Four

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Everything in the room moved at once. Pieces of ceiling plummeted. Humans scrambled. Guns whirled.

Then came the sounds.

Crashing, snarling, spitting, howling. A shriek, a shotgun discharged. A shout and then a horrible, horrible silence.

Nothing moved. Nothing dared make noise.

The Doctor pushed his hands under him where he had fallen. He craned his neck left to survey the room. He found Jack with his back flat against the opposite wall as he crouched, his service revolver lowered by his side. His wide eyes matched what the Doctor very much expected his own to look like. The two Winchesters were against the right hand wall. Dean sagged against it as if barely clinging on to lucidity, Sam's large hand pinning his brother's chest back, keeping him to the wall. Sam was staring in horror at the centre of the beaten-up room.

The Doctor's gaze followed. His eyes took in the large, hairless creature, hissing to itself in victory. Easily seven feet tall and built like an outhouse, its huge scaly feet were planted either side of the male werewolf. The rippling mass of muscle that served as a left arm flexed, the attached clawed hand gripping a wooden staff. It plunged it down, twisting it into the heart of the prone male below. The creature wheezed repeatedly as it carved the pike backwards and forwards in its hollow directly through the male's breastbone.

"Think that's funny, do you?" the Doctor accused with a vehemence of ages.

The creature straightened its spiky back and lashed a tail against the wooden floorboards in surprise. Its head, a flat, almost saurian excuse for a humanoid processing plant, turned and the deep purple eyes fixed on the Gallifreyan.

"Doctor," Jack said quickly. "That is not a Gro-at."

"Yes, thank you Jack," he bit out. His face was a seething sea of age-old fury and untold vengeance, his eyes pinning themselves to the monstrous faint pink animal currently enjoying the movement of the wooden staff in the werewolf's internal organs. "Well? What now?" the Doctor spat.

The animal ripped the pike upward, freeing it of the male corpse with a slurp that made even Sam shiver. The youngest Winchester reached for his jacket pocket as the creature kept its eyes on the Doctor. It turned and grabbed the shoulder of the insensate female, dragging her into its reach.

"No!" the Doctor ordered.

But the powerhouse of ruthless hunting instinct cared little for the smaller animal trying to interrupt it. It simply lifted the unconscious werewolf girl and opened its jaws.

"No! I'm warning you!"

The creature pulled her up. The next instant Sam and Jack jumped in revulsion as they stared, unable to look away; the monster simply hammered its rows of teeth into the girl's neck.

It snapped. It split open. Blood spurted for barely a second. The animal neither saw nor cared. Instead it jerked its head back to sever hers from her body. It fell and lay still. The creature slung the rest of the corpse to the floor before slamming the pike into her chest, twisting it in satisfaction.

Jack scrambled to his feet, hurrying to the Doctor and grabbing his arm. He manhandled him up and then looked at the two Winchesters. "Sam! Your brother ok?" he hissed.

"He took one to the head," Sam called from across the room. "We got to get out of here!"

"No argument there," Jack agreed. He watched the creature enjoying the squishing, carving sounds as it twisted the wooden pike still. It yanked it free and raised the silver tip to watch it drip. "Ok, he's done with the cocktail stick food. Get your shotgun, Sam!" Jack cried.

But Sam's hand came out of his jacket to reveal a small round item, suspiciously like a water-bomb.

"You get the Doctor. I've got Dean," he warned.

The creature, happy to have two piles of werewolf parts on the floorboards, now turned its attention to the four people of decidedly more human appearance. It sent its purple eyes over the two crouched and sat against the wall. Then something made it turn its scaly head to appraise the two men looking back at it, one of them pulling a small silver item from his jacket and clicking it on.

A weird blue light began to pulse and a strange noise caught the creature's attention. It turned and ripped the pike free, taking a step toward the man in the brown suit and his glowing blue tube.

"I don't think he likes sonic screwdrivers," Jack hissed from the side of his mouth.

