Chapter One

The Sea Screams

"So, let me get this straight," Agent Hotchner tried not to show just how incredulous he was. How could anyone with any remnant of sanity let something like this go on for this long? "Every week for the last two and a half months, a dead woman has been washing up on the Yemaya City portion of Virginia Beach. That's ten women, am I right? Ten women? And you're calling us in now?!"

"Actually, one of your agents stumbled onto our crime scene. He found a victim who was still alive. She's not from our state, so that made it federal. I didn't want the bitch to sue me if your guy ever told her that." The blue eyed, ruddy faced little officer, no more than five-six and twice as jiggly-wiggly as double-F sized breast implants, smirked like he'd said something clever.

Hotch decided right then that if this guy got shot in the line of duty, as long as it didn't interfere with solving the case, he didn't really give a damn. He didn't say that, though. He only said, "Detective Kritikos, where is this woman?"

"Saint Peter's Hospital. The agent with her, Agent Reid, has to give his statement." The fat man sounded like a petulant toddler. He smoothed back his thinning, ginger hair and tried not to look nervous.

"I'm sure that's no trouble. Seeing as this is an FBI investigation, I'm going to need access to all your case files…."

Detective Kritikos didn't look too happy about that, but there wasn't much he could say.

oo8oo8oo8oo

Ariel floats in darkness, darker than the deepest places of the Deepness of the Sea, but she cannot escape pain, cannot escape premonition, cannot escape purpose. Her hand, the hand clutching the jagged seashell to give her a screaming edge, burns like the scalding water that gushed from the steam vents beneath the surface of the ocean in the deepest places. Her body aches and throbs, as if a riptide had thrown her to the mercy of the sea shore's rocky fists. Even her hair, long and still dripping wet and tangled, hurts at the memory of that beating… and the memory from before.

Screaming as the tender soft flesh was scalded and burned until it blistered, fat white blisters that burst and left her crippled, and the woman, that woman, laughing as she hissed, "Find your prince now, little guppy. Walk on land now. That's what feet are for aren't they? To walk?" As she says this, she twists something near Ariel's ear, something in her hair but not her hair, something that burns her mind until she thinks everything is screaming. Then the woman lets it go, this thing that hurts her, and Ariel can breathe again. "You'll never be able to walk on land with feet like these."

"But," whimpers Ariel in her pain, "I've always had feet like these and I've always walked on land. Why are you doing this?"

"Because I hate mermaids," the woman whispered, voice cutting across the girl's ears like a Moray eel snapping with its teeth. "I hate them all."

"But I'm not a mermaid," she begs the woman to believe her, "I'm human… I'm human…." And the burning begins again, this time in her arm, like someone is thrusting a needle a big as a knife into the soft part of her arm, and she wakes up….

In a white hell, where masked demons rake at her shivering, aching form with needle-claws, and the golden haired angel who had called aid to her was nowhere to be found.

She opens her mouth, drew a lungful of biting cold air, and screams as if she will die.

oo8oo8oo8oo

"Tell us again what you were doing on the beach, Dr. Reid."

Reid scrubbed at his face, barely able to stay on his feet as he looked at the tall, trim, brown officer, with the mud brown hair and mud brown eyes. The only reason Reid was even still there was so he could be there when Ariel woke up. He wanted her to see a familiar face, the poor girl, she'd be terrified when she woke up.

"Dr. Reid?"

He told them about the case he and the team were working on, and how he'd gone to the beach to think because a piece was missing from the puzzle, a piece that was there but couldn't be seen, and then he'd heard that horrible scream, the girl, Ariel, screaming on the beach, naked and bleeding and unable to move, barely able to speak.

"And you immediately called 911?" The officer asked skeptically. He looked at Reid as if he didn't believe the young doctor had the wit to follow procedures.

"What did you expect me to do? Cop a few feels while she bled out on the sand? Come on, man."

The detective's eyes hardened into daggers of jagged sharp, frozen mud. "Well, Dr. Reid, forgive me, but we have your record in our file- the FBI sent it to us when we found out you were an agent involved with a non-federal case as a civilian- and we know about your drug addiction, your erratic behavior patterns, the traumas you've suffered at the hands of some of your case suspects, your mother's schizophrenia-"

"What does any of that have to do with Ariel?"

"Ariel? You two are on a first name basis?" The office asked with mock surprise. "I was under the impression you'd never met before."

"We haven't, but-"

"But what, Dr. Reid?"

"Excuse me," and Hotchner walked through the door. "I could ask why you're badgering my agent, but we'll skip that conversation if you promise to make nice and leave him alone." The FBI agent glanced at Reid's somewhat confused, annoyed face, then said, "By the way, the Yemaya-Virginia Beach case is now officially FBI jurisdiction, so I suggest you get your ass out of here before I lose my temper and start forgetting why I didn't report you and your partner, Detective Kritikos, to your superiors, Detective Vrough."

"You can't-"

A scream, faint and terrified, echoed off the walls, stabbing at Reid's heart, silencing the other two men. A nurse rushed headlong into the room, gasping for breath as she cried, "Patient in… room 263… screaming… Doctor Del Gato… wants… Doctor Reid…."

Hotch turned to give permission, and the young genius was already sweeping past him and sprinting down the hall.

oo8oo8oo8oo

The woman, eyes glittering like frosted spring violets- the kind that were actually purple, not blue, like in that stupid rhyme for human brats- watched eagerly through the eyes of a nightingale perched upon the hospital room window sill as the girl- that irritating girl, with the hair like spun garnets beneath summer sea waters- thrashed and screamed and wept like a rabid thing every time anyone came near her, and inside the body of the tiny songbird, her thin lips curved into a smile that, when a small Monarch Butterfly happened to glimpse it with its beautiful compound eyes, stopped the poor thing's tiny heart in its chest and shredded its wings in an eye blink.

Soon, girl, she hissed. You're just the bait. I want all of them dead, and you'll be the one to bring it all about. I'll return to your nightmares again very soon, Ariel Finn.

oo8oo8oo8oo

In the words of JunoMagic:

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