Devil's Lover

Chapter 4

The worst part about working at the BAU was that they were always on call. And right when they all needed a break the most, while Nathan still hung over them like a bad omen, was exactly when they didn’t get one. There was a fifty/fifty chance that her cell buzzing in the middle of the night was a good thing. That also meant there was a fifty/fifty chance it was a bad one.

It could be Reid forgetting the time and informing her about manatees’ vestigial fingernails, or it could be JJ apologising sweetly and then informing her of vicious murders all within the same breath.

Sunday night was the latter, although, even through text, JJ sounded confused.

JJ: Morning, Em. The week’s starting early. Boss wants us in ASAP.

“Work? Again?” Sergio asked, uncurling from his warm furrow in the blankets and blinking up at her. She didn’t know why he didn’t sleep in his own room, he knew chances were she’d be waking him up at some ridiculous hour. “Bad one?”

“They’re all bad, Serge,” she answered quietly, her phone making the dull boop that symbolised her message being sent. “Are you coming this time?”

To JJ: That doesn’t sound good. Did he say why?

“I think you’re capable of handling this on your own.” Sergio punctuated his snide reply by oozing up the bed to perch on her pillow, ready to slip into the warm spot when she vacated it. “Besides, why would you possibly need me when you have a demon who can do everything I can?”

“He’s not half as good at coughing up hairballs as you are,” she teased the cat affectionately, tickling his chin and throwing the covers back. “Don’t be jealous. It’s not a flattering look on you.”

“Hmph.”

Her phone beeped again.

JJ: Nope. Just to be prepared.

Oh yeah. This was going to be another bad one.

Hotch walked into the conference room with a file and the grimmest expression she’d ever seen on him. That was saying something, since she was pretty sure his default setting was ‘eternally stoic’. Gideon followed, looking as placid as ever, but his eyes stayed fixed on Hotch’s back. Celine scanned the room. Her co-workers’ gazes were all locked on Hotch, and she noted the bevy of tired eyes and very-slightly-out-of-place clothing. They were all worried. The atmosphere was prohibitive. Well, everyone except JJ. She was still as perfectly presented as ever, as though she’d breezed straight out of bed and into work without so much as a hair being out of place, taking everything this job threw at her with a calm poise.

“In 1998, I worked the Boston Reaper case,” Hotch said, and the silence that filled the room was thick enough that Celine could hear the soft rhythm of Reid’s breathing next to her. “It was my first case for the BAU as lead profiler. And, as you all know, he was never caught.”

“Never caught?” Reid said, sitting upright and squinting slightly. Celine could practically hear the cogs in his mind whirring as his brain fired up. “We don’t even have a profile in our systems for him, do we? I’ve never seen one in Archives.”

“Maybe you saw it and forgot?” Garcia asked from the corner of her seat. She was fidgeting, out of place in the conference room, and kept glancing nervously at the blank plasma behind her. Reid turned very slowly and blinked at her. “Oh, right.” Garcia giggled, her voice shaky. “You’re you. You don’t forget. Why am I here Hot—sir? I mean, I know why I’m here, but why am I here. In this room. With the… ick.”

“Do we have ick?” Morgan cut in, swivelling around to look at the screen. Hotch’s face barely shifted as he clicked a button on the remote and the plasma flared to life. “What’s going on, Hotch?”

Celine had seen a lot of things in her life. She’d worked Interpol. She’d been in the BAU for a month now. She’d even seen magic casting gone horribly wrong—they all had. Their teachers weren’t shy about showing them what exactly could happen if they weren’t careful with their spellwork.

This was on a whole new level.

“He’s back,” Hotch said quietly, staring at the photos of the massacred victims with his eyes burning. “The Boston Reaper is back. And he’s taunting us. Taunting me.”

“He’s a power manipulator. When killing wasn’t giving him the buzz he needed, he switched to manipulating the police. The ultimate sign of control. ‘You can’t chase me or I’ll kill again’.” Morgan tapped at the page, deep in thought. The others were all lost in their own minds as well.

“He’s a shadow mage,” Celine said, leaning past JJ to pick up the photos of the first victims and examining the body. “These injuries, they weren’t all caused by a knife.”

“The biggest were.” Hotch watched her as he spoke, clearly encouraging her to continue. “He stabbed one of his victims over forty times. He also shot and bludgeoned them. Many of the smaller marks were obscured by the overkill.”

Obscured, maybe, but still there. “Shadow magic,” she said firmly, ignoring Hotch’s raised eyebrow. “See these odd bruises? I bet if we look closely they’ll be formed by dozens of tiny slices, all below the upper layer of skin. It’s a nasty technique, but very effective.” Doyle had used it. Her skin crawled at the memory of it. But, she wasn’t saying that.

“Most shadow mages use shadows as shields. The art was actually created as a non-offensive fighting style used to tire the opponent out and then incapacitate them without injury. Over time, there were perversions to the art that used shadows as weapons or bindings but none that caught on or became popular.” Reid leaned in close over the back of the chair she was sitting in, his hair hanging limply and almost obscuring his view of the photo she was holding. “It’s not a bad theory. They wouldn’t have noticed it back then; shadow magic is a lesser known magical practise. It doesn’t help us narrow it down much though, shadow mages are fairly…”

“Stubbornly isolated,” Gideon finished. “We know. We’re intimately acquainted with the sort.”

