Meg crawled to the floor where Evan lay across the bench seat, knees bent so his six-feet, two-inch body could fit. The badly burned thirteen-year-old dipped in and out of consciousness like a plastic bag caught in an alleyway’s draft. He was trying not to, but he couldn’t help moaning in pain.
Meg cringed—feeling his agony vicariously. She did everything she could to send him soothing emotions, but she knew her gift was pretty useless in the face of physical pain.
She looked into Alik’s face with tear-filled, dark eyes.
“Meg, you did everything you could. Just rest now, sister.”
Alik turned his attentions to Danny who was moaning in his sleep as though suffering through a bad dream. Alik carefully wiped his baby brother’s damp brow with his stretched-out T-shirt.
Farrow’s heart swelled as she watched Alik with Danny. Before Alik, she had never known a man to be gentle and caring to anything except his gun when he was cleaning it. She was crucially aware of how different Alik treated people compared to what she thought she knew of typical male metahuman behavior.
Farrow blushed when Alik looked over at her, catching her loving gaze with his intelligent sky-blue eyes. Her fears over what they were facing temporarily eclipsed when he offered her a half-smirk and a wink. All she could do was smile and turn back around so as not to seem like the drooling girlfriend she knew she was.
Farrow looked down at her chewed up fingernails as she thought, not for the first time, about fighting beside Alik. She was in awe of his heightened gift, but it was his heart that Farrow fell in love with; his forgiving, gentle, compassionate heart was absolutely breathtaking to the former assassin. She risked a quick glance back at him. Her blush deepened beautifully when she caught him watching her.
Meg, completely engrossed in her connection with Evan, felt compelled to climb back to be with him. She sat curled up on the floor, but had to scoot over to make room for Sloan, determined to study Evan herself.
“Alik, would you pass me the grocery sack with the washcloths, plastic bowl and thermometer? I think it’s near your feet.”
“Sure thing,” he said, peeling his eyes from Farrow. He yanked the packaging off the cloths before passing them back to his sister. Meg was ready with a bottle of water. “He’s definitely running a fever,” Sloan announced after barely touching the part of his face that wasn’t charred.
“What’s happening to him?” Meg sat on the floor of the back seat trying desperately to lower her brother’s core temperature with cool cloths.
“His fever just keeps climbing,” Sloan grimaced at the thermometer in her hands.
The family had stopped at a superstore off the highway to get essential medical supplies for Evan, bottled water and snacks for everyone else. They had to find another pillow for Danny as he had left his back at Greg’s house and couldn’t sleep without it. Even now, he was curled against it on the side of the booster seat they’d conveniently found already strapped into the van.
“I wish I had him in a lab where I could get his blood under a microscope.” Sloan frowned deeply at the handsome young man struggling to stay alive. She was adding cool cloths to Evan’s burned and raw face.
“Could it just be his evolution happening? I mean, I think it’s a little early, but maybe, like with you and the malarial virus Meg, Evan’s was brought on by the fire.” Alik was turned around in the second to last row of seats, watching his brother with worry.
“What if he were already starting his evolution before the fire? He looked different this morning at breakfast, but I’d just assumed it was from me strangling him last night,” Meg’s brow furrowed. “Sloan, what could happen if he were in the process of evolving when he was exposed to the fire?”
Sloan shook her head slowly, her blond ponytail swaying at the back of her head. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know very much about what happened to you three when you went through your evolution. Evan and I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk about the patterns he noted, if any, between yours and Alik’s change.” She wrung the water from a cloth in the shared popcorn-sized bowl they were using and traded it for the cloth that was already too warm on Evan’s neck.
“However, in nature,” she continued, “when a creature, say a caterpillar, is going through its chrysalis phase, it is very fragile. If exposed to extreme heat or cold—well, the creature certainly dies. The metamorphosis is an exact series of events, cellular development, growth…if something interrupts that, the results are undoubtedly disastrous.”
“That’s not helping, Sloan,” Cole mumbled.
“They asked my medical opinion, and I gave it,” Sloan said defensively.