I.

Raven craned her head to look up at the mansion. Its walls loomed over her, blocking out the sky. She was bigger than she was used to being at the moment, rattling around in Sharon Xavier's skin, but still it seemed incomprehensibly huge.

This was going to be the big take, her father had told her; the people who lived here were richer than god and if they pulled this one off they wouldn't ever need to hit another house again.

Raven wanted very much to believe that this was the truth. But her father had said the same thing at least twice before, and here she was anyway. At it again.

She held the lockpicks close against her too-tall belly. Normally, she was very good with them – she'd had a lot of practice – but the lady's hands, pale-cream colored with red paint on the nails, were an awkward fit, and they didn't want to do exactly what she told them to do.

And she was taking too long.

At least there weren't any nearby neighbors close enough to see them, not on a big estate like this one, but someone – a groundskeeper, maybe – might happen by any time. Who knew? She was wearing her disguise, but someone might see through it – they might call the police.

She was very afraid of being put into a prison, was scared that if she told the police, "But I'm just little!" they wouldn't believe her. They would say, "You look grown-up to us so that is how it's going to be," but things had the potential to be much worse than that; if they saw her blue – and they would have to if they kept her in prison for very long at all, because she was only able to look normal for a little bit – they might decide that she wasn't even human, and then anything at all could happen.

Also – if she took too long her father would get angry.

Raven glanced back over her shoulder furtively, the string of pearls she'd grown around her neck rattling, and saw him sitting in the limousine. Her father was wearing his own disguise – a chauffeur's uniform. If anyone asked why they were here, Raven was supposed to just say that she lived here, thank you very much, and that man down there was her driver.

Then everything would be okay, as long as she didn't screw it up.

Her father said.

He was just sitting there in the limo, though, on the other end of the long walkway, and he'd never see if she just...

Raven let go of just a corner of the thing, inside of herself, that she was holding onto with such a desperate grip, and the scales on her hands began to turn over, flipping right-side-up until the hands that held the lockpicks were small and blue, her very own hands, and they listened better than the lady's hands had, though they were shaking a little bit.

After a few moment, the door swung open and Raven stepped inside.

II.

It was dark inside the mansion, so Raven gave herself cat's eyes so she could see. The suitcase hanging off her shoulder was heavy already, and she hadn't even begun to fill it up yet. Big, slit-pupil eyes taking in everything around her, she headed upstairs – the jewelry would be up there, probably in a safe in the master bedroom.

Along the way, she paused to look at a picture on the wall. It showed a sandy-haired boy a couple of years older than herself, smiling at the camera with an open, gap-toothed grin. She liked that boy's face – he looked much nicer than the woman she was being right now – and since it was easier for her to be little than big, she slipped into his skin, making up the details that the photo didn't show.

She opened the first door she came to on the second floor, and saw immediately that she wouldn't find good pickings in that room, but she went inside anyway. It was the boy's room, she thought – the room of the boy she was being – and she looked around curiously, wondering what it was like for him to live someplace like this.

A baseball bat leaned against the wall beside the bed – a weapon, she thought, looking at it, a weapon kept within easy reach. Siting on the desk, there was a framed picture of a man with long funny whiskers. Raven didn't know who the man was – she had never so much as heard the name "Charles Darwin" – but she had a second sense for faces, and could tell at a glance that he wasn't related to the boy... and that seemed sad, somehow.

There was a little leather-bound book sitting on the table as well – a dairy, she realized with a start, and she stepped further into the room, picking it up, though she had only recently begun to absorb the most rudimentary basics of reading.

She opened the book, looking down at the oddly mature script which filled the pages in more or less straight lines. "...not the only... the only one who is..." she began, speaking out loud as she ran her finger under a line at random, then frowned, flummoxed by the next word. Raven squinted at it with her cat's eyes, gnawing at her lower-lip.

The bedside light came on, and Raven looked up sharply, her heart fluttering like a trapped bird inside her narrow chest, and saw a big lanky boy sitting up in the bed, where before she had thought there was only a mound of blankets.

He was watching her with one pale blue eye, as the other was hidden beneath a tangle of bandages that covered a third of his head. His skin was bright red and in her shock at the sudden flood of light and his unexpected presence she thought, He's bloody all over, and it would only be much later, once she'd had a chance to control her panic, that she would realize that it was only his skin – that that was the way his skin was, just a funny color, the same as hers was. A tail lashed speculatively at his side.

The boy was frowning in a way that seemed very cold to Raven, and that scared her. It all scared her – the surprise of finding that she was not alone in the big house, the way he looked, that harsh frown – and she felt her disguise slipping away, the scales flipping over like a cascade of cold water, leaving her grown tinier and blue and she saw his uncovered eye widen, saw astonishment and then recognition in it, saw his lips part to say something, but by then she had turned and was running.

III.

And she came out of the mansion as fast as she could, running, breathless and blue, and her father got out of the car in a hurry, looking every which way in a panic to see what she was running from – to see if anyone was looking – and for a moment she had a very strange thought, which was that he looked so dumb twisting his head around like that.

