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Thoroughfare- Fox Mulder x Female Reader

Chapter Five: Two Creams, Two Sugars, and a Little Blood

table of contents <3

if you’d prefer my ao3 | word count: 3,750

TW: mentions of murder details, some slight graphic description.

✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩

You were running a little late, which meant you were scatterbrained to the nines. You managed to fall asleep at some point between when Fox left your room and when the rain stopped and you forgot to set your alarm, so now you tore through the motel room like a tornado. You were exhausted, all the residual stress and anxiety of yesterday catching up to you, and you weren’t even dressed by the time your partner came knocking at your door. Bright and early, too- seven in the morning- and he was chipper as a bird. You wondered if he ever slept because you could see the violet shadows that caused his green eyes to glow, but he was in far better shape than you were. You swung the door open and then shut it, realizing you had two rollers sitting matronly atop your head, and you were in a wrinkled dress shirt and pajama pants, squinting without any contacts in. You opened it again, revealing just a sliver of yourself to a bewildered face.

“Woah. Good morning, sunshine,” Fox sing-songed.

You peeked through the crack of the doorway, and he was smiling sweetly at you, holding two paper cups. He nudged the door open to hand you the coffee, which you took gratefully, feeling the crabbiness of caffeine deficiency creeping up already. You were almost jealous of how easy it must be for him to wake up and get ready. His hair was tucked tidily atop his forehead, but he was not dressed in uniform- all he wore was a pair of slacks and a blue button-down, no tie, with the sleeves rolled up. You knew he was smarter for it because the mugginess hit you smack in the face when you opened the door, but you got a whiff of the piney scent he wore and knew he probably rolled out of bed ten minutes ago just looking alright to begin with. How nice would it be to look like that in just a few minutes, needing only a comb and some cologne to make you presentable? If you didn’t know any better, you could’ve seen him wearing something like this on a date, all laid-back, careless, dripping with charm as always…

Visibly flustered, you croaked, “Morning. Thank you,”

“Yeah, no problem. They have a coffee maker in the office. It’s not great, but after last night, I don’t trust any of those shops in town claiming they’ve got the best coffee in Marysville,” Fox joked, “You, uh, you don’t look ready,”

“Sorry,” you winced, “I overslept.”

“It’s okay. They want us down at the M.E.’s office, but we have a little time. I’ll wait for you.”

“I’ll just be a minute!”

You made him stand outside as you shuffled into a pencil skirt, hoping it was wiser for the weather, and tugged a little cardigan over your creased blouse. You grabbed your makeup pouch and took it with you, hoping he wouldn’t pay much attention to your bare face. He may have seen you last night, but you’d already convinced yourself that it was dark enough to hide anything of notoriety. The agent chuckled when you opened the door again, seeing your arms full with a coat that it was far too hot out for, the coffee, a loose gun and badge, a glasses case, your hairbrush– you looked like you just looted a house of all its most unimportant belongings.

“Let me take that for you,” he stole the coffee back and walked you to the truck parked outside your rooms, opening the door for you. You hopped inside and threw your crap in the backseat, and he slid into the driver’s side, setting your drinks down in the cupholders. He started the truck and gave the engine a minute to warm up, reaching for the Kansas map that you left on the dashboard, but he wasn’t really looking for directions to meet the coroner. He peeked at you in his peripheral, watching as you swiped some kind of sheer powder across your face, smoothing your complexion over. He never noticed the little beauty mark on the bridge of your nose, but now he watched you paint over it, and he wished you wouldn’t. You’ve gotten ready like this before, he could tell; you had the motions down, knowing exactly how not to poke your eyes out with the mascara and not to overdo the blush in the car. When he felt like he’d sufficiently given the engine enough time, he placed the map down between you two on the bench and shifted it into reverse.

“You okay if I start driving?”

You turned to him, mid-lipstick swipe, and you nodded. “Sure. I don’t look like a mess, do I?” Fox admired how you pushed your glasses on, adding, “I forgot about my contacts. I feel like a librarian.”

“No. You look… smart.”

“Wow, thanks,” you giggled, rolling your eyes. “I’ll try not to take that as an insult.”

“Well, who wants to look stupid?”

Yours challenged the flush of his cheeks, and you rolled down the window, letting some of the hot air out of the car. He began to back out of the motel, taking a right onto the main road.

