Chapter Text
There was knocking at his door.
Mulder shifted the phone to his other ear and scratched at a hole in his sock. "Uh," he said, forgetting what he'd been saying.
"Mulder?" Sue asked from the other side of the phone.
"Scully's at my door," Mulder explained, heaving himself up from the bed and swinging his feet to the floor, which was cold and unfriendly.
"What's she want?" Sue asked in a suspicious tone.
"It's Scully!" he said, yanking on the phone until the cord whipped through the air in a silver wave.
"Okay," Sue said, and he could practically hear her dismissive shrug, the one she used when she didn't agree with you but couldn't be bothered to argue.
Growling to himself, Mulder opened the door for Scully.
She was frowning. "You're still on the phone? Deek's been trying to call you."
Mulder shrugged and whipped the phone cord again.
"Mulder? You still there?"
Scully shoved some hair out of her eye. "There's been another attack. We've got a witness to talk to." She put a hand out. "Keys."
Holding the phone to his shoulder with his chin, Mulder reached into his pocket for the keys. "What happened?"
"When?" Sue asked.
"Not you," Mulder said. Scully cocked her head at him. Frustrated, he did a stompy little dance. "Sue, I've got to go. There are FBI things to do."
"Call me tomorrow?"
"Sure," he said, hanging up and starting the search for his shoes. Scully watched him from the doorway.
*****
There were two sets of footprints in the soft ground by Caleb Veigh's garage. One had a distinctive Adidas tread; the other was smaller, with five round toes and a deep impression for the ball of the foot.
Crouched on the sidewalk, Mulder hovered his hand over the prints, trying to get an idea of their size. The smaller one was barely bigger than his palm.
A flash went off in the rainy darkness and Mulder turned away. Someone in a uniform was already preparing the footprints for a plaster cast. Wiping the rain out of his eyes, Mulder stood, climbed the steps of the porch and went inside.
Caleb Veigh was sitting on his couch, holding an icepack to the back of his head while Scully examined his neck. The Adidas belonged to him, and he'd been attacked by something with small muddy feet.
"It was dark, you know?" he was saying. "My glasses were wet from the rain, so I couldn't see very well. She was sort of kneeling near the side of the house."
Scully glanced over her shoulder. Mulder nodded, thinking of the footprint and the way Scully's foot had pressed up against him in the bar. Her feet were about the same size as Caleb's attacker's.
"I thought maybe she was a student of mine, all I could see of her was her hair and her eyes." He winced, pulling away from Scully's probing hand. Scully whispered an apology.
"Well, and then, she--" He broke off and looked around the room. Several more uniformed officers were lined up along the wall next to the TV. Deek was sitting in a recliner, notebook balanced on one knee.
Caleb laughed a sigh and shrugged with one shoulder and a hand. He looked more embarrassed than traumatized. "She rushed me, knocked me to the ground and then jumped on top of me and started slamming my head into the driveway."
"And your neck?" Scully asked, tipping Caleb's chin so that Mulder could see the bite marks there.
Caleb pressed his tongue into his cheek and said, "Yeah, she did that too." With another laugh and a groan, he let the icepack slip down so that it covered his eyes. Scully leaned in and patted Caleb's knee, murmuring reassuring words.
Mulder almost didn't recognize her as Scully, sitting there and smiling at the good-looking high school history teacher. She was just a woman now, and Caleb Veigh was the kind of guy that women liked, a guy with a friendly face and a teasing smile and wiry blond hair and an endless supply of khakis and sweater vests and tennis shoes.
Mulder didn't want to think about Scully and other men. "Did you recognize the girl, Mr. Veigh?"
Caleb shook his head. "No, I don't know who she was."
"Could you describe her?" Scully asked.
"This is going to sound ridiculous," Caleb laughed nervously, "but she didn't seem, uh, human. I mean, she obviously WAS, but she moved like, well, like an animal, in quick darting movements. She ran off when a car drove past."
"Age, height, weight, hair color, any distinguishing marks?" one of the uniforms recited.
"I think she was about twelve or thirteen, maybe a hundred pounds, dark hair and," Caleb wiped one hand across his mouth, "um, naked."
The officers glanced at each other, and Caleb excused himself to the bathroom.
Deek ambled over, reading his notebook and scratching at the back of his neck. "Well, his injuries are in keeping with those of my animal attack victims."
"The bite mark certainly looked human," Scully said, joining them.
"So did the footprints." Mulder knew he was grinning but couldn't stop himself.
"Agent Mulder?" Deek asked.
"Agent Mulder has a theory," Scully translated, clearly trying not to smile.
Mulder held up a hand, feeling like the sleuth at the end of the mystery, the one who gathered everyone in the library and then dramatically named the murderer. "Agent Mulder has more than a theory. He's got evidence," he said with a flourish. "Scully, if you will. Footprints, plus teethprints, plus Veigh's statement equals a human attacker. Ah, but Deek, the method of attack, type of injuries and subsequent nibbling suggest an animal, you say? I think we can all win this one. We're looking for a human who acts like an animal. A little something I like to call Jersey Devil, Jr."
Deek shifted his weight. "Offspring?"
"The autopsy of the female did indicate she gave birth," Scully said.
Putting his notebook away, Deek nodded. "It would appear to be the simplest explanation."
Graciously ignoring all the qualifiers, Mulder put his arms around Deek's and Scully's shoulders for a moment of solidarity. "You know what this means, gang. Tomorrow we're going into the woods to find ourselves a critter."
Scully sighed. "Go team."
