by Lish McBride
“No Veronica and Olive this morning?”
For whatever reason, Cade had really taken to having the hares around. He must really miss having a kid in the house if he was missing Olive.
“Everyone met up at the hospital as soon as they were done at Thomas’s,” I said. “Nothing else useful for them to do right now, so they stayed to keep an eye on Sid.”
“If we can,” Sylvie added, her cheek resting on the table, “we should bring them some food that doesn’t come from a vending machine.”
“Of course.” Cade got out the bread for toast and grabbed the eggs from the back of the fridge. I stood up to help him, and he shoved me one-handed back into the chair. “You look like you’re about to keel over. Sit.”
I didn’t try to get back up. He was right. I was weary down to my freaking bones. My heart felt worn through, all the energy having leaked out of the resulting hole. I rested my chin on my hands, which were folded on the table.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this hopeless,” I said. “Even with all the crap we had to wade through with Venus, I never felt like I do right now.”
“Not even when you lost your mom?” Katya asked.
“That was different,” I said, watching Lock as he rose to grab us all orange juice. Ezra got the glasses. Things had to be bad if Ezra was helping and not complaining about it. “I felt devastated, but I had a goal and a plan, even if it was just to get to Cade. But this … I don’t even know what to do with this.”
Ezra rolled his neck, trying to stretch out the kinks. “I think it’s because we were used to how it was before. We might not have liked how Venus ran things, but we knew to expect misery and awfulness. But with Alistair, there’s no precedent to follow.”
“For a minute, we all tasted change,” Lock agreed. “We got to see what the Coterie could become. Then Thomas had to go Attack of the Giant Gastropods all over it.” He spilled a little of the orange juice and set the carton down to get a towel. “Also, you hate any situation that can’t be solved with fire or a solid uppercut.”
I’d have argued, but he was right. That was the scary thing about diseases—you couldn’t really fight them. Your immune system had to do that. It didn’t matter how healthy and strong you were, either. There was always a tiny organism out there in the world that could take you down. “If we could find a cure, that would be fighting it.”
“What do you want us to do, Ava? Put on some lab coats and try to Scooby Doo this problem away?” Lock tossed the towel onto the counter angrily. Cade didn’t say anything—didn’t even look at him—but two seconds later Lock was straightening it and putting it back on the bar to dry.
“I can’t help you with cartoon montages,” Ezra said, his chin in his hand. “But I could get us lab coats. I know a guy.”
I snorted. “You always know a guy.”
Sylvie stared at her orange juice glass, watching the condensation build on the sides. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Ezra getting us back-alley lab coats?” I asked.
“I think we’ve been approaching this wrong again.”
Katya drew on the table with her finger, leaving a frost line as her fingertip brushed the surface. “In what way?”
“The doctor’s been looking into an antibiotic or some other medicine that can touch this thing. We searched Thomas’s house, hoping he had a cure stashed away. Either way, we’re going about this medicinally.”
“That tends to be how illness is approached,” Cade said. The pan hissed as he poured in the eggs.
“But this isn’t a normal sickness,” Sylvie said emphatically. “It’s magic.”
“It’s still sickness,” Cade said. “It’s going to act a certain predictable way, and it will react to something. Everything has a cure. You just need to find it in time.”
“But that’s the thing,” Sylvie said, looking up from her glass. “This parasite is predictable, at least so far, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same as a human illness. We can see that in the fact that Sid’s having a hard time with the fungus. If it were a normal disease or parasite, his system would have given it the boot already, right?”
“Where are you going with this?” I asked.
“Magic,” she said as Cade put the first batch of toast onto a plate. “That’s what’s making the fungus act differently.”
“They really do remind me of those locusts,” Ezra said.
“Then let’s start there,” Sylvie said. “What made the locusts frenzy?”
I got the jam out of the fridge and placed it on the table. “A high concentration of magic. They’re drawn to it.” I paused, my hand hovering over the jar after I set it down. “Which is how we baited the locusts. I threw fire to distract them and draw them away from Ezra.”
