Exiled Mate, Future Luna novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Fever

I woke at dawn with the sheets soaked through and my skin on fire.

Below me in the bunk, Dani's breathing was loud enough to count.

I could hear every breath, and her heartbeat under it, slow and fat and a little too fast.

I could hear the ice machine two floors down and a man in the next building running a razor.

I smelled her shampoo, the pretzels in the trash, and the cold ash in the fireplace of a house three streets over.

"Sierra?" Dani said, sitting up. "You're making a noise."

"What noise?"

"A growl," she said, and turned on the lamp. "Oh my God. You're glowing. You're actually red."

She had a thermometer in my mouth before I could argue.

"A hundred and four point one," she said. "That's not a fever, that's a medical event. I'm calling someone."

"Don't."

"Sierra."

"It's a thing I get," I said. "It'll pass. Please."

She looked at my face for a long moment.

Then she went to the sink, soaked a towel, and laid it across my forehead.

"I'm a nursing major with a rice cooker," she said. "I can do broth and cold compresses. If you start seeing things, I'm calling an ambulance."

"Deal."

I lay there for two days.

Dani brought soup, and I couldn't keep it down.

She sat on the edge of my bed and read me her anatomy flashcards in a funny voice.

I drifted in and out, and every time I came back, I dreamed the same thing.

A pair of large scarred hands, and a voice that said, I won't ask.

On the third day the fever broke in the middle of the night.

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