Capture

by Melissa Darnell

  Once I finished delivering the water to the ladies giving sponge baths to toddlers and washing dishes in the kitchen, as well as refilling the toilet tanks in the house where Tarah and I would be staying for awhile, I joined Tarah in the living room.

  She was playing Monopoly with Cassie and Mike. Grandma Letty had suggested a huge stockpile of board and card games for each house since we couldn’t safely have cable or satellite TV. I had a feeling we’d all be getting tired of the games before winter ended, as they would be our only entertainment for months.

  “Mikey, you’re cheating again,” Cassie cried out, her wild head of white-blonde curls bouncing as she whapped Mike on the arm.

  “Cassie, play nicely,” Pamela called out from the kitchen where she was drying dinner plates. To her credit, she gave no sign of her recent argument with her husband. Maybe they argued all the time and it was no big deal to her.

  “Oh please. How can you tell?” Mike said to Cassie, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “All I did was roll the dice.”

  “And then used mag—” Cassie hesitated, her hand flying to her mouth as her eyes widened. She turned to her mother in fear.

  “It’s okay, honey.” Pamela smiled, but sadness kept it from reaching her eyes. “But only talk about it here with our friends.”

  What had our country’s latest civil war done to kids like Cassie? How long would it take before they learned to feel safe again? Months? Years?

  “Anyways, you can’t tell I used magic just now,” Mike teased the little girl. “Everyone’s using magic around here.”

  “So? I can tell it was you who did it just now,” Cassie insisted. “I can smell it.” She tapped her tiny button nose.

  I burst out laughing. “Mike, she says your magic stinks!”

  “Shut up,” he muttered, punching my shoulder. He turned back to the little girl. “Oh yeah? What does it smell like?”

  “Oranges and sunshine,” she chirped with a giggle.

  Mike grinned. “Ha! See? She says my magic smells good.”

  Tarah rolled the dice then asked, “And what does Hayden’s magic smell like?”

  Cassie frowned. “Hmm. Do something, Hay-Hay.”

  “Hay-Hay!” Mike fell over sideways laughing.

  Hay-Hay? Couldn’t Cassie pick a different nickname for me?

  I tried to forget about my new nickname and focus on doing something magical on a small scale. But what?

  Then I had it. I held out a finger a few inches from Tarah’s neck and blew softly, pushing a tiny bit of my will into the breath of air. The breeze lifted a strand of Tarah’s hair and coaxed it to wrap around my finger several times. As Tarah’s cheeks turned a light shade of pink, Cassie giggled and clapped her hands.

  “Blankets!” she cried out. “It smells like the blankets after Mommy washes them.”

  “I think she means the fresh breeze scented laundry detergent we used to use,” Pamela explained with a grin.

  My magic smelled like laundry soap. Great.

  Steve walked into the room, joining us from the master suite his family had claimed, his face clouded. He added a log to the fireplace, jabbing it way harder than needed with the poker before jerking the metal safety chain curtain back across the opening. Muttering about how we’d all die of the cold, he stomped back to his family’s bedroom. Either they had taken the master suite, or everyone else had assigned it to them so we wouldn’t have to see Steve every time he needed to visit a bathroom. But apparently the compromise was that his end of the house wasn’t getting much heat from the fireplace. Probably because he insisted on keeping their bedroom door shut.

  That reminded me. “Hey, Tarah, want to help me bring in more firewood?”

  “Sure.”

  As we pulled on our coats and boots at the door, Mike waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Keep her out there a while, would you? I need to get past her Boardwalk and Park Place in a few turns, and I’m running short on cash.”

  “Cassie, you keep an eye and a nose on him for me, okay?” Tarah said, tapping the side of her nose. “Play my turns for me till I get back. And don’t let him cheat anymore.”

  Cassie nodded solemnly.

  As I held the glass and metal storm door open for Tarah, I heard Cassie howl, “Mikey, you heard Tarah. Quit cheating!”

