I took the time to put on showshoes, hat and gloves. It was hard to describe what I was feeling just then. An odd mix of eagerness and need and anger, building and swelling in my breast. I kept feeling that rush that had consumed me when I'd held Lila's head under the water, when I'd stabbed Pike and watched his blood flow red onto white. There was even a giddy euphoria at the more indirect deaths of Cissy, Jenn, Roz and Anna. Just the thought that it had been me who had decided that they were to die.

I was the one who held the controls.

I thought briefly of the rest of the camp, the others who would be returning later this evening. Mulder. Foolish Lloyd. I supposed that I would be gone by the time they got back, though it distantly occurred to me that they might come looking for me.

The storm was the perfect foil.

The falling snow would cover my tracks by the time I finished here. I could leave and they would never know which way to follow. I smiled to myself as I began the slow climb up to the cavern, squinting in the blowing snow. It would have been nice to kill Mulder, of course. But I was reasonable. Dana would have to do. After all, it was she who had decided that I was ..

I didn't finish the thought, uncertain that I wanted to.

My breath chuffed out into the morning air, steaming and billowing in an opaque white cloud. If I glanced over my shoulder I could make out the remains of Jenn's cabin smoking and smoldering. It had collapsed in on itself, going up a much more spectacular blaze that my own home had. My dad had built a portion of the farmhouse out of brick. And brick didn't burn that well.

I wondered if they had screamed as they burned. Or if they had just passed out from the smoke. I remember my older brother Jason telling me once that people in the Middle Ages would get burned at the stake for heresy, but that they would usually die or pass out from smoke inhalation before they ever started to burn. Somehow that took a great deal of the horror out of it.

The cliff face loomed before me and I saw that so much snow had fallen just since that morning, the opening to the cavern was nearly covered.

I wondered if they had found Pike.

I paused at the entrance and pulled Dana's gun out, making sure that the skinning knife I'd stolen from my Dad's tool shed was still in my pocket. Just remembering the heady sensation of ripping my traitorous mother open was sending all the blood to my head. Seeing that look of fear and terror on Dana's face would be even better than seeing it on mom's.

Since I actually cared what Dana thought.

Flipping the safety off the gun, I slipped down into the opening of the cave.

She closed her eyes and tried to calm her breathing, trying to remind herself that, though he was a cold-blooded murderer, he was still only a 15 year old boy. She had fought off far greater threats.

Not unarmed and 8 months pregnant, her inner voice hissed venomously.

There was not a wealth of choices, however. Shan huddled against the wall behind her bulk, a shadow in the shadows. The cave was almost completely dark without the flashlight, but their eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark. That would be an advantage of sorts.

She had not even been certain that Denny would come after them, but the sound at the entrance had destroyed that fragile hope. Shan's sobs had finally settled into a frightened silence after they'd pulled poor little Peter's body from the snow and laid him in the cavern next to what looked like a dead animal of some kind.

The fact of the child's death hadn't sunk in yet, and she wasn't going to let it until the danger was over. For now she just gripped the cold, smooth handle of the ax in numb hands and waited...pressed against the rocky wall nearest to the bottleneck passage that led to the outside.

"Dana?"

Any doubts that it was Denny were erased when he called out her name softly. "I know you're in here. I followed your tracks."

His voice sent chills up and down her spine. Not because she knew he was a murderer, but because the words contained no warmth, no cold, nothing. They were spoken in the tones of the dead.

There would be no reasoning with him. No coaxing or pleading or cajoling. He would simply kill. She remembered a long-ago discussion with her partner one rainy day in DC. They'd been organizing the filing system, a task they'd saved for just such a day, and she'd come across the profile he'd written up for Tooms. It had been perhaps the only candid discussion of length they'd ever had about his profiling skill and he'd told her several things about serial killers that she still recalled to this day.

'They share the same realities as you and I, he'd said. They go to 7-11 and they watch A-Team reruns, but they have forsaken for one reason or another, the seemingly innate moral sensibilities that most of us take for granted. I, for example,' he'd lectured as he sat against a file cabinet with his sleeves rolled up and dust on his chin, 'know that it would be wrong to kill my mother and eat her brain. I would be repelled by the very thought of it. But the serial killer is deeply fucked up at the most basic level. He may not see another life as anything but a symbol, or a conquest or an archetype...whatever construct he's created in his own mind to justify it. When he kills his mother and eats her brain, he might be trying to regain his childhood or stealing her thoughts or maybe he just likes the taste of human brains. Most serial killers can't be reasoned with because you would be reasoning with your own set of rules. And those just don't apply to the pathological killer.'

