Chapter Text
Today, Cur is a hawk. Will only knows what kind — Harris' hawk, native to the southwestern deserts and surprisingly gregarious for a bird of prey, cooperative hunters — because Cur is a bird often enough that he's picked up field guides and has them sitting on his shelves at home.
In the wild Harris' hawks will find a high perch and then make it higher by standing on each other's backs. At the crime scene, Cur uses Will's shoulder instead before deciding that he isn't tall enough. Her body dips, tensing, and then with a rustling of wings — she hits the side of his head but doesn't seem to particularly care — she takes off, sweeping smoothly up to survey the scene and then down again to perch on a bare-limbed tree. She waggles her tail, satisfied with her vantage point, and takes a moment to preen her chest, scratching at some itch.
"Will," Jack says, and Will remembers that he's here to look at something other than his bird, her fierce brow and lean body. He wonders what her feathers would feel like, if he stroked his fingers down her back and along the length of her wing. He's never going to find out; she doesn't like to be touched when she's a hawk. She doesn't like to be touched in general. He can relate.
"Jack," he answers, trying not to let the wariness seep into his tone. He doesn't know how to navigate a man like Jack Crawford, can't get his head around the idea of hierarchies and why people care about them. Jack's not his boss, not really, but he talks like he is and he throws his weight around with everyone, all of the time. It leaves Will off-balance, the way it always does when he knows exactly what the social convention is and how it's meant to function but can't for the life of him fathom why anybody ought to abide by it, much less bring himself to do so. When Jack snaps at him he struggles not to snap back.
"I'm glad you're here," Jack says, ushering Will forward with a hand that circles behind his back but thankfully doesn't make contact. "Guy walking his dog found them this morning; guess sometimes people ignoring leash laws works in our favor."
The scene he's walking Will toward is lousy with people; it takes a lot of techs to process that many bodies. Even from here, there's too much noise and too much movement and it's setting Will's teeth on edge.
"Jack, I need the scene to myself," Will says, while they walk through the tall grass. "At least ten minutes. Preferably twenty. And everyone at a distance."
Jack ignores him. "There are five this time," he says, as they draw up to the first of the bodies where Jack's core team have clustered around.
"Five!" Price repeats. "How does he find the time? I can't manage to do five of anything before breakfast."
"Is it fair to say that serial killers tend to work the night shift?" Zeller asks.
Will doesn't engage with their banter; he knows better than to try to fake his way into their camaraderie. This is only the third scene he's worked with them, and there's an ease between them that he knows he'll never achieve. He chafes under Beverly's watchful gaze too, the way she always stares at him; it feels equal parts fascinated and judgmental, and he's never cared for either one. Her coati — Will's forgotten her name, never really retained it to begin with — perches on her shoulder, but she's looking across the field at Cur, who's staring back. The coati's whole posture says that she has some deep concerns about the hawk and her intentions; coatis are creatures of the desert southwest too, and fear of hawks is probably written into every fiber of her being. Supposedly daemons aren't animals, not really, but people don't like to acknowledge that humans are animals too. Deep in every person's genetic code there's a cornered, snarling animal tucked away, waiting for a chance to scramble out.
Will doesn't bother to reassure the coati. He doesn't like talking to other people's daemons, but it's even more awkward to direct something that ought to be said to a daemon to their human counterpart instead.
"Jack," he repeats. "The scene?"
"No time," Jack says. "It's warming up, and we need to get these bodies out of here before high noon hits and they start cooking." It's solidly autumn. They're all wearing jackets. The forecast predicted a high of fifty-eight. "Just do your best."
Will's very tired of this. He's tempted to turn around, go back to his car, just leave without a word and head home, Jack's temper be damned. He doesn't even have classes today; he could take the dogs for a long walk and maybe Cur would deign to come with them, riding thermals and chasing sparrows. It's been like this with Jack even from their first case, the Shrike, when Will had only a precious few moments to himself before Beverly had interrupted him, then bulldozed him, then everyone stayed in the room like they'd decided for him that he was done.
He can feel Cur's gaze on his back. He can feel, deep down in his gut, that this is going to go poorly. She's in a mood already, restless and irritable. She calls again, piercing and strange. Everyone in the FBI knows — absolutely everyone knows, whether he likes it or not — that he has an unsettled daemon, but it's one thing to know it and another thing to see it, to see how they are when they work. Three cases he's given Jack, and not a single scene this — open. Exposed.
"Do your best," Jack repeats, when he opens his mouth again.
