Page 2 of You Give Me Fever

He pulled back, feeling... offended? Amused? Had this little human actually shooed him? He had watched kings die.

“Yes, you are,” he said without thinking. His voice was the roll of thunder across the plains in summer, lower than the floorboards, buzzing just at the edges as if he had a chorus of cicadas for accompaniment.

Clara frowned. Had she left the Marconi on? Nothing could be speaking to her in this house unless it was a rerun of The Shadow.

No… it had come from inside the room, and the radio was in the kitchen.

This was new, something talking back to her, and a part of her fevered brain was shouting at her to be frightened, to turn on the light, but those thoughts were so quiet in the buzz and crackle between her ears, and as she struggled to grasp at something to understand, all she could think was—Some man contradicted me. In my own bedroom.

“Listen, missster,” she vaguely pointed a finger where the darkness seemed to gather. “M’not. Not. Maybe slightly... unner the weather.”

Shiver could not believe this girl was arguing with him. He ought to tell her what an expert he was on the subject, but he didn’t want to frighten her.

“Yes, you’re so far under the weather you’re practically in the ground,” he said. He reached forward to press the back of his shadowy hand to her forehead. As hot as he was, she still burned him. “You need a doctor, girl.”

“Nuh,” she shook her head, but the buzzing became a roar, so she stopped. “No doctors. Crooks.”

Her parents had not returned from their last trip to the doctor. What had come back was a bill Clara couldn’t afford, and an envelope of her parents’ personal effects, minus her mother’s wedding ring. To Clara, doctors were much like shotguns—a useful tool but distasteful, and one’s relationship with it often ended in death.

“Dry up, go back t’your... cemetery.”

Shiver looked around the room, as if he might find someone else to turn to and ask, with respect, if they could believe this shit.

Shiver was not, for the record, supposed to be helping this human. He was there to feed from her fever, soak in her heat and pain as he drew from her ever-swelling mind the energy he took to survive—and once she expired, he was fed for years. He had collected many in his time. The influenza, the consumption, even plagues— Shiver never allowed a full recovery. For him, this was a job well done.

Until her.

“I am not leaving until your fever breaks,” he said. He was telling the truth, but not all of it. He would leave one way or the other—with her, if she perished. If she recovered, it meant his death.

Clara squirmed in her hot sheets. There was something about that voice, the way he spoke to her, imperious and haughty and arrogant—with an undercurrent of concern. It had been so long since anyone showed her true care. It had been so long since anyone had even spoken more than a few polite words to her.

Clara hadn’t spent her whole life on the farm. She’d had a job, once—the first taste of freedom she had ever experienced. It wasn’t the newspaper’s front page, covering gruesome murders and Hollywood scandals, but it was a start—a tidy little advice column for women, tucked away in the section of the paper most people didn’t get to if they were in a hurry. For a girl who had grown up sequestered away from anyone her age, living and working and being educated on a farm with parents who were already in their golden years before she’d turned sixteen, life in a real city, with so much potential for adventure and even love, being able to talk to hundreds of women every day through her little column was a thrill, a safer way to ease in to making connections with people face to face. Which she was very certain she was likely to do again one day. Soon.

She had cried as she packed away her meager assemblage of things to return home. She knew what was waiting for her—more seclusion, her only company a temperamental old goat, a smattering of hens, and her parents, too sick to leave their beds.

In too short a time, she was down to only the goat and the hens. Then, just the hens.

She had put her new life away in a drawer in order to care for her parents, for the farm, for the aging house that was all she had left of her family, and by day’s end, she barely had the energy to care for herself.

So if some pushy spirit had suddenly decided to take care of her, it was a strange and unsettling feeling.

“You must call a doctor,” Shiver repeated, knowing he ought to keep his mouth shut.

Clara shook her head, and the golden swirling fireflies were back in front of her vision.

“No doctors,” she said again.

Shiver crossed his arms, staring down at the pale human girl, twisting up her bed sheets and—damn him—looking so fetching in practically nothing, that soft cotton nightdress hitched up to her thighs, just barely covering places he was aching to see, dipping low across her small breasts with only the most tantalizing hint of a pale curve, the gentle peak of a nipple. Why was his mouth watering? He didn’t know he could do that.

“Then you need sleep,” he said, trying to remain focused. He ought to be keeping her awake, fanning the fever into an inferno—and yet that only made his mind sink deeper into thoughts he needed to banish.

“Yeah, that’d be th’ berries,” she said around a groan. “How?”

Shiver felt something creeping up his spine, a burning sensation, a tingle, a pain. Lustful thoughts ran unbidden through his mind like a naked parade of imps, carrying banners that said, “Fuck her! Fuck her now!” As a demon, Shiver was not built to deny his baser instincts. He knew he could give her the best sleep of her life. But something pulled him ever so slightly back.

Not far enough back, it seemed, to stop him from feathering his fingers across her hot cheek, slipping them down her throat where he could feel her pulse against his fingertips, dipping boldly down her chest where he teased the curve of a breast, so perfectly small he could fit them both in the palm of one hand.

Clara sighed, rolling her body closer to that soft breeze of a touch. That tingle it sent through her was... so nice. Like a cool autumn wind.