Nightfall, Part Three
Title: Nightfall
Chapter: 3/?
Show: Navy NCIS
Genre: Horror/Angst
Notes: Takes place over a year after the end of chapter two (sometimes these things just have to happen...)
Kate grimaced as she forced herself to take a sip of her morning coffee. It felt like it was just too early in the morning for this, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. She wasn’t at work any earlier than was usual for her, but last night she had slept like a wreck. She just hoped she could keep it together enough that no one noticed and asked her why she was so tired, because she really didn’t want to talk about it.
She had no idea where the nightmare had come from. But there she was, standing all in black at the doorway to the church, wearing the same clothes she had worn to a funeral more than a year before. His funeral.
She’d thrown the clothes away afterwards, even the shoes. She’d never wanted to see them again.
The clothes might have been the same, but the church was all wrong. It was too old, too big…it looked like something right out of a Gothic painting. Everything was black, even the sparse candles hanging on the wall, the only meager lighting source against the darkness that filled the church to the point where it was hard to breathe. At the front of the church where the altar should have been, seemingly a million miles away, stood the casket. It was open, but from this angle she couldn’t see inside. Footsteps echoing loud and hollow in the empty church, Kate began to walk.
She was halfway to the casket when she noticed the blood. It was oozing down the sides in rivers, pouring forth so that the sides of the casket were covered in a crimson sheath. It ran down onto the floor, forming a massive red puddle that slowly spread down the steps and out onto the floor. It was shiny and bright against the black of the church, too red to be anything but surreal. Hollywood red, the color of blood you only saw in the movies.
There was something in her hands. Kate looked down and realized she was clutching a bouquet, carrying it close to her chest in front of her like bride. Somehow she knew it was supposed to be one of the arrangements from the funeral, but this too was all wrong. The arrangements there had been pure white lilies and orchids, all out of season and imported from hothouses. Kate remembered how she had wondered if the way Dinozzo’s parents had spared no expense at the funeral had been their way of trying to make up for how they kept him from their money in life. She had wondered if, somehow, in their own little way, the lavish gestures had made them feel any better.
The flowers she now held were roses, a thickly gathered bunch that had been spaced with small fern fronds. Once it would have been a bright display of dark red and forest green. But the bouquet Kate held was as black and lifeless as the building around her, the ferns withered and gray, the roses crumpled into darkness.
Her shoes came up against something wet, the carpet in the aisle squelching under her feet. Kate looked up from her study of the bouquet in her hands to discover she had finally reached the front of the church. She started walking through the blood puddle, steps slow and purposeful as she stared ahead at the casket. The blood still ran down the sides, just as heavy a flow as ever. This was too much blood, and she knew it; no human body contained this much blood. Blood only pooled on the floor and dripped down the walls like this at massacres, places where the bodies were stacked high in all their gruesome glory.
There was a smell in the air, the heavy reek of rot and human decay. It poured out of the casket not unlike the blood did, filling the atmosphere with a presence just as heavy as the overwhelming darkness of the church. Kate kept going, head held high and the flowers clutched in her hands. The blood was up to her ankles now, hot and sticky against her shoes as she mounted the steps leading to the where the casket sat. She was only inches away now; a few more steps and she would be able to see what lay inside…
Then her alarm clock had screamed her into awareness, cutting through the misty realm of her dreams and leaving her sitting up in bed, panting and sweating and feeling as if she hadn’t slept a wink.
Kate had never been much for dream interpretation. She knew her dream had probably meant something, but she didn’t really want to know what. Of course, either Abby or Ducky would have loved to psychobabble the hell out of it, so she was determined to keep her mouth shut on the subject. Kate just hoped it wouldn’t wind up being one of those recurring dreams, because she really didn’t need the sleepless nights. It was hard enough keeping their team on track sometimes, these days.
Without meaning to, Kate found herself glancing over at what had been his desk, over a year ago (one year, two months, a week, and three days, to be exact…not that she was being obsessive about it or anything; Gibbs had that market well-cornered all on his own). No trace of him remained, of course; his personal effects had long been distributed between his parents and the members of the team that had wanted them. Kate hadn’t taken anything herself; it had been too eerie and tragic for her for that. Gibbs had wanted Tony’s badge (the closest thing to his dog tags, since he had never been a Marine), but he’d had to settle for his baseball cap. They’d never found his badge. The killer must have taken it off of his body.
Right now, the desk stood empty. Or at least, it was empty to the casual eye. Kate knew all too well that it was permanently occupied by the ghost of Dinozzo, a persistent presence that just seemed to completely overshadow that of anyone else who tried to make that desk their own. All the potential replacements never lasted long. A few months, and Gibbs would find some excuse to transfer them elsewhere. Either that, or they’d get the hint and leave on their own.
Kate barely bothered to learn their names anymore, couldn’t force herself to care about their personalities or abilities. There was a Tony Dinozzo-shaped hole in the image of their team, and she doubted there was another jigsaw piece in the whole world unique enough to properly fit into that slot. Kate took another sip of her coffee and tried to resist the urge to set her head down on her desk.
“Eyes open, Agent Todd,” Gibbs barked as he seemingly appeared out of nowhere to bustle past her. Kate jumped, burning the roof of her mouth as the coffee she had been the middle of drinking splashed past her lips, and she quickly turned a violent swear into a noise that was somewhere between a grumble and a moan. “The van’s waiting downstairs,” Gibbs informed her curtly, pausing only long enough to grab his gun from his desk before hurrying out. “Get a move on.”
“But where are we…?” Kate called at his retreating back, staring in complete befuddlement.
“Massachusetts,” Gibbs yelled back without bothering to turn around. Any other questions Kate could have possibly come up with were not to be asked as Gibbs disappeared behind the closing elevator doors.
“Near Boston, to be precise,” Ducky’s voice piped up. Kate turned her head to watch the coroner walk up between the desks, a weary expression already in place.
“Why are we going to Boston?” Kate asked, hoping Ducky had been luckier at getting answers out of Gibbs than she had.
“To investigate a murder, of course,” Ducky replied smoothly. “A prostitute was found dead in a hotel in a decidedly wretched part of town.” He absently took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief he had pulled from his pocket. “A rather common hazard of the job, unfortunately. The oldest profession, they call it, and with good reason. In fact, there is historical proof of a thriving brothel trade in times as far back as…”
“A dead prostitute?” Kate cut him off before he could too far into one of his usual sermons. “Ducky, why is this one of our cases?” Somehow, the image of a naval officer who turned tricks on the side didn’t gel so easily in her mind.
And she had almost gotten to the point where she could round herself off before she started thinking of what Tony probably would have said in reaction to each new case. But she got the distinct feeling that for this particular story, jokes about porn would somehow have been involved.