So Will drops the matter entirely — how this whole thing goes or doesn't is on Jack's head now — and looks down at the nearest victim instead. The girl is young, maybe sixteen, and there's nothing about her in particular that would point to an obvious connection to the last case, whose bodies are only two days cold. Dark hair cut short, jogging clothes, one dangling earbud still playing tinny pop music he can only just hear (it echoes in his mind, his perception and Cur's doubled, because she can hear it too, even from that far away).
She died violently, vivid layered hand-prints around her neck speaking to a repeated strangulation. This isn't like the last scene at all; it's untidy, impulsive. There's dirt spilling from the sides of her sneakers; she literally dug her heels in while she was dragged backward into the field, an arm around her neck closing off her airway (for the first time, not for the last time).
Cur is aloft again, drifting; Will sees a thick strip of trees, the gravel path on the other side that winds along the banks of a river inlet. There are more people over there with white coveralls on, fluttering strips of police tape, little evidence markers that he can easily read through Cur's eyes even from the height. He sees a furrow coming out of the wood, stuttering through the grass, ending with the girl where she lays.
The second one is nearby, and he's in even worse shape. Male, mid-fifties, jogging clothes again. Missing one of his sneakers. He's been beaten, probably into at least a brief unconsciousness, and there's blood streaked down his face from a substantial head wound. His knees and palms are red with road rash, gravel still clinging to the open wounds. Someone took him down in his tracks, like a lion felling a gazelle, and they didn't do it in this spot. He was carried to where his body lays, and if the wild state of his limbs is anything to go by, he was slung over someone's shoulder and then dropped carelessly like a sack of potatoes.
"Jogging trail's on the other side of those trees," Beverly says to him, and he looks up to find her still watching him, knows instinctively that she never looked away. She's pointing her pen toward the dense copse that runs along the north side of the field. Will already knows the shape of it, of course, but he doesn't say so. "There's a pretty big disturbance in the gravel" — he's seen that too — "so we know exactly where he was taken from. We've got techs over there now."
The next definitely isn't a jogger. She's wearing business casual, and she's clearly the reason that they've linked this scene to the last one, because the state of her is exactly like the victims they'd found there: a heavy winding of distinctive red duct tape covering the mouth that wraps in long layered strips all the way around the back of the head, circling the arms up to the elbows, the legs up to the knees. She was taken earlier, a more planned abduction. Will can see purpling around the edges of the tape where it ends at her wrists; she struggled for awhile, and she was held for at least a day. He stoops and inhales, wishing Cur would come over and be a bloodhound or something so he could get better input, but the body smells strongly enough of motor oil, metal, and grime to tell him that she was brought to the scene in the trunk of a car, and probably taken from wherever she was abducted in the same way.
The fourth and fifth are kids, the older no more than twelve, and what he can see of their faces is alike enough that they have to be siblings, at very least close cousins. Nobody has any witty quips for them and Jack's people are silent while Will stands and looks down at them. There are dried tear tracks marking their faces, their reddened eyes wide open and watching the sky, their expressions frozen in something like terror. They're taped even more excessively than the woman, although they're so much smaller. Their arms are taped in the back rather than the front, because it's more uncomfortable and they deserve it. There's residue around their eyes too, and they're both missing the larger portion of their eyebrows; he took off the tape before the end so they could see.
These ones he knows. These ones he already felt contempt for, even before he took them.
Cur calls, a grating and strident scold, and swoops low over the field, over the bodies, dodging back and forth like she's chasing something before she pulls up again and lands neatly on the crumbling remains of an old wooden fence post. A couple of the techs duck and curse, startled. Most people strive to keep their daemons unobtrusive in an absently polite kind of way, but Cur is her own master and she does what she likes.
"Their daemons were all small," Will says. "Rabbits. Rodents. Prey animals."
There are many creatures who can see in visual spectrums well outside the human range. Will knows this because he can see through Cur's eyes, and so he can see what she sees: the gleaming of Dust smeared as bright as blood against the grass, ground into the dirt, glistening on top of the fence post. The lingering ghost of plucked feathers or scattered fur, a predator's meal. It shimmers in the cracks of the wood beneath her feet, smeared like blood. She only sits for a few moments, calling, agitated, before she takes off again.
The disparate scenes make sense now. The last two were in abandoned industrial buildings, a whole different hunting ground, but then the hunter had been entirely different too. Different shape, different prey, different method.
Cur lands on his arm — he flings it out at the last moment, almost in self-defense — with a jarring thump, feet outstretched like she's reaching for prey rather than perch, her talons careless of his flesh in a way that makes him thankful for his long sleeves and layers. She calls again, a long wheezing scream right in his ear, then eases her grip and turns her back to him to survey the killing ground.
