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Someone in Oslo needs Erik’s attention. That’s how he puts it. Charles reads the hints from his mind that there is someone from his past, nearby, someone Erik means to kill, or put some fear into. Erik needs this still, like he needs oxygen, so Charles only frowns a little when he lets Erik go.He keeps a tendril of thought on Erik. They’re in the same city after all; it doesn’t strain Charles to keep that thread of awareness on him. It’s not a surprise that there are some Nazis still here. Norway was strategically important to the Nazis. If Charles opens his mind wide enough he can feel the thread of guilt running through certain segments of the population. Not much, just a hint.Someone always collaborates. The thought is too cynical to be his; it must be bleed-through from Erik. Charles pulls away again and broadens his focus. He can’t bear to watch, even though Erik needs this. There is so much Erik needs, so much Charles can’t give him.With a wide net cast, the other mutants in Oslo appear. There are several. Some are children, some are weak, too weak, hiding in fear of their difference. At first he and Erik wanted to meet all of them. Now they focus on the ones strong enough to help them in the coming war, independent or broken enough to leave behind everything they know, and strong enough to survive the leaving.Oslo has narrow streets and cobbled stones. Meals are expensive, fish and overcooked vegetables swimming in cream. That night Charles eats too much in a small, expensive restaurant, and, alone, drinks too much aqua vit, herbal and burning.In the summer here, the days never end. He stumbles out of a restaurant at 10pm, the sun just brushing the horizon. The air holds smells like salt brine, pine forests. The wind is blowing in down Oslofjord tonight, a passing mind supplies.He brushes a thought against Erik’s mind. He’s resting, planning, mind sharp as a knife. Too sharp for Charles now; he withdraws.Charles turns down a narrow street, little more than an alley, which will take him back to his hotel on the waterfront. He drank too much tonight, as he does too often, especially without Erik. It’s a bad habit, one he’ll have to watch as he gets older. Drinking drowns out the voices, turns them into a fog of feeling, rather than a sharp cacophony.He feels an aura of threat only a moment before the sharp pressure on the small of his back. A blade or something like, pressed there, ready to split his suit jacket and the skin underneath.“Come with me,” says his would-be captor, in a Russian accent. Charles has seen this mutant before in Moira’s thoughts. The Devil, although he can’t be that. Charles feels a rush of sympathy—it can’t have been easy looking like he does.It’s been a long time since he’s worried about that, a voice says in Charles’s mind. The telepath, the other one, Emma, her thoughts crisp as snow.I don’t have to go with him, Charles thinks back at her, then checks if he’s telling the truth. The creature behind him has a mind more convoluted than any he’s seen before, protected by Emma’s crystalline shield. I can break this, Charles tells her, certain now. He pushes, finds a crack. The Devil’s name comes spilling out, along with a rush of other thoughts.“Azazel,” says Charles.A flicker of surprise mixed with amusement crosses Azazel’s mind. He likes to be amused. He is old. It doesn’t happen often. “You are here to meet mutants, yes, comrade?” he asks.“Um. Yes. I seem to have met one now, haven’t I?” Charles isn’t exactly nervous, though Azazel’s presence is far from comforting.“Yes. And it is time for you to meet another one.” Azazel prods him in the lower back again with the blunt edge of his tail.His tail. Charles hides a grin at that. “I’ll go willingly.”“As you wish.”Stairs take them to an untenanted apartment in the middle of the block. Few windows, Charles notes. Only one exit that Charles can see. Azazel’s mind supplies another. Spending time with Erik is making him paranoid. Well, they really are out to get him tonight.Azazel pulls out a dusty chair for Charles, and another for himself, cleaning his with a few smacks to the upholstery.“What now?” Charles asks.“Now we wait.”Charles rubs his temple. He’s never been good at patience—why should he when he can always find the answers he needs in the minds around him? Why wait for them to speak? He delves into Azazel’s again.Azazel’s tail never stops moving. It has a life of his own; even as Azazel sits preternaturally still, his tail switches from side to side like a cat’s. It means the same thing, Charles knows—signals hi s discomfort, a veiled need for dominance.“You know I could get out of here, right?” Charles asks. “I am not your prisoner.”Azazel gives him a grunt and a half smile, not at all a comforting expression.