Okay, everybody, I now officially have a beta for this story, for which I am eternally grateful. I've never had one before and she's AWESOME :grin:guess who?

Hey, Becs, are you ever off line? I hope not, cuz I LUV this instant feedback thing we've got going! And Deb, thanks. I'll be getting back to you about RC and TPTB -- interesting things are brewing on that front.

I appreciate the encouragement from all and the lack of flames. This chapter was a long time coming and I apologize, also I tried to tame the evil cliffie beast just a little bit. Hugs to everybody.

hc/hc/hc

Horatio was indeed hanging from the ceiling as Calleigh had suspected, except that the ropes she had envisioned weren't ropes at all but some kind of thin, stiff wire, twisted alternately around his wrists and over a four inch yellow metal hook screwed solidly into a nine foot ceiling. The kind of hook you use to hang up a ladder in your garage, she thought bitterly, trying to distract herself from the obvious. The taut wire strands had bitten so cruelly through Horatio's skin that white bone filmed with blood was actually visible in places. Tears began an unasked for, uncontrolled slide down Calleigh's face as she took three quick steps to reach his side.

"Horatio?" she choked softly, touching his hip which was at eye level and hoping he wasn't hurt there. He groaned again which Calleigh decided to take as an encouraging sign. "I'm just figuring out the best way to get you down," she soothed him, biting her lip until she tasted blood. "Won't be long now." Angrily she brushed the tears away and ran her eyes up and down the length of him, assessing the damage.

He was naked except for the boxer shorts he had been wearing in bed and his lean body was racked with silent shivering, every rib visible. By the way he was hanging Calleigh figured that one or more likely both shoulders were dislocated. His head was slumped forward, the wrapped bandages still in place. The blood liberally sprayed across them appeared dry and rusty brown in colour so Calleigh was hopeful that his head was in no worse shape that it had been before. His upper chest, where he had been stabbed in bed beside her, was a different story. The knife was still in there, she could see the hilt protruding just below his collarbone, and the wound had bled profusely. Blood from his wrists absolutely soaked his arms and had run down to mingle with the blood on his chest so she couldn't really tell if the knife wound had closed over. Even if it had, getting him down would probably reopen it.

The rest of him, thank God, seemed relatively intact except for some bruising on his legs which had probably happened when he was maneuvered up into position for hanging. Calleigh shuddered, forcing her attention away from his obviously serious physical condition to the more immediate problem of getting him down. A vision of wire cutters sprang toa mind desperate for hope but a quick visual survey of the room revealed nothing useful.

"How are we going to do this?" Horatio whispered, trying to lift his chin just enough to look at her. His body objected to the movement with a cramping spasm of agony. Horatio couldn't bite back the cry of pain.

"Be still!" Calleigh gasped, reaching around his waist and hugging him very gently. She pressed in as close as she could without hurting him and looked up into hazy pain filled pale blue eyes. "Easy," she insisted.

"I'll rephrase," he tried again, licking cracked lips as he shivered. "How the hell are we going to do this?"

"The chair," she told him confidently, speaking in the same instant that it occurred to her. "There's a chair over there. We're both going to stand on it, then you're going to lean on me while I untie your hands."

"Mmmm…sounds good," he mumbled. A flinch of pain jerked his eyelids shut and they stayed that way. "Especially the leaning on you part."

"Stay still," she warned him again before carefullyletting go. "I'll bring the chair."

Calleigh angled it carefully under his feet from the front, wincing as his toes brushed the wooden seat. She wriggled the chair downward, making sure all four legs were sitting solidly on the carpet. "Okay, try and stand up, Horatio. Go slow," she pleaded, touching his hip lightly. "Let me know what to do to help if I can. Otherwise I'll just end up hurting you by moving something I shouldn't."