Sylvie tapped the table with her fork. “This fungus is drawn to magic, and it mutated to adapt to the snails’ magic. So why wouldn’t the cure be magic?”
We all digested this while Cade scrambled the eggs, stopping occasionally to turn the bacon he’d decided to cook in a separate pan. “What we need to do is put all the elements we have together. So what have we learned about the fungus?” Sylvie mused.
“It only affects magical creatures,” I said.
“It doesn’t seem to like me or my family very much,” Katya said.
“It doesn’t thrive in the cold,” Lock said. “That’s why they dropped the temperature in the clinic.”
Ezra grabbed a piece of bacon from my plate as soon as Cade placed it there. “What if it hates Katya’s family because of what they are? It doesn’t like cold. They regularly reach temperatures on the low end. Maybe that’s why they were never infected. The fungus finds the cold uninhabitable.”
I thought back to the locusts again, and to the snails on the boat—they’d moved toward me even though I was throwing fire at them. “What if we found a way to bait the fungus itself? Draw it out of the host body?”
Sylvie squinted in the bright sun streaming in through the window. “Dialysis. Do you guys know how dialysis works?”
We didn’t, but Cade did. “They use an artificial kidney.” He scraped the eggs into a large serving bowl. “Your blood goes into the machine and it uses a compound—I can’t remember the name—to balance your electrolytes and clean out your blood. Then it goes back in.” The pan sizzled and popped as he added new bacon. “I saw a documentary about it.”
“So what if we did magical dialysis?” Sylvie asked.
“How? Did you invent a magical artificial kidney this morning before breakfast?”
Sylvie shook her head. “We don’t need a machine. Machines aren’t magic—you guys are. What we need to do is convince the fungus that its host is no longer viable and it needs to move on. Then we’ll need bait to convince the fungus to leave. Once we have it rounded up, we destroy it.”
“How would we convince the fungus the host is about to go?” I asked. “It’s not like we could send it an invitation or anything.”
Lock took over the bacon without being asked as Cade poured pancake batter into a pan. “The doctor mentioned other parasites like this, right?” Lock asked. “They left when they were offered something better or there was a necessary new step, like seeking a breeding ground. Magical creatures offer them food but they also offer them somewhere to breed. We need to ask the doctor if there’s some way we could safely make the host body uninhabitable.” He turned the pieces of bacon one by one in the pan, making sure they browned evenly. “We need to get back to the clinic and see if we can get anyone on board with this crazy idea.”
*
ALISTAIR WASN’T exactly thrilled with Sylvie’s plan, but he listened. I think it was the “make the host’s body unappealing” part of things that he found troubling. Because the best idea we had for that was for the doctor to medically induce a coma and use ice packs to cool the body down. We didn’t want to use magic to do it because that would be offering the fungus a fuel and would entice it to stay. Once the hosts were co
ld, we would have to tempt the fungus into exiting. We’d use the snails Alistair’s team had confiscated from Thomas’s for that. We’d put one into contact with the infected person. The fungus had already shown a liking for them, so it should make its way back into the snail. We would just have to hope that the weakened physical and magical state of the hosts would make the snail not want to feed off them. If not, we’d have to act quickly before the snail got more than a bite or two. Once the transfer had been made, Dr. Wesley or one of our other resident humans could remove the snail. Katya would freeze it, and then we’d bag it up, label it, and hand it off to the doctor to test. We were hoping that she’d eventually be able to manufacture some sort of vaccine or something if we managed to get her enough samples.
It seemed crazy, somewhat dangerous, and I had no idea if it would actually work. So really, not much different from our normal plans.
“We should test it on Bianca,” Dr. Wesley said.
“Absolutely not,” Alistair said emphatically. I caught a faint whiff of ozone as thunder rolled through the room.
