The Dying of the Light

His mind had barely registered her screaming his name before he was out of his room, gun in hand, racing to her door with the other members of his team. Morgan got there first and pulled the now silent Prentiss into the hallway, shoving her towards the waiting Rossi. Hotch spared a moment to look over his agent, and seeing that she appeared to be physically fine, he pushed his way into her hotel room, Morgan and Reid following closely behind him. What he saw, well, he was sure he wasn't going to stop seeing it any time soon.

No wonder she'd screamed.

She had found the body of, who was in all likelihood, their latest victim, although the state of the body made it impossible to tell for sure. And not only had she found it, but she had found it in her room. Nailed to her wall.

As he took in the details – the stitches holding the eyelids open and exposing the empty ocular cavities, the eyes removed from their sockets and placed in the mouth which was frozen open in a silent scream, the tongue and vocal cords torn out and discarded on the blood-soaked floor, the intestines pulled from the open abdomen and knotted around the neck like a hangman's noose – Hotch motioned for Reid to join him.

"Call for CSU, tell them that this is now their first priority. Then call the detectives, have them meet us at the station."

Reid nodded as he walked off, already dialing the numbers.

Morgan took his place.

"She must've still been alive when he brought her here, there's too much blood for her to already have been dead."

Morgan took Hotch's silence for agreement and continued, "That's a bold move, breaking into an FBI agent's room with a live victim. Why take that chance?"

Hotch took that moment to speak, "How did he get in?"

"What?"

"How did he get in here? The window is locked, the door was locked, the vents are too small to crawl through, there's no connecting door. How did he get in?"

Hotch didn't wait for an answer, instead turning and walking back out to where Rossi was softly talking to Prentiss. She looked up at him as he approached, and he held out his room key.

"You can change in my room. We're headed to the station."

She took the key card from his outstretched hand, nodded, and went back into her now former hotel room, presumably to grab her go-bag. As they watched her go, Rossi gravely spoke:

"I have a bad feeling about this one, Aaron."

As his friend returned to his own hotel room to prepare for the long day that was stretching out before them, Hotch couldn't help but feel a coil of anxiety tightening in his own gut.

Yeah, I have a bad feeling about this one too.

He had been watching her for the last five hours, since they had arrived at the police station to add these newest elements to their admittedly lacking profile. He had seen her pack her earlier distress away into those infamous boxes, seen her shields come up and watched her slip back into her mask. She seemed fine, kept insisting that she was, but the knot that was in his stomach from earlier was only growing. He felt a surge of protectiveness flood him as he watched yet another of the deputies come to speak with her, laying his hand on her arm and no doubt asking her about what had happened at the hotel. He pushed it down, attempting to block out the voice in his head that was insisting that something was going to happen, but he couldn't quite shake it. So lost was he in his own internal battle that it took him a moment to realize that the conversation had stopped and everyone was now waiting for him to say something.

He cleared his throat.

"Morgan, take Rossi and go down to the morgue. This one was different from the other five, and we need to know why. Prentiss and I will head out to the last dump site and see if we missed anything. Reid, I want you to call JJ, see if she can get us two new rooms. Then coordinate with Garcia. Go over everything again, all of their contacts, the places they frequented, everything. Nobody goes out alone. We don't know much about him, so be careful. Check in every two hours."

He made eye contact with each of his agents, and they nodded back at him. Morgan and Rossi immediately stood and started toward one of the SUVs. Hotch waited for Emily to meet him at the door before following her outside. As they made their way to the waiting Suburban, Hotch noticed that the air was heavier now than it had been when they had arrived at the station earlier that morning. He glanced up at the sky and saw the dark clouds rolling in – a storm was coming. The knot in his stomach clenched painfully, but once again he pushed it out of his mind. They climbed into the SUV and he drove them off into the dying light.