“It’s not,” Ducky told her with a sigh, and the weariness just seemed to overtake him, making his features a good decade older than they’d been moments before. “Gibbs is making it our case.” He gave another sigh in reaction to Kate’s puzzled frown, and gave a slight bow of his head as he met her eyes gravely. “The cause of death is complete exsanguination from what appears to be some rather sharp-toothed human bites.”
“Oh,” Kate said softly, feeling a little cold as she tried not to think about her dream. As she made her way to the van, she felt even more tired than she had been before. This was going to be a very long day, and she only had to glance at the expression on Abby and McGee’s faces to know that they knew it too.
Obsession was, quite frankly, not quite strong enough a word to cover how Gibbs behaved in reaction to what could be even the slightest lead into the Maine Vampire. He had barely stopped to rest back when it had first happened, back when the case was still fresh. They had thought it would be easy to catch him, particularly with a creature more rabid bloodhound than Gibbs hard on the trail. But that was when they were assuming to see what you usually saw with an active serial killer, namely more bodies. But there hadn’t been a single one.
The killer that had been so far taking a new life every month like clockwork had suddenly stopped; the trail had run cold. They had widened their search, exhausted every lead, reexamined every clue…nothing. The killer had disappeared, taking their peace of mind and, seemingly, Gibbs’ sanity with him. The Maine Vampire had quickly become Gibbs’ new Ari. No matter how remote or ludicrous a lead seemed, if it had even the slightest possible connection to the case, Gibbs was all over it. He kept his eyes peeled for cases that had any vampiric connection or connotation, any at all. He was a man possessed. Kate knew there was now a pretty decent sized pool going among the office as to just how much longer Gibbs was going to last at this rate, with a few added bets on the side as to whether he would eventually go insane or just wear himself into the ground first.
Somehow, she couldn’t help but feel a touch of irony that Tony had indirectly inspired such a massive amount of gambling among the department, gambling that he wasn’t even there to take any part it in.
_________
“Somehow I fail to see how this winds up in your jurisdiction,” the homicide detective was telling Gibbs. He stood firmly planted in the doorway to the hotel room that was the crime scene, arms crossed over his chest. Gibbs stood as close to him as possible without breathing directly into his face, glaring down at him with all the fire and murder he could muster, which these days was quite a lot. It didn’t bring even the slightest flinch to the detective’s face, which was set in a stubborn frown. Even through his impatient rage, Gibbs had to give him credit for having some real stones on him.
“I know I already explained this to at least three people this morning,” Gibbs told him through clenched teeth. “I swear, if you’re trying to make it four, your squad is going to have to hang around just to cover your murder.” The detective just tilted his head up to meet Gibbs squarely in the eyes. Gibbs heaved a huge sigh and started to count to ten in his head. He ended up going all the way to twenty-five before he felt nearly composed enough to try and speak again. “We believe that this killing may be the work of a serial killer who has already claimed the lives of eight victims, two of whom were Navy personal. Until we find something to prove otherwise, this case is ours.”
“I don’t suppose you mean the Maine Vampire?” the detective’s frown turned down yet another notch. It took all his years of training and practice at keeping his face a complete blank to keep Gibbs from registering his surprise in his expression.
“How the hell do you know about that?”
“Death by bite mark-related exsanguination isn’t exactly something you see every day, even in an urban area like this one,” the detective snorted derisively. “We checked to see if there were any open cases that matched the MO, and your Maine Vampire came up.” He shook his head. “We ruled it out. This isn’t the work of your guy.”
“Well, why don’t you just let me and my team be the determiners of that,” Gibbs snapped, finally losing his patience and shoving the detective aside as he stormed into the room. He made an impatient gesture with his hand, and the four waiting team members quickly hurried inside after him.
“You wanna be that way, fine,” the detective yelled angrily as he turned to leave in disgust. “But I’m telling you, unless your guy started a convention, you’re barking up the wrong body.”
“What do you think he meant by that?” McGee blinked in confusion as he knelt to take some photos of the doorway to the bathroom. “About a convention?”
“Because it looks like our young victim was killed by more than one attacker,” Ducky told him, pulling the sheet off of the body to reveal a naked woman lying on the bed. “I can see three distinctly separate bites here,” the coroner went on, pointing to a set of fang marks on either side of her neck and another on the inside of her upper left thigh, “and I can already tell you without measuring that they probably belong to three separate people.”
“Oh, definitely,” Abby agreed, bobbing close to look at one side of the victim’s neck, then the other. “One of these is way bigger than the other one.” She gave a faint smile as she pulled back so McGee could take pictures of the body. “Someone has a really big mouth.” Kate and McGee exchanged looks. It was usually up to the Goth girl to fill in the space on their team when they were between replacement field agents, but despite their many trips together the two special agents still hadn’t quite gotten used to her odd sense of corpse-side humor.
“Kate?” Gibbs prompted, barely looking up from where he was walking the room, looking for any important clues. Kate looked at him for a minute before responding in a reluctant tone.
“Well, it is possible that our killer found two more people of…like interests…and they decided to do a group killing together.”
“But you don’t think it’s very likely,” Gibbs inferred from her tone.
“Not really,” Kate shook her head.
“It’s still possible, though,” Gibbs pressed. Kate opened her mouth, shut it, and finally gave a faint nod. “Well, then that’s all that matters,” Gibbs announced with a settled air as he went back to poking around the room. McGee, Abby, and Kate exchanged mournful looks before going back to their work.
A half an hour later, they had pretty much covered the tiny hotel room, for all the good it did them. Like most skuzzy hotels, it was obvious it hadn’t been properly cleaned in awhile. Abby couldn’t get a single print off of anything that wasn’t a useless smudge, and there were enough old stains and scattered bits of trash around the room to keep them busy for months.
“Well, Ducky?” Gibbs prompted, looking impatiently over at where the coroner was examining the body.
“It looks like the young lady here went out with quite a bang,” Ducky told him conversationally, bending over the body for a good look at the bite mark on the right side of her neck. “Both her lower ports of entry are filled with vaginal and semenal secretions.”
“One of her attackers was a woman?” McGee gaped, sticking his head back through the door from where he’d been poking around inside the dingy bathroom.
“Well, one of her sexual partners certainly was,” Ducky said, “though I think it’s a fairly safe guess that whoever killed her also among those involved with her beforehand. I’m also going to go a bit out on a limb and say that it was one woman and two men, judging by the fact the semenal fluid outnumbers the other sort two to one. And I wouldn’t bother looking for condoms, Kaitlin,” he added, causing Kate to look up from where she had started to dig through the trashcan. “Considering the amount of stains on the bed sheet here, I daresay our intrepid three didn’t bother to use any.”
“Are you kidding me?” Kate couldn’t keep the disgust and shock out of her tone. “In this day and age, who’s out having casual sex without a condom? Particularly with…” she nodded in the direction of the corpse. “Well, someone like her.”