You’d never seen the Midwest in the morning. The sun wasn’t high yet, so everything had a soft, golden tone to it; the wheat fields swayed, lining the street into town, homes croaked on sprawling acres, and street signs were so faded you had to rely on the shapes to conclude the directions they gave. It was silent, only birds and wind. You liked this part of the middle of nowhere. Back in D.C., and even worse in New York, people are everywhere, clogging the streets until they burst, cutting you off and giving you the finger. You can’t get a seat at a restaurant. You have to get put on a list for bestsellers at the library. But out here, life is slow. There’s always room to breathe, and to look up and see actual stars, rather than cloudy, light-polluted skies. Something about that spoke to you. You found yourself thinking that maybe someday when your work was done with law enforcement, and you have some money put away, you could come back out here and buy a little bungalow and live out the rest of your days in a place where you don’t have to worry about running out of space and time. Fox seemed to enjoy the quaintness of it all, too, because he was quiet as a mouse beside you.

Fox drove straight through town, and you finally got a glimpse of what the local life looked like as you passed. There weren’t many men around, but given that it was mainly an agricultural economy down here, they were probably out working on the farms. But there were pretty women in sundresses crawling up and down the streets with coffee cups and big purses, hair done up like it was a Sunday; little kids were scuttling down the sidewalks towards the school near the police station. You spotted Sheriff Hale’s car parked outside the bakery, but no one inside.

“Wonder where all these people were yesterday,” you observed.

“At the crime scene,” your partner answered, shooting you an apologetic glance. “I think we showed up at an unusual time.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

You rolled the window up a bit, knowing you were allowing your hair to poof up like yesterday. You settled against the bench seat and took up the map, flipping to the larger scale with the main country road running through. With your finger, you followed it to the county medical examiner's office, which was a whopping sixty miles from Marysville. You knew this place was a blip on the radar, but you had no idea just how far away you were from civilization. Fox’s screw-ups getting you both here had skewed your sense of direction.

“Jeez, we’ve got a while to go. You see this?” You asked, pointing to the location.

Fox glanced over and gave a wry chuckle. “Yeah. Straight shot up. We should get there in a little over an hour if I ignore these speed limits,” he winked, pointing to a sign.

You watched it fly by, announcing the stretch of road was a 35 miles per hour zone, and you smiled. Flopping the map onto the dashboard, you reached for your cup of coffee and took a sip, relishing in the room-temperature taste. It tasted good for about a second, and then it turned sour on your tongue. No cream, no sugar. Your face scrunched up and you smacked your lips. Fox seemed to have his own lightbulb going off, and he kept one hand on the wheel while he reached across your lap to open up the glove compartment. You drew in a short breath as his arm brushed against your thigh, and when he uprighted himself, you huffed in frustration.

“You could’ve swerved us into the field, Fox. Why don’t you let me open the damn thing? I’m sitting right in front of it!”

“Jeez. We’re on the road, aren’t we, Piglet?” he mocked, gesturing for you to look inside. A mess of pink sugar packets and little cream containers littered the compartment, and he giggled, “I didn’t know how you liked your coffee.”

A shameful heat flooded your chest, and you shut your mouth.

“You’re welcome.”

You grabbed two creams and two sugars, and as you stirred them into the chilling coffee with your finger, Fox made a note of how you took it and kept driving. You piped down and watched the scenery go by, all yellow fields and blue sky, and wondered what they might have found regarding Liane’s death. What you were aware of from the case files was the girls were all beaten and penetrated postmortem, but in the last murders, the object of violation wasn’t ever identified. There was no clear definition of the instrument used in the mutilation of their bodies, either. Everything was suspiciously contactless, like whoever was murdering these teenagers never had to lay a hand on them to do it; you weren’t sure how that was possible, and you weren’t convinced it was. Someone had to be committing these crimes. It was just in a way you’d never seen.

You were engrossed in your thoughts when Fox began to slow the car to a stop in the center of the road. You saw his attention being drawn by a dilapidated building on the side of the route– a building that could barely fit twenty people was rotting all over, with an eaten-away roof and rusted windows. You would’ve assumed it to be an abandoned shack if it weren’t for the silver cross nailed to the front door.

“Is that a church?”

“I think so. It’s not on the map.” Fox replied, turning off the engine and unbuckling his seatbelt.

“Hey, wait, we have to get to the–”

“I’ll only be a minute. It’s not like anyone’s driving out here anyway.”

