Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Prologue
Three Years Ago:

One fall a serial killer terrorized Honolulu and the surrounding areas. He left bodies behind that were so mangled and mutilated that it took dental records to identify most of the victims.

Danny had a very clear image stuck in his head from the first scene of a crab picking pieces of brain matter out of a tourist from Delaware’s skull. The crab had also gone in an evidence bag to be dissected by Max later and that had given Danny a sick sense of satisfaction to see the crab taken away like it was solely responsible for the atrocity that lay strewn across a secluded cove.

Kono’s rookie nerves had at long last caught up with her after taking in the scene and she said, “Guys, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to—”

Chin patted her and he looked a little green around the gills himself. They all did. “We understand cuz, do what you need to do,” he said and she’d given a jerky nod before sprinting away with her hand over her mouth.

“What kind of sick freak would do something like this?” Danny asked as he looked at the remains glistening wet and red in the bright morning sun. “Nevermind, don’t answer that, I don’t want to think about it.”

Steve nodded, expression a twisted mix of grim and angry at the brutal, senseless death. “We’re going to need to find out if we’re going to catch this guy though.”

Danny sighed and felt his shoulders slump. “I know,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No one likes it, Danno,” Steve said and sighed, too, echoing Danny before drawing himself up and getting his Serious Face firmly in place. “Let’s get to work.”

“Woo,” Danny said flatly as he’d eyed the strings of intestine leading down into the water where they floated like morbid kelp. “Where do we even start?”

Steve opened his mouth like he was going to answer then he looked at the mess that had once been a person and closed it again. “I have no idea,” he said and then pressed his lips into a thin, tight line.

Danny patted his back and ended it with a light, discreet stroke and nodded. He understood Steve’s dismayed horror perfectly well.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Six bodies later, they were still floundering around in the dark waters of No Idea and it was driving them all nuts. It seemed like every time they turned around, there was a new body torn to pieces for them to go scoop into little baggies. Danny was sickened when he thought about the victims’ grieving families burying garbage bags full of their loved ones, hidden away in closed caskets to hide the fact there was an industrial Hefty sack lying against the satin lining.

They never did find all of victim number six’s head and had used fingerprinting for the ID. Some asshole from HPD let that bit slip to the poor girl’s mother and she screamed before collapsing in sobs. Chin caught her before she hit the floor and Danny lost his professional cool and decked the fucking moron. Steve had nodded his approval as he’d looked on while the guy bitched about his nose being broken. By that point no one cared about one stupid jerk’s broken nose when they had bodies turning up looking more like splatter punk abstract art than human beings.

They all tried their best to close the case quickly as possible. They followed every lead—of which there were few—they checked and re-checked the areas the murders had occurred for witnesses and came up empty every time. Steve gnawed his fingernails down to bloody crescent moons and Danny’s crappy apartment sported an unsightly hole in the flimsy plaster. Kono looked like she hadn’t washed her hair in days with anything more than ocean water and it hung around her drawn face in saltwater clumps. Chin had circles under his eyes that seemed to be making a bid for his cheeks they were so big. All of that and they still had nothing except a bunch of bereaved families wanting answers and six bodies stored in bags within bags.

“How is he doing it?” Steve asked one day while they all wolfed down their lunches, not tasting the good food, but eating because they needed their strength. “How can one person rip another person apart like they’re paper?”

“I keep asking my Magic 8 Ball the same thing,” Danny said around a mouthful of turkey club.

“Yeah? What’s it telling you?” Kono asked, cracking the first sliver of a smile anyone had seen from her in days.

“Nada, no matter how hard I shake it, I keep getting ‘the answer is unclear’,” Danny said. “Even telling it how serious an offense it is to withhold information in a criminal investigation hasn’t cracked it.”

“Maybe you should get a court order,” Chin offered.

“Or just rough it up, show it I mean business,” Danny said. “Anybody got some jumper cables and a battery they wanna loan me?”

Steve looked a little constipated when the exchange first began, but by the end of it, he was laughing, too and with that, Danny had gone back to his sandwich. He’d done what he set out to do—get a laugh out of his teammates and ease some of their tension for a few minutes. While they chuckled softly and Kono mentioned that she’d had a Magic 8 Ball as a teenager, Danny turned over what Steve’d originally asked in his mind. A light bump against his shin had Danny looking up from his lunch to find Steve looking at him with a slight smile. He winked at Danny, a silent version of thanks and Danny winked back then fluttered his lashes at him, which made Steve snort.

