Scully set her book aside and stretched her arms over her head, trying to ease the cramp that had settled in the small of her back. Now that Mulder was back, perhaps he could make himself useful by giving her a backrub. When he returned from his manly posturing, she would ask him.

A knock on the door sounded, muffled by the wailing of the wind in the chimney flue. Frowning, she sighed. Mulder wouldn't knock and there really was only one other it could be this time of night. Even knowing who it was, her eyes automatically found the shape of her Sig. sitting on the table out of habit.

She heaved her bulk up and moved slowly to the door, hoping that her partner would return sooner rather than later. Opening the portal only reinforced that wish. Denny stood there with a weak, yet hopeful smile on his face. He was holding up a notebook.

"I was hoping you could tell me more about some of those herbs."

It was almost laughable, she thought. The transparency of his excuse to spend time with her. Had her excuses been that lame when she was in 8th grade offering to wash blackboards for Mr. Jackson? Probably, she sighed.

"What a coincidence. I was just reading my herb book." She said with a smile. Perhaps tonight was the night to try and get him to understand. She offered him a chair at the table and he sat down, still smiling shyly at her. She noted that he hadn't made one furtive glance around the room looking for Mulder. That probably meant he'd been watching the cabin to see when Mulder left. A little creepy, she thought with a sigh.

After he'd settled, she took her seat again and then took a deep breath. Better now than any other time. Mulder would be back any moment and that would make this impossible.

"Denny?" she asked, waiting until he looked up at her. He was really not bad looking. Likely he would be quite handsome when he grew up. Quite big for his age, he had light brown hair and a wide mouth full of straight teeth. She set a hand on his. "Denny, I think we need to talk."

To her surprise, his young face hardened.

"This is about Mulder, isn't it?" He asked. "he doesn't want me coming around anymore now that he's back."

Scully tried to imagine Mulder demanding that she stop seeing Denny and had to bite the inside of her cheek hard to keep from smiling.

"No Denny, that's not it. I just don't think we should spend so much time together anymore. I know you have...feelings for me, but it's probably not wise to let them continue." She touched her stomach as if it was exhibit A. Denny's dark brown eyes flicked to the evidence of her pregnancy as if it was incidental.

"What does that matter?" he asked. "It doesn't mean he loves you. It doesn't mean you have to love him."

She couldn't hold back the smile that time.

"You're right, Denny." She gestured at her stomach again. "This doesn't matter about that, but it doesn't change the fact that do I love him."

"And you're saying there's no room for some little kid like me, right?"

"I'm not saying that." She said, somehow sensing that she was walking on thin ice. "But I don't think it's a good idea for you to.."

His face was red. Humiliation, rage, embarrassment...it was hard to tell. He stood up, upsetting the chair behind him.

"You spend time with Pike. Even Mulder does. Are you asking him to get lost too?"

"Denny.." her tone was placating now, never once had she imagined that things would go this badly. It was just as well she was no psychologist. "I'm not saying I don't want to spend time with you, I just think that you need to examine your feelings for me..."

He held up his hand, his face cooling into a mask of control that was eerie on a 15 year old.

"No. I get it. Mulder is back, you have no more time for me."

She sighed, not certain that there was anything that she could say that wouldn't make things worse. He was stalking to the door, grabbing his coat and yanking it on when the door swung open and Mulder tromped in, covered from head to toe in snow.

"Hey Denny," Mulder grinned at him. "On your way out already?"

Denny said not a word and instead stalked past her partner out into the snow, pulling the door shut behind him with a loud bang.

You would think that it would be difficult to plot your parents' murder.

It's not. I realized that right away. But I'm not dumb, though my Dad might tell you different. I needed the right opportunity and I had the patience to wait for it.

To tell you the truth, it wasn't so much my dad that I wanted to squeeze the life out of, it was my mom. The little bitch had allowed her children to be used like playthings. My dad was just an animal, but my mom was *weak*. Weak like Mr. Ears had been.

And Lila.

Hard to say how long it was between the time I drowned my sister and the time when I killed everyone else. Maybe years? Maybe months? Each day crawled by in frozen vignettes of eagerness tempered with hatred. Every night I imagined a new way to kill her, a new look of fear on her face.

