Midmorning light flooded her office and Vicki rubbed her eyes for the hundredth time. Hunting demons and keeping regular hours were pretty much mutually exclusive and yet here she was, sitting at her desk, trying to focus on the phone records of a very normal, very adulterous husband she'd been hired to expose. Can't all be 2 am chases and improvised weaponry, she thought, as she shuffled the pages again and squinted at them through her glasses.
Reading the same line ten times over and not registering any of the information, Vicki decided it was time for more coffee. She picked up her empty mug and rounded the table, heading into Coreen's area of the office. She'd given her assistant a couple of days off after she fell asleep at her desk while researching the batlike creature Vicki had spent most of the night tracking. Even though she was meant to be resting, Coreen had already emailed and faxed her twenty new pages on potential weapons, spells and traps to use on their latest monster. Vicki sighed as she pulled another couple of sheets from the fax machine, scanning them tiredly while she poured coffee from the pot into her TPS mug.
She dropped the pages on Coreen's desk, planning on reading them when she was more alert. Vicki trailed into her office and sat heavily in her chair, placing her coffee cup carefully to the side of the desk and dropping her head into her hands. Bed, sleep, sheets, soft, warm... a tumble of words and images circled around her head and she growled into her hands. Focus - cheating husbands aren't as interesting as murderous fiends (or soft beds) but they pay the bills. Just as she readied herself to take another stab at the phone records, she heard a soft rap at her door. She looked up from her desk to see two familiar figures standing in the doorway, watching her. The couple from last night.
"Victoria Nelson?" The man stepped forward first, his long coat whispering against his dark suit. The woman was close behind him, watching Vicki carefully with bright blue eyes. The PI regarded them both with caution. Trenchcoats, suits, neutral colours... government agency, for sure.
"That's me." She watched as they pulled identification out of their pockets in almost mirror image.
"I'm Agent Mulder, this is Agent Scully. We're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and we'd like to talk to you about last night." Vicki cringed inwardly. Of all the people for the demon she was following to choose for a snack, it had to be a couple of feds away from home. She indicated the seats opposite her desk and watched them sit down, focusing their attention on her.
"How did you find me?"
Vicki picked up her coffee and took a sip, taking in the agents across from her. The man was obviously tall, even seated, and his suit hung from his shoulders in a reasonably attractive way, if not quite in the manner that Mike's fit across his muscled chest. His eyes had an insistent probing quality but, although she was getting a pretty pissed off vibe from him, she didn't sense the usual macho bullshit presented by out of town cops. His partner tilted her head slightly. Those blue eyes were a little unsettling. Between the two of them, Vicki felt a little like something being observed in a test tube.
"We asked one of the TPS detectives on duty this morning about a woman in glasses roaming the streets in the middle of the night, involved in paranormal activity. Your name came up rather quickly."
The female agent had a ghost of a smile on her lips as she spoke. Vicki raised an eyebrow and let her gaze wander. She was easily recognisable as the woman firing her 9mm at the supernatural predator the previous night. Her hair was a golden red in the sunlight that filtered through the office windows. She was tiny compared to her partner but the brightness of her burning-ember hair, her blue eyes and her pale skin gave her a certain presence. Vicki had the feeling her quick appraisal hadn't been missed by the female agent but she feigned nonchalance, leaning back in her chair and cradling her mug in both hands.
"So, what would you like to know?" A faint look of disbelief appeared on Mulder's face. Vicki couldn't blame him.
"Well, let's start with what the hell was that thing?" Vicki shrugged and sipped her coffee. She was way too tired to go through the whole This'll-sound-a-little-weird-but... routine and being direct sometimes got rid of people with questions. Play the crazy card and Uno! Only one person left in the room.
"Ice demon." There was a pause, during which Vicki calmly returned the twin blank stares she was receiving. Scully recovered first, leaning forward slightly and making very direct eye contact, speaking slowly as if Vicki was a child with an overactive imagination.
"An ice demon?" Vicki nodded. Scully shot a look at Mulder before returning her attention to Vicki. "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?" Vicki smirked into her cup.
"That's what you're getting from this? Infernal popsicles don't make sense?" She watched them both, waiting for them to thank her for her help and leave, shaking their heads. When neither moved an inch, she sighed, placing her mug to the left of her phone records and pushing a folder full of papers across the desk. "As far as I can tell, it's from Scandanavian mythology. A sorceror wants to take control of his little section of Nordic countryside, so he creates a kind of crystal ball with eternally swirling ice and snow inside. Says a couple of spells, rubs the ball and hey presto, instant ice demon." She paused as they flipped through the research she'd gathered, with much help from Coreen.
