Part II: The F.B.I.'s Most Unwanted
Alex has just enough time to hear the snarled 'Krycek!' before he's slammed into the wall and Mulder's fist is flying towards his face at what he knows from experience will feel like a hundred miles an hour.
The blow doesn't land. A pale, black-nailed hand wraps itself around Mulder's fist, and even though Alex can't see the pressure those slender fingers exert, Mulder squeaks and his fist unclenches. The next moment, Mulder's other hand is pried free of Alex's collar and Mulder himself is jerked backwards and away.
When Alex looks, Spike is holding Mulder in the air with one hand twisted into his collar as Mulder's feet dangle about an inch or so off the ground. It is obvious that Spike is not really exerting himself, despite the difference in their heights.
Mulder is gurgling. Spike is smiling.
Alex rubs at his throat.
"Can I kill this one?" Spike asks, voice dark with bloodlust and annoyance.
"No," Alex rasps, still massaging his throat. "Put him down, Spike."
For a long, terrible moment, he thinks that Spike might not listen, that he will snap Mulder's neck with the same casual twist of his free hand that Alex has seen so often in the past three weeks.
Then Spike puts Mulder down, or rather, lets him go. Mulder falls to the ground, trying to untwist his collar and get a breath of air. Somehow, Alex is having trouble feeling too sorry for him.
"Oh," Spike says, "I almost forgot." He bends over Mulder, then straightens with a gun in each hand. He offers them to Alex, handling them with surprising confidence for a man who's been dead for more than a century.
"You might want these," he says, pushing Mulder back down casually with one booted foot as he tries to keep Alex from getting the guns.
"Thanks," Alex says, taking them one at a time and tucking Mulder's main weapon in his belt. Aiming the man's own backup weapon at him, he motions Spike out of the way with a jerk of his head. The vampire complies with a look of displeasure.
"Are you going to calm down now, Mulder?" Alex asks him.
"You killed my father," Mulder spits. "Why should I calm down?"
"This is Mulder?" Spike asks, then interrupts whatever he was going to say with: "You killed his father?"
"He was involved up to his eyebrows," Alex snaps at Spike, who looks supremely unconcerned.
"It don't matter to me either way, mate," he says lazily. "I did for my own mother, so there's no stones coming from this direction."
"Thank you, Spike," Alex says drily, and receives a shrug in return.
Mulder's reaction to True Vampire Confessions is fairly predictable: he tries to get up again, swearing in fury. It's enough to irritate Spike into direct action: he leans down and grabs Mulder by the back of the neck, hauling him to his feet with one hand and an audible growl.
"Will you hold still?" he snarls, giving Mulder a tooth-rattling shake. "You're outnumbered and outgunned, and even Alex here can only keep me in check for so long. You're irritating me, and I'm hungry."
There's a world of intent in the last word. Mulder may not realise exactly what has him by the neck, but he's far from stupid. He goes limp in Spike's grasp. His mouth, however, keeps moving.
Genius or no, you couldn't fill a thimble with his common sense, Alex thinks.
"Who's your new friend, Krycek?" Mulder asks. "Another serial killer? A cannibal?"
Spike raises an eyebrow at Alex. "You're a serial killer? I thought you were an assassin-slash-alien hunter, pet." Adding, with a shake to Mulder's collar that threatens to remove his head from his neck: "An' I'm not a sodding cannibal. For one thing, cannibals are human." He growls the last word, slipping into gameface as he speaks.
"What are you?" Mulder demands. "An alien? How did you do that?" Spike lets go of Mulder with an exasperated snort.
"Isn't anyone afraid of me any more? I'm a vampire, you idiot, not somewhat to pester with a fuckload of annoying questions while it's got you by the throat. Gerrit?"
Mulder opens his mouth - probably to ask another question - and Spike is behind him, one hand tangled in his hair, the other pinning his arms to his sides, his fangs pressing against the arch of Mulder's exposed throat. A stunned second later, Spike releases him and is half-way back to Alex before Mulder realises that he's gone, shifted back to human face in an instant.
"Alex here has a safe pass from me, but there's not many of us who want anything from any of you - with the exception of dinner. You're alive because Alex wants it that way, but keep pressing me an' I'll have your guts for garlands." He turns to Alex with a grin, the deadly intensity sliding down a few notches. "Me an' Dru did that for Christmas one year. I think it was 1952. Somewhere in Nebraska."
