I'd taken classes in lockpicking while I worked for the Protectorate, but I'd never thought I'd need them. It had always been so much easier to simply send a swarm up under the door to open it from the other side, or to use the bugs that were already in the room.

Because of that, I was more than rusty, and picking the lock in the back garden of the first house took me more than forty five minutes. Even this, the third house was taking me twenty minutes. It was frustrating; even though I could now control a single bug that wasn't nearly good enough to get through the door.

His vision and other senses weren't good enough for me to simply use him to remotely scout the place out either. In my former life I would have used thousands of bugs, my vision and other senses a composite of all of their senses. Bugs' vision wasn't particularly good anyway, and my new connection was tenuous.

Eventually I felt the lock click under my hand, the pieces of wire I'd found finally doing the job. I grimaced, and looking around I slipped into the house.

There wasn't any blood. That didn't surprise me. These people had supposedly died in a car accident along with their ten year old child. They hadn't even been on my radar, but I'd noticed the story about the accident and I'd drawn my own conclusions.

A single murder or even two could go under the radar; three would be a pattern.

The newspapers had thought it strange that two other young families had been dying of natural causes. What I was looking for was a reason why they were being targeted. If there was a common thread between the three of them, it would go a long way to helping me to determine where the others might strike next.

This was the third house, and the other two had been a bust. They'd all seemed like ordinary people; family pictures on the wall, toys and other things. If I'd slipped a few more valuables in my pack, who could blame me? It wasn't likely to do them much good, and even the food in their pantries was likely to go to waste by the time the police finished their investigations.

So I drank their milk and I ate the cheese in their refrigerators; luxuries that I wouldn't get in my little culvert. I checked bank books and passports, looked through records; everything I could to see any single clue that would give me the hook that I needed to lead me to the next step.

There had been clothes at one house that fit me. I hadn't taken as many with me as I should when I'd left my flat. I'd even risked a quick shower.

I slipped any jewelry or valuables I could into my pack; I still wasn't sure how I was going to pawn them, but I had a few ideas. The four hundred pounds I'd gotten from my parents wouldn't last forever, and it wasn't like I could get a job.

It was humiliating; I'd been a super hero and before that a crime lord. Now I was reduced to being a grave robber and a burglar.

I was checking their mail, when I heard the front door open. I froze, and then I carefully began to move. There was a large picture window leading out to the back garden, with floor length curtains, and I slipped behind those, careful that my feet didn't stick out. I slipped my pack behind the other side of the curtains.

It was helpful that I was small and thin.

"The muggles haven't checked here yet?" I heard one voice.

"They were busy with the other two; the muggles here just died in a car crash, so going through everything wasn't a top priority."

"It seems suspicious, three sets of Hogwarts kids dead in one night, and another missing. Muggles die all the time, but I don't like it."

"You think somebody is targeting them? The other side likes to pretend they don't know anything about muggle life, but they know enough to fake a death or two."

"Well, they'd stick out, wouldn't they? Purebloods like to pretend that they don't understand muggles, so much that they intentionally dress like they've never seen one. There's been some complaints by the Obliviators about the problems it's causing."

"It's not like half of them don't live right in the middle of the muggles; not everybody can live in Hogsmeade," the second voice said. "They just don't want their pureblood friends to know that they've rubbed elbows with them."

"Well, the older ones still remember how muggles used to dress, and they think none of it changes. It's not like muggle fashions don't change every twenty years or so."

"I think it's more like every ten years they change," the second voice said.

"Hell, you can get all kinds of things cheaper from the muggles; you know some of those rich bastards are tighter than a goblin on tax day. They've got to be getting some cheap muggle crap on the sly."

"Well, it's a little over our pay grade. We're just here to make sure there isn't anything incriminating for the muggles to find. The last thing we need is for some muggle auror to find an acceptance letter."

"I thought the boy hadn't gotten his letter yet."

"That's the funny thing; all of these kids have birthdays in August. They're the last lot to get their letters, and it was the professors who alerted us about what to look for when they noticed the letters not being sent out."

"Aren't these supposed to be hand delivered anyway?"