Celine hid a grin by ducking her head, letting her hair curtain forward and hide her mouth. David Rossi. It was a pity he was retired. If they were hunting a rogue shadow mage, it would have been nice to have the most decorated user of the art by their sides. If the man was half of the legend, anyway.

“I was going to say, private,” Reid said, blinking owlishly and tossing his hair back with an impatient flick of his head. “But uh, isolated works… well, they might help us. If we prove this is shadow work. They don’t generally like negative publicity.”

Hotch was shaking his head. “We would have seen it if it was shadow magic. We did have Dave on our team then, and he wouldn’t have missed something like that.”

Celine wondered which of them was going to say it first, out of her, JJ, or Morgan, because she could see the same thought on all of their faces. Reid looked oblivious. Gideon beat them: “We all have our blind-spots,” he stated. “Even Dave. He might not have wanted to see. And it does fit—the Reaper gets off on control. What could be more controlling than literally slipping his magic under their skin? He’s killing them from the inside out.”

Celine shuddered.

“Dark affinity then?” Morgan asked, changing the subject as Hotch’s eyebrows drew together in a frown. “Shadow magic is a dark art, right?”

Celine kept her mouth closed. She didn’t need to say anything, she was pretty sure Reid’s fetish was correcting people, and she didn’t want to take away his greatest joy. It would be like taking candy from a sugar-addicted demon.

Exactly like that, actually.

“A common misconception is that dark magic equals evil or immoral,” Reid said eagerly. She could feel him almost bouncing on the spot through the chair. JJ covered her mouth as though to hide a sneeze, her eyes creasing at the corners. “When it really just refers to how to a mage or magical being obtains their magic—light magic is knowledge based and uses stable power sources such as fixed natural power wells or familial bonds. Dark magic is more, err… well, gut based I guess. Erratic. It draws from unstable power sources such as the magic users’ own life forces or living creatures around them. Even more unpredictable natural wells such as volcanoes or storms can be exploited. Both affinities have their benefits and drawbacks.” He paused before continuing, now sounding less certain. “Having said that, I agree that he’s a dark affined mage. Not because of the shadow magic, that can be light based, but because…” He trailed off. Celine could see his cheeks flushing. If his ears were visible under that mop of hair, she’d bet they’d be glowing like beacons as well.

“Because there’s no smoke without fire, and dark magic is a lot easier to misuse,” Hotch completed. “You can’t deny that a lot of the arts practised within it have elements of compulsion.”

“No, I can’t,” Reid said quietly. He avoided everyone’s gaze, glancing out the window of the jet almost warily. For someone who wore his heart so openly, Casper Reid had a whole heap of baggage he kept hidden. She could relate to that.

It hadn’t been a good first day on the case. Two more dead; two more names that she knew Hotch was quietly adding to his personal list of those he’d failed. They all had that list. She knew she did. She suspected that Reid did too. She also had a firm suspicion that his was a lot longer than hers. He seemed the type to hoard guilt like a dragon did gold, keeping it close to his chest and defending it jealously.

Every action the Reaper had taken so far suggested that his focus had shifted to Hotch. She knew exactly where an obsession like that could take them. If they didn’t stop him, the Reaper would bring Hotch down in flames and drag them down with him. She didn’t intend on letting that happen, and she doubted the rest of the team would either. That wasn’t how they worked. They didn’t get to have personal vendettas with unsubs, not even Hotch.

For some reason, this train of thought had led her to padding quietly down the hallway of their hotel on the sides of her bed-socked feet; passing Morgan’s door with a careful knowledge of his superior hearing, and JJ’s with the wry thought that even if the elf did hear her, she probably wouldn’t say anything. Not that Celine was willing to test that theory.

She tapped on his door lightly, trusting that he’d know it was her. Judging from the eager rustle of movement towards the door, he knew. Or he’d just ordered late night room service.

“I thought you said it wasn’t socially acceptable to visit people past eight p.m.,” he said, opening the door and smiling warmly at her. She took a long moment to look him up and down, raising an eyebrow at the brightly patterned flannel pyjamas he was wearing. Covered in… dancing toothbrushes.

Casper Reid, you f*****g dork, she thought with glee, but she didn’t say it out loud. Judging from the self-conscious way he slipped back to put the door between her and him, he knew what she was thinking anyway.

“I’m the exception that proves the rule,” she replied, oozing her way past the door and letting herself in. He opened his mouth with the kind half-smug half-over excited expression he always wore before correcting someone, and she shut him up quickly by nudging the door shut with her hip and pulling him down to her height by the collar of his preposterous pyjamas.

“That’s technically an incorrect usage,” he mumbled into her mouth. She rolled her eyes under closed lids. “An exception should be stated from which a rule can be inferred.” He punctuated each word with increasingly eager kisses, working his way down her mouth and along her jawline, his hands tracing absentminded patterns on her sides. “In this case, you would say—”

“Reid,” she said sharply, almost hissing the word out as he found her ear and nipped at the shell of it. “Shush.” His back thudded against the wall, the weird artwork that all hotels seemed to emulate rattling in its frame at the impact.

