Thank you for the reviews; they are much appreciated and I'm sending virtual cookies to those who reviewed the last chapter as I haven't done replies yet! I may get time to do them later, if I stop feeling under the weather.

I was asked by RainyDaysandBlueJays why the November 11th/12th sections have stopped – if I continued with them, I'd spoil the ending! If I had the option to edit the story as a whole, I'd put those entries every other chapter, but as it's already posted I can't!

Hope you enjoy this; I'll post the next chapter on Thursday, then Sunday, then Tuesday. You will notice that this chapter is a little shorter than usual, and I apologise for that. There are two reasons: time, and it ended at the right place. However, shorter chapters mean the story will be longer, and if I get enough time (and reviews, hint hint), I may post more regularly.

Where the Blue of the Night

"Moonlight is sculpture."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Chapter Fifteen

November 6th

Night time has many sounds the day doesn't own: an owl's call, the scuffle of a mouse, the creak of a house as it settles in the stillness. They can be soothing or unnerving, depending on the disposition or mood of the listener. In a strange place, the sounds are amplified, every creak unusual, every utterance echoed by a pounding of the heart.

A dark, starless sky was hidden by thick curtains, the material heavy and dense. They were the same in every room; blocking out the light that would come from dawn, the light that could come from headlights or the beam of a flashlight, and stopping any sign of life from being seen from outside during the hours of darkness. They also insulated the rooms, keeping in heat, stopping the old building from becoming too cold, too soulless.

Garcia had managed to get to sleep much more readily than she'd thought. She'd imagined herself staying awake all night, her mind running through the things she could do to keep her team, her friends, safe. But instead, some night time remedy of Hotch's had acted like a lullaby, and she'd fallen asleep before Kevin had even turned off the light.

It had been a long day; one which had made her hold her breath and recoil on numerous occasions, and one that had seemed like a waking bad dream. However, they were all safe, out in the middle of nowhere, in a house that didn't exist except on old maps.

She dreamed of nothing in particular; a myriad of recent memories and old recollections playing like a digital photo frame set to randomly display images. None of it was remarkable, none of it telling, and Garcia slept soundly, oblivious to the noises that were stopping Emily from falling asleep properly, and Henry from settling. Had she been able to comment as she slept, she would have been surprised by herself and her slumber; and by how her colleagues and friends spent their night hours.

She would have seen Morgan, waking up from a bad dream and stumbling sleepily to the window, pulling open the curtains. He saw the trees around them, barely lit by a black night, not a flicker of light to illuminate their surrounding area. He remained there for ten, fifteen minutes, his eyes becoming accustomed to the lack of light, noticing the signs of nocturnal life. His expression lacked his usual drive, looking more like the Morgan that had surfaced in Utah, the Morgan who Garcia had only been told snippets about. Something was still missing, a search still underway to find something to fill the emptiness that was there. He closed the curtains, slipping back into the smooth sheets, and fell back to sleep, his arms stretched across the width of the bed.

She would have seen Reid, still awake and online, winding down by playing chess with a woman in Belgium called Hanne. The light from the screen cast shadows in the room that he was already accustomed to; its anonymity, like Hanne's, reassuring with its lack of demands. She was a competent chess player, and Reid had found that she wasn't as easy to defeat as he'd predicted. But within a few more moves he'd called checkmate, and she'd signed off; their acquaintance brief but pleasurable, for him at least. He'd changed into the clothes he typically wore to bed, having already carried out his evening ablutions before retiring to his computer. Five hours sleep would be enough to function on the next day, he'd managed on less. But as he closed his eyes all he could focus on were the sounds of the house; the shifting of the heating pipes that ran through the place like veins, the creaking of an odd floorboard as something trod upon it, and the sound of silence that had its own echo. He felt more alert than ever.

And that was how he stayed; eyes closed, waiting for the sandman to come along and do his job, sprinkling those dreams and spreading sleep. But he stayed away from Reid, even as he counted chess moves.

Will and JJ lay quietly in bed, facing each other without touching, Henry between them having eventually fallen asleep. Their conversation was whispered, muted, assuming that everyone else was no longer awake. JJ's eyes were dry, their rims reddened with acute tiredness, something Will had noticed but not commented on. They were safe, that was what mattered, and Hotch had relieved her of a lot of the usual pressure.

Will reached over, certain he wouldn't wake his son, and lay a hand on JJ's waist, her eyes almost closed, and he watched her fall asleep, still mid sentence, and hoped her dreams were sweet enough to neutralise the sourness of the day. Garcia would have smiled if she had seen them, her heart content, the picture they created giving her strength.

