“It should take days for the wound to get this infected.” I leaned in closer to examine it, probing around of my fingers again, this time closer to the opened edge. Zont flinched, and I glanced up at his face.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t touch it again right now. Let me feel your forehead.”
He frowned even more fiercely, but I was in my element, and I had dealt with less cooperative patients than him. “Right now,” I demanded.
Not until he bent down to let me place my hand on his broad forehead did it occur to me how ridiculous this was. I had no idea what a Khanavai’s normal body temperature might be. It felt to me as if he were burning up, like a furnace turned up high. I might have chalked that up to his alienness, except for the sweat that began rolling down his face. As I stared at him trying to decide what to do, a huge shudder racked his body, followed almost immediately by another one.
Chills.
This was bad. I needed to get him somewhere safe and see if I could help him get through this infection.
You need to get him to a hospital, Amelia. I brushed the thought away. There was still time for that.
At that point, it didn’t even occur to me to run. I could have gotten away, I’m sure. He was too sick to follow me. But in this moment, I was a doctor, and he was my patient. I would not leave him sick and alone, possibly dying. I wouldn’t have left him dying from anything—much less a wound he had gotten trying to protect me.
“Trade seats with me. I’m taking you someplace where you can get better.”
From the tone of the Khanavai words he said, Zont was protesting my announcement, but he made no real move to stop me as I opened my door and moved around to the driver’s side. “Scoot over, big guy. Or get out and walk around. Your call.”
He swung his legs out, and I expected him to stand up and walk around the car, but when he pushed away from the seat in order to stand up, he staggered into me. I caught him under his arms, stumbling back under his weight, but he managed to steady himself by grabbing the roof of the car and regain his balance.
“Back seat,” I ordered him, opening the door and gesturing. “Now.”
He managed to stay upright for the amount of time it took to get around the door before he toppled over into the car’s back seat. I pushed on his legs to get him to draw them after himself, and then I slammed the door.
In the driver’s seat a moment later, I rubbed my eyes before heading back the way we came.
As I retraced our route toward the highway, I berated myself silently. Why hadn’t I insisted on cleaning out his wound before we left the garage? What the hell kind of doctor was I?
A surgeon, the logical part of my mind answered. The wound wasn’t deep, even though it was long. On a normal human, it probably would have healed up just fine without any intervention at all.
I wasn’t used to treating Khanavai patients.
As we pulled into the parking lot of the first hotel, it occurred to me to turn on the radio to hear what was being said about me, about the Alveron attack, even about Zont.
But when I keyed it on, there was nothing but static.
Exactly like the static on Zont’s wrist com earlier.
Either we were in some sort of information blackout, or the Alveron Horde had taken out our entire communications system.
I was really afraid it was the latter.
Turning off the radio again, I glanced back at Zont. He was perfectly still, but I could hear his shallow, rapid breathing.
Time to play doctor.
I didn’t know where the words came from, but they came with a host of utterly inappropriate images in my mind.
Time to get out of this car and start treating him like a patient instead of a hot guy, I told my overactive imagination, which responded by sending one more image of Zont stretched out on a bed, totally naked, smiling at me.
With a groan, I forced myself out of the car and headed inside. Not until I was halfway across the small lobby did it occur to me that I should have looked for someplace less generic—preferably the kind of place where you could rent rooms by the hour, since I didn’t have a credit card on me.
I cursed silently with every step toward the check-in desk. I had to at least try.
A woman slightly older than I was sat on a stool behind the registration desk, flipping through an epaper magazine.
When she glanced up, her eyes widened, and I knew I’d been made.
Chapter Ten
Zont
Later, I remembered the next three days only in flashes.
The sound of human females talking, their words both sharp and blurred at the same time.
“Thank you so much for this,” Amelia said as she opened the car door.
“Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to for one of them.” I didn’t recognize the second voice, and I couldn’t drag my eyes open enough to look at her.
“It’s … complicated,” Amelia said, and then her voice faded out as everything around me turned black.
The next time I woke, it was to the sound of her voice urging me to drink something. “Come on. You have to take this. That’s it, sit up a little.”
I swallowed instinctively, felt the cold, fizzy liquid wash down two pills. I coughed a little, and she patted my back until I stopped. Her cold hands felt good against my overheated skin.
I awoke again to a burning pain in my side, and Amelia’s soothing voice as she said, “I know this hurts. I’m trying to draw out the infection as much as I can.” The heat disappeared for a moment, only to return. “I wish I had a wound
