Heart Secret

by Robin D. Owens

  Garrett had moved the man to the chill dead area, cleansed in the sanitation tube, figured it wouldn’t help.

  People deteriorated and a lot of them died. The stench rose around him.

  He moved bodies to the back, but there wasn’t enough room for them all. He had to raise the shelves against the wall, stack bodies.

  Old Grisc, the driver, succumbed to fever eight septhours in. Garrett had to stop. The road was bad, the weather got bad—sleet and mud. People were dying, and he’d never driven such a vehicle.

  The very worst memory rose like a ghost. Vivid and horrifying. Icy pellets had battered the windshield. It was full dark, and the console in front of him was lit, but the timer was nothing but a blur. Night was deep and dark, no bright twinmoons or stars, but they were finally off the mountain.

  An eternity of time had passed. He thought he’d been in the hellbox forever. He stopped the bus and rested his throbbing head on the steering bar, felt the cool press of padded metal against his hot forehead.

  A time later he’d lifted his aching bones from the driver’s chair and moved into the main compartment. No reason to keep the doors shut.

  Old Grisc trembled and sweated in a front seat. Another old woman had died. Garrett picked her up and shuffled down the broad aisle. There were few enough now—eight? ten?—that everyone slumped across a row.

  He glanced at Dinni. She was pale with a gleam of sweat. He nodded, but she didn’t look at him or the woman he carried. He opened the door and put the shell of the person atop her husband. They’d been bonded HeartMates, so there’d been no hope for her. HeartBonded died within a year of each other. That hadn’t helped the grief of loss. He’d known the pair. The little town he’d grown up in, Dinni had grown up in, was attached to the Smallage estate.

  The dead section of the bus was colder than outside and a relief to Garrett. Cold to preserve the lost for study.

  After a while he got his feet moving and went into the main compartment.

  Dinni was crooning a little sleep song to the baby that mothers sang. He moved to her and everything in him simply stopped.

  The baby was dead.

  Dinni didn’t seem to understand or acknowledge that.

  Garrett’s knees gave out and he fell into the seat next to her. “Dinni,” he said and his lips cracked and he tasted blood-salt.

  She lifted big blue eyes to him, smiled sweetly. “You’ll get us to the safe place, Garrett.” Her voice was barely a rasping whisper.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know you do,” she said.

  He closed his fingers over her upper arm. “Don’t leave me. Stay with me. Stay alive. Please. Please, Dinni.”

  She nodded solemnly. “We will.” Her lips cracked, too. “When will we get there?”

  He levered himself away from the horror, back into duty that would force him to the driver’s seat, to the clinic, to more of this hell. He wanted to stay with her, hold her. But he couldn’t face the dead child.

  “Stay with me,” he demanded as he had before.

  Unlike when she’d left him, this time Dinni said she would.

  “Stay alive.”

  “We will.”

  Didn’t matter if he thought she lied. Didn’t matter that she’d never love him as he loved her, would never be his wife. He only wanted her alive. If he could get her to the clinic, they would help her.

  His steps back to the cab dragged as if chained weights were attached to his ankles. His hands whitened around the steering bar. He could set the autonav now. They were close enough for that. Nothing else on this road and only a couple of septhours to the HealingHall. He would make it. So would Dinni.

  He had to. He had to save Dinni, so he couldn’t give up.

  And he didn’t. He jolted from a daze as they pulled into the clinic yard. Healers rushed out, spellshields surrounding them in lovely colors, seeming to pick up the light of the dawn. He moved back into the bus. Old Grisc was dead. So were most of the others.

  Dinni wasn’t and Garrett prayed and prayed. “We’re here. Stay with me.”

  “We will,” she croaked.

  He’d helped her out, and the other three.

  Healers took her away, but after a moment he heard screams.

  Then time passed as he fell into nightmares. Felt cool hands and sipped liquids. They took care of him. For a while.

