This is my ninth NCIS story, not counting non-Mysteries, all following one progression. The list grew so extensive I moved it, with summaries, to my profile.
NCIS is © Belisarius Productions. I own Siobhan (Sha-vawn) O'Mallory and any Original Agents.
Please Review.
Rating: T or NCis-17. Death, Violence, Intrigue, a not usual set of days for our Agents.

Inner Darkness
By: JMK758
Prologue

The Elf Lord was victorious in his Quest, saved and won the lovely Princess Mairenn and inherited the Kingdom of Men but Tim McGee is in Hell.

He shoves open the door to his apartment and throws his wallet, keys, shield case and weapon on the edge of his computer workstation. A crack to the head had given him an amazing adventure, battling against the forces of Darkness; 'And I can't remember any of it.'

Looking about his apartment, he wonders if life would be better had he stayed in Dubhrein.

'Okay, no, that's petty. They risked - who knows what - to save me. Tony could well be dead if I was better with that sword or Zee's plan hadn't worked. But it's really unfair that I lived the most incredible adventure of my life and I don't remember any of it!'

He rips off his shirt, clenches it in his left fist. 'I can know what Cearbhall was like, I created him. I can know how he spoke, I know his Quest, I did it all but I have to depend on everyone else's stories of my daring exploits.'

He heads for his bedroom and the hot bath beyond. 'But it all comes back to plain old McGee, the Cosmic Nerd of Googlespace. Maybe I need a new personality, something more befitting a Special Agent. Maybe I'll Gibbsify myself, see what adventure–'

The naked blonde woman lying upon his bed is a perfect twenty. "Hello," she purrs hotly enough to melt the paint off his walls.

x

'I'm hallucinating again. Come on, I can't be hallucinating. The doctors said I was okay. Ducky says I'm okay. Tony's right, I should've refused to go in.' He stares at the naked woman, upping her from a twenty to a twenty-five. 'Well, if this is a hallucination I hope I remember this one.'

"How did you get in here?" 'Just in case she's not an illusion. She looks real. She can't be real.'

"I let myself in," she breathes, scorching the air. She slithers off the bed and slinks toward him, her body moving to a sensual inner rhythm only she can hear but which he's starting to appreciate.

But he's annoyed. 'Okay, she's sexy, maybe even a thirty but I didn't put her here!' He's mad that his sanctum has been invaded but she further invades his personal space, presses her naked body to him.

'She's real all right.' He grabs her shoulders - if she were a dream he'd grab other things - and pushes her away.

"Well, then you can let yourself back out. Did Tony put you up to this? I don't think it's funny."

She pouts but gets close to him again, puts her arms about his neck. She moves her body seductively against him, strokes him with her hips. He supposes she's fertile because she's trying to make him grow.

"What's wrong? Don't you think I'm beautiful?"

Tim doesn't think he has been asked an easier question in years. 'If this is for real I'm going to have my head examined - again - but: "I think you're gorgeous - and if I had invited you to my apartment–." Even in his annoyance he feels a chill of apprehension. What if Ziva shows up now?

"Then what's wrong, Thom?" she coos. "Don't you like me?" She tries to kiss him, but he pushes her back harder than before. Even if he were going to get into it, the moment's shattered.

"What did you call me?"

"Thom. You're exactlylike your picture." She looks him over, clearly appreciating what she's found, pointedly giving her attention to one particular part of him.

Tim sighs. He'd been annoyed to find an unexpected - unwelcome - and naked - visitor in his bedroom. Now he's mad. She's not here to see him, she's here to see Gemcity.

He's already had a nightmare experience with an obsessed - though fortunately not naked - fan. Abby almost died because of that obsession, and then there was Cearbhall. 'I definitely need to Gibbsify myself. Things like this never happen to him.'

x

"How did you find me?" Gemcity isn't listed in the phone book. Neither, come to that, is he.

"I followed you. I've been following you for days, trying to work up the nerve to visit you." She slips past his restraining grip, presses her firm and impressive chest to his and her warm lips cover his.

He pushes her away again, this time mad. While normally not averse to the attention of a beautiful naked woman, his appreciation is shorted out by her intrusion - and how Ziva would undoubtedly react if she were to drop in.

"'Visit' is one thing, but if you've followed me for days - something I do not appreciate - you must know by now there is no 'Thom E. Gemcity'. That's a name I use for my books."

"I don't care," she breathes ardently and closes the gap between them, holds him close to her heat, her words barely intelligible through burning lips working his. "I want to have your baby."

Chapter One
Break in

The morning sun shines brightly through the plate glass window and door into the white-on-white shop. Having a store that faces the strip mall's tremendous parking lot is a true advantage for any Bridal shop owner and Ann DuPres can't be happier.

