You've all been wondering where Danny went. I got one guess that he had absconded with Mauna somewhere, others guessed that he'd been taken. Now we see. ;)

Shout out to Phoebe Miller for beta reading!

Fact #36: Some view dragons as nothing more than animals.

Season: Midway through Season 3

He hadn't even opened his eyes yet and his brain was already sloshing around in his head like he was in a washing machine. The ground buckled and swayed under him and his heart beat unsteadily in his chest at the rolling sensation. Not wanting to induce more nausea than what he was already feeling, he kept his eyes shuttered while he took stock of his body.

Something was off. It was off in the way that it was hard to put a finger on. He had been feeling better after the antivenin, but now he wasn't so sure. He couldn't definitively point to why, he just wasn't. He wasn't slowly roasting like he had been. He didn't feel like he was going to burst into flames again. He could breathe.

Instead, his veins felt like they had molasses slugging through them and his head felt like it was buried under a mountain of blankets while being strapped into a Tilt-A-Whirl. He was definitely on a different carnival ride this time.

Limbs were heavy, not tingly. Mouth was cottony, not slobbery. It was like he was listening to the world through a tin can. Odd and full of echoes. Through the poor audio quality he could hear soft voices. Maybe it was the nurses. Had something happened to him during the night? It was possible he had crashed from the venom or had a reaction to the antivenin, he remembered Mauna mentioning that they would have to watch for that. His life was Murphy's Law, go figure.

The voices became clearer the closer they came.

"…get it in?"

"Yeah, but we're going to have to wait for Krimshaw to get back to get the catheter in."

"He show any signs of waking?"

He was awake. He was awake and he wanted to know what was going on, who Krimshaw was, where Hale or Mauna or Kori was, and he demanded an excellent reason as to why he now needed a catheter. No way, no how was that one happening.

"No. The drugs should keep him under for the rest of the day."

Drugs? What drugs? All four rounds of antivenin hadn't knocked him out and the Columbian Water Claw extract was an upper according to Mauna, so what drugs should keep him under?

He tried to open his eyes, but it was too much effort. He was tired. So tired. Even more tired than before. Like he had run up the Diamond Head stairs and then back down without a break. A speck of unfazed intelligence in his mind held itself aloft from the sleep overtaking him. The speck was seldom wrong. Listen to the speck. Listen to it. Stay awake.

Danny barely had any time to even figure out what the speck was saying before the drug induced sleep clasped its hand over him.

The next time he came up for air from the dreamless slumber, he was more aware. How much time had passed he didn't know. The soft voices were no longer chatting near him and he wasn't on the Tilt-A-Whirl anymore.

Pins and needles traveled up and down his legs. The tingling had returned. Maybe the venom had gotten its second wind. The feeling of molasses in his veins was replaced by what felt like pop rocks. Fortunately, none of his muscles were twitching and the heat still hadn't returned. Unfortunately, or maybe not, depending on how he looked at it, his mouth was dry and he wasn't drowning in spit.

His limbs were leaden despite the tingling. There was a bit of a signal lag between his brain and body. Not good.

He forced his eyes to open into slits. That didn't help, either. It was dark. Not pitch black, but too dark for his unadjusted eyes to make out what was going on.

His other senses, though, were sharpening despite the persistent tug of a drugged sleep.

He groaned. He was on his side. Man, how long had he been in that position? He must have been lying on his left side for some time now if the cramps and the numbness in that arm were anything to go by. As he tried to move there was a metallic scrape and his leg jerked to a halt. Dragging his head upwards and twisting, he squinted in the dark to make out the jumbled shapes.

What? Someone had cuffed his ankle? Why was he cuffed?

That exhausted feeling was creeping back up on him, forcing his head to return to the floor. No, he couldn't go to sleep again. That speck that was holding itself aloft was screaming at him. His cop instincts were screaming at him that he was missing a great big stinking clue. Don't ignore the instinct. Listen to it.

There were the soft voices again.

Stay awake. Figure out what was going on.

"Crossbreed, crossbreed, pure blood, crossbreed, and he's a pure blood?"

"Pure blooded Cliff by the looks of it."

