Lanie stood in the hospital room doorway, watching her friend and his wife with a gnawing sense of frustration in the pit of her stomach. She hated feeling so helpless. She knew she could keep him in reasonable physical condition, but as to why he wasn't waking up...she was at a loss. And it was driving her crazy.

Jenny looked over to the door, feeling more than seeing the other presence in the room. "Oh," she said, "hey Lanie."

Lanie walked into the room, closing the door behind her, and pulled up a chair on the other side of her friend's bed. "Hey girl," she drawled with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes, "how're you holding up?"

"Okay," Jenny replied with a small, weary sigh. "The uncertainty is probably the worst part."

"I can respect that," Lanie agreed. "I wish I had more I could tell you."

A groan from the man in the bed stopped all other conversation in the room. "Kevin?" asked Jenny, unable to keep the relief out of her voice. "Honey?"

Ryan turned toward the gentle voice of his wife. "Hey..." he cooed, smiling. It was then that he realized she wasn't in bed with him, but that she was in a chair and there was a plastic barrier between them. "We're in the hospital?" he asked sleepily.

Jenny wiped a couple of relieved tears from her cheeks with one hand while fiercely squeezing her husband's hand with the other. "Yeah, baby. You didn't wake up this time."

Memories flooded back into Ryan's mind. "I was checking out a lead with Agent Shaw...and that's the last thing I remember before..."

"Kevin?"

Ryan turned to see Lanie standing by the other side of his bed. "Hey, Lane..."

Lanie tried to keep her voice as level and calm as possible. "I'm just going to give you a once-over, make sure everything's ok..."

Ryan's eyes widened as his mind started to connect the dots. "Lanie?" he asked, the worry now clear in his own voice, "Lanie, how long was I out this time?"

Jenny answered her husband's question. "Sweetheart...it was probably close to 15 hours."

"God..." Ryan exclaimed in a whisper. He leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to understand what had happened.

Lanie disengaged from her healing trance quickly, which Ryan found reassuring. "Well, the good news is that physically, you're okay...at least so far."

"But my body's never been the problem," Ryan countered. "And we both know that."

Lanie nodded. "Do you remember what happened when you were in Tyson's head?"

"Not much," Ryan replied, disappointed in his own memory. "All I remember was that I think I was trying to talk Tyson out of killing that woman."

"Want me to call Javi?" asked Lanie. When Ryan nodded, Lanie reached into the connection she shared only with her fiancé. Baby?

One of the benefits of having a federal task force working your case was that you had a lot more people to work on the various monotonous aspects of investigating a murder. However...the sheer number of investigations going on at the same time meant that there was always plenty of busywork to go around.

Which is how Castle, Beckett and Esposito found themselves settled in at Castle and Beckett's adjoining desks, slogging through the financials of both Jerry Tyson and David Terkowich. Esposito was growing restless. "Why are we doing this again?"

Beckett never looked up from the papers she was examining. "We need to figure out how Tyson is picking his victims..."

"But Tyson never seems to go back to the same hunting ground twice," Esposito grumbled, "so I have no idea how this..." The detective's voice trailed off as the voice of his beloved echoed through his mind. Yeah, chica?

Ryan's awake, she told him through their mind-link, he's asking for you to come down and help him remember what happened.

On my way, he replied. Esposito passed on the news to his other friends. "Ryan's awake."

Castle's face brightened immediately. "Is he ok?"

Esposito nodded. "He needs me to go to the hospital and help him remember what he saw. Is it ok if I...?"

Beckett nodded. "We'll meet you there as soon as we can get away."

Castle looked around, scanning the area to see if anyone was paying attention to them. Confident that no one was paying attention to them, he waved his hand, causing Esposito to disappear in the blink of an eye.

Beckett was furious. "Castle, are you out of your *mind*?!" she hissed through clenched teeth. "What if somebody saw you do that?!"

"Nobody saw me!" Castle countered in a whisper. "And besides, we all agreed that we need to know what the hell happened in there, right? So I figured the sooner we know, the better."

Beckett scanned the room. No one was staring at them in shock, and no one seemed to be talking about them in any way that felt out of the ordinary. Confident that they had just dodged a bullet, she relaxed...but only a little. "Okay, well, let's figure out an excuse to get out of here so we can go see Ryan at the hospital. And Castle?"

