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“My strong hand isn’t going to do him much good, the way he’s acting.”
“Please,” she said gently. “Give it time. Don’t come to any conclusions yet.”
I snorted. “Conclusions, my ass.”
“Conclusions about what?” It was Reggie, back with a waffle that was hidden under a teetering heap of berries and cream. “What about your ass?”
“Nothing, sweetie,” I said. “My ass is fine.”
“I’m not a baby anymore, you know,” she told me solemnly. “Particularly not after the clinic. You can tell me stuff. I won’t break.”
Not this stuff, babydoll.“Sure, honey. I know. That looks amazing.”
“It is, but I’m stuffed. Already. Here.” She slid the plate my way and smiled at Kat. “Want a bite?”
“Already had mine,” Kat said. “But thanks.”
I took a bite and let out an involuntary moan of pleasure. Dessert for breakfast.
There was a brief commotion on the other side of the room as five guys simultaneously got an alert on their phones and leaped up, at the ready. They checked the camera feeds on their devices, and all of them visibly relaxed.
“It’s just Rose,” Ethan told us. “Not to worry.”
“Oh, good.” Kat sounded relieved. “We can start getting some answers.”
I was hopping with eagerness to get right to it, but I had to wait through all the rituals and pleasantries. Rose was a beautiful young woman, about my age, with strawberry blond hair. She was luscious and curvy and eye-catching, and she seemed very bright and focused. But of course, Angela had to fuss over her, feed her breakfast, catch up on every detail of her life, yada yada.
Thirty nail-chewing, knuckle-grinding minutes later, we were finally ensconced on the generous square of big couches in the big living room of Ethan’s house, armed with fresh coffee and staring down at the little box of vials and IV bags that had been in the fridge in Reggie’s clinic room. The object upon which all our hopes were pinned.
Reggie herself came in and sat down on the edge of the couch next to me with a businesslike air, folding her hands, eyes expectant. Everyone looked at her, and then looked at me. Amos coughed. “Ah… are we sure we want to talk about all this, ah…”
“With me here?” Reggie asked. “Of course. This is all mostly about me, right? Who knows more than me about what happened in that place?”
“She’s not wrong,” Remy observed wryly.
Everyone exchanged eyebrow twitches, but they talked to Reggie with careful respect as we hashed through it all, again and again. Reggie was patient about repeating herself. “I knew they were dirty somehow pretty early on,” she told us. “As soon as I started feeling better. I saw how the nurses and doctors treated Mom when she had Varen’s Disease. These people didn’t treat me that way at all. They were really mean. They all ignored me when I tried to talk to them.”
“I was struck by the way the staff behaved when we stormed into the place,” Kat said. “They didn’t act like busy professionals who resented being interrupted from the important job they were doing. They acted like assholes who’d gotten caught doing something nasty. They scattered like rats. I had to chase down one of the doctors to question him, if he was a doctor at all. Probably just a shill.”
“Well, the people there were definitely assholes,” Reggie said solemnly.
The rest of them chuckled, but I couldn’t afford to, being the only quasi-authority figure in Reggie’s life. “Hey,” I said. “Watch that language, babe.”
She gave me a look. “Really, Cass? From you? With your mouth?”
I had to laugh, along with the others, but it made me sad, that my sweet little sister seemed more like a jaded adult than the cheerful little girl she had been.
“I sent people over there this morning,” Ethan said. “The place is deserted. Doors unlocked. Papers scattered everywhere. Property records show it’s rented by ABC Properties, a shell company located in Delaware which no longer exists as of today. These people know how to cover their tracks.”
I stared down at the medicine, my stomach clenching around the food I had eaten. “So if they weren’t doctors, what is this stuff?” I gestured at the box.
“It seems like it hadn’t hurt her yet,” Ethan offered. “Maybe the drug is for real, even if the clinic isn’t. We don’t know.”
Rose angled herself toward me and Reggie. “Tell me about the symptoms,” she urged.
I racked my brains to remember. “It was about three and a half months ago that it started,” I said. “Maybe a little more. It came on slow. Fatigue, a nose bleed, another nose bleed, a rash, then a fever. All this over about twenty days or so. Oh, except for that episode about a week before it started. You fainted on the steps leading down to the track field, remember?”
“I told you,” Reggie said impatiently. “I didn’t faint. I was pushed. Probably the mean girls from my class.”
