I.
When Raven woke up, she was in the limo and the limo was rolling.
Her head hurt, worse than she could ever remember anything hurting, and she had taken enough beatings over the course of her short life to know what pain was. She lifted her head and the world began to spin and her stomach to lurch, and at the same time the fear came back because she remembered –
Raven remembered about her father.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, against the spinning and against the nausea but most of all against the fear, but she knew he was there behind the wheel because she could hear him breathing. Behind her eyelids, Raven could sense perfectly the space he filled up, the size and shape of him.
For the longest time – for as long as she could remember – he had been the biggest thing in her life, but he seemed somehow reduced now. Perhaps it was only that the scope of her own world had increased so much that he now seemed petty by comparison.
"Daddy," she said, lifting her head slowly to watch him with eyes that wouldn't quite focus. She'd never called him daddy before, but he no longer seemed great enough to warrant father. "Let me out of this car, Daddy. I don't want to be going anywhere with you – not ever again."
Her father snorted. "Like hell I'm letting go of my meal ticket that easily," he said, in a voice that was oddly slurred. Her father was not a drinker, but if he had been Raven might have noted now that he was moving in the manner of a drunken man.
His arm was still bleeding badly where she had bitten him, she saw. The bandage around his arm was soaked with red. She wondered if he was as dizzy as she was.
She wondered how badly she had weakened him.
"Fucking waste," he said to the steering wheel. It was not, Raven thought, that he had forgotten that she was there. It was simply that he had abandoned the most basic pretenses. "Waste of time even raising the ungrateful little freak – ought to have taken it out back and drowned it – It would have saved the trouble –"
"Daddy, look at me!" Raven shouted, and in her voice there were many voices, all laid over each other, slightly out of sync. Azazel's voice was there, among the others, as was her father's.
His head began to turn slowly, as though he were a man half asleep, and but the time it had turned all the way toward her she had finished changing her skin, and it was Azazel sitting in the seat beside him.
"You can't get away from me," she told her father in Azazel's heavily accented voice. "I am the Devil and you can't run away – you can't hide anywhere – because I am not going to stop until you let her go."
Raven wasn't sure if that was true, but she said it to scare her father, who she had come to see scared very easily. She didn't know if Azazel was a devil or a demon or a monster or a freak, and she didn't know what she was herself either, but she knew that she didn't want to stay with her father any longer.
She turned back into herself, the scales flowing down her body like rain, and part of her wanted to let the tears flow too, but there was a hard thing inside her chest now, a weight like a stone, and it remembered how he had used her as a shield. So she didn't cry.
"He's close now, Daddy, and he's coming closer. Can't you feel how close he is? You'd better run away – just let me out right here and run away." There was nothing here but empty, snow-covered fields, and she had neither coat or shoes on, but she thought that Azazel would come back for her. Even if he didn't, she knew now that she needed to get away from her father. She supposed that she might have come to that realization on her own sooner rather than later, had she not met Azazel.
"Leave me here and go to the hospital – you'd better, you're really hurt," she begged. "How are you going to win this, Daddy, when are you going to sleep? He'll get me from you anyway, so you'd better just let me go and run away as far as you can, or the Devil is going to get you."
As though to prove it, Azazel appeared in the road ahead of them. He had two swords now instead of one, swords with wicked, curved blades. He held them out from his body, arms spread like wings, and it seemed to Raven that she had never seen anything that looked so absolutely deadly.
Her father stepped on the brake – out of shock or instinct – but then he changed his mind and stomped down on the gas pedal, propelling the limousine onward to where Azazel waited in the center of the road.
His eyes were narrowed, fixed on Azazel in the road ahead of him, and Raven saw her opening and made a grab for the gun.
She didn't get it – it was stuck in the holster, it wouldn't come free, and then her father slapped her away and she cracked her head against the window, and then the limo was sliding on the ice, fishtailing wildly.
They went off the road.
II.
Azazel had gone out of fear that Raven's father would kill Raven if he did not.
But the longer he stayed away, the greater his fear that the man might kill her regardless became.
It seemed better to fight than to wait passively – it seemed, in fact, quite impossible to wait any longer – and that was why he came back.
When the limo began to slide across the road he tried desperately to get a lock on the interior of the car, to get in there with them, thought what he would have done then he hadn't even time to consider.
It all happened so quickly, and then the limo was spinning off the road. It crashed into a fence post with a screech of metal. There was a musical chiming of broken glass raining down on the limo's crumpled hood.
Neutralize the threat first, Azazel thought to himself, letting his training take control of the situation.
He sheathed one of the swords and teleported to the driver's side of the limo, and wretched the door open.
The man's head was lolling against the steering wheel and Azazel watched him carefully for several seconds, the second blade held at the ready.
He did not allow his eyes to stray to the other side of the car, though his his heart jumped – half out of fear, half from joy – when he heard Raven whimper.
Her father was still breathing, but he didn't seem apt to move. Azazel pushed his limp body back against the seat and reached over him for the gun, removing it from its holster and slipping it under his belt.
The man was still breathing, but he wasn't moving. Azazel pushed his limp body back against the seat and reached over him for the gun, removing it from its holster deftly and slipping it under the band of his pants.
