Hi all!

Cheers to JaneyGWF for betaing as always! Please let me know if you like this one, it's a bit more plot-like than usual, so if you guys really hate chapters like this, let me know!

Maura had been in the other room talking to her mothers for several awkward minutes, leaving Frankie and Jane sitting uncomfortably with no idea what to say to each other. Until recently, they had kept their relationship close and amicable by avoiding the subject of vampires and their mother's death entirely. Now that it was in the open, it felt like a wedge had been driven between them. Jane had no idea why, but it felt like she had betrayed Frankie somehow, and she'd just been caught.

Not wanting to dwell on it, she grasped desperately for a safe topic. "So, has anything interesting been going on at the station lately?"

Frankie sat up a little straighter, obviously thankful for the chance to think about something else for a minute. "Well, things have been fairly quiet since the mob bosses went down really. I assume Maura…well, anyway."

Jane sighed in frustration, baffled by the way that everything somehow came back to the taboo subject.

Frankie suddenly chuckled slightly, drawing a surprised look from Jane as he explained. "OK, you want something interesting. This happened yesterday. We've been working with DCU on a drugs and arms dealer ring, one of the last organised groups we know about. We got involved because there was one murdered dealer linked to the ring, plus our case load has been basically zero lately. Anyway, we've been tracking these guys, trying to get someone undercover, tracing the deliveries, but nothing's worked. Then, out of nowhere, the ringleader and all his top guys turn up at the station and turn themselves in. They completely cooperate, tell us everything they've been doing, name all their suppliers, everything we could ever want to know."

Jane gaped for a moment in disbelief, making Frankie chuckle again before continuing. "I know! We couldn't believe it either! It turns out that the leader is convinced he's cursed. He's been feeling sick for a few weeks, with a few weird symptoms like boils, sores, nose bleeds, that sort of thing. He had these books and flyers about a curse that can be put on someone, and the only way to recover is to confess and repent, or something like that. Apparently he went and saw a whole bunch of doctors, and there was nothing medically wrong with him, so he decided to turn himself in."

Jane laughed, then turned to see Maura coming back into the room with an amused and smug look on her face. Jane raised an eyebrow. She knew that look, it was Maura's 'I just proved who the killer is' look.

Jane cleared her throat to get Maura's attention. "Something you'd like to share with the class?"

The guilty look on her face made Frankie groan in frustration. "Really? This was you too? Why do we even bother having real cops in this town?"

Jane tried not to laugh as Maura answered apologetically. "I'm sorry, Frankie. I just wanted to try a new method of getting criminals off the streets. I've been putting chemicals in his food for a few weeks, which cause the symptoms you describe but without any long term ill effects. I also planted the religious material in his safe house and put up some posters in his neighbourhood."

Jane lost the battle and burst out laughing. "And exactly why did you need to go to all this trouble to get one arms dealer to confess? Surely it would have been quicker to just call in an anonymous tip and then knock them all out when BPD showed up."

Maura nodded. "Quicker, yes, but I wanted to see if I could get him to truly regret his actions, and prevent him from returning to the same activities once he serves his time. I know I can bash heads and get criminals off the street, but I also want to make an effort to stop them coming back again."

That brought Jane's laughter to a stop. She looked at Frankie, who was also looking contemplative. They had always had a specific job as cops, which was to get criminals away from law-abiding citizens, but the rehabilitation part had always been someone else's responsibility. Maura had managed to go a step further, or at least she'd tried to.

Jane smiled proudly at her friend, who looked back with a hopeful expression. "So, is it okay that I did this? I can stop if I'm treading on someone's toes, I just wanted to do more."

Frankie jumped in before Jane could respond. "It's actually a great idea. I mean, normal people wouldn't have been able to pull it off, but I guess if you can manage it, and you have the time, it's a really smart way to go about it. No casualties, lots of criminals behind bars, win-win."

