"If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf." - Nikita Khrushchev

Chapter Eleven

Your eyes! Emma's voice hissed sharply inside her head, and Mystique caught a glance of herself in the dirty window glass; her eyes had gone yellow and were glowing like two golden coals. She blinked, and it was better – they were brown now, the way they were meant to be.

Nothing else was. Nothing else was the way it was supposed to be.

She looked through the window at the Mutant child, green and scaly and so very small, the embodiment of every nightmare that had haunted her own mind when she was a child, and she felt nothing but a dull and distant ache for something – anything – different for what their lives were.

She turned back to Emma and Erik, and saw them share a look that was nothing but icy calculation. More seemed to pass between them in that brief instant than either could have projected, and Mystique did not believe that they had traded thoughts; she did not think that they had needed any words – spoken or otherwise – to reach a consensus on what to do next.

I'm among wolves, she thought again, as she had been Azazel had stared at her from the shadows of his bedroom a few nights previously, speculative murder in his eyes, but the thought no longer frightened her. She found it bracing. I can be a wolf, too, she thought, and took another step away from the girl that she had been.

Erik had gone into the store, and Emma and Mystique had followed after him. The owner had greeted them in English – we're tourists, Mystique had thought distantly, trying to control her face, we look like tourists – and while Erik was making small talk with him Emma had said to her, Go lock the door and close the blinds. He won't see you. And Mystique had done so, letting near darkness into the already shadowy shop.

And there was very little, after all, that needed to be said about what happened next. To Mystique, the most remarkable thing about what followed next was how little she found that it all meant to her. A few months previously she would not have imagined how easy it could be to get used to seeing people being killed.

Emma had made herself known by shifting into her diamond form, and the man had drawn in a breath to cry out, but the air had caught in his throat an instant later when Emma had said quickly, "You can't scream," and he'd only produced a low panicked hissing.

Following Emma's lead automatically, Mystique had transformed as well, and the man's eyes had left Emma to lock on her. It was the first time she had revealed her natural form for the express purpose of frightening someone else, and she would have thought that doing so would make her feel something – powerful or repellent or something – but it did not.

"Do you want to know what he's thinking?" Emma had asked her, and her voice was as clinical and disengaged as Mystique felt. "He's looking at you, and he's thinking, 'Oh god oh god oh god, it's the monster's mother. It's the monster's mother and she's found me.'" She was watching the man with a highly focused gaze, and Mystique knew that she was doing more inside his mind than simply compelling his silence. There was no reason to hurt the man, no need to put him to the question; Emma could know everything he did and more without either of them breathing a word.

By then they had the man backed up against the front counter, and he had begun to cry – wet, panicked sobs that came with an eerie silence, since Emma had told his brain that his vocal chords did not work anymore – and Mystique had found that she simply didn't care. He meant absolutely nothing to her; his tears meant nothing, and everything he was or had been or might have become meant nothing. The dead child in the window meant something – certainly it did – but she found that she felt numb to that, too. She felt frightened by herself, but only in a distant and muffled way – it was not the sort of fear that would effect her ability to act.

"He's the one who did it?" Erik asked Emma.

"Of course."

"Did he know what he was doing?"

"Of course," Emma said again, and her upper lip had curled, revealing teeth that glittered like a line of cut gems. Later Mystique would wonder if that was completely true; she didn't think that Emma had lied to Erik – not exactly anyway – but Emma had a way of looking into people's minds and only seeing the worst parts. She was different from Charles in that; Charles always saw people as they saw themselves, and that so often blinded him to the reality, but Emma could miss things too. If the man had suspected – even in a dim, unacknowledged corner of his mind – that it wasn't some swamp monster or deformed animal that he'd killed and displayed in his window like a conversational piece – then Emma would conclude that the man had known exactly what he was doing. So, Mystique didn't think that Emma had lied, but it would not have worried her too much if she had.

There was a pause in which Mystique knew that Emma had projected something to Erik, and Erik had shrugged and said, "Fine," to Emma and "Go take her down from the window," to Mystique and he had stepped around the counter to go into the backroom and Mystique had walked to the front of the store to lift the child from out of the window, and when they had come back – Erik with a large cardboard box under one arm and Mystique with the child cradled in her arms like a hideously sad doll – there had been a body on the floor, and no one would ever call it murder, the coroner would declare that the cause of death had been a completely natural brain aneurysm, and the shopkeeper would be buried in the cemetery with all this friends and family around to mourn him, which was more than the child had gotten, and she and Erik had placed the poor little thing gently in the box, nested in among some old cleaning rags Erik had found, and then Emma had whistled for Azazel.

Azazel had appeared a few moments later. He had glanced impassively down at the body, asking no questions, but then he had lifted the flap of the box to peer inside. Then he recoiled, swearing loudly in Russian, and Mystique had believed then that some of the terrors that had haunted her childhood had been his as well. He looked up at Emma – he seemed to understand at once that the body had been her work – and had said, "You are getting soft. I would not have let him get away so easily."

"Let's just get the hell out of here," Emma said, and they had.