared back silently from her shadows, no smile visible now.
“He was the one meeting with Magneto here the night he went missing.” Dazzler shrugged again. “If he or your bar were to be publicly implicated in the disappearance, well… that would not be a good look, would it?”
“What happens after someone leaves my bar, is none of my business,” the woman said.
“Maybe,” Dazzler said, “but still, you want to keep this place secret, don’t you? I mean, that’s how you get your clientele, right? You’ve created an exclusive hideaway here. It won’t be so secret if the press gets hold of it. Imagine the tabloids hanging around out front.”
The woman smiled again. “What makes you so sure that Magneto is the victim here?”
“You tell us,” Polaris blurted, stepping toward her. “We’re all ears.”
The woman grimaced. “Tell the redhead to stop trying to get inside my head. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Rachel shifted uncomfortably, her whitened eyes turning green again.
“Just tell us one thing,” Dazzler said. “Who did he leave with?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “Now go or I’ll have you thrown out.”
Polaris laughed. “By who? Your lone doorman?”
They heard footsteps, and suddenly saw more large men lined up behind the woman at the top of the stairs. Dazzler counted five of them, but who knew how many more were obscured from her view.
Dazzler sized them up then looked back at the woman. “We just want a name. Did he leave with Squires?”
“Get out,” the woman said with disinterest and walked away.
“Last chance,” Davis said, punching a fist into his palm. “Before me and my buddies get to work.”
“Hey, what are you doing?” the barmaid asked Sage. Dazzler saw Sage’s hands were behind her back, her haptic glove on and her fingers moving about. “Davis–”
“We can take these guys!” Polaris said, adamantly, overriding the barmaid while Rachel’s eyes went white again. “We need answers.”
Dazzler glanced at Sage who gave a subtle shake of her head. Dazzler wasn’t sure what she’d been doing with the glove, but she must’ve found something, and Dazzler wanted to know what it was. If they went into battle with these guys, she might not. She’d save the fight for another day.
She looked over at the doorman and flashed another smile. “Sure thing, Davis,” she said. “Come on girls, let’s go. This bar sucks.”
Davis gave a smug laugh. Dazzler wanted to wipe the smile of his face but held herself back.
They moved to the door, and Polaris angrily shoved the table aside with a flick of her hands, then flung the door open wide.