The creature leaned back for a whole second. The next moment it leapt forward with an angry growl.

Jack hauled the Doctor to one side. The creature slammed into the wall, the boards and wainscoting splintering in testament to its weight. It squirmed and turned.

Sam's arm jerked up and something sailed through the air. "Don't look up! Run!" he bellowed.

The item squished against the monster's slab of muscled chest. It burst in a terrific flash of light, bathing the entire room in blinding, agonising, silent lightning. Jack pushed the Doctor ahead of him and they scrambled to the doorjamb. Sam yanked and hauled, grabbing his brother by the arm and forcing him to put his feet in front of him, more or less in the right order.

As Dean figured out which way was up and realised he had better go with the autopilot function to keep going away from the source of the Bad Noises, he realised something else.

They weren't fighting. They were running.

He was not happy about this. A part of him considered planting his feet in the floor, jerking his brother to a stop, and taking a stand. But then, as the four survivors stumbled out and along passageways that smelt of mould, damp and dead rats, he surmised that, upset as he was at what he was doing, would be a lot more upset should the crashing sound behind them catch up.

He ran.

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They burst out onto the street, wooden doors flapping and slamming behind them. Jack was first, whipping his head left and right, his service revolver ready. Uncharacteristically, the New York street was quiet; a few people jumped back and eyed the two men that followed Jack: one taller man, supporting the arm of the other over his shoulder as he shuffled them out as fast as he could. The last man, in a brown suit that would have been smart save his battered Converse, followed - except he was backing up, his stern frown still aimed at the doors behind them.

Jack hastily holstered his handgun, turning to the Doctor, ignoring the two Winchesters as Sam leaned his brother against a long, sleek car waiting at the kerb.

"Doctor - what was that thing?" Jack urged. "And why was it killing werewolves?"

"I don't know," the Gallifreyan replied, looking troubled. He pushed past Jack and went directly to Dean, flicking Sam's hands away and lifting one of the sluggish eyelids himself. "Dean?" he asked clearly.

"Get off me, man," Dean said irritably.

"What happened to your head?"

"I fell off a swing, what do you think?" he snapped.

"Did it scratch you?" the Doctor demanded. "Bite you? Break anything? Make any attempt to kill you?"

"What? I don't know," Dean protested, looking much more awake. "I think I got the back of his hand in my face. Next thing I know, I've dropped my shotgun and Sam's dragging me clear."

"Hmm," the Doctor managed, standing back. His hands slid into his pockets. "Well I don't fancy braving that building again, not while it's wandering around, probably looking for us." He twisted to look at the doors behind him. "Which makes things rather difficult. I need the TARDIS."

"You want to see what your screwdriver made of that thing?" Jack hazarded.

"Exactly. I need something I can turn into a DNA analyser with a posineutron analysing GUI," he mused, biting his lower lip in thought.

"Uh.. I have a laptop. Does that help?" Sam offered.

The Doctor shined a blistering grin on him. "Monumentally so," he nodded. "Where is it?"

Sam chucked a thumb over his shoulder at the black car. "In the trunk," he said simply.

"We need to be somewhere else while we do this," Jack said. "It's not exactly private round here."

"Good point." The Doctor turned to the two Americans. "Well then. You're obviously based around here. Got room for two more at yours? As long as you don't mind working together on this?"

Sam let out a small smile. "Looks like we could do with some information."

"Right then," the Doctor cried happily, clapping his hands together and rubbing. "Allons-y. Last one there's making the tea," he declared, as Sam unlocked the passenger door and Dean slid in.

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Dean sat on the wooden chair under the window, his forehead and elbow on the table and an ice-pack squeezed against the back of his head. Jack leant against the wall, his arms folded, as he watched Sam boot up his laptop and try to explain how much of it he needed operative when the Doctor was done cannibalising the software to bend to his masterplan.

"Sam, trust me, I'll give it back as good as - er - as seen," the Doctor soothed, elbowing him smoothly to one side to pick up the laptop and place it on the table on the opposite side to Dean. The eldest Winchester lifted his head, keeping the ice-pack in place and his elbow on the table.

