Notes:I blame online translators for all my wesen names. It's addictive.

Warnings:Language, violence, illness, Nick-whump, ummm….creepy flannel-loving volunteer hospital staff. Mentions of domestic violence and off screen deaths as related to past crimes.

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It was the same hospital Nick had been in last time with the same flannel-loving woman at the desk. This time she had pink hair tips and cherry red fingernails and when she saw him her eyes lit up in a way that made him happy he already had the room number from Juliette.

There was a cop in uniform standing in the hall and another by the door to Nick's room. Both were wesen, which he didn't think was coincidence. Both woged as soon as they got a whiff of him and Monroe was in no mood to put up with that but he sucked it up and brought out his manners instead of his claws (his sponsor would have been so proud). They weren't going to let him past but Nick's partner came out of the elevator just as he was digging out his phone to have Juliette to come vouch for him.

"Did Juliette call you?" Hank asked, leading the way down the hall. He still had his coat and scarf on and a duffle bag in one hand.

"She said someone broke in." Monroe looked through the window. The blinds were half open and he could see Nick's head above the blankets and Juliette sitting beside the bed. "Is Nick alright?" There was no team of doctor's hovering over the bed which he took as a good sign.

"I just got here myself. Last I heard the doctors were running more tests."

Juliette spotted them through the window and got up. A wave of heat followed her out of the room, momentarily overwhelming the coolness of the hallway. She was wearing dress slacks, fuzzy puppy slippers, and what had to be one of Nick's too-big-in-the-shoulders P.P.D. sweat-shirts. "Did you catch her?" She was flushed and sweating, hair sticking to her face, and she looked like she really needed a hug.

If she'd been blutbad Monroe wouldn't have hesitated. But she wasn't, she was human and fragile and he was desperately glad Hank stepped in to put his free arm around her shoulders and pull her against his chest. "Not yet," Hank said. "Captain has every cop in the city looking for her. We'll get her."

"I know you will." She nodded her head against his shoulder. "Monroe," She detached from Hank only to wrap both arms around him. "Thank you for coming."

"Oh, okay, we're hugging," he said awkwardly. It had been so long since he'd done this he has no idea where to put his hands. A discreet sniff brought him exhaustion, sweat, last night's lasagna, faded minty toothpaste, Hank and Nick most strongly, a couple other people who had touched her, a whiff of cold that was completely out of place with the heat pouring off her, but no pain and no blood-smell. Relieved, he patted her back gently. "You're okay."

Pulling back, Juliette pushed the hair off her face. "I'm fine. Nick shot her before she touched me." She glanced back at the window. "I think…I think she was a wesen. She did something to Nick. The doctor's don't know what. I thought you might."

Monroe shot a look at Hank. He had no idea how much Nick had told him, but there was no surprise on the other man's face. "You saw her?"

"I saw something."

"Describe her," Hank prompted.

"Small." She held a hand up about her shoulder height. "White hair. Pale skin. Really sharp teeth." She took a deep breath. "She had her hand on Nick's arm and it was like…you know that saying the lights are on but no one is home? That's what his eyes looked like." She pressed a hand to her mouth for a moment then curled her fingers into a fist against her chin.

"She just touched him. Nothing else."

"Not that I saw. And we were only separated for maybe thirty seconds."

"I need to—" Smell him. He gestured towards the room, unwilling to say it out loud. In the hallway. In front of people.

"You'll want to take off your coats," Juliette warned. "They're trying to keep him warm."

"Warm?" Hank asked as she opened the door.

Warm was a colossal understatement The Sahara was a warm; this was like leaning over an open oven door after cooking a pizza.

Nick was cold. He smelled like cold. Not like soft, golden, winter mornings or crisp, clean snow, but like stale, rotting ice at the dead middle of the season when winter stretched on and on and warm summer days were so far away they seemed a dream. The creature stink was on him too but it was faint and hard to find among the hospital smells.

Juliette took the duffle from Hank and disappeared into the bathroom leaving the Detective to stare at him while he sniffed and snuffled and generally relived Nick's entire evening through his nose. She came out in a tank top and track shorts, hair pulled back. She looked cooler already and Monroe's heavy flannel was envious. "Thanks, Hank. I wanted to ride in the ambulance so I had, like, a minute to get dressed," she explained to Monroe.

"No problem," Hank said. "Just don't tell Nick I had to rifle through your unmentionables drawer. I'll never hear the end of it."