“Someone who thinks they’re going to live forever,” Gibbs commented dryly, standing beside the bed and looking at the dead hooker. Her face was a mess of heavy makeup that had been smeared by sweat and God knew what else. She was painfully skinny, several old needle marks scarring the inner arm around the elbow.
“This is a pretty crappy hotel,” Abby reminded them. “Couldn’t those be stains from, uh, previous customers?”
“Ew,” Kate muttered to no one in particular, making a face.
“No, I’m certain they’re quite fresh,” Ducky insisted, raising his eyebrows. “I suppose we should be glad that at least the sheets were freshly cleaned in this place.”
“Any sign of blood in her mouth?” Gibbs prompted, all business.
“That would be practically the only bodily fluid I didn’t find traces of in her mouth,” Ducky replied, parting her lips with his gloved hands to show Gibbs what he was talking about.
“So she had sex with three people and then pleasured them orally as well?” Abby remarked, quirking an eyebrow. “At the risk of sounding like I know more about the going rate of ladies of the night than I should, that kind of job can not come cheap.”
“Here’s hoping she got cash up front,” Kate sighed, looking at the dead woman. “For all the good it did her.”
“Assuming the killers didn’t just take it back when they left,” Gibbs reminded her.
“Actually, I don’t think so,” McGee spoke up from where he was now rifling through the contents of the victim’s purse. “I don’t think they even bothered to take anything. There’s a decent-sized wad of cash in here, a beat-up credit card from a local clothing store…” He paused and then cocked his head ironically. “Some old syringes…”
“No drugs, though?” Gibbs asked. McGee shook his head.
“The cash was probably for her dealer, then,” Kate inferred. She looked through the carelessly tossed aside articles of clothing that had been left on the hotel room floor. For the most part, it looked as if the victim’s clothing had been removed willingly rather than ripped off of her, although there was a slight tear around one of the buttons on her blouse where apparently someone had gotten a little overeager. Kate paused, her forehead creasing as she got a good look at the tear in the fabric of the shirt. It looked as though whoever had done the tearing had some rather long fingernails. Kate decided to file that one away for later.
“McGee, did you check the bathtub drain for hairs?” Gibbs spoke up, turning to the agent.
“Gibbs, that bathroom hasn’t been cleaned in God knows how long,” McGee protested, eyes wide with disbelief. “Do you realize just how big a clump of hair must be stuck in that drain by now?”
“It doesn’t matter, McGee, because I want it anyway,” Gibbs barked. McGee looked stunned for only a fraction of a second before scrambling to his feet and hurrying back into the bathroom. “Can you tell me what happened here, Ducky?” the senior agent turned without pause to face the coroner.
“Well, I’ll obviously know more once I can get the young lady onto the table down at the Boston lab,” Ducky began, straightening up and adjusting his glasses. “Very good of them to be so accommodating, by the way. Most labs wouldn’t be nearly so understanding. Why, I remember this time down in West Virginia when…”
“Today, Ducky.”
“Oh, very well. As far as I can tell, the various sexual acts were all completed pre-mortem, and the lack of significant bruising suggests that they were all consensual on the victim’s part. The biting, however, was certainly not.”
“Why not?” Kate frowned. “You’d think she’d be used to getting paid for all kinds of twisted things.”
“Well, either biting wasn’t one of them, or the attackers chose not to warn her about that part beforehand,” Ducky explained, pointing to some heavy bruising on the woman’s wrists and ankles. “From what I can tell, one attacker climbed on top of her and began biting her from the right side of the neck. She struggled, so the other two held her down until she was weakened into compliancy. Then the first attacker shifted positions slightly…” Ducky moved around the bed so he could better point out the marks on the victim’s neck as he continued, “so that they were facing her from the side rather than the front as they bit into her. You can see here that there are actually two bite marks overlapping one another.” He straightened back up. “It seems that then they lifted our young lady here so that she was in a sitting position with her legs spread, and one of the other attackers began biting her on the left side of her neck while the final attacker bit into her inner thigh. I’ll know for sure once I cut into her, of course, but as far as I can tell now, it certainly looks like an exsanguination.”
“A group exsanguination,” Kate couldn’t help stressing, stealing a look over at Gibbs.
“Did the Boston homicide squad get a chance to interview any potential witnesses yet?” Gibbs called to McGee, completely ignoring Kate.
“No,” McGee answered, coming out of the bathroom and holding a baggie completely filled with a matted clump of human hairs at full arm’s length as he stared at it in sickened fascination.
“Well, we’d better get on that, then,” Gibbs determined, making his way towards the door. Kate sighed, rolling her eyes heavenward. It was going to be a very long day indeed.
_________
“We’ve been here for six days now,” McGee muttered gloomily, staring at his half-empty glass of water from where he was resting his head on his arms folded on the table. “When is Gibbs finally going to admit that there’s nothing about this case that connects it to the Maine Vampire and let us go home?”
“I don’t know, McGee,” Kate sighed, picking at her french fries. “Soon, I hope.” She glanced around the sidewalk café, trying to ignore how the happy smiling faces of the other patrons eating their dinners made her feel even more miserable and exhausted. “Where is Gibbs, anyway?”
“He was going to stop by the Boston lab to talk to Ducky and Abby,” McGee reminded her. “Abby was supposed to finally get her chance with their equipment today to run the DNA samples we collected through the system.”
“Right,” Kate nodded faintly as she took a sip of her iced tea. They had spent the past three days getting information about their dead prostitute and then tracking down some of her “coworkers”. Apparently she went by the name of Valentine, and she typically worked a stretch of city block not far from the hotel she had been killed at. The girls that had been walking the block that night with her claimed she had been picked up by a pale, dark-haired girl (one hooker had described her look as “very morbid”, while another had said it was “heroin chic”) and a man with long black hair and stubble who had appeared to be her boyfriend. The two had said they were interested in doing a foursome, and that they had another man waiting for them back at a hotel room. They paid Valentine, and then she walked off with them in the direction of the hotel. That was the last anyone had ever seen of her. The only description they had of the unknown second man was from the hotel clerk, who hadn’t been paying very good attention when he gave him the room key and could only describe him as “bald with tattoos”. The clerk hadn’t seen either the other two suspects or Valentine.
“Here he comes,” McGee quickly sat up as Gibbs came walking towards them. Kate turned around in her chair and felt her mood get even gloomier at the look on Gibbs’ face.
“No luck?” Kate guessed.
“None,” Gibbs spat, coming to stand beside the table. “None of the fluid samples match any cases on file, and all of the hairs had been in the drain too long to be of any use.” Kate and McGee looked at each other nervously and then back at Gibbs, who was practically sparking with livid energy.
“You, uh, want to get something to eat?” McGee offered timidly.