"Yes?"

"Don't *ever* do that again."

Jordan Shaw tried to melt into the wall of the break room, forcing her breathing to deepen and relax and her heart rate to descend to something approaching normal. There's no way I saw what I think I just saw, is there? She peeked through the doorway, making sure that her targets had no idea what she was doing. Sure enough, Castle and Beckett were far too embroiled in some sort of whispered fight across their desks to be paying any attention to her. And the chair next to Castle's desk, where detective Esposito had been sitting less than a split second earlier, was empty.

It was impossible. Had to be. If Detective Esposito had moved *anywhere*, there was no way he could have left the large open bullpen so quickly without her seeing him. But he was *gone*. His coat was still hanging on the back of his chair, but he was no longer anywhere on the floor. It was as if he had just disappeared into thin air.

But then where did Detective Esposito go? And how did he get there?

Esposito fell on his behind in the private hospital room, startled at being blinked out of his environment without notice and into a different room where there was no chair waiting for him. His first memory in the hospital room was of his partner, his partner's wife and his fiancée.

Laughing at him.

"Ha, ha." Esposito rolled his eyes, trying to ignore his friends as he rubbed his bruised backside and even more bruised ego. "Very funny. It's not like I *knew* Castle was going to send me here on the express bus."

Lanie crossed the room, helping her fiancé up from his spot on the floor. "Sorry baby," she soothed, trying harder than ever to suppress a giggle even as she rubbed his tailbone to heal him of any physical discomfort. "But it was kind of funny just to see you dumped on the floor like that."

"Yeah, well, not to me," he grumbled as he crossed the room with Lanie to get to his partner's side. His face softened almost immediately at the sight of his friend awake and smiling...even if the smile probably was at his expense. He held out a hand to greet his partner and do the job he had come there to do. "How ya doin', bro?"

Ryan waited for his partner's lightly twitchy eye movements to subside before answering. "Physically, I'm fine...according to Lanie. Otherwise...you tell me, man."

Esposito reviewed his partner's subconscious memory of the brutal crime scene. Once he got to the end of the memory, he cuffed his partner in the back of the head...surprising and annoying the man in the bed. "Don't ever do that again."

Ryan frowned at Esposito in confusion. "Do what?"

"I'll show you," replied Esposito, holding out his hand for his partner to grab onto. Ryan grabbed wrists with his partner, linking into his mind as Esposito replayed the memory.

Jenny watched the exchange between her husband and his partner with a mix of curiosity and concern. "Honey?" she asked her husband. "What happened back there?"

"I was trying to talk Tyson out of killing that woman, like I told you earlier," Ryan replied. "What I didn't remember was that every time I tried to talk to Tyson, it drained a ton of energy. That's...uh...that's why it took so long for me to wake up," he added, embarrassed. "After I got kicked out of Tyson's mind I didn't have enough energy left to get back into my own."

Jenny's eyes widened in shock. "So then why did you do it?"

"If it could give the next woman a chance to get away from Tyson alive?" Ryan countered.

Jenny sighed, knowing what her husband's answer to that question would be. That was exactly why he did what he did...and why he would do it again in a heartbeat. She squeezed her husband's hand, a gesture she hoped would reassure him that she understood.

Esposito's eyes brightened as he came up with an alternative idea. "What if we tried something else?"

Ryan caught the glint in his partner's eye. "What are you thinking?"

"You always seem to jump into Tyson's mind *before* his victim gets home. What if you can send us a message with the address where you are right at the start?"

Ryan caught on to the idea immediately. "Castle can get you guys there in seconds...so hopefully not only can we stop him from killing, but we can actually *catch* him."

Esposito nodded in agreement. "That's what I'm thinking, yeah."

Satisfied that they had a workable plan in place, Ryan swung his legs off to the side of the bed. "In that case," he declared, leveling his question right at Lanie, "how soon can I get the hell out of here?"

The reason this chapter got out so fast? Credit TheTruthBetween, whose complaints that the last chapter didn't have enough action (or Ryan) were, to me, totally valid. This one's for you, Kenzi!

As always, lots of comments make for a happy writer, and happy writers write faster!