Horatio flexed his knees experimentally, then dragged the tops of his toes off the wooden seat, bringing the balls of his feet back to settle there instead. Calleigh was pleased with the progress he was making until he tentatively tried to take some of his own weight. When his shoulders rolled slightly forward it forced a scream of agony from his lips after which he hung limply, panting, his body spinning slightly clockwise.

"Passing out is not an option," she told him firmly as she stopped his midair motion with gentle hands. "I'm getting up beside you." Praying not to lose her balance Calleigh stepped up onto the chair. The doorframe she had run into earlier in the dark was just close enough that she could reach out and steady herself. The top of Horatio's head was now level with his and she had to swallow hard to keep her stomach where it belonged as she forced herself to look up and study the position of his bound wrists. Calleigh was quite used to the sight of mangled flesh and exposed bone but usually they had the decency to be part of a corpse or at the very least not attached to someone she loved.

"The wire's not twisted through a closed hook," she told him after a gut-wrenching inspection, "it's only looped over. If you can stand up on your own and get enough height I'll try and lift your wrists up and over instead of having to untwist all the wire. It'll be easier to do that later when you're down."

He grunted and she could tell that he was all ready trying."Lean against me as much as you need to," she told him,intent on keeping her own balance as he shifted more and then more of his weight against her.

After pushing upward just a fragment of an inch Horatio's position shifted ever so slightly. Calleigh heard him suck a lungful of air past clenched teeth. He would be in absolute agony when his dislocated shoulders began to rotate for real, Calleigh realized. She gripped his upper arms firmly and did her best to hold them steady in the air above his head, hoping it would help. Her own arms immediately ached with the strain and she could only begin to imagine how his must feel.

"Okay, here we go," she whispered in his ear when he had straightened up enough that she thought it would work. His breath was coming in rough gasps and catching in his throat. "Listen to me, Horatio. You can't slip or we'll have to start all over. You need to stay standing while I do this. I'm sorry, I can't think of any way to make it not hurt so I'm just going to go ahead and do it."

Calleigh stood on tip toes and pushed his arms upward, ignoring the hot breath of his scream when it filled her ear. As soon as his bound wrists were high enough she lifted them up and over the hook, then began to lower them in as fluid a motion as she could manage, doing her best to rotate his shoulders smoothly as his arms came down.

It took an eternity. Horatio managed to stand steady but by the time his hands were hanging limply in front of him he was sobbing uncontrollably into her shoulder and trying at the same time to unsuccessfully quit and catch his breath. Tenderly she held him, carefully avoiding the knife wound, stroking his back as she talked about stepping down off the chair together. "We go that way," she moved her head to give him the direction. "The end of the bed is only about two feet away and there's no footboard. Hitting the mattress will hurt less than the floor if you fall."

Horatio groaned. "It's a theory, I suppose." But a moment later when she asked if he was ready he shook his head. "Cal, I don't think I can," he gasped.

"Okay, tell you what. I'll get down first and help you off. Just don't fall on top me. Deal?"

"'kay," he muttered, and she stepped lightly off the chair without touching him in any way. His legs were shaking so badly she knew he was coming down now, one way or the other.

"Your turn." She fitted her hands on either side of his waist. "I'll try and balance you. Just one step, it's about twenty inches, not much farther than the running board on the Hummer. Take your time."

Horatio sucked some air down his tight throat, looked straight into Calleigh's confident eyes and stepped down. He swayed but stayed on his feet, although by the look of him it wasn't going to last for long. Carefully Calleigh steered him over to the side of the bed and sat him on it. "Lay down," she urged, guiding with one hand on his back, the other making sure that the pillow ended up between his head and the mattress. She picked up his ankles and helped lift his legs onto the bed. Horatio weakly smiled his thanks, knowing at this moment he didn't have the strength to do it himself.

"Okay. There you go, Handsome." Calleigh bent over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, also using the movement to do a close, visual check of the knife. Horatio seemed barely aware of it and by some miracle the hilt didn't seem to have moved much, but there was so much blood everywhere it was impossible to tell if the wound had reopened or not. At least blood wasn't pouring from anywhere at the moment. She smiled reassuringly. "Hopefully that's a bathroom over there. I'm going to check it out, see if there's something I can use. Wait here, okay?"