“But what if this knowledge could save your life one day?” he protested, breaking away from her and widening his eyes in almost sincere concern. She broke that gaze before she actually convinced herself he was being serious and slipped under his chin to mouth at his neck, hearing his breath catch even as he tried to keep talking. “What if, say, you get caught by a serial killer with… ah… an obsession for correct… Celine, you’re making it hard to focus.”

She pressed her knee between his legs, forcing them apart and bringing her hips flush with his. “Am I?” she teased, biting gently at the delicate protrusion of his collarbone. So. Damn. Skinny. She could probably bench press him if she was so inclined.

He made a rough noise that might have been a laugh, sliding an arm around her and settling his hand on the small of her back. “Innuendo is the lowest form of wit,” he said, before rolling his hips forward gently into hers and oh. He wasn’t hard, not quite, but he certainly wasn’t soft and the loose cotton pyjamas didn’t leave much to her, admittedly fantastic, imagination.

Jesus Christ, if he did that again they were going to end up dry humping against the wall like a pair of horny teenagers because that, that was going into the part of her memory bank that she stored up for quiet nights in her bed with her eyes closed and one hand between her thighs. Which was insane, because they’d only mostly just kissed, and she’d never before been halfway into someone’s bed just from that. But yet, if he asked it of her, she knew she’d jump into his in a heartbeat and see if his precise fashion of kissing extended to his bedroom.

And that was nothing like her.

“Hotch is on the other side of this wall,” she said finally, pausing to catch her breath and gather her thoughts before the hungry lizard-brain that was trying to tell her to see how quickly she could remove the dancing toothbrushes from current proceedings won out. “And if he’s awake, he’s going to be wondering why you’re trying to tap out Morse code through the drywall.”

“I didn’t start this, you did,” he grumbled, breaking away from her and standing back. He was… well, aroused. Almost sinfully so, with the way his bow-shaped lips looked after she’d been kissing them, red and slightly swollen. Hair mussed, pyjamas askew; somehow, he made dancing toothbrushes look like the hottest thing she’d seen all year.

What the hell was he doing to her?

She wondered what he saw when he looked at her, in her own much more modest pyjamas and with all her make-up washed off. She wasn’t the insecure type, but even the most confident woman would feel a thrill of nerves at facing a man ten years her junior and looking like that.

“Beautiful,” he said suddenly, gently, stepping forward and cupping a hand under her chin, examining her closely. “God, Celine, you have no idea.” He leaned and she thought he was going to kiss her again, but instead he just wrapped his arms around her and held her like he had nothing better to do with his night. “You need to decide right now how you want this night to go.”

“Oh?” she asked, tucking her nose against his shoulder and breathing in the bitter-rich scent of him. It was tempered by the smell of his washing detergent and a slight hint of soap, but her gut still twisted slightly at it, even as the heat between her legs made it hard to focus on his words. “I don’t think I’m in the position to be clear-headed.”

“Mmm,” he hummed against her hair, his fingers tracing gently over her back. She thought of reaching to his back, slipping a hand under his shirt and seeing what she found. She ignored that and kept her hands firmly to his front, respecting his boundaries. She thought, briefly, of slipping a hand lower. She knew what she’d find there, but his reaction to that was what would really intrigue her.

“You should probably go back to your room and sleep since we have to be up in six hours,” Reid said finally. “And, also, because if you stay here much longer, we’re very probably going to end up having s*x, and there’s a part of me that very, very much wants to know what that’s like.” It wasn’t a particularly seductive way of informing her what was on his mind, but it did bring a vivid flash of holy s**t this is what that would lookfeelsound like in her mind that came complete with a dull aching feeling of emptiness between her legs that suggested she take him up on that offer.

At some point, he’d slipped in under her defences in every way possible and he proved that now.

“Do we really want our first time to be in a hotel room nine point seven feet away from our boss and having to muffle our voices so he doesn’t hear us?” Reid’s voice murmured into her mind directly, and fuckfuck he still hadn’t worked out how to separate his emotions from his voice so it brought a heady rush of his own burning arousal and the sudden knowledge that she wasn’t the only one vividly imagining what he’d feel like inside her. She thought maybe she’d made a noise, but he caught it with his mouth, even as she shivered through the sudden feedback-loop of both their excitement combining. “Because I don’t know about you, but I want to hear you come.”

“Stop,” she panted into his chest. “I… I can feel your thoughts… emotions. Shit.”

He smiled against her mouth, and she realized that he absolutely knew what he was doing. “Oops,” he sent, and his voice still felt like melty-sweetness on her tongue but it brought a darker hint of velvet-texture with it that made her brain ache. “My mistake.”

She could f*****g taste his insincerity and that was about the point she realized that if, when, they did have s*x, this was going to be a mind-blowing addition to it.

He didn’t respond, just made a low noise and sent a very, very detailed thought of him pressing her against the wall and sliding her pants down in one swift movement, slipping his hand between… She choked back a moan, her hips stuttering against his, seeking friction, even as he held her close and did nothing but think really loudly at her.

