"Somebody help!" Sam shouted as he carried Dean, cradled his pale, sweating body like a child in his arms through the emergency room doors. "Please!"

"I's okay, S'mmy," Dean insisted, chin shivering as he lay limply in his little brother's hold. "'m okay."

Sam shook his head, nostrils flaring in both anger and fear.

"Sir, let us take him!" a nurse yelled, and Sam looked up from his brother to see a small swarm of medical staff running up with a stretcher.

"H-he's in shock," Sam stammered out as he carefully laid Dean onto the bed. "We didn't know it was this bad..."

"They're taking him back right now, alright?" the nurse tried to get the giant to breathe and focus as she led him to sit down on an unoccupied bed in what he now realized was the hallway outside of the OR intake doors. "I need you to calm down and take a deep breath, okay?" she continued. "Can you tell me your name?"

"Sam," he replied, trying to breathe as she'd instructed.

"Okay, Sam. And can you tell me the name of the man you brought in?"

"Dean...He's my brother. Fitzgerald," he added. Dean would kill him.

"Okay, great. Now can you tell me what happened, Sam?" She sat down on the bed beside him, putting a comforting arm around his shaking shoulders.

"Uh...he uh..." Sam clamped his eyes shut and shook his head, trying to clear the terrifying image of his brother in so much damned pain that made it too difficult to think straight...

*~.~*

48 hours earlier...

"Okay, so we've got missing hearts," Dean said as he drove the Impala up the lonely dirt road into Bar Nunn, Wyoming. "Three people in the past few weeks that they know about," he continued. "Sounds like a werewolf to me."

"Yeah, most likely," Sam replied. "I've got the address for the coroner's office. Figured we could grab a room, get changed and head over there just to make sure." Dean nodded silently. It sounded like a simple case, and the only time-consuming part would be finding where the wolf was currently residing. Truth be told, Dean was ecstatic that they were going on a regular old monster hunt, something he didn't have to think twice about or second guess the 'how' and 'why' of it all. Werewolves, he could handle.

"So you think there are more victims that they just don't know about?"

"Has to be," Dean replied. "Either that or they just recently moved in and got sloppy with their work," he said with a shrug.

"Makes sense," Sam replied as he began typing into his phone. "Guess we can narrow down the suspect list to new residents in the last month or so."

"If he's not just holed up in the woods somewhere."

"True..."

*~.~*

"Hi," Sam smiled at the receptionist at the front desk of the coroner's office as he pulled out his badge. "I'm Agent Hamilton. This is my partner, Agent Tyler. We're here to speak to the coroner concerning the mutilation case."

"Uh...which one?" the younger man asked, adjusting his glasses nervously.

"The most recent," Dean replied. "Which I imagine is the only one that's still here."

"R-right. Yes. The others were cremated. I'll uh... Hang on a second." He picked up the office phone and and pressed a button. Sam and Dean shared a glance. "Dr. Bully, the FBI is here to speak to you about Miss Anderson." There was a pause. "Yes, sir, I'll send them right in." He hung up the phone and looked to Sam. "Right through those doors," he gestured behind him to the right. "Second door on the right."

Sam nodded to him in thanks, and he and Dean made there way through the double door. "Lucky break they were cremated," Dean said in a quiet voice. "Makes our job easier."

"Yeah, I'm sure it was a real lucky break for them, too."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Shut up, you know what I mean."

"Agents!" An older, balding man met them in the hallway outside of the room they'd been directed to. "I'm Dr. Bully," he said as he held his hand out to Dean.

"Doctor," Dean nodded as he shook his hand. Then Sam did the same. "Tyler," he said, then pointed to Sam. "Hamilton."

"Very nice to meet you," Bully replied. "So the FBI caught wind of this, eh?"

"We've had a few similar cases in the surrounding area," Dean replied. "Just checking to see if it could be the same guy that's doing this."

"Surrounding area? Like...'cross state lines? I hadn't heard of anything like this before. You think it's some kinda serial killer?"

"It could be," Sam replied. "You said the heart was missing?"

"Sure is," Bully replied. "Not just missing, but ripped right outta there. Victims were alive when it happened, and that's all I can tell you about it except that it looked more like an animal attack than anything else... If there hadn't been two others with the same type of injury, that's what I would've believed it was."

"May we see the body?" Sam asked.

"Dr. Bully, you have an urgent call on line one," sounded over the loudspeaker.

"Ah hell. Y'all go on in there and take a look. Drawer three. Only body we've got in there. I've gotta go take this call."

They entered the morgue as Dr. Bully went in the opposite direction. Sam pulled open the drawer, Dean on the other side of it as the younger brother pulled back the sheet to reveal the open wound in the victim's chest. "Yeah, I'd say definitely a werewolf," Dean said as he picked up the file that lay on top of the sheet. "See if you can poke around for the reports on the other two. We might get lucky enough to find a pattern in where their bodies were found."

Just then, Dr. Bully threw open the door. "Looks like you got here just in time," he told them. "We've got another one. Figured you might as well tag along and see the scene since you're here." The brothers shared another glance before shutting the drawer and heading out with the coroner.

*~.~*

"You say they've all been found within six miles of each other?" Sam asked the doctor as Dean took a look at the wound on the latest victim. He listened in on the conversation between his brother and the doc as he grimaced at the bloody hole in the woman's chest. He covered her back up before standing and scoping the area.

They were half a mile off the hiking trail, and the girl had probably been there since the night before or really early that morning. He heard the doc say she'd been discovered by a couple who'd been walking with their dog. The mutt had gotten loose from the leash and lead them to the body.

When Sam was finished talking to the doc and the sheriff, it took him a moment to spot his brother who had been heading back toward the trail. He ran to catch up with him. "Hey," he said only slightly out of breath when he reached his side. "So the sheriff has decided to close the trails off from dusk till dawn until this gets resolved," he informed him. "They think it's a wild animal, still. He's gonna call in some local hunters...I mean the animal hunter kind of hunters, and see if they can't figure it out and trap it."

"Yeah, we should probably take care of this pretty quick then," Dean said without taking his eyes from where he'd been tracking.

"The kills are accelerating," Sam added. "He started out killing every four or five days. It's only been three since the last one."

"And now the sheriff is laying out a nice little camo-style buffet, so who knows?"

"It might scare him off," Sam thought out loud. "Might force him to a location outside of the woods."

"Maybe," Dean replied as they reached the trail. "Thing is...there's two of 'em."

"What?" Sam's eyes widened a bit as they sought out what Dean was looking at. He saw it within a few moments. The victim's shoe prints, and two other sets almost undetectable in the dirt on either side of hers.

"They blocked her path," Dean said. "Forced her off the trail. She took off, ran like hell, but she never stood a chance."

"It wouldn't have taken much for them to catch her," Sam said.

"Oh it wouldn't have, no. They wanted her off the trail so she wouldn't be found so easily."

They were silent for a few long moments until Sam broke it. "Dean...there could be more bodies they haven't even thought to look for out here."

"And we could be lookin' at a pack. We should call in some reinforcements..."

*~.~*

tbc...