Criminal Minds The Blood On The Wall

Doubled over and creeping across the pavement, she prowled through the shadows, her hands clasped around her gun as she paced towards the lamppost that her team leader had designated for the whole team to meet under that night. Agent Emmanuelle Grayson had been with the FBI's SDC for years now, and she knew when there was a crisis going on; the hidden panic in her boss' face, the small anxious twitch in her right hand and the strained smile on her face had made her instantly weary and she wasn't taking any chances. It was clear to the average eye that Agent Grayson was on high alert by the way that her rubber-soled shoes made no sound on the pavement or the wince that she made whenever a sound echoed through the woods to her right.

Emmanuelle Grayson, during the twenty-eight year period that she had lived, had had a lot to be anxious about.

With her five foot nine stature and thin, athletic build, Emmanuelle had quite the intimidating build. She was tall, thin and curvy, and any body fat she had was pure muscle and she despised being lazy. She kept herself constantly vigilant and alert, and because of her sarcastic, over-vigilant and witty nature her personality could be just as intimidating as her appearance. Her chocolate hair made her face seem softer sweeter, but there was a certain spark in her bright green eyes that made others weary, especially with the upturned corner of her lips that made her look as though she was sneering, and her short temper that caused her to snap quite often. She was the one that always stormed down the front door to the suspect's apartment and she was the one that often got to him first; unfortunately, that meant she was usually the one that was injured in action.

"You're prowling like a cat, Grayson," commented a voice from behind her, and Emmanuelle stiffened before relaxing. There was Jocelyn Godwineson, a woman in her late forties, her blonde hair pulled back into a messy ponytail on the back of her head and her gun clasped in her own hands. But she knew Jocelyn well enough to see the stiffening of her five foot eight spine and the way that her voice shook slightly when she spoke, or the way that her dark brown eyes kept darting around. Jocelyn was their media liaison, but she had seen her fair share of action over the years. "You should relax."

"Monkey see, monkey do," Emmanuelle shrugged, but allowed herself to relax a little. "I heard that you were with Richard tonight. I'm a little surprised not to see him with you, the skinny git."

"Hey!"

Richard Anderson stepped out of the shadows, a small smirk on his face. His black hair was a messy mop on his head, while his clothes were uncharacteristically dark on him, and he seemed a little more weary than usual. His blue eyes kept on sliding around him as if expecting an attack and his hand was covering his gun as he walked towards with his usual, stiff walk. Despite Richard being a reasonably calm man, he had spent quite a while in the field and knew how to hold his own, but fighting made him anxious and he'd been trained well enough to spot the fear in his boss' eyes when she spoke. He wasn't a genius for nothing after all.

"I resent that," he spat, but there was a spark in his eyes that let her know that he was joking. Richard was odd like that; he would sound vicious and often his words would sting, but knowing him for as long as she had she knew when he was serious and when he was joking. Jocelyn's emotions were easier to read and she was out like an open book. When she was made, the person on the other end would know it and she would never even give them the chance to run. "Where's Isla?"

"I love how you talk about me as though I'm not here," said a voice casually from the other side of the street, and Isla, uncrossing her arms from her front, marched across the street; Emmanuelle knew that their technical analyst had no gun with her, because she had no need for a gun behind her computer screen inside her ominous and suspicious lair that she had built for herself, and she saw the little tension that the woman had stored up flood out of her as she found herself in a small circle in the middle of people who were well-equipped and quite willing to risk their lives for her.

Isla Warrington was the shortest of them at five foot two, and she was a little plump, but she was in quite a fit state. Her black hair reached her elbows in perfectly straight waves, but her eyes were perhaps the most startling thing about her; they were a shock of colour on a black and white form in a pair of bright blue eyes, framed by an over-sized pair of horn-rimmed glasses that suited the woman's personality quite firmly. Isla tended to wear all black clothing, sometimes with splashes of white and brown here and there, but she was bright and bubbly and quite kind, but Emmanuelle knew that Isla wore what she did to compensate the people on the other side of her screens after witnessing horrible things. Isla felt guilty about watching people dying or dead and she tried to make herself presentable for a funeral every day just in case, to make up for not being able to do anything but watch.

"Well, excuse me if I don't have eyes in the back of my head, Isla," Jocelyn snorted, but smiled quite warmly. "Did Norton tell you to come here, too? Because if you're following us for the hell of it, go away."

