Thanks for your answers – and your continued patience, my lovelies! I suspect, based on your rather overwhelming response, that I'll be continuing with the original S2-7 plan, but with my own stuff as a priority. I'll be responding to your messages this evening, but in the meantime (and as a big thank you), I actually managed to produce a chapter! Can't promise to know when the next one will be, but hey!
Pxx
0o0
Essential Listening: The River, by Imagine Dragons
"There's not much," said Garcia a couple of hours later. "Just ordinary browsing – or what I assume ordinary browsing looks like for a genius level professor type." She shot a grin at Reid. "I did notice one thing, though: there's an invitation to speak at a conference in Norway, and when I opened the page, this flashed up."
She opened a window on the smart screen the Meridian Police Department had had installed as an unexpected attempt to win their vote during the last mayoral run, showing a pop-up advert for a match-3 game.
"That's just like the one Helen Kirkpatrick described," said JJ at once.
"Uh-huh," said Garcia. "And the second it popped up every bit of anti-virus software I have on there lit up like a freaking Christmas tree, including the ones I made my very own self. It's a nasty one."
"Did you stop it?" Prentiss asked, mildly concerned.
"I'm gonna go ahead and pretend you didn't ask me that, because that would mean you doubt my mystical powers, and you should not doubt me, that would be foolish and impolite."
"Oh, of course, I'm sorry," said Prentiss, sharing a wry smile with the others.
"Okay, so it's a Trojan, some mods. Clever, but not clever enough for me!" Garcia preened, and several of them chuckled. "From the code, I can tell you he's collecting data on email, calendars, any programmes running on the PC, contacts, bank account information, everything. Also – and this is the creepiest thing in the history of time, and why I now have a post-it note over my built-in webcam camera – he can tap into webcams whenever he wants."
"There's the stalking component," said Spencer, leaning on the back of a chair.
"All wrapped up in an innocent game," Rossi mused. "Hidden in plain sight."
"I am never playing another match-3," said Grace.
"I don't even know what they are," Spencer admitted.
"Of course you don't, it wasn't invented in the thirteenth century," Morgan teased.
Spencer rolled his eyes.
"Can you track him?" Hotch asked.
"Alas, my powers are not universal, and this skin-thief has bounced this thing off about a zillion VPNS with a dozen drop points. However, I am locked in, I have a trail of thread and I am going to yank that thread until I'm all up in this unsub's creepy-ass grill."
She retreated back behind her laptop, took a slurp of one of the enormous caffeine slushies Detective Singh had brought for her when he'd realised she hadn't stopped for lunch, and started typing, oblivious to everything around her.
"We're assuming that this guy is putting these commercials in places where people who meet his criteria are likely to see it," said Rossi. "If he's targeting specific demographics we might be able to get ahead of him."
"JJ and I are re-interviewing the friends and family of the first victim to get an idea of his browsing habits," said Emily. "We want to talk to the third victim's mother, too, but we're going to wait on that, given… what happened to her husband."
"I've got a bunch of them lined up for you," said Detective Singh, an ugly expression on his face. "The first should be here soon."
"Good. Reid?" Hotch asked, turning to him.
He detached himself from the chair and gestured at the map. "There isn't much. I'm not seeing a real pattern here, perhaps because he's using the – uh – pop-up to select his victims, but I can tell you that most of the murders have taken place along the North Meridian Road." He pointed to the long, North-South road that ran through the heart of Meridian. "But honestly, that doesn't help us very much."
"That's the main access road going from and to basically everywhere in town," said Detective Singh.
"Exactly," said Reid. "All it tells us is that he has transport and is mobile."
"Wizard cartoon," Morgan pointed out, gazing at the screen. "Long, black jacket, top hat, staff. That's fits your description of how this guy sees himself."
Grace nodded, grateful that he'd listened, even if he hadn't been happy about it. "Powerful and mysterious. He probably sees it as an in-joke. Garcia, what are his IT skills like from the pop-up virus?"
Garcia was so focused on her hunt that she didn't look up, so Grace balled up a piece of notepaper and bounced it off her friend's head.
"Hey!" she squealed, glaring at them all over the top of the laptop.
"Rate the unsub's IT skills," Grace said.
Garcia's face turned into an immediate grimace. "He's good, but also a total hack. The code is sound and even clever, but it's nothing innovative. There are places where it looks like he's sewn a couple of off-the-shelf chunks together, using other people's stuff and so on. I mean, hacking code is inherently open source, but there's something flashy, but slipshod about it."
