Hidden Embers (30 page)

Shooting into action, Jasmine headed down the hall at a run. She glanced in each open doorway until she found an unused exam room. Plopping the little girl down on the bed, she shouted for ice packs even as she began stripping her.

She turned to the nurse next to her. “What works on dragon fevers?” she demanded.

“We don’t normally get fevers, so it’s pretty much anyone’s guess,” she answered, full of worry. “We can try ibuprofen—that’s what Quinn has been treating the fever with for other patients who contract the virus.”

“The virus?” she demanded, ignoring the gasp of the trembling mother who was standing next to her, on the other side of the child’s bed. “What makes you think this is it? There’s never been a patient anywhere close to this young before.”

At that moment, the little girl’s body convulsed, her eyes rolling up in her head as she began to vomit. Jasmine turned her over, so that she didn’t aspirate, and snapped out, “Get Quinn. I want his opinion.”

The nurse’s eyes were horrified as she went to do Jasmine’s bidding. “Check in the drawers behind you,” Jasmine told the mother as she continued to hold the baby. “See if there’s a stethoscope in there. I need to listen to her heart.”

The woman didn’t move, just swayed on her feet with blank eyes. Jasmine realized the woman was going into shock. Of course—as if they needed any more trouble.

“What’s her name?” she asked, trying to get the woman’s attention and head off yet another disaster.

“Rose.” It was the barest of whispers.

“That’s a beautiful name,” Jasmine told her, internally cursing her lack of familiarity with the room—and the clinic. When this nightmare was over, she swore she would familiarize herself with every room in the clinic, so she was never at this same disadvantage again.

The nurse came back with a bunch of temperature-lowering ice kits, a stethoscope and two syringes. Quinn was right behind her, and Jasmine swore he moved so fast she didn’t see his feet touch the ground between the doorway and little Rose’s bed, where the baby continued to convulse and vomit, vomit and convulse.

He closed his eyes and ran his hand lightly over the baby’s stomach and head. Within seconds the vomiting stopped and the crying began—a high-pitched wail that no one could ever mistake for normal. The baby was in serious distress, and if they didn’t get her temperature down, now, they wouldn’t have to worry about the progression of the disease.

“Save my baby,” the woman chanted, as she stared at Quinn with pleading eyes. “Please, Quinn, save my child.”

“I’m trying, Melinda. I promise you, I’m trying. Why don’t you go down the hall and check on Brian while I examine her?”

Jasmine realized with dawning horror—this was Brian’s baby. Somehow he had managed to infect the baby, probably within an hour or so of getting infected himself, judging from the symptoms.

The nurse took Melinda out of the room—presumably to visit her dying husband and deliver the news that their child was dying with him—and for the first time, Jasmine noticed the little boy trailing after her. He couldn’t be more than six or seven, with bright blue eyes and an adorable mane of blond hair.

She closed her eyes and muttered a swift prayer that he too wasn’t infected. Surely, God, fate, the universe couldn’t be that cruel.

She turned back to Quinn, who was working feverishly over the patient, packing the little girl in ice despite the violent trembling of her body. “What can I do?” Jasmine demanded. She didn’t know much about dragon anatomy yet, but she was a quick learner.

“Not a damn thing,” Quinn growled, his green eyes all but destroyed as they met hers over the little girl’s shaking form. “The fever’s too high—her internal organs have already begun to fry.”

“Surely there’s something we can do? She’s just—”

“Besides making her more comfortable, I don’t know what to do. At this rate, she’ll be dead before her father.”

His face was grimmer than she’d ever seen it, and Jasmine knew he was suffering right alongside his pint-sized patient. But when he closed his eyes and held his hands a few inches off Rose’s skin, Jasmine jumped toward him. “Quinn, no! Don’t. If she has the virus, you can’t heal this.”

He didn’t answer her, didn’t so much as acknowledge that he’d heard her. Jasmine cursed as she watched him risk himself for a child who was destined to die, as her father was.

It angered her to see him use his gift with so little regard for himself, but at the same time, could she really blame him? He wouldn’t be the man she had fallen for if he wasn’t willing to risk himself to try to save a child.

