Page 4 of Hollow Child

The whole hike back home, I had a ball of dread hardening in my stomach. Lazlo hadn’t shown up, and I didn’t know how to reach him or find his homestead. With the distance and the lack of clear direction, it was not a trip I could make lightly. Especially not when I had no way of knowing the reason for his absence. He could have moved, died, or even becomea zombie.

I walked as quickly as I could, hoping that I would feel better when I was home and talked it all over with Boden.

But when I saw the lakehouse – the spacious log cabin on top of a hill next to a lake – in the mid-afternoon sun, my unease didn’t lessen. As I walked up the long gravel driveway, half-overgrown with grass, no one came out to greet me. Usually, at least Max or Stella would hurry out to me after I had been gone for a while, and more often than not, Boden or Serg would join them.

But today, there was no one. Not even Ripley.

When I finally made it to the house, I opened the front door to murmuring voices in the living room. Boden and Serg were standing beside the couch, and Stella was curled up with Ripley on it. Max sat on the arm of the couch near her head, looking down at her.

Stella noticed me first, her eyes brightening at the sight of me, but her cheeks were flushed, and her wild auburn hair stuck to her forehead. “Remy!”

“Thank god,” Serg said under his breath when he looked at me, and the worry in his eyes was alarming.

Boden came over and pulled me into his arms and kissed my temple, his stubble tickling my skin. “Fuck, Rem, I’ve missed you.” Then he pulled away so we were eye to eye when he said, “Stella passed out two days ago, and she has been throwing up on and off for a week.”

“What?” I brushed past Boden to go to Stella. In her oversized sweaterdress with the big cat curled up with her, she looked so small and frail.

“I feel better in the evenings, and I only passed out that one time.” Stella tried to minimize her illness with a weak, unconvincing smile.

“Come on, kiddo, even the damn cat knows you’re sick,” Boden said in an exasperated tone.

“She just missed me,” Stella argued, running her fingers through Ripley’s thick fur.

The lioness had taken to Stella and Max as soon as she met them. Maybe because they had been so young, and Ripley had never had cubs of her own or even been around another lion in years. At any rate, she had always been especially fond of the kids, gentle and more affectionate with them than she was with me.

But she didn’t usually race ahead of me to smother Stella on the couch, which made me worry that the lion could sense or smell something I couldn’t.

“So what’s going on?” I asked Stella. “Did you eat anything strange?”

She glared up at me with her pale gray eyes. “You know I would never do that.”

To her credit, Stella had become the family expert on foraging and botany, thanks to the extensive library in the lakehouse. She read everything she could, studying them for hours, and she knew better than any of us what was edible and what wasn’t.

“You’ve been throwing up and fainted. Have you had any other symptoms?” I asked.

“I’ve already gone through this a dozen times,” she complained.

On the coffee table, there were stacks of medical books, encyclopedias, and even the first aid kit. Boden had some medic training in the military, but that was it. We had no other ways to diagnose or treat Stella.

“She’s been throwing up, mostly in the morning, but she’s also been tired and gets the chills sometimes,” Max supplied, since Stella didn’t seem to want to explain it again.

“Tired, chills, vomiting,” I muttered to myself, trying to think of what it could be. “And no one else is sick”

Serg shook his head. “We’ve all been feeling pretty good, actually.”

I glanced down at Ripley nuzzling against Stella’s stomach, and the wordsmorning sicknessfloated in my head. I looked at Stella, and my heart dropped.

“Everyone out,” I snapped. “I need to talk to Stella alone.”

“What? Why?” Max asked in dismay.

“Out!” I shouted because I didn’t have the fortitude to explain just then.

The boys grumbled as they left, but they did leave, so I didn’t care. I sat down at the edge of the coffee table, and my stomach rolled as I leaned forward and took the hand of the girl that I had helped raise for the past eight years.

“Stella,” I began carefully, “have you missed your period lately?”

Two years ago, when she had first started menstruating, it had given us all a scare. I hadn’t had my period in years, since some overzealous doctor had taken my uterus, and it was something that I just didn’t think about anymore. There were usually more important survival issues to contend with anyway.

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