"You know," Monroe mused, "they say that even unconscious, a person can still hear everything that happens around them."

"You're totally making that up," Hank accused.

Monroe pretended deep absorption in the monitors around Nick's bed.

Juliette took the chair on the other side of the bed, leaning forward to rub a hand over Nick's shoulder through the blankets. "They're treating him for hypothermia. They wouldn't believe me that he hadn't been anywhere cold." She took a deep, shuddering breath. "We just got out of bed and went downstairs. He didn't even go outside. She just…put her hand on his arm."

Monroe dug under the heated blankets until he located an arm. It was sweltering under there but the chill of Nick's skin was giving him goose bumps. The handprint was white, like frost had settled on his skin, and blue as bruises. The creature smell was stronger there and so was the cold.

He really wished Nick would wake up. A better description than really sharp teeth would be helpful.

"Can you help him?" She was worrying a thumbnail between her teeth, watching with an expression so expectant and hopeful Monroe's stomach twisted hard. It hadn't been too long ago Nick had looked at him with that same quietly desperate expression. Apparently he couldn't refuse either of them.

"I'll make a couple calls. I'm not promising anything, but I'll see what I can find out."

By five o'clock he was running low on cell phone minutes and patience. He had to repeatedly remind himself that he should be polite to the people he was waking up in the dark of the morning. It wasn't their fault he didn't have specifics. "Thanks, man. Let me know if you come up with anything else." He slapped the phone down with a loud snap then winced and looked over at Juliette curled up asleep in the chair on the other side of the bed.

Seventeen species of wesen fit the description she had given. Nick's symptoms narrowed it down to five. Really it was amazing how many wesen could hypnotize and send their victims into a slumber as deep and cold as death, and if he heard that phrase one more time he was going to burn every damn fairy tale book with a sleeping princess in it.

Ha, sleeping princess. He was soooo remembering that for later when Nick was…well, awake to appreciate it the joke.

Five possibilities and five remedies for the unnatural slumber they induced. Unfortunately the cures weren't something they could just experiment with and hope they worked without some serious side effects. Like death.

Rubbing his hands over his face he scrubbed his eyes and looked at Nick. They had switched him from nasal cannula to oxygen mask an hour ago. There was talk of bringing in a machine that would remove, warm, and recirculate the blood from another hospital.

"This would be so much easier if you would just wake up," he said softly.

Nick made a sound in the back of his throat, shifting a little. Being talked too made him restless, but he hadn't yet come all the way awake. He twitched his head into the pillow, worry lines forming on his forehead.

Monroe sighed and smoothed them away absently. "Why do I get the feeling you've never done anything the easy way?" There was a lot more he wanted to say about expectations and how Nick needed to explain to his fiancé that Monroe wasn't a good guy and she shouldn't trust him with important things like Nick's life. He was terrified he was going to fail and that by failing he was going to prove his own father's expectations right.

The temperature on the display beeped and dropped to 94.6.

Enough of this. He couldn't sit here and wait for something to happen. Writing a quick note he slipped it onto the table next to Juliette and sought out the blessed coolness of the hallway. He'd stripped down as much as he could but the room was a sauna and sometime in the last hour he'd seriously begun to consider begging a pair of scissors off the desk nurse and making cut-offs out of his favorite jeans.

He ran into Hank downstairs, looking exhausted and carrying a travel-tray of coffee cups and a white paper bag. "Anything?" Monroe asked hopefully.

Hank shook his head. "If she was as badly injured as Juliette thought she was could be she might have crawled off and died somewhere."

"Ha. Unlikely." Monroe sniffed in the direction of the coffee and was rewarded with a cup and Hank's chuckle at his grabby hands. "This isn't half bad," he said with some surprise when he was able to stop drinking for more than a breath.

Hank smirked. "Glad you like it. Where are you headed?"

Irritation boiled back up. "I'm going to go track down the…whatever it was and squeeze her head until she tells us how to cure Nick," Monroe growled.

"Can you do that?"

"I don't know." He shrugged and sipped his coffee. "But trying is better than sitting here."

"Sounds like a plan. Let me get someone to take this up and I'll come with you." He grabbed one of the uniforms walking by. "You can tell me how you plan to accomplish that on the way. I'm driving."

"I have my own car," Monroe protested as they walked through the automatic doors. He'd watched the sun come up through the window in Nick's room; it shouldn't have been a surprise to walk into daylight, but it was. And bright. Really, really bright.