And then he snatched her up hard and shoved her into the backseat of the limo, and when she was in there, cowering back against the black leather seats, he got halfway inside too, his front half in the car with her and so big and scary and she couldn't get away because he had her by the wrists and that hurt. He looked at her in a way that was so much meaner than the red boy had before he'd seen that she was blue, and then Raven started to cry.

And she had tried to explain to him about the boy, but he wasn't listening and maybe she wasn't telling right, but how could she when he was yelling at her in that voice that wasn't loud enough to really be yelling, but that was so dangerous?

Eventually, though, he caught onto the fact that there was someone in the house, and how he was asking – demanding with increasing panic to know – what she had done with the bag. His fingerprints were on the bag, and his never changed.

Raven didn't know. She couldn't even remember letting go of the bag, and –

And there was a thrump sound outside, on the other side of the limo. It was like the dull crack of distant thunder, and her father straightened, and Raven saw his hand reach for the gun that he wore on his hip.

Raven crawled across the seats to look out of the tinted window on the other side.

And there was the bag, standing crookedly in the snow.

Raven's own tracks – shod and woman-sized as well as small and bare – ran up to the mansion and back down to the limo, but there were no tracks leading to or away from the bag. There was only one single set of footprints.

She wondered if her father noticed that as he stomped over to the bag and snatched it up and flung it in the car after her, looking about suspiciously because how had it gotten there? and he'd gotten in behind the wheel of the limo and they drove away fast.

And the entire way back home he shouted at her in that quiet, dangerous way, and when they got there he'd taken her up to her room and locked the door behind her.

Raven had a pretty good idea that she could break that door down if she tried – she was a lot stronger than she had any right to be, her father said, and sometimes she thought that scared him – but if she did he would be angry at her, and that scared Raven.

So instead, she laid down on her bed to think about what had happened, and when the tears started again she was no longer sure just why she was crying.

IV.

Azazel watched from a window on the top floor of the mansion as the limo drove away. He held his lanky form very straight, his hands behind his back, long fingers steepled, reflecting upon the blue girl with the changeable skin and the man who had been with her, as well as his own current situation, with all the pensiveness that a shell-shocked twelve-year-old could muster.

He was not at all sure why he had come to be where he was now.

Three days ago (Or had it been more? Less? The time zones were confusing to him) he had been in the USSR, and in the USSR there was war.

Three days ago he had also been among friends. He had been at the childrens' home, which three days ago had still been standing.

There had been the war there (though at the time it had often seemed distant) and there had been hunger and cold and want, but there had also been others like himself – well, not exactly like himself, because he was quite sure that there was no one else in the world who was anything at all like himself.

But there had been other talented children, in any case.

The triplets who held private conversations amongst themselves without ever moving their lips, and who could draw the most secret of thoughts from anyone's mind. The boy who could could cause things to move without touching them, the girl who could make the earth underfoot move to her will.

His friends and family and comrades, all of them, though they had been markedly younger than Azazel himself, and none of them had shared any of the physical oddities he possessed.

Five days (Six? Four? It wasn't simply a matter of time zones... he was fairly certain that he had lost at least twelve hours somewhere along the way) ago, the soldiers had come to the childrens' home. Their commander had said that it was past time that the lot of them join the war effort, that the Motherland needed them.

The director of the childrens' home hadn't liked any of that, and though she had not wasted anyone's time on useless arguments, it was evident that she believed that her charges were all much too young to be asked to take part in such dangerous work.

But Azazel had been ready to go to war. He wasn't a small child like the others, after all. He could fight – he'd had the training, hadn't he, he had been groomed for assassinations and so he knew how it was done – and he wanted to fight. He wanted to go and kill the Nazis who were torturing his country.

They had all left the childrens' home together, their director and the soldiers and the other talented children, and Azazel had walked into their private train car so bundled up in furs that the other people on the platform couldn't see a patch of his skin.

All of that had been a great adventure, so much so that he had found himself drifting off to sleep almost as soon as the train had departed, despite all of his best efforts.

He never knew exactly what caused the destruction of their train. Had there been an explosion in the engine, had collaborators sabotaged the tracks or planted bombs along the rails?

All Azazel knew was that he had awoken to screams and a hideous squealing of metal, and then something sharp and very heavy had struck him across the face. He teleported away reflexively.

Outside, he watched with the blood freezing on his face as the train cars piled up, crumpling like tin cans under a jackboot. It was not long before the fires had begun to spread.

Azazel managed to find one part of the telepathic trio alive inside the wreck, and carried him outside. Everyone else who had been in their car – children, director, soldiers – was dead, but inexplicably the dark-haired boy seemed entirely unharmed, at least so far as Azazel could ascertain, crouching in the blowing snow beside the boy's still form.

Nonetheless, the boy had seemed entirely catatonic. Azazel thought it was Pavel that he he had found but he was not entirely sure; the three of them had been so hard to tell apart, had never seemed like individual persons but rather three parts of a whole.