"It seems that this crystal ball is more fact than fiction and someone who knows what it is has managed to create their very own pet ice demon. I can't find anything on how to kill them so the next best thing I've got is finding Mr Magic. Problem is I've hit a complete dead end in tracking this guy down. I've talked to every historian, every antiquities dealer and run fifty something names through every database there is and nothing." She took a deep breath, rubbing the bridge of her nose trying to stave off a headache.
"So I've been following this thing round for the past week trying to make sure it doesn't eat anyone I know." Mulder looked at her with intense curiosity, as if deciding whether she was insane or just a little cracked. His question surprised her.
"You shot that thing last night and it cut and run. My partner emptied a full clip into it and it didn't even flinch. What did you do?" Vicki smiled at him and hooked a boot under the strap of the rifle she'd left leaning against a filing cabinet. She swung the firearm into one hand and placed it on the desk.
"Salt cartridges. A little body modification, the right coating on the inside of the barrel and knowing something about home made ammunition goes a long way to deterring a demon." Mulder picked up the gun and examined it, running sure fingers across the cold metal.
"Why salt? I would have thought hot sauce would be a more irritating condiment." He shot her a half smile and Vicki felt the aggression he'd arrived with dissipate. If she'd been attacked by some supernatural ice cube and the person who saved her disappeared without so much as a "Jeez, you sure get some bad hail up here!", she'd be pissed too. But hell, she was just happy they weren't trying to have her committed, jurisdictionary boundaries or no.
"Salt bullets work on an ice demon like hollow points on humans. Salt goes in, melts the ice it hits on the way and once it's embedded, causes major internal water haemorrhage. A day of rest and recuperation in its chosen den will pretty much fix an ice demon up but a couple of good shots can cut its night short, enough to save a few people anyway." Vicki rubbed her eyes tiredly.
"That would explain the trails of water droplets across the pavement after it flew off. Scully said the water was slightly saline." Mulder turned to his partner who looked up from the pages she was studying to Vicki.
"If this is true, wouldn't destroying the crystal ball kill the creature? In theory, this thing is elemental and derives its energy from the ball. Wouldn't shattering it cease animation?" Vicki admired the intelligence of the female agent and smiled at the glasses she put on to read the photocopies and printouts. Differently shaped to her own, they were a little owlish but managed to complement the redhead's large eyes perfectly.
"It should do, yeah. But there's still the small problem of not being able to find the genius who summoned the demon in the first place." Scully shot a look at Mulder and Vicki frowned. "What?"
"We found your guy." Scully removed her glasses and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her left ear. "Remember the X-File on that Baltimore man, Leo Hodges, found in his apartment covered in frost? You filed it a week before the first death, Mulder." As her partner nodded in recognition, Scully turned to Vicki.
"We're here following a series of deaths in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and now two in Toronto that were red flagged as similar to the ones in the US. All of the deceased were discovered with no obvious cause of death but with a significantly lowered body temperature hours, sometimes minutes, after death. This is expected, of course, but not to the degree reported. There was cell crystallisation, something that usually only occurs in people who've died of hypothermia, present in all the bodies, with average temperatures reported for each time of death in every location." She crossed her legs and thought for a moment.
"If I remember correctly, Hodges was a collector of antiquities and unusual artifacts. He was found face down on the floor of his penthouse apartment with every surface, especially around his body, covered with frost and ice. The only other thing out of place was a small radius of shattered glass near his left hip. It was assumed it was the crushed bowl of a champagne flute but what if it was this crystal ball you mention? It would certainly explain the frost. Some sort of endothermic reaction, like ethanoic acid with sodium carbonate, but much more powerful." Scully looked very far away for a moment and Vicki glanced at Mulder with a questioning look. He gave a slight shrug.
"She's not a big fan of the paranormal. I think a chemical reaction is more comforting than a sorceror's christmas decoration complete with magic snow and ice." Scully eyed him with vague hostility and amusement. Vicki coughed to hide her smile. Then she considered what she'd heard.
"But if that's right, the demon should be toast. It should have melted as soon as the crystal smashed. Unless..." She held her hand out for the file, which the other woman handed her. She flipped through until she found a page with a large asterisk in red pen next to an ending paragraph.
"Here... In some versions of the myth, the sorcerer's plan came undone because he was forced to destroy each ice demon several days after creation, to stop them becoming too powerful. Like the golems in Jewish folklore, the ice demons became more difficult to control as time passed. The sorceror was eventually killed by one demon he failed to 'deactivate' before it overpowered him."