They ate their lunches slower after that, actually tasting their food and relaxing, even if it was only a fraction.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The call came in one night while they looked over the crime scene photos from the last victim. It was late and they were beyond exhausted, eyes red-rimmed and food stains on their shirts. They’d taken to snapping at each other over the slightest things, right down to Chin and Kono getting into a short-lived shouting match over who had dibs on the last of the coffee, neither of them thinking about there being more in the cabinet for the making. Danny and Steve had nearly come to blows over a half-stale malasada about an hour before the Great Coffee War. They’d settled it by grudgingly agreeing to half it at Chin’s suggestion, which had earned him twin glares for the trouble.

Danny was listening to the coffee pot percolating away when the phone rang and he was up, out of his seat like a shot. He beat Steve to it and gave him a little smirk as he snatched up the receiver. While Steve took a moment to sulk about that, Danny said, “This is Detective Williams.”

He listened as the dispatch officer on the other end told him they had gotten a call reporting screaming from a neighbor. The island was on red alert by that point, people imposing their own curfews and locking their houses up like fortresses since some jackass had leaked photos of the fourth scene to the press, so calls like that weren’t uncommon.

Which is why Danny asked, “So what makes this one special? How do we know it’s not some panicking housewife who’s had too much wine or something?”

“The neighbor says he saw an arm fly through a window,” the annoyed female dispatch officer said. “It landed in the swimming pool.”

“Damn,” Danny said and the dispatcher gave him the address.

Hanging up, he tore the address off the notepad he’d scribbled it on and waved it around. “Let’s go,” he said.

Steve was already halfway down the hall and they had to catch up.

~*~*~*~*~*~

There was indeed an arm in the swimming pool and an arc of blood marking its path across the lawn from the shattered kitchen window it had flown through. The inside of the house looked like something out of a nightmare and Danny crossed himself as they approached the body lying by the island counter. His face was hanging off to one side, partially torn away, grey eyebrows grizzled with gore.

“Jesus,” Chin said softly under his breath as he joined Danny beside the body. “Why would someone do this?”

“That’s the question of the decade, my friend,” Danny muttered as he looked down at the sad ruins.

“Guys, we’ve got another vic,” Steve said, coming in from the step-down living room. “Female.”

“Fuck!” Danny said as he rose from his crouch to go with Chin to check out the second body.

“We’ve also got footprints,” Kono said. “They’re hard to see because of the blood, but they smooth out and take shape a few feet away since there aren’t…” She stopped and swallowed thickly. “Puddles,” she finished with a frown.

They all perked up at that. Footprints meant there was a way to track their perp if they could pick up a trail soon enough before he washed his shoes or the blood on them dried. The murdered couple was the first inside murder they’d had and hardwood floors held onto evidence far better than sand or grass did.

Kono showed them where the trail started and they stared at it in the beams from their flashlights as sirens filled the air, announcing HPD’s rapid approach to the scene. The footprints looked odd, misshapen or something, perhaps a distortion caused by the copious amounts of blood. No one really dwelled on that part because the tracks led further into the house, not out and away from it and that’s what they latched onto.

“He’s still here,” Steve said, his whole body coiled tight and ready for a fight if that’s what it took to bring the bastard down.

“Do we wait for backup or do we go ahead?” Danny asked even though he knew the answer already.

Steve just gave him a look and Danny smirked back. It was dangerous, it was insane to go after such a violent offender without half the police department backing them up, but for weeks they’d been sifting through bloody remains and listening to families sobbing over their lost loved ones. After all of that, a lack of backup didn’t really matter because they had their chance and they’d be just as insane not to take it. Besides, they had guns and nothing about their guy ever suggested he employed a firearm to help him rend and ruin lives. With guns, they had the upper hand here, no matter how violent their offender was; no matter how slice-and-dice sickly talented he was with a knife.

“He can’t have gone far, I want to follow the prints as far as we can and then we spread out and do a full sweep,” Steve said.

They followed the bloody trail to the foyer and then it got weird. The foyer was a mess of footprints, slick-wet-tacky red trampled in all different directions. Danny scoffed as he looked at the tracks on the floor.

“He’s fucking with us,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair. “Bastard knows he’s cornered and he’s still making a game of it.”

“We’ll get him though and then we can see who laughs, right?” Steve said through gritted teeth.

“Sure enough,” Chin said.