You watched the man slip out of the car and trot around the front, heading off the road. You sat for a second, watching him disappear into the overgrown weeds, and a pressure began to inflate in your chest.

“Damn it.”

You unbuckled yourself and hopped out of the car, leaving your door wide open as you followed in his footsteps. You watched the church door close, his hands slipping out of view behind it, and you groaned. You patted your hip to find you forgot to grab your gun, so you prayed to God that these wouldn’t be your last moments alive, stranded in Kansas with Spooky Mulder. You walked up to the door, looking back to check no one was coming on the road, and you huffed, pulling it open. Stepping inside, you instantly felt disgusting. It was dark and windowless, trapping all the heat in a dead building where mold was absolutely growing within the walls. The only light inside poked through holes in the wood where bugs probably had eaten through, and everything was upturned or offset. It looked like people had left in a hurry- there was still a cloth atop the altar, and Bibles were discarded on the six slender pews filling the room. You looked around for Fox, walking further down the aisle when you heard a creaking from somewhere behind you. Turning quickly on your heels, you saw nobody by the door, and then a creak sounded again, this time too quick for you to locate its direction. You slowly turned back towards the alter, and when your eyes caught up with your body, the agent appeared but inches from your face, holding a flashlight and shining it on a creepy expression. You yelped and turned away from him, covering your face.

“Fuck! You scared me, Fox!”

“Peace be with you,” he wiggled his eyebrows, digging into that creepy smile.

“Not funny.”

“What, you don’t enjoy a little blasphemy? I thought you weren’t religious.”

“Not particularly,” you grumbled, “But I don’t like getting snuck up on. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Fox dropped the flashlight and let his expression mold into something much more like himself, and he hummed. “Good to know.”

You pushed past him and stepped up onto the stage, feeling a bit odd. If your father were here, he wouldve insisted you make the sign of the cross and kneel before it, but you haven’t done that in quite a while. Instead, you paced the sinking platform, running your fingers over the dust-covered podium and chairs.

“What do you think happened here?”

“I don’t know. The rapture?” Fox scoffed, picking up a Bible that was hanging split open over the back of a pew, and flipping through the thin pages. “Looks like everyone up and left.”

“Yeah,”

You walked to the back wall, in front of the chairs, where there was a little wooden trapdoor. You tugged it open, fighting with the swollen lumber, and inside was a silver bowl full of what looked like wine, and beside it, a torn-open package of Eucharist.

“Hey, come look at this,” you called for your partner, and he stepped out of the pews to meet you at the altar.

Upon seeing the contents inside the wall, he asked, “What is this, like, a makeshift tabernacle?”

“Might be. But this bowl looks polished, and…” you paused to reach into the Eucharist bag, taking one and popping it into your mouth, “These are fresh, not stale.”

“You think someone’s been back to replace the bread and body?”

Curiously, you dipped your fingertip into the wine, and a violent chill ran down your back. The liquid was a familiar viscosity as it ran down into your palm, staining the creases. You drew the bowl out of the cupboard and carefully raised it to your nose, and a gag rose in your throat.

“That’s not wine,” you choked, “Jesus!”

Fox leaned down to sniff it, catching the metallic warning, and his eyes blew wide with shock. “Blood.”

You put the bowl back inside the cupboard and shut the door, feeling an anxiety swell in your chest. You stared at the brownish-red on your finger and thought of how it once belonged to somebody, and now it was sitting inside an abandoned church. You stumbled back like you were learning to walk, heading down the altar steps and to the pews.

“Can we please get out of here?” You pleaded at Fox, who stood at the tabernacle making faces.

“You know, now that I think of it, the other girls in the file had a loss of blood reported in their autopsies. Each a few pints. I figured it was a result of the mutilation of their chest cavities, but it could be possible that some of the blood was for sacrifice…”

“You think this has to do with the case?”

Fox began to pace, spanning the church from wall to wall as he mused. “Think about it. Whoever’s killing these girls is doing it for some divine purpose, right? What if they’re making sacrifices to God with their blood, the blood of another who’s untainted and innocent as Jesus Christ?”

“Fox–”

“No, seriously, it makes sense! This guy is clearly working in the shadow of Iscariot, and if that guy had a connection to the real Judas, wouldn’t he need to atone for his sins passed down through history? By sacrificing pure blood to God he could be saving himself from damnation in his own twisted way. Maybe his God-fearing devotion drives him to kill, to make up for Judas’ betrayal.”

