Unhappily Ever After

Chapter 62 - Festering

"Feeling up to guests?" I asked my mate as I sat down beside her. Alex and Evie were supposed to be coming over in a few hours, but if she wasn't feeling well...

Jess rested her head against my shoulder and smiled down at little Bran. "As long as they don't stay all afternoon, yes."

Strange. Alex and Evie weren't exactly demanding company, and I was sure they'd spend most of their time cooing over the baby anyway. Even as I thought that, I realised I could feel the heat coming off her. One of my hands snuck up to rest on her forehead. It was burning hot.

"Jess?" I asked. "I don't remember there being anything about fevers in the books."

And I should know. I'd read pretty much all of them. Well, Jess had read them, and I'd listened. I had been much too young to help with Eira when she had been a baby, so my knowledge had been very much limited to Mort's kid and a few Shadowcat second-cousins before that.

"I'm fine," she grumbled.

"Then you won't mind if the doctor looks you over, just to be sure, will you?" I said dryly. "Where's Hailey?"

"Off treating some raider who got his throat torn open near Ember," Jess sighed. She let her head rest against the pillow. "Can you link her from here?"

I wasn't sure. That was a very long way. Eira could have helped me, but she was on her way to Bangor with Lee by then. Still, I would have to try. I sat down, and I took Jessie's hand to anchor myself while I gathered my strength and began to reach.

At first, I struggled to even find the fragile thread of mind-link between us, because it wasn't like I knew her well. Eira and I could talk at opposite ends of the Silverstones without much issue, but the doctor wasn't a tapper and she wasn't related to me.

Every time I would try following the thread, I would lose concentration somewhere along the way. It took a dozen attempts to even get close and another dozen to actually make contact. When I felt the edges of her mind, I didn't wait around for my concentration to slip — I just sort of threw the message at her and hoped for the best.

"Jess has a fever," I told her. I was practically shouting, but it would likely be a whisper by the time it reached her.

Holding the mind-link still while I waited for a reply ... it was like trying to build a bridge across a chasm. I was pushing a steel beam over the edge, knowing damn well it wasn't long enough for the job, and I was holding it steady without any kind of support at the other end while someone walked across.

She didn't manage to convey any words. All I got was a whisper too quiet to hear and a general vibe of 'bad' and 'uh oh.' I had to drop the link at that point or fall with it, and I slammed back into my body with jarring force.

"Rhodric," Jess said softly. She touched the side of my neck and chewed on her lip. "You're bleeding."

That made sense. Everything was blurry. My head was throbbing in time with my heartbeat, and I could feel something trickling down the side of my face. It appeared the link had skipped the nosebleed stage and gone straight to ears — a sure sign I'd done something I shouldn't have.

"Yeah, that's normal," I assured her.

"Normal? It's anything but normal," she growled. "That's a symptom of brain trauma, jackass, and you can't just ignore it."

I did try to hide my grin, but she must have noticed my lips twitching. "Yes, I can actually. I've been doing it for years. Now stop trying to deflect attention, love. The doctor said I have to take you to the hospital."

She'd said no such thing, of course, but Jess didn't need to know that. Most shifters would die before they went to A&E because most shifters didn't have a tapper to stop the humans noticing their skin knitting together in real time. You might survive the initial injury, yeah, but you would spend the rest of your life as a test subject, if I knew anything about human beings.