  Chuckling, I followed Tarah down the steps, pulling her in against my side as we strolled along the houses. We’d chopped up and piled firewood behind every house earlier so no one had to go too far, and taking a shortcut in between the houses would have been quicker. But I wanted time alone to talk with her, so we walked past the shortcut and took the long way around instead.

  As we crunched along on the snow, carefully avoiding the tree stumps everywhere, I told her about the argument I’d overheard between Pamela and Steve. “So we might want to keep an eye on at least Cassie when we can.”

  “You don’t think Steve would really try to take her away, do you?”

  “He killed that cop in Oklahoma without even blinking an eye. I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t do for his family.”

  “Well, what if he uses magic on them to make them agree to go with him? How would we know if they’d really changed their minds or not?”

  Good point. I sighed. “I guess we’ll have to deal with that possibility if it comes up. Maybe some of the others have a way to break another's spell?”

  Tarah shrugged. “I know as much as you do about what Clann people can and can’t do.”

  A breeze stirred through the pines, making them sigh and sway. As the breeze passed us, it brought with it the scent of the freshly cut firewood and pine sap.

  Tarah shivered. I threw an arm around her shoulders and grinned. “You’re getting cold. Let’s grab some firewood and get back inside before you turn into a human popsicle. I don’t want a girlfriend with ugly, frostbitten toes.”

  She gasped and whapped my shoulder. “You’d just have to learn to like me anyway. ‘Cause I don’t want a boyfriend who’s too shallow to like a girl with frostbitten toes.”

  “I would not like you with frostbitten toes.” At the firewood stack now, I loaded her arms with a small pile of wood then filled mine with chopped logs up to my chin.

  “You really wouldn’t?” Her eyebrows drew together.

  “Nope.” Leading the way back towards our house, I added in a murmur, “I’d love you. Even with fugly toes.”

  Grinning, she pushed me away with her shoulder. “You’d better.”

  “Think we’ll ever get everyone out of the living room so we can get some sleep tonight?” she whispered as we awkwardly navigated our house’s stairs and storm door. The scent of pine from the fresh cut logs inches from our faces was nearly overwhelming now.

  I managed a shrug without dropping any of the firewood. “Eventually.”

  Once inside, we toed off our snow boots then dumped the logs by the fireplace and shucked our coats.

  Cassie sniffed the air. “Mmm, pine trees! Smells like Christmas.”

  Which had been a touchy group subject at Grandma Letty’s. Our group’s religious preferences were too diverse for it to be a good idea to have Christmas trees in the main areas of any of the temporary homes, even though Christmas was just two days away now. But each family was welcome to decorate their bedrooms if they wanted to. I’d spotted a couple of fathers cutting baby pine trees earlier this evening. The sight of those puny trees had reminded me of the Charlie Brown Christmas movie Damon used to insist we watch on DVD every Christmas Eve.

  But Tarah and I didn’t even have a room of our own to decorate. I was starting to see the point in Grandma Letty’s argument for private rooms for us now. Did Tarah miss having a tree to decorate with presents underneath it?

  I turned to ask her about it but got distracted in the process. Bud, who we’d almost forgotten about in the recliner a few feet away, moaned in his sleep, his head turning to one side then the other.

  Nightmares?

  I watched him for a
few seconds, then looked at Pamela in the kitchen area. “Is it time for another dose?”

  “No, he shouldn’t wake up for at least another couple of hours,” she replied with a frown. She dried her hands on a dish towel then took the three steps over to Bud’s chair. “He looks a little flushed.” She touched his forehead and hummed. “He’s running a fever. Let me get my kit.”

  She was gone in her family’s bedroom for a few minutes, returning with what looked like an ordinary women’s shoulder bag. From it she took out an electronic thermometer, the kind with a short wand on one end topped by a white plastic ball. She slowly ran it across Bud’s forehead then froze.

  I didn’t like her body language. I walked over to see the reading for myself then silently swore. Bud’s temperature was a hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t have to be a doctor to figure out that wasn’t good.