“But the sacrifice of human blood isn’t exactly Catholic,” you pointed out.

“Sure it is, people drink it every Sunday!”

“Yeah, but that’s not–”

“You were not redeemed with corruptible things as gold and silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, as a lamb unspotted and defiled,” the man recited, “Peter 1:18. Maybe it’s not widley known as human sacrifice, but Christ and the lamb are thought of as one. Maybe this guy is recreating the sacrifice in the hopes that he will be forgiven. Offering up sacrificial lambs to win the favor of Heaven.”

Fox reached to open the tabernacle again, then hesitated. Turning to you, he asked, “Would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Could you go grab my coffee cup from the truck?”

You looked at his hand on the tabernacle door, and looked to the blood on your palm, and you rolled your eyes in utter disbelief. “Fox, no way.”

“If I had a vile, I’d ask for that, but–”

“You are not going to bring that shit into our rental car!”

“What if this blood belongs to Liane, Ro? We owe it to her to find out what happened. And maybe it isn’t hers, but it’s someone’s, isn’t it? What if he’s already got another victim?”

“We don’t even know if it’s our guy!”

Fox shot you a look that said, You know it is. He wasn’t going to budge, and you knew it. You watched him open the cupboard and take the bowl out, carefully walking it to the table at the altar. Even if you wanted to leave and forget you ever stumbled upon this shithole, you knew he was right. Churches don’t store human blood in silver bowls, and if that belonged to someone who could be in danger or already dead, it was your duty to find out. You let out a stressed groan and hurried out the front door, jogging back to the truck. The sudden sunshine strained your eyes, but even through a squint in both directions on the road, there was still not a soul to be seen out there. You leaned in through the open passenger side door, fished his empty coffee cup from the cupholder, and hurried back inside where the man waited with the bowl in his hands.

“It’s gonna be contaminated,” you nagged.

“Well, we can’t just leave it here. You know that.”

Fox was careful to only pour a little of the blood into the cup, and even more careful not to spill it on you or the mildewed carpet. Once there was an espresso shot’s worth, he tipped the bowl back level and shoved it in the tabernacle, shutting the door tight on it. You fastened the lid onto the cup and held it between two fingers, freaking out just to have it in your grasp. You followed the man down the steps again, and he held the church doors open for you, which you walked through quickly, hoping it would be the last time you ever had to.

“We can get this tested at the county morgue, they can test it alongside Liane’s blood to see if there’s a match,” Fox explained, taking the evidence from your hand as you hopped into the truck.

You placed your dirty hand on the door handle and said, “You’re crazy.”

“We would’ve never found it if I wasn’t.”

He shut your door for you, and then he clambered behind the wheel, placing the blood down beside your coffee cup, which you elected to have no more of. As he started up the engine and remind himself of how many more miles he had to go on the map, you tapped his shoulder. The two of you gazed through the windshield as a little truck with a tow attachment sped past, the first car you’d seen all day. Inside was a pale man, one you didn’t get a good look at, but you saw his dark hair and small eyes, and as he drove by you felt the presence of him like an omen. You remembered how it felt to look at Liane’s cold face, and recognized the feeling as the same. Maybe you were just on edge, but everything about this felt very, very wrong.

“Something’s off about that guy,” Fox scratched his forehead in thought, “Should we follow him?”

“What? No. We’re going to see the medical examiner. Now.”

“Well–”

“Fox, you dragged me into a church and made me put blood into a coffee cup. Drive.”

“You could’ve waited in the car–”

“I said drive!”

Fox raised his palms in surrender and chuckled, shifting the car into gear and pedaling away down the road. You watched the run-down church grow small in the rearview mirror until it disappeared, and you wondered what happened inside. Maybe everyone did get up and leave. Maybe a Mass had gone horribly wrong. Maybe teenagers broke in and trashed the place. Maybe God had come down, or He had brought them up. But of all the theories you could draw, not one of them explained what that blood was doing inside the wall, and even if it was your job, you weren’t entirely sure you wanted to know. Liane’s face flashed before your eyes as you closed them and slumped in your seat. Fox watched you out of the corner of his eye, and he saw the blood on your finger, and he hoped that you’d come away from this case with more than just resentment for his insane methods. He kept driving, and you kept breathing, and the both of you prayed that the medical examiner hadn’t called the Bureau about the agents who were an hour late for their meeting.