"That fits," said Grace. "Arrogant, semi-skilled, but not skilled enough to pull it off without help – and unwilling to acknowledge that. A flair for the dramatic, but quite immature."
"Exactly." She paused and narrowed her eyes. "You throw anything else at me, 007, I'll hack into your Amazon account and send you weird and suspicious things at random times, and I don't care how many members of law enforcement just heard me say that."
Even Detective Singh chuckled.
0o0
With the fourth victim, the vast quantity of paperwork that murder generated was beginning to develop into a mountain – statements, crime scene photos, autopsy reports, toxicology reports, background checks for friends, neighbours and any persons of interest all needed reading and digesting, and given how quickly this unsub was moving, it was unsurprising that the team ended up pulling an all-nighter.
Grace was too wired to sleep, anyway, what with the sheer volume of magic around. She had become accustomed to a much less magic-saturated environment since moving to Quantico and joining the BAU, and the presence of such a vast amount of raw, sparkling energy was enough to make it a struggle not to bounce off the walls. She felt a lot like she had been chugging energy drinks all day. It was also difficult not to let everyone else know it, and she knew perfectly well that the bouncing-her-leg-up-and-down method of energy dispersal was really irritating whoever sat next to her.
The horror of what had been done to these victims was sufficient to keep everyone awake, and the Detectives' office of the Police Department was unusually busy. There was a distinct sense that this one was going to be one of those cases that nobody ever let go of. It was probably the horror aspect, but each time she walked through the office, Grace was sure she spotted more and more good luck tokens of various faiths. Perhaps the other officers were instinctually sensing the darkness lurking at each scene, even without the disturbing remains of the victims still in place.
The rest of the team were feeling the weirdness, too. Even though they dealt with cases as physically and emotional disturbing as this on a daily basis, there was just something about the taking of a whole human's skin that was hard to comprehend or accept. Each of them were burying themselves in the work with more than usual dedication, avoiding having to think too hard about the nightmares that this case was going to leave them with.
Hotch in particular was unusually dour, though Grace was sure it had everything to do with the unliving horror he had ordered her to show him at the third victim's house. Reid, too, seemed a little more vulnerable than normal, what with the similarities between him and the late Bill Waters – similarities that just seemed to keep stacking up, the more they uncovered.
She glanced over at him and felt the corner of her mouth lift fondly. The kiss in the library had been an unexpected moment of sweetness in an otherwise horrible day, and by no means unwelcome. There were a whole raft of complicated emotions she needed to unpack (some of them with him) before she let whatever they were got any further, but this wasn't really the time for that.
Meeting his gaze for a moment as he turned from the map to the main board, pinning up locations and adding information in his sweeping, spidery handwriting, she offered him a small smile, which he returned almost shyly, before they both sank once again into the avalanche of paperwork developing around them.
It was just past the witching hour when Grace's phone figuratively exploded with message after message from her old team – or, at least, those of them who still chose to talk to her – signalling the start of the working day.
The Guv must have passed on my good wishes, she thought, sifting through the demands for her to write or call, advice on tackling practitioners (like she didn't already know!) and weird titbits of knowledge about flayings.
She texted most of them back, then went out into the early morning mist hanging over Meridian to call Max.
Detective Sergeant Max Cassidy was one of those people who, no matter how long it has been since you last saw or spoke to them, always made you feel like you'd only stepped out of the room five minutes before. He and Grace had come up together through the detective programme, along with a couple of other officers, and the two of them had a habit of thinking of one another as siblings. Since her relocation to America, he had been the ringleader behind various care packages (along with Alice), including a small crate full of tea, old fashioned sweets, whiskey and a book on 17th century murder following her recent brush with death.
He answered on the third ring. "Morn-n' Ki- Vishus," he said, though the words were muffled, as if his mouth was full. "Jus' grabb-n' brea-f-st a' th' 'ive."
"Hey Supermax," she replied, unable to prevent the grin from spreading across her face. "You know if you talk with your mouth full, Betsy'll kick you out for the sake of her other patrons."
"Betsy's in the back," he said, much more clearly this time. "And what she doesn't know, won't hurt her. What do you need?"
"Can't I call an old friend for a chat?" she asked, playing up the mock offence.
Max laughed. "Yes, and you do, but not during work hours. I meant what I said in the text, just let me know what I can do to help."