"They can't deliver to the dead."

"So why bother here?"

"This one knew a half-blood. They aren't supposed to, but sometimes kids share toys, chocolate frogs, cards... the usual things. What do you think a muggle auror would do if he saw a chocolate frog jumping around?"

"Investigate?"

"He'd give the obliviators even more work. It's best to head these things off before they become problems."

"You put the muggle repelling charms up, right?"

"What do I look like, an incompetent? Just get to searching."

For the next several minutes I stood as still as I possibly could, worried that one of them would notice that the drapes were moving in a way they shouldn't. The time stretched out, although it couldn't have been more than thirty minutes.

Eventually, the two men met back at the bottom of the stairs.

"Find anything?"

"No. It looks like it's clean."

I closed my eyes and tried to reach out to any bugs in the area. My senses still weren't that good but I finally locked into a housefly.

Houseflies were nearsighted and they couldn't focus, but I didn't dare even try to peek out from behind the curtains, and I wanted a look at these guys. I still regretted not getting even a peek at the men who had killed the Scriveners and the other.

Now, I'd never know who they were even if they walked up to me; not until I heard their voices.

I strained, and felt myself making the connection. It took a moment for me to force the fly to move, and then it took a moment for me to realize what I was seeing through the poor vision of the fly. Luckily I'd had years of experience in seeing through the eyes of insects and I was able to make a reasonable guess at what I was seeing.

It looked like two white men wearing long coats... most likely trench coats of some kind. When I'd been in control of the swarm, I'd been able to compensate by using different kinds of insects to compensate for each others visual weaknesses, but here I only had a single bug, and mostly everything was a blur.

I forced the fly to get closer to them. I might be able to identify his face, but it was like looking at someone's face without my glasses on and squinting. There were no guarantees that I would recognize him.

Part of me wanted to peek out from behind the curtain. Even a single glimpse might be enough to recognize both of them later. But if I was able to see them, they'd be able to see me, and the human eye was designed to see movement. I didn't dare move.

I kept my breathing slow and shallow, not wanting to alert either of them to the fact that I was here.

"Want to have a drink at the Leaky Cauldron? I hear that Tom's got some of the new stuff from France."

"I've got to file a report, but I'll meet you later."

"Fine."

Then there was a sudden explosion, and it looked like the man further away simply vanished. A moment later, the one the fly was close to did as well, and the fly was pulled inevitably toward the place where the man had vanished, its body tumbling uncontrollably as the second crack sounded.

I flinched as I heard the sounds; they reminded me a little of twin pistol shots, which given that I'd been shot in the back of my head twice in my last life was understandable.

What... the... hell?

There weren't any parahumans in this world, not that were talked about. I'd been looking, both in the library and in the newspaper. It was possible that I had missed something without the Internet, but even if it was true, what were the odds of there being two teleporters in the same place?

By definition, parahuman abilities tended to be unique. The Entities that had granted them were interested in seeing what we would do with them, and they hadn't seemed to like to repeat themselves, not exactly. No two parahumans had exactly the same power, although some were very similar.

Worse, the way they were talking, there was an entire community, and some of them were engaged in working to keep the secret. I didn't know what obliviators, but it sounded like they had people who made problems and probably people disappear.

That there were at least two sides wasn't a comfort when it was possible that neither side was actually good people. Just because the Empire 88 weren't quite as bad as the Slaughterhouse Nine didn't make them heroes. They were still Nazis.

Would the other side want to kill me to cover up the murder of my family? Making me disappear would be a good way of keeping me from talking, especially as I had already disappeared myself.

Moving out of the country might be my only option, and even that depended on how large their organization was. It couldn't be that large; the more people you were trying to keep secret, the harder it got.

They'd used terms that I didn't understand. Muggle seemed to refer to the larger community... and it didn't seem complimentary. There was a certain casual racism about it that suggested that these people kept themselves separate from the rest of the world, even if the two men had said that almost all of them lived among us.

How that could have been accomplished I wasn't sure, but there had always been groups that had tried it...the Amish, certain Jewish groups... others. Usually it tended to be related to religion.