"Yeah, but I have a siren and a cool flashy light."

Monroe had to admit he had a point there. "Can I run the siren?"

There was a police car down the block from Nick's house; they passed it on the way by. Hank paused for a quick word before they parked and headed up the sidewalk. The front door was closed but swung opened when Hank pushed on it. The knob had been ripped almost completely out of the door.

"Captain's sending over the crime scene cleanup crew this afternoon to get the blood out," Hank told him, giving the knob a rattle. It fell off the door. "And there's a locksmith coming later."

Monroe added really fucking strong to his mental list of the attacker's characteristics.

Hank picked up the knob, laying it on the little three sided table in the corner by the door. "Apparently she came in through this door and went straight for the living room. Juliette said that Nick heard the noise downstairs."

Monroe nodded. He'd heard the story from Juliette. Nick had made her wait on the stairs while he went in to investigate and promptly gotten snared. Juliette had seen him drop his gun and gone in after him, then gone after the wesen with her flashlight—which was so, so stupid but had, Monroe reluctantly agreed, probably saved Nick's life.

"What exactly are we doing here?" Hank asked.

Monroe paused in hall. "What has Nick told you about…?" he waved a hand around, searching for a good word.

"You mean the Grimm thing?"

"I guess that answers my question right there."

Hank shut the door behind them, shoving hard to get it to stay closed. "He told me you weren't entirely human and that he could see the differences but I can't."

Monroe shot him a squinty-eyed look. It was baffling how blasé he was being. "And that doesn't bother you."

Hank chuckled dryly. "Play twenty questions with Nick sometime." He shrugged and flipped on a light switch for the hall. "He's always seen more than the rest of us. I got used to that years ago."

"Still," Monroe insisted. "Most people are pretty freaked when they find out the monster under the bed are real." The scent was stronger in here. She'd walked around, taken her time, touched things.

"My fourth case when I became a detective," Hank began thoughtfully, feeling around the inside of the wall for another light switch, "was a missing fifteen year old girl. This was back when I was in property crimes but it was all hands on deck for a missing kid. It was a nice neighborhood, nice people. The kind of place that still shuts down the street and has block parties on the Fourth of July."

Monroe eyed him warily. "This doesn't sound like it's going to have a happy ending." On the floor there was a long-handled, metal flashlight next to evidence marker #13 and a few drops of blood. Huh, he thought they only did that sort of thing on TV shows.

"We found her body. Shallow grave in the woods behind the house. Ex-boyfriend eventually confessed. She broke up with him. He decided if he couldn't have her no one else would either. Same old story."

"That's really…depressing."

"Oh, that's not even the worst thing I've seen," Hank said. "A sixteen year old kid killing his girlfriend because he was a selfish little shit. Not even in the top ten. Maybe he was creature, maybe he wasn't." He shrugged. "Doesn't matter to the dead girl one way or the other. Hair color and height aren't what make a person evil. I can't imagine fur and claws do either."

Monroe just stared at him for a second. "Wow, that's, um, really enlightened and yet incredibly disheartening at the same time."

Hank laughed. "Welcome to my life. I won't say finding out about wesen was not just about the most unsettling thing I've ever dealt with—and I have four ex-wives so that's saying something—but it's also not the weirdest thing I've heard either. Everyone has a deep dark secret they hide away from the world, at least yours isn't some kinky sex thing."

Monroe pulled his jaw up from where it had dropped with a click. What could he say to that?

Hank grinned at his flummoxed expression and reminded him, "You never explained why we're here."

Turning his attention back to the room, he said, "I need a better scent than what I got off Nick to track with. Too many people and hospital smells interfering." He poked around a bit more. The air in here was heavy with blood. There was a spatter of it across the floor, the glass table, a larger trail heading for the door. Cordite, because with the wesen distracted by Juliette whacking her with the flashlight, Nick had been able to get to his gun and get off a shot. Sweat. Fear. A chalky smell that he figured must be the fingerprint powder that was on every flat surface. A dozen cops and techs and all their attendant perfumes, soaps, shampoos, and detergents.

That cold scent was everywhere. On drawers, the bookcase, the storage baskets tucked into the nook along the wall. "She wasn't here to kill Nick. Or at least not just to kill Nick. She was looking for something."

"What?"