  He fought to stay alive for Dinni, passed out, revived, succumbed. His head finally cleared enough for him to smell his own filth days later.

  He was the only one alive in the entire clinic. That had been another horror he’d dealt with, cleaned up.

  He yelled, “Dinni!”

  And the bright light of the mountain clinic glared on and on, revealing only death.

  It dimmed and he was in Heather’s office again. That FirstLevel Healer continued to tap her writestick and judge. Lark Holly was no longer there.

  Artemisia Mugwort Panax held out her hands and wept.

  He didn’t want her; he turned away.

  * * *

  Garrett had quieted except for the fever tremors. Artemisia didn’t know whether that was good or bad. She sensed he fought.

  For the first time in two septhours, she took a deep breath, wiping her sleeve across her forehead. She was sticky with perspiration. TQ had adjusted the atmosphere of the room for Garrett’s comfort and she’d suffered through the changes.

  “He seems to be resting more easily,” TQ said.

  “For now,” Artemisia agreed, standing and shaking out her limbs.

  TQ creaked.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I reviewed my records. Dinni Spurge Flixweed and her two-month-old son died at the mountain clinic. She had recommended and requested Garrett be a driver for the quarantine bus. Dinni had a prior personal relationship with Garrett.”

  Artemisia’s heart gave a large, dull thud. “The child wasn’t Primross’s?”

  “No, the child’s father was one of those who found the fish and contracted the disease first. He died and left Dinni Flixweed a widow.”

  Artemisia put a hand to her chest. How horrible that must have been for the woman, for her husband to die fast of an unknown sickness, for her baby to contract the same illness. To leave her home for sanctuary—and be turned away. What a terrible situation. Artemisia’s throat closed at the pity of it. She swallowed tears.

  No one at the mountain quarantine clinic had survived except Garrett. So Dinni and her baby had died.

  So sad. Tragic.

  “Shouldn’t you take a blood sample?” TQ reminded gently.

  Artemisia shook off the bleakness of the past. “Yes.”

  Again she automatically did what needed to be done. But Dinni’s story haunted her, and after she took Garrett’s blood and stored it, she found herself in the dressing room, shivering with effort to suppress fear. She could die. Worse, the epidemic could arise, mutate, kill off every single being of Earthan origin—human, Fam, and animal—on Celta. They could be a dead race.

  She let the brain-numbing fear whirl through her, coat her skin in cold sweat, drip tears from her eyes as she trembled and gasped, visualized all that could go wrong. Not a technique she used to weather terrible events, but this time it worked. When she was on the far side of panic, she felt stronger, able to recapture serenity.

  Once again she checked on Gar—GentleSir Primross, and he appeared to be as well as possible. “Can you monitor our patient while I take a quick waterfall and change my clothes?”

  “Of course, Artemisia.”

  “Thank you.”

  After she’d washed her panic-sweat away, was cleansed and smelling of fresh herbs, dressed in shabby, loose clothes that she could sleep in, she felt steady. She wouldn’t let the sickness win. Nor
would any of the Healers.

  Garrett wouldn’t, either. Even now he fought, muttering, back in that terrible time.

  This time they would all win.

  She was hopeful until he began shouting again.

  “Dinni! Dinni!” He called so desperately it squeezed her heart and brought more tears. She bent and covered his fist with her palm. His fingers turned, grabbed, his eyelids opened. “Not Dinni!” His voice broke. He flung her hand aside and thrashed until he rolled and his back displayed a purple-bruised rash.

  She gasped and hurried to smooth ointment onto his skin. When she touched him, he moaned and writhed . . . and pled for Dinni. Artemisia forced emotions away. She could not fulfill the man’s cry for the woman. He was a patient who needed her help and that was all she could provide.

  By the time the cream was gone, he’d sweated through his trous and sheets again. This she could deal with. And now he couldn’t mind if he were nude, and it was better for them both.

