Rogue: Untouched, page 1
part #2 of Marvel Heroines Series
Rogue: Untouched
Remy placed his hand over mine, looking directly into my eyes. Still holding my gaze, he brought my palm up to his mouth and kissed it, sending tingles down my body.
“Hey! Cut that out.” I snatched my hand away. “We’re trying to be scientific, here.”
“Biology is a science.” Remy sank back down onto the stool, shaking his hand as if something had stung it.
I clenched and unclenched my hand, which still felt just like a regular hand. “All right, let’s see if this works. What do I do?”
“Try something small. I learned that cards give, how shall I put it? The most bang for the buck.” He gestured at my fridge, which was studded with business cards.
“Focus. Try to send your energy into it.”
I frowned at the card with its smiling squirrel, focusing. “OK.”
“Flick it at me.”
I flicked the card, ready for the let-down of it not working, and then – bam! It exploded in the air.
FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING
VP Production & Special Projects: Jeff Youngquist
Associate Editor, Special Projects: Caitlin O’Connell
Manager, Licensed Publishing: Jeremy West
VP, Licensed Publishing: Sven Larsen
SVP Print, Sales & Marketing: David Gabriel
Editor in Chief: C B Cebulski
Special Thanks to Jordan D White & Jacque Porte
© 2021 MARVEL
First published by Aconyte Books in 2021
ISBN 978 1 83908 056 2
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 057 9
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover art by Joey Hi-Fi
Distributed in North America by Simon & Schuster Inc, New York, USA
ACONYTE BOOKS
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For Holly Harrison, who keeps coming to my rescue when all is sturm und drang.
Part One
Gamblers & Rogues
One
I turned the key in the ignition of my pickup truck and said a little prayer to the god of lemons and wrecks and zombie transmissions. The starter made a sound like it was clicking bad-fitting dentures, and then commenced to chattering and shaking like a chicken caught in a storm. Don’t do this to me, Willie, I begged. I was already running late for work, on account of a series of unwise decisions earlier in the day. Now I had five minutes to make a fifteen-minute drive. Too bad I didn’t have superpowers, like those East Coast mutant kids I followed on Instagram. A pair of big old angel wings would suit me just fine, so I could just fly myself out of this pissant Mississippi town.
I turned the key again, and this time my truck made a gasping wheeze of a sound, rattled and then died. Damnit. I’d named my ’86 pickup after Willie Nelson, hoping it would prove as indestructible as the singer, but instead it was as temperamental as a boomer.
Just like my boss.
Touching the green Tulane charm hanging from my rearview mirror for luck, I climbed down from Willie’s front seat, rolled up my sleeves and unlatched the hood. What the heck could be wrong? I’d only just replaced the dang fuel pump six months ago. After the last breakdown, I had considered letting the ancient pickup die the true death, but I kept bringing him back. I had to – Willie might be a cantankerous old frankentruck, but he was all I had to get me where I was going.
Untwisting the cap, I pressed down the Schrader valve, which instantly shot a jet of fuel up into my face.
Idiot girl. Well, that’s what you get for rushing. I had nothing but my sleeve to wipe my eyes, which meant my favorite baby-blue hoodie was stained and ruined.
“What’s goin’ on, Anna Marie?”
Oh, God, it was Chet. I did not have the patience for him right now. Chet had seen my name on a piece of official mail and now it didn’t matter how many times I told him to call me Marie, he insisted on using my full name.
Then it hit me. If I didn’t want to call into work with car trouble again, then I was going to have to sweet talk my neighbor.
I pasted a smile on my face. “Oh, hey, sugar. Will you look at the fix I’m in?”
Chet set down the ladder he was carrying and puffed out his skinny chest. “Old Willie giving you a hard time?” He grinned at me, eyes gleaming under the brim of his Mississippi Braves baseball cap. At five foot three, with a hedgehog bristle of hair and a permanent scruff on his chin, Chet always reminded me of a slightly manic monkey. “Want me to take a look?”
“You are a prince,” I said, even though Chet knew less about trucks than I knew about ballroom dancing. “But I am running so late already… I just don’t know what to do.”
Chet considered this, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Well, I was about to paint over the damp spot in my wall before it rains again, but… oh, the hell with it. Let me put this here ladder away and I’ll give you a ride.”
“You are saving my life is what you are doing.”
“Back in a tick.” Chet jogged off to set the ladder near his apartment door. A hundred and fifty odd years ago, Sweetbriar Apartments had been a classic antebellum mansion with big white pillars, a wraparound balcony, and the kind of luxury only human suffering can buy. Now it was a crumbling old ruin subdivided into small apartments. When it rained, the ceiling leaked for a week and everything sprouted mold. Guess that’s what you get for living in a place built on misery and unfairness, but hey, the trailer park was full, so it wasn’t like I had a choice.
“Chet? That you?” Chet’s mother opened the door to their apartment. Chet was in his mid-twenties, around five or six years older than me, but his mother kept him on a short leash.
