As she was getting out of the car with her bags, the lamb said, "Take the big flashlight with you."

She stopped. "Why? Give me a good reason why I should go to the trouble of digging that thing out of the trunk."

The flashlight in question had been a Christmas gift from Grace's brother Arthur. It was unwieldy, it weighed over two pounds, and the 16-LEDs made it so bright it could be seen from over a mile away. In the five years she had it, she had never had a reason to use it. It was, in fact, high on her list of 'Worst Christmas Gifts Ever', and it had a way of rattling around in the trunk until it found the most inaccessible spot to get wedged in. Getting it out would be a hassle.

"If you don't, you won't live to have your baby."

She froze. If it had said anything but that, I'd scoff and go straight in…Whatever's doing this is clever. It knows what buttons to push. What if I get it, and it turns out I didn't need it? The worst that would happen would be that I'd feel like a fool. If it turns out I do need it, I'll have to start taking the animals seriously—which is probably bad. But if I don't take it, and I do need it…I could wind up dead.

It had wedged itself into the center of the spare, and she got smudges on the cuffs of her cherry-blossom print blouse. She suspected they wouldn't wash out. I hope this is worth it.

As she went up the short walk to her front door, she noticed the security light over it, the one which was guaranteed not to burn out, ever, was dark. However, since there was still enough light to see by, she didn't turn on the flashlight; not yet.

She had her keys ready in her hand—an urban safety tip for women. There was a can of pepper spray swinging from it—another precaution.

The back of her neck prickled, as if some insect was crawling on her. She turned the key, opened the door, and went inside. The light switch was to the left of the door, and when she flipped it, nothing happened.

So she turned on the flashlight.

A howl in stereo staggered her, and she saw two figures grab frantically for the goggles they wore, tearing them from their faces and throwing them down. Night-vision goggles, she realized. Turning on my flashlight must be like turning on the sun.

Blinded as he was, the nearest of them took a roundhouse swing at her; she brought the flashlight up to protect herself, and its beam shone full in his face, which made him stumble backward and trip on the steps down to her sunken living room. He fell, and hit something with a thunk. She turned to the other, fumbling for her pepper spray with fingers made weak by panic, and sprayed it in his eyes at a distance of inches.

He screamed, a surprisingly high pitched, almost feminine tone, and made a rush—whether for her, or for the door, she wasn't sure. She flattened herself against the wall as he barreled past her out the door. She heard his feet patter on the sidewalk, then crunch on the gravel—and then came the crack of a high-powered rifle shot.

She shone her light out the door, keeping flat against the wall, and its beam illuminated the figure of her second attacker as he made a few last uneven steps, and fell to the ground. What? Who shot him?

Her question was answered immediately as someone leapt out of a van she had not seen at the back of the parking lot. "Hey, Andy, Dave!" he called, joyously. "I got her!" He approached the body on the ground, and he turned it over as her heart pounded so hard she could hear it, feel the veins in her temples throb.

"Andy—oh, God, Andy!" he screamed. He looked up, toward the house, at her. She saw that he was only a boy, no more than eighteen or twenty. Way to ruin your life, kid, she thought. His face contorted with horrified fear, and he turned, dashed for the van. The engine turned, failed, turned again, and caught.

She saw it swerve away, and she spun on her heel, to play the flashlight over her living room.

The first thing she saw was the graffiti spraypainted on the wall in garish, bloody red.

'TWO DOWN. MUTIES BEWARE A.G.P.'

A.G.P.—the Association for Genetic Purity, she thought. Al didn't just call the Registration Board. He called his friends. She steadied herself, and moved the beam over more of the room. It had been vandalized so thoroughly it was nearly demolished, the upholstery slashed and gutted, the house plants smashed on the floor, her books torn apart and strewn around. There were holes punched in the walls, and the throw rugs were every which way, rucked up and wayward—and then she saw the other attacker. He was lying at the bottom of the steps, and there was blood on his face. When he fell, he had landed headfirst on her granite carving from Japan, which usually sat on the hearthstone of the fireplace. He was not moving.

She approached him cautiously, wary of him, wary of the open door behind her, listening for any sound that meant danger. He didn't move. She touched his neck, feeling for a pulse—and ready to smash his face in the rest of the way with the flashlight if she had to.

His pulse was thin and thready. He's not likely to get up and try for me again. She went back to the door, closed and locked it, and found her purse.

She explained matters to the 911 dispatcher, who advised her to go to the bathroom and lock herself in until the police arrived. There was a powder room right off the hall, so she went there, bringing the lamb along with her.

If I hadn't brought the flashlight with me, I would be dead, she thought. I must call Arthur and tell him his gift saved my life. For that matter…

She cleared her throat. "Thank you for telling me to bring the flashlight. I'm—um, going to start taking your warnings more seriously."