"Really? Fantastic. I wasn't expecting that. I want to take a peek."

The creaking of large metal hinges made his ears ring. Bright light struck him in the eyes and he squeezed them closed. The footsteps came closer. Someone kneeled next to his head. The ground. Why was he on the ground? Why wasn't he in the hospital bed?

A hand touched his face.

He cracked his eyes open, just barely. Just enough to see a blurry outline of a woman looking at him.

"And the drugs?" she craned her head around to the person standing outside of the doors.

"Working as far as we can tell. Sometimes they open their eyes while they're asleep if they sense someone close by."

They. They. Who were 'they'? Who were these guys? Why was he on the ground? What was going on?

"He is going to give us some nice ones," the woman patted his cheek and stood up.

He wanted to call out and question what was going on as the door swung shut, but the speck of cop instinct told him to hold his tongue. That great big stinking clue he had initially missed? They had been talking about crossbreeds and pure bloods. They had mentioned a pure blooded Cliff before opening the doors.

Sleep was already dragging him down again as he put the pieces together. They. That was the great big stinking clue. The 'they' were dragons.

Steve was ready to burn the city to the ground to find Danny. He had made the heart wrenching call to put Grace and Rachel under protective custody, just in case this turned out like the Peterson incident. The not knowing was what was killing him, not knowing what to tell Rachel and not knowing what to tell Grace when she begged him to tell her Danno was okay.

Chin and Kono wisely kept their distance and examined the security footage while their boss wore a rut in the floor. They weren't sure how long their friend had been missing. At the very least it had been three hours. At the most it had been thirteen hours. The latter was more frightening.

Wound tighter than a tense dog ready to attack, Steve whipped his head towards the doors when they opened.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Steve barked at the doctor.

"Don't you dare snarl at me, McGarrett," Mauna snapped.

"My partner disappeared under your watch!"

"I. Wasn't. On. Duty," she said very slowly and deliberately. "I got off my shift yesterday morning, so I technically wasn't on duty while I was saving Danny's life yesterday. You're welcome for that, by the way. I left the hospital at midnight last night after checking in on him one more time and giving him a third dose of the Columbian Water Claw extract."

"Where was Hale? Where was Kori?" Steve questioned.

"Steve," Chin said. His tone was calm, but brooked no room for an argument.

Steve's jaw worked like he was going to continue, but instead he sighed unhappily and crossed his arms over his chest.

"We called her here to help," Kono glanced between him and the doctor before gesturing for her to come over to the smart table. "We've been checking out the staff that was on duty at the time, but they've all checked out as clean. We wanted to see if you can see anyone out of place."

"There're a lot of nurses and janitors and doctors at King's," Mauna muttered. "I don't know all of them."

"But you spend most of your time on the one floor, right?" Kono asked.

"I'm a specialist. I move around a lot. I pick up ER shifts. Add that to the fact that one of the floors got scattered while they were remodeling after the Wyvern attack, and that means a lot of people are still in between floors and like I said, I don't know everyone."

"Well, just look over these and maybe something will pop out at you."

As Kono and Mauna started going through the footage from the hallway Danny had been down and the footage from the nurses' station on that floor as well as the stairwell, Chin peeled away from the smart table. He set his hand firmly on Steve's shoulder.

"Don't worry, brah. We'll find him."

"We better."

Neither of them spoke about what might happen if they didn't.

This time he was awake. The tingling was gone except for his left arm that he had been putting pressure on for too long. The dull and cottony senses had returned to normal levels. His brain was able to take in all the information each sense was sending to it. Unfortunately, the processing part was taking longer than he wanted it to. Some signals were coming in and his brain was sluggishly trying to make sense of them.

He did know one thing for certain. He was fully shifted. That much he had understood almost immediately upon waking up this third time. His scales scraped the metal flooring where the blanket he was on had been moved aside and his claws scratched across it, producing a nails-on-chalkboard sound.

He unfurled one wing, freezing when it clanked against a metal ceiling.

Dark, confined space. He was stuck in a dark, confined space.

