Disclaimer: I do not own any aspect of Twilight or X-Files, so my apologies to Stephanie Meyer and Chris Carter. This is not an exceptionally original story, there other crossovers, but I felt this storyline was logical. This is as canon as I can make it for both series. Mid-run Mulder and Scully met the Twilight gang just before the battle in Eclipse. Yeah, I know this doesn't match up time wise, but just suspend your belief.

Chapter 1

The Missing and the Dead

Never one for parties, Janice Snowden slipped silently out the grand French doors of the Rain Garden Hotel. Leaving the glittering lights and bustle of her cousin Sophia's wedding, she picked her way slowly down the gravel path to the immaculate English style garden. The gray twilight still rang with the reception guests' laughter and the tinkling of silverware on crystal and china. The sounds and the sights would have been magical to anyone else, but Janice was practical and couldn't get caught up in the silly nonsense of a wedding, nor the drama of a gray misty twilight settling in around the garden. She paused a moment, bending down and removing her highly impractical heels. Rising again, she crunched the silver shoes in her left and gathered up the slippery taffeta of her dress in her right hand. She wandered through the labyrinth of boxwood hedges, letting her mind unwind the stresses of the day. She didn't register the faint rustle of fabric from behind her; she thought it was only the breeze that shifted the scrunched taffeta in her hand.

Janice sat down on the damp stone bench, facing the marble fountain at the center of the labyrinth. She tossed her shoes down beside the bench and closed her eyes. The sounds of the wedding reception had faded away and everything around her was at peace. She smiled for the first time since the whole wedding began. Her silent stress floated out from her into the swirling mist.

"It's a little late to be wandering in the garden."

The voice should have startled her, but Janice was too practical to fear. Besides, the seductive velvet of the masculine voice sounded too friendly to be threatening. Janice opened her eyes and looked toward the owner of the voice. He was tall and thin. His dark completion looked somewhat ashy and sickly, but perhaps that was a trick of the light. She assumed he followed her from the reception, but she couldn't recall seeing him before.

"No, it's a perfect time to visit a garden. I don't like parties. I'd much rather be here." She left out the part about preferring to be alone. If he had followed her, that meant he found her attractive, or interesting. As practical as she was, Janice never passed on an opportunity for a quick lay. Sex, to her, was an impulse best acted on as soon as the need presented itself. The need was there and so was her opportunity. She turned to face the approaching stranger more fully.

"That's good. I never liked an audience." The dark stranger stepped closer and Janice felt her heartbeat quicken. His very voice aroused her in a way no man ever had before. This was going to be good.

"Well then, we have plenty in common." Her voice lowered, husky with desire.

"Yes." The stranger was standing in front of Janice, almost too quickly to be possible. But she had one thing on her mind and didn't notice. He reached for her and she took his hand.

She noticed several things at once as she gripped his icy hand. She was enveloped in a heady scent, nearly nauseating in its sweetness. And the stranger's eyes were very unusual. The strange hue seemed to glow red. His casual clothing also suggested he was not a wedding guest.

Poor, practical Janice ignored the warning shiver that raced up her spine. The stranger turned her head to the side and kissed her fully on her neck, tracing his lips down to the place where the shoulder joins the neck and chest, just above the collarbone. She moaned.

His victims always tasted the sweetest when they were sexually aroused. Perhaps he could use her first, but no, the pulse beneath his lips was too much for him. The scent of her blood was too strong. He crushed her against him and bit down into the sweet, tender spot he had located. She never uttered a gasp as he sucked her blood.

He ignored the fleeting thought of licking the wound on her neck shut before it was too late, and continued drawing in great gulps of her blood into his parched throat. He heard her heartbeat quiver and begin to fail. He wouldn't get much more of her intoxicating nectar before her heart gave out. With one last mouthful, he crushed her violently against his chest, hearing her ribs and sternum crack. She fell limply to the ground. He grasped her head in his hands and twisted it so hard he heard, not only her neck snap neatly in half, but several vertebrae below the initial fracture shatter as well.

