11. Quarantine
QUARANTINE
Alex
The pain didn’t want rivals; it dominated my body so completely that anything else faded.
Chaotic dreams, or maybe hallucinations, tormented me. Irene’s sweet voice came from afar, but it might be a trick of my mind. I wasn’t sure whether she was close. But she’d been.
Darius’s voice rang in my ears. “What have you done?”
I went in and out of consciousness. People talked. His Lordship shouted, but it had to be a nightmare. Why would Lord Mansel be in my flat?
Hands grabbed me. Their touch was a scorching fire on my skin, and I shouted, or tried to.
Faceless people told me I had break-bone fever, but it wasn’t the fever. It was the thirst, which had been much better since… I didn’t remember. My burning body was the problem.
I was rocked right and left. Darius wept and begged people not to take me. He apologised to me for whatever reason. His face was badly bruised.
In one of my few spells of clarity, I found myself in a large room, packed with rows of beds. People groaned, writhed, and vomited blood.
I was in the fever hospital, the place where sick, contagious people were dispatched, never to be seen again. Odette had been barely alive when she’d been sent here. She had never left. They had buried her in a common grave with other dead people without a stone to remember her.
Now and then, a nurse would give me water or maybe soup. But I didn’t want soup. I wanted blood. I wanted to get drunk on it.
There. I’d said it.
I wasn’t ashamed anymore of craving blood. Besides, I hadn’t bitten anyone, had I? Had I?
“You need to drink.” The nurse pressed a glass of cold water to my lips.
The memory of tasting Irene’s blood flooded me. Was it a dream or something real? I wasn’t sure, but the rich, flowery taste of her sweet blood was etched in my brain. Her blood had triggered something in my body—a transformation.
I groaned, wishing to drink her blood again.
Shame returned.
My memory tricked me. I didn’t have a clear vision of drinking Irene’s blood, but I had the strongest sensation that I’d drunk it.
A commotion made me turn my head. More people were carried into the hall. I vaguely noticed there wasn’t enough space for all of them before I fell into a delirious sleep.
When I woke up, my skin burnt as if something tried to crawl through it from the inside out.
I couldn’t move. Two people were pressed against my body.
Their sweaty, stinky skin made me gag. I tried to shrug free of them, but they squashed me so much I couldn’t lift my arms, and my bones hurt. A sickening lump was choking me.
There was blood everywhere—on my skin, on people’s skin, and in my mind. The fight was futile. I wanted to drink blood, to gorge myself on it, and drink until the thirst was quenched.
But my skin was so sensitive, each touch was torture as if someone were pressing an incandescent branding iron to it. My bones broke a thousand times. The agony throbbed so intensely that it blocked my throat. Not a sound came out of me.
White-coated people piled more feverish bodies around me. My body was being slashed and burnt and stabbed.
It wasn’t break-bone fever. Not possible.
Whatever disease afflicted me, I was going to die in pain, as Riley had said.