"What are you doing, anyway?" he grumbled.

The Doctor pulled the long silver screwdriver from his pocket and set it on the table. Dean immediately put his hand out for it but the Gallifreyan turned an innocent if innocuous look on him. Dean's hand shrank back again.

Jack grinned and crossed the cheap motel room to the kettle and assortment of refreshments. "Bad news, Doctor," he said with a smile. "There's no tea."

"No tea?" the man gasped in horror, turning to look at him, perhaps in the hope that Jack was mistaken. "Well, what is there?"

"We have two different kinds of coffee," Jack advised, already picking up the coffee jug from the hotplate in the machine and going into the bathroom.

"Ah well. Needs must, I suppose," the Doctor sighed unhappily. He turned back to the laptop, picking up his screwdriver and flicking it on. A soft blue light and a fuzzy, almost mesmerising buzzing sound had the two Winchesters enthralled.

"What is that?" Sam dared.

"Oh, nothing really. Just a screwdriver. Well, a multi-functional screwdriver. Well, a sonic multi-functional screwdriver. Well, when I say-"

"What does it do?" Dean asked wearily.

"This," the Doctor said happily. He turned it in the direction of the laptop, waving it over the screen and then the side, over the slot for the CD drive. The machine whirred and made strange beeping sounds, before the entire monitor blinked off. It popped straight back on with a bright blue default screen, complete with error message.

Sam rushed up by his side, fighting to see around his shoulder. "What are you-"

"Just hold on, Sam," the Doctor protested, and Sam stood back. The Doctor kept the screwdriver pointed at the laptop and suddenly the Blue Screen Of Death was replaced with a dazzling display of strings and numbers, patterns and lights.

"Trippy," Dean observed. "Can you make it play Dancing Queen, too?"

"If you like," the Doctor said, his entire demeanour rather conspiratorial.

"Don't make my head worse," Dean warned, making the Doctor smile back at the laptop.

"What's it doing?" Sam asked, hearing Jack setting up coffee filters and jugs in the machine behind them.

"It's searching a database of known DNA chains for something resembling the sample I recorded from the xenoform in the basement," the Doctor said, sounding pre-occupied, as he watched the screen intently. He began to lean toward it in thought. "All we need is a species name or some kind of information on it. Hopefully we can use that to find out its habits or at least reasoning behind why it's here and why it's hunting werewolves."

"You're Googling the creature? To see if there's any lore?" Dean pressed. He looked at Sam quickly, making his brother turn and raise innocent eyebrows at him. "Sam, he's like you," Dean asserted. "On crack."

Sam's eyebrows rammed down and frowned for him, before he turned back to watch the laptop. "Anything?" he asked hopefully.

"Give it a minute. It's searching for it system by system."

"You mean filing system?" Sam wondered.

"He means solar system, by galaxy," Jack put in helpfully. Sam turned and looked at him in surprise. "Oh yeah, that thing's not from round here. I mean, I don't know what it is, but it definitely looked more Bahdraheyan than native to this planet."

Sam blinked, looked round at his brother, and shrugged. Dean just waved a finger in a circle by his left temple, making little 'whoo-whoo' whistling noises.

Jack chuckled as he found four paper cups from on top of the small fridge. "Yeah yeah, have your laugh. Did it look human to you?"

"Oh!" the Doctor cried, as if he'd been shot. Everyone jumped in fright. "Found you! Ha-haa!" he crowed, making Dean squeeze his eyes shut in auditory pain. "Got it!"

"Whatever it is," the eldest Winchester said, "I'm sure there's a good doctor somewhere that can cure it with the right medication and-"

"Trelania VI!" the Doctor interrupted, putting his hands, complete with screwdriver, in his hair in triumph. "A nintriannen bilapted trelanian devil!" He spun before anyone had a chance to remark on his gabbled tirade, grabbing Sam's upper arms. "Sam! Your laptop has saved the day!"