"That was rude," said Isla bluntly, but she was smiling. "No, Norton told me to come here. She says it's personal, for all of us. What do you think it might be? Does Johnathan know?"

"I know just as much as you do," said another voice, and Emmanuelle watched as Isla squealed and turned around to hug the man tightly.

Johnathan Hooper was the tallest at six foot two, and he was quite intimidating, but all of the bravado he put up was just that, bravado. He was sweet, kind and protective, and he adored each of them with everything he had, and his books were popular world-wide. His tanned skin was dotted with a few darker freckles up and down his well-muscled arms and he towered over Isla, but that was why he was so protective of her. He had a mop of dark brown hair and a pair of calculating black eyes – a rare genetic mutation on the Hooper line – that were quite scary underneath bushy, low-cut eyebrows. He was extremely intimidating, but she knew that his hugs were back-breaking and, once he loved you, he loved fiercely and unconditionally.

"Really, Norton's kept even me in the dark about this," he admitted. "I tried to weasel it out of her, believe me, but she just told me to meet everyone here and I'd know everything at the same time that you guys would."

"Well then, I guess we have to wait for Norton," said Emmanuelle, sighing as she leaned against the lamppost, but she made sure that her gun was still in her hands. She saw Jocelyn readjust her grip on the gun as their resident genius Richard shifted his gun into his holster, relaxing. Mainly because, in Isla's words, 'Johnny's big enough to shield us all… at the same time'.

"You don't have to wait long," said a voice from behind them, and Norton came into their little group, her gun at her side as she glanced around at them all. "We have a problem, agents."

Louise Norton was an intimidating woman. She was quite short at five foot three, but she packed one hell of a punch even from her wheelchair. Norton had been paralysed from the waist down forty-nine weeks ago, but she had convinced Richard and Johnathan to install quite an arsenal of weapons into her wheelchair to make her less of a target and more of a, in her words, 'a damn good FBI agent'. Her hair was greying at age fifty-two, but most her wrinkles were frown lines and the roots of her hair were the only really grey part of her body. Norton liked to point out that she'd gotten most of them from worrying about 'my family', which really was the team as a whole. Norton was strict, stern and rather rude, but she loved everyone she knew and she would rather die than let one of them get hurt, which made her an extremely good leader.

"What's up?" Emmanuelle began, knowing that the others would stay silent until Norton spoke.

Heaving a sigh, Norton opened her mouth. "Last night, we received news that Isaac Keynes has escaped from prison."

Silence.

Shock.

Cold.

"What the fuck?" breathed Emmanuelle. "I never – what – fucking hell – Jesus Christ - !"

The whole team was processing the news, knowing perfectly well what Isaac Keynes, an infamous mass murderer and one of their previous cases, was capable of, having experienced it first-hand. They, of all people, would know what it would mean to have him escape.

"He did. His partner, Elyse Windsor, got out last summer. She brought him a cake – the icing was chock-a-block with explosives and he blew the bars on his window and escaped through the gap. Guards were unsuspicious of the cake because Windsor did the same thing every year and every time it was about as dangerous as a blind duck, so they just let her through without checking it," said Norton, and Emmanuelle was instantly fuming. "We were assigned the case again because we know Windsor and Keynes better than anybody, and we are the ones in charge of putting them back behind bars, this time permanently."

"Well… now that they're in the same place at the same time… Norton, we might need some help with this," admitted Johnathan. "Last time, both Jocelyn and Emmanuelle almost died in the effort to put them away, and now that Isla's pregnant we can't risk her and the baby. As stupid as it may seem to you guys right now, we need some help to put them away this time. I don't want to risk any of you guys again."

"But who would help us?" interjected Jocelyn. "We're the Sexually Driven Crimes unit; we're hardly one of the bigger units, even if we do pack one hell of a punch."

"About that," said Richard, and all eyes snapped to him. "I've been thinking ever since Norton said it, but we could call the Behavioural Analysis Unit. They're a team of profilers, kind of like us, and they put away some of the major criminals of the US. They might be able to get some fresh eyes on this case," he admitted. "They're pretty good."

"Come on, Anderson," Emmanuelle rolled her eyes. "I'm all for getting help, but we know this case inside and out – we know the profile's right, we know his hang outs, we know his allies and we can snatch him up on his way home for supper if we wanted to. Who even says we need to get help in the first place? I'm fine with doing it again, because it saved lives before."

"The same thing won't work twice!" exclaimed Norton, glaring. "Come on. Johnathan and Richard are right. We'll call them at the office in the morning and - !"