Danny's breath quickened as he tried to get to his feet. The thick metal cuff on his ankle jangled and he had to lean on the wall for support due to his left arm, front leg rather, still being asleep.

No, no, no, why did it have to be such a small space? Granted, if he had been in human form it wouldn't have been so bad, but as it was his one wing was pressed against the wall and ceiling and he couldn't move. And there were people that he didn't know somewhere close by and his instincts were identifying them as bad guys that knew he was a Cliff and had locked him up and shackled him and drugged him.

His open wing thumped against the sides of his prison again as his chest tightened and his thoughts went into a downward spiral. It was dark and tight and unfamiliar and he still felt off and slightly sick to his stomach and weak and where was his partner or a nurse or doctor and why was he here and where was here and what did they want with him and how was he going to get out of here –

"Easy there, sweetheart, easy."

He stopped dead, willing the nervous shivers going down his back to cease. Was that the woman that had been here before? Something about her had set him on edge. Well, more on edge than he currently was. She was not to be trusted. Not that he would trust anyone wherever he was at the moment. Trust for kidnappers wasn't something that welled up inside him naturally.

"They must have screwed up your drug dosage for you to be awake."

The voice wasn't coming from beyond the doors. It was a soft voice drifting down to him from a vent at the back of his prison. Now that his eyes had adjusted and he was looking, there were several slits high up on the walls that were covered with metal grating. What were they for? Airflow?

Airflow meant long term containment. Great.

"You're the new one they picked up, right?"

Kidnapped, snatched away from his hospital bed, yes, but picked up made it sound like he was some stray dog they'd plucked off the street and he was one hundred percent sure that he had been smuggled out of the hospital.

He was going to say as much. It didn't matter if this was the bad woman or someone else, he was ready to begin a full and total rant to whomever he could.

That was, if he could open his mouth.

He crossed his eyes. What the hell was that? Was that a metal band looped around his jaws? He couldn't do much more than barely crack his mouth open. What kind of cruel and unusual treatment was this? What kind of hell had he been dragged into?

His breaths came shallowly and rapidly as he clawed at the band. He had to get it off. Get it off right now.

"Oh, you poor dumb thing, they muzzled you, didn't they?"

Kidnapped him, somehow forced a full shift on him, drugged him, chained him, and muzzled him all after he had barely recovered from almost dying from a snake bite. Oh god, his life really was Murphy's Law. His vision blurred and his ribs constricted around his lungs as anxiety fastened its deadly fingers around him.

"Honey, stop. You're going to hurt yourself. You need a key to get it off."

Or big, meaty claws. This had to work. He scrabbled at the band, ignoring the stinging as he nicked himself and as the metal chafed his snout. Being reduced to a mute was not on his nightmare list. Waking up a foot shorter, losing Grace, Steve getting himself killed, those were on his nightmare list. For a reason unknown to him, he had never considered not being able to talk to be as panic inducing as it was.

"Hey, sweetheart! You need to calm down or they're going to come check on you."

Danny paused with one claw lodged partially under the band.

If the 'they' this woman was talking about were the bad guys he had identified earlier, then he didn't want them to come back until he had a better plan of escape. If they thought he was awake when he shouldn't be, they may drug him again and he doubted they would get the dosage wrong a second time. He'd be royally screwed.

He needed to calm down. Calm down. Easier said than done, he snorted bitterly. Think of something that calmed him. Calm, calm, calm. Calm.

Grace.

Grace with her smiling face and her silky pigtails.

Grace with her big brown eyes that could make even a Navy SEAL cave and her voice that made him melt like a scoop of ice cream that had been dropped on the sidewalk.

The way she hugged him with her arms wrapped around his chest.

The way she laughed when Chin told a funny story.

The way she grinned as she learned to surf with Kono.

How she called him Danno.

How much she loved him.

How much she so purely and honestly loved him.

He slumped against the cool metal wall and let his unfurled wing drape across his side. With the picture of his beautiful daughter still in his mind, he inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. Grace was his breath and his life. She was his lifeline.

"I'm sorry they did that to you, sweetheart."

Danny nodded to himself in the dark.

