Bennet sat almost freezing in the car, waiting for it to begin to warm up as Nea drove recklessly onto the 464, the sun dipping behind the horizon slowly submerging them in darkness.

"So now why is it so important that we have to go trekking into the fucking snow at night?"

"I had an idea about what it may be," Nea said.

"Well? Unlike you, I'm not well-versed in mythology," Bennet pressed shifty in the car uncomfortably as the cold air from the heater hit him as the car tried to warm up.

"It's not a mythology; there are people still to this day who believe in it, so don't call it that. It's disrespectful."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"It's from the Navajo tribe to the south. They don't talk about it, not to us outsiders, especially. They're called skinwalkers; they're an evil type of witch where simply talking about them is said to bring bad luck."

"Well they don't sound that scary..." Bennet muttered, pulling a cigarette out of the box in his jacket before looking for his lighter as Nea continued talking.

"Everything I've read up on - and trust me there's not much - says they have a taste for human flesh. They stop at nothing short of tricking their victims to become easy prey, like brave rabbits approaching a trap filled with food," Nea said, glancing at Bennet who had found his lighter, he frowned. "Can you at least crack the window while you do that specs?"

"Yea no problem," Bennet said. complying with the request but regretting it instantly when the freezing air whistled through the car. He reached over to put the heater on full blast before lighting the cigarette.

By the time the cigarette had burnt down to the butt, Nea was throttling through the snow banks next to the river, pulling up to the location where the body had been found earlier that day.

"So these skinwalkers, would they eat or store the flesh for later?" Bennet asked as Nea turned off the car engine.

" In some stories? Yes, and in others no. Stealing people's appearances by stealing their actual skin is normally their most described feature not their eating habits. They're described as skilled mimics, calling their victims with the familiar noises and voices of relatives," Nea said, watching the forest in the distance. Barely anything was visible under the pale low rising moonlight.

"Why?" Bennet asked, attempting to fight sleep from his eyes. Letting Nea ramble to prevent the other man from noticing him falling asleep, he didn't need shit for that. Bennet let himself drift as Nea spoke in-depth about the scant information he knew.

He didn't know how much time had passed, but suddenly he was jolted awake. Nea had stopped talking, his eyes hyper focused on something beyond the windshield, watching it like a cat watching its prey from afar. He was tense. Bennet was about to speak but Nea shushed him, barely moving his lips. Bennet began to move his head slightly to follow Nea's line of sight. Eyes locked, he felt his breath catch and his pulse quicken and he felt a flood of adrenaline wash over him.

In the moonlight, he could be seen. A thin pale man, unnaturally thin, staring them down. A sneer creeped across his face. Eyes shone unnaturally in the moonlight.

"The murderer," Bennet whispered under his breath but that was quickly taken back.

Its fingers slid under the skin, black dripping down his neck and began to flood the fibers of the shirt with a dark color. Even though the moonlight had bleached the colours around them, Bennet immediately knew what the liquid was.

Even though Bennet couldn't hear it he could only imagine the sound of flesh being ripped off the muscle and bones that kept them in place.

"What the f-"

"Don't look at its face," Nea hissed. "Not directly, anyway."

"You don't actually believe this, Nea. We need backup." When Bennet even slightly raised his voice, the creature froze.

Nea's eyes darted directly up the man's face, for a second he gripped the steering wheel tighter than he had been before. He reached into his coat, hand making contact with the butt of the pistol, and then Nea launched himself out of the car without so much of a second thought, the car shook with the force he pushed off with. Bennet fumbled with the flashlight as he watched Nea sprint into the forest and disappear behind the trees and into the night.

"Oh For the love of fuck…" Bennet got his coat on, feeling the warmth of the car already beginning to leach out of the window. He braced himself for the cold as he pushed the passenger's side door open, feeling the freezing air threatening to steal his soul as he stepped out into the deep snow.

In the distance, he could only make out the flicker of a few house lights through the thicket of the snow-covered pines. Bennet flicked the flashlight on and stopped to listen for any sounds, and he could hear Nea crashed through the snow and trees. His glasses fogged up in the cold, and while attempting to clear his glasses he accidently shone the flashlight onto the ground.

Red.

Vibrant, almost unnatural red.

Bennet scrambled to shove his glasses back on his face. He knew what that red was.