Maura smiled happily at Frankie, obviously thrilled to have done something right in the eyes of the younger Rizzoli detective. Jane felt a slight pang of unease at his 'normal' comment, but let it pass as an assumed innocent use of the expression rather than an intentional dig at Maura.

The three passed the time until Maura's mothers arrived by getting Frankie up to speed on everything they knew about vampires. He had already seen a glimpse of their powers when he watched Maura during the mob war, but he was amazed to hear just how fast and strong she really was. Jane tried to pull the conversation up before they told him how to kill vampires, just in case he hadn't really forgiven Maura completely, but Maura barrelled right through the subject without pause. She even showed Frankie a few of the incendiary rounds from Jane's ammo stockpile. She either trusted him completely, or had decided that if he wanted to kill her someday, he deserved to know how. The unsettling suspicion that it might be the more troubling option made Jane frown unhappily, unnoticed by either of the others as they continued to discuss ammunition.

The moment for Jane to comment passed as the door swung open, with Constance and Hope walking in together chatting animatedly. They stopped talking as they noticed Frankie, regarding him warily as they noted him sitting next to their daughter holding a handful of bullets.

Maura was oblivious to their uneasiness, bustling over and ushering them into the lounge room. Frankie got up and joined them, handing the bullets back to Maura. Jane stood carefully, moving slowly to give her arm a chance to adjust to the new position. As she finally made it to a seat, Maura reappeared, the bullets presumably put away and the stack of files in her hands. She glanced at Jane, asking silently if she wanted to take the lead, but Jane shook her head minutely, passing the control of the informal meeting over to Maura. As much as Jane was used to taking the lead in investigations, this felt like a time where Maura needed to be in control of something. Since they weren't having much luck controlling anything else, the least Jane could do was let Maura speak about a subject she was now an expert in.

Maura carefully divided the files into stacks on the table before starting to speak. "Thank you all for coming. As I mentioned, Frankie has become aware of the existence of vampires, and we have agreed to inform him about everything that has happened since…well, since I became one. The reason this is happening now is that he is being sent to New York to assist a task force that will be, on the surface, pursuing a cult. We know, however, that the so-called cult is actually a group of vampires."

Constance and Hope looked concerned, but didn't interrupt. "I wanted to get all of us together to make sure everyone is on the same page."

Jane and Frankie shared a small grin when Maura got the slang right. They sat and listened as Maura went through every event that had occurred since they had first encountered a vampire. Jane had heard it all before, as well as living through most of it, so she spent most of the time watching everyone's reactions.

Frankie looked bewildered from the start, and the expression didn't change until Maura reached the part about their mother dying. Jane could see the rage making his whole body tremble as he heard exactly how she'd died, and she noted that it didn't dissipate until he heard how she'd been avenged at Jane's hands. Even then, there was still some residual anger, evidenced by his hands, which hadn't let go of their death grip on his seat the entire time Maura had been talking. He had mostly been maintaining normal eye contact, but he still looked a little uneasy when he looked at Maura, his eyes sometimes sliding away for a moment before he regained his composure and concentrated again.

Like Jane, Constance and Hope had heard most of the story before, so their reactions were calmer. They both looked sad when Maura talked about all the difficulties she'd faced, and Jane knew that Maura had skated over most of them. She'd only mentioned physical obstacles, like her unquenchable thirst or inability to be seen in sunlight. She hadn't talked about the crippling loneliness, or her fears for the future. She hadn't explained the dark place she'd ended up in after she accidentally killed Angela, or the struggle she'd endured to get back to where she was now.

Instead, Maura focussed on the parts of her story that were relevant to the problem in front of them. Frankie was going to an unfamiliar city which, unlike Boston, had murderous vampires to deal with.

Maura completed her story and summarised the statistics they had discovered. "So, as far as we know, there have been twenty four hybrids born in Boston, twenty one in Chicago, twenty two in Philadelphia, and thirty one in New York. These are the latest numbers based on the reports we have here. It is very likely that there are more, since these are just the mothers' bodies that have been found."