Danny knew that if, for some reason, their perp ended up with a bullet between his eyes instead of a pair of steel bracelets then no one would complain. It was something they’d all thought about more than once, but had never said. Sworn to uphold the law or not, after having seen what he had the past few weeks Danny was more than a little okay with that unspoken decision.

“Which way do we go?” Kono asked, turning in a tight circle to follow the paths spinning out like spokes on a wheel. “He could’ve only went one way, but which one?”

“Split up,” Steve said. “Chin, you go east; Kono, you go west. I’ll take the south and Danny, you go north.”

“You mean upstairs?” Danny asked.

“Yes, I mean upstairs,” Steve said.

“That’s all you had to say,” Danny said and squeezed his arm before moving toward the stairs, skirting as much of the mucked up foyer floor as he could.

He took the stairs quickly and quietly, noting that the blood trail petered out to smears and smudges halfway up. Careful inspection of the white runner on the stairs showed fainter red marks that continued the rest of the way though. Danny grinned, the expression tight and grimace-like as he continued to climb. If he had to put money down on it, he’d have to say their perp was upstairs. The smudged places on the carpet had been his attempt at wiping his weirdly deformed feet. His bare feet, Danny realized with a start that made his skin crawl.

At the top of the stairs, standing on the landing, Danny looked down the hallway and even with the current situation; he was drawn up short at the sight before him. The window at the end of the hallway was filled by the bloated, orange harvest moon. It was so big and bright that its sudden light left Danny blinking in the glow it cast through the large window. The top of the window was made of stained glass mosaic tiles and multicolored prisms of moonlight freckled the ceiling and walls. It was beautiful.

Danny blinked his eyes rapidly to try and adjust to the brightness of the silver-orange light streaming down the hallway as he looked around. The door to his left was open and he edged his way inside, weapon drawn as he did so. It was a comfortably furnished guest bedroom and Danny made quick work of his sweep.

On his way out of the bedroom he realized he’d forgotten to check the closet. Biting his lip against a curse and ignoring the sweat prickling the back of his neck despite the cool interior of the house, Danny turned and went back to the closet.

He opened the door, standing back slightly with his gun aimed at the interior as he brought up his flashlight to look inside. All he found was a largely empty space and a few suede-covered coat hangers dangling from the rod. Without even realizing it, Danny let out a sigh of relief as he stepped back to turn and walk out of the room again.

It was then Danny felt the hot gust of breath on the back of his sweaty neck. He couldn’t see who was behind him, but he had a sense of being loomed over all the same. Thanks to the moonlight, there was a grotesque shadow distorted by the light thrown up on the wall to Danny’s right, twisting its human-but-not shape up to the ceiling. He ran cold all over and felt the adrenaline rush kick in, jumpstarting his instincts that had him tightening his grip on his weapon. Everything else around him narrowed down to pinpoint focus, making things sharper and more detailed as he stepped forward again even as he dropped his flashlight to brace his gun hand on his left forearm as he turned.

The sound that tore out of whatever had come up behind him made Danny’s heart triphammer in his chest. All he could think was, I am going to die here. He raised his weapon to fire anyway because he wouldn’t just let himself be murdered, not like that and not by some fucking psycho. He tightened his finger on the trigger, starting to squeeze and then there was pain exploding up his left arm as his attacker lunged forward and bit him.

Danny screamed, partly in pain and partly out of nothing but primal fear as he caught a glimpse of the beast—monster—that was attacking him in the light of his flashlight laying on the floor.

Then he pulled the trigger despite the pain, unwilling to back down and give into the searing agony of it and heard the solid, meaty thwump of the bullet meeting flesh. A gout of blood and a hunk of flesh flew out of the thing’s massive shoulder and it staggered back half a step from the force of impact. It was the monster’s turn to scream then, but it recovered and made another advance on Danny as he stumbled back, falling into the open closet, even as he pulled the trigger again.

He hit the thing again and it snarled, the sound so loud and full of raw anger that Danny actually felt his blood run cold. He heard the others pounding up the stairs, calling his name as he fired again and missed, the bullet wedging into the opposite wall.

There was a glimpse of glowing eyes catching in the moonlight, flaring chatoyant chartreuse green and then the monster was gone, moving with remarkable speed and agility towards the bedroom window. Just as the beams of the others flashlights spilled over the bedroom’s threshold there came the sound of shattering glass and Kono ran towards it while Steve went for the closet to check on Danny.