The last thing I needed was to deal with a cult of parahumans. On my world the Fallen had been some of the worst... Endbringer worshipers and fanatics. Religious fanatics couldn't be reasoned with; they did crazy things like suicide bombing and kamikaze attacks.

What was a chocolate frog anyway? Some kind of rare species that they were keeping hidden? Why would that arouse suspicion with the authorities? Police officers weren't zoologists. They'd look at a brown frog and think it was weird, but they'd move on pretty quickly.

They kept talking about pure-bloods and half bloods, and muggle borns. It almost sounded like powers were genetic here, passed down from generation to generation. Scion had only appeared in 1982, which was hardly enough time for bloodlines to have appeared.

So these people had powers that didn't come from Scion or his wife? What did that mean?

Were they mutants, like in my Dad's old comics from before real superheroes had put the publishers out of business?

There were too many unanswered questions, and while this had filled in a few blanks, it had created ten questions for every one it answered. It hadn't gotten me any closer to finding out the things I needed to know.

Who was trying to kill me, and why were they targeting children who were born to ordinary people? It sounded like an ethnic cleansing but for that to be true there had to be actual ethnicities involved.

They'd mentioned some places... The Leaky Cauldron was apparently a bar or a pub. Hogsmeade was a place where no normal people lived, which was probably why it wasn't on the map. How did you hide an entire city, though? I'd never heard of a Stranger power strong enough to cloak an entire village.

Maybe they used a different name around other people and simply didn't let "muggles" buy in? Even so, there would be ordinary people driving through all the time on the way to somewhere else. The way they were talking it didn't sound like one of those creepy religious compounds.

This was the second group that mentioned letters. Were these some kinds of Death Notes? Was killing people before they received their letters a form of cheating?

I had so many questions, and very few things that I could act on to get more information. The one thing I couldn't do was let the second group know I was around, or they'd send their obliviators to deal with me.

The one thing that might be useful was that they'd suggested that members of this group, whatever it was didn't fit in. There would be deliberate oddities in how they dressed, and that would be something I could watch out for. I couldn't depend on it, of course.

If some of them were in the police department, that meant that some of them were able to fit in reasonably well.

I waited ten minutes behind the curtain, my fly buzzing around the whole time. I had no guarantee after all that they had actually teleported. What if they'd simply gone invisible with a weird side effect? I'd seen weirder on my own world after all.

It probably wasn't a problem. This species of housefly had excellent hearing, and I could hear my own breathing just fine. Still, Stranger abilities were by definition strange. People who could become invisible might be able to become inaudible too.

Nightmare images of slipping around the curtains only to face a psychotic murderer on the other side went through my head. I carefully slipped my knife open before I slipped around the corner.

I really needed to find out what weapons were legal to carry in this country... not that it bothered me a lot to carry something that wasn't legal, but because the legal weapons would be easier to get a hold of. It would also let me know what to expect from the enemy.

Getting out of the house was easy; I didn't even steal any more food other than a jar of pickles on the way out. I'd parked my bicycle down the street, and as I slipped through the back gate, I kept an eye for any watchers.

I felt imaginary eyes on me on my way home; I tried using every trick I knew to lose a trail; doubling back, making quick course changes... none of it was very good on a girl's bicycle. There were no crowds for me to get lost in, and little I could do about my lack of speed.

Taking up jogging again would be useful for my endurance, but I was struggling to keep enough food as it was. In situations where food was scarce, calories count.

Still, I got home shortly after dark, and I spent the rest of the evening practicing my bug skills. I finally managed to control two of them at once, even if it was still like juggling instead of easy like it had once been.

If I'd used the bugs to fly around outside looking for people trying to sneak up on me, no one could blame me.

The only thing I could do now was to keep my eye out for people and things that didn't look right. These people deliberately set themselves apart from normal people, possibly so they could identify each other. I could use that.

That night my dreams were twisted and distorted.

I saw Scion destroying the entire world, all worlds once again, and this time I wasn't there to stop him. Instead I was being stalked by teleporting men in brown trench coats.