He stood back and admired the beautiful, pale body, clad in shimmering red taffeta. He felt guilt for a second that he hadn't turned her into the shadow creature he was, but only Victoria and Riley had that privilege. He shrugged and pulled out the vaguely familiar engraved lighter from his jeans pocket. Studying it for a millisecond, he wondered what the woman whom had given it to him had looked like. Did she look like the twisted, drained body before him? He knew that the memory was long gone, and flicked the lighter open and got a flame started. He touched the flame to the wound on the his elegantly dead victim's neck, making sure the flame touched the clear fluid seeping out of the gash. He hoped there was enough venom in her to start a good fire.

The next time anyone saw Janice Snowden, some twenty minutes later, she was in flames.

(*)

Ben Boyle, chief of the Seattle Police Department, pulled the white sheet down to expose the new victim's face, what was left of it. The charred skin pulled away from the mouth, revealing even, white teeth. He flipped the sheet back over the scorched face and its grisly semblance of a smile, disgusted and very frustrated.

"Jesus Christ! The second one tonight! Do we have an ID for this one or are we going to have to wait twenty four hours for some poor family to file a missing person report?"

The young lieutenant balked at Boyle's gruff tone. "We have to make a positive ID by dental records, to be certain. But..."

"Jimmy, I fucking know that! Did anyone know," he gestured at the corpse on the gurney, "who this was?" Hell, the body was so badly burned, he couldn't even tell if it was a male or a female.

"Sir, we interviewed all of the wedding and hotel guest and everyone's been accounted for, except a woman. Janice Snowden. She was a cousin of the bride and a bridesmaid." Jimmy held up a sealed evidence bag containing a pair of silver high-heeled sandals. "The rest of the girls had the same type of shoes."

Boyle made a disgruntled sound deep in his throat. "Family?"

"She wasn't married, but most of her family was here at the reception when she was found."

Ben Boyle let out a long, tired sigh. "Jesus fucking Christ. This goddamned nonsense has got to stop." He rubbed his hand over the thick, graying stubble on his chin. The static breaking through on the radio of a nearby squad car made him start. He knew what the dispacher's voice was going to say, even before the sound left the radio. This was going to be one hell of a night.

"Jimmy, I want you to go back to the station and make a few calls. We're going to need all the help we can get on this one. And soon."

(*)

"They never send us anywhere remotely sunny, do they? Always rain and damp and cold, never any sun." Agent Dana Scully gazed out of the rain spattered car window, her breath fogging the chilly glass slightly.

"Just like they never spring for a luxury rental car. Always some bland fleet car and never a Porsche."

Scully turned her head away from the window to glare at her long-time professional partner, Fox Mulder. "Just like you always drive."

Mulder flashed her a charmingly boyish smile. "What can I say? Some things are just meant to be a certain way. Next case, you can drive, promise. At least the Agency still springs for separate rooms."

"There's always that." She sighed and turned to look out at the gloomy buildings. She never liked where her thoughts strayed when Mulder smiled at her like that. "So, why are we here in Seattle? I thought they already had a team of profilers here from the behavioral unit."

"Apparently, they're a little stumped. There's some facts that seem a little...impossible."

"Impossible, how?" Instinctively, she held her breath, waiting for Mulder to say something about alien abductions, ghosts, demons or something of that sort. That was his explanation for most things, and he did happen to get it right more often than she'd like to admit. Sometimes, she almost found herself believing without questioning. For Mulder, she nearly took the leap, almost.

"Well, for starters, bodies have been found burned with an accelerant, but they can't find any evidence to say for sure. There's some other things, but we're almost to the station. We'll have a good look at the files."

(*)

"Chief Boyle, I'm Agent Mulder and this is my partner, Agent Scully." Mulder flashed his badge and tucked it away again in a pocket. "We hear you need help."

"Understatement of the year." Boyle grimly shook hands with the FBI agents and steered them over to the last vacant conference room. "Have a seat." He motioned for them to sit down and poked his head back out the door. "Jimmy, bring me those copies of the case files."

Jimmy appeared swiftly, carrying a large file box. "Thanks, Jimmy." Boyle removed the lid and passed each agent several stacks of manilla folders. He paced while Mulder and Scully perused the files for several minutes.

Mulder leafed through his stack, occasionally catching a glimpse of Scully from the corner of his eye. Her head was bent over the never ending supply of files, glasses perch low on her nose. Mulder was pretty sure she was the only woman he knew that could make researching grisly cases sexy But they were here on business. "Have you or any of the other FBI agents noticed a pattern in the disappearances?"