Not much help, Mulder, she told her memory. How about you shed some light on how I'm supposed to get out of this? The pains in her abdomen were increasing in frequency. She wasn't certain, but she didn't think they were labor contractions.

And that worried her almost as much as the pains themselves.

A pebble skittered across the cavern and she saw the shadowy shape of Denny pause at the bottleneck opening, perhaps sensing her there with the ax or just being cautious, she didn't know. Her heart was thumping wildly against her ribs and she reminded herself again that this 15 year old was not the harmless boy who had sat at her table and pretended to learn about natural medicine. This *boy* had murdered Peter, Jenn and possibly others. This boy was about to murder *her*.

She lifted the ax higher, waiting for him to make one more step into the cave. She could see the vague shape of her gun in his hand and she knew it would just take one squeeze of the trigger to kill either her or Shan. The little girl was shaking against her back and Scully prayed that she would remain silent.

She whimpered and Scully saw Denny swing his gun hand around. She couldn't wait any longer and she let the heavy blade fall, swinging with all her strength. It struck the metal of the gun and the thing went off with an ear-shattering retort that momentarily deafened her. Sparks flew from the rocky floor to her right as the bullet ricocheted off the stone. The Sig went clattering out of Denny's grip, landing somewhere in the darkness.

She heard the boy swear...watched his form shift as if moving his hand into his pocket for another weapon. Too dim to see, but she guessed it was a knife.

"I wish I could see your face." He said softly, wistfully.

"Why?" she asked, not sure if talking to him was a good idea or not, but not knowing what else to do. She began to inch to her right slowly, thinking to perhaps slide in a wide semi-circle around him and find her gun.

His eyes were adjusting quickly and she watched him track her movements, matching them easily. Moving towards her. Luckily he still hadn't noticed Shan.

"I want to see your fear. Not quite so laughable anymore, am I? The little boy with the crush? The joke you share with Mulder at night? Maybe now you'll wake up to the fact that I'm as much a man as he is."

"Yes, you've proved yourself all right." Scully said, her voice reasonable. "Proved that you're a small man. A petty man. A man who would kill a 10 year old boy. Did Pike laugh at you? Did he threaten you? Or were you just being a bully?" Scully was unable to hide the rage she still felt over Pike's murder and it bled into her voice. The contempt she felt for the brutal, mindless act.

"He was going to show you the elk calf. He was going to tell you that I killed it."

Calf? She remembered the dead creature they shared the cave with. Peter, that bright vibrant boy, had been killed to hide the death of an animal? She shook her head at the senselessness of it, still backing slowly away from Denny. The boy was most definitely holding a knife. A big one from the look of it.

"It was stupid," Denny admitted. "Killing it wasn't worth it. It didn't help. It wasn't the same."

"The same as what?" Scully asked, chills running down her spine at his words, though she couldn't name why.

"When I killed Her. She doesn't know it, but I saved that baby. Saved it from Her and from Him. I hid it in a place he wouldn't find it."

Oh God. She knew what he was talking about. It was the same thing that had been haunting Mulder. The terrible scene of ...Denny's crimes. She was speechless for a moment and then her hands came up to touch her belly, as, as if on cue, another pain, worse than the others, nearly brought her to her knees.

She could feel Denny watching the pain bend her body double, his form still easing towards her. She straightened with an effort and lifted the ax threateningly.

"You're not going to be able to do this Denny. Even if you kill me like you killed the others, there's no way that they will let you get away. You think that you can run? From Chris? From Mulder? You are severely mistaken if you think so. You know what Mulder and I did before? We were FBI agents. It was our job to chase murderers like you. Believe me, you won't get far."

She took a deep breath, taking a chance by lowering her ax and letting her voice go soft and pleading. "You know you don't want that Denny. You need help. Let us help you."

He just laughed. Not a laugh of disbelief or scorn, but just of joy. He loved hearing her plead.

She could hear Mulder tsking in her head. 'Didn't I tell you that you can't reason with them if you follow your own rules? They don't follow those standards. They have their own reality. You have to learn that reality if you hope to understand them. If you really want to talk to them.' He was right, of course. But this was his goddamned specialty, not hers. After Denny was dead, she could cut him open and find any empirical evidence that might explain his mental illness. That was her venue.

He was only three feet away now, close enough that she could almost make out the glint of his eyes, the faint whuff of his breath. She lifted the ax again.