The lamb said nothing.

When the silence bothered her, she asked, "So—am I a mutant?" She had thought it to herself in the yarn shop, but she hadn't believed it. Not then. Not yet.

It cocked its head at her. "What do you think?"

"I think I'm having a conversation with a stuffed toy. By any ordinary human standard, I'm sure I'm clinically insane. I can only hope mutants are prepared to be more broadminded. Yes, I'm a mutant. What about the baby?"

"Him, too."

"It's a boy?"

"That's what I said."

"Hmmm." was all she managed. "How do you know all of this? Are you God?"

It said nothing.

"Are you Satan?"

Silence.

"Are you an echo off the back of my skull?"

Quiet hung heavy in the bathroom.

"An extraterrestrial? The baby?"

Still nothing.

"You could give me some help here. I'm prepared to listen."

Waiting was torturous. She talked just to fill time and displace silence.

"I never was anti-mutant, at least. I never voted for or supported any of the acts or regulations."

"Silence implies consent."

"What do you mean by that?" She tried to fix her eyes on its, but the lamb's eyes were black buttons, and it didn't work well.

"You haven't voted in the last eight years."

"There was nothing or no one I cared to vote for!" She thought about it for a moment. "Oh, that hurts. You mean I should have voted against anti-mutant policies. I contributed to my own persecution. All right, I was wrong. What do I do about it now?"

"Ask for your file."

"What?"

"Ask for your file."

"Which file? Ask who? You could be a little more forthcoming here."

Her phone rang. She answered it.

"Oh, Grace, thank God. You're all right. It's Melody. Listen—whatever you do, don't go home. Al is the stupidest back-stabbing sack of slime alive. Do you know what he did?"

"He told the Association for Genetic Purity about me."

"Yes—that's right! How did you know?"

"I'm already home. I'm all right, though." She explained to Melody, who exploded.

"That putrid cockroach! He came home and told me about it. 'You did what?' I said. 'You puddle of dog vomit, Grace knitted booties for your three children. For our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she gave us a crocheted tablecloth with twelve matching napkins that must have taken her hundreds of hours to make, and you went and ratted on her? Don't you know what they're going to do?'

"He looks at me and sniffs. 'I don't know what you mean.' 'You ignorant moron, they shouldn't be called the AGP! They ought to be called the KKK! Don't you read their literature? What do you think 'Actively and aggressively pursuing the goal of an untainted world' means?' His jaw drops, and he starts choking out 'It isn't true.' The idiot!"

Grace was reminded why she was content to see Al and Melody socially only two or three times a year. They conducted their marriage as if it were a war.

"Anyhow, Grace. I'm begging you. If you can, will you keep his name out of this? Not for his sake, the slop bucket, and he's sleeping on the sofa for the next month. Not for my sake either, but for the kids. For Sammy and Josh and Kristin. Please? I'll do anything."

"If I can. I can't promise. You know what I do want?" Grace looked down at the lamb. "You still have keys to his office, right? I'd like my medical file. Everything there is."

"You got it! Call me tomorrow, tell me where to bring it."

After their goodbyes, Grace regarded the lamb warily. "What do I do with it once I get it?"

"Give it to the bald guy on wheels."

"All right. Here is where more information would be very useful. What bald guy on wheels? The first one I happen to see? Am I looking for a trucker with tattoos up and down his arms? A motorcyclist? A gay rollerblader? A straight rollerblader?"

She saw flashing colored lights dance across the wall, and a moment later, someone banged on the door. "This is the police!"


Some hours later, Grace sat slumped on the loveseat in her workroom and stared at the floor. The lamb rested on the seat's arm, and she had a skein of Baby Alpaca Silk in cornflower blue from her yarn stash in her hand. It wasn't Baby Alpaca Grande, but Grace doubted that mattered. The illustration was the same.

If I weren't pregnant, she thought furiously, all this never would have happened. I wouldn't have gone to the doctor today, and… No, that's not true. Al took my DNA sample for the breast cancer screening over a month before I went to Australia and got pregnant. He only tested me again today because I went to him today. Sooner or later I would have gone to him again anyway. She looked around the room. At least this escaped those bigots.

Her workrooms—the two rooms on the third floor at the top of the house—were the true heart of her home. This was where she stored her supplies and equipment—the skeins of yarn waiting to be used, the buttons, zippers and ribbons to fasten them, the sewing machine, and the blocking board where she stretched components into shape. It was also her office—which meant her computer had survived—and her entertainment center, because she had to do something while she knitted.

More importantly, it was where she stored the finished pieces, whether they were for her own use, made for sale or to give as gifts, the pieces commissioned by individuals and the pieces intended for photo shoots, for magazines and catalogs. They represented hundreds of hours of work and thousands of dollars.

