Page 114 of The Hero Within
"Johnny!" A voice. Eden's voice. He felt her hand on his shoulder then, and the breath snarled out of him. Her face loomed in front of him. "Stop it! He's right. You need to calm down."
He looked down at his hands, and realized he wasn't staring at human flesh anymore.
Another slither of ice through his veins. He hauled himself up short.Fuck. He'd almost gone warg. Lincoln stared at him like he didn't dare move, his cheekbone swelling.
Johnny reached deep, searching for that part of him that belonged to his father. It was harder to find than he'd expected. His heart beat a hundred miles an hour, and all he could see was that damned rash.
Eden wrapped her arms around him. "It's going to be okay."
Wasn't that a punch in the face? He was the one who should have been consoling her. Eden knew exactly what the plague could do. She had to be scared.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I wasn't expecting that. I just...."Lost it."I can't lose you, angel."
"You're not going to," she reminded him.
Calmness washed over him like a sluice of cold water as his omega half rose. His skin itched with heat as he pulled back, forcing his body to shift. Hair vanished along his arms, and his fingernails ached as they transformed.
He'd never in his life come so close to flipping that switch before. A part of him had almost thought itself immune.
It's her, said the darker part of himself.She does this to you. You're too involved. Too twisted up emotionally in her.
Having no one might have been both a blessing and a curse. He breathed out a helpless laugh. All this time, and the warg had been sitting there beneath the surface of his skin, waiting.
"Are you okay?" he asked hoarsely, drawing back and looking down into her upturned face.
Eden swallowed. "No. But now I know how my patients feel. I can't afford to fall apart right now. And I've got plenty of time."
"Bullshit." She wasn't going to live with the threat of this over her head any longer than she needed to. "I'm done sitting around waiting on the Confederacy. We have to crack the military labs tonight."
"Arik tellsme you have important information for me," Mayhew said, looking bored even through an eight-inch monitor.
"I do," Eden said, swallowing hard.
"I'm not interested in playing games, Miss McClain. I told you this morning I don't take risks for no gain. So what's changed?"
She let out a slow breath and started unbuttoning her shirt. "This."
Mayhew's eyebrow arched as she worked the first three buttons open. "Intriguing, to be sure, but a strip show isn't something I can't view any day of the week, for the right price."
She opened her shirt, revealing the rash across her chest. "I didn't notice it this morning. It was only after I got out of the shower that I saw it." And since then, it had only darkened and spread. "I have the plague, Mr. Mayhew."
He froze, and then his fingers continued rolling those ever-present dice over the backs of them. "I'm sorry to hear that, Miss McClain."
"You should be," she replied bluntly. "There's a chance you were exposed to it this morning. You won't know for another three to seven days, of course, and you might be lucky. But you did share your drink with me. Wanted to show me the finer aspects of Confederacy life."
The color rapidly drained out of his face.
"It's a virulent disease, passed along through body fluids," she continued, reeling off the facts. "Blood, semen, saliva. You drank out of the glass after I did. I'd recommend you start a course of antibiotics, just to make certain, but as you know, the plague's immune to them. It might help ease the fever, a little. It might prolong it. But within two weeks there's a chance you might be dead... unless you'd care to beg General Bligh to open up his laboratory to you. Maybe he will. You know him better than I do.
"And of course, there's the risk to your loved ones, the people around you. It didn't take much to set it off within the population of Absolution."
"Did you know?" he snapped, clenching his fist around his dice.
"Of course not," she replied tightly. "Regardless of how much I want that cure, I wouldneverrisk the lives of innocent people."
"Fuck." He pushed away from his monitor, pressing his fist to his mouth. A muscle in his jaw ticked.
"We're going after the labs tonight," she told him. "We need your help to get us in."