I walked through those days with the same demeanor I had always worn. My dad directed us through our chores on the ranch, my mom cooked for us...mended our clothes, life moved in its normal paces. She got pregnant again and seemed fairly happy about it. Why, I don't know. Just another brat for my dad to molest. Bitch.

When the virus came, we hardly noticed. Our ranch was distant enough from other places and my dad had never been one to socialize with the neighbors. We were his own personal slave-force, much as he had been for his Dad and so on. Or trips into town were curtailed with the end of the world, but little else changed. We had our own well, we had our own generator. Fuel would run out eventually, but not for a time.

The only thing the fall of civilization meant for me was that I no longer had to worry about being caught by the authorities.

There were no more authorities.

It wasn't too long after the TV started to broadcast only white noise that I decided the time was right. It was easy enough to drug my dad and my brothers. There were plenty of cattle tranquilizers lying around the barn. I just slipped it into their food, leaving my mother's untouched.

I'd set the fire after I'd locked dear old dad up with Peter, Emily and Jason in the dining room. They were too drugged to put up much of a fight. Too drugged to know enough to be properly afraid of me. It didn't matter, they were simple detritus. It was my mother that I was focused on.

I helped her away from the house, her sobbing and wailing like music to my ears. Suffer, bitch. Suffer. I wished that my family could have been awake for their burning. I would have liked to have heard them scream.

Once we were a distance from the house, I simply pushed the cow down. She fell heavily, looking up at me like a stunned rabbit. The satisfaction that I felt when I let all my pretenses fall, when I showed her all the hatred I had for her, and she realized...everything.

She was scared of me. This woman whom I'd looked up to and been nurtured by and had respected. She was afraid. Of me.

And then I'd pulled out my knife.

This dream was different.

Still the same ranch house, the same snow, the same burned frame...but this time Scully was with him. She stood at his side, still heavily pregnant, but wearing her sleek Bureau attire. Her hair was short and smooth again, shining crisply red in the afternoon light. He too, was wearing his work clothes. Long black overcoat and pressed suit.

They stood next to the corpse of the dead mother.

"This is not important. Look inside." Scully said, her eyes clear and blue as the sky overhead.

He walked forward, unable to stop himself from glancing back at the woman, unable to stop fixating on her, walking until he was right at the edge of the house's footprint. The skeletons were there, clustered in a clump against what had once been a wall. A door. Something about it. Had they been trying to get out?

That was it.

They had been locked in. Ok. So they had been murdered, burned alive. Why did he need to know this?

"Look"

He turned towards the voice. Scully was gone. The dead woman stood in the doorway instead, her gapingly empty abdomen half hidden beneath her lavender shirt.

He looked again, reviewing every nuance of his memory. Something here. Something important. His feet walked him forward much as they had when he'd actually been here...past the skeletons. He'd looked at them enough.

A seared, heat-bubbled photograph. That was the clue his mind was shoving at him. Burned frame, browned glass. He leaned down and picked it up, looking at the photo --

"Mulder" A voice was in his ear, warm and soft.

His eyes snapped open and he found himself looking into Scully's sleep-rosy face. "Mulder," she repeated, "You have to get up. They're waiting for you."

"What?" he mumbled, sitting up and scrubbing his face.

"You wanted to go out with the hunting party." She reminded him. She was wrapped in a blanket kneeling next to the bed and Chris stood by the door, fully dressed.

"You can stay and sleep some more if you want." Chris said apologetically. "I'm sure you're tired."

The dream vanished as he remembered Hobb.

"No. give me a minute. I'll be right out." Chris nodded and left.

"You're really tired." Scully said gently. "You didn't even stir when Chris knocked." Her smooth fingers stroked a line down his cheek. "Maybe you should stay here?"

He shook his head and pushed himself up out of the warmth of the blankets.

"No way Scully. I don't trust that guy. I'm thinking that he might be the one who killed that family down in the foothills. He had an item from the farm on him."

Her eyes widened slightly.

"I thought you said that scene was easily 8 or more months old. Why would he hang around there and then follow you up here?"

"I don't know." He was yanking on his long-johns. "But there's no way I'm letting him out of my sight till I get the whole story. He's lying about something, that I do know."

A few more layers padded on to his frame, he turned for his coat and snowshoes. Scully stopped him with a touch on his arm.

Her face was smooth and earnest when she took his hand and pressed it to her stomach. The gesture was more important than words and he leaned down to kiss her, a tender, intimate thing that left her on the verge of tears.