"We take the woman first," Will says. He makes a conscious but probably foolish choice to say it out loud, instead of keeping the monologue in his head like he usually does. Perhaps it'll prove a point to Jack, that he ought to give his rabid pet the space he's requested. Everyone already knows there's something wrong with him, several things wrong with him, and the longer this all goes on the more they'll see it; maybe if they get a nice look up front, Jack won't darken the door of his lecture hall again. That sounds pretty nice, actually. "We plan it, but without a victim picked out; we just take the opportunity when it falls into our laps, tape her up, shove her in the trunk. The kids are an idiotic but irresistible impulse. We know them, and people in their lives know us; it isn't smart, but we can't help it. They're little rabbits, both of them, jumpy, and it makes us want to chase."
The scene unravels: Jack's people disappear and the sun rewinds itself. The victims next: first one jogger, then the other. The woman. The kids. The gleam of Dust disappears with them. The grass where their bodies had been is upright, unbent. The sky is only just lightening, tinged pink. The morning is beautiful, the air is crisp and clean, and there's a perfect stiff wind for flying.
Cur leaps from his arm, agitated, and between one wing-beat and the next she turns into a peregrine, starts climbing up and up, higher and further away than she ought to be able to go.
"Will—" Jack says uneasily, watching her, watching Will. Whatever the thought is, he doesn't finish it. People hate to watch Cur move so far away from him, like they're feeling a sympathetic pain, a horrible stomach-churning wrongness, an echo of the discomfort Will ought to be feeling himself but doesn't. On campus once, Cur had leapt on raven wings from his shoulder and flown a good half-mile away and then entirely out of sight around a building; a passing trainee had stopped to watch, gaping, and then actually begun to cry.
Will thinks, vindictively, that Jack asked for this. Jack wanted his imagination, his strangeness, wanted every inch of his aberration, wanted the wrongness of his daemon that makes every neurologist and psychologist and daemonologist so desperate to prod at them. Jack wanted him to do his best. Jack's a demanding guy who gets what he wants, and Will's going to give it to him.
"She likes the little boy rabbits, and the woman's daemon is challenging, fast, but she wants to try something even faster, wants to dip and dive and chase and feel the wind," Will says. Cur has gone so high she's a dot, wings outstretched. He feels more than sees it when she folds them in, begins to plummet. "The joggers are birds. We shouldn't take them at all, but she goes ahead and does the first one without talking about it first. I have to sprint across the field and take the guy down because he's screaming and screaming while she plucks his daemon apart, and then I kill him by accident and she's so frustrated when the meal turns to Dust beneath her. The whole thing's turning into a mess, it's all too exposed and we're going to get caught, but her eyes are gleaming and she's never looked at me that way before, like she loves me. She says she wants another one. This is" — he pauses, frowning, watching Cur drop, understanding every single piece of the scene, understanding the man's emotions in a way that would make everyone standing around him absolutely horrified if he said it out loud — "not my design, but it is hers."
A falcon's stoop is an art beyond merely falling. Cur doesn't just let herself drop; she pumps her wings hard and then tucks in tight, twists as if to slip the constraining grasp of drag, throws herself downward as if to attack the very idea of terminal velocity. Watching her he thinks, not for the first time, that a daemon must surely be the most remarkable thing on the planet. Here is a creature that, never having examined a real peregrine in minute detail, can still reconstruct it perfectly: not just the perfect tapering of primaries, the precision archwork of a killing beak, the elegant curl of surprisingly dainty toes, but also the white flicker of the third eyelid, the powerful heart and efficient lungs, all those invisible things that make up a perfect predator. She's a miracle pretending to be a bird pretending to be a bullet.
"Will!" Jack says again, half a shout this time. Reality filters back in, the scene returns: the bodies, the people, Jack's livid face doubled through his own vision and Cur's.
Jack's daemon is a big striped hyena and the hackles on her back are up; she lets out a loud and high-pitched chattering noise that must be alarm. Beverly's coati scrambles down to her waist and crawls not very successfully underneath her jacket; Price's tamarin seems to see the wisdom in the idea and does the same. The techs that Cur startled earlier back away from the bodies, mouths open as they watch the bird drop toward them.
