Title: These Endless Days
Rating: R
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Universe: Creatures of the Night (Part Three)
Characters/Pairing: JJ/Hotch; Morgan/Prentiss
Genre: Supernatural/Drama
Summary: The forces of darkness are creeping ever closer to war. Before the team can pick a side, they have to figure out who's actually fighting.

Chapter Eighteen

The first ambulance arrives in fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Usually, it doesn't take this long, but when there's a potential turning, any paramedics are required to be both trained, and wearing the correct protective gear.

When they jump out of the vehicle, ominous figures in bright green beekeeper suits, Reid's hands are pressed to Hotch's neck. He's sure that there's something that he's supposed to do to prevent the virus from taking hold, but his mind and his body are broken. He barely remembers his name, let alone any encyclopedic content.

The lone paramedic that looks over his injuries is perplexed. 'You're an android?' she asks, frowning. She's taken off the helmet of her suit, and her nametag reads "Sarah." Spencer stares at her, equally confused, before he remembers.

'Oh…yes.' He tries to make his voice sound as apologetic as possible. 'Sorry, I forgot.'

'You forgot,' Sarah repeats, skeptical. Reid ignores her, watching as her colleagues work on Hotch.

'He's too far gone, we're gonna have to bag him.' The words are ominous enough, but then Reid sees the bag of dark red liquid that they start to hook up to his supervisor.

'He has a DNR,' Reid says, urgently, but they ignore him.

'DNR doesn't apply to someone who's already vamped,' Sarah tells him. 'Legally speaking, the undead are still alive.'

Reid knows this. He knows he knows it. There had been a fairly well publicized case about it a few years ago, when a defense lawyer had tried to argue that murder of a vampire was not really murder, considering that the victim hadn't really been alive in the first place.

It means that Hotch is now a vampire. There's no turning back, no changing anything. From now, until the moment someone cuts off his head, or stabs him with a stake, or pushes him into the sunlight, he'll be a vampire.

Too busy trying to stop his body from falling apart, his mind can't fully comprehend the enormity of that statement. He gives a short gasp, as Sarah pulls splinters of wood from his thighs. He looks down, and realizes that there's a branch sticking out from his leg. His pain circuits down there must have shorted out. They flicker back in as she adjusts his pant leg.

'Your internal structure isn't like any android I've ever seen.'

'I was a scientific experiment,' he murmurs, before passing out. Hotch's fate will have to wait until later.

…

'Morgan!' She's yelling, not much caring for how loud she is. Her fist slams against the wood. If she wakes up the entire complex, then Morgan damn well better get up and answer the door, too.

He answers the door in a towel, with the top of his head covered in shaving cream. He'd picked the bedroom with an ensuite. On any other day, she might've laughed, but today, she can't.

'JJ, what—?'

'We have to go home.'

He stares at her, incredulous.

'JJ, we can't just go home, we have job to do.'

'Hotch and Reid are in trouble,' she tells him. 'She's going to attack them.'

He doesn't ask who "she" is, but then, he probably doesn't have to. 'Have you tried calling?'

She gives him a look. She's not an idiot.

'Nobody's picking up. Hotch, Reid, Garcia…Even Rossi's line is going straight through to voicemail.'

Morgan straightens at that. 'You think someone's screwing with us?'

'Someone's always screwing with us, Derek. They don't want us to go home, so that's what we have to do.'

He opens his mouth to argue, but before he can, JJ feels her body hit with a sudden wave of fuzziness.

Please, not again.

She clutches at air, trying to grab hold of something; to stop herself from falling over.

The fuzziness is gone all of a sudden, and she straightens, only she isn't in the cabin anymore. She's in her office, and at her desk is…

Well, shit.

She sits in the chair opposite. 'So is this one of those things where my subconscious tells me I'm being an idiot?'

The other JJ stares at her. Her hair is perfectly set, her skirt-suit perfectly ironed. 'I don't think you need your subconscious to tell you that now, do you?'

JJ snorts, but she concedes that her subconscious (or her brain, or whatever) isn't wrong. 'I have to go home. He needs me.'

'No,' said the other JJ, firmly. 'You need to stay in Babylon and finish what you went there to do.'

