Argus turned and looked Noble in the eye. His brother was shivering again, and the look on his face was more than just fear…it was terror. It was so out of place on Noble that it made Argus afraid.

“Argus,” Phyllis repeated. “Is he sick?”

Argus just kept staring at his brother.

“Argus?”

Finally, Argus began nodding his head. “Yeah, he’s sick.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s nothing a warm bed and some hot chicken soup can’t fix.”

Argus didn’t answer. Chicken soup wasn’t going to help Noble, and who knew what could? After all, how can you fix something when you don’t even know what’s wrong?

Chapter 6

It was past midnight and no one was asleep.

How could anyone in the house possibly go to bed when Noble, the leader of the pack, was in such bad shape? Sure, he’d felt under the weather before—they all had—but this was way more than just a touch of the flu or a bit of fever. Noble was sick, gravely ill, and the worst thing of all was that no one had a clue what was wrong with him.

They were all huddled in the boys’ bedroom, Argus and Tora sitting on the edge of one bed while Harlan worked at the computer in a corner of the room. Phyllis was in the chair next to Noble’s bed, where she’d been for the past three hours, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth and pulling back the covers each time Noble’s chills turned into a fever. His body temperature was all over the place, bouncing from a few degrees below normal to well up over a hundred and five. One minute his body would be covered in sweat and cold to the touch, and the next minute he’d be as hot and dry as beach sand in July. And blue…his skin had an unnatural blue tint to it, like the lips of someone who has been out in the cold for too long.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.