Capture (36 page)

“
There's my truck keys if anyone needs anything from town.”

She was looking down at the keys as I slammed the door shut in front of her.

She had the nerve to start to open the door again. Without looking, I slammed it shut for the last time then locked it. Then I turned and checked the temperature of the water on the stove. After a few seconds, the sound of footsteps faded off my porch.

Good.
I had work to do.

“
Well, you sure told her,” Tarah murmured, her teeth still chattering.

I crouched down beside her.
“Had to. I wanted you all for myself.” I forced a smile for her, even as her trembling tried its best to break my heart.

Tarah’s eyes rolled around in their sockets.
For a few seconds, I panicked, thinking she was going into convulsions or something. But then her gaze locked back onto mine and she smiled. “It’s kind of dark in here. But f-from what I can see, it looks really g-good.”

She’d been checking out her new home.
I let the breath of relief ease out of me. “Not done with it yet. But it should be good enough for now. Get well for me and I might even let you do the interior decorating.”

“
Yeah?” She clutched the blankets up to her chin as a fresh round of shivering wracked her body. “Resorting to b-bribery now?”

I couldn’t talk for a minute
as my throat choked up. I took her hand, swallowed hard, and finally managed to say, “Whatever it takes. Now rest while I go see what meds I can find, all right?”

I waited for her nod before I rushed out, the cold burning my already stinging eyes.

I had to search the infirmary’s kitchen cabinets to find the acetaminophen; the dragon ladies now running the show there refused to speak to me when I asked for some. Apparently they’d decided they couldn’t fight me over Tarah, but they sure weren’t going to help me none either.

They still had several bottles of meds, so I went ahead and took a mostly empty bottle plus a ceramic cup sitting on the drainboard.
I also got some more firewood, which I left on my porch by the door for later. Finally, I found a tube of cherry flavored chapstick in the backseat of my truck.

Tarah’s eyes were closed when I returned, and she was murmuring something I couldn’t make out.

“Hey, Tarah, I’m back,” I told her, holding her hand. With my free hand I managed to twist and then pop the cap off the medicine. I shook out a few pills on the blanket by her.

She didn’t respond.

C
HAPTER 23

F
ighting the rising panic, I dipped the cup from the infirmary into the water, now hot, on the stove. I had to blow it a little to cool it off. Then I slid a hand under Tarah’s head, lifting her up as I pressed the cup to her lips. “Take a sip, Tarah. I need you to take some medicine now.”

She seemed to hear me this time, dutifully swallowing the pills after I slid them past her lips.
Then I applied the chapstick to her lips, doing a crap job of getting it on straight. Not that Tarah seemed to care about a little smeared lip product.

It was beyond nightmarish how quickly the virus gained a hold over her.
She didn’t speak again over the next few hours other than to make the occasional whimper, her head tossing and turning in her sleep like she was having bad dreams.

But they couldn’t be nearly as bad as the real life memories I was making with her right now.

I alternated between washing her face and neck, getting her to take sips of water or more pills, and holding her hand, wanting her to know at all times that I was there. When she slept more peacefully, though her fever was still high, I ran out to the truck for the spellbook, waiting till I was back by her side before rereading the chapter on healing. I also tried to remember what Mike had told me about how to heal.

Again and again, I followed
both his and the spellbook’s instructions, trying to make my conscious mind relax and somehow mystically enter Tarah’s body, hunt down the sickness and eradicate it.

Over and over again, I failed.

In frustration, I sat there on the floor, hands buried in my hair, tugging at it, using the pain on my scalp to keep me from going nuts. I stood up with the urge to pace then stopped myself just in time. I couldn’t risk shaking the floor and disturbing Tarah. Her body probably needed this rest to help heal itself.

At least s
he was sleeping peacefully now. But her fever climbed ever higher with each passing hour.

She was like a flame, burning brighter and brighter, so beautiful and brilliant to look at even as her body tried to burn itself out as fast as it could.

And I was completely powerless to stop it.

“
Please, Tarah,” I whispered, sinking to my knees beside her, her hand limp and far too hot when I picked it up again. “Tarah, you’ve got to fight! I can’t do it for you. You’ve got to do it. I know you can still hear me. Fight!”

Hot liquid scalded my eyes, my nose and cheeks as I kissed her hand, her body just a shell, her mind and soul so far out of my reach now.