You were running a little late, which meant you were scatterbrained to the nines. You managed to fall asleep at some point between when Fox left your room and when the rain stopped and you forgot to set your alarm, so now you tore through the motel room like a tornado. You were exhausted, all the residual stress and anxiety of yesterday catching up to you, and you weren’t even dressed by the time your partner came knocking at your door. Bright and early, too- seven in the morning- and he was chipper as a bird. You wondered if he ever slept because you could see the violet shadows that caused his green eyes to glow, but he was in far better shape than you were. You swung the door open and then shut it, realizing you had two rollers sitting matronly atop your head, and you were in a wrinkled dress shirt and pajama pants, squinting without any contacts in. You opened it again, revealing just a sliver of yourself to a bewildered face.

“Woah. Good morning, sunshine,” Fox sing-songed.

You peeked through the crack of the doorway, and he was smiling sweetly at you, holding two paper cups. He nudged the door open to hand you the coffee, which you took gratefully, feeling the crabbiness of caffeine deficiency creeping up already. You were almost jealous of how easy it must be for him to wake up and get ready. His hair was tucked tidily atop his forehead, but he was not dressed in uniform- all he wore was a pair of slacks and a blue button-down, no tie, with the sleeves rolled up. You knew he was smarter for it because the mugginess hit you smack in the face when you opened the door, but you got a whiff of the piney scent he wore and knew he probably rolled out of bed ten minutes ago just looking alright to begin with. How nice would it be to look like that in just a few minutes, needing only a comb and some cologne to make you presentable? If you didn’t know any better, you could’ve seen him wearing something like this on a date, all laid-back, careless, dripping with charm as always…

Visibly flustered, you croaked, “Morning. Thank you,”

“Yeah, no problem. They have a coffee maker in the office. It’s not great, but after last night, I don’t trust any of those shops in town claiming they’ve got the best coffee in Marysville,” Fox joked, “You, uh, you don’t look ready,”

“Sorry,” you winced, “I overslept.”

“It’s okay. They want us down at the M.E.’s office, but we have a little time. I’ll wait for you.”

“I’ll just be a minute!”

You made him stand outside as you shuffled into a pencil skirt, hoping it was wiser for the weather, and tugged a little cardigan over your creased blouse. You grabbed your makeup pouch and took it with you, hoping he wouldn’t pay much attention to your bare face. He may have seen you last night, but you’d already convinced yourself that it was dark enough to hide anything of notoriety. The agent chuckled when you opened the door again, seeing your arms full with a coat that it was far too hot out for, the coffee, a loose gun and badge, a glasses case, your hairbrush– you looked like you just looted a house of all its most unimportant belongings.

“Let me take that for you,” he stole the coffee back and walked you to the truck parked outside your rooms, opening the door for you. You hopped inside and threw your crap in the backseat, and he slid into the driver’s side, setting your drinks down in the cupholders. He started the truck and gave the engine a minute to warm up, reaching for the Kansas map that you left on the dashboard, but he wasn’t really looking for directions to meet the coroner. He peeked at you in his peripheral, watching as you swiped some kind of sheer powder across your face, smoothing your complexion over. He never noticed the little beauty mark on the bridge of your nose, but now he watched you paint over it, and he wished you wouldn’t. You’ve gotten ready like this before, he could tell; you had the motions down, knowing exactly how not to poke your eyes out with the mascara and not to overdo the blush in the car. When he felt like he’d sufficiently given the engine enough time, he placed the map down between you two on the bench and shifted it into reverse.

“You okay if I start driving?”

You turned to him, mid-lipstick swipe, and you nodded. “Sure. I don’t look like a mess, do I?” Fox admired how you pushed your glasses on, adding, “I forgot about my contacts. I feel like a librarian.”

“No. You look… smart.”

“Wow, thanks,” you giggled, rolling your eyes. “I’ll try not to take that as an insult.”

“Well, who wants to look stupid?”

Yours challenged the flush of his cheeks, and you rolled down the window, letting some of the hot air out of the car. He began to back out of the motel, taking a right onto the main road.

