Alpha Strom finished demonstrating the upward-stab movement with the staff and handed it back to a young woman, before turning to face Scarlet. “I have not.”
Scarlet scanned the hectic crowd for the thousandth time. “Me either, not for a long time. She has a tendency to wander off…”
Tilting his head back, Strom sniffed a few times at the air, then shook his head. “It seems she hasn’t been around for a while now. Perhaps she’s found somewhere to rest.”
“Or perhaps she’s poking out her own eye with a stick. I’m telling you, it’s not good for her to be left alone.”
Grumbling, Strom gestured at one of the beta members of his pack, then shambled toward a bench. He paused to sniff again, sending his keen eyes into the crowd, before turning and gazing into the forest.
“You’re being creepy,” said Scarlet.
“You asked for my help.”
“Not technically.”
When Strom headed into the shadows of the not-really-a-forest, Scarlet followed, though she couldn’t imagine why Winter would have left everyone behind and wandered off all by her—
Never mind. She could imagine it after all.
“She came this way,” Strom said, running his fingers over a tree’s bark. He turned to the right and increased his speed. “I’ve picked up on her now.”
Scarlet trotted along beside him.
“There.”
She saw her at the same moment, and broke into a run before Strom did.
“Winter!” she screamed, dropping to her knees. Winter’s body was sprawled out in the patchy gra.s.s. Scarlet rolled the princess onto her back and checked for a pulse, relieved to find one fluttering at Winter’s neck.
A hand grabbed Scarlet’s hood and dragged her back. She yelped, flailing to get away, but Strom ignored her pummeling fists. “Let me go! What are you doing?”
“She is sick.”
“What?” Unzipping her hoodie, Scarlet scrambled out of the sleeves and fell at Winter’s side again. “What are you talking about?”
“I can smell it on her,” Strom growled. He didn’t come any closer. “Diseased flesh. Vile.”
Scarlet frowned up at him before refocusing on the princess. “Winter, wake up,” she said, smacking the princess’s cheek a few times, but Winter didn’t even flinch. Scarlet pressed a hand to her forehead. She was clammy and hot. She felt the back of her head, wondering if the princess had hit her head again, but there was no blood and the only b.u.mp was from the fight at Maha’s house. “Winter!”
Strom kicked something and it skipped through a tuft of gra.s.s and hit Scarlet’s knee. Scarlet blinked and picked it up. A sour apple pet.i.te, one of the candies Winter had often brought to her in the menagerie, usually laced with painkillers. It had a bite taken out of it. Picking up Winter’s hand, Scarlet found bits of melted candy sh.e.l.l stuck to her fingertips.
“Poison?”
“I don’t know,” said Strom. “She isn’t dead—just dying.”
“With some sort of disease?”
He gave a curt nod. “You should not be so close to her. It smells—” He looked like he might be sick.
“Oh, pull yourself together. All those muscles and teeth and you’re afraid of a little cold?”
His expression darkened, but he didn’t come any closer. In fact, after a second, he stepped back. “There is something wrong with her.”
“Obviously! But what? And how?” She shook her head. “Look, I saw a little med-clinic on the main street. Can you carry her there? We’ll have a doctor check her out. She might need her stomach pumped or—”
Scarlet’s gaze landed on Winter’s arm and she gasped. She skittered away from the princess’s unconscious form, every instinct telling her to hold her breath. To clean the skin that had come in contact with the princess. To run.
“Now she listens.”
Ignoring him, Scarlet cursed, loudly. “When you said she had a disease, I didn’t think you meant she had the plague!”
“I do not know what this is,” said Strom. “I have never smelled this before.”
Scarlet hesitated a moment more, then let out a painful, frustrated sound, and forced herself to crawl back to Winter again. She grimaced as she lifted Winter’s arm to inspect the dark spots scattered across her elbow. The red-tinged rings around the bruises had swollen above the skin, puffed and glossy like blisters.
For as long as she could remember, the plague had worked in predictable stages, though how long they took to manifest varied by victim. Once the rash of bruise-colored rings marred a person’s skin, they may have three days or three weeks still to live. But given that Winter hadn’t been gone for more than an hour, the disease seemed to be working especially fast.
She scrutinized Winter’s fingertips, relieved to see them pink and healthy—no tinge of blue. Blood loss to the extremities was the final symptom of the disease before death.
She scowled. Hadn’t Cinder once told her that Lunars were immune to letumosis? This disease shouldn’t even be here.
“It’s called letumosis,” she said. “It’s a pandemic on Earth. It acts fast and no one survives. But … Levana has an antidote. It’s half the reason Emperor Kai is marrying her in the first place. We just … we need to keep Winter alive long enough to get it. We have to keep her alive until the revolution is over. All right?”