"You're a gentleman and a scholar," said Grace, imagining her old friend rolling his eyes.
"Wow, the talent must be very thin on the ground where you are, then."
Grace snorted. "Not as thin as all that. Just need someone with your particular expertise."
"And here was me thinking you'd hit your head and got all romantical."
"Did the Guv tell you about the case I'm working on?"
"A bit," he said, immediately switching gears. "Enough that I'm sure everyone has sent you their opinion on how the flayings were done." He lowered his voice. "Sorry, there are other customers in here, so –"
"Yeah, don't make them regret their breakfasts, or Betsy really will have your guts for garters," said Grace. "He must be using magic to do it, and as both Geoff and Arnold texted me, there are a limited number of ways of doing that. Nothing in this guy's profile suggests he's clever or powerful enough to do it."
"Hence the circle," said Max, thoughtfully. "Accomplice?"
"Highly unlikely," Grace said at once. "He won't be able to work with others; he sees himself as a sort of superior lone wolf."
Max made an unhappy sort of noise.
"Yeah," Grace agreed. "There is one thing I've been wondering – and it sounds insane, but hear me out."
"Insane is relative," said Max philosophically. "In an hour I have an appointment to meet a 12th century mummy about a records search."
"Fair. Okay, I know traditionally modern tech does not play well with magic –"
"Tends to get a bit melty, yeah," Max remarked, between bites of whatever his breakfast was.
"– but this unsub is tech-savvy. He's using a virus to stalk his victims, learn their routines and so on. What if the virus contains code that activates some kind of holding spell? None of the victims resisted – there are no defensive wounds, or signs of a struggle, and not one neighbour heard screaming – even on the campus, which was teeming with students last night because of some kind of rally."
There was a moment of speculative silence in which Grace could mostly hear chewing.
"I've heard the odd rumour," he said, at last. "Hard drives with spells built into the software, made to order. Sounded like bollocks, but it wouldn't surprise me. The IT field is always moving forward, and you know what practitioners are like for prodding things other people think they shouldn't."
"Anything more concrete?"
"No, sorry. I'll ask around, though. Might've started trickling through – may be something that's evolving elsewhere, like over there, or in Asia, and making its way into our patches more slowly." He took a noisy slurp of tea that made Grace wince and continued, "If you're right it'll be a brave new world of new and horrible ways to fuck people up with magic."
"You've got that right," said Grace, thinking of the crime scenes. "Bringing anyone who is unskilled and powerful the tools they need to cause trouble."
"Or skilled, but weak."
"Hmm."
"You might try the local goblin market," he suggested, and Grace nodded, even though he couldn't see her.
"Yes, that was next on my list. There're always people willing to sell less legal stuff under the counter – and everything I've looked into suggests it's pretty much all deregulated over here anyway. I get the impression most practitioners are either self-policing or get caught in other investigations, where there's enough evidence to tie someone to a crime, but not enough to work out how they did it. There's no Eldritch Branch equivalent."
"Except you," he teased.
Grace laughed. "I hate to break it to you, Supermax, but America's a big place. It'll take more than one weirdo with a badge to keep the other weirdos from hurting people."
She thought fleetingly of Sergeant Barnum. Perhaps there were others, surreptitiously keeping an eye on things, their colleagues unaware of their (and likely the criminals they dealt with) more unusual skills or habits. At the very least, it meant eyes on the ground with local knowledge.
Perhaps, when all of this was over, she should get Alice to mine Garcia for the tools to start finding practitioners who were also first responders and linking them into some kind of useful network.
"I think you could handle them," said Max.
"I could handle you," Grace replied automatically and he laughed.
"Weirdo. I miss your stupid face."
Grace smiled. "You know, you could always come out here and visit my stupid face."
"Maybe I will."
"You'd be more than welcome – the others too, if they fancied it," she offered. "Well, maybe not Roger…"
Max snorted. "Do me a favour, Kid Vicious, and don't get dead before I get a chance to take you up on that. This bastard sounds tricky – and I know you have enough trickiness in you for about six people, but still. It's not like your team can really back you up on this one."
"I'll do my best," she promised, clicking the bones in her wrist in an absent minded sort of way.
"Alright then. Hey, if you get your hands on any of this technomancy kit, I'd love to take one apart."
"I'll get you one for your birthday," she promised.
"Hey, even Goblin Markets keep digital records these days – your techie friend that's mentoring Alice might have an in there."
Grace's smile turned into a frown. "You keeping me on the line for some reason? You know that's the first thing I'm gonna check."