  “Clothes off!” she ordered and the spell-melding seams disintegrated. “Cleanse!” Garrett’s body lifted and clothes and linens whipped from under him and rolled, dry sides out. The scent of fresh herbs flooded the room. “Fit!” New sheets skimmed over the bedsponge, tucked themselves in, again adding fragrance—clover in bloom.

  She quickly replaced his fluids belt. He groaned again as she reactivated the spell, then checked it, sighing when all was working properly.

  The FirstLevel Healers appeared and she listened to TQ’s report. She walked to the observation door and gave her own, handing over the blood samples and fluid belts. Ura Heather seemed satisfied, Lark Holly concerned. Lark said they’d come by in the evening, then Artemisia and TQ would be on their own throughout the night.

  Late in the afternoon she heard a bumping at the window and looked over to see cats sitting outside it, staring at Garrett.

  Their mouths opened and they yowled in chorus.

  “Stop that!” she snapped, then, “Soundproof the room, TQ!”

  Silence descended with only the sound of Garrett’s harsh breathing—and his joints cracking as he struggled to get out of bed. “Feeding time,” he gasped. “Must feed ferals. Cats on the bus? Do we have food? Grisc?” He looked to the window, blinked around crusty lashes. “I hear you already. What are cats doing on the front of the bus?”

  Artemisia was amazed to see Garrett stagger toward the window. She grasped his unsteady body, using Flair to get him back in bed.

  He tussled with her. “Must feed feral Fams!”

  “I’ll take care of it! TQ, the cats must be speaking to him telepathically. Tell them I’ll be right out!”

  “I am repeating that announcement through an outside speaker,” TQ said.

  Garrett blinked again. “Dinni? You don’t know the cats.” His head shook ponderously. “Not Dinni.”

  “No, but I’ll take care of the cats.” She didn’t want to send him into his tormenting past. “Time for a little break, isn’t it?”

  He sat against pillows as if they were a driving seat, his fingers curled like they held a steering stick.

  “Rest, get your strength up,” she said.

  “To make the trip.” He glanced along the wall. “Dinni is still there. Old Grisc is sick.”

  “We can do this.”

  Garrett’s shoulders set, his jaw firmed. “Will do this. Don’ like the looks of that shelf road. Might crumble behind us. Gotta go fast as we can . . .”

  Artemisia shuddered, then counted every second as she was decontaminated and drew on new clothes. Once TQ told her that she was Iasc-microbe free, she teleported out to the back grassyard.

  Cats circled her, staring.

  Eleven

  TQ’s actor’s voice lilted indulgently. “The SecondLevel Healer is coming to feed you, please wait.”

  “I’m here,” Artemisia said.

  A short growl and inimical glare from a black-and-white tom.

  “He says you have no food in your hands,” TQ said.

  “You can speak with them telepathically?” she asked.

  “Not quite,” TQ said. “But I have had cat Fams within and can read their body language.”

  Artemisia glanced around until she spotted a series of scrystones that TQ must be using to view them, and a speaker.

  A spotted kitten gamboled up. “Pppht, phht, fhhoot!”

  “Food?” She frowned, glanced at TQ. “Isn’t he too little for dry food?”

  “He will eat a bit, but will also be fed by his mother.”

  “Oh.” She stared at the line of bowls on the deck under the House’s overhang but saw no food. Turning, she caught the glimmer of more eyes in the bushes.

  “The cats who live here are hungry and want to eat before the dogs and others come.”

  “All right, all right. Where’s the food?”

  “In the small south-side porch,” TQ said.

  And Artemisia realized she was irritated. Instead of being annoyed, she should bless the distraction for getting her outside, letting her feel colorful comfort.

  She moved to the window to check on Garrett. He was “driving.” Sweat slid down his face.

  “I must get back,” she said.

  “His vital signs have not changed,” TQ reassured her.

  A door clicked unlocked. As she walked to the south, spellshields vanished and a pale turquoise forceglass door opened.

