djinn wars 01 - chosen Read Online Free PDF Page B

touch with either of her parents, so she was freaking out. So I stayed with her.”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling some of my righteous indignation begin to seep away. Lori was an only child, and a little coddled, so I could see why she’d be more than ordinarily upset at not being able to contact her parents. “Is she okay?”
    “Yeah, her mom finally got a text through and said she was on her way home, so I thought I’d better get over here.” His gaze sharpened on me, and I wondered what he saw. Lord knows, I was starting to feel kind of overloaded. “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine, but Mom isn’t,” I replied bluntly. Maybe too bluntly, because he almost dropped the glass he was holding.
    “She’s — she’s not sick, is she?”
    “Yes. She just got the fever about a half hour ago.”
    Beneath his end-of-summer tan, my brother’s face drained of all color. “She can’t be sick!”
    Right then he didn’t look like the big, broad-shouldered running back, but a scared kid. I wanted to go hug him, but lately he’d been scorning such sisterly displays of emotion, so I wasn’t sure how he would react. Instead, I kept my voice calm as I told him, “She had a high fever, but I got her to take some ibuprofen, and she’s resting now with some cold cloths on her head. So far, so good.”
    That sounded very reasonable, very steady. Never mind that I didn’t really believe it. If this disease really was at all survivable, that information would’ve been all over the news by now. The complete radio silence on the actual facts of the disease told me that it was beyond dire…it was catastrophic.
    My words didn’t seem to reassure Devin. He gave me a stricken look and then went into the family room, where he stopped a few feet away from the couch and stared down at our mother. She seemed to be sleeping, but something seemed off about her face, as if her cheeks and eye sockets had begun to look sunken, far too shadowed.
    No, that couldn’t be right. It had to be a trick of the lighting in the room; I’d pulled the drapes almost closed so the afternoon light that was beginning to slant into the space wouldn’t disturb her. Just some sort of strange optical illusion.
    Only I feared that wasn’t it at all.
    Devin appeared to be of the same mind. He stood there, hands hanging helplessly at his sides, as he stared down at her. Finally, he whispered, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”
    In that moment, I was furious with him for giving voice to that thought, as if by saying it out loud he could somehow cause it to happen. “No, she’s not,” I shot back, my voice shaking.
    “She is,” he insisted, and right then I was glad that she was more or less comatose. At least that way she couldn’t possibly hear what we were saying. “When I was over at Lori’s house, we were on the computer, trying to get more information. A lot of the sites we went to were down, but we found one with this guy on video saying that everyone who catches it dies, and that the government is shutting down anyone who tries to spread the truth.”
    I recalled that one blonde newscaster, and the way her gaze kept flickering nervously to something — or someone — off-screen. FBI…or CIA…or NSA…agents, standing there and watching to make sure the reporters all said the same thing?
    At any other time, that would have felt like rank paranoia. Now, though….
    “That’s crazy,” I said, although I didn’t sound all that convinced, even to myself. “No disease is one hundred percent fatal.”
    “That we know of,” Devin shot back. Then his face twisted as he looked back down at our mother, at her strangely waxy and sunken features. “Is there anything else we can do? Like, I don’t know, ice packs or something?”
    “Maybe,” I said. It was worth a try. Covering her in ice packs would complete the ruin of her outfit, but I doubted that mattered much at the moment.
    Glad to have something to do, Devin and I went to the kitchen