“What happened? Shit, Danny, talk to me,” he said as he crouched down in front of Danny who was still aiming his gun at the open mouth of the closet. “Danny,” Steve repeated and gently pushed his hand down to lower his weapon.

“Dog, the fucker has a dog,” Danny said as the shock of the situation bore down on him, leaving him wanting to shake as he thought about how close he’d come to being hash for some kind of mutant German shepherd.

“What? God, your arm,” Steve said, worried, but always the consummate professional in a crisis as he examined the wound on Danny’s arm, holes from the slightly curved canines looking like he’d had ten penny nails driven into his flesh.

“Big, big fucking dog, Steve. Not your average Lassie, no sir,” Danny went on, babbling and half out of his head with shock.

“Come on, HPD is here, they can deal with this for now,” Steve said, helping to lever Danny up off the floor. “Let’s get you to a hospital.”

“No, I need to be here,” Danny said even as his stomach roiled, leaving him feeling like he was going to vomit.

“You need stitches and a rabies shot,” Steve said.

“Just get the paramedics here to patch me up and then let me work,” Danny said, digging his bloody fingers into Steve’s shoulder. “We’ve got many exciting things to do and a psycho killer to catch, I do not need a hospital.

What he really needed was home, but there was no way in hell he was going to let a dog bite—albeit a really nasty one—keep him from working the scene and seeing if they could find anything.

“No, you’re going to the hospital and after the hospital, you’re going home,” Steve insisted.

“No, not home,” Danny snapped as he leaned heavily against Steve despite himself. “Back here to work this scene.”

“Home,” Steve said as they made their careful way down the stairs.

“No, Steven,” Danny countered.

“Yes, Daniel,” Steve countered right back.

His stomach was flipping and clenching with nausea that he swallowed down as his head also began to pound. His arm felt like it was on fire and he was sweating again by the time they started down the stairs. Maybe going to the hospital and getting some painkillers at least wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

In the end, Steve got his way because by the time he was stitched and well medicated with painkillers, Danny felt so sick he thought he was going to pass out. He did a good enough job of hiding it though and the ride back to his apartment was strangely quiet and blessedly uneventful.

Steve still offered to stay with him, saying that Chin and Kono could handle things for a little while, at least until he’d gotten Danny settled. Danny only shook his head, pulled Steve down for a quick kiss and then pushed him out the door.

“I’ll be fine,” Danny told him, laying a gently restraining hand on Steve’s chest. “You go catch that motherfucker and his mutt, huh?”

“Will do,” Steve said with a quick grin before he turned and walked away.

Danny shut the door with a soft groan and blinked his gritty feeling eyes. Feeling like he had an itch in the middle of his mind that he couldn’t scratch, he shuffled over to the pull-out and collapsed.

That same night he woke up from strange dreams of fur and fangs, shivering and racked with pain so intense he couldn’t even scream. His muscles ached and cramped, his skin itched so badly all over that it nearly burned. His jaws hurt; hell, his entire mouth hurt and Danny swore he could taste blood in the back of his throat. As he laid there soaking his sheets with cold sweat, Danny was aware of that itch in his mind having grown stronger. He was unable to shake the sensation of being watched from inside his own head and thought himself delirious with fever even as it moved and came forward to calm him.

Thankfully, he passed out not long after that.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Danny spent the next couple of days huddled in his bed, feeling sick and feverish while the certainty that something was wrong with him grew. The sound of his neighbors moving around outside his door sounded like they were right there in his living room, stomping their feet as they walked past. The noise was enough to finally drive him out of bed and into the shower to wash the funk off and re-bandage his wound. He didn’t pay it much mind at first, but after drying off and getting all of the gauze and ointment gathered up to wrap his arm again, he realized the bite was almost healed. Aside from the deeper punctures made by the dog’s fangs, there was nothing but a wicked looking scar where the bite had been only a couple of days earlier.

“What is this?” Danny said to himself as he studied his arm, turning it this way and that. He wasn’t complaining, but it was still weird and he wrapped his arm anyway since the punctures weren’t completely healed.

It was as he was brushing his teeth that he noticed they were also different, his canines slightly longer; barely noticeable as different unless someone was to really look. Danny knew his teeth, he’d had them his whole life and they had never looked like that.

“I cannot deal with this,” he said with a shake of his head and backed away from the bathroom mirror. “I… nope, not gonna. I am hallucinating and trapped in some fever dream because this is bullshit, total bullshit and I am talking to myself, too. Obviously I have gone insane and I can accept that. Mostly.”