That voice sounded nothing like the other woman that had been there earlier. Her voice had been older and gravelly. This voice was younger and sweeter. Now that his claustrophobia didn't have such a strangling hold on his mind, merely a slightly choking one, that speck of cop instinct could grow and take control of the situation.

First order of business, freaking out would get him nowhere fast. He would grab a hold of his lifeline of Grace and hold on for as long as it took for him to get out of this.

"I'm sorry. You'll be…okay. We'll be okay."

Danny blinked as her soft words filtered through the grating. She reminded him of Rachel with her British accent, but her voice was more lilting than his ex-wife's. Either that or he had come to expect double edged words whenever he was speaking with Rachel, so he had a hard time picking out the charm in her voice anymore.

Was she was trapped in a container close to him? Or she could have been a plant to watch him. Or maybe she was in the same situation he was, minus the muzzle.

He thumped his foot down in irritation. This was one time where he really needed to ask questions that he really needed answers to, and of course there was some instrument from the Dark Ages strapped around his mouth.

"It's okay, I know it's frustrating. How about two taps for yes, one for no?"

Not ideal for someone who thrived on words, but it was better than nothing. If his partner was here he would be beating out a signal in morose code and what good would that do him if no one understood it? Would the man even notice if his mouth was banded shut? He didn't tend to share a lot in these types of situations and often poked at Danny for voicing his concerns and worries.

"Sweetheart?"

He double tapped the wall.

"I'm sorry if I'm bothering you. I haven't had a neighbor in a while."

Christ, how long had she been here? Longer than him and she sounded as if she had had neighbors before. What was this place? Somewhere that obviously had people, dragons and maybe humans too, passing through and getting stuffed into containers often enough that the harder he thought about it the more could feel the spindly fingers of anxiety weaving their way through his ribs.

"It's okay, I'll leave you alone."

No!

No, alone in a dark and confined space was worse than having a disembodied voice talking to him with kind tones and sweet words. Forget if she was a plant. He needed to hear another living being's voice.

He tapped against the wall once.

"Okay, sweetheart, I'll keep talking. You're the Cliff I heard them talking about, right?"

Awesome first question that didn't help the niggling thought that she was a plant to spy on him. His type wasn't something that he was willing to give up. It took him two and a half years to finally let his partner know that was his type, and that had been through yet another drugging and a fit of rage. Five or ten minutes did not warrant that kind of trust, no matter how sweet and kind the person was.

"You don't have to answer that. How about a name? You have name?"

Warily, he tapped twice. Yes, he had a name. No, he didn't know how to tell her because he did not know morose code. Maybe there could be some use to learn at least some morose code, after all.

"A?"

Or they could do that. He tapped once.

"B?"

One tap.

"C?"

One tap.

"D?"

Two taps. Good thing his name didn't start with a Z.

"Starts with a D. Next letter. A?"

Two taps.

"That was fast. Okay, a D and an A. Maybe Dan?"

Sort of. He tapped twice.

"Dan?"

One tap.

"Dan, but not Dan. Daniel?"

One tap.

"Danny?"

Two taps.

"Danny. Nice to meet you, Danny. I'm Tamarin."

Steve saw Mauna's brows furrow before she could move any other muscle or open her mouth. He switched from watching her to watching the screen. She had seen something.

"That guy," she pointed at someone as they walked off screen. "Go back."

Kono reversed the footage twenty seconds back. Mauna narrowed her eyes and approached the hanging screen. Her finger jabbed at a man once he was in the shot again. Kono froze the video right there.

"You know him?" Steve questioned.

"No. And that's what I don't like," she pushed her shoulders back and set her hands on her hips.

Chin selected the man's face and sorted it against the hospital employee records. King's was a large facility and had numerous employees, from nurses and doctors to receptionists to janitors to cafeteria workers to security guards and much more. Taking a chance, he used the fact that the man was garbed in teal scrubs to narrow it down to nurses. That guess lopped a significant amount of time off matching a name to the face.

"Samuel Hopkins, part time ER nurse. Checked out as clean with no record or complaints," Chin relayed.

Kono's face lit up and she looked at the boys. "Wasn't he the other nurse with Kori when we first went up there?"

