SEQUEL TO HALLOWEEN CRIMINAL MINDS STYLE
I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings do to other real human beings.
Walter Jon Williams
(In honor of the upcoming Halloween season! Please enjoy!)
There are certain types of men who are destined to be the protectors. In olden days they were the warriors who fought to protect the tribe, or the self-appointed sheriffs in new territories.
In modern times-they were Aaron Hotchner, Unit Chief of one of the best teams in the BAU.
He'd do everything, anything, to protect those he cared about. Especially his team, and especially the women. JJ and Garcia, blond and feminine both, he would always watch over. Their lives, he knew, would be considerably shorter than his. As would Morgan's, Reid's, and Rossi's. He'd keep an eye on them as they aged, too.
He wouldn't age. He'd accepted that fact nearly a year ago. On his fortieth birthday, Aaron Hotchner stopped aging in the biological sense and succumbed to the mutated gene that all the men in his family carried—instead of the XY chromosomal pair that signified a human male, the Hotchners carried XV.
A year had passed since he'd learned he carried it, and accepted it. A full year—and he'd yet to let Prentiss know. A year of him dreaming of her every night, of him aching for his mate and not claiming her. Of him needing her.
Aaron Hotchner, great protector and leader of the best team in the BAU wasn't just a vampire—he was a freaking coward.
And it was all where she was concerned.
He remembered his fortieth birthday clearly. He'd woken and met with the rest of the team; she'd been the first down the stairs of the old B and B they'd been staying in. She'd looked good, smelled good, and as his fangs had erupted, he knew she would taste good, too.
He'd had one taste in a year.
He'd lost control the first night, had pulled Prentiss into a closet and had a taste. And then he'd tucked her into her bed and walked away. Erased the whole encounter from her mind and then left her there.
He'd almost made up his mind to just take her, fly through the night sky with her held tight, then take the time to convince her that she wanted to stay with him forever. But he'd gotten scared, and seeing her lying in a hospital bed suffering the ill effects of an allergic reaction to mushrooms—after the UNSUB had tossed the fungus-based drug in her face—had reiterated the fact that he wasn't enough to protect her. He hadn't even been able to protect her from a human for Hade's sake.
Could he protect her from a vampire? Hotch somehow doubted it.
In fact—he'd had to call out to her when Foyet had jumped him in his own apartment. While he hadn't been shot, the other man had gotten in a few good knocks—and slices. And blood loss was one of the biggest threats to a man with Hotch's condition. So bad a threat that Hotch had had to send a mental push to her, to make her worry for him. To make her realize he needed help.
If that poor excuse for a human had managed to get to him, how would he keep her safe from the other creatures he knew were in the world. If he kept her human, just watched her from afar, it was far less likely she'd ever draw the attention of the others.
It was for her own good.
And he just had to live with that.
Sometimes, Emily Prentiss just wanted to grab her supervisor and shake him. The man could brood like no other. It seemed like he'd spent the last yearbrooding. Drove her nuts. It wasn't healthy. For him, for his son, even for the team.
But what could she do about it really? While they were certainly friendly colleagues, they weren't friends. And for her to question him—even though they'd worked together for two and a half years now—it would be a breach of protocol.
At least, if she came right out and cornered him. If she were to maneuver him into the conversation, then it wouldn't be a real breach. Just a happenstance conversation between two colleagues with psychological training. It would work, if she could get him to that point.
Still, as she watched him stare out the window of the Evansville precinct, she had no idea how to get him to that conversation. So she did the one thing she'd done every time she'd felt the least bit of concern for the man and been unable to do anything about it—she turned back to the case at hand.
Four women gone, missing from the Evansville Indiana area in the last week. Just gone, and the team had nothing to go on.
She couldn't help but wonder who would be next.
They learned nothing in the next twelve hours, and when one a.m. rolled around, Emily found herself staggering back to the hotel room. JJ and Garcia had been somewhere behind her, their room beside hers. Hotch's room was on the other side of Emily's. She was tired and she was safe, tucked in between her friends and Hotch.
She didn't even look around the room before falling into the bed.
Hotch kept an ear out for the woman next door. He knew she'd been a few minutes behind him, he'd read her intention to find her bed in her wonderfully complex mind. It was never as complex when she was tired and vulnerable; that's when her defenses went down and she began to call for him. Her heart would beat and he'd hear it in his own—even when miles separated them. Her blood would call out to his. Mate to mate. Lover to lover.
He'd found himself perched on the window sill outside her bedroom on numerous occasions, taunted by the thought that if he'd only acted on instinct so many months earlier, he'd be sharing her bed. Instead he'd turned into a damned peeping tom, watching a woman he'd never have.
But as she slid into sleep in the room next to his, the clock slid closer to midnight.
The next day was his birthday in human sense—he'd turn forty-one.
It would officially be one year since the last time he'd tasted Emily Prentiss.
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