"All the disappearances have occurred overnight, as have the discovery of most of the bodies. We don't find a body for everyone that has gone missing in the past three months. There has been an increase in the number of those found missing and dead. If it keeps escalating, whoever is doing this is going to exceed the Green River Killer's numbers."

"No other connections?" Mulder glanced over at Scully, who was intensely studying autopsy photos.

"Nothing. The victims can't be connected in any other way. They only thing that connects them is when and where they disappear. There's a few more men than women, but nothing to make a clear profile. They don't even disappear in the same sections of town. The only thing the profilers came up with was the fact that this appears to be the work of a group, not a single person, maybe even several groups. Well that much was pretty damned obvious. When you're finding two flaming bodies on the same night and they're on opposite sides of the city, it isn't one person doing this. I sent their useless asses back to Washington." Boyle sat down hard in the metal chair and slammed his fist into the table.

Scully laid her glasses down on top of the thick pile of autopsy photos. "Have all the bodies you found been burned?"

"Burned and crushed. The coroner can't say when the victims were crushed, you know, before or after death. John is pretty sure some sort of accelerant was used to burn the bodies, but he can't find any trace evidence that matches anything we know."

Mulder could see Scully's mind working. Her face was deep in thought as she resumed questioning Chief Boyle. "This only started happening three months ago?"

"Yeah. Before this, we only had missing whores and homeless people, occasionally a runaway teen, but nothing like this. Most of these people had no reason to run away. They had families and careers. Hell, one even disappeared right out of his god damned seat in a movie theater. None of it makes any damned sense."

Scully pressed her lips together, thinking. "Have any neighboring communities had similar disappearances recently?"

"Come to think of it, this past February and early March, a town on the Olympic Peninsula had a couple of tourists and hikers disappear. I think they also had sightings of a huge bear or wolf or something along that line. It stopped about a month ago. I never thought much of it, I mean hikers and mountain climbers disappear all the time. And it seemed pretty clear that those incidents were related to the animal sighted."

This bit of information piqued Mulder's curiosity. The same news caused Scully to shudder. "Don't even think about it," she mouthed silently to Mulder. But he did, anyway.

"Do you remember the name of the town, Chief Boyle?"

"Yeah, it was Forks. An old buddy of mine is chief out there."

"Can you get us some contact information? I think we might need to see their case files too."

"Sure thing, Agent Mulder." Boyle rose and went out the door.

Before Mulder could say anything more, Scully raised a restraining hand. "No, Mulder, just no. How can you be so sure that these cases are even remotely connected? We are needed here, not in some God forsaken damp wilderness."

"I have a hunch they're connected." Again, Mulder flashed that smile of his and Scully was considering the possibilities. His hunches were rarely wrong, but still.

"Fine, we'll go to Forks, but I want to examine the bodies myself before we go."

"Of course." Mulder's smile widened and he returned to the files. Scully resumed reading the autopsy files and looking at the horrific montage of photos.

Moments later, Chief Boyle returned with a slip of paper, which he handed to Mulder. "Here's the address to Forks' police station. Chief Charlie Swan is the one you'll want to talk to. I already called him and told him to expect you some time soon."

"Chief Boyle, I was wondering if some of the victims were still in the morgue. I would like to re-examine them, in case anything went unnoticed."

"The last three victims are still there, over at Harbor View's morgue. The bodies were so charred that the ME did a virtual autopsy on them."

"Thank you. We'll be in contact if we find anything useful. Mulder, we had better get going if you want to drive out to Forks today."

A/N: All information about the disappearences in Seattle are taken from Eclipse, pages 279-281. I will also take some facts from New Moon. I assumed that the bodies that were found were victims of vampire attacks, not vampires killed by other vampires. My reasoning for this is: if they were vampires, then they would burn completely. If vampire newborns don't burn completely, then the Cullen clan is going to have to work harder to destroy the evidence after the battle in Eclipse. I'm also operating under the assumption that vampire venom is like a natural lighter fluid. I hope I haven't lost any of you yet:) Any questions, just ask me.

I would like to thank Rosewell 1828 for pre-reading and beta-ing this story. Thanks a bunch!