"Yeah," Steve agreed. "He was drawing blood."

"Well, that would explain why he's up there," Chin said.

Mauna's eyes narrowed. "Look at the time stamp. That was after I had told Hale and Kori that they were to be the only ones tending to Danny since they were in on the loop that he was a fire breather. No one else was to go in his room."

"So, what was he doing leaving Danny's room?" Chin questioned.

"I say we go and ask him ourselves," Steve said.

"He's not working today, but I've got his home address."

"Chin, with me. Kono, stay here with Mauna and keep searching through the footage. I want to know what Hopkins does for the rest of his shift. Every step he takes, every person he talks to."

"On it, Boss."

"Are we somewhere warm?"

The question caught him off guard. He had been focused on a new problem that had come to his attention after he had played the name game with Tamarin.

The detective in him, however, latched onto her question and let his new problem slip from his mind temporarily. Were they somewhere warm? That made it sound like she had been moved around from place to place. Obviously, she had been here longer than him, and she apparently hadn't started out on Oahu.

A frigid chunk of ice settled in his stomach. He wondered how quickly these people could pull up stakes and leave somewhere.

He tapped twice.

"Really?" he heard her shuffle in the container next to his. "I thought it felt a bit warmer, but then again thought maybe I was imagining it. Are we in the United States?"

Two taps, though he didn't really consider Hawaii in the US so much as a part of the US.

"California?"

One tap.

"Not California? I suppose Oregon and Washington aren't really warm, are they?"

One tap.

"Didn't think so. Are we in the South again? Like Florida or Louisiana or Texas or something?"

He tapped once. These people did pull up stakes and move around a lot. She had been in the southern US before, which was thousands of miles from their current position. Or, hopefully still current position. Crap, he may not even be on Oahu anymore. How was his team supposed to find him?

"We're not in Hawaii, are we?"

He tapped twice. Please, please let them still be in Hawaii.

"We are? I've always wanted to go to an island. I know I'm from the Isle of Britain, but that doesn't really count. Are we at the big one?"

One tap. She was talking in present tense. Maybe she knew when these people were moving. There was a chance they were still on the island.

"One of the little ones, then. Must be Oahu, right?"

Two taps.

"I had a friend that went to Oahu when he got married…."

Danny half-heartedly listened to her talk longingly about her friend and the honeymoon said friend took. His gaze returned to the new problem that he had noticed in front of him. He frowned, sort of. The metal band was screwing up his facial expressions.

Swallowing against a dry throat, he tried to focus his eyes and trace the thin tube to where it disappeared through a hole in the metal door. This was the new problem that had been brought to his attention. One end of the tube went out of the door and was more than likely hooked up to some bag with an unknown solution in it while the other end was snaked through one nostril and down his throat. He was hyper aware of it every time he swallowed now.

He would pull it out, but what if he did and it triggered an alarm? Even if it didn't, when the bad guys returned they would notice it was out and know something was up. If he was shot up with more drugs he was done.

Tamarin probably knew what this nose tube was for. She seemed to have a broader grasp of what was going on. If only he could open his mouth.

He huffed out a growl.

"What's wrong, sweetheart? Am I driving you nuts?"

No, nothing was wrong at all. He was only rendered mute in a time when he needed to talk and had who knew what being pumped into him, but other than that he was just peachy. He needed to know what this tube was for. Easy way to administer drugs? Feeding tube? For all he knew, it could have been slowly dripping poison into him.

He thumped against the wall once. Charades would be an option if they weren't in separate containers. Steve always said he could carry a conversation with his hands, no words required. That only helped if the other person could see his hands.

"Is it the muzzle?"

Two thumps. Who knew? He may have been able to solve the case of his own kidnapping if he could talk, but so long as this metal band was ratcheted around his mouth he was doing a lousy job of getting very far or finding out very much.

"I know. I had one on me for a while," little cracks broke up the smooth flow of her voice. "They finally left it off of me once I stopped screaming."

Danny exhaled sharply. A cold wave washed over him. He had seen a lot of sick and twisted things in all of his years as a cop. Met a lot of victims. Tamarin's façade was cracking with harsh memories and with the horrors she must have endured in whatever this place was. Right now, he wished he could just see her face to face and assure her that his partner was coming.