"I just, er…"
"What?"
Max sniffed, took a monster slurp of tea with a noise that never failed to turn Grace's stomach, and said, "How's your wrist?"
She didn't answer right away, gazing out into the still, slightly damp night. "Got the cast off, which is a bit of a relief," she said at last. "And it's started clicking, which is a pain in the arse."
"Yeah, I bet."
"Mmm."
Max sighed, but didn't say anything else about it, to Grace's relief. "Alright, I've got to go. I don't want to be late for Old Meg."
"Old Meg's always late, to begin with," she responded, but the humour was half-hearted.
0o0
"Yahtzee!" Garcia shouted, leaping up from her chair.
It was a quarter to five, and about half an hour before shift change. Most of the department were out, or lulled into that semi-savage dullness that you only really got on an early morning when everyone had worked straight through. Spencer and Grace jumped out of their skins [no pun intended]; Morgan dropped his half-cold cup of coffee; JJ clutched her chest in fright; Rossi gave a loud snort that suggested he had been asleep; and Emily – who had been asleep with her face on the desk – shot upright so fast she fell off her chair.
"Holy mother of –" Morgan exclaimed. "Babygirl, go easy on us. It's not even dawn yet and not a single one of us has slept yet. Well, except Prentiss."
Emily glowered at him as Hotch pulled her to her feet, giving him some choice words of complaint.
Garcia ignored them. "I tracked his servers," she said, and suddenly everyone was significantly more awake. "Not his IP address – this sneaky little asshat his clever, but not that clever. I'm onto him. I am onto his tricks."
"Garcia, slow down," said Hotch. "You said you have his servers – do you have an address?"
"No, no, I have his servers, but he's got them cycling randomly. He's using a pseudonym – at least, the name he registered them under dead-ends in a guy who died in 1992 with an address on a vacant lot. But I have his servers, and he's not about to change those now."
"Which means?" Rossi asked.
"It means," said Garcia, with the air of someone being made to explain post graduate physics to a room full of five year olds, "I can stop him using the virus from his dumb pop-up thing to select his victims and stalk them."
"And that's way more than we had yesterday," said JJ, a smile beginning to form on her face.
"Can you write a programme to track his IP address?" Spencer asked.
"A virus to piggyback on his virus?" she asked, giving him a hard stare. "Oh, you know, I hadn't thought of that."
Spencer rolled his eyes, fondly.
"How long will it take, Garcia?" Hotch asked.
"It's already running, but I don't know. You profiled this guy as arrogant, and he's nothing but a hack, but in this instance his IT skills are annoyingly on point, as far as I can tell."
"Keep at it," Hotch instructed.
"The sun'll be up in a couple of hours," Rossi mused.
"The rest of us should get some sleep," said Hotch, and people began to stir.
"Oh, I'm so out," said Emily, stretching. "My brain has turned to soup."
"Me too." JJ yawned.
"I've actually just hit a second wind," said Grace, and felt Hotch's eyes laser in on the side of her head. "You guys sleep, I'll take the next shift."
"Uh, yeah, me too," said Reid. He shot Grace a look and then glanced at Hotch. "Someone's gotta keep Garcia company."
"You sleepin' Babygirl?" Morgan asked, following their cue.
"Sleep is for the weak," she said, not even looking up from her keyboard.
"Guess I'm stayin' too," said Morgan, with affection.
"Alright," said Hotch, after a long moment. "Call us if anything changes."
"You got it," said Morgan.
0o0
Twenty minutes later, he was asleep on the desk, snoring lightly, and Garcia was so deeply engrossed in cracking the guy's IP that she hadn't even commented.
Spencer glanced out into the main homicide office. It was quiet, though a lot of officers were dozing at their desks or downing mug after mug of coffee. Right now, this chase was paperwork, forensics and processing, and that couldn't be done properly at speed. It made for a lull in attentiveness, and that was useful for his current purposes.
Shooting a glance at Garcia and Morgan, he took the corner seat beside Grace, angled so they were both next to one another and opposite. She looked up from her paperwork and gave him a tired grimace.
"How're you holding up?" she asked, sending her own glance towards their colleagues.
"Better," he said, a small smile growing on his face. "Thanks."
Below the table, she knocked her leg into his, companionably; his smile broadened.
"So, what's really going on here?" he asked, more soberly.