“I’m not hungry,” Gibbs snapped. “Finish up and get out of here.”
“You done?” Kate asked McGee softly, pushing her plate away. What little appetite she had had was gone.
“I’m done,” McGee agreed. They quickly paid the bill and split, the two younger agents practically running to keep up with Gibbs’ furious pace.
“One of us needs to talk to him,” Kate whispered to McGee, glancing ahead at the rigid set of Gibbs’ shoulders.
“You talk to him,” McGee balked. “I’m quite fond of my head just where it’s at.”
“He’s going to explode if we don’t do something soon,” Kate argued. “This is just insane. It’s pointless.” She swallowed past a sudden cold knot in her stomach as unpleasant memories were once again stirred from where they seemed to lie just beneath the surface. “We all feel bad about what happened, but this isn’t going to help anything.”
“You think I don’t know that?” McGee hissed. He slowed his pace considerably, a sorrowful expression on his face. “Kate, I honestly don’t know what’s worse; what happened to Tony, or what not being able to solve that case doing to Gibbs. But do you really think we can just stop him?”
“From obsessing?” Kate shook her head. “I don’t know, but we have to try.”
“Try what?” The sound of Gibbs’ voice brought the both of them to a screeching halt. The older man stood there, arms crossed as he stared them down with an expression that gave Kate the sinking feeling that Gibbs had heard enough of their conversation to figure out the answer to that question himself.
“Uh…” Kate started to force out a stuttering reply.
“Did either of you hear that?” McGee cut her off sharply. Kate turned to look at McGee, certain the other agent was trying to change the subject. McGee had an intent look of confusion on his face, however, and he was staring off to one side with a frown as he apparently listened for something. “It sounded like…” he was interrupted as a piercing shriek rang through the air.
“A scream?” Gibbs guessed with a touch of sarcasm, already pushing past him to run in the direction the scream had come from. Kate and McGee quickly went after him. They had moved away from the well-lit area of the city now, more towards the dirty back alleys with few streetlights. It was pretty dark in the direction it sounded like the scream had come from, and Kate quickly pulled out her flashlight from where it had been tucked into her pocket. Behind her she could hear McGee fumbling to do the same.
A black woman clad in a moth-eaten faux fur coat and a pleather lime green skirt with matching go-go boots rushed down the street, terror etched into her heavily-painted features as she looked over her shoulder behind her.
“Hold up,” Gibbs said curtly, catching onto her arm and pulling her to a halt. He flashed his badge. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Tabby,” the prostitute wailed, pointing with a trembling, long-nailed finger from which the nail polish was chipping off down a pitch-black alley. “Those guys, they got Tabby! They grabbed her, and they dragged her off…!”
“Okay,” Gibbs shoved the woman into McGee’s arms. “Call for backup. Kate, you’re with me.” McGee was left to comfort the hysterical madame as Kate and Gibbs advanced slowly on the alley, guns drawn and flashlights out. From inside the darkness of the alley came the sounds of a woman struggling and several people moving around. If Kate squinted, she could just make out a woman pinned with her back to the brick wall and four figures around her.
Four?
Kate blinked, and looked again. By now, Gibbs and her had crept close enough so that she could start to make out a few more details. Sure enough, there were four attackers pressed close to the woman’s body, not three. Kate felt her stomach flip-flop as she realized each had their mouth clamped down firmly on a part of the victim’s body, faint slurping sounds echoing in the alley as the prostitute writhed weakly in their grasp.
The man standing next to her on her right side, one hand pressed tightly over her mouth, was tall and thin, black hair falling thickly across his eyes, his dark stubble and silver nose ring just visible in the shadows. A short pale woman in tight-fitting black clothes clung to the front of the victim, her black hair pulled into a ponytail, her heavily made-up eyes closed in pleasure as she plunged her fangs into the base of the victim’s throat. Kneeling on one knee between them was a bald, well-muscled man with designs tattooed all over his arms, holding the prostitute’s left arm out as he drank deeply from her wrist.
Kate could barely make out the fourth attacker, a man with light brown hair and a leather jacket that had his fangs buried deeply in the right side of the woman’s neck. She found herself frowning, however, straining to see closer. There was something familiar about him, a sense of familiarity she couldn’t quite shake. She took a few steps closer, but was unable to see the man’s face because of how close it was bent to the victim’s neck. Kate squinted into the dark, her heart starting to pound. She must be starting to get as obsessive as Gibbs, because she could swear it almost looked like...
“NCIS!” Gibbs yelled from where he stood behind and slightly to one side of Kate, gun pointing at the attackers. “Freeze!” At the sound of his voice, the four people jerked, lifting their faces to look in the direction of the two NCIS agents. Because of where she had been looking at the time Gibbs had shouted, Kate found herself locking eyes with the assailant whose face she had not been able to see.
He stared at her, eyes wide in shocked recognition, his features stricken. His mouth was partially open in a gasp, and Kate could see the faint gleam from one fang-point. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth; blood that Kate knew full well wasn’t his own.
“Tony?” she whispered hoarsely, a numb sensation sweeping over her body like she had just been run over by a frozen tidal wave. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gibbs jerk his head in the direction she was looking at the sound of her voice. In a much lighter-hearted situation, perhaps Kate would have been better able to appreciate the sight of Gibbs motionless with shock, goggled-eyed with a mouth hanging partially open. At that moment, however, the rest of the world and reality felt very, very far away as Tony stared at them with eyes the same color as the blood he had been drinking.
Time came unfrozen with a screech as Tony yanked his eyes away from them and shoved the woman out of his arms, the back of her head knocking loudly against the stone wall. The other three simultaneously released her, leaving her to crash onto the alley floor like a heap of trash. They turned and bolted down the alley, running so fast Kate could feel a faint gush of wind as they went.
“I told you we should have taken her someplace private, bro!”
“Shut your yap, Gio!”
Their voices seemed to blow right past Kate, leaving her standing there cold, unaffected. Everything seemed so far away and distant. She just stood there, gun arm dropping to limply hang at her side as she stared into the now-empty darkness. She didn’t move, didn’t speak. The world seemed numb, muted. She was distantly aware of Gibbs coming unfrozen beside her and taking off after the four attackers in hot pursuit. She was distantly aware of McGee as he came bolting down the alley, first demanding to know what had happened and then dropping to his knees to examine the prostitute on the ground. Even the small part of her still alive enough to feel emotion at that point wasn’t surprised when McGee cried out that the woman was dead.
This couldn’t be happening. It made no sense, logically; it defied too many rules, contradicted too many facts for it to make any kind of sense. It was a million levels beyond improbable, beyond impossible. But Kate knew what she had seen with her own two eyes, and she had always trusted her eyes. But now what her eyes had told her she was seeing…
She barely felt the pavement hit her knees as she dropped to the ground and began to cry.