He was f*****g getting her off with his brain and she wasn’t even that surprised.

She wasn’t going to say that out loud with Hotch in the next room. For all she knew, he had his damn ear pressed against the wall waiting for something he could write them up for. All bosses got a sick sense of satisfaction from issuing warnings; Hotch was no exception. And, she really needed to stop thinking about Hotch now because she’d never had a hair-trigger in bed before, but she was already coasting on the edge of holy s**t I’m about to come without even taking my pants off. “Casper, I don’t think this counts as having s*x you know.”

Mistake, because talking back to him meant she got the full loop of his thoughts and he chose that exact moment to imagine the feel of him pushing into her for the first time, and that was weird indeed; both the idea of what she felt like to him and what he’d feel like in her crowding her simultaneously. He also imagined the noise he’d make, a stuttering groan, and she suddenly wasn’t so sure he hadn’t made that noise in real life.  

Then, he actually did make the noise, choking back a word that could have been please but also could have very likely been the beginning of her name; it was all she needed before she was shaking against him, her mouth and nose pressed against his shoulder, and clenching around a c**k that she could feel in her mind but that wasn’t actually there. It was both the most intense orgasm she’d had in a very long time and the most unsatisfying, and she was left breathing heavily against him with a dull ache between her legs that suggested very politely that she rectify that issue with the real thing. The real thing that was inches from her, and at this point probably not adverse to the idea.

“I hate you,” she muttered, kissing his one of the toothbrushes on his shoulder with a tenderness she knew she’d think back at later and worry over. She shifted, flinching in distaste at the slickness of her poor underwear against her inner thigh, and the constant throbbing reminder of that dissatisfaction.

“No, you don’t,” he replied, and his voice was strained and husky. She glanced up at him and almost groaned at his expression, the heavy-lidded eyes and partly open lips suggesting that he hadn’t quite expected the feedback of her orgasm to be anywhere near as distracting as it had been. There was nothing soft about him now and when she glanced down she could see him straining against the elastic of his pants, clearly uncomfortable. Oh, how the tables had turned.

“Need a hand?” she offered with a smirk.

He shook his head halfway before turning it into an uncertain nod, looking so lost that she actually felt sorry for him. “Turnabout is fair play, Spence,” she whispered, slipping into his mind before very swiftly hitting him with a memory of her fingers inside herself, rocking against them, coming with his name on her lips. He jerked, twitched, and she was pretty sure almost yelped her name in shock before turning it into a groan that he muffled against her hair. She pulled out his mind quickly, not needing to relive this quite yet, but it didn’t matter since he was pressed so close to her she could feel him coming anyway.

Your poor pyjamas, she thought wryly to herself, even as she slid a hand down to run over the softening bulge in the front of them, the dampness spreading on the thin cotton, and there was another memory to hoard because she hadn’t made someone finish in their damn pants since high school and it was unexpectedly titillating. She was pretty sure this wasn’t what the artist who’d originally drawn the dancing toothbrushes had planned for them when he’d carefully sketched out their innocent-but-slightly-maniacal grins, but she decided to pretend that he’d have approved.

Casper’s breathing had slowed, his weight resting more fully on her, and, she swore to god, if he fell asleep standing in the middle of his room like a damn horse, she was going to leave him there. And take pictures. And probably give those pictures, tastefully cropped at the waist of course, to Garcia to blow up and make life-sized cardboard cut-outs of.

“Bed,” she scolded, shaking him. He blinked slowly, his reactions sluggish.

“Join me?” he asked, and oh the plaintive longing in his voice almost shattered her resolve. Now it wasn’t s*x she was imagining but waking up in his arms, what he’d look like as he dreamed, of opening her eyes to know he was there, and she wanted it all.

“No,” she said reluctantly. “But I will. Soon. Promise.” She smirked as he nodded sadly. “You might want to get changed before you sleep.”

His mouth quirked. He leaned close and she thought he was going to say something sweet, something that made walking away back to her empty room and emptier bed even more impossible.

“I know that was a memory, Celine Ryder, not your imagination. And I approve very much of your choice of masturbatory aids,” he murmured into her ear and she flushed, his breath hot and still slightly uneven. “Now go to your room. It’s bad luck to keep people waiting on you.”

That made no sense but, before she could ask him what the hell he meant, he’d slipped into the bathroom and closed the door between them.

She knew her room wasn’t empty as soon as she unlocked the door and slid through. She always forgot how much of an asshole her cat could be.

“I thought you said I could deal with this on my own,” she teased him, narrowing her eyes and scanning the apparently empty room for her wayward familiar. “Or did you miss me so terribly you just had to come?”

“Well,” said a smug voice from the bed. The pillow dipped slightly as he shifted his weight, purring and reappearing as a solid black lump of fur on the creamy linen: “then you managed to completely fail to notice I was here for a whole day. Clearly, you are simply lost without me. Also, you stink. You’re not getting in the bed while you smell like him.”

Reid’s cryptic comment now made sense. “Reid knew you were here.”