*****
Crunching branches and bark under wet leaves with every step, Mulder trudged through the woods and whistled the Colonel Bogie March.
Deek tramped on about two yards ahead, brushing aside peaty undergrowth with one yellow-slickered arm, shining a flashlight into the moss with the other.
"Sorry about the rain," he called over his shoulder, his foggy glasses slipping down his nose in the drizzle. "It's a yucky day to try and find anything out here."
"It's fine," Scully said, coming up beside Mulder and sinking her boots into the mud.
"No, we blame you for the rain, McNamara." Mulder stopped whistling. "Please turn it off."
"I've got some friends in high places," Deek grinned. "I'll call in a few favors."
Deek pushed on and Scully fell in behind him, two teetering silhouettes on the greasy ground. The sky, what Mulder could see of it through the crosshatched branches and drippy leaves, was uniformly grey, darker than it ought to be at just before three p.m. and heavy with clouds that were producing less rain now than they had all morning, but which threatened to start up again any minute. Somewhere, behind the sea spray and the rich earth, Mulder thought he could smell the beginnings of snow.
"Anyway," Deek said, marching on, "looks like it's clearing up. Better than it was when we started, right?"
Mulder shoved his hands into his pockets, thought briefly of Sue's fireplace, and started whistling again.
He caught up with Scully and Deek in a low place. The brush was thick here and Deek hacked at it with a pocketknife. "What kind of habitat you think we're looking for?" he asked.
"Well, without more knowledge of her behavior, I think it would be hard to say," Scully said. "We don't know if she hibernates, or what."
"Well, what about that last one you said you saw? I mean, all accounts suggest she makes her home out here, isn't that right?"
"All accounts," Mulder said, pausing mid-whistling-phrase, "suggest that she's a frightened little girl who grew up in the woods and who's been on her own for the last five years, who would want to make her home wherever she thought she'd be safe from predators. In this case, we're the predators, so, I think looking for her as far away from human settlements as possible is a good start. Not forgetting, of course, that she depends on us for snacks and leftovers, so she needs to be able to take a quick jaunt to the general store when she's out of peanut butter or puppies."
Scully growled.
"So what you're saying is we don't really know," Deek said with a chuckle.
Mulder picked up where he'd left off in the whistling. Scully joined in, high and off-key, but resonant. Deek shook his head.
"I'll take what I can get at this point," he said. "I been working on this case a month and I'm no closer than the PD was when they handed it over to me. Your theory's as good as any."
"What we've got to remember is that we're looking for a child," Scully said, grabbing a branch to steady herself as she crawled over a larger downed tree trunk. "So she probably doesn't have the kind of survival skills--"
Some muffled squishing sounds, and Scully was gone.
"Help," came her small voice from somewhere wet and dark. Mulder leaped across the log in a single bound and landed in a squatting position in a heap of wet leaves.
"Scully?" He clawed at the leaves, mud soaking through his jeans as he knelt and scraped at the ground, searching for her. This was absurdly familiar, and his heart pounded.
He heard scraping and struggling and then nothing, silence. "Scully?" he called again.
She coughed.
"No," she said, from somewhere else. "I'm okay. I'm over here."
"That's sort of useless information, Scully," he said, breaking a smile and pulling himself to his feet. "Keep talking."
Silence, again, for a long time. Too long. Seconds. Then whistling, from just to the right of his knee, the faint tinny strains of the Colonel Bogie March.
Deek peered over the tree and shined his flashlight down into the grotto where Scully had slid. It was a narrow, angular sort of space, but the light caught her eyes and her mud-streaked cheeks and her lips, pursed, whistling. Mulder thrust an arm down and she grabbed it, and, digging his heels into the dirt, he pulled her out.
She fell on top of him, mud everywhere, her fingers frozen where they gripped at his shoulders as she tried to regain her balance. He pulled her to her feet and then they all sat on the log and laughed.
"Well, you, uh..." Mulder started.
"Hang on," Deek said, digging in his backpack. "What I have, for you, Agent Scully, is..." He emerged with a red plastic thermos. "Coffee!"
She brushed at her eyes with a thumb, spreading mud around but not really doing anything to lessen it. Mulder tugged the sleeve of his sweatshirt down over his palm and wiped her face, one cheek at a time, tucking the muddy clumps of her hair behind her ears.
"That was definitely it," she said, after a long draw off the little red plastic cup. "That was her burrow, her nest, whatever."
"You find any comic books down there?" Mulder teased, taking Scully's non-coffee hand and rubbing it between two of his.
"Nah, just six or seven My Little Ponys."
Mulder beamed. "Why, Scully, as I live and breathe. Half-drowned in mud and you're making jokes."
"Mulder," Scully said, her eyes widening as she shifted her gaze from Mulder to Deek and back again. "We found her. I mean, we can find her now. Think of everything we can learn about her."
"Nice work, Agent Scully," Deek said. Scully nodded.
"And we didn't even have to shoot her," Scully said, more quietly.
"Nice, isn't it?" Mulder agreed.
The sky offered a grumble of thunder in appreciation.
"Ooh, that's no good." Deek stood up, took the cup back from Scully and screwed it back on the thermos. "Let's get you home and cleaned up. We'll send some people to stake out the area, but I think you're right. We've got her."
Mulder slid off the log, reached up, grabbed Scully by the waist and stood her up on solid ground. "Don't fall," he said, shaking a finger at her.
"Don't whistle," she said.
"Hmpf," Mulder said, and as he led the way back to the truck, he started in on another chorus of the Colonel Bogie March.