Up here I can almost imagine it didn't happen.

Almost…

Not really.

Will this night never end?

She could hear the police moving around down below her, talking, taking pictures, speculating. She could also still smell the reek of her perfumes, smashed against the bedroom wall as if her assailants were throwing baseballs, mixed with the stench of excrement and the fumes of spray paint. The three invaders had wantonly destroyed and befouled her house, trashing everything, scrawling obscenities on the walls with her lipsticks, shredding some of her clothes and smearing others with filth. Her great-grandmother's majolica collection lay smashed all over the dining room floor, the food in her kitchen had been spread everywhere, and they had slashed her bed to pieces.

I will never feel safe here again, she realized. I will never be able to live here without seeing it as it is now. No amount of cleaning and redecorating will fix it. I'll have to move. A heavy darkness descended on her heart. "I want to go home," she said out loud. "But I don't know where that is anymore."

"Ma'am?" A young police officer poked his head around the door. "There's a Professor Tisdale downstairs. She says she's come to get you."

"Yes." Grace picked up the lamb and swayed to her feet. Eleanor Tisdale lived nearby in the same townhouse complex. She was a professor of comparative religions at the University of Michigan, and a good friend. She was the first person Grace had thought of when the police asked if she had somewhere to go.

Grace had not told her that she was a mutant, but she had said, "I'll understand if you don't feel you can take me in. There's probably going to be some trouble attached to helping me."

"Don't be ridiculous." Eleanor had snorted. "I'll make up the spare room and be right over."

Now she was waiting for Grace in the hallway, looking around at the destruction. "Oh, Grace, I'm so sorry. Your beautiful home." She was about sixty years old, with short salt-and-pepper hair, and she wore small round glasses.

"I'm all right." Grace said, automatically.

"No, you're not. Here." The older woman wrapped an afghan around Grace's shoulders, swaddling her and the lamb together.

Grace fingered the soft material. "This is one of mine."

"Yes. You gave it to me on my last birthday. Now let's go. I put the kettle on, and we'll have a cup of Sleepymint tea once we get to my place. We have to make it past the reporters first, though."

Police walked them past the media, who called out urgent questions. Grace answered a few of them, but kept moving. "Wait a moment." she said as they passed her car. They paused as she unlocked the car and retrieved the little lion from the cup holder. "He's my good luck charm." she explained, weakly.

Soon she was in Eleanor's bright warm kitchen, where a teakettle whistled and Eleanor's elderly golden retriever, Cinnamon, dozed on the floor. She sat down at the table and placed the lion directly in front of her, as Eleanor bustled about getting tea.

"Eleanor, in that book you gave me about the American Indians, there was something about animal spirit guides, Manitous. I remember that when a boy was at the point of manhood, he would go out into the forest and fast until he had visions, and whatever animal came to him in the vision and spoke to him was his Manitou."

"Yes, that's right. Then he would go back to his tribe, and make up a chant, a ballad about what he saw, the wisdom his Manitou gave him. He would also get an image of his Manitou tattooed on his chest, so he carried the protection of his guide everywhere he went. Why do you bring it up now?"

"It's something to talk about that isn't…what happened. I don't recall if women went through the same ritual."

"No. Women had spirit guides, too, but they had rituals of their own. Unfortunately, women's mysteries are still mysteries. They didn't share them with researchers—because the researchers were all male, back then."

"That's a shame. So, although seeing, hearing and talking with animal visions was considered an important stage of development and growth to the Indians, and perfectly normal, the settlers didn't see it that way, and made them all become Christians."

"Essentially. Although every religion has its ancient tradition of communication with anthropomorphic animals, spirit guides or gods. The Bible has more than one recorded vision where a creature with wings and the head of a lion or a bull speaks with a man's voice—the symbols of the Four Apostles of the Gospel. Also, there were the trickster stories—Coyote of the Western Indians, Spider of Africa, Bre'r Fox and Bre'r Rabbit of the American South. They weren't all holy and good. Sometimes the lessons they taught were not to be greedy or foolish—the hard way. They were gods with a sense of humor, but not always a nice one."

"Yet today anyone who said they saw and spoke to an animal guide would be called a liar, or institutionalized. Even though at one time it was perfectly normal. We're a more sophisticated culture, and the natural world is disappearing all around us, so perhaps spirit guides would have to manifest in another form." Grace looked at her lion.

"Here's your tea. That's an interesting idea. Grace…I'm sorry I'm bringing this up, but that graffiti on the wall. The AGP. Are you a mutant?"

"Are you going to ask me to leave if I am?"

"No. But I would like to know what I'm getting into."

"I am. I should have said so over the phone. I'm sorry. How—or what?"