She would have also drawn comfort from Rossi, propped almost upright against his pillows, his hand on his cell phone from a call to Jolene, and his mouth slightly agape as sleep stole him away, a soft snore breaking the silence in his room. In this state, there was no reason to regard him as someone to call 'sir'; he was just a man, like any other. Rossi had left the curtains open slightly, the sky casting no light into the room. They were in an area that could have been anywhere, not even the stars would give them away.

Garcia's final two colleagues were together, one asleep and one still awake, watching the figures on a digital clock slowly change. Time is a constant, ever changing measure, yet in the middle of the night, when sleep is an evasive ghost, each second seems to last a minute longer, lingering in the darkness.

The sheets were tangled around them, a blanket thrown to the floor. Emily's eyes were wide open, staring at the vague outlines of the furniture. It was rare this happened, that she couldn't drift off into sleep, and she found it frustrating, which only made the situation worse. Garcia knew that Emily was used to winning battles, and had she seen her, forcing herself to keep still so as not to wake Hotch, she would have seen a side to her not usually revealed.

Eventually, Emily got out of bed, holding the sheets down at the side so they didn't let a draft in upon her exit and disturb Hotch, and slipped out of the bedroom to head downstairs. The house was still, its daytime rhythm subdued now as most of its occupants slept. She made her way to the kitchen, her eyes accustomed to the dark, and opened to fridge. When she was at home, she would often wake for a midnight snack, a habit developed as a teenager when she had stuck to a rigid diet all day and gone to bed hungry.

The fridge had been well stocked by someone they would probably never meet, and Emily found a set of black cherry yoghurts. She pulled one out, then rummaged in a drawer for a spoon, finally sitting down at the wooden breakfast bar.

"Do you often do this?" a voice came out of the darkness. She wasn't startled; she'd been aware that someone was lurking.

"Sometimes," she said. "Couldn't sleep."

Agent Boyd's nod was just about visible. "Me neither," he said. "I guess yesterday was a bit of a shock."

"You'd worked with Mansfield for some time," Emily said, the yoghurt cup still unopened. "Anything like that is never easy to deal with."

Boyd shrugged. "I'm not even going to try to deal with it until we've caught whoever did it. Anyway, I'm just going to get some water then try to get some sleep."

He was a grey blur in the kitchen, the lack of light stopping his pained expression from being visible. Emily heard his soft footfalls disappear up the stairs, their sound joining in the quiet cacophony of noises the house seemed to produce.

Boyd didn't try to go to sleep. Instead, he switched on his computer and continued to look through the databases he had been given access to, looking at the details of agents he knew from reputation were unsteady, dangerous. There were psych evaluations, all usually confidential, but now opened up to Agent Hotchner and therefore him.

He found the one he was looking for, James Smithson, and opened it, reading through the reasons he'd been allowed back to work after all the equipment necessary to make a bomb had been found in his garden shed.

Garcia was oblivious to this, sleeping soundly. She didn't hear Emily's footsteps as she passed her room, or the loud snore that woke Rossi from his own sleep. She didn't hear the rumbling of the central heating as it fired up, maintaining a comfortable temperature on a cold night, and she didn't hear an owl hooting from the tree outside.

Garcia was oblivious to everything, until Garcia's phone, whose number nobody had except the team and Boyd, rang at five minutes past three, shattering her dreams and her ideas of safety, as well as the relative peace of the night.

"You didn't think to mention this sooner?" Rossi's tone of voice made both Morgan and Kevin turn towards him. "Someone strange calls your helpline, and you don't think to say anything? I thought we'd gotten over this confidentiality crap after you were shot?"

"Dave," Hotch said, his tone insistent but quiet. "This isn't helping. Garcia, what did he say the night he called the helpline?"

Her voice was wavering; she sounded panicked. "He said he wanted to talk to me, wanted to know if I was okay, and then he asked why I wasn't having a Halloween party like last year. That was when I terminated the call."

"Did you tell anyone about it?" Hotch said, sitting down on a chair opposite Garcia.

She shook her hair. "No, sir. I meant to contact Agent Mansfield, but he was on vacation – oh!"

"What is it, Penelope?" Morgan said. "Anything you can remember can help."

"He said he was doing something that evening that would help him get over his grief. Halloween – that would be the night Agent Mansfield was..." She looked around to Agent Boyd, wide-eyed.

"You weren't to know, Garcia," Hotch said. "There was nothing you could have done. We couldn't have identified him from that phone call, and we wouldn't have assumed he was going to go after Mansfield."

"But what it does tell us is that it's someone who knew what we did last Halloween," Emily said, her face bare of make-up. "This is someone who has been watching us for the past year, at least."

"Probably longer," Hotch said. "An interest in us would have developed earlier than that." He looked at Garcia. "Can you take us through what he said just now?"

Garcia nodded, clearly anxious to please. "He called me Penny, which is the name I use at the helpline. Then he asked how we all were. I just asked him what he wanted, I didn't want to give anything away or confirm that we were together. Then he said he was still watching and hung up. He didn't sound worried or annoyed; I think he even laughed at the end."