Chapter: 3/?
Show: Navy NCIS
Genre: Horror/Angst
Notes: Takes place over a year after the end of chapter two (sometimes these things just have to happen...)
Kate grimaced as she forced herself to take a sip of her morning coffee. It felt like it was just too early in the morning for this, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. She wasn’t at work any earlier than was usual for her, but last night she had slept like a wreck. She just hoped she could keep it together enough that no one noticed and asked her why she was so tired, because she really didn’t want to talk about it.
She had no idea where the nightmare had come from. But there she was, standing all in black at the doorway to the church, wearing the same clothes she had worn to a funeral more than a year before. His funeral.
She’d thrown the clothes away afterwards, even the shoes. She’d never wanted to see them again.
The clothes might have been the same, but the church was all wrong. It was too old, too big…it looked like something right out of a Gothic painting. Everything was black, even the sparse candles hanging on the wall, the only meager lighting source against the darkness that filled the church to the point where it was hard to breathe. At the front of the church where the altar should have been, seemingly a million miles away, stood the casket. It was open, but from this angle she couldn’t see inside. Footsteps echoing loud and hollow in the empty church, Kate began to walk.
She was halfway to the casket when she noticed the blood. It was oozing down the sides in rivers, pouring forth so that the sides of the casket were covered in a crimson sheath. It ran down onto the floor, forming a massive red puddle that slowly spread down the steps and out onto the floor. It was shiny and bright against the black of the church, too red to be anything but surreal. Hollywood red, the color of blood you only saw in the movies.
There was something in her hands. Kate looked down and realized she was clutching a bouquet, carrying it close to her chest in front of her like bride. Somehow she knew it was supposed to be one of the arrangements from the funeral, but this too was all wrong. The arrangements there had been pure white lilies and orchids, all out of season and imported from hothouses. Kate remembered how she had wondered if the way Dinozzo’s parents had spared no expense at the funeral had been their way of trying to make up for how they kept him from their money in life. She had wondered if, somehow, in their own little way, the lavish gestures had made them feel any better.
The flowers she now held were roses, a thickly gathered bunch that had been spaced with small fern fronds. Once it would have been a bright display of dark red and forest green. But the bouquet Kate held was as black and lifeless as the building around her, the ferns withered and gray, the roses crumpled into darkness.
Her shoes came up against something wet, the carpet in the aisle squelching under her feet. Kate looked up from her study of the bouquet in her hands to discover she had finally reached the front of the church. She started walking through the blood puddle, steps slow and purposeful as she stared ahead at the casket. The blood still ran down the sides, just as heavy a flow as ever. This was too much blood, and she knew it; no human body contained this much blood. Blood only pooled on the floor and dripped down the walls like this at massacres, places where the bodies were stacked high in all their gruesome glory.
There was a smell in the air, the heavy reek of rot and human decay. It poured out of the casket not unlike the blood did, filling the atmosphere with a presence just as heavy as the overwhelming darkness of the church. Kate kept going, head held high and the flowers clutched in her hands. The blood was up to her ankles now, hot and sticky against her shoes as she mounted the steps leading to the where the casket sat. She was only inches away now; a few more steps and she would be able to see what lay inside…
Then her alarm clock had screamed her into awareness, cutting through the misty realm of her dreams and leaving her sitting up in bed, panting and sweating and feeling as if she hadn’t slept a wink.
Kate had never been much for dream interpretation. She knew her dream had probably meant something, but she didn’t really want to know what. Of course, either Abby or Ducky would have loved to psychobabble the hell out of it, so she was determined to keep her mouth shut on the subject. Kate just hoped it wouldn’t wind up being one of those recurring dreams, because she really didn’t need the sleepless nights. It was hard enough keeping their team on track sometimes, these days.
Without meaning to, Kate found herself glancing over at what had been his desk, over a year ago (one year, two months, a week, and three days, to be exact…not that she was being obsessive about it or anything; Gibbs had that market well-cornered all on his own). No trace of him remained, of course; his personal effects had long been distributed between his parents and the members of the team that had wanted them. Kate hadn’t taken anything herself; it had been too eerie and tragic for her for that. Gibbs had wanted Tony’s badge (the closest thing to his dog tags, since he had never been a Marine), but he’d had to settle for his baseball cap. They’d never found his badge. The killer must have taken it off of his body.
Right now, the desk stood empty. Or at least, it was empty to the casual eye. Kate knew all too well that it was permanently occupied by the ghost of Dinozzo, a persistent presence that just seemed to completely overshadow that of anyone else who tried to make that desk their own. All the potential replacements never lasted long. A few months, and Gibbs would find some excuse to transfer them elsewhere. Either that, or they’d get the hint and leave on their own.
Kate barely bothered to learn their names anymore, couldn’t force herself to care about their personalities or abilities. There was a Tony Dinozzo-shaped hole in the image of their team, and she doubted there was another jigsaw piece in the whole world unique enough to properly fit into that slot. Kate took another sip of her coffee and tried to resist the urge to set her head down on her desk.
“Eyes open, Agent Todd,” Gibbs barked as he seemingly appeared out of nowhere to bustle past her. Kate jumped, burning the roof of her mouth as the coffee she had been the middle of drinking splashed past her lips, and she quickly turned a violent swear into a noise that was somewhere between a grumble and a moan. “The van’s waiting downstairs,” Gibbs informed her curtly, pausing only long enough to grab his gun from his desk before hurrying out. “Get a move on.”
“But where are we…?” Kate called at his retreating back, staring in complete befuddlement.
“Massachusetts,” Gibbs yelled back without bothering to turn around. Any other questions Kate could have possibly come up with were not to be asked as Gibbs disappeared behind the closing elevator doors.
“Near Boston, to be precise,” Ducky’s voice piped up. Kate turned her head to watch the coroner walk up between the desks, a weary expression already in place.
“Why are we going to Boston?” Kate asked, hoping Ducky had been luckier at getting answers out of Gibbs than she had.
“To investigate a murder, of course,” Ducky replied smoothly. “A prostitute was found dead in a hotel in a decidedly wretched part of town.” He absently took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief he had pulled from his pocket. “A rather common hazard of the job, unfortunately. The oldest profession, they call it, and with good reason. In fact, there is historical proof of a thriving brothel trade in times as far back as…”
“A dead prostitute?” Kate cut him off before he could too far into one of his usual sermons. “Ducky, why is this one of our cases?” Somehow, the image of a naval officer who turned tricks on the side didn’t gel so easily in her mind.
And she had almost gotten to the point where she could round herself off before she started thinking of what Tony probably would have said in reaction to each new case. But she got the distinct feeling that for this particular story, jokes about porn would somehow have been involved.