"I only found out today. So far, the only outward manifestation of it is that I seem to be aging slower than normal."

"I knew you looked too good for your age. So it isn't natural!" Eleanor teased. "Mrs. Jensen swears you must have had a facelift. However—I know what sort of feeling, what sort of violence accompanies anything to do with mutants. I'm not sure I have the resources, in every sense of the word, to cope with that for very long. I don't know who would."

"I understand." Grace drank tea. "Tomorrow I'll work out where to go and what to do. Thank you for taking me in tonight, though."

"I'm glad to do it."


The next morning, Magneto got up, showered, and went down for coffee. Taking it to his office, he turned on CNN, and read over various documents. Not until he heard 'anti-mutant hate crime' did the television command his full attention.

"—coming to you live from the scene of the crime, in this normally quiet neighborhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we're speaking with Police Chief Arnold Wilcox. Can you tell us exactly what happened here last night?" A young Hispanic woman held a microphone for a sweating, florid faced man in uniform.

"Yes. Around seven-thirty yesterday evening, the victim, Grace Engstrom returned home. She parked her car over there. Now, there were three perpetrators. Two of them were waiting for her inside her front door, while the third was in a van parked over there. He had a rifle. It was his job, if she got away from them, to pick her off before she escaped." The chief gestured, and the camera panned to show the car, and the site where the shooter waited in the van.

Magneto watched and listened as the tale unfolded. The woman in question had been extremely fortunate. He drank his coffee while he saw the destruction inside the house.

Typical, he thought.

"The shooter sees that he shot his friend, and he panics. He took off in the van, but he got rattled and ran right into a tree. He wasn't hurt, but the van was totaled, so he got out and ran for it. As you can see, the townhouse complex was built around a wooded area. He got lost, and so we were able to pick him up at four this morning."

"Can there be any doubt he's a suspect?"

"None at all. You saw how the place was torn up—he has fibers all over him, and if that weren't enough, his prints are all over the gun."

"I understand he claims Ms. Engstrom used her mutant powers to make him shoot his coconspirator."

"He's saying that, but that man he shot ran out of the house with a face full of pepper spray. He had his hands covering his face, and it was dark. The shooter is only 19 years old, and he was worked up. He just got trigger happy."

"And the assailant who hit his head on the stone carving?"

"He's in the hospital, in critical condition."

"Will Ms. Engstrom be charged with any crime?" the reporter asked.

"No. While it's true she's unregistered, she only found out she was a mutant yesterday, and she is still within the two-week grace period for new registries. As for the rest—she was defending herself inside her own home against two intruders who broke in and lay in wait to attack her. Last I heard, it was still legal for a mutant to do that in this country."

"Do you have any parting words to say about the crime, Chief?"

"Yes. This is as ugly and hateful as human nature gets. We all of us have this little voice that tells us not to do stuff like this, but these three fellows weren't listening to theirs."

The image cut back to the studio, where the anchor said, "Grace Engstrom, shown here in file footage from a Knit-a-thon fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, organized by Sara Pulaski, owner of Ewe Need 2 Knit…"

Magneto paid no attention to the anchor's voice, because that was Lucy Jordan in the clip, with her disheveled fiery hair and her smoky eyes. Grace Engstrom was Lucy Jordan, and she was a mutant.

On some level I must have known it. Why else should I have been so strongly attracted to her, as to no other woman in years? She is a mutant, and now I know where she is…

The screen flashed to Michigan again, where it now showed the horde of bigots gathered on the street just off the townhouse community complex, where they waved placards calling for her death. As he watched, a bus with anti-mutant banners pulled up and disgorged more of the howling mob, and the reporter explained that anti-mutant groups were gathering from all over the country, holding a deathwatch for the man in the hospital.

If he dies, they will riot. It shall be "Judge Lynch" and "Mob Rule", and they will tear her limb from limb if they can. No; I will not allow it. No doubt my Brotherhood shall wonder at my decision, but no matter. Besides, can there be a better way to reintroduce myself than as her rescuer?

He pushed back his chair and stood, but sat back down when a clip taken the night before began to play. Lucy—Grace looked like a child woken from a nightmare, who goes to her parents for comfort—an afghan around her shoulders, and a stuffed toy clasped to her chest. Her hair hung in her face, and grim lines of fear and anger pulled that wide, expressive mouth downward.

"As police escorted Ms. Engstrom to another location last night, she had this to say.."

Grace answered a few questions with one word answers, avoiding the reporters—until the last one asked, "Can you explain the cryptic meaning of 'Two Down' in the graffiti, Ms. Engstrom? I understand you live alone."

Her head lifted at that, and he saw a hint of the woman who lay in his arms, as she said. "Yes. I'm pregnant."


A/N; With the next chapter, I shall move this fic under the movie X-Men category.