“He’s clever, for a demon,” Sergio admitted reluctantly. “Sir saw me as well. He just didn’t tell you.”

“Sir?” It clicked seconds later. “Gideon? Wait, you call him ‘Sir’ and yet I’m still stuck as ‘little witch’?”

“I have the utmost respect for him. You are just a witch and not a very good one. Now shower, little smelly witch.”

She should have gotten an owl.

Two steps into the Boston precinct the next day with Reid on her heels rambling about the brewing technique the local coffee shop had used on his double mocha frappo-whatever the hell sugar thing he was drinking, and Celine’s heart sank. She could see Hotch and Gideon squaring off in the field office with JJ between them like a referee at a cage match, looking way too stressed for this time of the morning. Morgan was hovering around the edges, looking back and forth with a desperate expression.

“Uh oh,” Reid murmured, pausing. “I don’t want to go in there.”

“Bad luck, sugar,” Celine said. She stopped and shoved him forward. “You’ve got that ‘butter wouldn’t melt on my puppy dog eyes’ look. You go in first.”

He dug his heels into the thin blue carpeting. “What? That’s not even an idiom. You’ve completely… hey! Uh, morning, Hotch. Good morning, Gideon.”

Their esteemed leaders turned as one to face them and, suddenly, it wasn’t funny anymore. Celine had seen the look that Hotch was wearing on a previous colleague's face, right before he’d knocked off work, left his dog at his sister’s, and gone home to spit-start his own service pistol. Judging from Reid’s sharp exhale, he had too.

“What happened?” Celine asked, looking to JJ. Hotch was pale, a man on the brink of destruction. Even Gideon looked positively… rattled.

“He called me last night and offered me the deal,” Hotch snarled, his voice cracking. Celine felt Reid pull away, looking from Hotch to Gideon in a panic. “He offered me the deal, and I practically hung up on him!”

“The Reaper attacked a city bus this morning,” JJ filled them in, her voice soft but firm as she cut over Hotch. “Six passengers and the driver were killed.”

“Because I signed their death warrants.” Hotch looked away, his throat visibly working as he swallowed hard. “This is my fault.”

JJ and Morgan made identical noises of disagreement. Gideon snorted loudly, rolling his eyes. Celine could practically taste the derision rolling off his tongue. “You’re right, Hotch. You essentially walked onto that bus and shot them yourself. You may as well hand in your gun now, I’ll let the families know where to find you so you can personally tell them how sorry you are for not being able to see the future.”

“This isn’t about my ego, Jason.”

“It’s entirely about your ego, Aaron! He’s playing you, getting into your head, and you’re rolling out the welcome mat!”

There was silence except for the two men’s heavy breathing and the roaring sound of Celine’s own heartbeat in her ears. She hoped that none of the local PD had decided to come in early and were watching this. The only thing Hotch would take worse than losing his control in front of the team would be losing control in front of the team and the people they needed to trust them implicitly to do their jobs.

Morgan interrupted, his voice oddly gently. “Hotch, man, we’re just human.”

“Speak for yourself,” mumbled JJ. Morgan nudged her with his shoulder, frowning. She looked up, her blue eyes wide and innocent. If Celine hadn’t known the keen mind that ticked behind those eyes, she’d have been sucked into that beguiling look as well. “He’s right, Aaron. We can’t bear the guilt of every sick thing the people we hunt try to pin back on us. That’s how they win. They make us second guess ourselves, break us down. It’s our job to not let them.”

Hotch’s chest moved with one last deep, calming breath, and his face cleared. Instant control restored. Celine was envious. “You’re correct. I’m sorry, everyone. I allowed my emotions to get the better of me, and that was entirely unprofessional and not at all conducive to our case. It’s time we got to work showing this man that we don’t play by his rules.”

Gideon said nothing, even as every one of the rest of them tripped over themselves trying to reassure Hotch that there was no damage done.

When Celine slipped out the room after, Reid followed. “You realize that while we were… wrapped up in ourselves… last night, Hotch and Gideon were looking down on seven victims,” he murmured in her ear, making her jump. She hadn’t even heard him behind her.

She turned on her heel and scowled at the mulish expression on his face. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Reid. What, is self-recrimination in the water around here or something? He didn’t call us. He and Gideon went alone—nothing would have changed about last night whether we were in our own beds or not. Don’t do this. Don’t overthink things.”

He looked away, and she saw the exact moment he decided to do just that. “Nevertheless, we were on the job and it was supremely unprofessional of us. What if he did call? Would we have heard it?”

She wanted to grab his arm and shake it, snap him out of the stubborn mood he’d sunk into at the sight of their close-knit team bickering amongst themselves, but they were surrounded by strangers and she couldn’t. “Okay, fine. Yes. We keep our distance on the job, that’s acceptable. We’re adults, we should have been doing that from the beginning. But don’t you dare suggest that we could have changed anything last night, because the last thing Hotch needs is a role-model in shouldering misdirected blame.”

“Okay,” Reid murmured, and promptly vanished. She stared at the spot he’d been standing, wrestling with the warring sensations of wanting to find him and hug him or wanting to be furious with him and storming off. She decided to be an adult about it and quietly walked away as though nothing had happened. This case was getting in all their heads. They needed to close it, and soon.

