"Thiiird time today, Will. Are you all right?" Since his return, Bigfoot had been in the medical lab, repairing the various wounds he'd picked up in the desert. Will kept him company, hobbling around the room on his sore ankle, moaning about the creature downstairs and how they should have left it in the damn desert.

"I better be," he replied, lifting his leg onto the bed. They'd changed the dressings three times but the bite mark continued to fester. Bigfoot pulled the light over and began peeling the layers of fabric away. "I've got months of work accumulating on my desk and the last thing I need is rabies. How about you," Will eyed a bloodied patch of fur on Bigfoot's arm, "you okay?"

Bigfoot grunted.

"Was that a, 'yes'?" Will prompted, but Bigfoot was engrossed in the discoloured bandages. With dexterity not obvious by the size of his hands, Bigfoot carefully attended the sore.

Will winced as the final layer revealed his skin. It was a mess of liquids and torn pieces of flesh which had flaked away from the stitching.

"Wiiiill..." Bigfoot fished a metal tool out of the medical tray.

Will laid back on the bed, covering his forehead with his hands. "What?" he exhaled, trying to block out the searing pain from the creature's bite mark. There was a burning heat working its way from his ankle, up his leg and into a knot somewhere in his thigh. He was already two tablets over the sensible painkiller dose. Bigfoot had confiscated the packet half an hour ago and refused to reveal its location despite Will's flawless impersonation of Shrek's Puss in Boots.

Bigfoot wiped the sore clean. It was as he had thought – healed.

"Isn't that a good thing?" Will sat up and examined his ankle. A zigzagging line of black stitching was a little puffy at the edges, but otherwise in good condition. It didn't stop it stinging like hell though.

"Look agaaain," Bigfoot pointed to the skin at the centre of the wound. They waited a few minutes with Will glancing at his watch and then back to Bigfoot until he saw it too – a shimmering sensation in time with a particularly large wave of pain. His skin flickered, mimicking the white sheets beneath his leg.

Will gulped.

"Shit..." he whispered, as Bigfoot reached for the intercom.

*~*~*

"Mum, what are you doing?" Ashley repeated, striding over to the cage door, holding it shut. Joe remained frozen, a few notes crumpling as his grip tightened.

Helen blinked slowly, "Let. Go."

The creature shifted in the cage, sensing Helen's intention.

"This is a sanctuary," whispered Ashley, leaning against the cell door to hold it shut. Her mother had withdrawn a large blade from her leather boots and was brandishing it at the bars, letting the creature know that she was coming. "We don't kill things unless we have to."

"Trust me Ashley," Helen's voice was low and silky. She moved her head from side to side, a few strands of hair falling across her face as she followed the sand creature's pacing. "This one has to die."

Ashley didn't fancy the sand creatures for their murderous personality, but still, they were last of their species. All the things that they must have seen. Their intelligence, it was possible in time that –

"No, mum!"

Helen had seen Ashley distracted and gone for the cell door but her daughter was too quick, launching herself at the bars, snapping the door shut once again. The creature hissed, changing its skin.

"This is wrong," Ashley shook her head. "What's gotten into you?" Her mother was like a different person, turning the knife through her fingers.

"Heeelen. Need you in the infirmary. It's Will."

They both glanced up at the tv screen bolted to the wall. It was filled by Bigfoot looking very concerned, urging them to hurry up.

Helen released her grip on the cell door. "Stay here," she instructed, handing Ashley the knife. "I'll be back in a minute. Detective," she nodded in Joe's direction. He was still holding his notes protectively to his chest, having difficulty swallowing.

"She always like this?" Joe breathed once Helen had left the room.

Ashley shook her head. "No."

*~*~*

"I don't know Heeelen. It's spreading like an infection."

Will's worried look got worse as Bigfoot took Helen on a guided tour of his ankle. It wasn't long before her hand jumped to her mouth which had never been a good sign.

"I know what this is," she said, quietly. Her green eyes returned to Will. "But there's nothing I can do about it."

"You mean," Will kicked them off as he sat up. The vampire virus was spreading through is blood stream, mutating every strand of DNA in his body. Already the skin on his ankle shifted with his mood, stretching into its new ability. "I'm going to become one of those? There's no way..."

"I'm going to start you on a course of powerful anti-biotics," she pointed to the far end of the room. Bigfoot nodded.

