Title: Stolen Innocence

Rating: T for mild swearing and blood.

Summary: When Michael learns he has a niece, he decides to kidnap her instead of kill her. Jamie x Michael [AU]

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the major characters in this story. Michael Myers is the property of John Carpenter, Debra Hill, Dimension Films, and most recently, Rob Zombie. The lucky bastards.

Author's Note: For this story, I've decided to disregard the wacky Curse of Thorn and make Michael's problems psychological in nature. No, there won't be any incest or extreme squickiness between Michael and Jamie. Yes, the two will form a bond that will (hopefully) bring out some of The Shape's humanity. I'm going to use a pinch of Rob Zombie, a dash of John Carpenter, and a heaping spoonful of my own ideas. Hope you enjoy.

Chapter One

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I think I see ghosts in the birch grove up the hill.

-Judith Minty, "First Snow"

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In the front row of a small second grade classroom, a little girl was frantically trying to copy down the math lesson her teacher was putting on the board. The girl kept chewing on a lock of her long brown hair because she was nervous. She hated math more than any other subject and the teacher talked almost too fast for her to keep up.

"Jamie, what would you have to subtract from one hundred and thirty to get ninety?"

Jamie Strode scrunched her nose up in concentration.

"Um...eighty-eight?"

"Close. Ninety. Now we add that to the dividend..."

The teacher droned on and Jamie did her best to pay attention. She glanced at the clock on the wall, which read 10:25. Jamie's lips quirked up in a smile, for recess was only five minutes away.

The teacher continued putting numbers on the chalkboard. At one point, she pressed down too hard with the chalk, causing it to make a painful squealing noise. Everyone winced.

"Oops! Guess I got carried away there?"

When the bell rang, Jamie could not have been more ready. Throwing her pencil down, she jumped out of her chair, shrugged on her jacket, and joined the line that was heading out to the playground.

The air outside was chilly. It was late October, just a week away from Halloween. Jamie sighed as her shoes squelched through wet, muddy ground on the way to the swing sets. All the other kids were picking out their costumes and getting ready for parties. All of them, except for Jamie. Her mother hated Halloween.

Boys and girls ran everywhere, laughing, yelling, bickering voices mixed together to form a high-pitched maelstrom of sound. Jamie avoided the kickball field and the merry-go-round, preferring to spend her free time in a quieter place. Shy and soft spoken, she had made only one close friend during her time at this school. Most of the other kids tended to avoid interacting with her, not because Jamie was mean or hateful, but because of the weird rumors going around about her mother's past. Of course her mother tried to pretend that those rumors didn't exist, but Jamie often heard them repeated in whispers at school.

She's totally crazy. She chopped up her two best friends with the biggest butcher knife in the world.

No, I heard that the boogeyman did it.

There's no boogeyman, you idiot!

There is where she came from.

Jamie plopped down on the swing that was the least dirty and kicked off. She wanted to leave the ground, leave the math lessons and annoying teachers and missed parties behind her.

"Hey, Jamie!" A little boy with sandy blonde hair and a big toothy smile came running up to her. It was Billy, one of the few friends that Jamie had. They'd met a year ago at a funeral for one of her mother's friends. Jamie had been scared to touch the coffin lid, imagining that doing so would make the ghost of the woman in the coffin angry. She'd cried and attempted to pull away from her mother, who'd been trying to convince her there was nothing to be afraid of. Then a freckled, blonde boy the same age as Jamie had marched straight up to the coffin and fearlessly smacked his hand down hard on the polished wood. He'd looked brazenly at Jamie, as if daring her to be so brave. She"d given in, not wanting to be a coward in front of the new boy. After the funeral, they'd talked a little and discovered they were both in the same first-grade class.

"My mom took me to pick out my Halloween costume last night! I'm gonna be a werewolf! What're you gonna be?"

"Nothing," Jamie mumbled sadly.

"Oh yeah, I forgot," Billy said, his enthusiasm wilting like a dead weed. He sat down on the swing next to Jamie and dangled his feet. They sat in silence for a moment, then Billy said, "Maybe your mom will let you come to my Halloween party."

"Maybe," said Jamie, who didn't hold out much hope. Her mother wouldn't even let her leave the house on October 31st.

"Why does your mom hate Halloween so much?" They were both swinging now, the layers of rust making the chains squeal loudly.

"I don't know," Jamie looked down at her white shoelaces trailing in the mud, then over at Billy. Her lips pressed together in a thin line, then she whispered, as if confiding a deep secret, "I think she's scared of the boogeyman."

"There's no such thing," said Billy, who rolled his eyes but made sure Jamie didn't see it. Billy's parents were staunch atheists, refusing to acknowledge the existence of anything science couldn't prove, and were raising their son to be the same.

"I heard there was a boogeyman in the town where my mom grew up. Jenny and Paul were standing in the hallway talking about it once."

"Really?" Billy looked over at his friend, genuinely curious now. He liked ghost stories, even if he didn't believe in them.

"They say that if the boogeyman doesn't like you, he hides in your bedroom closet and waits till you fall asleep, then he comes out and cuts you into little pieces."

"No way!"

"I asked my mom if it was true but she wouldn't tell me," said Jamie, her voice rising slightly as it always did when she felt frustrated. Jamie knew that her mother kept secrets from her. The place where her mother had grown up had always been a forbidden subject. All Jamie knew was that it was called Haddonfield and that it was somewhere in Illinois. She also knew that her mother had been adopted, but wouldn't say or didn't know who her real parents had been.

And her mother was strange in other ways, not just in her unreasonable hatred of Halloween. She never left the house without taking a gun, as if she expected strangers to attack her wherever she went. Jamie knew that her mother collected guns and knives, she'd once seen her mother sorting through a shoebox full of Swiss Army knives, polishing and sharpening the dull ones. It made Jamie sad to think that maybe her mother didn't trust anyone, not even her own daughter.

Feeling a burst of angry energy, Jamie began to swing faster and higher. At the height of her swing, she could almost see over the edge of the metal fence that surrounded the playground. The trees back there were bare, most of the leaves having already fallen. The brown and black branches tangled up with each other, forming a spiderweb of dry wood.

Then Jamie saw a flash of another color, white. White like snow, with spots of black that could've been eyes and a mouth. Though the glimpse she got was blurry, the white moon face appeared to be looking right at her.

When Jamie swung up to look again, it was gone.

"Did you see that?"Jamie shouted. She strained her eyes, trying to find it again, but whatever she'd seen was definitely gone. Yet she was certain that something had been there. The last time Jamie had seen the doctor he'd said that her eyesight was excellent, she could spot deer from a mile away without binoculars

"What?" said Billy, who'd stopped swinging to look sideways at Jamie.

"There was something in the trees!" She pointed in the direction she thought the face had been. "It looked like a ghost!"

"Maybe it was the boogeyman!"said Billy teasingly. Sometimes he couldn't help but make fun of his friend's superstitions.

"That's not funny."

"C'mon. We have to go in anyway."

The teacher had already blown the whistle for everyone to come inside. Jamie ran to catch up with Billy, who had already gotten in line. As she ran, she couldn't help but look over her shoulder towards the grove of barren trees, trying to spot the pasty white face again, but nothing was there.