You’d never seen the Midwest in the morning. The sun wasn’t high yet, so everything had a soft, golden tone to it; the wheat fields swayed, lining the street into town, homes croaked on sprawling acres, and street signs were so faded you had to rely on the shapes to conclude the directions they gave. It was silent, only birds and wind. You liked this part of the middle of nowhere. Back in D.C., and even worse in New York, people are everywhere, clogging the streets until they burst, cutting you off and giving you the finger. You can’t get a seat at a restaurant. You have to get put on a list for bestsellers at the library. But out here, life is slow. There’s always room to breathe, and to look up and see actual stars, rather than cloudy, light-polluted skies. Something about that spoke to you. You found yourself thinking that maybe someday when your work was done with law enforcement, and you have some money put away, you could come back out here and buy a little bungalow and live out the rest of your days in a place where you don’t have to worry about running out of space and time. Fox seemed to enjoy the quaintness of it all, too, because he was quiet as a mouse beside you.

Fox drove straight through town, and you finally got a glimpse of what the local life looked like as you passed. There weren’t many men around, but given that it was mainly an agricultural economy down here, they were probably out working on the farms. But there were pretty women in sundresses crawling up and down the streets with coffee cups and big purses, hair done up like it was a Sunday; little kids were scuttling down the sidewalks towards the school near the police station. You spotted Sheriff Hale’s car parked outside the bakery, but no one inside.

“Wonder where all these people were yesterday,” you observed.

“At the crime scene,” your partner answered, shooting you an apologetic glance. “I think we showed up at an unusual time.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

You rolled the window up a bit, knowing you were allowing your hair to poof up like yesterday. You settled against the bench seat and took up the map, flipping to the larger scale with the main country road running through. With your finger, you followed it to the county medical examiner's office, which was a whopping sixty miles from Marysville. You knew this place was a blip on the radar, but you had no idea just how far away you were from civilization. Fox’s screw-ups getting you both here had skewed your sense of direction.

“Jeez, we’ve got a while to go. You see this?” You asked, pointing to the location.

Fox glanced over and gave a wry chuckle. “Yeah. Straight shot up. We should get there in a little over an hour if I ignore these speed limits,” he winked, pointing to a sign.

You watched it fly by, announcing the stretch of road was a 35 miles per hour zone, and you smiled. Flopping the map onto the dashboard, you reached for your cup of coffee and took a sip, relishing in the room-temperature taste. It tasted good for about a second, and then it turned sour on your tongue. No cream, no sugar. Your face scrunched up and you smacked your lips. Fox seemed to have his own lightbulb going off, and he kept one hand on the wheel while he reached across your lap to open up the glove compartment. You drew in a short breath as his arm brushed against your thigh, and when he uprighted himself, you huffed in frustration.

“You could’ve swerved us into the field, Fox. Why don’t you let me open the damn thing? I’m sitting right in front of it!”

“Jeez. We’re on the road, aren’t we, Piglet?” he mocked, gesturing for you to look inside. A mess of pink sugar packets and little cream containers littered the compartment, and he giggled, “I didn’t know how you liked your coffee.”

A shameful heat flooded your chest, and you shut your mouth.

“You’re welcome.”

You grabbed two creams and two sugars, and as you stirred them into the chilling coffee with your finger, Fox made a note of how you took it and kept driving. You piped down and watched the scenery go by, all yellow fields and blue sky, and wondered what they might have found regarding Liane’s death. What you were aware of from the case files was the girls were all beaten and penetrated postmortem, but in the last murders, the object of violation wasn’t ever identified. There was no clear definition of the instrument used in the mutilation of their bodies, either. Everything was suspiciously contactless, like whoever was murdering these teenagers never had to lay a hand on them to do it; you weren’t sure how that was possible, and you weren’t convinced it was. Someone had to be committing these crimes. It was just in a way you’d never seen.

You were engrossed in your thoughts when Fox began to slow the car to a stop in the center of the road. You saw his attention being drawn by a dilapidated building on the side of the route– a building that could barely fit twenty people was rotting all over, with an eaten-away roof and rusted windows. You would’ve assumed it to be an abandoned shack if it weren’t for the silver cross nailed to the front door.

“Is that a church?”

“I think so. It’s not on the map.” Fox replied, turning off the engine and unbuckling his seatbelt.

“Hey, wait, we have to get to the–”

“I’ll only be a minute. It’s not like anyone’s driving out here anyway.”

You watched the man slip out of the car and trot around the front, heading off the road. You sat for a second, watching him disappear into the overgrown weeds, and a pressure began to inflate in your chest.