Closing my eyes, I rested my forehead against her hand. I looked at her face, serene now, like that day when she’d seemed like an otherworldly queen, calm and accepting. She’d asked me to believe in the impossible that day. To have faith that the dark would end.

She wouldn’t like my panicking like this.

“
You've got to get well, Tarah,” I whispered to her, watching her face for some response, any response at all. “What about that story you wanted to finish writing about this place? Who's going to finish it if you don't? Not me. You know I can't write nothing worth crap.”

No response from her, no flicker from her closed eyes.

She was the only person who really knew me, all of me, and still accepted me as I was. She wasn’t just the first girl I’d fallen in love with. She was also my first and only true best friend other than my brother, and the only person I’d been completely honest with. If I lost her, there wasn’t another person on this planet who would know who I really was.

I couldn’t lose her.

I wouldn’t.
If she went, she’d have to take me with her.

I closed my eyes, pressed my lips to the back of her hand, and whispered,
“Tell me what I have to do, and I swear I’ll do it. Just please...don’t die.”

“
You have to let go of yourself and what you want,” Mike had told me during our one and only tutorial on healing. The useless spellbook said the same thing. “You have to learn how to let go of who you are.”

Just let go,
I could hear Tarah whisper to me.

And just like that, it clicked.

It was like falling asleep. Or maybe I really did fall asleep, because it sure seemed like a dream.

I was outside my body, a thin
silver thread holding my spirit to my body at my stomach. I saw Tarah’s body just below me, and my spirit growing smaller, floating down, the cord that bound me to my body stretching like infinite elastic as I seemed to sink right through Tarah’s skin, through her tissues and muscles, into her veins that appeared all around me then like a maze of red tunnels. Beyond, I could feel her organs throbbing and pulsing.

Something bumped into me.
I turned to look. It was a strangely shapeless black blob. And there, another black orb.

“
Tarah, I’m yours,” I whispered, embracing those evil shapes, not willing them to come to me, but simply allowing them to attack me if they wanted to. Because I didn’t care if I got sick now. If that was what it took to save Tarah, if I had to take the virus out of her and into my own body, even if I got sick in the process, even if I died, it would be worth it. Up to now, my life on earth hadn’t really been all that spectacular. But Tarah...she deserved to live. She had a story to tell. Hers. Mine. These people’s. She had to live and tell that story so it wouldn't all be a big pointless waste.

But the black masses raced away.

“No!” I shouted. “No, it’s me you want, not her!”

The virus didn’t listen
, and I could see it through the semi transparent walls of her veins, rushing off to attack her heart now, surrounding the desperately beating organ as if it were the last fortress in the virus’s war on humanity and it must be brought down tonight.

And as always, I couldn’t save her.
I seemed destined to love her and lose her. I had no sword, no Clann skills, no medicine, no weapon at all to fight the virus with. Nothing. If only the virus would attack the both of us at once, then at least I could die with her and maybe it would be all right. But I could not face being the survivor. I didn’t want to survive Tarah.

“
Hayden,” I heard Tarah murmur, her voice all around me at once.

“
I’m failing you,” I confessed in a whisper to her.

“
No. Don’t you see? This is not some ordinary virus. It thinks and reacts to us,” she whispered back, her voice coaxing me not to give up. To have hope, as she always did, just one more time.

Somehow I found the strength to listen, to think about her words.
“Then what is it? How do we beat it?”

“
You must find its source.”

Its source? What was she talking about?

As I began to get angry and frustrated, I felt myself slipping away, being pulled backward toward my own body again. And the more I fought it, the more strongly I was pulled away.

Because I was being negative?

I tried a different strategy, giving up resisting the pull. “Okay, Tarah. You win. What is its source?”

“
Not what. Who.”

My spirit eased back into my own body again, and I woke up, needing the deep breath of air I took as if I’d just surfaced after being underwater too long.

A dream? Or had I truly connected with Tarah’s unconscious mind?

She was still asleep, her fever as high as before.
And her pulse... I felt it beneath my fingertips at her wrist, its every beat more feeble than the last.

As if
her heart really was now under attack. Just like in my dream.

She’d said the virus wasn’t normal, that someone was creating it.
But who? Who would want to hurt a bunch of outcasts hidden away in the woods?

The
government? My dad?