Vicki looked up. "That's not good."
"So Hodges was killed by the demon or crystal ball's energy when it broke... either way, the demon is still alive and neither the destruction of the crystal nor the death of its summoner has had any effect on it. And you have no idea how to kill it yourself." Scully summarised grimly. Mulder shifted in his chair, looking impatient with his partner's line of thought.
"Do we even want to kill it? We should study it, Scully. If there's even the slightest chance we can capture it, we've got to. What if this crystal ball was a piece of alien technology that controlled the movement and direction of wormholes - that creature could be an alien, come through from another galaxy or even another point in human history." He shot her a let's-be-reasonable look, hands spread.
"Come on, isn't that more likely than magic and ice demons? More scientifically sound?" He paused, turning to Vicki. "No offence, Ms Nelson." She shrugged, standing up to lean against the back wall with her arms crossed.
"Doesn't bother me, I'm already betrothed to the Bruce Willis of the underworld. But seriously, what kind of cases are the FBI picking up these days?" Mulder smirked at Vicki. Scully shook her head vehemently, ignoring their little exchange.
"It doesn't matter what this thing is, alien or demon or genetic anomaly, it has killed eight people so far and we are not Animal Control. Our priority should be finding a way to destroy it and that's going to be hard enough. It's been alive for at least 3 weeks by our investigation, it's got to be a lot stronger than it was when Hodges died. Do we know how it feeds? Does it... feed?" She looked to Vicki who took a deep breath in and scuffed her shoe against the offices old wooden floor.
"I don't know. If it's responsible for your deaths then I guess it's taken something from the victims. The cyclist and the business exec they found here had nothing wrong with them, apart from being very cold and very dead. It's not eating any part of the victims and no one has seen it kill. I've seen a few attempted attacks but I managed to pop it each time before it chowed down. It freezes them... maybe it takes their heat?" Vicki was guessing, trying to find them an in. Mulder looked pensive but Scully began to nod slowly.
"An energy exchange. It's possible..." Mulder stood and walked to the window, hands in pockets. He turned to Vicki, his face open and inviting ideas.
"So, how're we going to stop this thing killing people?" Vicki looked from one agent to another and then to her coffee, gone disgustingly cold. And here she was hoping for an afternoon nap.
"Well, our best bet is to find where it sleeps. Attacking it during the day when its more vulnerable can only help. The problem is that it changes location every few days. This thing does not like to get comfortable. I found the basement of a condemned building that looked like the inside of a freezer a few days ago - that was its last hang out. Now, I have no idea. I know it's somewhere to the north-east. But with my assistant running herself into the ground, the other cases I have and the police being..." Vicki paused, searching for the right words, "...less than helpful, all I've been able to do is tail it until it gives up for the night."
She watched as Mulder and Scully shared a look and an understanding passed between them. It reminded Vicki of her and Mike when she was still on Homicide. The little redhead stood and her partner joined her by Vicki's desk.
"That's where we come in." Mulder started. "We'll help you track down this thing tonight and stay on it until it flies away home. A few extra bodies and a car couldn't hurt, if you don't mind us tagging along. Once we've figured out where it's hiding during the day, we're one step closer to getting rid of it altogether. If that's what we have to do..." He looked to Scully and she avoided his eyes. Vicki got the idea that it sucked being on the wrong end of that doleful look.
"For now, we've got files to relieve the local detectives of. Maybe we can get some help from them on possible locations for a demon to get some shut-eye. We might track down its nest before tonight." Vicki smiled half-heartedly, doubting their luck would hold out. As the FBI agents turned to leave, she remembered something.
"Ask for Mike Celluci, he'll help you out. Tell him I sent you, only leave out the part about the ice demon. It'll be easier, trust me." Scully nodded to her and Vicki tried to ignore the prickle at the back of her neck those eyes seemed to cause.
"Where shall we meet you?" Vicki pulled out a map from her top drawer, unfolded half of it and circled a patch of green a block north of the university.
"Ramsden Park. I've been starting out there for the past few nights. The demon tends to fly over around 10 o'clock. I'll be by the fountain from about 9."
She handed the map over to Agent Mulder, who tucked it into a coat pocket. As they both left in a swirl of tan and grey, Vicki flopped back into her chair. She stayed still for a moment, wondering how she ended up working one of her GhostBusters cases with a couple of FBI agents - who seemed to believe her. She shook it off and reached for her cheating husband's phone records. Plenty of time to think about her new allies after she'd earned her paycheck.