"And my ears," Dean muttered, massaging the ice-pack against his hair.

"So much for Windows 7 being crap," Sam grinned, well pleased.

"Well it did the best it could, not being a Mac," the Doctor rattled off, making Sam's smile drop like a lead balloon. The Doctor hauled him out of the way and went straight to Jack. "We need to trap it and send it home."

"Woah woah woah," Dean said loudly, dragging everyone's attention back to him. "Trap it and send it home? What for? To go hunt with its little devil friends? Let's just kill the friggin' thing."

The Doctor turned, his face losing its cheer. "We don't have to kill it, we can send it home," he said clearly.

"We don't have to send it home, we can kill it," Dean argued. "Look, I don't know how you do things wherever it is you escaped from, Doctor Strange, but round here things called devils that tear up other creatures? They get taken out, and good riddance."

"That's all you humans know how to do, isn't it?" the Doctor shot back. "Kill it, destroy it, set your morals back a few hundred years. Did it ever occur to you that that thing shouldn't be here? That it's just in the wrong place? They don't even have werewolves where it comes from! It thinks it's hunting foxes!"

Dean glared at him, with seventy years of green rage in his eyes. "So what are you gonna do, huh? Huh? Set up a Scooby trap and hope it falls in? Then what? Kriss Angel its ass to the local zoo?"

Jack suppressed a chuckle. "I like him," he nodded to himself.

"No," the Doctor snapped. "We trap it and send it home. When it gets back, it'll have its own court to judge it."

"Wait, what? Hold on here," Sam said, his hands up in a placating gesture completely lost on his brother. "You're saying you're sending it home - to be judged?"

"They're only allowed to just hunt whatever they want," the Doctor said. "Nintriannen bilapted trelanian devils of Trelania VI have a caste system. That was a nintriannen devil - they only hunt foxes."

"And people that stand there watching him," Dean groused. "I saw the way he wasn't exactly keeping to open fox season."

"Well he didn't kill you. And it doesn't change the fact that he's a rogue, breaking his own laws," the Doctor said patiently.

"So you want to take a photo of him killing something that's not a fox and take him to the police station? What then, huh? They put him in prison for mistaking a wolf for a fox?" Dean scoffed.

"Do we want to know what a werefox looks like?" Sam dared, his face a scrunched up ball of worry.

"Not a werefox, just a fox," the Doctor said, eyeing Sam with a winning smile. "But I kind of like that. Anyway, no, uhm, basically, we take it home, let its own people sort it out."

"What happens when its 'people' find its done wrong?" Sam asked quietly.

The Gallifreyan turned and looked at him. "I… don't know," he havered. "Something or other."

"Well what?" Sam pressed. "A slap on the wrist? A driving ban?"

Jack came forward slowly. "What, Doctor?" he asked knowingly.

"Well," he said lightly, pulling at his ear as he thought for a long second. "I can't really be-"

"They'll kill it," Dean said firmly. "Won't they?"

"Not 'kill', exactly," the Doctor began.

Dean stood up slowly, dropping the ice-pack to the table. "Whatever you want to call it, they'll put him down for being a rabid hunter who couldn't stick to just one white meat. So whether we kill him here or they kill him there - wherever 'there' really is - it makes no difference. And at least here he'll die quick and easy." He folded his arms resolutely, eyeing the Doctor. "So you tell me, Doctor. Which is better? Which is more humane?"

The Gallifreyan eyed the three humans in turn, feeling the monumental pressure of the sagging optimism of both of Sam's heart-wrenching eyebrows. He took a deep breath.

"We're not killing it," he stated clearly.

"Then what do we do to stop it eating werewolves? Which - by the way - is kind of what me and Sam do for a living," Dean shot back.

"Just listen," the Doctor said slowly, looking back at Dean. "This is what we do."

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Thanks for waiting for this update! Sorry it took so long. Next chapter up Sunday 10th Oct (2010), all being well. :)