“Cut that out,” Dr. Wesley said. “This is a hospital room. Not a good place for a tantrum.” The doctor slipped a pen into the pocket of her scrubs. “Remember, Alistair, as the fungus progresses, it destroys the brain. It hasn’t gone that far in Bianca, but once it does, there’s no coming back from that. Sid is a were. If we get the fungus out of him and give him time, he will heal any sort of brain damage as long as it’s not fatal. For her sake, Bianca should go first.”
I could tell Alistair still wanted to debate the plan further but couldn’t think of anything valid to say. We couldn’t put it off if we wanted to save Bianca’s brain. She might not have the most charming of personalities sometimes, but better bitchy than vegetable.
Bianca agreed with our logic, though hesitated at the “we’re going to put a giant magic-eating snail on your chest” part. Not the forced-coma thing. No, she was cool with that. But the snail? Well, she’d heard what I’d said about Fitz, and he hadn’t woken up yet. Bianca’s life, like most of our lives, was centered around her gift. What would she do if it were gone?
Dr. Wesley and her assistant hooked Bianca up to a lot of machines that I couldn’t identify—things that beeped, hummed, and even went ping. The Monty Python boys would have been thrilled. Any machine that wouldn’t play well with even the smallest spark was removed if it could be. Cold packs were placed around her body. Sylvie brought in a snail in a cat carrier, which was just weird. Once Bianca was confirmed to be under and cold enough, we needed to offer tempting bait. I, of course, made the best bait.
I created a small fire butterfly, letting it hover above Bianca’s chest, keeping it close enough to draw the fungus, but not so close as to warm Bianca up. A rosy stain spread under Bianca’s skin directly under the butterfly. The bait was working. Once the stain stopped growing and the doctor thought all the fungus was accounted for, I let the butterfly dissipate, and Sylvie handed the doctor the snail.
The doctor placed the snail on Bianca’s chest directly above the pink stain. She held it there, which was harder than it sounds, because the snail wasn’t really interested in staying still. We all watched in disgusting fascination as the stain moved up Bianca’s chest toward her throat.
Katya stood by, ready to freeze the snail at a moment’s notice. Then we waited, a rapt audience observing through the glass. The doctor had insisted that everyone else wait outside unless they were needed. Not a good idea to give the fungus other tempting hosts.
The minutes ticked by.
“How long until we know if it’s worked?” Sylvie whispered. Everyone had been whispering, even though they couldn’t hear us through the glass and it wasn’t like we were going to wake Bianca up.
“Until I’m sure the spores have all moved onto greener gastropod pastures,” I said, sounding confident, even though I felt far from it.
Bianca sneezed then. And she kept sneezing, sending a clear fluid out over the doctor and the snail. The snail went crazy for it, and acting on instinct, the doctor let the snail go, letting it clean up all the infected fluid.
“See?” I said. “I told you it would find a way.” The fungus was magic, and the snails were drawn to the closest source.
“Nature is disgusting,” Katya said.
“I agree.” I took another step back, feeling that a little more space between me and the fungus was for the best. “Fighting fungus mucus with snails and vice versa. I am going to be so glad when we can go back to beating things up.”
Dr. Wesley removed the snail, holding it up for Katya. The snail shied from her, trying to pull its head into its shell, but you can’t run from a Jill Frost. Katya froze it quickly. I doubt the snail had time to suffer. The purple-haired assistant entered as soon as the snail was frozen and the doctor deemed it safe, and held open a collection bag with gloved fingers. The doctor dropped the flash-frozen gastropod inside. It was done. The cold would, hopefully, kill the fungus, leaving the snail for her to dissect and study. Just to be safe, the doctor and her assistant cleared the room so Katya could finish up. We weren’t sure that the snail had cleared away all the fungus, so she sent a frost along the walls, blankets, counters, and finally across Bianca’s skin. Bianca might end up with some frostbite, but she could recover from that. Katya left the room and the doctor came back in, ready to bring Bianca’s body temperature back up. Dr. Wesley kept glancing at the machines, their pings and whirs telling her something that none of us could understand.