He waited another second – trying to quell the fear in his belly, willing his hands not to shake. Telling himself that this would not be like the last wreck he had witnessed, that what had happened to Pavel would not happen to the girl.
Then he turned to Raven.
III.
Raven's memories from there on were confused and jumbled, a mess of blurry images and words only half comprehended. She was badly concussed, though she lacked the terminology to diagnose herself.
She couldn't remember how she had come to be outside of the limo, but she found herself lying on its crumpled hood, looking up into the sky. It was snowing, big fat snowflakes falling down from heaven, and she wanted to open her mouth to try to catch one, but that seemed like far too much work.
There were hands running up and down her limbs, fingers prodding gingerly through her hair to check for skull fractures, taking inventory of every abrasion and gash, and after a little while Raven decided that they had to be Azazel's hands, because they seemed to be trying to be gentle and she couldn't remember any time her father had touched her except to cause hurt.
Azazel turned around, and Raven could see her father now, moving jerkily inside of the limo. She thought maybe he was caught behind the wheel, and that seemed good. It seemed like the best thing because that way he wouldn't get into any more trouble.
Only... she was a little worried that Azazel would want to hurt him, after everything he'd done. She didn't think she loved her father anymore, but she had loved him for a long time because there was no one else to love, so she wasn't sure that she wanted that.
"Run, Daddy," she said again, and then things started to get foggy again.
So maybe she only dreamed what she heard next. "Da, run," Azazel agreed. "But it won't make any difference."
IV.
It was nearly dawn before the mansion came into sight. Charles Xavier, the boy with the journal, was waiting for them half a mile outside of the grounds.
He had heard them coming a long way off. The teleporter's mental voice was strong – Charles wondered distractedly if that had something to do with his ability – and it had carried across space to him, repeating like a mantra the words that Charles himself had set down in writing.
Not alone.
Not alone.
Not alone.
Azazel stared at him, and Charles felt the tinge of uncertainty and disappointment that soured the older boy's relief as he studied Charles's freckled, grinning face. I did not imagine that he would be so young, Azazel thought to himself in Russian, and Charles reached into his mind and found the means to translate the words easily. He frowned then, wet his lips anxiously.
"She needs help," Azazel said at last, and Charles sensed the hesitation, the way he amended the thought before putting it into words, striking through the we that wanted so badly to slip from between his lips. He would not be good at asking for help, this Azazel, not for himself anyway. Charles could see that already.
"The doctor's been called," Charles reassured him, and before Azazel could vocalize the objection, he added, "None of them will see anything that I don't want them to see. You don't need to worry. It's safe here."
They turned and continued on toward the mansion.
V.
It was an alien thing for Azazel, to stand in the same room with the doctor and to know that the kindly old man did not see him as he was, saw only a regular boy, tailless and of a common complexion, and before very long he felt compelled to slip away, though he did not like the idea of leaving Raven alone.
There was a bad moment, while he was washing his hands in the bathroom basin, when he saw the red running down the sink and thought for an instant that the color was coming away from his skin. Then he understood that it was blood – Raven's blood, washing away from where it had dried on his hands, and the rage came flooding back. He reached down and touched the hilt of his sword, and looking out in the world with the extra sense his ability gave him found Raven's father in a hospital not far from here, and –
– And the instant before he teleported away, the knock came on the other side of the door. Charles voice was soft and intent. The degree of confidence that Charles would develop later in life was not entirely there yet, but he seemed to Azazel to be remarkably self-possessed for someone who could be no older than nine.
"I could keep you from going after that dreadful man," he said, through the door. "I could make it so you didn't want to, but I don't want to do that. I just want you to understand that Raven isn't going to like you anymore if you kill him."
There was a pause, and when Charles continued on his voice had become pensive. "I think we can really start something here – something like what you had back in Russia, but better. If you stay."
Azazel listened as Charles walked away, and his hand still clutching the sword hilt.
But after a while he followed.
VI.
Raven was sitting up in the bed when Azazel came back into the room, and the doctor was gone. She beamed woozily at him when he came in.
"Azazel!" she said. "Azazel, we're going to stay here, aren't we?" She added almost as an afterthought, "Charles says we can."
He looked around at the room with all its finery somewhat dubiously – it was true that he had spent a few days here, but it was still very different from what he was used to. Then he looked back to Raven's smiling face. "Okay," he said.
"It will all work out," Charles added brightly. "I'll send mother away on a holiday – sunny Spain, something like that..." He hesitated, and Azazel thought he glimpsed something raw and aching beneath Charles cheerful exterior; Azazel reflected briefly that being an orphan really wasn't all that bad, if most parents were like the ones he'd encountered so far.
Charles continued on. "Really, she needs a bit of a rest anyway. And we can find others –"
"Other Mutants," Azazel said, using the word he had found in Charles's journal.
"Right," Charles said, grinning ear to ear. "I haven't worked it all out yet, but we'll find them somehow, and you can fetch them back here and –"
"Shhh," Azazel said, raising a finger to his lips. Raven's eyes had fallen shut while he and Charles were talking.
"Right," Charles said, looking down at her. "I think everything's going to come out alright, you know," he added softly, and Azazel wasn't sure just whom he was addressing.
"I like this," Raven said without opening her eyes, burrowing deeper under the covers. "This is going to be like having a real family."
