The Fever King (Feverwake, #1)

by Victoria Lee

I still don’t know if I’m going to DC because you fucked up your order and I have to or because I want to.

I hurt people just being around them. Usually it’s by accident, but with you it was on purpose, at least at first.

Noam reckoned he’d stay the perfect candidate right up until they remembered he was Atlantian. Then it’d be all, thanks for your time and conflict of interest.

He hadn’t cried over losing his father since feverwake three days ago, and now it felt wrong to be upset, as if he had the chance to grieve and missed it.

Noam’s whole body was on edge, waiting for someone to say it. Someone was going to say it, any second now. Carolinians just couldn’t help themselves— “Border control is shit,” Ames agreed. She hadn’t stopped watching Noam. “You flood a small neighborhood with a bunch of rednecks who’re probably infected already, and it’s gonna be a shitshow.” And there it was.

He couldn’t imagine anything less appealing than being asked to make a fool of himself in front of a whole bunch of government officials.

What if his presenting power turned out to be something dumb, like changing his eye color? They’d probably kick him out.

“What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?” The woman shrugged. “You tell me.” All I see is a bunch of random shit.

“This is a waste of time,” one of them—the black-haired man—muttered. Lehrer cleared his throat and picked up a pen to make a note on a pad of paper. It was oddly gratifying to watch the way the others’ faces went pale. All gazes swung back round to Noam, as if he were suddenly the most important person in the world.

“So,” Noam said, returning to the center of the room and stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Did I pass?” Judging from the disappointed looks on their faces, the resigned set to the woman’s mouth, that was a no.

There was probably some cosmic quota for the amount of sass you could get away with in one day, and Noam wouldn’t be surprised if that cold black-haired man was keeping score.

Turned out, learning physics required a little bit more than knowing how to read.

It’s fine. It’s just critical thinking. You can do this. But it wasn’t, and he couldn’t. The questions weren’t logic based; they were factual, designed to appeal to someone skilled in rote memorization.

Noam sat in silence, at the same table as the rest yet not there at all.

Noam waited for him to keep going, to say whatever else polite people usually said when meeting someone new, but that appeared to be all Dara had in him.

How the hell had Lehrer lived to be over a hundred years old if he was a smoker? He imagined Lehrer’s lungs staining black, crumpling in on themselves like burned paper, only to heal themselves and expand, pink and fleshy. Over and over again.

Raphael says he needs therapy. Dunno where we’re gonna find that in NC these days. Does he think shrinks set up shop in bombed-out supermarkets and give out pills at the Shell station?

Dara could take his good looks and cool power and bewildering popularity and fuck right off.

He was so drunk that when he waved, even his hand looked slurred.

Noam felt like they were talking about two totally different people. Dara being an asshole was unsurprising. Dara losing his grip on that perfect self-control for even a second, on the other hand, struck Noam as less characteristic.

“I suspect,” he said, “you’re starting to wonder why I accepted you into this program in the first place.” Well, he wasn’t wrong. Noam shrugged one shoulder. I figured you’d put too much bourbon in your coffee that morning probably wasn’t appropriate.

His pulse raced in his chest, and he half expected to find Swensson standing there on the other side: I thought you might try something like this.

Today Noam wasn’t just another student but something greater, stronger and smarter than everyone else.

Noam nearly froze, his blood running to ice when their eyes met. But if he froze he’d get caught, he’d be expelled, never allowed back here again— Noam smiled instead, bright and cheery. “Heya!” Heya? The woman looked startled, but just said good morning and brushed past. Holy shit, that actually worked. Unbelievable. He had a cadet star right there on his sleeve.

This must be what power felt like.

Fuck, this was a stupid idea, he thought as his knees hit the floor.

A moment ago people wondered if the alarm was broken, but now they all thought this was some kind of terrorist attack.

Noam clutched his bag to his chest as people raced past, more worried about someone trashing his computer...

“Shit,” Dara whispered. And—he had a gun in his hand, what the fuck, what the fuck— Only, no, that was an illusion.

There was even something mischievous about the subtle curve of Dara’s mouth, the way he tilted his head to the side. He was magnetic.

“That was a bad idea,” Lehrer said. “You caused building-wide panic. It would have been better to let the alarm keep going.” No shit.

No shit. Dara hadn’t been checking his social media accounts on the MoD servers, after all.

He had Noam captured there as thoroughly as if he’d tied him down, because Noam couldn’t imagine moving when Dara was looking at him like that.

“Do you really think Lehrer let me drink moonshine growing up?” “Lehrer does seem more the vintage imported whisky type,” Noam admitted. “Like, he’d probably say we could only enjoy this drink if we had sophisticated adult palates.”

There was something too slow and precise about the way he moved, an intent that carved through silence.

“They tried. I deflected the first bomb into the Atlantic and told them the next would find its way back where it came from.” Deflected a nuclear bomb. Lehrer, at age nineteen, deflected a nuclear bomb.

All of them were so very proud an accident of birth made them Carolinian and bought them a lifetime of safety and privilege instead of fear and poverty and death.

Noam smirked, even though it made his bruised cheekbone hurt like fuck. “I can see the headline now: ‘Level IV–trained witching arrested at anti-Sacha protest.’ Ouch. Hope you have a good PR department.”

Great. Here he was, worried about whether he sounded Carolinian enough to impress a rich white man.

Governments didn’t have to listen to the people until the people made it hurt not to listen.

“And I meant it when I said I wasn’t gay,” Noam said. Ames looked disbelieving, but she didn’t pull away. Noam smirked. “Bisexual isn’t gay.”

Maybe this was why he and Ames both wanted Noam to come along so badly—to stop them all from killing each other.

Noam didn’t like that look on Lehrer’s face. It was too strange, too—mechanical. As if it had been pieced together as carefully as the wards around this room.

Dara had a way of making even the mundane extraordinary.

Dara was born to lie on mussed bedsheets with wet hair spilling like an ink stain onto white pillows, flush cheeked.

“I was sorry to hear about your father.” Ames snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit, Noam.” “Okay, I won’t. But I didn’t think you wanted me saying, ‘Oh, what a relief your dad’s dead now’ when you just got done being accused of his murder.”

“History is written by the victors.”

Lehrer didn’t have a computer, as if he thought owning something made after 1965 would throw off his aesthetic.

“What are you doing here?” “What do you think? I’m on a rescue mission, Rapunzel. Now let down your hair.”