The cars farther down the train had not been as badly damaged as Azazel's own, and many of the soldiers who had been riding inside these cars had already emerged, dragging their wounded with them. The idea of speaking to so many strangers might have been intimidating under different circumstances – Azazel's circle of acquaintances had, previous to all of this, been extremely circumscribed – but the situation was so desperate that there had not been time for such considerations.

He'd looked to the soldiers for help.

The reaction was swift and ugly. He was met with curses, enraged shouting, outrageous accusations. Many of the soldiers had rural accents, and it had taken him longer than it might have otherwise to understand that they were accusing him of all manners of thing – of having derailed the train himself, of being a demon and a devil, of meaning to kill all of them.

It was at this point that he realized that his face had become uncovered and that his tail was out, lashing back and forth in fear and agitation.

"This is absurd," he said, and was unnerved by the tremor in his own voice. I was heading off to kill Nazis, he thought wildly, and I wasn't scared at all. How was it now that his own countrymen were aligning against him? "Backwards superstitions... nothing more..." he started again, but that didn't seem powerful enough.

"Comrades!" he shouted, though in the normal course of things a twelve-year-old would not have referred to grown men as such, "Surely you know better than this."

The soldiers were crossing themselves, forking the evil eye at him, and he hardly understood some of the things that they were shouting at him; his own religious education had been very nearly nonexistent.

"This boy is hurt," he tried again, and the freezing wind lashed against his own wounded face.

"He – we – need help."

Somewhere in the crowd, he heard the cocking of a gun.

Azazel turned sharply toward the sound, his eyes blazing, and at the same time his hand slid as though by its own volition down to the long knife that was still hanging sheathed against his hip.

And then he simply allowed his training to take over.

It was surprising, really, when all was said and done, how easy it was to transform theory into practice, to apply to real human flesh techniques which he had hitherto only used against dummies.

He teleported, reappearing behind the back of the soldier who had drawn his gun. Before he could turn, Azazel reached up to grip the arm that held the gun, twisting it, hearing the crackling of breaking bone, understanding truly and for the first time just how much more powerful he was than a normal human.

The screaming ended when Azazel drew the man down to his own level and cut his throat from behind.

The soldier's gun fell from his lifeless fingers and into the snow, and Azazel allowed the soldier to fall after it. He twitched, bleeding out face down in the snow, while Azazel eyed the crowd viciously.

He expected that they would fall upon him then, and upon Pavel as well.

Instead, they ran.

V.

He could not teleport with Pavel – it would be years still until Azazel's ability developed to the point that he could carry another person along with him – and so he hoisted the boy's unmoving form up into his arms and set out.

Inside his mind's eye he was mapping out the terrain ahead of them, drawing on the same talent that allowed him to teleport sight-unseen into new places. It was in this way he located the abandoned charcoal-maker's hut; the shelter was only a few kilometers away, but in the wind and snow it was a cruel march.

Azazel left Pavel in the hut and teleported away, returning directly with food, blankets, coal for a fire, but none of it made any difference.

It was bad to be alone – Azazel had since learned that very well in the days following the train wreck – and Pavel did not seem to know how to live that way. In the absence of his brothers, Pavel himself had no definition. Before the night was over, the boy had died as well.

VI.

After that, Azazel had only wanted to be away. To be somewhere else.

He closed his eyes and found the great empty mansion in New York – what place could possibly be more different from his miserable little shack? – and he went.

And that was how he had come to be where he was when the little blue girl found him, napping in a stranger's bed.

After the girl had gone away – after Azazel had watched from the attic window as the man drove her away in that long black car – he went back to the bedroom and picked up the book that the girl had dropped on the floor there.

It belonged in the room, Azazel knew – that was why he hadn't returned it to the girl along with her bag, and now he tucked it into his pocket and headed downstairs. The girl was heavy in his thoughts – the implications of her, of finding her here – and in his mind's eye he traced the movements of the black car as it carried her wherever it was headed.

He put together something to eat quickly, considering his next move. Azazel didn't consider it stealing to take what he needed from the mansion's pantry. It seemed to him that it was theft for the owners of this mansion to have kept so much food to themselves, hoarding it away when there was a war on and so many were starving.

Azazel opened the journal at the table, wondering why the thing had attracted the girl's attention.

His English was not especially strong, and it took him quite a while to puzzle his way through the journal. Nonetheless, he read it attentively, the girl almost forgotten on the edge of his consciousness, for the author – a young Mister Charles Francis Xavier, according to the inside cover – had a great deal to say on topics which were of great personal interest to Azazel.

Once he was finished, he flipped back to the beginning of the journal and began to reread, returning to specific passages which seemed especially important or which he had not understood fully.

After that, Azazel set quietly at the table for a long time, thinking hard, weighing his options, making a plan.

The book was one thing, and the girl was another... He could not exactly see her – his ability didn't give him that skill – but he could sense where she was. She'd stopped moving, and Azazel took that to mean that she'd come to wherever it was that she called home, which was exactly what he had been waiting for.

Once he had made up his mind, Azazel moved quickly.

He found a pen and added his own message to the journal, his neat and economical handwriting marching across the page beneath Charles' most recent entry. Then he returned the journal to its rightful place.

He homed in on the girl's location, and went.