Alex knows he should cut him off. Spike's stories are dubious at their best, horrific at their worst, and the gleam in the vampire's eyes says that this one will probably be the latter.
"Got invited in by this fat, happy farm family on Christmas Eve, an' Dru got it into her head that if we saved the kiddies for him, Santa Claus might put in an appearance." He chuckles reminiscently. "Anyway, we tied the little bleeders up - or rather, I did, as Dru was busy scolding the Christmas tree - an' bunged them into the cellar. When I got back, Dru'd disembowelled mum an' dad, an' was busy replacing the tinsel with loops of guts. Said the tinsel was lookin' at her," he finishes, smiling fondly. "She's as crazy as a flock of loons, my Dru."
"What about the kids?" Mulder asks, an expression of unwilling, horrified fasination on his face.
"Hm? Oh, the kids. Right. St. Nick never did show, so we left 'em down there till sunset, then ate 'em before we left." Spike grins. "Good times."
They get Mulder into the car, struggling and swearing the entire time. Or rather, Spike does. Left to his own devices, Alex would have ordered Mulder into the vehicle at gunpoint, but the vampire manhandles 190-odd pounds of furiously resisting FBI agent into the back seat with about as much difficulty as Alex would have had with an angry toddler.
Alex could do something similar, using pressure points and nasty holds learned from nastier men, but Spike isn't using any fancy tricks, or threatening evisceration and mangled limbs as he sometimes does when feeling melodramatic. He's just that much stronger than Mulder is - and by extension, that much stronger than Alex is, too.
Alex spares a moment to be grateful that Spike finds him diverting. He's taken to carrying a stake since that night in Tucson, but he's not certain that he'll win if Spike gets hungry enough, or irritated enough - or bored enough - to decide that snacking on Alex might keep him entertained for the next five minutes. Currently he's just glad that Spike is holding Mulder relatively immobile, as he doesn't particularly want to kill all of them - well, himself and Mulder - in a car crash.
Besides, he needs to think.
He's not sure why Mulder turned up, though he's fairly sure that someone deliberately sent the man his way. He reminds himself to thank whoever did it in an unpleasant fashion some time in the future. Mulder is not only a diversion; he's a fucking homing signal for anyone who might be looking for Alex, because where Alex is invisible, Mulder is about as conspicuous as a neon sign on a dark night. Alex's life would be infinitely smoother if he were to feed Mulder to Spike and let the vampire do... whatever it is he does with the bodies he doesn't want found. Things would be simpler. But whoever sent Mulder his way might be banking on just that - or they might be banking on Alex's unwillingness to kill the man, though he doesn't think he's been stupid enough to let anyone notice that particular weakness.
Either way, Mulder's presence is intended to cause chaos and distraction, and Alex needs to come up with some sort of solution, quickly.
The hotel room he's been sharing with Spike has a sofa, but Spike digs a set of manacles out of the trunk of his car, along with three vintage punk records, a battered copy of Lord of the Flies, and a human femur. The records and the femur he throws back into the trunk; the book he brings upstairs with him, shoved into one coat pocket on top of the manacles.
"Right," he says cheerfully to Mulder, "time to chain you up for the night, pet."
Mulder, who has always had more courage than sense, swears at him. Alex is impressed by the vulgarity and variety of the language he employs, and Spike raises both eyebrows approvingly.
"I can see why you like him," he says to Alex, and in the shocked silence of Mulder's gaze, Alex can think of nothing to say for long moments. Finally, he addresses himself to Spike.
"Where were you planning on putting him?"
"Well, I could chain him to your bed, if you like," Spike offers. "Or to mine, if you don't want him."
"No," Alex manages. Mulder is looking at him with a combination of horror and relief that he finds distinctly unnerving. Spike shrugs, looking supremely unconcerned.
"Fine," he says. "We can put him in the bathtub."
Mulder, perhaps realizing that this is the best possible option, doesn't even protest as Spike chains him expertly to the pipes. Alex can't help smiling when he notices Mulder staring avidly at Spike's non-reflection in the mirror, but when Mulder looks his way, he wipes his expression clean.