“That Russian accent isn’t even real,” says Charles.“It is for now,” says Azazel. Yes, a five-thousand-year-old creature like Azazel might spend several decades learning Russian, creating this persona, just to amuse himself, to make himself over into someone’s devil, yet again. He’s fascinating—Charles had no idea this kind of mutation has been around for so long.“Where is this other mutant?” Charles asks. He’s in no hurry to leave, though. He insinuates a layer deeper into Azazel’s thoughts. Emma and Shaw are there. Charles gathers the information without looking too closely now. He can share what he’s learned with Erik later, and they can plan together. He goes deeper, into centuries, millennia, Azazel thinking he was the only one of his kind.“He’ll come,” says Azazel. Charles reads: Azazel still doesn’t quite believe he has anything in common with Shaw, Riptide, Emma. He has been a devil for so long. Now he waits, watches, follows orders only as a means of gathering data. His time scales moves on a different rhythm than Charles has ever encountered before.“You do, though,” says Charles. “You’re . . . remarkable.”Azazel narrows his eyes. “Stay out of my mind, little man.”Charles curves his lips, not a smile, it is something he’s copied off of Erik’s face. It feels unsettling. “We’re not exactly on the same side.”I can’t keep him out any longer, Emma says into Azazel’s mind. Charles realizes she has been keeping him out, letting Azazel distract him with pieces of himself, a history she knew Charles couldn’t resist. We’d better do this.Woman, you owe me, Azazel thinks. His lover is supposed to be here.Before Charles can wrap his mind about what that means, lust slams into him like a freight train. For a moment before it comes he can feel the mind of another mutant, one Emma kept hidden from him, but then it’s washed away in a tide of pure heat. A moment’s panic comes from Azazel, you were supposed to wait for Lensherr and then resignation—this is not new to him.Emma’s mind brushes his. Charles closes his eyes and shields himself against it. He reaches out toward whatever—whoever—is causing this terrible, overpowering heat. The closer he reaches, the more the lust magnifies; he’ll die unless he gets someone’s anyone’s skin on his. The feeling of Emma’s mind, cool and clinical, observing this, only adds to it, her voyeurism a tantalizing spice.Erik—Erik, the enemy was supposed to bring him here, somehow he and Erik giving into their desire would help them, at least in this time and this place, exposed to Emma’s telepathy. Charles can guard against that, or he can guard against this other mutant, the one whose mind feels like a blast furnace turned on all of Charles’s most sensitive nerve endings.Erik isn’t here. Azazel is, with the ponderous weight of centuries in his mind, the intriguing red skin. Charles saw him first, him, Emma and Riptide, in Moira’s mind, the first other mutants he’d seen since Raven. He reaches out to touch that skin.Charles pushes back, wanting to feel that this lust is alien to him, somehow, imposed on him, but it feels entirely his, as though he’s never known a time when he doesn’t want Azazel’s hands on him. He can keep her out, if he gives into this. A finger of thought, chilly and amused, touches Charles’s mind, ready to take him apart. Charles slams down his barriers and pulls Azazel to him. Azazel’s mouth is on his forcing him back, invading his.Azazel wears a beautiful black suit, of fabric so rich it seems to glow with the same sultry glow of his skin. Charles wants to look, but even more he wants those clothes off, the skin underneath against his. Azazel has the same thought. “I could cut your clothes off you,” he says, tail poised.God help him, even that thought is appealing. Charles falters, mouth open, before shaking his head, putting fingers that don’t want to obey him too his buttons. “Too slow,” says Azazel. He rips the shirt off Charles instead.There’s a pallet, but it’s too small and too far away. They tumble on the floor instead, dust now unheeded smudging the knees of Azazel’s trousers.Charles can block out Emma, but he can’t block out this, the feedback loop that usually makes him so grateful to be to be a telepath. He feels Azazel’s desire for him, the need to touch pale, soft, human flesh. He pulls Charles’s trousers off his hips and slides his hand around Charles’s cock, so he’s thrusting up into it, into Azazel’s hot grip. It’s hotter than a normal human’s hand, differently textured, smoother and less yielding than a human’s.That difference it almost too much to bear. Charles holds back only out of fear that it won’t end there, that this mutant’s power can force pleasure from an exhausted body. Better to draw it out a little, until Emma realizes she isn’t going to win this.Charles instinctively opens his mind further to Azazel’s—he always does during sex, it’s what keeps him coming back for more, the textures and nuance of others’ desires, always so much more varied than most humans would imagine. Azazel’s mind is full of memories, of witches’ Sabbats, of Babylonian priestesses, of sacred groves and Bacchanalian revels. And of a wish, rarely fulfilled. Even the Devil has desires he rarely admits to.