"I don't know." Monroe shook his head, frustrated with the crisscrossing scents. He hadn't done this for a long time. "She was all over the room." He sneezed violently. His sinuses were going to be unhappy tomorrow.

Hank poked through the open drawers on the sideboard with the air of a man not really expecting to find anything useful. "That explains why she didn't go straight upstairs."

"I've got her scent now." Monroe sneezed again. "Let's see where it leads."

If this didn't pan out he was going to that house on Lovejoy and shake someone until they came up with a good explanation as to why they were stalking his Grimm. Might be related, might now. He'd planned to wander by there at some point in the next week or so anyway, give them a little wrath of blutbad action; that plan might get advanced to right now.

There was no convenient line of blood drops to follow but the scent hung in the air, claret red and thick and easy to follow as a trail of flashing neon arrows. Across the yard, over the neighbor's fence, down the street. He walked fast, shifting through the myriad of smells. Cat. Cold scent mixed with the heat of wesen blood. Paper boy, hours ago. Vehicle with a failing catalytic converter, stinky. Jogger. Mmmm…she smelled good. Wet leaves. Ewww—garbage truck. That was just unpleasant.

"You okay?" Hank asked.

"Yeah." He coughed a couple times. "Geh. That's not going away anytime soon." Eucalyptus and goldenseal for him tonight or he wouldn't be able to breathe through his nose tomorrow. "She went in there."

Hank looked at the patch of forested park across the street and sighed. "Figures." He loosened his gun in its holster. "Let's go."

It wasn't a large park but the tightly packed trees and thick swathes of moss made it seem bigger. The light and street noises faded once they were past the first row, senses overwhelmed in winter-chilled earth and evergreen and wet.

Hank kept trying to move in front of him, which Monroe found kind of charming until the third time they tripped over each other. Must be a cop thing; he was just as bad as Nick. Blutbaden could take care of themselves in the woods, thank you very much.

"I see what Nick means now," Hank muttered, catching a branch for balance the third time they ran into each other.

"What? What is that supposed to mean?"

Hank gave him a bland smile. "Nothing."

Monroe squinted at him suspiciously but let it go. For now.

"There's not much blood," Hank commented after Monroe found a couple of splotches of it on a rocky outcropping. He toed at a bit of bloody cloth with his boot.

"Wesen heal fast. Some more than others." He poked around; found a few long white hairs caught in the rock. "She rested here for several hours."

"How long ago did she leave?"

"Not long. Ten minutes. Maybe less."

Hank looked around the clearing again. "Doesn't this strike you as weird? If she's mobile, why is she still here? She has to know she broke into a cop's house and that everyone with a badge is going to be looking for her."

"I did sort of expect the trail to go straight to her getaway car," Monroe admitted.

Hank nodded agreement. "Which way?"

They came out the other side of the park and headed across the street. By now it was past six o'clock, traffic was starting to pick up.

"Son of a—this is the back of Nick's block," Hank exclaimed. "She's circling back to the house."

"That's exactly where she's headed," Monroe said and pointed out a flash of white ducking into the bushes down a partially overgrown alley.

"Whatever it is she's after must be damned important." Hank pulled out his cell phone. "I'm calling in help."

"Hey, hey, back up a minute." Monroe tried to be tactful. "I know you guys like to bring the whole department along for the ride, but before you go calling in the cavalry, we need to be careful here. Someone gets trigger happy and we lose any chance to help Nick."

Hank gave him a look but asked quite mildly, "What do you suggest?"

"First we need to cover up as much as possible," Monroe told him. "She infected Nick through touch so, yeah, we should avoid that. Second, stealth over shock and awe." He watched the pale shape disappear behind a fence. "Third, don't look in her eyes. Juliette said they were staring at each other so it's a good bet that's how she hypnotizes or whatever." He looked back in time to see Hank raise an eyebrow at him.

"Anything else?" Hank asked sardonically.

Monroe had never met anyone who did sardonic as well as Hank. "No, no I think that's about it."

"You want to hear my plan now?"

There was a plan! "You didn't say anything about a plan."

"You didn't exactly give me a chance."

"Oh," Monroe said awkwardly. "Sorry. Nick usually just sort of," he flailed a hand, "wings it."

Hank grinned. "I hear you there, man. How about we give this a try instead?"

TBC

Thanks to everyone who waited around and to those who took the time to review. You have no idea how much it means to us writers to know that your story moved someone to take a few seconds to type something even if it's just one or two words.