Chapter 187 CLXXXVII

Chapter 187 CLXXXVII
Levi's POV

I drove the forty minutes back to the pack territory in twenty-six minutes. I did not think about what I was doing to the speed limit. I did not think about anything except the sound of Zoe's voice on the phone and the word convulsing and the image of Aria standing on that pavement in the rain four nights ago, shaking and soaked and doing everything she had been told to do while her mother was driven away.

I parked outside the building and went up the stairs rather than the lift because the lift was too slow and the apartment door was open.

I went in.

The living room had been rearranged, the couch had been pushed back and the coffee table moved and Aria was on the floor on a spread of blankets that Zoe had clearly put down in the moments before or after calling me, the kind of fast practical response Zoe made when something needed to be done and she was the person there to do it.

Aria was not convulsing anymore; she was lying still, which was both better and worse than the word convulsing had prepared me for, because the stillness of a six-year-old who had been convulsing ten minutes ago was a particular kind of stillness that had too much in it.

Zoe was beside her on the floor, one hand on Aria's chest, monitoring. Lily and Rose were in the doorway of the second bedroom, both of them in their pajamas, both of them very still in the way that small children went still when something was happening that they understood was serious.

I crouched beside Aria as she was burning.

I put my hand on her forehead and the heat coming off her skin was significant, beyond the manageable fever of the previous days, operating at a level that had moved from illness into something that required immediate intervention.

Her eyes were open but not tracking. Half-present, looking at the ceiling without seeing it.

"When did this change?" I said to Zoe.

"The fever spiked about an hour ago," Zoe said her voice was controlled but tightly so. 

"She was coughing and I thought she just needed water, and then she went rigid and the convulsing started." 

She paused. "It lasted about four minutes then it stopped. She has been like this since."

Four minutes was a long time for a convulsion.

"The pack doctor," I said.

"Called him the moment it started. He's coming from the eastern sector, he said fifteen minutes, that was twelve minutes ago."

I looked at Aria.

Her chest was rising and falling with the short quick breaths that came with high fever, the body working harder than it should to manage a temperature that had exceeded what it could regulate on its own. 

The heat under my hand had not reduced since I placed it there. If anything it was climbing.

My phone rang Xavier.

I answered. "Where are you?"

"Four minutes out," he said. "How is she?"

"Get here," I said.

I stayed beside Aria and kept my hand on her forehead and watched her breathe and did not think about the other things I needed to be doing tonight, the three-hour timeline I had given Marcus, the extraction plan for the facility.

I did not think about any of that I thought about a small person who had stood in the rain for twenty minutes following instructions because her mother had told her to, and who had told me every morning since whether she could have the yellow cereal, and who had laughed yesterday for the first time when Lily and Rose came into her room.

I thought about how she had said Mama on that pavement not as a word she was trying. As a word that belonged to her.

The pack doctor arrived at the same time as Xavier.

Dr. Fenwick was a practical man in his sixties who had been practicing pack medicine for thirty years and who had, to my knowledge, never been rattled by anything he had walked into. He came through the door with his bag already open and went directly to Aria without preamble.

Xavier came in behind him he saw Aria on the floor and stopped. He stopped in the way that a man stopped when he had spent six years raising a small person alone and had arrived in a room where that small person was burning with fever on a blanket on the floor looking at a ceiling she could not see.

His face did not collapse; he was not a man whose face collapsed. But the control it took to prevent that was visible in a way it was not usually visible from Xavier, the jaw held very deliberately, the eyes doing the work of processing something that the rest of him was not going to perform in front of other people.

He crossed the room and crouched on the other side of Aria from me.

He put his hand on her face. "Aria," he said, quietly. "I'm here."

Her eyes moved slowly, with the unfocused quality of someone coming back from a long distance, her eyes moved toward the sound of his voice.

She looked at him. "Daddy," she said. The word came out in almost no voice at all.

"Yes," he said. "Right here."

Dr. Fenwick was working efficiently beside them, taking her temperature with a proper medical thermometer, checking her pulse and breathing, opening her eyelids gently to check her response.

"Thirty-nine point eight," he said, reading the thermometer. 

"That's what triggered the convulsion. At this temperature in a child her age, seizure is not uncommon but it needs to be addressed immediately." 

He pulled an IV kit from his bag. "I need to get a line in. She needs fluids and fever reduction medication directly; the oral route isn't reliable right now given her state."

"Dit," Xavier said.