“It’s not,” Ducky told her with a sigh, and the weariness just seemed to overtake him, making his features a good decade older than they’d been moments before. “Gibbs is making it our case.” He gave another sigh in reaction to Kate’s puzzled frown, and gave a slight bow of his head as he met her eyes gravely. “The cause of death is complete exsanguination from what appears to be some rather sharp-toothed human bites.”
“Oh,” Kate said softly, feeling a little cold as she tried not to think about her dream. As she made her way to the van, she felt even more tired than she had been before. This was going to be a very long day, and she only had to glance at the expression on Abby and McGee’s faces to know that they knew it too.
Obsession was, quite frankly, not quite strong enough a word to cover how Gibbs behaved in reaction to what could be even the slightest lead into the Maine Vampire. He had barely stopped to rest back when it had first happened, back when the case was still fresh. They had thought it would be easy to catch him, particularly with a creature more rabid bloodhound than Gibbs hard on the trail. But that was when they were assuming to see what you usually saw with an active serial killer, namely more bodies. But there hadn’t been a single one.
The killer that had been so far taking a new life every month like clockwork had suddenly stopped; the trail had run cold. They had widened their search, exhausted every lead, reexamined every clue…nothing. The killer had disappeared, taking their peace of mind and, seemingly, Gibbs’ sanity with him. The Maine Vampire had quickly become Gibbs’ new Ari. No matter how remote or ludicrous a lead seemed, if it had even the slightest possible connection to the case, Gibbs was all over it. He kept his eyes peeled for cases that had any vampiric connection or connotation, any at all. He was a man possessed. Kate knew there was now a pretty decent sized pool going among the office as to just how much longer Gibbs was going to last at this rate, with a few added bets on the side as to whether he would eventually go insane or just wear himself into the ground first.
Somehow, she couldn’t help but feel a touch of irony that Tony had indirectly inspired such a massive amount of gambling among the department, gambling that he wasn’t even there to take any part it in.
_________
“Somehow I fail to see how this winds up in your jurisdiction,” the homicide detective was telling Gibbs. He stood firmly planted in the doorway to the hotel room that was the crime scene, arms crossed over his chest. Gibbs stood as close to him as possible without breathing directly into his face, glaring down at him with all the fire and murder he could muster, which these days was quite a lot. It didn’t bring even the slightest flinch to the detective’s face, which was set in a stubborn frown. Even through his impatient rage, Gibbs had to give him credit for having some real stones on him.
“I know I already explained this to at least three people this morning,” Gibbs told him through clenched teeth. “I swear, if you’re trying to make it four, your squad is going to have to hang around just to cover your murder.” The detective just tilted his head up to meet Gibbs squarely in the eyes. Gibbs heaved a huge sigh and started to count to ten in his head. He ended up going all the way to twenty-five before he felt nearly composed enough to try and speak again. “We believe that this killing may be the work of a serial killer who has already claimed the lives of eight victims, two of whom were Navy personal. Until we find something to prove otherwise, this case is ours.”
“I don’t suppose you mean the Maine Vampire?” the detective’s frown turned down yet another notch. It took all his years of training and practice at keeping his face a complete blank to keep Gibbs from registering his surprise in his expression.
“How the hell do you know about that?”
“Death by bite mark-related exsanguination isn’t exactly something you see every day, even in an urban area like this one,” the detective snorted derisively. “We checked to see if there were any open cases that matched the MO, and your Maine Vampire came up.” He shook his head. “We ruled it out. This isn’t the work of your guy.”
“Well, why don’t you just let me and my team be the determiners of that,” Gibbs snapped, finally losing his patience and shoving the detective aside as he stormed into the room. He made an impatient gesture with his hand, and the four waiting team members quickly hurried inside after him.
“You wanna be that way, fine,” the detective yelled angrily as he turned to leave in disgust. “But I’m telling you, unless your guy started a convention, you’re barking up the wrong body.”
“What do you think he meant by that?” McGee blinked in confusion as he knelt to take some photos of the doorway to the bathroom. “About a convention?”
“Because it looks like our young victim was killed by more than one attacker,” Ducky told him, pulling the sheet off of the body to reveal a naked woman lying on the bed. “I can see three distinctly separate bites here,” the coroner went on, pointing to a set of fang marks on either side of her neck and another on the inside of her upper left thigh, “and I can already tell you without measuring that they probably belong to three separate people.”
“Oh, definitely,” Abby agreed, bobbing close to look at one side of the victim’s neck, then the other. “One of these is way bigger than the other one.” She gave a faint smile as she pulled back so McGee could take pictures of the body. “Someone has a really big mouth.” Kate and McGee exchanged looks. It was usually up to the Goth girl to fill in the space on their team when they were between replacement field agents, but despite their many trips together the two special agents still hadn’t quite gotten used to her odd sense of corpse-side humor.
“Kate?” Gibbs prompted, barely looking up from where he was walking the room, looking for any important clues. Kate looked at him for a minute before responding in a reluctant tone.
“Well, it is possible that our killer found two more people of…like interests…and they decided to do a group killing together.”
“But you don’t think it’s very likely,” Gibbs inferred from her tone.
“Not really,” Kate shook her head.
“It’s still possible, though,” Gibbs pressed. Kate opened her mouth, shut it, and finally gave a faint nod. “Well, then that’s all that matters,” Gibbs announced with a settled air as he went back to poking around the room. McGee, Abby, and Kate exchanged mournful looks before going back to their work.
A half an hour later, they had pretty much covered the tiny hotel room, for all the good it did them. Like most skuzzy hotels, it was obvious it hadn’t been properly cleaned in awhile. Abby couldn’t get a single print off of anything that wasn’t a useless smudge, and there were enough old stains and scattered bits of trash around the room to keep them busy for months.
“Well, Ducky?” Gibbs prompted, looking impatiently over at where the coroner was examining the body.
“It looks like the young lady here went out with quite a bang,” Ducky told him conversationally, bending over the body for a good look at the bite mark on the right side of her neck. “Both her lower ports of entry are filled with vaginal and semenal secretions.”
“One of her attackers was a woman?” McGee gaped, sticking his head back through the door from where he’d been poking around inside the dingy bathroom.
“Well, one of her sexual partners certainly was,” Ducky said, “though I think it’s a fairly safe guess that whoever killed her also among those involved with her beforehand. I’m also going to go a bit out on a limb and say that it was one woman and two men, judging by the fact the semenal fluid outnumbers the other sort two to one. And I wouldn’t bother looking for condoms, Kaitlin,” he added, causing Kate to look up from where she had started to dig through the trashcan. “Considering the amount of stains on the bed sheet here, I daresay our intrepid three didn’t bother to use any.”
“Are you kidding me?” Kate couldn’t keep the disgust and shock out of her tone. “In this day and age, who’s out having casual sex without a condom? Particularly with…” she nodded in the direction of the corpse. “Well, someone like her.”