The reaction is absurd on the face of it; she's only a three-pound bird and she's hardly going to attack any of the people here, but he can feel Cur's vicious satisfaction at seeing them back away anyhow. One of the techs has a gopher for a daemon and it scrambles for some nearby bushes and the opening to some creature's burrow that's underneath. Thankfully Cur doesn't chase it, even though she's seeing through another daemon's eyes, feeling another daemon's hunger. Rabbits, rodents, these aren't her challenge now. She wants birds.
Zeller's little tree swallow has been clinging to his shirt collar like a brightly jeweled sapphire pin, but now it panics and bolts toward the treeline, though there's no way it'll make it; the distance would be a strain for the average tether, and Cur's coming in too fast anyway. Zeller shouts after his bird, and Beverly lurches toward Will like she's going to distract his daemon by slugging him right in the face.
Cur doesn't so much as look at the swallow as it darts away, nor is she concerned that Will's in immediate danger of physical harm; she pulls up sharp and decisive, swooping so low over the teenager's body that her passage ruffles the girl's thin windbreaker. Cur's long toes and slender talons curl around the ghost of a bird that isn't there, her beak reaches down and closes around a spine that isn't in her grip, and she lands in the grass a few feet away, head low, gleaming eyes a fathomless black, wings mantled out to guard her non-existent catch.
For a long moment nobody says anything. Beverly's standing close, jaw clenched, hands balled into fists, and the way she stares at Will now is definitely worse than before. Jack's heaving breaths in and out like his patience has been reduced to one single frayed string. His hyena is more agitated than Will's ever seen her, pacing a line between Zeller and Cur.
Zeller catches his nervous, fluttering bird in his hands and finally breaks the silence to say, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" to Will and Cur both.
It's a great question. Will doesn't have an answer for him. If he did, it'd probably take an hour just to cover it all.
"He's young," Will says. "Early twenties. Strong, big, athletic. His daemon won't settle, and as we all know" — he smiles, if it can be called a smile, grim and sickle-sharp — "that's either a sign of mental instability, or a cause of it. He's trying to teach her, to help her find a shape she likes, because he thinks if she'd just settle then they could be normal. He's an emotionally detached loner — big surprise, I know — and he's desperate for his daemon to love him, because she's supposed to care about him even though nobody else does. But she's not capable; she's broken just like he is. She doesn't want him, she wants to hunt, so he's giving her prey."
"That's why they've all died of heart failure," Price says, quiet. "He's just been taping them up to hold them still, so they're alive but helpless while their daemons die."
"While they're eaten, yes," Will agrees. The feathers on Cur's back rise, threatening, wings still outstretched over a phantom. Will can't tell if she's still bristling over the idea of prey, or whether she's giving shelter to the Dust-painted space that's something like a grave.
"The daemon committed the murders," Jack says.
"God," Zeller gasps. He looks ill. He staggers away a few steps, clutching his swallow to his chest, the shining metallic blue of her feathers a barely-there flash between his fingers. His hands are shaking with the adrenaline drop. "God, what the fuck." He's still reeling from what he feels was a close call, and the idea of little daemon birds plucked apart is clearly turning his stomach on top of it.
"It'll be an interesting prosecution, to say the least," Will remarks. "The man is violent, yes, but the daemon's driving the actual murder. He might not have ever done it without her."
"Forget the prosecution, we need to take a second to talk about how messed up that was," Beverly's coati rebukes, venturing out and onto her shoulder again, facing away from Will and shouting at Cur. "Why did you do that?!"
"She won't answer," Will says mildly, with a sigh. "She doesn't talk."
"Of course she fucking doesn't," Zeller says. He takes a step in her direction, like in spite of taboo he's prepared to take a kick at her. Jack's hyena is clearly feeling the same way — or is trying to head off the HR nightmare that an agent assaulting a colleague's daemon would be — because she lunges in first like she means to catch Cur in her jaws.
Cur becomes a crocodile, becomes a grizzly bear, becomes a mountain lion, flickering one to the next in the space of seconds before she finally holds on to the cat, wicked teeth exposed, her threatening scream so deep Will can feel it resonating in his chest. Zeller yelps and stumbles back, and Cur takes a very menacing swipe at the hyena that Will's only half sure is a feint.
"Fuck you," the hyena snarls — her name is Chiara, which is a pretty name for such a bad attitude — and she feints right back, thick body half-charging, teeth snapping. A mountain lion and a striped hyena aren't that far off in size, though Will would like Cur's chances in a fight he hopes she doesn't get into. She seems to realize she could have a greater advantage, anyway, and makes herself a polar bear. Her forms are always very much on the larger end of the species average, so as a polar bear she's intimidatingly enormous. Chiara backs off, grumbling, but goes to stand in front of Zeller again like a guard dog.