The nurse stood by with a shot of painkillers, waiting for Quinn’s or Jasmine’s order to deliver the opiate. Jasmine started to tell her to go ahead, but under Quinn’s healing focus, baby Rose’s skin was losing its dangerous scarlet color and her little body stopped trembling altogether.

Jasmine couldn’t tell if he was actually healing her or simply reducing the symptoms. She prayed it was the former, but she was pretty sure it was the latter. Nothing Quinn had been able to do for any patient so far had managed to prolong his or her life, at least not according to the extensive case studies.

Just then, a shrill scream rang through the clinic. Jasmine was out the door in a matter of seconds, tearing down the hall toward the sound at top speed. She froze when she realized the sound had come from Brian’s room, that the woman screaming was Melinda.

Has Brian died already?
she wondered frantically, slipping into the room. But Phoebe wasn’t standing near Brian, who had a look of abject horror on his face. No, she was standing near the cute little boy with the big blue eyes, and Jasmine saw the line of blood leaking from his nose and trailing down his face.

At that moment, it really hit her, the hopelessness and helplessness of this virus that Phoebe and Quinn were fighting. In Africa, she faced incurable diseases every day, but at least she could fight them with education and preventative measures that stopped them from spreading.

This disease, this virus, came out of nowhere. There were no preventative measures to take, no steps to lesson the impact or bolster the survival rate. Anyone who got it—whether by injection or simple communicable contact, as this strain appeared to have been spread—was dead, and there was nothing any of them could do.

The thought was absolutely devastating, particularly as she looked at the utter hopelessness on Brian and Melinda’s faces, the fear on their son’s face and the agony on their daughter’s. This disease was a nightmare of epic proportions.

The next couple of hours passed in a blur as Jasmine assisted Quinn and Phoebe in whatever ways she could—which weren’t nearly as many as she would have liked, but then she was still learning the ropes when it came to dragon anatomy and how to treat this disease.

Not that they were actually treating the disease, but simply prolonging the inevitable. Even Quinn, who tried so hard to heal his patients that he was literally gray with exhaustion, couldn’t do anything but try to make them comfortable as he ordered their entire wing of the clinic to be locked down and quarantine measures put into place.

No strain of the virus had ever been this contagious before, and he wasn’t taking any chances with it spreading, even though only Brian and his children seemed to be affected by it. Melinda was showing no symptoms, and neither were his nurses, Phoebe or himself, though they’d been in contact with Brian for hours. While he’d demanded that Jasmine put on protective gear, she didn’t really expect to contract the virus; she wasn’t a dragon.

They moved Brian to the biggest room in the wing, so they could move in two other beds for Rose and her big brother, Jake. This way the family could be together and Melinda could tend to all three. After her initial shock, Melinda proved to be a trouper, moving between her husband and sick children as needed—hugging, kissing, soothing. Jasmine wasn’t sure she could have stood up under the strain nearly half as well.

Through it all, Quinn and Phoebe worked tirelessly, trying a long list of treatments. Jasmine hung back, taking notes and blood samples, her brain working a mile a minute. She ran through every possible scenario regarding the spread of this disease, which had affected the father and his two kids but not the mother. If it spread by contact, whether by air or fluid, surely the mother would have caught it, too. But she still showed no symptoms of the disease, even hours after her children had fallen prey to it.

Did that mean that all three of the sick patients had been injected with the virus? Or was there a way to spread it that they had not managed to think of yet? She needed to get to the laboratory, needed to look at the blood samples, if she was to even hazard a guess.

Yet an idea hovered in her brain, nebulous and not quite formed, but there nonetheless. She knew it would come when it was ready, perhaps when she stopped trying so hard to catch hold of it.

Baby Rose was the first to go, a little after noon. Her father cried silent tears, which were pitiful to see—particularly as he was almost fully paralyzed by that point. She was followed three hours later by Jake and Brian, within minutes of each other. Afterward, Melinda, healthy and shell-shocked, simply sat in a chair against the wall and stared out the opposite window.

