Black Cat, White Moon

Chapter One
Miss Fortune

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To the gentlemen I'm Miss Fortune...
To the ladies I'm Sir Prize...
But call on me by any name
Because anyway it's all the same....

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The black Jaguar cut through the night, and the electric city lights glided off the smooth glass windows like luminous rain. How many women – how many people- could prowl the Vegas night wearing elegant, mirrored shades, and still be able to track the prey they hunted? Even with that hideously blinking clock, reminding her that Dragon needed to see her.

Blink-blink-blink!

The only thing that could keep her from going mad- blinking lights tended to piss her off, especially if they tried to remind her of things she really didn't want to remember- was that smell she followed, tracking it with nose and brain. Oh, and she could smell him, so much stronger now, that delicious smell, and now there was more to it: the scent of smoke, wildness, and pain, pain like the copper tang of freshly spilt arterial blood. That scent tugged at her consciousness, asking her to come and play, come and find him....

Even as she drove through the streets, she daydreamed about stripping naked and rolling like a wallowing puppy in Spencer Reid's blood. Maybe nuzzling his corpse to feel his silken hair against her skin.

Ugh!

Where had that morbid thought come from?

She was starting to sound like her mother.

The old night hag would probably get a kick out of that, her precious, lily-white, ever so boring daughter finally giving in to the call of blood, both in the vein and out. It wasn't enough for Shekinah that her eldest daughter was Dragon's best, the oldest of the Dragon's killers- they tended not to live very long, considering how many of them had been taken out by any number of cops, FBI agents, etc.- and the best hunter the little cretin could find, better even than Croup and Vandemar put together.

But no, despite the bloodshed and the excellent track record, her mother was not happy at all with her. Shekinah wanted her daughter to be like her- vicious, cruel, hungry for flesh and blood, the beast-witch of Eastwitch, her father used to say.

Her father had been a bit more… affectionate in his pet names for her, at least: Miss Fortune, among other things. He'd trained her to be a Dragon killer. Her mother had taught her to be bloodthirsty, but her father had taught her to fight, and fight well, not just with the weapons he bore, but the teeth and claws that blood infected her with.

Her father would have known what to do with the mist inside her. He'd told her about the decaying mist before. It infected his kind, the lords of the Kiss de Carabas, the gray mist. He'd told her that much, and told her that it had something to do with death, life, and blood. Maybe something to do with sex, she couldn't remember. But hang it all, she snapped, glancing again at the clock set in the dash, its luminously bloody numbers blinking at her. A trick of every Dragon killer's car. If you had a meeting with the Dragon, it made sure you knew about it.

"All right!" She yelled, slamming a fist down on the steering wheel.

She knew what Dragon wanted. He wanted to know what was taking so long. Spencer Reid should have been dead months ago, pushing up the sweetest of daisies, the softest of posies, now that spring had come. A year was too long, according to Dragon, to spend looking for one human.

Never mind that she was getting old and tired, never mind that as a Child of the Cat's Cradle, she had the right to take however fracking long she wanted, as long as it happened before the mark met a natural death- relatively speaking, at any rate- and as long as there was no deadline. This particular assassin was still blissfully unaware of any encroaching deadline, any time line on the battered angel's inhumation.

Yet the Dragon wanted to speak to her.

Her.

Her, daughter of a Hunter, daughter of Shekinah, daughter of the Marquis de Carabas, capable both physically and legally of putting a knife through the little wretch's reptilian heart. But the Dragon was her boss, and she didn't feel like having to deal with the Justices. She didn't feel like being hurt, being punished. Murder wasn't a death sentence, not for someone like her, but still, it incurred punishment. She didn't feel like dealing with it.

Not for one insignificant mark, no matter how sweet he looked.

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Call on me by any name,
Any way it's all the same...

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Reid stared into the mirror, straightening his silver-gray silk tie with shaking hands. He didn't want to know what Gideon would say about his appearance. He didn't care about Rossi. The scruffy, Itallian-mobster-looking agent gave Reid the creeps. But Spencer knew Gideon would've been very worried about him. He'd never looked so sheet white before. How often, he had to wonder, had the lack of sleep and the vicious nightmares rendered him into a ghosted, fading shadow-man? He'd taken to wearing black, but it just washed him out even worse.