“Do it, friend,” says Charles.Azazel tail snakes over his shoulder. The tip is sharp as a serpent’s tooth. Even the lightest touch scrapes across Charles’s chest, leaving a line of red along with the sharp pain-mixed pleasure. Charles touches it. It feels like the rest of Azazel’s skin, too warm, with a strange non-human texture.Azazel tips his head back. “Yesssss,” he says.Charles strokes it. The end twitches. He shares this pleasure, as strange as it is, to feel pleasure in a body part that doesn’t belong to him. Charles strokes it more. It wants a harder touch. Charles can’t help thinking of it as entirely separate from Azazel, even though it clearly is not, even though his every touch sends waves of pleasure through Azazel.It is not enough to make Azazel come, though, and Charles is still swept up in this, the need to fulfill this lust, by any means necessary. He wraps his hand around Azazel’s cock, dark red like the rest of him, pearled with moisture on the tip. At this moment, the sight of Azazel’s dark, alien skin is the most erotic thing Charles can imagine. Maybe this is why he doesn’t like to see Raven that way—his mind shies away from the thought.He can feel Azazel’s pleasure building. Azazel replaces his hand with a loop of tail around Charles’s cock, and then another, a hot channel for him to thrust into. Azazel puts a loop around his neck—it would be threatening except Charles knows, can feel, how much Azazel likes it to be touched, brushing skin and stubble. It brushes across his lips, and then he’s licking it, sucking on it as he thrusts into it, and Azazel is coming in his hand—pale, like any other man’s—and Charles is too, gasping and licking and drunk with the strangeness of it all.And as soon as it came, the lust is gone. He’s naked and sticky with a man he hardly knows, an enemy, even. The mutant who inspired this . . . debauchery, sends a brush of power again down Charles’s spine, a hint that he could do it again. Charles is almost disappointed when he pulls it away again.Azazel doesn’t seem to feel the awkwardness, though, not as deeply as Charles does. Maybe five thousand years of living acclimates one to such things. He inclines his head in a courtly sort of bow when he disengages from Charles.“Is that what you—your people—wanted?” Charles asks acidly.Azazel tips his head to one side, listening for Emma. Charles keeps his mind tightly barred from Azazel’s now. “No,” Azazel says. “Your mind is not so easy to read.”“Sorry to be so useless,” says Charles, pulling on his shirt. He catches himself watching Azazel do the same, red fingers against lush, dark cloth. Damn. The mutant’s power has left a trace.Azazel’s tail twitches above his head. “Not entirely useless, comrade.”**Charles stumbles back to his hotel room. The sun has finally gone down, although the sky is still orange at the horizon. Charles doesn’t care. He’s packing haphazardly when Erik comes in.“The trail’s cold,” he says in explanation. “I’ll get him another time.” He lies down on the bed, all long tailored lines, begging to be rumpled. Usually Charles would take the invitation; now he’s too busy packing. They have to leave as soon as possible.“Someone tried to kidnap me tonight,” Erik adds idly. “Anything odd happen to you?”Charles can’t say it out loud so he puts the images into Erik’s mind. It’s probably worse for Erik that way, but Charles doesn’t care. Saying it will make it too real.“You had sex with Azazel? Really, Charles?” His voice is indignant, but underneath he’s laughing.“Yes, well, I’m fairly embarrassed about it.”“Azazel. Red, with the tail?” Erik asks, lips quirking.Oh God, the tail. Charles blushes remembering. “He’s quite fascinating, you know. He was born five thousand years ago.”“Fascinating?”“You don’t know what it was like,” says Charles.“What was it like?” Erik asks, eyebrow raised.Charles shares the memory, trying to project feelings, not facts. Erik takes his hand and pulls him down on the bed on top of him. “It was impossible to resist,” Charles says.Erik kisses the side of his neck, up to his ear, his breath warmth through Charles’s belly and into his cock. “Impossible? Really?” Erik asks. “Is it going to be a problem now?”“No,” says Charles, affronted. “Why would it be a problem?”“I don’t have a tail.”