“Someone who thinks they’re going to live forever,” Gibbs commented dryly, standing beside the bed and looking at the dead hooker. Her face was a mess of heavy makeup that had been smeared by sweat and God knew what else. She was painfully skinny, several old needle marks scarring the inner arm around the elbow.
“This is a pretty crappy hotel,” Abby reminded them. “Couldn’t those be stains from, uh, previous customers?”
“Ew,” Kate muttered to no one in particular, making a face.
“No, I’m certain they’re quite fresh,” Ducky insisted, raising his eyebrows. “I suppose we should be glad that at least the sheets were freshly cleaned in this place.”
“Any sign of blood in her mouth?” Gibbs prompted, all business.
“That would be practically the only bodily fluid I didn’t find traces of in her mouth,” Ducky replied, parting her lips with his gloved hands to show Gibbs what he was talking about.
“So she had sex with three people and then pleasured them orally as well?” Abby remarked, quirking an eyebrow. “At the risk of sounding like I know more about the going rate of ladies of the night than I should, that kind of job can not come cheap.”
“Here’s hoping she got cash up front,” Kate sighed, looking at the dead woman. “For all the good it did her.”
“Assuming the killers didn’t just take it back when they left,” Gibbs reminded her.
“Actually, I don’t think so,” McGee spoke up from where he was now rifling through the contents of the victim’s purse. “I don’t think they even bothered to take anything. There’s a decent-sized wad of cash in here, a beat-up credit card from a local clothing store…” He paused and then cocked his head ironically. “Some old syringes…”
“No drugs, though?” Gibbs asked. McGee shook his head.
“The cash was probably for her dealer, then,” Kate inferred. She looked through the carelessly tossed aside articles of clothing that had been left on the hotel room floor. For the most part, it looked as if the victim’s clothing had been removed willingly rather than ripped off of her, although there was a slight tear around one of the buttons on her blouse where apparently someone had gotten a little overeager. Kate paused, her forehead creasing as she got a good look at the tear in the fabric of the shirt. It looked as though whoever had done the tearing had some rather long fingernails. Kate decided to file that one away for later.
“McGee, did you check the bathtub drain for hairs?” Gibbs spoke up, turning to the agent.
“Gibbs, that bathroom hasn’t been cleaned in God knows how long,” McGee protested, eyes wide with disbelief. “Do you realize just how big a clump of hair must be stuck in that drain by now?”
“It doesn’t matter, McGee, because I want it anyway,” Gibbs barked. McGee looked stunned for only a fraction of a second before scrambling to his feet and hurrying back into the bathroom. “Can you tell me what happened here, Ducky?” the senior agent turned without pause to face the coroner.
“Well, I’ll obviously know more once I can get the young lady onto the table down at the Boston lab,” Ducky began, straightening up and adjusting his glasses. “Very good of them to be so accommodating, by the way. Most labs wouldn’t be nearly so understanding. Why, I remember this time down in West Virginia when…”
“Today, Ducky.”
“Oh, very well. As far as I can tell, the various sexual acts were all completed pre-mortem, and the lack of significant bruising suggests that they were all consensual on the victim’s part. The biting, however, was certainly not.”
“Why not?” Kate frowned. “You’d think she’d be used to getting paid for all kinds of twisted things.”
“Well, either biting wasn’t one of them, or the attackers chose not to warn her about that part beforehand,” Ducky explained, pointing to some heavy bruising on the woman’s wrists and ankles. “From what I can tell, one attacker climbed on top of her and began biting her from the right side of the neck. She struggled, so the other two held her down until she was weakened into compliancy. Then the first attacker shifted positions slightly…” Ducky moved around the bed so he could better point out the marks on the victim’s neck as he continued, “so that they were facing her from the side rather than the front as they bit into her. You can see here that there are actually two bite marks overlapping one another.” He straightened back up. “It seems that then they lifted our young lady here so that she was in a sitting position with her legs spread, and one of the other attackers began biting her on the left side of her neck while the final attacker bit into her inner thigh. I’ll know for sure once I cut into her, of course, but as far as I can tell now, it certainly looks like an exsanguination.”
“A group exsanguination,” Kate couldn’t help stressing, stealing a look over at Gibbs.
“Did the Boston homicide squad get a chance to interview any potential witnesses yet?” Gibbs called to McGee, completely ignoring Kate.
“No,” McGee answered, coming out of the bathroom and holding a baggie completely filled with a matted clump of human hairs at full arm’s length as he stared at it in sickened fascination.
“Well, we’d better get on that, then,” Gibbs determined, making his way towards the door. Kate sighed, rolling her eyes heavenward. It was going to be a very long day indeed.
_________
“We’ve been here for six days now,” McGee muttered gloomily, staring at his half-empty glass of water from where he was resting his head on his arms folded on the table. “When is Gibbs finally going to admit that there’s nothing about this case that connects it to the Maine Vampire and let us go home?”
“I don’t know, McGee,” Kate sighed, picking at her french fries. “Soon, I hope.” She glanced around the sidewalk café, trying to ignore how the happy smiling faces of the other patrons eating their dinners made her feel even more miserable and exhausted. “Where is Gibbs, anyway?”
“He was going to stop by the Boston lab to talk to Ducky and Abby,” McGee reminded her. “Abby was supposed to finally get her chance with their equipment today to run the DNA samples we collected through the system.”
“Right,” Kate nodded faintly as she took a sip of her iced tea. They had spent the past three days getting information about their dead prostitute and then tracking down some of her “coworkers”. Apparently she went by the name of Valentine, and she typically worked a stretch of city block not far from the hotel she had been killed at. The girls that had been walking the block that night with her claimed she had been picked up by a pale, dark-haired girl (one hooker had described her look as “very morbid”, while another had said it was “heroin chic”) and a man with long black hair and stubble who had appeared to be her boyfriend. The two had said they were interested in doing a foursome, and that they had another man waiting for them back at a hotel room. They paid Valentine, and then she walked off with them in the direction of the hotel. That was the last anyone had ever seen of her. The only description they had of the unknown second man was from the hotel clerk, who hadn’t been paying very good attention when he gave him the room key and could only describe him as “bald with tattoos”. The clerk hadn’t seen either the other two suspects or Valentine.
“Here he comes,” McGee quickly sat up as Gibbs came walking towards them. Kate turned around in her chair and felt her mood get even gloomier at the look on Gibbs’ face.
“No luck?” Kate guessed.
“None,” Gibbs spat, coming to stand beside the table. “None of the fluid samples match any cases on file, and all of the hairs had been in the drain too long to be of any use.” Kate and McGee looked at each other nervously and then back at Gibbs, who was practically sparking with livid energy.
“You, uh, want to get something to eat?” McGee offered timidly.