He doesn't manage it in time. Mulder's eyes are tense on his face, unreadable and waiting.
Next time, Mulder thinks sourly, he will leave a note detailing exactly where he's gone and why. Scully, though no fool, will rush after him into places that would have the bravest angel cowering in fear. If necessary, she will bring the entire FBI with her, and damn the consequences. Next time, he will definitely leave a note.
If there is a next time. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have left a note this time. Nothing good has ever come of mysterious hints as to Alex Krycek's location.
This goes beyond 'nothing good', and into the realm of 'freakishly catastastrophic.'
Mulder prides himself on his open mind, on his ability to accept the unusual, the strange, the downright freakish, with barely a blink. The fact remains that Alex Krycek has apparently taken up with a sociopathic uber-punk British vampire named Spike, and the pair of them have kidnapped him and chained him, unharmed, to a bathtub in the local Four Seasons. This is a little much for anyone, he thinks, somewhat hysterically.
Spike frightens him, truly frightens him, in a deeper. more primitive way than the worst of the human monsters he'd once dealt with used to. The vampire's presence activates that squirming impulse in his hindbrain that says run, that tells him he's prey, a toy, an object to be used and discarded with no more thought than he himself would give an empty beer can. That pale, handsome young face with those grave-cold blue eyes looking out of it is one of the most terrifying things Mulder has ever seen. The casual way Spike had discussed the murders of an entire family, smiling faintly as if in pleasant reminiscence -- and the only thing standing between him and Mulder is Alex Krycek.
This is not a pleasant thought.
Krycek killed his father. Mulder has never doubted this, and tonight Krycek hadn't denied it. He'd even given a reason for it, though he'd been talking to Spike at the time. He was involved in it up to his eyebrows. And Spike, to Krycek: You're a serial killer? I thought you were an assassin-slash-alien hunter, pet.
Which means that Krycek knows about the aliens, and not only knows about them but is actively trying to kill them, and if Krycek is against the aliens, then Mulder has an entirely new set of problems to deal with; namely, is Alex Krycek, against all the odds, actually working for the side of light and humanity? Or are the aliens really the goodguys?
The evidence for either Krycek or the aliens being secretly on Mulder's side is, in both cases, so slim as to be actually negative. Of course, the aliens didn't kill Mulder's father; but then, Krycek didn't abduct Mulder's sister. As far as Mulder knows, Krycek doesn't abduct people from their beds and experiment on them in attempts to dominate mankind. In fact, given what Spike has said, Krycek is apparently against that sort of thing.
Which means that Krycek really might be working for the side of light and humanity.
It is typical of Krycek that his chosen partner in this quest is practically a charter member in the Forces of Darkness, and is even less ambiguously evil than Cancer Man.
Of course, Spike is probably fairly good at killing aliens, and anything else unfortunate enough to attract his attention. He hasn't killed Krycek though, or Mulder - not that Mulder would give anyone else good odds, especially if Krycek is otherwise occupied, or if Spike is sufficiently motivated.
Mulder has gathered from Spike's conversation that boredom is, for him, sufficient motivation for anything, up to and including random massacre of passers-by.
He hopes fervently that Krycek has an actual hold over the vampire and not just the promise of killing aliens for entertainment -- or that Krycek knows how to kill him. Mulder can't see Krycek working with something he can't kill. He can't exacctly picture Krycek waving a cross around for protection, either.
Mulder shifts in the bathtub, checking the limits of his manacles, but he's securely chained. It's probably better if he doesn't think about how practiced Spike's movements were when he put the chains on, or where the vampire might have acquired that practice.
The vampire. Mulder's been trying to avoid irritating him, because no matter what Scully might think he does possess some survival instincts, but he's nearly ready to explode with unasked questions. He's fairly certain that Krycek is well aware of the fact, as the bastard looked downright amused while Spike was dangling Mulder from one hand. The fact that Spike is able to pick him up like a kitten strikes Mulder as distinctly unfair, as the vampire is shorter than he is.
It is proof that the rumors of vampiric strength are true, though, and Mulder spends a few contented moments conjecturing relative strengths of vampires and humans, given himself and Spike as reference points. He realizes fairly quickly that - a. Spike is much, much stronger than he is, and b. This is not entertaining enough to keep him from screaming with boredom. An alternate plan is in order.