  Artemisia sighed and went into the porch made of the same tinted glass. She smiled. The House-becoming-a-Residence was optimistic in all its ways, including cheerful tinting.

  There was a bin with a slanted top. Inside was a huge bag of dry “Multi-Fam Tasty Fooood!” She didn’t think so. “Is this—” she began but stopped when she saw cats lining up near the door. “I guess it is.” Using Flair, she lifted the bag and filled ten bowls to the rim.

  Gobbling noises filled the air.

  “GentleSir Primross does this every day?” she asked, looking at the motley sizes and shapes of the FamCats, the scruffiness of the dogs who’d appeared.

  “Twice a day,” TQ affirmed.

  “He’s more generous than I thought.”

  A thin black cat lifted his muzzle, stared at her, made sounds she couldn’t decipher.

  TQ chuckled. “The cats say this is payment for information.”

  “Hmm.” Artemisia put the bag back and looked longingly at the late-afternoon summer sunlight. “How’s he doing?”

  “I would inform you if he had problems,” TQ said.

  As she nodded and left the porch, a plump calico trotted up and swished across her legs.

  “The cats also get petting,” TQ said.

  “Oh.” Artemisia crossed to a bench that was half in and half out of shade. The sun felt good, but she’d get hot soon if she stayed in it, and she didn’t want to spare any Flair to shield herself from rays.

  She was enjoying petting the cat when the black-and-white tom strolled up, growled at the calico, swatted her rear, and took her place. Other cats sauntered up in a raggedly spaced line, waiting their turn, and grooming.

  Stroking the cats, rubbing the dogs—who were at the last of the line—helped Artemisia relax even more. And as she saw the cats arrange themselves in the sun or shade as they pleased, she thought of the small cat in TQ’s HouseHeart.

  “Feral Fams?” She projected her voice.

  They all looked at her.

  “GentleSir Primross must like you very much.” A couple sniffed, most revved their purrs. The dog she was petting swiped her hand with his tongue. “If you like him, you might want to send him any energy you can spare during his sickness.”

  At that two of the cats jumped upon the wide sill outside the MasterSuite bedroom window and stared in. Artemisia could feel their suppo
rt—mental, emotional, physical, even Flair—being transmuted to Garrett.

  Which reminded her it was time to step back into his nightmares.

  She stood slowly, absorbing all she could of the peace in the grassyard. Then with a sigh, she teleported into her dressing room.

  And saw the spotted kitten on the bed with Garrett.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  I am his Fam, the kitten insisted.

  “TQ?” she asked.

  “He teleported through the window. I think a Fam will be good for Garrett.”

  The kitten looked at the four cats on the windowsill and lifted his small brown nose. I will give him MORE love, MORE energy, than They. Because I want to be FAM with him. A loud sniff. They come and They go and They eat and get little pettings from him, but I will give more and get more!

  She certainly heard him clearly and didn’t know if that meant he was more Flaired than the others or he was more interested in telepathically speaking with her.

  “What about your mother?”

  She does not want to be a Fam. I do.

  “Aren’t you too young—”

  No. This is MY FamMan. With a rough purr, he curled up in the curve between Garrett’s shoulder and head and flicked a tongue out at Garrett’s jaw, then sent her an accusing gaze.

  He needs washing.

  She supposed he did—and his fluids belt changed and his blood taken again. But the man appeared to have subsided into sleep, though his fingers fisted and released and he mumbled.

  Narrowing her eyes, she thought she saw the aura of the small cat impinging on Garrett’s, helping him.

  All to the good.

  “Animals don’t get the Iasc sickness?” She knew that, but her voice raised in a question to TQ anyway.

  “No, Artemisia,” the House said.

  After one last sigh, she got to work.

  The next couple of septhours, she spent hands-on time with Garrett, wiping him down, rubbing ointments into his body, replenishing his fluids. The kitten watched her, and the Fams outside the window rotated.