Instead, he worried about getting some food into his belly. He hadn’t eaten since the night he was attacked because he had felt too ill to bother nor did he trust anything to stay down. Now, he was hungrier than he could ever remember being and ended up eating every scrap of meat in his refrigerator, gagging when he took his first bite of steak raw without even thinking about it. He ate it though, swallowing it down with relish and licking his lips. Then he took another bite and another and another until he was staring at nothing but the styrofoam tray that had held the steak.

“Oh, God,” Danny muttered around the last mouthful of raw beef as he stumbled away from his counter. He repeated that like a mantra all the way back to the pull-out where he sat down with a thump and cradled his head in his hands, smearing beef blood through his mussed hair.

He had the distinct impression that whatever it was living in his head did not believe in God the way that Danny did and he was only able to laugh until he was hiccupping. He was convinced he was going mad as a fucking hatter while that calm, alien presence watched and tried to comfort him. Despite himself, Danny let it and laid down across the foot of his bed, bitten arm cradled against his chest and dozed.

A couple of hours later he awoke from more strange dreams of chasing elk across a frosty plain. He sat up and took a deep breath, nostrils flaring as he sniffed and recognized the new smell as Steve. He smelled Steve coming up the walk to his apartment door and Danny shook his head again as the presence in his mind quivered with delight at the scent. A few seconds later he heard a scuff-scrape of sound outside his door and saw a shadow on the other side.

“If you pick my lock, so help me I will arrest you,” Danny called as he stood up to go open the door and look back at Steve’s surprised face. “Honestly, can’t you knock?”

“Can you?” Steve asked and then he frowned as he looked Danny over. “You look like shit run over twice.”

“Thank you for that charming assessment,” Danny said as he stepped back to let Steve in.

He had the strangest urge to rub up against him and lick his face, a happy sound of greeting rising unbidden in his throat that he bit back. Without thinking, he gave a violent shake of his head that left him feeling dizzy before he shuffled back to the pull-out and collapsed.

Waving a hand around and trying like hell to look like everything was normal, Danny asked, “To what do I owe the honor of having you attempting to break and enter on me?”

“You haven’t been answering your phone, for one thing,” Steve said from the kitchen where he was digging around, looking for… who knew what. Probably fluids to try and pump into Danny. “The first day, I figured I’d leave it alone and let you rest, but it’s been two days and I was starting to… you know.”

“Aww, you were worried about me,” Danny said with a smile. “It’s okay, you can say it; I won’t laugh at you for having feelings or anything unmanly like that.”

“Shut up, Danny,” Steve said as he came back with a glass of apple juice. Thrusting it at Danny, he ignored his smile as Danny took the juice. “I’m going to the store and I am getting soup and ibuprofen and then you’re going back to the doctor tomorrow if you’re not better by then. Got it?”

“Sure thing, Nurse Ratched,” Danny said. Then he leaned forward to press his face against Steve’s belly. He breathed him in before grasping the hem of his shirt in his teeth and tugging once before letting go. “Can’t you put that trip off for about an hour though? I’m just saying, you know, sexual healing and all that.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Steve said, but he pulled his shirt over his head and climbed up on the pull-out anyway.

“Fine by me, so long as you don’t run off to buy soup,” Danny said and pulled Steve down to kiss him.

As he licked into Steve’s mouth, he growled, the sound low and possessive in his throat. Steve pulled back to look at him with an eyebrow raised and Danny grinned back through his uneasiness.

“What can I say?” he said and left it at that because he actually had no clue what to say. He’d never growled in his life, not like that, not for real. The sound he just made wasn’t human and he was all too aware of that strange stirring in his mind as he looked at Steve.

Steve rolled his shoulders in a careless shrug. Then he got a glint in his eyes as the corners of his mouth turned up in a little smile. “Do it again,” he said before leaning in to kiss Danny again.

Danny laughed into the kiss as he slid a hand up the back of Steve’s neck. He tilted his head to deepen the kiss some and when he did, he growled again. It was much easier the second time and as they moved together, Danny was not altogether unaware of the presence inside of him settling in. Melting into his consciousness like it belonged there and he didn’t fight it because it didn’t scare him all that much anymore; over the past couple of days, it had begun to fit.

As he laid there afterward, content and sated as he listened to Steve in the shower, Danny came to a strange realization and started at the thought. Because no, there was no way, he thought as he sat up in bed like he’d just been kicked.

“No, no,” he said under his breath and that slowly merging consciousness in his mind seemed to whisper back, Yes.