'But—'

'JJ, think of what will happen if this all comes to a head, and the werewolves and the vampires are on the same side. Do you think it'll matter whether or not you were beside Hotch's bed when they told him he'd be sucking down O neg thickshakes for the rest of his life?'

'Yes!' JJ says, exasperated, before she can even process the question.

'Why?'

'Because I…Because I care about him. Because I respect him.'

'If you respected him, you'd be respecting his order to make nice with the werewolves. Hotch can take care of himself. You know that.'

She does. Her subconscious is right. Morgan is right. They won't stand a chance in this war if they don't get the werewolves on side. They'll be dead before they know it.

She blinks, and she's standing outside Morgan's room again. He's waving his hand in front of her face.

'JJ? Did you hear what I said?'

'What?'

'I said I doubt we could go back anyway. If someone's trying to screw with us, then they're sure as hell watching the airport.'

'So what do you suggest? Walk right into whatever trap they're setting for us?'

From the look on Morgan's face, she's pretty sure that's what he has in mind. From the flicker of his thoughts in her head, that's exactly what he has in mind.

At least, she thinks, it will take her mind off everything else.

…

Rossi taps his foot against the floor, trying not to let his impatience show. They've been waiting for a while now; he's done his online banking, finished the paperback in his inside jacket pocket, and made a fair attempt at turning each stone in the wall opposite into cheese.

The top row is made entirely of Gouda when the door opposite them finally opens. Clarissa, who is a hell of a lot more impatient than he is, gives an almost relieved sigh. 'Fucking finally,' she mutters, jerking out of what Rossi knew was a pretty heavy trance. She's fantastic at psychic magic, which is completely different from regular psychic powers, and means that when she's bored, she can literally pretend she's in another world.

The woman is wearing entirely black, her long red hair cascading in curls down her back. 'He's ready for you,' she says, and they follow her down a long, dark hallway to a brightly lit room.

The Odyssean is a man named Tim Lock, but nobody ever calls him that. He's held the title of Odyssean for a little over a decade, and he knows how to use his power.

'Odyssean, we're here to—'

'I know why you're here,' he interjects. His voice has a sort of sneer to it. 'We are against a vampire or werewolf dominance,' The Odyssean says. 'That much is true. But do not mistake that as some kind of unity. The Order of the Mystic knows as well as everyone else what the future holds. Anath's Circle are not so wrong. Soon you will see a world where the vampire and the werewolf are nothing more than a minority. Enough orders agree they are powerless in the face of our strength.'

Shit, Rossi thinks. It's not entirely a surprise – a lot of the sorcerers he knows are narcissistic assholes – but he'd hoped for a better response.

Clarissa moves to say something (knowing her, it's nothing polite), but Rossi steps on her foot surreptitiously.

'You must know that this won't be a unanimous decision,' he says, evenly.

'I do,' he agrees. 'But soon enough people will see our side of things.'

It's not exactly a thread. Rossi knows that the Odyssean knows very well how they feel about the situation, but he's not going to kill them. That would serve little purpose but to rile up an opposition. He'll do things subtly.

Hell, maybe he already has been. Playing the long game definitely wouldn't be beyond his reach. It's something that they'll have to look into.

'If that's everything, Miss Bear, Mr. Rossi, I'll have Cecile escort you out.

And just like that, they're pushed out the door. The meeting hadn't even lasted three minutes.

'Coffee?' Clarissa asks, and Rossi frowns. He's generally used to her being a little more verbose. Then, he realizes, based on the furrowed brow, that she's thinking. When she's not being impatient, when she takes her time, and thinks things over, Clarissa is terrifying, which is why she'd been voted in as leader of the Order of the Mystic.

'What do you think?' she asks, when they're sitting in a back corner booth of CityCosmicBeans fifteen minutes later.

'Tough call,' says Rossi. 'He's popular, sure, but genocide doesn't always sell so well.'

'Depends how you sell it,' Clarissa breathes, into her Cappuccino. 'I mean, I'm all for showing the vampires and werewolves that we're better than them, but manipulating a power vacuum and murdering them? That's a step to far.'

Murdering them.

The words have a strange sort of effect on Rossi, though he's not sure why. There's something in there…Something he should be remembering.

It's there for a flash, and then it's gone.

'I guess it's time to see where everyone else stands,' he says, and he downs the rest of his coffee in one sip.