Hound 10 Comes Calling

Nine p.m.

The streets around the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan began to fall quiet.

It was not the ordinary quiet that came with night. It was an oppressive, manufactured stillness, the uneasy hush before a storm.

Police cars appeared at the intersections, not to patrol, but to block the roads.

Yellow-and-black police tape sealed off several blocks. Officers in bulletproof vests stood guard at every entrance, their faces grim as urgent orders crackled over their radios.

Pedestrians were kept out, and traffic was diverted to other streets. It was as though an invisible hand had cut the entire area away from the city.

The hot dog vendor on the corner had packed up long ago. The homeless men who had been counting cash during the day had vanished too.

Only the wind remained, the streetlights, and the faces of ordinary people watching through distant windows.

An unmarked black van sat inside the cordon, its doors shut and engine off. Nothing stirred.

No lights were on inside, but someone was sitting there.

A young man with brown hair and gray eyes. His face held no expression.

It was the blankness of someone who had been brainwashed so many times that he had lost the ability to show emotion. He wore a dark gray tactical suit with no markings, no rank, nothing to identify him.

His hands rested quietly on his knees. His breathing was steady, his heart rate normal, as though he were waiting for an ordinary traffic light to turn green.

In the passenger seat, a man in a suit glanced back at him and swallowed.

"The targets are on the hotel's top floor, in the Presidential Suite. Three targets. The primary is a white male, eighteen years old. His mutant abilities include matter manipulation, Superhuman Healing, and Mental Defense. The two secondary targets are underage females. Do not engage them alone."

The gray-eyed man said nothing.

He merely gave a slight nod.

The man in the suit took a deep breath and picked up his radio. "All units, target confirmed. Move in ten minutes."

The gray-eyed man closed his eyes.

His fingers twitched slightly. It was not nerves, but the instinct of a hunter waiting for the hunt to begin.

Energy coursed through his body like an invisible river, gathering in his chest from every limb before spreading through him again.

He had absorbed many things: the kinetic energy of bullets, the heat of explosions, the electricity of lightning. It was all still stored inside him, waiting quietly to be released.

He opened his eyes.

A faint white gleam, almost too dim to see, flashed across his gray pupils.

Hound 10 was ready.

Nine seventeen p.m.

The café across from the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan had closed long ago, but a light still burned beside a second-floor window.

Scott Summers sat there with a cup of black coffee that had already been refilled three times. Through the window, he watched the building surrounded by layers of police cordons.

His phone screen lit up. A message from Charles read: "The military has deployed Hound 10. Energy absorber. Don't face him head-on."

Scott turned his phone facedown on the table and kept drinking his coffee.

An energy absorber.

He had seen mutants like that before—the military's favorite kind. In theory, given enough energy to draw on, he could absorb any attack and return it twice as hard.

Bullets, explosions, lasers, lightning, even Cyclops's optic blasts.

The stronger you were, the stronger he became.

"Interesting," Scott murmured. Whether he meant Hound 10 or the person about to face him, even he could not have said.

The hotel's top floor. The Presidential Suite.

When Russell rose from the bathtub, Aqua Regia slid off his body and left fine bubbles on the tiles. He did not dry himself. He simply pulled on a bathrobe, crossed the cold marble floor barefoot, and stopped before the floor-to-ceiling window.

Below, the police cars and cordons stood out starkly against the night.

The streetlights turned the road into a vast stage, and he was its only actor.

"Lord Russell." Felicity's voice came from behind him, trembling slightly. "There are a lot of people outside."

"I know," Russell said.

"They're surrounding us."

"I know."

Felicity took a deep breath and tried to steady herself.

Ra stood beside her, hands at her sides. Her steel claws had slipped out without a sound, gleaming cold white under the lights.

She did not look out the window. She watched Russell's back.

"Are you going down?" Ra asked.

"Let them come up," Russell said. "We're high enough that no bystanders will get hurt."

He spoke as calmly as if he were deciding what to have for dinner.

Ra watched his profile. From that angle, she could just make out the faint curve of his lips. It was not nerves or excitement, but a surer, almost cold composure.

The elevator chimed.

Not the guest elevator. The service elevator ran from the hotel's rear entrance straight to the kitchens and staff areas.

Russell's molecular vision had already picked up the figure ascending inside: one man, with an abnormally strong energy signature. Something dangerously unstable was stored within him, ready to erupt at any moment.

Hound 10.

The elevator doors slid open at the end of the corridor. The gray-eyed man stepped out, his tactical suit fitting close to his body, with no unnecessary equipment.

His stride was steady, each step so precise it could have been measured with a ruler. He moved like a calibrated machine.

At last, he stopped outside the Presidential Suite. He did not knock. He simply placed a hand against the door.

Energy surged out.

In an instant, the lock melted under the heat. Metal turned dark red and liquid, running down the door. It swung inward without a sound, revealing a dim corridor and the figure standing before the floor-to-ceiling window at its far end.

Hound 10 walked in. His gaze fixed on Russell, blind to everything else.

The sofa, the coffee table, the stacks of books, the two girls standing in the corner—to him, they were nothing but irrelevant background noise.