"How the hell did he get her phone number?" Morgan said, pulling a chair from the breakfast bar towards the living room at the end of the kitchen where they had congregated.

There was a cloud of silence for a moment, a few looks were exchanged.

"He had already predicted what would happen with our phones. That we would get new handsets and numbers," Emily said. "He's one step ahead. Are we certain that he can't follow what we're doing on line?"

Kevin nodded emphatically. "For him to remotely access our laptops would take him at least seven days of constant hacking. He couldn't have done it this quickly. The computers we have now are brand new, right out of the box, and couldn't have been tampered with in any way."

"He could have been monitoring the reserve mobile numbers we have," Boyd said, his words said in a monotone that would have told of his current state of mind if anyone had been listening close enough at that moment.

They weren't though, thoughts consumed by what had just happened.

"There's a list that we take numbers from for people going into witness protection. Chances are, he's been watching for activity on that list and calling the numbers when they become active. It could have been any one of us he contacted," Boyd said. "I'll take Jacob with me and head over to Keith Fielding's place. We'll sort something out by way of new phones." Boyd stood, Agent Rose already near the door.

Hotch nodded. "Before you go – Garcia, how long did the call last?"

"Twenty four seconds," she said. "Not long enough for us to track his location even if we have been set up for that, so not long enough for him to find ours. I turned the phone off as soon as he terminated the call."

"Then our location is still secure," Rossi said, now seeming slightly calmer. "Although I don't feel happy about going back to sleep just yet."

"Why don't we take one hour shifts for the rest of the night?" Will said, his soft southern accent soothing. "I'll go first. Folks are more likely to sleep if they know someone's looking out."

Hotch nodded. "I'll stay with you. I've had a good few hours, and what's happened tonight needs to be logged. There are a few things I can look for immediately now this has happened."

Emily stood up. "I haven't slept at all," she said. "I'm going to go see if I can get a few hours before we have to be up."

"I think everyone should do the same," Hotch said. "Agent Boyd, keep me informed via email, unless you think it's too risky to do that. Otherwise, we'll continue our investigation into Alfie Fletcher's disappearance as we discussed yesterday. Those details shouldn't have been discovered."

The room began to empty, most people going via the fridge for juice or milk, leaving Hotch and Will alone in the room.

Hotch looked out of the window, taking in what features he could see in the blackness outside. "This place seemed safe yesterday," he said. "Now I'm not sure."

"But what else is there that we can do?" Will said. "The other option would have been to have everyone separate, but then you leave yourself more vulnerable because of the increased reliance you'd have on phones and such. And this place is well monitored."

"You noticed them?"

Will nodded. "The perimeter is secured with video cameras. When anyone approaches, it's logged. I guess there's a room somewhere round here where we can check it ourselves as well."

Hotch closed the curtains. "There's probably a lot about this place we'll never know," he said, before leaving Will alone as he went to gather the files and his computer.

The longest and darkest hours of night are those just before the dawn, when nothing stirs, and any noise or movement appears unnatural. Will picked up a magazine Agent Boyd had left in the kitchen on cars and began to flick through the pages, the sounds of the paper and Hotch's footfalls resonating through the house like a poltergeist.

He knew she wouldn't remain on the phone for very long, and that was why he was extra pleased it had been Penelope Garcia he'd contacted first. By now, he was sure, all of their cell phones would be switched off, the SIM cards removed, and they would be reliant on communicating via email for the next few hours at least.

There was unfortunately no possibility of breaking into the new systems that had been set up; it had taken at least three weeks to access all the email accounts of the team, and then he'd had physical access to the machines as well. That wouldn't happen now; he had no idea of where they were. Not that it mattered.

They would come to him.

He sat in his living room, the TV on mute, and looked at the empty shelves. When his wife had left, she'd taken all the books and the ornaments, leaving just the things they'd bought together. She'd also taken the photographs, not for sentimental value; he knew that. It was because she hadn't wanted him to have any pictures of her.

She'd been ideal; long blond hair that was thick and healthy, a face that was almost pretty, and a slim, toned figure that drew looks from men whenever she went out. At first, she'd ignored his obsession and he'd played it down, but after living together for two years, it had become a problem, for her anyway, and gradually she'd had enough.

He told everyone at work that Joely had left him for another man, and nobody had doubted what he said. Some of his colleagues had been a little shocked anyway when they had first met her. He knew they'd wondered why she was with someone who looked like him, was quiet and work driven, when she was attractive and outgoing.

But he'd treated her well and been attentive, something her other lovers hadn't seemed to do, and for a while it had worked, although he'd never been happy.

He guessed he could never be happy. Not until he had her, the other one. The original one.

His butterfly.

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Sarah x