“I’m not hungry,” Gibbs snapped. “Finish up and get out of here.”
“You done?” Kate asked McGee softly, pushing her plate away. What little appetite she had had was gone.
“I’m done,” McGee agreed. They quickly paid the bill and split, the two younger agents practically running to keep up with Gibbs’ furious pace.
“One of us needs to talk to him,” Kate whispered to McGee, glancing ahead at the rigid set of Gibbs’ shoulders.
“You talk to him,” McGee balked. “I’m quite fond of my head just where it’s at.”
“He’s going to explode if we don’t do something soon,” Kate argued. “This is just insane. It’s pointless.” She swallowed past a sudden cold knot in her stomach as unpleasant memories were once again stirred from where they seemed to lie just beneath the surface. “We all feel bad about what happened, but this isn’t going to help anything.”
“You think I don’t know that?” McGee hissed. He slowed his pace considerably, a sorrowful expression on his face. “Kate, I honestly don’t know what’s worse; what happened to Tony, or what not being able to solve that case doing to Gibbs. But do you really think we can just stop him?”
“From obsessing?” Kate shook her head. “I don’t know, but we have to try.”
“Try what?” The sound of Gibbs’ voice brought the both of them to a screeching halt. The older man stood there, arms crossed as he stared them down with an expression that gave Kate the sinking feeling that Gibbs had heard enough of their conversation to figure out the answer to that question himself.
“Uh…” Kate started to force out a stuttering reply.
“Did either of you hear that?” McGee cut her off sharply. Kate turned to look at McGee, certain the other agent was trying to change the subject. McGee had an intent look of confusion on his face, however, and he was staring off to one side with a frown as he apparently listened for something. “It sounded like…” he was interrupted as a piercing shriek rang through the air.
“A scream?” Gibbs guessed with a touch of sarcasm, already pushing past him to run in the direction the scream had come from. Kate and McGee quickly went after him. They had moved away from the well-lit area of the city now, more towards the dirty back alleys with few streetlights. It was pretty dark in the direction it sounded like the scream had come from, and Kate quickly pulled out her flashlight from where it had been tucked into her pocket. Behind her she could hear McGee fumbling to do the same.
A black woman clad in a moth-eaten faux fur coat and a pleather lime green skirt with matching go-go boots rushed down the street, terror etched into her heavily-painted features as she looked over her shoulder behind her.
“Hold up,” Gibbs said curtly, catching onto her arm and pulling her to a halt. He flashed his badge. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Tabby,” the prostitute wailed, pointing with a trembling, long-nailed finger from which the nail polish was chipping off down a pitch-black alley. “Those guys, they got Tabby! They grabbed her, and they dragged her off…!”
“Okay,” Gibbs shoved the woman into McGee’s arms. “Call for backup. Kate, you’re with me.” McGee was left to comfort the hysterical madame as Kate and Gibbs advanced slowly on the alley, guns drawn and flashlights out. From inside the darkness of the alley came the sounds of a woman struggling and several people moving around. If Kate squinted, she could just make out a woman pinned with her back to the brick wall and four figures around her.
Four?
Kate blinked, and looked again. By now, Gibbs and her had crept close enough so that she could start to make out a few more details. Sure enough, there were four attackers pressed close to the woman’s body, not three. Kate felt her stomach flip-flop as she realized each had their mouth clamped down firmly on a part of the victim’s body, faint slurping sounds echoing in the alley as the prostitute writhed weakly in their grasp.
The man standing next to her on her right side, one hand pressed tightly over her mouth, was tall and thin, black hair falling thickly across his eyes, his dark stubble and silver nose ring just visible in the shadows. A short pale woman in tight-fitting black clothes clung to the front of the victim, her black hair pulled into a ponytail, her heavily made-up eyes closed in pleasure as she plunged her fangs into the base of the victim’s throat. Kneeling on one knee between them was a bald, well-muscled man with designs tattooed all over his arms, holding the prostitute’s left arm out as he drank deeply from her wrist.
Kate could barely make out the fourth attacker, a man with light brown hair and a leather jacket that had his fangs buried deeply in the right side of the woman’s neck. She found herself frowning, however, straining to see closer. There was something familiar about him, a sense of familiarity she couldn’t quite shake. She took a few steps closer, but was unable to see the man’s face because of how close it was bent to the victim’s neck. Kate squinted into the dark, her heart starting to pound. She must be starting to get as obsessive as Gibbs, because she could swear it almost looked like...
“NCIS!” Gibbs yelled from where he stood behind and slightly to one side of Kate, gun pointing at the attackers. “Freeze!” At the sound of his voice, the four people jerked, lifting their faces to look in the direction of the two NCIS agents. Because of where she had been looking at the time Gibbs had shouted, Kate found herself locking eyes with the assailant whose face she had not been able to see.
He stared at her, eyes wide in shocked recognition, his features stricken. His mouth was partially open in a gasp, and Kate could see the faint gleam from one fang-point. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth; blood that Kate knew full well wasn’t his own.
“Tony?” she whispered hoarsely, a numb sensation sweeping over her body like she had just been run over by a frozen tidal wave. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gibbs jerk his head in the direction she was looking at the sound of her voice. In a much lighter-hearted situation, perhaps Kate would have been better able to appreciate the sight of Gibbs motionless with shock, goggled-eyed with a mouth hanging partially open. At that moment, however, the rest of the world and reality felt very, very far away as Tony stared at them with eyes the same color as the blood he had been drinking.
Time came unfrozen with a screech as Tony yanked his eyes away from them and shoved the woman out of his arms, the back of her head knocking loudly against the stone wall. The other three simultaneously released her, leaving her to crash onto the alley floor like a heap of trash. They turned and bolted down the alley, running so fast Kate could feel a faint gush of wind as they went.
“I told you we should have taken her someplace private, bro!”
“Shut your yap, Gio!”
Their voices seemed to blow right past Kate, leaving her standing there cold, unaffected. Everything seemed so far away and distant. She just stood there, gun arm dropping to limply hang at her side as she stared into the now-empty darkness. She didn’t move, didn’t speak. The world seemed numb, muted. She was distantly aware of Gibbs coming unfrozen beside her and taking off after the four attackers in hot pursuit. She was distantly aware of McGee as he came bolting down the alley, first demanding to know what had happened and then dropping to his knees to examine the prostitute on the ground. Even the small part of her still alive enough to feel emotion at that point wasn’t surprised when McGee cried out that the woman was dead.
This couldn’t be happening. It made no sense, logically; it defied too many rules, contradicted too many facts for it to make any kind of sense. It was a million levels beyond improbable, beyond impossible. But Kate knew what she had seen with her own two eyes, and she had always trusted her eyes. But now what her eyes had told her she was seeing…
She barely felt the pavement hit her knees as she dropped to the ground and began to cry.