His team would save them.

Samuel Hopkins was, for all intents and purposes, a chicken that had been cornered by a fox. Or a bear. Chin wasn't sure which animal his boss was exuding at the moment. The way Steve was pacing, though, made him think distinctly of a big cat. A jaguar or a tiger. Shoulders racked up with tension, slinking back and forth in the backyard, snarling.

"For your sake, you better start talking," Chin told the frazzled ER nurse that was cuffed to the chain link fence.

"I know my rights," Samuel said lowly. He glared at the pair of them.

"No," Steve crouched down by him. "You don't have any rights. You lost those as soon as we found footage of you entering a patient's room you weren't supposed to. Where. Is. He?"

Samuel shrunk back slightly against the fence, but maintained his glare. "I don't know what you're talking about. I work at a hospital. I'm a nurse. I go into patients' rooms."

Steve grabbed the fence above Samuel's cuffed hands and shook it violently. "Where the hell is he?"

"Don't test him, brah, he's got a shorter fuse than usual today," Chin said, having to play the level-headed man. He wanted to get their friend back as much as Steve did, but someone had to keep the boss from hauling off and killing their suspect.

"You're cops!" Samuel spat. "You can't do anything to me, and even if you do, you'll get yourselves suspended and any imaginary evidence you might have will get tossed out the window."

"Tossed out the window," Steve repeated with a cold and soulless smirk spreading across his face.

"Steve, tossing him out a window will make him dead, and we don't want him dead," Chin said coolly. He used the barrel of his shotgun to gesture at Samuel, enjoying the flinch he received in response. "You see, we're not regular cops, Samuel. We're Five-0. You know what that means?"

Samuel kept his mouth shut and his dark eyes darted between them.

"It means we have full immunity and means," Chin grinned maliciously. "It means we have permission from the Governor to do whatever is necessary to get the job done."

"So where is Danny?" Steve growled.

Apparently, Samuel decided that they were bluffing. He didn't say a word.

Chin dusted off his hands. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

He turned back to the house as his phone rang. Leaving Samuel in the capable hands of Steve, he swiped his thumb across the screen as he stepped back up into the kitchen through the back door. It was time to let the Navy SEAL do his thing while he put his detective skills to good use.

"What do you have, Kono?" he asked as he started to poke and prod through Samuel's belongings.

"We caught Samuel talking to another nurse in the back of the hospital where the dumpsters are. It looks like he used her as a distraction to smuggle Danny out and then she drove off with Danny in a black van."

"Did you get a license plate?" he stepped down on the foot lever of the kitchen trashcan, peering into the half-full bag as the lid flipped up. He frowned and pulled out a glove.

"Yeah, didn't take long to figure out where it was. HPD said that it had been stolen from a rental place yesterday morning and had its GPS locator ripped out. They found it dumped in a tow away zone near Ala Moana Park early this morning."

Chin held the small glass vial to the light and squinted. It was nearly empty except for a tiny drop swirling around in the bottom. There were no labels or discernable tags on it to detail what had been contained in it. He dug an evidence bag out and dropped it in. The crime lab would have to determine what it was.

"Mauna, what are you – no, hold on, don't – damn it, I have to let you go, Chin."

"What's wrong?"

"Mauna figured out who the other nurse was before I did. She called Hale and is heading to the hospital."

"Don't let her do anything stupid."

"I'm on it, cuz, but man she's got a long stride. Mauna! Mauna!"

The call ended. Chin shook his head and stared at his phone a moment before putting it back in his pocket. Figuring it was time to collect Steve and their suspect, he made his way into the backyard again.

"Steve."

Chin didn't want to even know what he had done to Samuel, but whatever it was had turned the ER nurse into a cowering and whimpering fool. He flicked two fingers out at Steve and swept them towards the truck parked at the front of the house.

Steve released Samuel from the fence and roughly cuffed him again, fisting the back of his shirt in his hand and marching him forward. Samuel shuffled along with his tail, not between his legs, but cut off.