And then he was pushing out the door into the howling storm.

The blizzard had hit full force that morning, completely encasing the mountaintop in clouds, wind and snow. All around the small cluster of buildings trees swayed dangerously, snow blew and swirled and bit into every crack and crevice...coating the northwest sides of the trees with a thick sheet of ice. Drifts piled up almost to the roofs of some of the cabins, nearly burying the ones on the north side of the clearing.

It only set more of an urgency in Pike to get up. No need for quiet now that his Dad had left early with the others to try and track down the elk that were supposed to be around. He slipped into his warm clothes and managed to get the front door open wide enough to slide out, his snowshoes in one hand. He knew that Shan would not likely be coming out this morning, the weather was too much for her and it was hard enough for her to sneak out of her mom's bed as it was. But Denny...

He frowned. Where was Denny? Had he gone on without him? Or maybe he had gone with the hunters this time.

Tugging his hat down over his ears, he squinted into the howling maelstrom. A set of slowly vanishing tracks that pointed in the direction of the cave gave him his answer. Denny had already left.

Tucking his chin down into his collar, he began the long slog over the snow towards the cave.

Snowshoes made the going much easier, but they were no joy to walk in. Even with them on, he still sank about 5 inches with each step. Denny's tracks were getting harder and harder to see.

The trees shook and moaned over him, the wind driving icy needles into his exposed cheeks. It was mostly uphill to the cliff face and he found himself out of breath and sweating under his heavy coat by the time he reached the top of the rise.

Denny's tracks led right into the crack and he picked up his pace, eager to get out of the wind. Discarding the awkward snowshoes, he ducked into the tight confines of the bottleneck and crawled into the main cavern.

Only to be greeted with the sight of Denny crouched in a pool of blood over the calf, his darkly stained knife in hand. It was dark in the cave, but not dark enough to disguise the fact that, for some reason...

... Denny had cut the calf's throat.

"What are you doing?" Pike cried, rushing forward and falling to his knees next to the little animal. It was gasping weakly. He looked up at the older boy with hot, burning eyes.

Denny's face was little more than a mask.

"It needed to die." He said finally, his voice odd.

"She was going to be all right!" Pike's voice was high and stunned. He couldn't quite assimilate the sight of Denny covered in the little elk's blood, the big knife glinting dully in the dim light.

He staggered to his feet, his pants wet with blood at the knees.

"I...I" he didn't know what to do. "I'm going to go and get Dr. Scully. She'll be able to fix her..."

"No!" Denny said sharply, rising to his feet. "No!"

Pike didn't stop. He had tears on his cheeks now, but he didn't care. There was something terribly wrong here. Wrong.

"Pike stop!" Denny called. He could hear the sounds of the older boy's footsteps echoing in the rocky cavern as he scrabbled through the tight bottleneck. Frigid wind bit at the moisture on his face as he emerged into the snow. His snowshoes had already collected a thin layer of snow on them and he shook them off, lacing them onto his boots with trembling hands. He had to hurry, there might still be a chance to save her.

He hadn't managed to put one on all the way when Denny emerged from the cave, his face hard and spattered with blood, his eyes...

...his eyes sent a chill of fear down Pike's spine. He gave up on his snowshoes, startled into flight. He staggered one step, two, and sank to his chest in the soft, new snow.

Denny reached out and grabbed his collar, hauling him back to the opening where the snow was more tramped down. Terror surged through the boy and he felt his bladder give, hot and wet down his leg.

Pike stared up into the dark brown eyes, his own gray gaze glazing with his fear. Denny was still holding the gory knife clutched in one bloody fist. Even though this was a boy he had spent the last 8 months playing with, Pike had little doubt of his intentions.

He began to struggle frantically as he watched a look of pure animal pleasure cross Denny's face. And then the big knife lifted and fell, driving deep into his upper chest, severing muscle and tendon and biting into bone. Again it raised, blood flying from it...landing in the snow like red confetti.

He tried to speak, but his lungs were closing up. The pain was fading into a sort of blissful numbness, pretty spots dancing around the fringes of his vision.

His mouth opened to call for his Dad, but no noise came out.

It was getting quiet. The howling snowstorm was fading. The thwacking sound the knife made, his own heartbeat...these were the only things he heard before everything simply swam into black.