"No," interrupted Jocelyn. "One of us will have to contact Jennifer Jareau tonight. They get urgent cases pretty much every time they solve one, so we'll have to act quickly before Agent Jareau makes a decision."

Norton nodded thoughtfully. "Grayson, I want you to go home and contact this Agent Jareau and make sure that she knows just how urgent this is. You of all people have the powers of persuasion. And God knows, whatever you do, don't let Anderson talk to her before you do. We might need to explain his awkwardness a little beforehand."

Richard pouted, crossing his arms and glaring at Norton, but he knew better than to open his mouth on Norton, who was quite cranky, especially with Keynes on the loose.

"I'll get on that," Emmanuelle nodded. "What time in the morning tomorrow?"

"Seven," said Norton bluntly, but she didn't have to sound so firm. The others, recognising the severity of the situation, all nodded before going on their separate ways.

They were going to need all the help they could get with Keynes on the loose.

* * *

Jennifer Jareau of the FBI's Behavioural Analysis Unit was startled from the case files she was reading when the phone rang. The whole bullpen quietened at the phone call and each one was paying undivided attention, to which JJ was quite thankful. She didn't think she could handle much after the last case, where she had almost been stabbed and Reid had almost died. She was quite paranoid now, but the whole team was just as paranoid for her safety, if not more so than she was.

"Hello?"

_"Hi. This is Agent Emmanuelle Grayson; I'm with the FBI's Sexually Driven Crimes Unit. Is this, by any chance, Agent Jennifer Jareau of the BAU?"_

"Yeah, that's me. Hang on, the whole team is here, I'll put you on speaker."

_"That would be fine, Agent Jareau."_

"So… what was it that you wanted?" she asked, not impolitely, as she turned the phone on speaker and informed the others who it was. "I don't mean to sound rude, but it's ten o'clock at night and we're all quite tired…"

_"I'm here to proposition you with a case. Recently, as you may know, one of our previous suspects – you call them UnSubs, I believe – has escaped from prison. Isaac Keynes and Elyse Windsor are, as you possibly know, quite the dangerous pair. In addition, we are the team that put him away. Keynes and Windsor are a deadly team – they murdered eighty people in three days, I'm afraid, before we caught them. I know that there are more cases that you can take and more cases that might need you urgently, but we know first-hand what this man operates like. Knowing him, he'll have allies all across the states and he is willing to do anything to get back at us, including murdering innocent people."_

"You are talking about THE Isaac Keynes, right?" said Reid after a moment of stunned silence.

_"Yes. Four years ago, we put him in that prison and now that he's got out he's more fuelled with purpose than ever. My team leader, Agent Louise Norton, was once a BAU agent, as you may know. She knew that you would help us if you could. Please. I don't want anyone else to die at his hands, Agent Jareau. No one deserves to die the way that he kills his victims. His MO hasn't changed even a little bit."_

"Hotch? What should we do?" that was Prentiss, as she knew better than anyone what Keynes was capable of, having interrogated him during her Interpol days.

"I don't know," said Hotch, turning to the team. "What do you think, Dave?"

"Agent Grayson sounds serious," Rossi concluded, nodding. "Isaac Keynes… I wrote a book on him once. It was one of the few people that I wrote about but never put away. Someone else on your team, Agent, wrote about him. I think his name was Johnathan Hooper. The ways that he described the insight to Keynes' mind and the description of the way that Keynes killed people was chilling, quite astounding. He also described all of you in his books, I believe. Is it true that you are Emmanuelle Grayson?"

_"Yes, I am. Jocelyn, Johnathan and I were the ones on our team who personally experienced the ways that Keynes and Windsor would kill people. Of course, Keynes was the dominant one of their pair; he was narcissistic and willing to go to any length to meet his ends. Windsor was the submissive one; easily pushed around, one of the crowd – she believed that she was above what she was and she would willing allow her partner to have his wicked way with her." _All humour in her tone vanished. _"Believe me when I say that I'm willing to do everything that I can to put him away. He is going to come after us, one by one. Isla's pregnant and I won't risk that. I won't risk any of them for anything. But I am going to put the bastard away… for good."_

"Weren't you the one who jumped off the burning apartment building in order to handcuff him, Agent Grayson?"

_"I was. Norton grounded me for months just for jumping."_

"JJ? It's up to you."