Too late.

He lunged at her, the speed of the young, the agility of the eager.

The knife bit into her shoulder, the panic sending another bolt of pain tearing through her...almost nullifying the bite of the blade.

A crack and roar filled her senses, blacking her hearing out, driving her back. She felt herself stumble, falling...falling...another thunderous retort snapped in her ears before she hit the rocks, the back of her skull connecting with a sharp edge. Stars exploded behind her eyes, multicolored whorls of brilliance. The pain swelled up in a flood, engulfing her, surrounding her in black water.

Sending her into oblivion.

It was the apocalypse.

No. That had already happened.

This was worse.

The snow was howling around him like all the furies of hell as he staggered into the clearing that the cabins clustered around. Sweat was slippery against his body, the hair around his face frozen and stinging his cheeks. He stopped momentarily at the edge of the treeline, his breath burning in his lungs, his side hitching in a terrible cramp.

Two of the cabins were on fire. Well. Mostly. Both had collapsed in on themselves, but flames still leaped and stuttered in the whipping wind, smoke hanging thick in the air. He took a step forward, eyes wide, pain in his side forgotten. The cabin he shared with Scully was untouched, but the door hung wide open, blowing to and fro in the wind, occasionally banging hard against the log wall behind it.

"Oh my god." Chris's voice was behind him, as out of breath as he was. "What happened? What's going on Mulder?"

He could hear the panic in Chris's voice, the fear for his son, but he didn't have the capability to spout useless reassurances.

He slogged towards his gaping cabin, dragging his snowshoes through the fluffy white drifts that heaped obscenely high, stopping at the doorway. Snow had already blown inside, piling onto the floor almost two feet in. In the half-light of the storm, he could see that her coat was gone.

"Fox!" His head whipped around at the cry, the syllable torn and muffled by the wind. Two figures, silhouettes against the gray-white, emerged across the clearing, struggling through the snow. One was tall, pale and razor-thin, the other round, dark and earthy. Roz and Cissy. Neither were wearing snowshoes and their progress was slow.

"Where is she?!" He made three shuffling strides towards the women, his eyes felt hot and dry in their sockets.

Cissy shook her head and as she neared, he could see terrible burns on her face and hands, Roz too.

"We've been looking. Her and Shan both...Pike and Denny. They're all gone."

"Pike too?" Chris gasped.

Roz nodded.

Mulder jerked his head once, sharply.

"Denny. Is he the one who set the fires?" He already knew, but part of him wanted confirmation.

Cissy and Roz exchanged glances.

"We thought it was the stranger. Strick. Our cabins were jammed shut from the outside. You don't really think it was Denny, do you?"

He didn't have time for this.

"Have you checked all the cabins for them?" he growled.

Roz frowned.

"Of course." She snapped. For once he didn't see the hybrid as his sister, he saw her simply as another person who didn't know where Scully was. And therefore of no use to him.

He spun away from the pair, distantly aware that Chris had thrown open the door of his own cabin, casting around on the ground for tracks. His gun was in his hand and he hadn't remembered reaching for it. Both Roz and Cissy were talking, but their voices had receded into meaningless babble. Even the wailing of the wind quieted in his head. All his attention focused on the palette of the snow.

She hadn't taken her snowshoes, she would have left a noticeable trail. If only the storm wasn't so eager to cover any and every feature that might possibly help him.

A piece of army green and rainbow poked up out of the snow three yards up the hill. Lunging at it, he pulled it free of the snow and shook it off. It was a scarf that looked familiar.

"That's the scarf I gave to Dr. Scully." Roz's voice came from behind him, diluted in the wind. He looked up the hill. Why would she have gone this way?

And then he heard the unmistakable sound of a shot fired, the retort echoing off the mountains around him, making it difficult to triangulate on it. He froze, every nerve poised and listening.

Another shot.

He knew where to go.

Gun in hand, he began to push up the slope behind the cabins, only now noticing faint signs of passage here. Chris huffed behind him. A rough, moon-quality texture to the smooth expanse of snow. As if someone had pushed their path through it eons before. Why would she run out into the storm? Denny might be a killer, but even pregnant she was a match for him.

Unless.

Unless he had a gun. Unless he had her gun. A thousand other circumstances were flying through his head as he forced his aching legs and body to climb the hill, to lift the heavy snowshoes, to duck his head down into the stinging wind. The temperature was dropping, making the snow lighter and drier, but also making the air painful to breath.

