“The water,” he said flatly. “It’s still bad.”
Kennedy straightened, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled the air. The fire truck was dumping gallons of water in a thick stream onto her laundromat. And though Alyssa couldn’t smell anything wrong, she believed that their grizzly noses could.
Meanwhile, Detective Kennedy was turning toward them, tilting his head close as he spoke in a low tone.
“About that,” he began. “I have an idea…”
BEFORE YOU GO…
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CLAIMED BY THE GUARDIAN
THE HEART OF A GUARDIAN, BOOK 5
Chapter 1
“I need a clue.”
Cecilia Lu stared across her microscope at her coworker. He was snoring quietly on the couch. His entire body looked like a scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out, and no wonder. They’d both been logging twenty-hour days and were no closer to solving the mystery of the Detroit Flu than when they’d first showed up a week ago.
“No really,” she continued. “You know, like a place to look. Because right now, as far as I can tell, the answer could be in the neurotransmitters. Or the blood. Hell, it could be the phases of the moon because I sure as hell don’t know.”
She stared at the monitor where it was trained on their latest patient. The image on the screen was just too unbelievable to credit. But when she blinked her eyes and looked again, there was Brittany still looking like something out of a horror film. Brittany was a sweet girl. A gymnast with a B+ average at school and a laugh that made Cecilia think of unicorns snorting. It was both earthy and magical at the same time. But instead of the perky strawberry-blond girl who appeared in her social media profile, Brittany now had reddish black fur on her face, slit-shaped yellow eyes, and nails that extended in sharp, curved points like claws. Even her ears had changed into tufted points.
Impossible.
The girl had come in hysterical and bloody; she’d tried to claw out her own eyes. They’d knocked her out in the ER and sent her straight up here to the Weird Ward as it was now called. Yes, the CDC had jurisdiction of all the strange cases because—the theory went—the CDC had all the answers.
Not.
And now Brittany lay slack-jawed and restrained, but all Cecilia could see was the dark hair against white hospital sheets.
For most people, the illness put them in bed with congestion and a killer headache. Others threw up for a couple days, which was how the disease had gotten its “flu” name. This last outbreak had added hallucinations to the list of symptoms, and now half the city was in bed seeing elephants wearing tutus on their ceiling. Clinics and hospitals quickly became overwhelmed by society’s most vulnerable members—the elderly and the very young. Add in crazy people seeing things, and the ERs had gotten many times the normal cases of gunshots and car crashes.
And then there were Cecilia’s cases. People like Brittany who came in deformed. Some arrived crazy. Others went insane afterward. Every one so far had died and their autopsies showed deformities in their brains. Something happened to their nerves causing them to warp. And the brain had a whole lot of nerves to warp.
“Maybe I should get something to eat.” Her stomach rumbled at the thought, but that might just be a reaction to the sludge they called coffee in this hospital. She’d been drinking it nonstop since the day she arrived. “Some kind of brain food.” She leaned back in her chair and stretched her spine. How long had she been slumped over that microscope? “Bet I’d know the best foods if I were a brain surgeon. And I’d know if the answer is in the neurotransmitters, too. If only I’d studied neurology, then maybe I’d have a clue.”
Or maybe not. Dennis on the couch—the one who had collapsed in exhaustion—was one of the top neurologists in the world, and he was as confused as she was.
Cecilia hopped off her stool and stretched her aching back. She thought about ditching her lab coat as she went in search of brain food, but it had deep pockets that held her many different colored pens, her Detroit Flu dedicated notepad, and her phone. No sense in?—