He looked practically sick. He looked like he had leukemia, with eyes shadowed almost to pitch blackness and bruised looking, viciously bruised looking. When had he become so thin? He was only human, only mortal, a 23-year-old triple doctorate with a shattered heart sucking at his life force until he sank into deepest shadow….

His hands shook as he pulled a comb through his hair. His entire body ached. Maybe just a couple pills. Just one or two, for the pain….

'You don't need them,' a soft, purring voice whispered in his mind. He looked up from the bottle in his hands and stood transfixed, staring at the mirror. 'You don't need them, Spencer Reid.'

In the mirror, standing as if she were draped around him like a cloak of sable fur, a girl, more like a woman, with long chestnut ringlets falling past her wide, beautiful hips and glimmering green eyes flecked with golden eye bright, rested her chin on his shoulder. She smiled, and he saw bright, pearl white teeth, but there was something familiar and yet all too alien about them, as if they were just a little too long, a little too sharp, and there were far too many....

"Who are you?" His voice croaked out of him, hoarse with surprise, after several moments of attempted speech. "Who… how... what?"

'Look, I try to be nice to people who are about to die, even if death is a few days off, so I came to tell you, you shouldn't waste your time on things like pain killers and miserable memories.'

In the reflection in the mirror- the girl wasn't in the bathroom with him, anyway, somehow, but she was there in that reflection, and though he couldn't see her in the actual room, he could feel her. He felt the tiny nibbling bites she placed along his jaw, and he shivered. Her lips whispered against his jaw like silk.

"What... what do you want?"

'I can't tell you that."

"Can't... or won't?"

The look the strange, phantom woman gave him was poignant with darkness and understanding. A keen pain lanced through Spencer's chest, and with it came a dull, icy throbbing behind his heart. Her eyes, green as a cat's, pierced him. Goosebumps ran up and down his arms. For a moment, something inhuman seemed to writhe and crawl beneath the flesh of her face, and the battered young man felt a vicious yearning take root in his belly. His stomach twisted violently. Reid fought not to be sick.

'Won't, because that's the rules. You knew that.'

"Who are you?"

'A kitten in the cradle,' she murmured, her breath warm and moist against his ear. Shivers tried to crawl up his spine. 'Or a Kitten in the Cradle. You choose. The panther, or the Panther. Death, or your death. Which will it be, do you think?'

"Are you going to save me?" Spencer suddenly demanded. The idea was ludicrous – she wasn't even there, wasn't even real, just some freakish, schizophrenic delusion brought on from the stress, he was having a nervous breakdown – but he knew in the pit of his stomach that if she said yes, the young genius would believe her.

Fear slithered down his throat to nest in his body.

'No.'

"Why not?"

'Miss Fortune is coming to find you, Spencer Reid, and eventually she will kill you, and so, there really isn't much else I can do, now that the warning's been given. I wanted to see you. See why you looked so bruised and broken. You're too sweet a soul to be a slave to pain, or the absence of pain. Don't give into it. Be stronger than that. It's only for a few days, then you'll be dead anyway.'

"Do you know who's trying to kill me?"

'Yes.'

"Who?"

'Can't tell you that. Good night, Spencer.'

He felt the press of soft lips to his cheek, then suddenly, the reflection of the girl was gone, and he didn't feel anything. Only air. Emptiness.

Spencer's hands began to shake, and suddenly he remembered his mother being hauled off to the institution, screaming, begging him not to do this to her. Was he going crazy? Were the madmen with warning the most dangerous, fearing madness and yet reassured by their own fear, because no madman ever suspected the poison of the blood in his brain?

He remembered the press of those sweet lips against his cheek, and suddenly felt a vicious ache in his body. Those lips… those silk lips so sweet and tender against his skin… those beautiful lips….

Reid barely made it to the toilet in time. This time, his stomach had nothing to offer up but bile.

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I'm the fear that keeps you awake
I'm the shadows on the wall
I'm the monsters they become
I'm the nightmare in your skull

I'm the dagger in your back
An extra turn upon the rack
I'm the whimpering of your heart
A stabbing pain, a sudden start

And it's so easy when you're evil...

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Author's Note: the lyrics seen throughout this chapter are from When You're Evil by the Goth singer called Voltaire. This is a beautiful song, gorgeous violin playing. You may have heard Voltaire sing on Cartoon Network on the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. He's the voice of the evil, brain-eating, singing meteor from outer space.

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