Jasmine’s heart broke for the woman. If she’d had to go through what Melinda just had, she’d probably be a blathering idiot.

Quinn called a family member to pick her up—it turned out he’d known Brian and his family quite well, as he’d been treating him for a number of years, off and on, for the genetic disease that had struck him nearly ten years before. Jasmine made a note of the disease off his chart and made a mental note to look it up at the soonest opportunity. Maybe there was a connection between it and the virus, though she wasn’t sure what the connection could possibly be. But she wasn’t ruling anything out, not until she’d followed each path as far as she could. Quinn deserved that from her, as did his people.

After Melinda left, the bodies were taken to a special, contained portion of the morgue for immediate autopsy, with cremation soon to follow. Quinn was taking no chances with the contagiousness of the disease. Eventually, the quarantine was lifted, as no one else contracted the disease; the paperwork was completed, and Quinn made his usual rounds. Jasmine was aching to get to the lab, to see what the blood samples she’d drawn showed under the microscope, but Quinn was so exhausted, so damaged by this latest battle, that she knew everything else was going to have to wait.

She found she didn’t mind, when usually she resented anything that got in the way of her finding an answer she was looking for. But with Quinn, it came naturally. Maybe because, in his own way, he was what she’d spent her life looking for all along.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Q
uinn was exhausted, his entire body drained from the healing energy he’d given to Brian and Rose and Jake. It hadn’t been enough. But then, with this virus—with him—it was never enough.

Despair swamped him as he followed Jasmine out of the clinic and into the night. He wanted nothing more than to return to his cave to lick his wounds, but he knew they needed to head to the lab despite the late hour. There were blood samples to look at, and they needed to finish their notes while the incident was still fresh in their minds. God knew, he’d been fighting this damn disease for years, and never before had he seen it wipe out a family like this.

He hoped never to see it work this way again, though he had a sick feeling that wasn’t going to be the case. Every time this damn virus made an evolutionary leap—such as crossing from a father to his two kids in under three hours—it had a tendency never to go back. The clan might very well be stuck like this for the rest of their lives.

It was a despicable thought.

Jasmine looped her hand through his arm and started pulling him down the street, in the direction opposite from the lab.

“Hey, the lab’s that way.” He motioned to their left.

“We’re not going to the lab. We’re going to your house. Phoebe tells me it’s just a block or so down this way. Do you think you can make it?”

He shot her an insulted look. “What do I look like? Some candy ass?”

“You don’t want to know what you look like right now,” she answered tartly, continuing to drag him along.

“We have work to do.”

“Believe me, I know. And if it wasn’t for you, I’d be in the lab already—deep into the new research samples. But here you are, gray and swaying and looking like one wrong move will have you laid out on the sidewalk. We’re going to your place.”

“I actually feel pretty okay, all things considered.” And he did feel much better than he usually did after something like that. It must be Jasmine again, providing some kind of buffer between him and the pain and exhaustion that had threatened to swamp him in the clinic. He grinned, even as his eyes nearly drifted shut. He could get used to this.

“Yeah,” she muttered sarcastically. “You feel great—ready to take on the world. That is, if you don’t fall asleep on your feet.”

“Med school was worse than this.”

“Like that’s a recommendation for the state you’re in? I remember being a zombie for at least two years there.” She eyed him curiously. “You went to medical school?”

“Three times. Things kept changing, and I wanted to keep up.”

“Of course you did.” She pulled them to a stop in front of a small cul-de-sac. “Now, which one is yours?”

He gave her directions, then let her guide him down the street to his place. He was so wiped out that he floated along in a mix of euphoria and sorrow. Once he got some rest, he knew the anger and sadness would take precedence, but right now he almost enjoyed the strange high that came from being this exhausted.

Within minutes Jasmine had him inside his house and stretched out on the large king-sized bed in the middle of his bedroom. She stood up, as if to move away, but he grabbed her hand. “Stay with me,” he said, shocked at how vulnerable it made him feel to ask.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she answered, slipping his shoes and jeans off before doing the same to her own. Then she climbed into the bed beside him, her long, lean body fitting against his like she was made for him.