Constance sat forward and interrupted politely. "I have managed to establish contacts with offices of the medical examiner in thirty five states. As far as I've been able to find, these are the only four cities in the U.S. that have seen these types of deaths. They also don't match any historical cases. It seems as though hybrids are a new phenomenon, or at least this practice of mass breeding is new."

Maura nodded. "That corroborates the story I got from Carlisle and the Volturi."

Jane noticed the slight catch in Maura's voice as she flinched at having to mention their deceased tormentor, but it was brief. "We also know of multiple deaths identifiable as vampire kills that have occurred in all four affected cities since the hybrids started being bred."

Constance interjected again. "Vampire killings have been around as long as there are records, but never in this number. I have case files for eighty seven murders that occurred at or around the same time as the hybrid births. The national average for vampire murders seems to be closer to a death per month in a major city, but these deaths have been happening at a rate of more than one a week per city."

Hope sat up to add her part to the discussion, her voice hesitant. "I've seen these sort of deaths at a lot of my clinics, before I knew what I was looking at. I can recall three separate instances of towns that appeared to have some sort of violent serial killer attacking them, which must have been a vampire or a group of vampires killing and then covering their tracks badly. I couldn't get any specific records from any of my contacts, but from what I've heard, there were about fifty deaths that were probably vampire related over a two year period. There were probably hundreds more that I didn't hear about. This was mostly in third world countries though. Murders aren't necessarily looked into as carefully as they are here, so there would have been nobody to notice the trend. I only heard about the killings because I ended up with a lot of orphaned children or widowed wives in my clinics, who told me about a faceless killer that came at night without a sound."

The whole room sobered as they let the magnitude of the issue sink in. It was a worldwide issue, with vampires potentially in every country. They were ridiculously powerful, fast, impossible to kill and insatiable in their thirst. There would be nothing any human law enforcement agency could do to stop them.

Frankie was the first to speak up. "So, if there's been vampires murdering people all throughout history, how is it nobody has ever noticed? It's bad enough now with these 'serial killer' murders, but this has obviously been going on forever, right?"

Maura nodded thoughtfully. "When this first happened to me, I tried to research vampires, both on the internet and at local libraries. I also quietly contacted a few colleagues at various universities. There are mentions of vampires, or creatures very close to them, in most ancient civilisation's mythology. There are references to an aversion to sunlight, strength, speed, and a thirst for blood. But there are also myths that include stakes, garlic, powers of persuasion, the ability to fly, shapeshifting, powers of seduction, the need to sleep in coffins, aversion to fire, the list goes on. It is almost impossible to find the slivers of truth buried in the mountains of rumour and fantasy. The popularisation of vampires in fiction has also brought the legends of vampirism out of the realm of myth and into storytelling, making vampires something to aspire to or gossip about rather than fear. The sheer volume of material is enough to convince most logical humans that there is no such thing as vampires."

Jane frowned. "So humans have known about vampires forever, but we've convinced ourselves that we made them up?"

Maura shrugged, obviously disliking how much Jane had simplified her answer but unable to disagree with the sentiment. "Whatever the history of vampires, the other thing that has kept them, well, us, a secret is the Volturi. They have assigned themselves the responsibility and the authority of protecting the secret, with the application of deadly force to be used as they see fit. They have created several laws to assist in this task, and they are brutal when faced with a vampire that is not obeying their laws."

Frankie frowned in disagreement. "But surely that can't be enough in this day and age. People have smart phones, there are surveillance drones and cameras everywhere. There's no way that some vampire hasn't been caught doing something supernatural by now."

Jane flicked a foot at the pile of folders on the table. "Add to that the fact that all these murders haven't been picked up by some higher authority. The fact that this was never national news. I think we can all agree that there is somebody or something covering up vampire activity over and above what we know the Volturi can do. This isn't just cleaning up messes and killing rogue vampires, this is high level computer hacking, cover ups within federal level law enforcement all the way down, possibly even governmental interference. We haven't seen the players at the top yet."