"He tell you anything?" Chin asked.

Steve's face remained grim. "Said he doesn't know where he is. That's not part of his job."

Chin hummed lowly. "Alright, come on, Jack Bauer, I have evidence to get to Charlie and Kono's got a lead."

Steve looked at him oddly at the reference.

Chin shrugged one shoulder. "Danny would want me to keep up the tradition."

Mauna was gone by the time Kono got out to the Palace parking lot. Cursing, she jumped in her little red Cruze and blasted out into the mid-morning traffic, flicking on the sirens to send cars scrambling out of her way. Steve would have been proud of her evasive maneuvers and Danny would've ranted that she had been hanging out with their boss too much.

A grim look settled on her face. "Don't worry, Danny, we'll find you."

Maybe, just maybe, with the use of her sirens she had managed to pass Mauna somewhere on the streets and beat her to the hospital. The look on the older woman's face when realization had hit her sprang to Kono's mind as she sprinted from her car up to the entrance of the hospital. Kori had been right, she could be terrifying.

She made a right at the reception desk and headed back towards the ER.

"Excuse me, Miss, can I help you?" one of the nurses at the nurses' station stood up as she sped by.

"Have you seen Doctor Hale or Mauna recently?" she asked, pausing to take a breath.

The nurse nodded and pointed. "Mauna just met up with Hale maybe five minutes ago and they both took off for the breakroom."

"Okay, thanks," Kono followed where the nurse was pointing. Mauna must've known some kind of back alley shortcut to beat her by five minutes.

She turned down the hallway the nurse had indicated. It was lined by various doors, all leading to consultation, storage, and bathrooms. She came to one door that was shut and had a small tag on it that read 'Breakroom'. She tried the handle. Locked, but she could hear voices on the other side.

"Five-0! Open up."

The handle swiveled and Hale peeked out. His salt and pepper hair was disheveled like he had dug his fingers through it repeatedly and he sighed upon recognizing her. He held the door open.

"Mauna? What the hell?" Kono's eyes widened.

Mauna sat on the edge of one of the tables with her arms crossed over her chest, her warm amber eyes fiery and narrowed at a woman secured to a chair with duct tape. An entire roll of duct tape. Only one strip was spared and that strip was slapped over her mouth.

"I knew I recognized her," Mauna said. "She was peeping in on Danny when I was digging through his clothes looking for the snake. She took off once she realized McGarrett and I were in there, didn't you, Caroline?"

The youngish pale faced, frizzy black haired nurse snorted and shot daggers at Mauna with her lightly colored eyes.

"You can't just go and tape people to a chair," Kono said. Was this how Danny felt with Steve? Wondering exactly what insane and not by the book thing he was going to do next?

"Tell her where she was when I called you, Hale," Mauna tilted her head at the other doctor.

Hale's thumb darted into his palm and rubbed in tiny circles. "Mauna called and asked me to find her and to not let her leave, which I can tell you is not what I am trained for. I don't know how I always wind up involved with this kind of stuff."

"Looks like you didn't let her leave, though," Kono ran her fingers through the underside of her hair, pulling it up off her neck.

"She was trying to get into the security room," Hale continued.

"Hale kept her talking with questions about another patient long enough for me to get here," Mauna finished.

Kono wasn't sure she wanted to know what had transpired after that, but assumed it went something along the lines of Mauna kidnapping the nurse and then shoving her into the breakroom. This must have been exactly how Danny felt with Steve. Maybe all his ranting wasn't just him blowing off steam.

"Caroline, you're coming with me. My boss will want to ask you some questions," Kono said, sighing and reaching into her back pocket for her knife. "Once we separate you from the chair."

Pacing panther. That's what Chin had settled on to describe Steve. Here in the darkened, blue lit interrogation room, the reserve Navy SEAL perfectly emulated an apex predator. Which he was, whether all anyone saw was the human side or the dragon side. It didn't matter, the man was scary when he was in a mood like this.

"What were you doing trying to get into the security room?" Chin asked, keeping his tone level yet as hard as a slab of marble.

"I want my lawyer," Caroline reiterated for the fourth time.