“Damn it.”

You unbuckled yourself and hopped out of the car, leaving your door wide open as you followed in his footsteps. You watched the church door close, his hands slipping out of view behind it, and you groaned. You patted your hip to find you forgot to grab your gun, so you prayed to God that these wouldn’t be your last moments alive, stranded in Kansas with Spooky Mulder. You walked up to the door, looking back to check no one was coming on the road, and you huffed, pulling it open. Stepping inside, you instantly felt disgusting. It was dark and windowless, trapping all the heat in a dead building where mold was absolutely growing within the walls. The only light inside poked through holes in the wood where bugs probably had eaten through, and everything was upturned or offset. It looked like people had left in a hurry- there was still a cloth atop the altar, and Bibles were discarded on the six slender pews filling the room. You looked around for Fox, walking further down the aisle when you heard a creaking from somewhere behind you. Turning quickly on your heels, you saw nobody by the door, and then a creak sounded again, this time too quick for you to locate its direction. You slowly turned back towards the alter, and when your eyes caught up with your body, the agent appeared but inches from your face, holding a flashlight and shining it on a creepy expression. You yelped and turned away from him, covering your face.

“Fuck! You scared me, Fox!”

“Peace be with you,” he wiggled his eyebrows, digging into that creepy smile.

“Not funny.”

“What, you don’t enjoy a little blasphemy? I thought you weren’t religious.”

“Not particularly,” you grumbled, “But I don’t like getting snuck up on. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Fox dropped the flashlight and let his expression mold into something much more like himself, and he hummed. “Good to know.”

You pushed past him and stepped up onto the stage, feeling a bit odd. If your father were here, he would've insisted you make the sign of the cross and kneel before it, but you haven’t done that in quite a while. Instead, you paced the sinking platform, running your fingers over the dust-covered podium and chairs.

“What do you think happened here?”

“I don’t know. The rapture?” Fox scoffed, picking up a Bible that was hanging split open over the back of a pew, and flipping through the thin pages. “Looks like everyone up and left.”

“Yeah,”

You walked to the back wall, in front of the chairs, where there was a little wooden trapdoor. You tugged it open, fighting with the swollen lumber, and inside was a silver bowl full of what looked like wine, and beside it, a torn-open package of Eucharist.

“Hey, come look at this,” you called for your partner, and he stepped out of the pews to meet you at the altar.

Upon seeing the contents inside the wall, he asked, “What is this, like, a makeshift tabernacle?”

“Might be. But this bowl looks polished, and…” you paused to reach into the Eucharist bag, taking one and popping it into your mouth, “These are fresh, not stale.”

“You think someone’s been back to replace the bread and body?”

Curiously, you dipped your fingertip into the wine, and a violent chill ran down your back. The liquid was a familiar viscosity as it ran down into your palm, staining the creases. You drew the bowl out of the cupboard and carefully raised it to your nose, and a gag rose in your throat.

“That’s not wine,” you choked, “Jesus!”

Fox leaned down to sniff it, catching the metallic warning, and his eyes blew wide with shock. “Blood.”

You put the bowl back inside the cupboard and shut the door, feeling an anxiety swell in your chest. You stared at the brownish-red on your finger and thought of how it once belonged to somebody, and now it was sitting inside an abandoned church. You stumbled back like you were learning to walk, heading down the altar steps and to the pews.

“Can we please get out of here?” You pleaded at Fox, who stood at the tabernacle making faces.

“You know, now that I think of it, the other girls in the file had a loss of blood reported in their autopsies. Each a few pints. I figured it was a result of the mutilation of their chest cavities, but it could be possible that some of the blood was for sacrifice…”

“You think this has to do with the case?”

Fox began to pace, spanning the church from wall to wall as he mused. “Think about it. Whoever’s killing these girls is doing it for some divine purpose, right? What if they’re making sacrifices to God with their blood, the blood of another who’s untainted and innocent as Jesus Christ?”

“Fox–”

“No, seriously, it makes sense! This guy is clearly working in the shadow of Iscariot, and if that guy had a connection to the real Judas, wouldn’t he need to atone for his sins passed down through history? By sacrificing pure blood to God he could be saving himself from damnation in his own twisted way. Maybe his God-fearing devotion drives him to kill, to make up for Judas’ betrayal.”