The room fell silent again. The sheer amount of history that was staring them in the face, telling them to stop investigating and leave it alone, was staggering. To Jane, it felt like this was all far too dangerous. She was only a homicide detective. She just wanted to put in an honest day's work protecting her loved ones and the innocent public, then come home and feel safe in her own city. But her eyes had been opened to the reality of the darker, more sinister world that they had always unknowingly lived in, and she suspected she'd never feel safe again.

Maura shuffled a file around, before deciding to move on. "Well, that's the general overview of the human side of this. The next part I wanted to go over was what I've found out about the vampires that were in Boston."

Maura moved to the bench and grabbed Jane's laptop, opening up a file and typing frantically for a few seconds. She then placed the laptop on the table, encouraging Frankie to stand so he could see the screen. "From what I've been able to piece together, Jane and I have encountered the trails of nine different vampires. The first was at the crime scene we were taken from, when I was bitten by the hybrid newborn. I picked up this scent at all of the hybrid scenes before that one, and also the one after. The second is the Volturi, Jane, who I have on here as V1. Since she was a senior member of the Volturi, and the vampire that abducted us was clearly also a Volturi, I have called him or her V2."

Maura indicated a spreadsheet she'd just created on Jane's laptop. It showed each of the locations where they had encountered vampires, hybrids or vampire trails, naturally all colour coded. V2 was next to all the locations Maura had just mentioned, as well as the hospital where they'd been held while Maura transformed.

Maura gave the group a moment to absorb the information and understand the spreadsheet before continuing. "Now, the next scene had V2's scent, plus five other vampires. It also had a scent that I couldn't identify at the time, but I now know to be the odour of a burned and killed vampire. Since the unknown five scents all leave together, and V2's scent terminates at the scene, I believe the five unknown vampires to be enemies of the Volturi. I have designated them R1 through R5. R is for Rogue vampire."

Jane cast her eyes over the rest of the list as Maura continued. "As you can see, the Rogue vampires attend all the rest of the hybrid scenes, but I haven't found any sign of them since the last body was found. My best guess is that they were in Boston to breed hybrids, and when the last of them was born they left town. Since there are similar patterns in other cities, it is likely that they joined up with other Rogue vampires who were gathering hybrids from those cities."

Jane raised an eyebrow at Maura in disbelief. "Doctor Isles, was that a guess? Did you actually express a guess without me having to prise it from your cold, dead lips?"

Maura looked like she was trying to make herself smile, but she was too hurt to manage it, and Jane kicked herself when she realised what she'd said. Constance and Hope gave Jane an angry look, while Frankie looked nonchalant about the unfortunate comment as he sat back down. Jane put her good hand over her face, muttering apologetically. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that."

When Jane took her hand away, Maura gave her a small forgiving smile before continuing as if nobody had interrupted. "I didn't find any sign of vampires in Boston until the first vampire kill was found. I identified a new scent at the scene, which I later identified as a third Volturi vampire. The next scene had the scent of the last vampire we have encountered, also a Volturi. I have labelled these two as V3 and V4 on the sheet. These two were killed by Jane and myself during the confrontation at the mob warehouse, as was Jane, their leader. This means that four Volturi have been killed in Boston over the last few months, while the Rogue vampires have managed to breed at least twenty four hybrids and escape the city."

Frankie looked worried. "So, if all these Volturi have been killed here, why hasn't anyone come looking? They don't really sound like the type to live and let live."

Jane nodded. "That worries me too. But it's been months, and Maura hasn't found any sign of vampires anywhere in the city. She's been killing herself looking out for us, but they haven't made a move. My guess is that they're busy with the Rogue group somewhere else. Most likely New York, since that's where these vampire murders have started up again."

Maura rolled her eyes at Jane. "I haven't been killing myself, Jane. But she's right, the Volturi seem to be avoiding Boston. That's why I think I should go to New York with Frankie."

Everyone in the room gaped at her, before standing angrily and protesting all at once.