'A Touch of Elegance' Bridal Salon is busy; Autumn being an opportune time for marriages. The sweltering heat of Summer is just a memory but with snow many weeks away they'll do most of their business during these months.

This morning, with three fittings scheduled, one a final, plus two new customers booked to whom to introduce the pleasures and benefits of her shop and three alterations from last week well in progress, this a beehive of activity. Ann loves every second of it.

'Touch' is the only Bridal Salon in more than three miles, set conspicuously in the middle of the strip mall off Interstate 50, tucked between a Tuxedo Rental shop on the left, of which she owns a one-third interest, and a Circuit City on the right so any male escort has plenty of choices of places to wait. They're clearly visible from the highway on the opposite side of the parking lot. The location is perfect and today Ann expects to net five figures. With the least expensive dress in the shop priced at $3,000 before expensive fittings and alterations, this is going to be a very pleasant morning.

Her good mood, as she moves from customer to customer, carries her right up until a tinkle of breaking glass behind her. It comes from a small round hole punched through the large display window and before she can turn there's the sharp crack of a hole being punched in the sheetrock wall before her at the rear of the shop. Just as she looks from the source of one sound back to the other the plate glass window implodes.

A green Chevy Blazer rockets into the shop amidst a billion glass shards. Tiny missiles precede the huge juggernaut that obliterates three mannequins and the front rack. Startled shrieks rise, employees and customers dive for safety. The car blasts on. Gloves, silken purses and white shoes on a display table blast in all directions. The car smashes through the rear checkout counter. The maelstrom of noise, which probably took one second, climaxes in a titanic crash as it smashes through the rear wall and buries itself deep in her office.

As the staggering noise dissolves into falling debris and frightened crying, the pleasant scents of the shop are overwhelmed by exhaust fumes and pulverized sheet rock. Ann looks up from the floor where she had thrown herself, looks about, relieved there are no bodies littering the shop, no blood marring the white carpet. There will be, however.

She scrambles to her feet as quickly as her high heels will allow her and advances on the green car in high fury. The car is buried to the windshield into what's left of her office wall.

There's a large, four-color circular emblem on the driver's door. It depicts a red, white and blue shield surmounted by a bald eagle. The outer border bears, as an upper arch and lower curve, the golden words: 'United States' and 'Naval Criminal Investigative Service'.

"You'd better have some good coverage, bitch," Ann grates as she stalks to the front door, able to see only a long haired head leaning back on the headrest, "because if you don-!"

Ann freezes when she sees the red haired woman still belted and harnessed in place. Her head has fallen back against the headrest. Her forehead is gone! Blood flows from the large hole extending from her hairline to her eyes, down her face and neck to gather into the collar of her white blouse.

Ann's screech can be heard through the adjacent stores.

xxx

"I tell you, Tony," Tim McGee assures his friend from his desk to the one on his left, Ziva and Michelle looking on from across the bullpen and to his right, "it was unreal, like something out of one of your movies."

"Not one of my movies, Probie," Tony denies. He doesn't waste time with 'that sort of movie', or so he would have his team mates believe, preferring the real thing.

However, though the story is interesting, of greater importance to DiNozzo at the moment is his constant, if subtle, watch of his friend. He and his partners remain alert for any signs of uncommon behavior that might presage a relapse into the Probie's 'Sword & Sorcery' persona Greagoir Daibhidh Cearbhall, the Elf Lord they'd teased him with for years. It was too few days ago that they'd journeyed to the land of the evil Cormac Ciardha Dubhshlaine to rescue a princess and Tony doesn't ever want to return.

Still, as a story, this one is much better. 'A naked, desperate woman waiting in his bed? How did the Probie get this lucky? "So what did you do?" He's ready for all the lurid details.

"Do?"

"'Do', McAuthor, a nice simple English word used to designate whatever it is you did."

"I made her put her clothes on and sent her home."

x

DiNozzo feels the anticipatory grin freeze solid upon his face. "You're kidding, right?" he asks, lips frozen in rictus smile. If this isn't a red flag, he doesn't know what is. "You feeling all right, McGoo?" This has to mean the 'Elf Lord' is back. What other explanation could justify that colossal–?

"No, Tony, I am not kidding, and I am not blind. She was pretty, but I happen to be in a relationship." Across the bullpen, Ziva nods appreciatively. "Besides, I was half expecting Ziva to drop in. I didn't want to know what would happen if she saw her."

"Ducky would have a guest this morning," the woman assures him, "and you would be wishing you were still an Elf Lord."