  CHAPTER 18

  “A problem with the sedatives maybe?” I murmured, my mind racing. This was not a complication we needed right now. We needed to be able to send him home tomorrow with no memories of this place so we could focus on getting our new community through the winter.

  “Maybe a reaction to them? He’s been on them off and on all week. Maybe his body’s signaling he’s had enough?” Pamela said.

  Sweat beaded on Bud’s forehead and upper lip, trickling down the gullies of his weathered face. He moaned again through lips that looked dry enough to crack soon.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  Pamela shook her head. “If his fever was a little lower, I’d say just cover him up, monitor his temp and let the fever break on its own. But a hundred and two is pretty high. We need to cool him off. A lukewarm bath might help, and I’ve got some acetaminophen we can give him. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to try more aggressive methods.”

  “Master bath, or the other?” Every house had the same layout with two full baths at either end. The master bathrooms had larger garden tubs.

  “Master bath,” she said. “I’ll set up a pallet in the bedroom too. We can keep Bud there for the night so I can monitor him without having to wake everyone else. Plus, it’s flu season. If that’s what this is, things could get messy soon.”

  Meaning Bud might start vomiting. Great. And the flu was pretty darn contagious too.

  “Maybe Cassie should bunk with Tarah and me in here tonight?” Tarah and I only took up two of the U-shaped couch’s sections, so Cassie could have a whole section to herself.

  Pamela nodded, her face grim. “Let’s hope it isn’t the flu, though. If it is, it’ll spread fast and we’ll have a rough few days till I can catch up to it and get everyone healed. Normally the flu only takes me about an hour or two to detox out of a person’s system, but since it’s so contagious and with the housing situation being what it currently is…”

  I looked around us, trying to see the situation through Pamela’s point of view. She was right. The central air and heat might not be working, but everyone’s bedroom doors were open to allow the heat from the fireplace to warm them. Making this house one big box of communal germs. If Bud was contagious, every person in this house had already been exposed.

  “I’ll tell everyone to stay in the house away from the others tonight just in case,” I said. “At least that will contain it to just this house. We’ll know more tomorrow whether he’s contagious, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Alright. If he is, we’ll do an official quarantine then.”

  “Sounds good.” Pamela bent down and lifted Bud’s arm as if she planned to haul him off to the bathtub herself.

  “Mike and I’ve got this.” I took Bud’s arm from her then called out for Mike. He hopped up from the living room floor by the coffee table to join us. “Bud’s sick,” I explained. “We need to get him into the master tub to cool him down.”

  Mike grabbed Bud’s other arm, and between the two of us, we managed to haul the unconscious man up out of the chair, through the kitchen, through the master bedroom past two metal frame bunk beds and a startled Steve who was reading in bed, and into the master bath. We set Bud on the linoleum covered steps that edged the garden tub. Mike held him upright while I got Bud shucked down to his underwear. Pamela brought a few buckets of room temperature water plus one pot of warmed water to fill the tub a few inches. Once she gave the go-ahead, Mike and I managed to lift Bud over the lip of the tub and into the lukewarm water.

  I tried not to think about how similar this was to arranging that dead cop’s body behind the steering wheel of his car.

  As soon as he was in the water, Bud began to shake. And yet he still didn’t open his eyes.

  “What the heck are you doing?” Steve asked from the doorway behind us.

  “The bus driver’s sick,” Pamela said. “We’ve got to get his fever down. He’ll be sleeping in our room tonight.” She wasn’t asking his permission and clearly didn’t care about her husband’s opinion on the subject.

  I kept my back turned toward Steve to hide my grin. Pamela was a lot stronger than her tiny frame looked.

  “What about Cassie? I don’t want her to get—” Steve began.

  “She’ll be sleeping in the living room tonight,” Pamela said, leaning over to dip a washcloth in the water so she could cool off Bud’s face and neck.

  “I want her out of this house. Now,” Steve said.

  “There’s no telling how long this man has been running a fever,” Pamela said. “If he’s contagious, she’s already been exposed, along with you and me and everyone else in this house. We need to try and keep this contained if we can. We don’t even know what it is yet.”