Danny buried his face in his hands, honestly fighting the urge to scream. “No,” he repeated through clenched teeth.

“No, what?” Steve asked. Danny jumped at the sound of his voice. He’d been so wrapped up in his little mental breakdown he didn’t hear the shower stop running.

“Nothing.” Danny looked at Steve and caught himself sniffing the air to breathe him in again.

Yes, that wordless voice said inside his head again and Danny shuddered.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Over the course of the month that followed, Danny learned new things about himself. He was faster, stronger, he could hear and see better, his sense of smell was phenomenal—which was awesome when he was inside a bakery, but absolutely terrible when they had to chase a suspect inside a fish cannery. He also shook himself off after a shower half the time before he even thought to grab a towel, which was just annoying.

Everything but the latter made him better at a job he was already good at and people noticed, but in a good way. While he still feared it, to an extent, after having realized the why of it all in his still largely disbelieving way (because shit like that did not happen except in movies and folktales) Danny gradually started to welcome it as well. Especially after outrunning Steve one morning on the beach by his house. The look on Steve’s face as Danny tore past him had almost been enough to make his superstitious terror lay down and hush.

Because Danny was nothing if not curious, he also learned that he could make it happen. Sitting alone in his apartment late at night on the occasions he wasn’t with Steve, Danny took to calling it. He learned to pull on the awareness that was a part of him now and draw it up through his body like thread. The first time, all it took was a twitch of his muscles that promised incredible pain if he persisted and Danny quit. He sat back on his pull-out and sucked in harsh breaths as fear sweat greased his skin with its oily, sour stink.

“This isn’t happening,” he said to himself even though he knew it was a lie.

A couple of days later, he tried again and pushed past the initial ache in his muscles right up until his jaw cracked and shifted under his skin. Danny shoved it back down again with a gasp of pain and a swallowed down sound of terror.

The third time he made it far enough to see the hair as it began to push through his skin, blonde just like the hair on his head. He’d been in so much pain by that point as his bones had cracked and seemed to stretch that he’d barely been capable of wondering at that little detail. He’d let it go so far that the reshaping of his twisted body hurt as much if not more. He laid there, naked and sweating all over and blinked up at his ceiling dumbly. The one thing he thought about again and again was how the fur had been the same shade of blonde as his hair.

It really was a part of him, he thought and then he laughed and laughed, hysterical, coughing bursts of sound.

~*~*~*~*~*~

After the seventh and eighth victims, the murders stopped. HPD had found a trail of blood going across the back lawn of the residence, leading down through some scrub growth that petered out onto a stretch of beach. The blood had led to the surf line and then it, along with the strange tracks, had been washed away by the surge and pull of the ocean.

They never did find any paw prints to suggest a dog had been there. Danny maintained his story, the nasty bite he’d received backing it up. “Maybe the asshole carried the damn thing,” Danny said. “I did shoot it after all.”

Everyone agreed maybe that was the case simply because they had no other explanations.

Danny alone knew the truth, not the whole truth—not by a long shot—but he knew more than anyone else. He knew it hadn’t really been a dog that bit him even though at first he’d believed that, too. He knew that it hadn’t been a mere man that had torn all of those people apart even though everyone else still thought so. He had to’ve used some kind of tool to tear those poor people up so bad, they said. Maybe he was on drugs, they speculated. Maybes and what ifs had run rampant through 5-0 and the HPD during the killing spree and they didn’t stop even though the murders did. A case like that one, especially an unsolved case, would never be completely let go of. It would become a legend passed down to each new generation of law enforcement officers in Honolulu and probably other places as well.

Everyone else was so busy speculating about how the guy had done it that no one noticed how quiet on the matter Danny had become.

He couldn’t help but wonder though: What had happened to their killer? Had his shots hit something vital and the guy had slunk off somewhere to die? Or had he simply left Oahu and gone elsewhere to carry on? Danny actually put his money on the latter because after such a close call, any serial killer with a lick of sense would take that as their cue to pack up and get the hell out of Dodge.

He dreaded the day they got the call from another state—or even a country, he couldn’t discount that—telling them they had crimes matching the same MO as their guy in Honolulu.

~*~*~*~*~*~

As that month wore on, Danny grew increasingly aware of the moon’s phase. The bigger and brighter it got in the sky, the more it seemed to pull at something inside of him. He wanted to go to it, rip his skin off and run all night to try and chase that silver globe of light down.