"You don't get it, do you?" Steve stalked closer to the cuffed woman. "We have you on video talking to Samuel Hopkins, who we've already connected to this case. We have you driving away in a stolen van that was found this morning."

Chin's brows shifted up slightly. "You were going to try and wipe the security footage from last night and this morning, weren't you?"

"You have nothing on me," she said.

"You caught wind that we were investigating, didn't you?" Steve exhaled slowly and Chin noted that he saw a puff of vapor escape his nose. He was definitely stressed if he was boiling during work hours. As fast as the small puff had appeared it dissipated and Steve was growling, "Didn't know Danny was one of ours."

"You have nothing–"

"We have the footage! We have a witness! And you are going to stay in this room and cuffed to that chair until you tell us what is going on," Chin allowed his frustration to increase the volume of his voice. "What happened? Why did you take him?"

"Is this revenge against Five-0?" Steve gestured to himself and then to Chin. "Are you planning on making a ransom demand, or are you planning on killing him to send a message?"

Caroline remained silent, but her bottom lip was quivering and sweat poured down her face and arms. Her visage starting to crumble. They were getting to her. A few more blows and she might finally crack.

"I find it strange that two ER nurses would abduct a detective," Chin dropped his voice back to its level tone. "Now, why would you do that?"

"Are you working for someone? Did they pay you to kidnap Danny?" Steve uncrossed his arms and set them on his hips, fingertips tapping against the holstered gun clipped there.

Caroline lowered her head and hid her eyes from them.

"We're going to find out, sooner or later," Chin said. "We have police sweeping your apartment and one of our officers is going through your bank records. It's in your best interest that we find out sooner rather than later."

When she still held onto her silence by a thread, Steve invaded her personal space with a knife to sever that last effort to keep quiet. "If we don't find him, the last medical facility that you'll ever go will be the morgue."

"Okay!" Caroline shouted. Her chest heaved as she drew in shaking breaths and picked her head up to look at them. Licking her lips, she said, "Okay, I'll talk."

"Where is Danny? Where did you take him?" Steve questioned.

"I don't know," Caroline said.

"You don't know?" Steve moved in again.

"Wait! Wait!" Caroline flinched and tried to lean as far away from Steve as she could. "I know where he is, I just don't know where he is."

Chin exchanged a perplexed look with Steve before he looked at the woman with fully raised brows. "You know where, but you don't know where?"

Caroline nodded, beads of sweat dripping off her nose and running down her neck with the movement.

"Well, where is he?" Steve bellowed.

Caroline's wide and frightened eyes locked onto them as she answered.

Wait.

What was that?

Danny pressed his front feet against the floor of his small prison and laid his head on it.

Tamarin had grown quiet after revealing she had been muzzled, too. Through soft taps he had managed to coax her into talking again, glad when her voice returned to its silky smooth and sweet timbre after a few more conversations. If they could be called that. After the name and the guessing where they were game, she only asked simple yes or no questions.

"Were you born in Hawaii?" her gentle voice drifted down from the slots high in the walls.

One tap.

Really, what was that sound? It had been there the entire time he had been awake, but it was only now that he was actually taking notice of it. The cop in him was working fiercely to figure a way out and had taken great interest in this low hum. With his head against the floor he could sense motion, too. Weird. Well, weirder than what was already going on.

"I was born just outside of London, myself. Came to the States to travel with some friends before we all went our separate ways, you know. My cousin Louie was going to go to university in California, wanted to be a marine biologist."

Danny lifted his head with a puzzled frown.

California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Hawaii, they were all coastal states. Arizona was warm, yet she hadn't mentioned it earlier. She had mentioned states that were on the coast. Why would she –

His eyes widened and his heart worked its way into his throat.

The low hum was an engine. The slight motion he could feel were waves.

They were on a ship.

To be continued...

Gotcha again! *ducks a brick*

Next Tuesday on "Dragons", Danny plots his escape while his team plots his rescue, and the truth about the kidnappers is revealed.

Sorry, no artwork this week. Next week, though, there should be some. All my family has gone home and I've gotten back to my regular writing/drawing schedule.