_"I know that what we're asking is a little too much. To put yourselves in harm's way. You're probably wondering why we won't do this ourselves. But we are, I assure you. We are going to find this son of a bitch. But this time, the same trick won't work on him again; not putting ourselves as bait, and anyway, Norton and Johnathan were mad at Jocelyn and I for weeks after we did that, and Isla almost went into labour eight months early." _A little laugh. _"We're not saying put yourselves at risk. I'm saying find the bastard so that I can kick his ass all the way back to Hong Kong."_

Morgan chuckled. "I say we do it."

"Me too," added Prentiss. "I know what Keynes can do and I'm not going to let anyone else go through that again."

"I'm in," Reid shrugged. "I've read all about him and your team, Agent Grayson. I know the case inside and out and I want to put him away as much as you do. In fact, if I saw him, I might shoot him."

_"Yeah? Well, get in line. Behind all seven of us."_

Rossi laughed. "I want to do it just to meet your team. They sound so protective of each other."

_"The SDC is more like a family than a group of profilers, sir."_

"We can relate to that," said JJ, grimacing. "We'll do it. Is there a time that you want us there?"

_"Norton's having us in the PD at seven in the morning." _Everyone stiffened at the thought. _"But I'm not that mean. Could you be here by nine thirty? Anderson, Hooper and I will wait outside for you."_

"Sure."

_"And Agent Jareau? I know this might sound strange, but could you bring Penelope Garcia with you? We have our own technical analyst, Isla Warrington, and I think they might have a big chance of finding him when they put their brains together. And a word of warning – our Richard Anderson is quite the socially awkward guy. I think he's a little autistic and he was a lot of trouble talking to people. Don't worry though, his genius is amazing. An IQ of 185 and he can read 19,874 words a minute, not to mention his eidetic memory. I think he and Dr Reid would get along quite well."_

"That's perfectly reasonable," said Garcia firmly, grinning. "I like the sound of this Isla Warrington."

_"I think you'll like her, Garcia." _Grayson laughed. _"Just make sure you're here by nine thirty tomorrow morning, or Norton will kill me. Quite literally, actually; she's already described quite graphically what she'd do to me if I gave you the wrong time. I love how she's more slack with you even though she doesn't know you."_

"We'll be there," prompted JJ, tired.

_"Alright. Thank you. Norton won't have my head on the mantelpiece now. Great! Alright, I'll let you go now. You all sound exhausted. And I really need to sleep if I'm going in by seven tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow, Agent Jareau. Thank you for helping us, it's really appreciated."_

"We'll see you as soon as we can, Agent Grayson."

_"Oh! Before I go, just a little note. Um… when you get here, Norton's really the only person that we call by her last name. I know that Isla won't kill you if you call her by her name, anyway. Isla's the black-haired one, just so you know for tomorrow. Johnathan's quite intimidating but he's a sweetheart, really. Richard's awkward, but he's lovable and quite funny, actually. Jocelyn will murder you if you call her Godwineson – she once shot an UnSub in the balls, just so you're warned. Just call me Emmanuelle."_

"Um… OK?"

_"I know it sounds informal, but really. If you don't want to die or lose your balls, call us by our first names. Except Norton. I called her Louise once and my ears are still ringing when she bashed my head into the table."_

"I can't wait to meet her," said Rossi sarcastically.

_"She's pretty nice, actually, once you get to know her. Just don't call her Louise and you're fine. Anyway, I'll let you all sleep. We'll see you as soon as possible, Agents."_

And JJ hung up, a small smile on her face. "Let's get this bastard back behind bars," she said firmly. The team nodded gravely before going their separate ways, waiting, anticipating, the next day before them and the newest case that would, unknown to them, allow them to meet some remarkable people that would remain their family for the rest of their lives.

* * *

_**So... I was bored and this happened.**_

_**OK then. Glad we got that straight.**_

_**Alright, welcome to my newest baby! I adore this already! Just to be clear it is really, really needed that you get his: This is Morgan/Emmanuelle with a little side of Reid/Jocelyn that I find adorable.**__**My sister is currently poking me with a fork. Go away, Olivia! There, that showed her. Now I've written it. It's official.**_

_**I've already made myself look like a weirdo. Good, great job Marlene. You're amazing, really cool. Idiot, idiot, idiot.**_

_**Okay.**_

_**I love you all and I'd love to read your reviews! REVIEW! REVIEW! REVIEW!**_

_**Love,**_

_**Marlene **_


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Criminal Minds, Crime, Romance