"Nea!" Bennet shouted running past the blood, and into the forest.

Nea didn't hear Bennet shout, though. He had run so deep into the forest already that he had almost lost his footing and almost fell into the icy lake. The cold began to catch up with him as he regained his balance. Fear rippled through Nea when he realized that the sounds of the forest had completely dissipated. There was nothing but silence, an unnatural silence. He removed the pistol from his coat pocket and cocked it, keeping it pointed down to the ground as he began to return to the forest. The snow crunched harshly underneath his feet as he walked forward. He felt his heart beating in his ears and adrenaline was rushing through him, causing such exhilaration.

Red eyes peered around a tree, and Nea lifted his gun.

"Federal Agent! Come out with your hands up!"

The creature listened, ruby eyes moved towards the light in the clearing. but it wasn't the man who Nea had watched tear off its face.

The creature's face was revealed under the moonlight, and Nea felt a sickening sense of excitement raise in his chest as a disturbed smile appear across his face.

"Campbell!" Bennet hissed out, trudging through the snow while his right hand slowly unclipped the gun from his belt.

The riverbank was eerily quiet, so much so that Bennet was not even sure if he could even hear his own footsteps as he crunched through the snow. The moonlight caused the pines to cast long looming shadows, and suddenly there was a loud crack that had Bennet almost jumping out of his shoes. He felt his heart pound in his chest, and he slowly turned back to see the wintry expanse he came from. He took a deep breath trying to calm himself. He once again began to walk forward.

" Campbell!" Bennet hissed.

"Over here!" Nea's voice echoed through the forest, and in the distance, Bennet could see a figure slumped up against the tree.

"Oh fuck." Knowing Nea, he had probably confronted that skin-tearing freak, in an effort to prove that he was some kind of supernatural creature, got himself injured and left for dead. Bennet removed the safety from the gun and trudged across a small part of the frozen lake. It cracked and squeaked due to his weight, the same cracking noise he had heard in the forest. Bennet skid across the last few meters back onto the rocky snow covered shore to where Nea was.

Except the piercing scent of the cold had been replaced with the pungent smell of meat, as if something had been butchered. Bennet's adrenaline spiked as he approached Nea.

Except it wasn't Nea.

Bennet felt blood drain from him.

In front of Nea stood a man whose face he had seen this morning, being carried away in a body bag. Jacob Hampton stood in front of Nea as alive as he could be.

"Shouldn't you be in a body bag in a place called Glory Hole, Montana?" Nea said, looking at the man's - no, the creature's - sickening blood coloured eyes. It took a step forward, followed by a wet almost sloshing noise as it moved.

Nea took a step back, unsure of how steady his footing underneath was. Hampton let out a low growl, it was a deep visceral growl one that an animal would make. The creature inched closer its red irides's locked onto Nea.

Adrenaline shot through Nea and he felt a sickening smile form on his face. He knew it this wasn't human, but he wanted a closer look. Suddenly, whatever had possessed Hampton's body lurched towards him. Nea felt his body react on its own, sending him back and then skidding across the ice of the lake. He quickly regained his footing on the ice, lifting his gun to the creature. Hampton's face was streaked from its mouth down to its chest in blood, as if it had been feeding on something just before Nea had found him, or before it had found Nea.

"What are you? You creepy son of a b-" a gunshot resonated across the frozen tundra. Nea couldn't see where it had come from, and the echo made it impossible to clearly tell even what direction it came from, but he could easily see the bullet's target. A viscous almost black seeped from Hampton and onto the ice. Hampton stood stunned for a second, as if trying to process what had happened before it whipped its body around, and for a second, Nea could see the shooter. Bennet.

Bennet had seen Nea skid across the ice as he knelt next to the body he had stumbled across. What he hadn't expected was to see a man running nearly on all fours after Nea. He saw the purple haired man aim the gun at the man who began to stand as man once again. Was Nea…smiling? Bennet left what was probably this killer's latest victim and slowly returned to the ice, lifting his gun.

The man lurched at his partner and Bennet didn't hesitate. He took the shot, and with high visibility on this icy moonlit night, the bullet found its target with ease. The man didn't scream out, he didn't crumple in pain. He froze, stiff for the longest seconds of Bennet's life but not nearly long enough. The man turned quickly to face him, Jacob Hampton…how? No that couldn't be right, this was a scragglier, much thinner version of the man whose post mortem photos has been faxed to D.C., eyes as red as the blood on his face and fluid thick as honey dripping out onto the ice. Hampton didn't waste any time, charging towards Bennet.