Grace sighed and rubbed her face. "Our guy is using what I think is pre-programmed hack magic, built into computer software to subdue and possibly flay people alive," she said quietly, and then gave him a few moments to let that sink in.
Spencer stared at her, horrified. "Is that even possible?"
She gave a sort of facial shrug. "Three days ago, I'd have said no, but –" She waved a hand at the autopsy reports in front of her."
"You've never heard of that before?"
"No," she said. "But I asked Max, and he made noises about rumours, but there's nothing concrete."
Spencer nodded thoughtfully. "Okay, so he's on the front lines of magical and technological advancements. Why?"
"Why cross-pollinate electrical goods and magic?"
"No, I kinda get that," he said. "It's convenient, it's ubiquitous – and…" He met her gaze with no small amount of amusement, despite the tenor of the conversation. "And I totally get wanting to be able to do real magic."
Grace huffed a laugh. "Yeah, it's fairly tempting."
He frowned. "Not – not flaying, or anything," he assured her, and she gave his arm an answering squeeze.
He had to fight to keep the smile off his face. "What I mean is, why this? Why now?"
For a moment, Grace gazed out into the quiet bullpen beyond the blinds. Spencer waited, aware that this wasn't offence, or a brush off – merely her way of gathering her thoughts.
"From what I saw at the crime scene, he's using blended rituals and pseudo-scientific magic to tear these men from their bodies and trap them, in order to consume them, or bind them to him."
Spencer felt his eyebrows rocket skywards. "Like… their souls?"
Grace nodded, looking very weary and not a little angry.
He opened his mouth and shut it again. Then, "And he's using them for what, power? Like a battery?"
"More or less."
They were quiet for a moment as Spencer considered the logical conclusion of this. "We better get him before he finishes his ritual."
This time, Grace's nod was particularly emphatic.
A feeling of suspicion stole over him and Spencer narrowed his eyes. "You're going after him alone, aren't you," he said flatly.
Again, Grace rubbed a tired hand over her face. "I don't much like the idea, either – and it's been years since I properly sparred with someone – but I've got a much better shot at walking out of it than any of the rest of you."
He gave her the kind of look he knew in the depths of his soul that she would be giving him right now, were their positions reversed.
"Flak jackets and riot gear aren't much good against someone like me," she told him gently.
"You got shot in New York," he pointed out, and glanced at her wrist. He didn't say the words 'Peach Tree City' aloud, though.
A kiss was a kiss, but it didn't mean there wasn't still a line.
"We're far from immortal," she admitted, rotating her wrist. It gave a crunchy sort of click and Spencer winced on her behalf. "But I'm our best chance at bringing this guy to his knees."
Measuring the certainty in her voice, and weighing the likelihood that they were facing something outside of everyone's ballpark but hers, he nodded. "Okay. What's our next move?"
Some of the tension left Grace's features immediately. "Our?" she asked, cocking her head to one side, almost playfully.
"Mmhmm."
"My next move is to find the local goblin market and give it a good, old-fashioned shake down."
He frowned. "Goblin market… like, Christina Rosetti's goblin market?"
"More or less," she said again. "Much less fae and much more like a cross between a dodgy, low-level arms dealer and a suspicious aromatherapy shop. It's where all the local practitioners will get their ingredients – particularly the ones that might be frowned upon by a law enforcement agency, if they had any idea they existed in the first place."
Momentarily caught on the possibility that a shop like this might have rare books, he missed Grace's look of amusement.
"I think you ought to stay here, though."
"What? Why?" he asked, crestfallen.
"Far too many things to tempt a magician who 'wouldn't mind trying real magic' for themselves, there," she said, almost playfully.
He rolled his eyes. "I am never living that admission down, am I?"
"Not likely," she said, with a curve to her lips that did interesting things to his insides; then she frowned. "And the proprietors can spot a novice a mile off. It goes with the territory. I don't want you to become an ingredient for something. Besides, you're best placed to spot any weirdness that crops up – weirderness, anyway – and keep the others out of it until I get back."
Spencer sighed, resigned to the wisdom of this. It was her area, after all. "Fine."
He looked down, feeling her fingers lace with his, and then up into those periwinkle eyes that haunted the long hours before dawn. "I'll make it up to you," she promised, and he found himself glancing at her lips – and then further down, towards the dip of her collarbone, just visible at her neckline.
He swallowed. "Yeah?"
"I'll take you to a far more legit magical shop, when we're back in DC," she offered, and then gave him a deliciously crooked smile. "Among other things."