  Steve cursed loudly. “I told you this might happen. If Cassie gets sick—”

  “Then I’ll heal her, just like I always do every year during flu season.” Pamela’s voice was still firm but turning tense at the edges. “Let’s just see what this is first before we start panicking, okay?”

  Growling, Steve turned and stomped off.

  Pamela sighed. “Hayden, can you call your grandma and see if this could be a reaction to the sedatives? We won’t give him any more just in case, but there might also be something we can give him to counter the reaction, if that’s what this is.”

  “Yep, I’m on it.” I’d left my phone in my truck, so I headed through the house towards the front door now. But what I found in the living room made me instantly change direction.

  “Steve, stop,” Tarah said, keeping her voice low as she stood behind Cassie, holding onto the little girl’s shoulders. “You know her mother doesn’t want her to go.”

  “What do you know about my family’s business?” Steve snarled. “And she’s my kid. I’ll take her wherever I want! Now let her go.” He wasn’t dumb enough to touch Tarah yet, settling for tugging at one of his daughter’s hands.

  “Pamela,” I called out, crossing over to stand at Tarah’s side and add my hand to Cassie’s other shoulder so we both had a hold on her. The kid was shaking, but she made no attempt to be free. Instead, she’d actually grabbed Tarah’s shirt tail with her free hand and was leaning back against us as if for support or comfort.

  “Steve, what do you think you’re doing?” Pamela cried out as she entered the living room.

  “I’ve got to get her out of here,” Steve said. “Can’t you see how dangerous this place is for her? Don’t you want her to be safe?”

  “She is safe, Steve,” Pamela said, moving to stand in front of her daughter. She reached out, and I thought she was going to try and tear Cassie’s hand free from Steve’s grasp. But Pamela simply laid her hand on top of theirs. “Please calm down and think about this logically.”

  Several people poked their heads out through their doorways, then came all the way out into the hallway to watch. Part of me worried that our new audience would cause more trouble. The other part of me hoped they might serve as backup if Steve resorted to Clann abilities I might have never seen before.

  “Logic? There’s nothing illogical about my t
hinking here,” Steve said. “That man is sick in there, and now you want all of us to get sick too.”

  “It’s probably just the sedatives,” I said, working to keep my voice calm and reasonable when all I really wanted to do was punch the crap out of this man then kick him out of the village before he started a group wide panic.

  “Exactly,” Pamela said. “Too much sedatives, and he just needs to sleep them off. Worst case scenario, it’s the flu, and he’ll be sick for a few days then right as rain afterward, and I can detox anyone else who gets it in a matter of hours. There’s no more danger to any of us here than if we were back home and one of Cassie’s classmates or our coworkers came down with it.”

  “The flu?” someone murmured in the hallway.

  “Yeah, the flu,” I barked, fast losing my patience. “Everyone gets it every year. You feel like crap for a few hours while Pamela detoxes you, then you’re back to normal. It wouldn’t be the end of the world here, people.” Geez, they acted like we had no healers and were incapable of reaching the town a few miles away if necessary.

  “But the flu’s really contagious,” someone else said. “And people die from it every year.”

  “If they’re already weak and don’t get help,” Pamela countered. “I’m not the only healer in this group, and the city’s got a good hospital just a few miles away if needed. I’ve treated the flu in my family every year. There’s really no need to panic. Steve, you know I can handle healing someone with the flu. How many times have I taken care of you when you came down with it?”

  Steve shook his head. “But that was when we lived in town—”

  That was it. I’d had enough. “Steve, cut the crap. You know this is really just about you wanting to take your family away from here. Tell the truth and quit trying to scare everyone.”

  Silence in the hallway as the attention shifted back to Steve.

  His eyes narrowed as his scowl deepened. “Yeah, I want my family out of here. Why wouldn’t I? You think I should be happy having to share a house with other families? And now we’re probably going to be quarantined in here too.”