Tim spreads his hands. "I rest my case."

"Yeah, but - but McGee, come on." Tony continues to try to make the other man see reason, unable to believe what he's hearing. To him, it signals a relapse to Cearbhall, from whom none of the Agents are certain he has recovered. Despite McGee's claim to remember nothing of those two horrific days and his acceptance of Gibbs' contention that he's fit to return to work, DiNozzo doesn't trust it.

They'd all spent two stressful days in the fictional landscape of McGee's most recent book when, following a severe blow to the head, he'd believed himself to be the Elf Lord Greagoir Daibhidh Cearbhall. They'd each been forced to adopt the personae of the characters McGee had seen them as and to play out the drama to the end. It had, against odds, returned McGee to normal but without any memory of the incident.

Reverend Siobhan O'Mallory had also been written into that book without notice or permission, no surprise there since McGee had done the same to all of them in 'Deep Six' and its sequel 'Rock Hollow' and finally this unnamed Elf saga. O'Mallory had appealed to him at the end never to use her in one of his stories again and Tony can hardly blame her. The things written - and said - about her alter-ego had been embarrassingly romantic.

He considers it unfair, however, that of all those who've objected to appearing in McGee's tomes, she's probably the only one who has a reasonable hope of her request being granted.

McGee's only visible wound from that ordeal is two inches of square gauze on the back of his head; even the white band of gauze that had surrounded his head in the first days has been dispensed with. McGee had been annoyed that the substitution had come with the price of shaving a square area on the back of his head, but he'd been touched when Abby had presented him with adhesive coverings meticulously covered with his hair. He doesn't look a bit different now unless one looks more closely than the man is likely to allow.

It had been gesture that had saved him from a need to wear his black cap at all times, but in DiNozzo's view the damage runs deeper. After hearing this story, as far as he's concerned, if McGee is indeed in his right mind then he is out of his mind.

x

"I think Special Agent McGee behaved in a very chivalrous manner," Michelle Lee declares from her own desk beyond McGee's.

"You would. Cearbhall was 'chivalrous', and look what happened."

McGee looks at him blankly. He had said he remembers nothing, so none of them can be sure this is a good sign or a bad one.

"That's hardly the same type of chivalry," Lee insists. "Cearbhall wasn't a Knight, he was a Lord. They looked at things far differently."

"And you would know? McIeval doesn't even remember - or at least he says he doesn't. Me, I'm not so sure."

"Careful, Tony, memory is a tricky thing," Ziva cautions from across the bullpen. "I would not let him near too many swords if I were you."

"So says the woman who had me in a joint lock and tossed him a knife! 'Kill him'; you hollared. I've got a huge bruise in the center of my chest from that dagger."

"Could be worse," Ziva points out, "Cearbhall could have had Tim's knowledge of anatomy, as well as understanding of theatrical props."

"Sorry, Tony, I don't know what you're talking about," Tim maintains.

x

"All I'm saying is that I don't think you're cured, Probie-Wan, not if you have a naked woman in your bedroom pleading with you to do the wild thing and you sent her packing."

"And I feel," Michelle insists, cutting off whatever McGee would say, "that if a man is committed to one woman he should behave properly - respectfully - to her, whether she is there or not."

"You telling me you don't think any man, confronted by a naked, willing and desperate woman, will not say 'yes'?"

"Obviously one does have the moral rectitude to refuse."

"What if it was your boyfriend? Think he'd say 'no'?"

"First off, Agent DiNozzo, he is not my boyfriend, he's my fiancé. And yes, I think - no, I know - that he would have the moral rectitude to stay faithful to me no matter what."

"'Moral rectitude'," he scoffs dismissively, "I prefer another sort of rectitude."

Ziva slaps her desk explosively, comes out from behind it. "You are absolutely disgusting, you know that? And if anyone should–"

"Be disgusted on your own time, Ziva." Leroy Jethro Gibbs admonishes as he strides into the bullpen past her.

But as he reaches McGee he pauses, speaking quietly enough for only the man to hear, "I'm proud of you. That took a lot."

"Thanks, boss." He's surprised - Gibbs was nowhere near. How does he do this?

"Bringing it up in front of Ziva, not so smart - but it shows you've got it where it counts." He continues to his desk just as his telephone rings. The call is brief, the agents are alerted when they see his back stiffen. "Gear up," he orders as he hangs up the phone. "NCIS vehicle just went through the front of a Bridal Shop."

"When does an auto accident rate a call-out?" DiNozzo asks.

"Since the Agent was already dead before she hit, shot through the back of the head. No ID."

This kicks them into high gear. They scoop up equipment, sort them out as they rush for the elevator.