“Just running an errand, Ma.”
Dressed in hot-pink lycra leggings and an old Hello Kitty tee shirt, Scary Anne Billings looked straight from him to me, and I could just about see the mad coming off her. Scary Anne was as wiry and energetic as her son, but life had given her a few too many hard knocks and now she was a rage monkey, pure and simple. “Oh, no you don’t. You ain’t running off on your chores to go gallivanting with the likes of her.”
But Chet was already starting his truck, and I regretted every irritable thought I’d ever had about him. “She needs to get to work, Ma.”
“Don’t you do it!”
Chet’s truck gave a happy rumble, and he reversed out of his parking spot and started down the rut-filled dirt driveway. “She’s already late.”
“I won’t keep him long,” I called back over my shoulder as I opened the passenger door and hopped up next to Chet.
“It don’t take long,” Scary Anne called back. “How long did it take her to put that poor Robbins boy in a coma?”
Chet pretended he hadn’t heard. “I’ll be back afore you know it.”
I waited till we had turned onto the paved road before speaking. “I really do appreciate this, Chet.” I meant it. Not only was Chet giving me a ride, but he wasn’t trying to put his hands on my thighs or asking questions about what exactly had I done to Caldecott County High’s star quarterback. That was two and half years ago, back when I was a senior, and Cody was all better now, but Peck’s a small town, and good gossip has to last a while.
Chet made a tsk sound and waved my thanks away. “You’d have done the same for me.”
“Yeah, but I would’ve busted your chops about it.”
Chet laughed, sneaking a look at me out of the corner of his eyes. “What you done to your hair?”
I tried to smooth it down in front, without much success. “I had the bright idea bangs might look nice. Forgot my hair is as wayward as I am.”
“I think it looks real nice,” said Chet, unwrapping a stick of Juicy Fruit gum and popping it in his mouth. I flipped down the visor and checked in the mirror. “It’s only curling in five different directions.” Least that made the white streak a little less noticeable. I was born with it, which is why at school the kids used to call me the Skunk.
Chet laughed. “You couldn’t look bad if you tried, Anna Marie.”
That was a barefaced lie. After the hair debacle, the only way I could lift my spirits was to binge watch Broad City on my phone while eating cheese crackers and painting my toenails dark purple. By the time I peeled myself off the fake leather couch and realized I had no clean shirt to wear, I was already fifteen minutes late for work.
“Hey, been meaning to tell you about something,” said Chet, and started telling me about how a friend of a friend got hold of some tincture of mutant growth hormone and boiled it up in gin with a piece of bear root, and after that he could read minds. The
story didn’t end there, but Chet’s stories tended to have a lot of middle, so I let myself tune him out as I leaned toward the open window and watched the trees going by, their green touched here and there with October bronze and gold and coral. It was a cool, misty day, just beginning to warm up, and as we got closer to town, I caught the smell of diesel left from the big trucks that hurtled through Main Street without stopping. We drove past a boarded-up house – the old stagecoach hotel – two gas stations, a squat redbrick building that was the town hall, a smaller boxy white brick building that was our post office, and Frank’s pizza, which had been closed since Frank died some ten years back. Welcome to Peck, Mississippi, population 1,063. It was only a little over two hours from here to New Orleans and Tulane University, less if you drove fast, but a whole other world from here. As soon as I had enough money saved, I was headed for the Big Easy. I figured a waitress there could earn enough in tips to attend college part time, especially if she wasn’t too terrible looking.
“So,” Chet concluded as he pulled up in front of Karl’s Diner, “what do you think, Anna Marie?”
“Sounds interesting,” I said, figuring that ought to cover everything from a rock concert to reports of bears breaking into people’s kitchens. Really, I needed to learn to half listen to people better. “Thanks again for helping me out.”
“Only neighborly thing to do. Here, let me get the door for you.” He leaned across me and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up like a cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way.
I grabbed my handbag and lurched away from him, yanking the door open and jumping down. “See you later, Chet!”
“But what about next Saturday? You on for trying out the bear root?” He was fairly jittering with excitement at the prospect. “It’s authentic Indian medicine!”
I didn’t know where to begin correcting him. Forget the politically incorrect term – or the fact that bear root was a Navajo herb, and we were in Choctaw territory. I’d watched a few documentaries, and all the studies seemed to show that most mutants came into their powers right around the time that girls got their periods and boys turned into idiots. If there had been even the teensiest chance of a potion that could transform me, I’d have been first in line to try it, but hey, I was a realist. I didn’t have any special talents, unless you could count the fact that I was bad luck to anyone who got halfway close to me.
“Let’s talk about it later, OK, Chet?” I grabbed my handbag and jumped down from the truck. “Hope your mom doesn’t give you too hard of a time!”