It happened too quickly for her to respond in a way that might have changed what happened. They moved around the location they’d been given to find Foyet before the Reaper did; Detective O’Mara taking point with Celine close on his heels and Morgan pacing slowly behind them. They’d needed a mage. They’d taken Celine.

Celine regretted that.

Everything went pitch black around them, Celine instantly recognising and countering the darkness spell that had been thrown over them. She was quick, the black dispelling around them and letting her see far enough forward that O’Mara was a hazy blur turning back to look at her.

Not quick enough. A gun sounded, and O’Mara fell.

Morgan shouted, her hand burned, and she whirled. In that singular moment between Morgan’s yells shifting to yelps before silencing completely and the Reaper crashing down on her, she made a choice. She pulled her weapon instead of casting. Her offensive magic had always been her weak point.

It was the wrong choice.

He moved and the darkness moved with him. She couldn’t fire because she couldn’t see Morgan, her line of sight wasn’t clear, and by the time she’d gotten her bearings back the shadows had clawed at her legs and brought her down. She knew this feeling; knew what happened next. The shadows bit at her skin, threading their way into her and sharpening, slicing, binding. It itched at first, and then her skin ignited into thousands of points of pain as though she’d shoved her arm into a fire ant colony and held it there.

She thought to herself that she was very likely going to die here.

She thought to herself that Reid was very likely going to be furious at her for that.

And then, she pushed those thoughts away and concentrated on surviving. If she could hold him off, Hotch would already know they were in trouble. He’d already be on his way. Their creds weren’t just pretty patterns after all, he would have felt it as soon as Morgan went down. They would have all felt the burn of his pain, just the same as she had. The pain was good. If it burned, he was hurt. If it went cold…

It wasn’t going to go cold while she was still there to stop it.

The Reaper loomed over her, his face a rippling mask of the shadows he controlled obscuring all his features except for cold, blue eyes. It was the kind of face that children imagined jittering out from under their beds at night, a parody of a human being. Some small part of her noted she was bound and vulnerable and wanted to scream.

She didn’t.

His shadows slipped into her clothes, her own runes activating in a flurry of magic across her body as they fought off the touch of the opposing affinity. She looked down and felt ill; her vest a patchwork of moving darkness, the FBI acronym hidden as his magic split and writhed angrily at the points where her own runes defended her.

You like your women helpless and alone, huh, she thought furiously, snarling at him and struggling to lift her gun against the shadows that gripped it and tried to tear it from her grasp. Yeah, I’m not helpless, bud. And I’m not… alone.

She dropped the gun, not even pausing to watch it get sucked into the pool of shadows at her knees, sliding a hand to her right wrist and pressing two fingers against the small dark word tattooed there. Her familiar mark, one of the first she’d made back when she was a witch and a diplomat’s daughter and very little else.

And she didn’t often use it because just knowing it was there if she needed it was enough. The last time she’d pressed it was when she was pinned down under a brutal weight and there were teeth at her neck and a claw on her heart, and the cost had been oppressive. There’d been shadows then too.

It spelled out αἴλουρος above the Latin wording. Simply, cat.

She pressed two fingers to it and Sergio came.

She may have blacked out for a few seconds, but she heard the throbbing feline scream from a creature much larger than her petite little tom appeared to be and the comforting notion of something very large and determined standing over her.

Her last conscious thought was that she wouldn’t trade him for the world.

They were back in the bullpen when Foyet’s escape broadcasted. Hotch said nothing, just shut the door to his office and pulled the blinds. Celine stared at his office for a while after, waiting for some sign of movement, receiving none. It was a stark contrast to the almost cheerful-air of relief he’d been wearing since Foyet had been led away in handcuffs.

Reid was already gone. He’d barely let his feet touch the tarmac before vanishing as they landed in Quantico, cementing her suspicion that there was going to be hell to pay later for her dropping the ball.

Looked like it wasn’t going to come from Hotch.

Morgan was too sunk in his own guilt, JJ far too nice to say anything. Garcia was just happy that the same amount of people was coming home as what had left; plus, she enjoyed a reason to fuss over them. Celine had cupcakes coming out of her ears and no idea of when Garcia had had time to make the damn things. Gideon stopped by her desk on the way out. She spoke before he could.

“I messed up,” she admitted instantly. “I messed up and O’Mara died, and it took me and Morgan out of the field right when you needed us the most. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes plenty,” Gideon said quietly. “It means you know you could have done better. O’Mara may have died no matter what happened. That isn’t on you. But what happened after… we train our people better than that. I don’t know what they taught you in your previous work, but we don’t doubt ourselves. We don’t fall back on guns because our casting is merely ‘passable,’ especially not when faced with unknown mages. You know that now. You’ll do better next time.” And, he walked away, leaving her with the feeling that she’d only been privy to half of a conversation. It was a usual feeling with him.