“But the sacrifice of human blood isn’t exactly Catholic,” you pointed out.

“Sure it is, people drink it every Sunday!”

“Yeah, but that’s not–”

“You were not redeemed with corruptible things as gold and silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, as a lamb unspotted and defiled,” the man recited, “Peter 1:18. Maybe it’s not widley known as human sacrifice, but Christ and the lamb are thought of as one. Maybe this guy is recreating the sacrifice in the hopes that he will be forgiven. Offering up sacrificial lambs to win the favor of Heaven.”

Fox reached to open the tabernacle again, then hesitated. Turning to you, he asked, “Would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Could you go grab my coffee cup from the truck?”

You looked at his hand on the tabernacle door, and looked to the blood on your palm, and you rolled your eyes in utter disbelief. “Fox, no way.”

“If I had a vile, I’d ask for that, but–”

“You are not going to bring that shit into our rental car!”

“What if this blood belongs to Liane, Ro? We owe it to her to find out what happened. And maybe it isn’t hers, but it’s someone’s, isn’t it? What if he’s already got another victim?”

“We don’t even know if it’s our guy!”

Fox shot you a look that said, You know it is. He wasn’t going to budge, and you knew it. You watched him open the cupboard and take the bowl out, carefully walking it to the table at the altar. Even if you wanted to leave and forget you ever stumbled upon this shithole, you knew he was right. Churches don’t store human blood in silver bowls, and if that belonged to someone who could be in danger or already dead, it was your duty to find out. You let out a stressed groan and hurried out the front door, jogging back to the truck. The sudden sunshine strained your eyes, but even through a squint in both directions on the road, there was still not a soul to be seen out there. You leaned in through the open passenger side door, fished his empty coffee cup from the cupholder, and hurried back inside where the man waited with the bowl in his hands.

“It’s gonna be contaminated,” you nagged.

“Well, we can’t just leave it here. You know that.”

Fox was careful to only pour a little of the blood into the cup, and even more careful not to spill it on you or the mildewed carpet. Once there was an espresso shot’s worth, he tipped the bowl back level and shoved it in the tabernacle, shutting the door tight on it. You fastened the lid onto the cup and held it between two fingers, freaking out just to have it in your grasp. You followed the man down the steps again, and he held the church doors open for you, which you walked through quickly, hoping it would be the last time you ever had to.

“We can get this tested at the county morgue, they can test it alongside Liane’s blood to see if there’s a match,” Fox explained, taking the evidence from your hand as you hopped into the truck.

You placed your dirty hand on the door handle and said, “You’re crazy.”

“We would’ve never found it if I wasn’t.”

He shut your door for you, and then he clambered behind the wheel, placing the blood down beside your coffee cup, which you elected to have no more of. As he started up the engine and remind himself of how many more miles he had to go on the map, you tapped his shoulder. The two of you gazed through the windshield as a little truck with a tow attachment sped past, the first car you’d seen all day. Inside was a pale man, one you didn’t get a good look at, but you saw his dark hair and small eyes, and as he drove by you felt the presence of him like an omen. You remembered how it felt to look at Liane’s cold face, and recognized the feeling as the same. Maybe you were just on edge, but everything about this felt very, very wrong.

“Something’s off about that guy,” Fox scratched his forehead in thought, “Should we follow him?”

“What? No. We’re going to see the medical examiner. Now.”

“Well–”

“Fox, you dragged me into a church and made me put blood into a coffee cup. Drive.”

“You could’ve waited in the car–”

“I said drive!”

Fox raised his palms in surrender and chuckled, shifting the car into gear and pedaling away down the road. You watched the run-down church grow small in the rearview mirror until it disappeared, and you wondered what happened inside. Maybe everyone did get up and leave. Maybe a Mass had gone horribly wrong. Maybe teenagers broke in and trashed the place. Maybe God had come down, or He had brought them up. But of all the theories you could draw, not one of them explained what that blood was doing inside the wall, and even if it was your job, you weren’t entirely sure you wanted to know. Liane’s face flashed before your eyes as you closed them and slumped in your seat. Fox watched you out of the corner of his eye, and he saw the blood on your finger, and he hoped that you’d come away from this case with more than just resentment for his insane methods. He kept driving, and you kept breathing, and the both of you prayed that the medical examiner hadn’t called the Bureau about the agents who were an hour late for their meeting.

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