He chuckled dryly. "Shouldn't be a problem."

Calleigh came back with a first aid kit, a plastic tub of warm water, a stack of clean towels and wash cloths. "Very well stocked," she said out loud to herself, looking vaguely worried as she brought the chair over beside the bed. Why would someone hurt Horatio this badly and then leave a first aid kit and other supplies so she could presumably patch him up? None of the answers she came up with sounded like a picnic in the park. Time to analyze it later, she decided, cringing as Horatio's eyes strayed from her face to the yellow hook and stayed there.

"I can't believe you got me down off that thing," he murmured.

"You got you down. I just helped. Why don't you close your eyes, try to relax." And quit staring at that damn hook, she ranted silently as she scrabbled through the first aid kit for painkillers.

Horatio squinted at her, looking skeptical. First aid always hurt and the upcoming session promised to be an extra special treat. Relaxing was more or less the farthest thing from his mind. Passing out maybe, relaxing definitely not.

Calleigh's blood went cold when she realized that there were no medications of any kind in the otherwise overstocked first aid kit. Someone had removed them on purpose, someone who wanted Horatio in as much pain as possible. "I won't touch your wrists for now," she reassured him, gulping down her fear before it showed, "and I'll do my best not to move your arms. I'm just going to clean you up a bit so I can see what's bleeding and what's not. Please, Horatio, try and relax."

He sighed and let his eyelids droop as the delicious warmth of a damp cloth spread across his sore chest. "Are you okay, Cal?" he wondered,voice wandering. "He didn't hurt you."

It wasn't so much a question as a statement of fact. He didn't hurt you. He. Not they.

As frightened as she was by Horatio's words Calleigh carefully filed them away with everything else for later. He was so weak at the moment he could barely speak. Whatever strength he had left he needed for things other than a verbal interrogation.

"I'm perfectly fine," she reassured him. "I was chloroformed, that's all. Even the headache's gone. Now shut up and rest, Lieutenant, that's an order."

With a small, crooked smile he carefully settled his head down into the pillow and surprised them both by almost immediately relaxing. The soothing warmth on his chest as Calleigh cleaned him up felt wonderful and she was doing a great job of not disturbing his dislocated shoulders. As long as he kept perfectly still most of his pain was bearable. Horatio's breathing slowed, his heart rate steadied and he was very nearly asleep when he felt her gentle touch on his arm and heard her reluctant voice. "I hate to do this, but let's have a look at those wrists now."

He blinked open bleary eyes. "Me first," he told her and before Calleigh could do anything to stop him he flexed his elbows and wearily raised his bound wrists up as close to his face as he could get them. She grasped his upper arms to offer some support while Horatio studied his own mangled flesh with the same meticulous detachment he did bullet striations under Calleigh's microscope in the ballistics lab.

Most of the skin in the vicinity of his wrists was missing and fresh blood seeped up continually from the raw flesh. In some places strands of wire had sliced so deep they were embedded in striated white muscle and the rounded ends of both ulnas were exposed where skin and tissue had been scraped away. At first Calleigh could do nothing but stare, her mouth dry and her stomach flipping unpredictably, but gradually her attention switched from Horatio's torn flesh to the rapt expression on his face. Head slightly tipped as he concentrated, he seemed oblivious to what had to be excruciating pain and was instead intent on the wire itself and on tracing out a pattern of how the strands had been wound and twisted.

Suddenly his eyes snapped upward towards the ceiling. His sharp gaze settled and stayed on the yellow hook.

An icy shiver tracked down Calleigh's spine. "You know who's doing this, don't you?" she whispered.

Horatio nodded slowly, jaw working, eyes on the hook.

"Do you want to talk about it now or later?"

He bowed his head, refusing to look at her. "I don't ever want to talk about it."