Even indoors at night, he could feel the moon pressing down on him like a gentle hand. Often he’d find himself pacing his living room, looking at the windows where light crept around the flimsy blinds. If he was with Steve, Danny would lie beside him, soaking in his warmth and nearness; all while gazing out the window at the moon high up in the star-dappled sky.

He could push it aside and ignore it to a degree, but he knew what was coming and it had him scared witless. Sometimes, if he really focused, he could almost feel the smooth slide of thick fur just beneath his skin, making him itch and leaving him with the desire to sniff and hunt and run.

One day after a foot chase, Danny stood with his hands planted on his knees and panted like a dog while he waited for the others to catch up—he still couldn’t get over that: they had to catch up with him. The suspect was cuffed and laying on the ground a couple of feet from Danny and he watched with wary suspicion as Danny let his tongue loll slightly, not thinking and certainly not caring about the tattooed man on the ground.

But then the man said, “What the hell, yo? You think you some kind of dog or something? A K-9 cop?”

Danny snapped his head up and snarled at him, baring his weird new teeth, before he was able to stop himself. A few seconds later, Chin rounded the corner and asked if Danny was all right. He nodded and waved a hand at the guy on the ground that had gone pale under his tan.

“Grab that bozo, huh?” he said and licked his lips to clear away the flecks of saliva before anyone noticed.

Chin nodded and said, “Come on,” to the guy and dragged him up off the concrete. He didn’t pay any attention to the suspect’s exclamations about how Danny was “fucking crazy, I swear; the dude growled at me” as he led him away and Danny brought up the rear.

Behind them, the sun was setting and the nearly full moon was rising in the sky.

~*~*~*~*~*~

That month the full moon fell on a Sunday and for that, Danny was grateful. He was doubly grateful that it wasn’t a Sunday he had Grace. The way his luck usually ran, he was surprised it hadn’t fallen in the middle of a work week on a day he’d needed to pick Grace up from her evening piano lesson, something new that she insisted she needed. His poor baby seemed to be a little tone deaf, but Danny gave her big points for determination and thought if she stuck with it, she may eventually get her ears trained and be pretty good.

He spent the night before with Steve. As he had done for the past week or so, Danny laid awake beside him, looking out at the moon. Eventually the pull became too much and he rose from the bed to stand in front of the window for a better view. There was a newer sense of urgency thrumming under his skin that made him want to be closer to the silver face in the sky.

By sunrise, he was cagey and on edge as that shifting movement under his skin grew more insistent. He would’ve thought someone would notice it, the way his skin seemed to be stretched too tight and squirming. When he took a moment to actually look at himself, however, he saw nothing like what he felt. His skin was the same old skin it always was and as he scratched his arm, he wondered if maybe it was a just a feeling. Except he itched so fucking bad he could hardly stand it. His skin felt wrong, like it didn’t fit as it should.

“You okay?” Steve asked him that afternoon after having watched Danny scratch at himself on and off all day.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” Danny said and snatched his hand away from the side of his neck where he’d been busily clawing himself.

“I’ve got some hydrocortisone cream if you think you’re allergic to something,” Steve said. “Maybe you should take a Benadryl, too.”

“I said I’m fine, leave it alone,” Danny snapped at him. That was something else—he’d been irritable as hell, snapping at Steve when he hadn’t wanted to knock him down and fuck his brains out.

Frankly, Danny was going a little crazy and beneath all of that, he was scared shitless because he had no idea what would happen when the full moon rose. What if he turned on Steve and hurt him? What if it was like the movies and he went off on a killing spree, ripping his way through half the island’s population before the moon set again?

Then he thought about the killer, the fucker responsible for everything that had happened to him and he had to wonder. The guy was a murderer, a psychotic freak of a killer, but had it been mindless? Had it been the… the… Danny had to force himself to even think it: the wolf? Or had it been the man using that part of himself to really go whole hog with his little hobby?

“What the hell is your problem? You’ve been a fucking dickwad all goddamned day,” Steve finally snapped back, eyes narrowing with rising anger.

Even in the face of that, Danny almost laughed because yeah, Steve really could curse like a sailor when he let loose good and proper. It was one of the things Danny had always liked so much about him, his ability to string together profanity in new and interesting ways once he got going.

“I don’t have a problem, not at all,” Danny said as he shifted on his feet. A quick glance out the window showed it was getting dark, the sun slowly beginning to set and turning the sky creamsicle orange with its glow.