Will doesn't bother to chastise Cur; there wouldn't be much point, and it'd just make her mood worse. "She wouldn't have been a peregrine," he tells her. "Her tether was unusually long, for her to break through the trees from here and go after the joggers, but she was still tied to him. That's where all that rage comes from. She's a hunter in her heart, and in her dreams she's free, but no matter how much she stretches that tether he's always there at the end of it, holding her like a dog on a chain."
Cur grunts at the criticism but doesn't seem to take it poorly. She's a professional, after all. In her own way.
"She'd hunt fast and low," Will says, though Cur's probably thought it already. "An accipiter, maybe?"
"Get her under control," Jack demands, every inch of his body set in furious lines.
The CSI techs have mostly circled wide around the scene and made their way very quietly toward their vans. It's one thing to know that Cur's not settled, to grow almost accustomed to the way she's a changed thing every day when she accompanies him through the halls of Quantico and learn to be almost at ease with it. It's another to know that she's not the kind of civilized, chattering creature they're accustomed to. She's a wild animal and she's terrifyingly detached from him; it must be sobering for people the first time they realize she's not under his control at all, and worse when she's become a half-ton bear.
Cur tilts her huge ursine head like she's thinking. They don't know the size of the victims' birds, of course, whether the killer would shape herself for little songbirds or something bigger like waterfowl, but—
Cur becomes a gyrfalcon, stunning and snowy white with a precise black patterning draping her back. She spreads her wings experimentally and seems pleased with the way the air moves around her feathers. That's it: powerful, beautiful, coveted. That's exactly what their daemon-killer would be.
"Get her. Under. Control," Jack repeats, and an emboldened Chiara steps forward again like she's planning to do it for herself now that Cur is a more manageable size.
"That's not how it works," Will says, only fractionally turning his head, keeping his eyes on the bird in his heart. "You wanted me here. You wanted to 'borrow my imagination.' This is what it looks like. Together we can imagine the whole of the picture, not just the human part. This, right here, is exactly why I keep telling you that I need you to clear the scene for me to work, and give me the time to do it. Somehow that never seems to happen."
Beverly makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. "Right, because this is our fault!" she almost-shouts, waving a hand in Cur's direction. "And it's not because she's fucking crazy!"
Cur turns into a fox and sits on her haunches, an expression almost like a grin on her face.
"Very funny," Will says dryly. He doesn't really disagree with Beverly, and he'd personally prefer that Cur was a little less dedicated to ensuring that he's alone and miserable forever, but if she's crazy then isn't that because he is? She's a piece of him, and he's very certain that all of his madness hasn't been neatly excised into her body alone. She's made out of him, or he out of her; it's the same thing.
"She's your daemon," Jack growls. Will still doesn't turn to look but he can imagine that particular vein in Jack's temple is throbbing. "You are responsible for her. And this kind of behavior is not acceptable. I brought you here to give me a profile, not to give my staff a heart attack."
Cur doesn't respond to Jack at all, but she does stare Will down like she's daring him to say something to her. Then she turns herself into a thin-limbed monkey and starts doing a gamboling little dance.
She doesn't talk, but she sure does have a lot to say.
"Well, you've got your profile," Will says. "Your dancing monkeys have successfully performed. I think we're done here."
Cur, looking victorious, turns herself into the fluffiest, cutest little bird he's ever seen — some kind of tit, maybe, and isn't that appropriate — and flies primly to his outstretched hand. She looks like a wisp of cotton candy with eyes. She's such an absolute shit.
He wants to just turn and go, put the whole thing behind him because he's quite sure Crawford's never going to call on him again and that's probably for the best, all things considered. But he looks at Zeller instead, Price and Beverly and the collection of slack-jawed CSI techs clustered next to their van.
"I'm sorry," he says. "She's not— she wouldn't have hurt anyone."
They all look very dubious about this claim, especially when Cur turns back into the Harris' hawk and immediately sinks her talons into his hand hard enough to draw blood as she lets out another irritated, croaking scream. She always reacts badly, infuriated, when he apologizes for her behavior. Even when he apologizes for his own.
"That's not helping," Will tells her, but she only grates out another cry and flies off, perching on the cargo rails on top of his car, her hunched back turned to him.
Will sighs, looks down and watches his blood drip off his thumb and into the dirt, one drop at a time. He says, "Just— look at who knows those children. You'll find him. It won't be hard." He doesn't look at any of them again, just turns and walks away, following the most vicious part of his soul.