After a frenzy of activity involving warm blankets and rapid-fire orders, the doctor stopped. She took off her gloves, tossed them in the garbage can, and pulled down her mask. The doctor came out to go over everything with Alistair. “We’ve started the wake-up process. Now we’ll just have to wait and see.”
I crossed my fingers.
24
LIFE BONUS: SOMETIMES THE SELFISH THING IS ALSO THE RIGHT THING
BIANCA DIDN’T just pop right back up after the procedure. Her body had to process the anesthetics she’d been given, and the doctor thought it best to warm her up slowly. While she was sleeping it off, they tried the procedure on Sid. No one wanted to put it off any longer, and the feeling was that if Bianca’s procedure hadn’t worked, it wasn’t like trying the same thing on Sid was going to make him much worse than he already was.
Sid’s ride wasn’t as smooth. On the one hand, he was already chilled and they didn’t have to be as careful with the cold packs, but his body was also more resistant to the anesthetics. He couldn’t be dosed as easily as Bianca. The doctor had to take his accelerated metabolism into account and hope that his species wouldn’t matter. Weres didn’t exactly go to clinics or hospitals usually, so she was essentially flying blind.
After it was done, Alistair sent us all to our beds. No one had the energy to argue. We’d done what we could, and we were wiped out. Sylvie decided to nap on a pull-out couch in Fitz’s hospital room. She thought he’d like to wake up and see someone familiar. I was just hoping he’d wake up at all.
As I was pulling off my boots back at home, I got a text from Cade.
Hope all is well, Rat. The shop is quiet without you and Sylvie. Coming home soon?
My dad would rather poke out his own eye than use textspeak, and he’d have poked out mine if I replied in it.
I am hopeful, which is more than I’ve been in weeks. At the cabin now. Must rest. Will check in properly later. I hit send, then passed out before I made it under the sheets. I didn’t even bother getting out of my clothes.
I felt like I’d just closed my eyes when Ezra sat on the bed with a cup of coffee. “Yes, you’re tired and, yes, this is cruel. The fox in me is very angry about being awake. But there is coffee and I’m told the patients are up and Lock feels we should investigate, and he asks for very little, so we’re going to indulge him.”
I took the coffee he offered. “Bringing me this must go against everything you hold dear.”
His head tilted. “Of
course not. There are separate rules for family. Sometimes. If I feel like it.”
Lock leaned through my doorway, freshly showered and shaved. Like the rest of us, he still looked haggard, but it was an improvement. “‘If I feel like it’ being the operative part of that statement. We leave in five.”
Ezra sighed, staring at my coffee for a long moment right before he grabbed it back and downed it in one long gulp. “I’ll go get you another cup.”
“You do that.”
*
BIANCA AND SID were both still hooked to machines, despite the fact that they were sitting up and looking alert. Sid especially looked perky and ready to go and was currently working his way through the entire roast chicken Ikka had brought him. Healing was hungry work. We watched as Bianca threw a veil and Sid demonstrated his shifting skills for the doctor, who was suitably impressed. Their magic was fine, and they appeared fungus free. Dr. Wesley was keeping them under observation for a few more days, though, just in case.
Fitz woke up later that night. The doctor looked him over and declared him physically fit and ready to leave in a few days. She wanted to recheck his blood work. If he was still clear of the fungus, he could go whenever he wanted. Alistair had brought him new clothes, which he’d put on reluctantly, but now he sat despondently on the edge of the bed as Sylvie tried to give him a pep talk. I knocked, and they waved me in.
“It’s gone, Sylvie. I can feel the absence of it.”
Sylvie’s brow furrowed as she gave him a glare I recognized. She was about to argue him into the ground, which I didn’t think would go over very well.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“My magic,” Fitz said, dipping his head lower in mourning. “It’s gone. I am to be stuck in this form forever.”
I could think of worse outcomes, but Fitz didn’t need to hear that right then. “So you’re, what, human now?”
Fitz’s head snapped up like I’d slapped him. “Absolutely not. I was born a kelpie, and no matter what is done to me, that’s what I’ll be when I give myself up to the depths. Nothing you can do will change what I am.”