I’d heard of experimental programs in the past where they’d used psychics to help them with government projects.
And my father had said the government was working with scientists now, trying to suppress the genes that caused Clann abilities. What if they had changed tactics and were trying to wipe us out completely from a distance now, using Clann abilities to attack us with a fake illness that would cause us to die one by one?

If so, they sure were taking their time about it.
Shouldn’t the government have been killing us off much faster, if that was their intention?

What if they didn’t want to kill all of us?
What if they still wanted to capture us for some reason? The illness could be sent to try and flush us out of hiding and into nearby hospitals.

“
Tarah, I’ll be right back,” I promised, kissing her burning cheek before I stumbled to my feet and out the door on wobbly legs to the infirmary.

“
Hey, Tarah’s got an idea,” I said, only partially lying in order to get Mike and one of the healers to listen to me in the master bedroom. Once I had their attention, I told them the possibilities that I’d come up with.

“
Tarah said this?” The older dragon lady I’d faced off with at the tiny house stood before me now, hands on her wide hips, her eyes squinting with suspicion.

“
Yeah,” I said, figuring Tarah wouldn’t mind the half truth. If I’d really connected with Tarah’s unconscious mind, then it was the truth. And if I hadn’t and it was a lie, well, she’d lied about me being the one to suggest we all go to my grandma’s in South Dakota. So she couldn’t exactly mind my using her own tactics now. “Is it possible? Could someone use a spell to attack us and disguise it as a new strain of flu?”

Mike frowned.
“Hey, didn’t you healers say you couldn’t pin the virus down in any of the patients in order to treat it?”

“
That is true,” Dragon Lady replied. I really needed to learn more people’s names around here. “But why wouldn’t they kill us off faster?”

They’d found the hole in my theory.

“
Maybe because magic is harder to do from a distance?” Mike suggested.

I remembered how Steve had needed to come with me to the bus rental office in order to maintain the face altering spell on me.
“Yeah, Steve talked about that too. But why couldn’t they simply make more witches work together to help boost their spells to cover greater distances?” I was thinking out loud here. Surely the government could have put together a whole army of descendants and outcasts to work for them by now. All they would have to do is offer legal immunity and freedom from the internment camps to get the witches’ cooperation. Some might still refuse to attack fellow magic users. But others would do whatever it took to protect their families.

What wouldn’t a desperate
magic user do in the name of saving their family?

Look at Steve.
He hadn’t hesitated to kill that cop. And he would have gladly dragged Cassie, and maybe Pamela too, right out of this village for their protection if we hadn’t stopped him and convinced him they were happy here.

A guy like that wouldn’t hesitate to take a deal from the government.
Even if it meant having to attack a fellow outcast.

I looked past the healers and Mike, through the open bedroom door and kitchen area to the living room where Steve still sat at his wife’s side.
Steve looked like the walking dead. Almost as bad as the zombies in my nightmares a few weeks back.

“
Attacking Clann people from a distance would take a lot of energy, wouldn’t it?” I muttered.

Dragon Lady nodded.
“Much easier to do it up close. Do you think they’ve tracked us to this area?”

I didn’t answer her, still following my own train of thought.
“Could you attack several people at once if you were physically close to them?” I couldn’t seem to stop staring at Steve, my thoughts spiraling down into an ever darker abyss. But this idea had a problem too. Even if the government had somehow gotten to him and forced him to help them, he never would have used magic on his own wife.

Would he?

“Yes, you could attack multiple people close to you, but it would leave you constantly drained,” she said.

Bud had gotten sick only minutes after Steve had
...

After he had
tried and failed to convince his wife to leave the village with him and Cassie
.

What if the government had nothing to do with this? What if it was all Steve’s doing just so he could get his way?

But surely Steve wouldn’t make his own wife sick just to convince her that staying in the village wasn’t safe for their family.

I remembered how
at one point I’d been desperate enough to toss Tarah over my shoulder and nearly kidnap her for her own safety.

Mike frowned.
He looked over his shoulder, following my line of sight. Then his head whipped back to face me, his eyes wide. “You’re not thinking...”

“
Get Cassie,” I said.

Mike left, coming back a few minutes later with the little girl in tow.
She nearly started crying when she saw her mother lying unconscious on a floor pallet. Her father seemed to be sleeping while still sitting upright. He never reacted to his daughter’s presence or her soft whimpers.