"Will that do any good?" Will caught the sleeve of her lab coat. His hand was shaking. "I don't want to be a –"

Bigfoot returned, passing Helen a needle brimming with a yellow liquid. She wasted no time piercing Will's skin, plunging the cool substance into his system until his eyes rolled back.

*~*~*

Ashley's hand was still resting on the cell lock.

"Is she really going to kill it?" Joe laid his things on the table and edged toward her. He folded his arms across his chest, beginning to feel the cold of the underground rooms.

"Looks like," Ashley replied. "Detective?"

Joe was staring past her, apparently frozen. The shuffling noise that the creature had been making was suddenly absent from the room. "What's it doing?" he asked, the question falling out of his mouth as Ashley turned.

The creature was behind her with its claws curled around the bars of the cell door. It was no longer camouflaged but a reddish brown with deeper patches of red along its spine which curled around its back legs.

Helen hadn't locked the cage door.

*~*~*

"Hold him steady!" Helen and Bigfoot rolled Will onto his side as he began to shake violently. The bed rattled. Bigfoot took hold of Will's knees and put all of his weight on them while Helen threw herself on the top half of his body.

"He's going into shock...." said Bigfoot, struggling to keep hold.

"It was a large dose. There's nothing we can do except keep him still as possible."

It became harder and harder to hold Will down and soon he was shrieking in agony. Ten minutes later, he finally fell silent, passed out on the bed with beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. Helen and Bigfoot collapsed onto the bed, exhausted both by the physicality of holding Will to the bed, and the horror of hearing his cries of pain.

"He wooon't stay long like this." Bigfoot breathed.

*~*~*

"Damn..." Ashley muttered.

Her eyes opened, squinting in the sudden brightness of the cell. Her head felt as if it would crack apart – it nearly had. She was crumpled against the cell wall, bleeding onto the concrete where the creature had thrown her. The cage door was locked, trapping her inside while the room was empty except for a streak of blood along the floor where Detective Kavanaugh had been standing.

Not sure how long she'd been out, Ashley rolled onto her knees. Her lungs lurched in protest, coughing up cement dust.

"Detective?" she managed between rasps. "Joe?" Her words echoed off the cold room. "Joe, are you all right?"

Ashley crawled to the bars of her cage and used them to pull herself to her feet but she got no answer from the empty room.

*~*~*

Her mother unlocked the cell door, pushing it open harder than she needed to.

"What happened?" Helen demanded, still cloaked in her lab coat. She looked tired and withdrawn – not in the mood for this kind of catastrophe.

"You left the cell door unlocked," Ashley spat, with a more venom than she meant to. "It pushed the door open and that's all I remember. Joe's gone. We have to go and look for him now – before it's too late."

"Joe's dead," Helen paced away toward the exit.

"I don't believe that," Ashley took off in pursuit. "Why not just leave him here? It makes no sense." Ashley caught up to her mother at the elevator.

"If he's not dead yet, he will be soon. You have to go and find that thing before it kills anybody else. I can't come with you – not now that Will..." she trailed off, relieved by the glowing orb of the elevator button and its doors sliding open.

"Will?"

Helen paused, she hadn't told Ashley about Will yet.

"You better come and see him before you go."

*~*~*

Ashley left the house soon after, carrying more ordinance than Lara Croft. Five hours later, it was well and truly dark with storm clouds covering the half moon.

"Ah, thank you," Helen smiled at the doorway as Henry entered carrying a tray of tea. It was his tray of tea, ready for the nightshift so that Helen could get some sleep. "Will you be all right until the morning?"

Henry set the tray down on the desk and looked over to where his friend was sleeping. Will must have been in the middle of a horrible dream as his head kept falling from side to side with a frown cut across his forehead.

"Sure," he said, nudging Helen out of the way of what was now his chair. "Get some sleep. Ashley'll find that thing – I mean, it was her who found them in the first place."

Helen nodded, squeezing Henry's hand in thanks before she began the long walk through the hallways of her house toward her office. The inviting glow of her fireplace crept out from under the door. She clasped the handle, almost falling into her room as her tiredness took hold of her.

Except, there was something wrong with her office.

The fire was glowing even though she hadn't lit it, the curtains were drawn yet she hadn't had time to do so and her chair was facing the fireplace, rocking ever so slightly as someone prodded the coals with an iron poker.

"You have a problem," the chair announced, before spinning around to face her.