"Denny?" Chris ground out, his voice breathless and hard. "How can that be?"

Mulder didn't answer.

The faint trail led straight to a rock face, a cliff that loomed up over him, disappearing into the low clouds not 100 feet up. He and Chris followed the path the way up to a wall, and there was a crack.

Still gripping his gun, he slid in without hesitation and ran right into Shan.

She immediately clung to his leg, shaking like a leaf, sobbing desperately, tugging on his jacket while she gulped for a breath. Chris slid into the cave a moment later, his rifle in his hands.

"Shan, what is it? Where's Scully? What happened?" They were in a very low, cramped passage and Shan still didn't speak, she just turned and scrambled back down the tight space into the dark. He had to get on his hands and knees, but he followed, emerging into a wider area a moment later.

"Scully?" he called, panic tingeing his voice. "Shan?"

"Peter?" Chris's own fear just as evident.

"Over here." Shan's voice hitched with sobs. He pulled his own little maglite out of his pocket and flicked it on.

The first thing the beam of light swept over was the still, quiet form of Pike. The little boy lay on his side, his gray eyes wide open, his small face a frozen mask of peace.

The sharp pain of horror he experienced at the sight was nothing to the sound that Chris made.

"Oh God, no." It was a whisper that spoke of the past two years of fear and struggle, beginning with the death of his wife and ending now with the murder of his only child. Mulder's peripheral made out Chris staggering forward, violently kicking the hindrance of the snowshoes off his feet as he went.

His own heart clenched in his chest and he brutally forced the staggering wash of grief aside, a shaking hand trailing the light towards the sound of Shan's young voice. He found the little girl kneeling between two crumpled forms, Scully's gun clasped tightly in both small hands. The boy was clearly dead, shot in the back. Denny.

And there, not a foot away, lay the unmoving form of his partner. He dropped both flashlight and gun in his haste to go to her, his knees cracking on the rocks as he dropped unthinking down next to her.

"Scully?" His heart was pounding brutally in his throat as he reached trembling fingers to her throat. The pulse that beat there nearly incapacitated him with relief. He lifted her head from the rocky floor, feeling the sticky heat that spoke of blood at the back of her skull. There was more blood pooling around her left shoulder, fumbling fingers discovering another wound beyond torn fabric.

Carefully maneuvering her up against him, he drew an arm around her, his forearm brushing against her swollen abdomen...and he felt the wrenching tremor that tightened her muscles even through the sleeve of his jacket.

Oh... No.

"Shan!" He snapped out, he could still hear the 8 year old sobbing not six inches away. "Go and get your mom and Roz. Now! Hurry!" She hesitated only for a moment, like a rabbit in oncoming traffic, before she broke and ran, her footsteps receding into silence. She was still clutching Scully's gun like it was a part of her hands. The two women wouldn't be far, they would have followed Chris and him up the mountain.

Chris himself would be no help right now. The man was sobbing softly in the darkness.

He bent over Scully, brushing his lips against her ice cold cheek, whispering meaningless noises of comfort to her.

A scuffle of sound at the entrance. Mulder glanced up, expecting to see the capable visage of Roz...and finding the sunken shadowed face of Hobb Strick instead. The old man stood stone still, looking at the still form of Denny with eyes that seemed sad and old and clouded.

"I saw him up here that first morning, hmmm? Didn't believe it was him. Thought I was seeing things." Hobb's voice echoed faintly in the dark. "Always liked him best when he was little. Margie's other kids were deadwood. Worthless, stupid, no sense. He was always thinking, doing. He started to change when...his dad would...do things to him. To his brothers, hmmm. Bad things. I shoulda done something. Margie said it wasn't my business what Carl did with his boys...and there was no stopping him anyway. I shoulda tried anyway. Shoulda taken Denny away, hmmm."

Mulder was only listening with half an ear. The man was talking in a reedy sing-song, his voice almost inflectionless.

"When you said his name I knew I'd really seen him. I knew he'd go for your little gal there. Just like his ma. She looked a lot like her. I cut up here through the snow...know these woods pretty well. Used to hunt up here in the summers." A deep sigh rattled out of his chest and Mulder finally looked up in the darkness, trying to find Hobb's outline.

"Best thing for him really." His voice was small now. "Had to shoot a good dog of mine once. A good bird dog that got ina tangle with a foaming badger. Loved that dog. Terrible to have to kill something you love. Denny was a good boy once. I think."

The last was added so softly that Mulder wasn't sure he'd heard it. He no longer cared one whit what the man said or grieved about or regretted. He just wanted Scully to wake up and tell him that everything was all right.