At the reminder of what waited for him on his return, Chet’s smile wobbled. He gave me a quick wave and turned his truck around, hightailing it back home. I wasted a moment watching him go, reflecting that Chet ought to be really careful about what he wished for. If I lived with Scary Anne, the last thing I’d want was the ability to read minds. I mean, seriously, that has got to be the worst mutant power ever. Give me super strength or flight or even ice-zapping fingers, but lord, spare me having to hear what people say in the privacy of their own minds when they’re not trying to be polite.
On the other hand, if I could project my thoughts into other folks’ heads, I might convince my customers to stop ordering tap water and asking for mayonnaise on the side. From there, it would be a short step to total world domination.
Unfortunately, I was just plain old powerless Anna Marie, and mayonnaise was likely to remain the bane of my existence for the foreseeable future.
I opened the diner door and faced my fate.
Two
The bells on the diner door jangled as I swung it open. “Thank the lord,” said Darnique from behind the counter. “I was running out of excuses, and Karl’s in a mood.”
I unzipped my oil-stained hoodie. “What is it this time?”
An old-timer lifted his cup, and Darnique grabbed the coffee carafe and poured him a refill. “Tiny never showed so the dishes are all piled up, the supplier brought the wrong ketchup, and those bangs do not suit you.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said, tying my black half-apron around my waist.
“Come by tomorrow and I’ll work my magic on it.” Darnique wore her own hair natural, usually in a high puff, and she was a master of taming wayward hair without chemicals.
“What about tonight after I get off work?” Usually, I would never push myself on a person, but Darnique had become a really close friend over the past year. Also, she lived conveniently close, in the apartment one flight up from mine, and I really did want her to fix my bangs.
She shook her head. “Sorry, girlfriend. I’m doing my mom’s hair tonight.”
“I’ll just wait my turn, then.” I glanced in the mirror over the counter and gave my bangs a quick pat down. “So what have we got goin’ on here?”
Darnique grabbed her jacket off the hook and lowered her voice. “The counter folks are all taken care of, your old buddies Puke and Dolt are at table three waiting on a heart attack burger and heartburn fries, and Dolly Parton and her horse are sitting in the back, still decidin’.” She zipped up her jacket and walked past the out-of-towners. “I have to head out now, but Anna Marie here will take good care of you.”
“I was just about to ask you about the Greek salad.” This was from the big-haired blonde. For some reason, folks always get nervous when their waitress goes off shift. You’d think they were switching surgeons mid-operation.
“Anna Marie will be right over.”
I grabbed my pad and pen and sized up the newcomers. I started working as a waitress part time in my junior year, and I learned a lot about people. Most folks get a bit snappish when they’re hungry, but some turn into toddlers and pitch a fit. The big-haired blonde looked like one of those types to me. She was wearing a lot of carefully applied makeup and some doctor had plumped up her cheeks and lips and probably her bust as well, but she had to be at least fifty. “Y’all ready to order?”
Dolly tapped her cheek with one glossy red nail. “How’s the Greek salad?”
“I’m not a big fan of olives myself,” I said diplomatically, “but some folks really like it.”
“That’s a no, Lucretia,” said the other woman. Bev had called her a horse, but she wasn’t unattractive – just a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a strong jaw, short salt-and-pepper hair and thick-lensed spectacles that made her eyes look huge. “Can you recommend one of the salads?” She had a bit of a foreign accent, maybe Russian or German.
“The cobb salad’s my personal favorite.” Not that I spent a lot of time eating salads, but when I did I liked my greens with lots of crispy bacon and avocado.
“You know what? Forget the dang salad. Give me a burger with the works,” said Lucretia. “And fries.” She handed me her menu and the sparkle on her diamond rings nearly blinded me. “Real diamonds, fake hair and boobs,” she offered with a wink, and I decided I liked her.
“Since we’re revealing trade secrets,” I said, “you might as well know that there are more calories and fat in the salad than in the hamburger. As the old saying goes, don’t try to order healthy at a diner.”
“I will have grilled cheese and tomato,” said the other woman, glancing up at me. Behind her thick spectacles, her brown eyes were as big as saucers. They gave me the weirdest feeling, like she could look right through me and see what I was going to do next. “And a coffee with cream.”
“Good thing I remembered your lactose pills, Irene,” said Lucretia, reaching into her purse.
“Be right back with your drinks.” I forced myself to walk past table three, where Puke and Dolt – otherwise known as Duke and Holt – were sniggering over something on Duke’s phone. “How y’all doing?”
Duke grinned at me with pure malice in his pale beady eyes. “Doin’ just fine, Anna Marie. Picture of health – unlike some less fortunate.” I tried not show how much he was bothering me. Duke and Holt had been on Cody’s football team, and the two of them had blunt bull terrier faces and matching personalities. Of course they were going to blame me for what happened, even though Cody himself didn’t hold any grudges. He was doing just fine now, working for the local sheriff’s office. The fact that he never made a professional career out of playing football was not my fault.