“The fuck you say,” Steve said. “You haven’t been able to say a damned thing all day without being an asshole about it.”

“Really? Is that so?” Danny said, turning back on him, skin prickle-itching along the back of his neck. “Maybe you’re just on your rag because believe me, you sound like a chick right now.”

Steve stared at him openly for a moment and then huffed out an unamused little laugh. “I don’t know what your problem is, I really don’t, but if something is bothering you then tell me. And so help me if you call me a chick again, I will shove my fist down your throat.”

By that point Steve was good and pissed and Danny could see it in every line of his body. Yet, he still tried to talk to Danny, he still made an effort and for that, Danny wanted to go to him. He wanted to wrap himself around Steve and lick his face in apology—which was perfectly fucked up in every way. He didn’t want to fight with Steve; not really, he was just so wound up and stressed out that everything had been like a carrot dangling in front of him to bite at until he let off some of the tension humming in his body. Even his nerve endings felt like they were twitching and Danny was acutely aware of time slipping away from him even though he wasn’t looking at a clock or the orange sky.

He smiled at Steve, the expression showing his long, white teeth and he saw it—Steve finally noticed that one tell-tale thing that didn’t show all that much unless the person was really looking. It was a predatory smile, cold and hungry, but not for Steve or anyone else for that matter. It only wanted out and before long, Danny would have to let it. He didn’t need to be anywhere near people when it happened though. Just in case. Just in case…

“It’s not you, babe,” Danny said and shook his head, suddenly feeling very alone and very sad. There was no one he could tell about what had happened to him; about what was still happening because no one would believe him if he did. He couldn’t even tell Steve, who he trusted more than he had anyone in a long, long time. Steve especially wouldn’t believe him.

Danny spread his hands in a placating, apologetic gesture and shook his head again as he walked over to Steve. Tapping his temple, he said, “It’s all me, you know? All me.” Then he laughed, the sound bitter and strangely grating in his throat, like it wasn’t all him.

“Then what is it? Are you and Rachel fighting again? Is something going on with Grace? What?” Steve asked. “You’ve… you’re… Danny, just tell me what the fuck is going on.”

No can do, Danny thought with another sad twist in his gut and it was then that he knew what he had to do. He hated lying to Steve and he was about to tell a whopper, but needs must and right then he needed so much it hurt.

“I’ll reveal all after I run to the store and grab us a twelve pack,” Danny said. “Can you hold onto your suspense for that long?”

Steve narrowed his eyes at him even more, but he nodded his assent. He was still pissed off and rightfully so, but he was willing to back down if it meant Danny would come clean about whatever it was that was bothering him so much he’d turned into a royal prick overnight.

“Alright then,” Danny said, feeling more antsy by the second. It was like he could hear the sunset, like he could feel it in his bones; some low vibration that demanded he go, go, go.

He reached up to hook a hand around the back of Steve’s neck and pull him down for a long, hungry kiss that made Steve’s breath hitch despite his residual anger. Danny growled into his mouth once before he made himself back away.

“I’ll be back in a few,” he lied and tried on a friendlier smile for Steve to sell his point.

“Okay,” Steve said. He was looking at Danny funny, almost like he could sense Danny was lying.

Danny turned away then and headed for the door, feeling like he wanted to run and forced himself to walk. He also felt like a rat bastard for lying to Steve so blatantly because he knew he wouldn’t be coming back tonight and come tomorrow; he’d have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Assuming he didn’t get his ass dumped for his troubles.

Danny stopped with his hand on the doorknob and said, “Hey, Steve?”

“Yeah?” Steve asked.

Looking over his shoulder at him, Danny said, “You know I love you, right?”

Steve smiled at him for that; the smile that made his eyes crinkle up at the corners and his whole face seemed to light up. “Yeah, Danny, I know,” he said.

“Good, that’s good,” Danny said and then he opened the door and walked out into the setting sun.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Two days later, a group of kids out dirt biking found Danny’s car parked three miles down an old road outside of the city limits and called it in. The only things the 5-0 team and HPD discovered when they did a search of the area were Danny’s clothes strewn in a hundred yard path that led deeper into the jungle. His left shoe was the last thing they found.

Of Danny himself, there was no trace. No hair, no skin, no blood; nothing.

Steve stood with the evidence bag holding Danny’s left shoe and felt like he was being slowly gutted with something dull and rusty. He looked out at all the lush, green undergrowth and refused to believe that someone—especially Danny—could simply disappear.