Morgan leaned back in his chair, his arms liberally covered in both the white plasters the medics had put on his cuts and the SpongeBob Band-Aids Garcia had then stuck overtop. “Foyet isn’t going to just fade away,” he said quietly, and he was watching Hotch’s office too. “Hotch got the better of him, even just temporarily. So did you. He had you at his pleasure, and you still escaped.”

“I didn’t escape, Sergio kept him off us until the team arrived.”

Morgan shrugged and picked at the corner of one of the bandages. “End result is the same. He’s got unfinished business with us now. And with his history? He won’t let it go unfinished for long.”

She thought of the burn of the sigil on her hand as Morgan had fallen; the burning that must have been twice as bad for the rest of her team when she’d fallen alongside him. “Good,” she muttered, biting her lip and tasting blood. “Let him come. We’ll beat him again. No casualties this time.”

Morgan stood, shouldering his bag with a flinch. “Deal.”

She hoped they weren’t being too optimistic.

Her face resembled a Picasso painting; purple blotches and blue streaks breaking up the familiar lines and turning it into a painful impression of her reflection. Celine flinched and daubed a numbing cream on the sorest of the bruises, one that splashed vividly from her chin to her ear and was rapidly swelling. She greatly wished that she’d spent more time on her healing runes instead of defence. In moments like these, being a medical magus instead of a field agent was a tantalizing prospect. Sergio twirled around her legs, oddly silent. She let him do it, sensing his distress.

“I should have been quicker,” he said finally, blinking up at her with his tail low to the ground and whiskers drooping. “I was almost too late.”

“I should have casted first, shot after,” she reminded him. She nudged him with her foot and held her arms out. He leaped up, curling small against her chest and tucking his head under her chin. A rumbling purr started up in his body, and she felt the wave of calm it brought with it spread intently from where he pressed against her. “If the worst had happened today, it would have been my fault alone. Not yours. Not Morgan’s. Not Hotch’s. Mine.”

Sergio did nothing but purr for a long moment, and she waited for the scolding she knew was coming. “Be more careful, little witch. Your loss would break my heart.”

The quiet admission took her breath away. They didn’t do this. They didn’t do raw emotion and affection. She settled for snuggling him closer, inhaling the clean, fresh scent of his fur. “How am I supposed to respond to that?” she teased when she remembered how to speak past the happy kind of sadness his words had brought her.

“By never bringing it up again. I’ll deny it if you do.”

Her cell buzzed in her pocket. “I need an arm to answer that,” she told her ridiculous cat, trying to coax him onto her shoulder. He’d gone stiff and unwilling, growing heavier in her arms by the second as though he was deliberately increasing his mass. He probably was. Ass.

“It’s your demon beau.”

She stopped and looked at him. “How could you possibly know that?”

“You don’t have any other friends.”

“Go to hell, fish-breath.” She dropped him. He landed gracefully, as though he’d known she was going to do it, stalking to the door with his fur fluffed up and his thick tail lashing.

“Also, I smelled him. He’s at the window again. I’m going to my room. Don’t call me. I want nothing to do with the ruin you bring on us.”

And with that, he vanished. The purring disappeared as well, and she flinched as the pain washed back over her, no longer being dulled by his cat-like spellcasting. She took her mind off it by pulling her phone out and unlocking it with a swift flick of her thumb over the screen.

Einstein: Window.

He hadn’t signed his text. Uh oh. Celine had a suspicion she was about to get the tongue lashing she’d somehow avoided with Sergio.

At her first glance, he wasn’t there. When she opened the window and leaned out, a heavy wind bit at the raw skin on her face. It smelled of storms and rain and the acrid promise of thunder, even though the sky above was pale grey with light winter clouds and the oncoming night.

A second glance found him hunkered against the far side of the fire escape, only an arm’s length away from her and impossible to miss. Yet, even as she looked at him, her eyes skated away from him and he melded into the background, becoming unimportant. Bad luck for him, because if his ability to hide himself relied on him being unimportant, then it wasn’t going to work on her anymore. She couldn’t imagine him ever being unimportant to her again.

“Casper,” she said, sliding her ass onto the windowsill and leaning out to face him. “I can see you. Is this wind yours?” She tried to keep her tone light, but when he very abruptly became solid to her again his expression was anything but. She went cold with mixed fear and surprise. She’d never seen him like this. Not even when she’d sat up in Foyet’s backyard and found him standing where Sergio had been when she’d fallen; his skin crackling with suppressed power and hand blazing with his creds around the white-knuckled grip he had on his weapon.

She doubted anyone had seen this.

He stared at her from eyes that were almost entirely hazel; the pupils tiny pinpoints of black. His mouth, usually so expressive, was a firm line and almost white with the tension in his face. He didn’t look angry; if he had, she would have already bolted back into the safety of her home because, although she trusted him, some trust wasn’t enough to dispel old scars.

He looked scared. Terrified.

“You could have died today,” he pointed out with a voice that was as far from calm as he could get it without shouting. “Foyet… he could have killed you today. I thought he had. When I heard your cat, heard him screaming like that, I thought you were dead. Do you have any idea what that was like?”

“I have a vague notion,” she replied, swallowing hard. She slipped a leg out the window, standing up on the rickety grid work and taking a tiny step towards him. The platform was small enough that this was enough to bring her chest to chest with him. “But I’m not dead—I’m right here. Alive and okay. And very capable of protecting myself, despite what my stupid cat thinks.”