The cold air sent a sharp pain through his chest, shocking him out of his trance. Bennet scrambled, skidding on the ice trying to put as much distance between him and the deranged serial murder charging towards him, choking back any fear that dare come up. He raised his gun again as the man approached.

"Wait!" He heard Nea scream, but it was too late, Bennet had pulled the trigger and this time, they could hear it. The pang and ringing of the bullets impact. the soft sickening sound of bone cracking and splintering apart under the force applied by the bullet.

Hampton crumpled to the ground, and Bennet could hear Nea's shoes scraping across the ice. Bennet ignored him, walking over to Hampton, whose chest struggled to heave as he lay on the ice. The color of Hampton's skin began to fade, from its pale peach into splotches of white and gray across any visible parts. A man with crazed delirious eyes.

Prion disease had cause this, Bennet was certain. People like this, men like this…didn't randomly start consuming human flesh, They had been for years now. And now as their brains deteriorated, they would come out of the woodwork. Driven by a sickening desire to consume their own kind. He gasped on the ice as Bennet stared him down. A glint of vibrant yellow reflected off the man's eyes as Bennet began to recompose himself, only for that composure to be broken again by Nea's fist making contact with his face. Bennet didn't even have time to reel from the sucker punch when Nea grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and jacket at the same damn time. He was so close to Bennet's face, far too close. Nea's breath was warm, but disgusting and unwelcome even if it was below zero degrees out here.

"What the fuck! How could you, I was this close to having proof! Proof that there's something else and you jus-" Nea shouted when Bennet shoved him away.

"Don't get full of yourself," Bennet hissed, he could hear the sirens coming up the mountain road at this point, the gun shots must have called attention to them. "Proof of what? What we have here isn't proof of your paranoid delusions Campbell, this was a person! A person who was a second from taking your life! You're lucky I could shoot well enough to knock him down before he even got me, before he did to us what he did to her!" Bennet pointed to the tree with his gun.

"Her?" Nea echoed, losing any sense of rage.

"Margret Miller, the waitress who serves us yesterday morning. We didn't even know her name, but it was Margret Miller. And that thing you were trying to protect, killed her and began to eat her insides raw. He's not a monster in the paranormal sense, he's a monster in the human sense. What the fuck is wrong with you."

Nea didn't say anything. Bennet found it surprising that the other man could even keep his mouth shut for a whole goddamn minute, and soon he could see the lights passing through the forest line. He put the safety back on his pistol before returning it to the holster, removing his FBI badge from the inner pocket of his coat before reaching for the outer pocket for the pack of cigarettes, that weren't there.

Bennet grimaced. God, he could really use a cigarette.

Eyewitness accounts and paperwork for the incident took almost an entire day to complete. Hampton's body had been received by the morgue - Nea had made sure of that, but just as quickly as it arrived for autopsy, it vanished. Without so much as a trace that same night. The surveillance cameras didn't pick up anything unusual for the town, a few coyotes scavenging for food, not a human escaping from the hospital. Typical. According to the coroner, the man that had been brought in had been Jacob Hampton, the same Jacob Hampton that had been in the morgue earlier that day, right down to the Y incision in his chest.

Bennet sat in the police station drinking a relatively stale cup of coffee, made from a stale batch of year old bulk coffee left open so that all the flavor had escaped from the jar of coffee grounds. Margret Miller would be cremated within the week; she had been a kind daughter, sister, and wife. Bennet folded the newspaper and tossed it back onto a stack three high. Nea hadn't spoken to him since that night, which in itself was a blessing and a curse. The drive back to the airport was going to be a silent one, hopefully.

When Nea slunk out of the sheriff's office, he didn't look at Bennet, but rather stated, "We're leaving."

That's all Bennet needed to hear. Luggage had been packed into the rental car and the flight Scheduled to leave four hours after they would arrive at the airport. Nea was the first in the rental car, starting it up as it shook in the cold of winter, as if it attempted to warm itself up. Bennet had his hand on the handle when he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up, as if he were being watched by the cold unforgiving gaze of a hungry beast.