Storm jolted awake at the display, but I sent her back to sleep with another cast of Telepathy.
I teleported back to Kamar-Taj and flew over to Yao. The crowd parted as I dispelled my wings and rushed to her side.
She stumbled just before I reached her, and I caught her.
"What happened? Who did this to you?" I asked. But the answer came to me just as she spoke.
"Kaecilius," she muttered.
He'd finally had enough. We'd denied him revenge for so long that he got fed up and decided to take matters into his own hands.
"Hold on. I'll heal you." I began, hands glowing white as I channeled my new subskill—Benevolent Touch—but Yao stopped me.
"I've been waiting for this day for nearly five hundred years," she wheezed. "Your magic cannot save me. I owe Dormammu too much."
I clenched my jaw. "Then I'll make him leave you alone."
Yao eyed me curiously, then laughed. "You've evolved again."
I nodded. "Happened during the fight with Ororo."
She smiled, fragile. "It's good that you didn't kill her. Jean will be pleased."
"I… can't just watch you die."
"Then don't," she said. "Jean is waiting for you in New York, and the Raft has fallen. The true terrors of SHIELD now roam free, and I have a final spell to complete—one that will untether us from the demon world. I'm strong enough to perform it, but there's no time. It will be my final act. Will you help me?"
"I'm sorry," I stammered. "I should've told you Kaecilius would betray you. I always knew he would."
No. She couldn't die—not this soon, not after everything. We had superhumans bursting at the seams. This shouldn't have happened.
"As did I," Yao said. "But you changed the timeline and drastically altered the trajectory of our conflict. Perhaps it was hubris that made me discount the threat Kaecilius posed altogether. The silver lining is that he will never get his hands on the Book of Cagliostro—not that it counts for much now."
I gritted my teeth. "Where do you need me?"
"The Mariana Trench," she said simply, and my heart skipped a beat.
"You're serious?"
"It's where your father reinforced the barrier. He left certain security measures. Ordinarily, it would be a trivial matter to deactivate them, but in my current state…"
"Say no more."
She smiled softly. "It's a good thing you've improved. The defenses your father left were substantial."
Alarm bells went off in my head, but I tried not to overreact. I figured it couldn't be anything I couldn't handle with a Dimensional Slash or Anathema Flame.
"You should make arrangements to leave her behind," Yao added, looking straight at Storm's limp body. "A dose of Sally's blood, paired with our most potent demon-energy suppression systems, should work."
Sally.
I'd almost forgotten about her—the little mutant girl Yao rescued a while ago. She'd been relocated, resettled in some far-off place not even Jean knew about. Apparently, Yao had held onto some of her blood just in case.
Smart. And more ruthless than I'd expected from her.
Just as we were about to leave, Scott walked up. The dire expression on his face told me this wasn't about us.
"There's something you need to know before you go," he said. "Those agents you were talking about… I think we ran into them at the Raft."
And that's when he told me what happened.
Scott's POV
The gates sealed shut behind our Ferryman—a young man in his mid-twenties with a bushy brow and intense eyes.
Pietro was quick to point it out.
"It's a fight, man," he said, patting him on the back. "Not the end of the world."
"Might as well be," his sister Wanda huffed. "Didn't you see that dragon the team's going up against?"
"The Avengers are there with them," Pietro said with a sly grin and air quotes. "You gotta have more faith, sis."
On and on they went while the rest of us gathered around the Professor. He tried radioing in multiple times, only to be met with silence.
"If the demons are behind this, they might've had the forethought to cut communications. Slow us down, at least for a while."
I looked over at Kitty. "Think you can open the gate from the inside?"
She nodded. "I'll be back in a blink." She winked at me, then skipped over to the massive, jaw-like breaching gate and slipped through. Meanwhile, I took inventory of our lineup and wondered if it would be enough to handle whatever had the Raft's guards so shaken.
These weren't your average SHIELD agents. They knew what the worst of us were capable of and were trained to handle it.
If they'd been overwhelmed, then—
Kitty peeked her head out from the gate, her expression haunted. The door slowly shuddered open.
"You need to see what's down there," she said. "It's not pretty."
We exchanged glances and headed in, Colossus taking the lead—he was the most durable of us by far. Then came Bobby, followed by me, Logan, our sorcerer (a guy named Jim), and finally, the Maximoff siblings.
Wanda gagged at the sight inside. I pressed my lips into a hard line while Bobby turned and puked.
"Oh God," Professor Hank muttered. "What could've done this?"
"Nothing good," Logan spat.
All the guards were dead—bodies torn and scattered. It looked like what would have happened if Dante hadn't stopped the New York incident. Pure death and destruction.
"Less magic than I expected," I said. "It's like somebody just tore them apart."
"Where are the demons?" Pietro asked, and Logan grunted in agreement.
"The guards had next-gen weapons. They should've been able to cut down the weaker ones at least."
"Unless the demons sent something like that thing in New York," Wanda offered. "Or another shadow user."
"Unfortunately, there's only one way to find out," Professor Hank said with a cringe. I gave a grim nod.
"I'll scout ahead," Pietro offered, patting Kitty on the shoulder. "You hang back."
Before I could advise otherwise, he raced off in a flash of red lightning. His sister hovered into the air, legs crossed.
"I'll search the base for signs of life."
I turned to the rest of the team, who looked a bit stumped. "Then we establish a perimeter. Gather ourselves. Prepare for a fight."
The siblings didn't take long to get to the bottom of it. Pietro caught the tail end of a battle between a group of mutants and several greater demons—and shared the vision through Wanda.
Two of the mutants had strange, glowing, pulsing tentacles sticking out of their backs. A third had his hands encased in blackish metal. The fourth was a teleporter and sharpshooter who seemed to be everywhere at once.
It was a massacre. The tentacled ones bounced around the metal halls like the demons they were fighting, slicing and stabbing with deadly precision. Meanwhile, the metal-armed mutant charged fearlessly, punching greater demons with such force that ripples shook the prison.
The sharpshooter teleported strategically, firing from odd angles with a strange-looking gun that tore through everything—and everyone.
Pietro swallowed. "That thing's moving near the speed of lightning."
That was all it took to alert the attackers that they were being watched. All eyes turned to Pietro.
"Uh… guys?" he said, panic creeping into his voice.
"Jim, open up a portal, now!" I barked at our sorcerer—but he was already mid-cast.
"Quicksilver," the woman greeted him. She was the only person among the attackers who was masked.
I recognized the voice instantly. So did Pietro.
"Lauren?"