The scared expression vanished and was replaced by bemusement. “What? I know. This isn’t about… I’m not having some macho complex about protecting you. I’m not Morgan, I know you’re capable, Celine. That doesn’t… today was the closest I have ever been to losing control, and it was because I was terrified I was about to lose you. Don’t you realize how bizarre that is?”

She bit at her lip, not entirely sure what he was alluding to. Or, being entirely sure and yet unwilling to make the final leap to saying it out loud in case she was wrong.  “We’re a team. That’s what we do for each other. I would do the same for JJ or Morgan. So would you.”

He grinned, except it wasn’t so much of a grin as it was a baring of teeth. Something dull thudded into her ribcage at the suggestion of sharply pointed canines in his mouth, the merest hint of his inhumanity. Just in case she’d forgotten.

“I’m not so sure anymore,” he said, and tilted his head to examine her with his mouth slightly parted, as though halfway through a thought he’d forgotten before it could reach his lips. “Because when I thought you were dead, I wanted to kill him. And I don’t generally entertain homicidal thoughts, as a rule. So why would I desire that when I don’t believe I would do the same for Hotch or Morgan? I’ve only known you a month, and you don’t even trust me to let me into your home. I’ve known them for years, and they both have spare keys to my apartment.”

She tried to answer, but he’d closed the gap between them and now the thudding in her chest was a sharp gallop as her pulse and heartbeat raced at his proximity. She sucked in a shocked breath, finding herself inches from him, with his scent surrounding her, and the wind had died down to the stifling kind of humidity that preceded a storm. It was different, intoxicating, and she couldn’t breathe properly with the air so thick, or maybe it was the way her chest was constricting around her lungs.

He was really quite tall. She tilted back slightly to look into his eyes, ignoring the way her head spun at the movement, her bruises protesting.

Really tall.

His eyes had narrowed and they were slowly tracing the bruises, as though memorising each and every one of them. It was a milder version of Gideon or Hotch’s intent gazes, and it made her feel like a frog pinned back, ready to be dissected by a curious student.

“I wouldn’t say no to a spare key,” she ended up saying weakly, trying to smile but failing as it tugged at swollen skin and slipped away. “In case you fall in the shower and I have to swoop in and rescue you.”

There was a flicker of movement that drew her attention to his mouth as he ran his tongue over the bottom lip. Her own mouth went dry as her stomach promptly decided to bail out of her shoes, dropping and taking all the heat in her body with it. Almost all the heat. Suddenly, the memory of the hotel was loud and forward in her brain, impossible to ignore.

“You’re a puzzle, Celine Ryder,” he said quietly, his voice dangerously husky. “One I can’t solve without more data. I don’t believe I’m reading your body language incorrectly, so…”

His mouth met hers and the electric jolt of raw desire that shot through her body almost sent her reeling back into the window. His hand on her hip, the other on her arm, pulling her close and then wrapping around her and pressing his own body against her. He kissed like he profiled; confident and precise with every detail, starting with the widest margin for error and then narrowing it down. It was heady and nothing like before because this was the sort of kissing you did when you’d spent time imagining never having the chance.

Then he pulled away and left her cold, alone, and wildly aroused.

There were three spots of raw heat on her body. One between her legs, and one look at the hungry expression on Reid’s face told her that he was very aware of that one. Two on her shoulder. And those were the ones that snapped her back to herself, throwing a bucket of ice water over her and bringing everything back into vivid clarity. The runes hadn’t responded the first time on the fire escape, they hadn’t even hummed at the hotel, and the fact that they were responding now boded ill for his mental state.

“You can’t deny that a lot of the arts practised within it have elements of compulsion,” murmured the ghost of Hotch in her ear, except this time it was a warning instead of a statement. She wondered if Reid even knew what he was doing.

“What are you?” she asked again, and this time it wasn’t with careful curiosity but a need to know because they’d just flown past the point of it not mattering anymore. In fact, she was pretty sure they’d flown far enough past it that if she looked down, the point wouldn’t even be in sight anymore. His face flushed, but the dark, hungry look in his eyes didn’t vanish. He looked like a man who’d been starving and who’d been offered a bite of something delicious, only to have it taken away.

He c****d his head and smiled without humour. “Besides halfway to being in love with you?”

Shit.

He didn’t know he was doing it, she realized that now, but now that she knew she could counter it. And, before she found out, before he answered her hasty question, she needed to do something.

He opened his mouth to speak again, and she knew he was going to tell her. She stopped him, shaking her head. “Don’t. I… don’t need to know right now.”

“Why not?”

Here it was. Celine Ryder, jumping into the deep end again. Sergio was going to be furious. “Because I want you to know that I trust you.”

His eyes widened and, just like that, the darkly seductive man had vanished and left behind her awkward co-worker and his ridiculous hair. She was amused to note that this had no effect on quelling the heat in her belly and below. “Oh, um, you don’t have…”

“Casper, shut up for once in your life, and come inside. It’s f*****g cold out here.”