Her stomach tightened horribly under his hands again and he bit back a sob of his own. The fear that had coiled in the pit of his stomach was surfacing like a rank sea monster. When she'd gotten pregnant all those months ago, his first reaction had not been joy or wonder. It had been terror. They were not in the same world anymore. There was no net to catch them on this tightrope. No doctors or hospitals or drugs or sterile rooms.

She had reassured him that babies had been born for thousands of years without such things and that *she* was a doctor. She would be fine, she said.

She would be fine.

God Scully, wake up.

Her world fluttered in and out, frozen moments in time.

Dark shapes and bobbing lights, echoing voices and the sensation of hands on her.

Blinding white and biting cold, strong arms curling under her back and her knees, cold wet snowflakes kissing her cheeks.

Tearing agony ripping through her body, wetness between her thighs.

Softness beneath her and the alien sensation of warmth against her skin. Voices, some concerned, some angry, some choked with grief.

Mulder's face.

"Scully?" His voice was rough. Her peripheral caught sight of his hand just before it cupped her cheek, brushing a stray strand of hair back from her damp forehead.

"Where?" She managed only the one word, her eyes flickering around unsteadily, unfocused.

"Back in the cabin." His hand continued its soothing movement and she allowed it, just because it felt so good. "He managed to stab you in the shoulder, but it's not deep."

He wasn't telling her something. Something important.

Her hand flew down to her belly, expecting to find it flat and dead, instead coming contact with the same reassuring curve. Her gaze lifted to Mulder's. She was remembering the pain.

"I think it was false labor, Scully." He breathed, answering the unspoken question. She could still hear echoes of the terror that must have gripped him while she was unconscious. "I timed them once we got back here and they were uneven. Braxton-Hicks, maybe. Baby's fine, I listened to the heartbeat with your stethoscope."

She managed to smile weakly at him.

"Have you been reading Richard Scarry's Big Book Of Pregnancy, Mulder?"

That coaxed a shadow of a grin out of him.

"I had to do something while you were out, and I'm no good at knitting."

"How long *was* I out, Mulder?" she frowned at him. His face smoothed into a mask.

"Two days."

She just blinked, then wet her lips uncertainly.

"Two days." She closed her eyes, remembering everything that had happened. Poor little Pike.

"Chris...?" she started, opening her eyes again and looking up at her partner.

"He's...not good. We put Pike and Jenn in the cave and sealed it off. Chris is strong, but most of his strength was for Peter." Mulder shook his head. "That boy was all he had."

Her own grief over the death of the little boy was still unresolved. Too young.

"Denny?" She had to fight over the name. The sound of his mirthless laugh in the dark of the cavern was still alive in her head.

"Dead. Shan shot him. Somehow. Saved your life. She hasn't talked about it. She's been having nightmares...but I think she'll be ok. It'll take a little time." Mulder shook his head at the tragedy of it all, his face tight. "Turns out that Hobb was Denny's dear ole Grandpa, that's how I knew to come back for you. The old bastard knew his grandson was a killer and he *saw* him the other morning and said nothing to anyone." Mulder sounded like he wanted to spit. "Hobb's gone. He left yesterday, said he was sorry...for what that's worth." His mouth was a hard line. "As for Denny...we left him out for the animals."

It sounded harsh, but all Scully had to do was remember Pike to agree with the tone of Mulder's voice. His hands were back on her hair again, his face softening suddenly.

"How do you feel?"

"Tired, Mulder."

Her face was solemn, her eyes locked on his. "It's never going to be easy again, is it?"

"Was it easy before?" he quipped, his gentle face belying his words. Her hand reached up and clasped his, entwining their fingers.

"Sometimes it feels like we're a million years away from the life we used to have. Other times it's just like it's never changed. Just the skin over it has."

"Still the same monsters to kill." He nodded, the edge of his mouth lifting slightly.

"At least we had indoor plumbing then."

"And TV. I really miss TV Scully. The fireplace just isn't the same."

They chuckled softly together, not quite able to laugh with all the death around them.

They never really had, she thought. Even back then.

Suddenly the unborn kicked her hard, startling her...reminding her that it was still there. At that moment, she'd never felt anything so wonderful. She pulled Mulder's hand down to the movement, tears filling her tired, burning, unfocused eyes.

"Monsters or not, Mulder. I think things may be getting better soon." She said, smiling through her bleary tears. "Maybe for the first time ever."