Before antibiotics, people used to treat illnesses with herbal remedies.
In South America, cinchona bark was dried, ground into powder, and mixed with water to reduce fevers.
The Sumerians were thought to have used honey to treat wounds as far back as 2000 B.C.
Even during Felix’s time, different infections were combated with mercury treatment–not to mention the more visceral treatments, like bloodletting or leeches to remove the poison. Savannah told me they still used leeches in 2022. I wasn’t sure I believed her.

Regardless, none of this knowledge helped, because we had nothing to help fight off Felix’s fever except boiling water, a small bottle of ancient hydrogen peroxide, and sheer willpower. I didn’t tell Savannah the peroxide might be pure water at this point, because I didn’t want to upset her more. At least it was sterile–mostly–from being sealed. After three years in the real world though, it turned into water, even in a sealed bottle. I hoped like hell the house magic had preserved its efficacy.

For the next two days, Savannah and I took shifts watching and changing Felix’s bandages. The bite was steadily becoming worse. The welt spread across most of his palm now, and was hot to the touch. His arm was entirely streaked with angry red slashes. Most of the time he was sleeping. When he was awake, he wasn’t coherent enough to understand. We also couldn’t be certain if the infection stemmed from the spider or the soil, so we were fighting blind.

We only made Theo stay with him if we were both needed elsewhere. Theo being sober was great for so many things, but caring for a deathly-ill Felix was not one of them. Being around someone so near death was triggering for him, and the poor kid literally shook when he had to be alone with Felix. Neither Savannah nor I acknowledged this to each other though, because mentioning it would mean we were accepting how close Felix was to the end.

When I was alone in my bed, trying to scrape together a couple hours of sleep to do it all again the next day, I would think about it. I tried to rationalize what we would do with his body afterwards. How it would mentally and emotionally affect all of us, and what we could do to carry on. We’d have to rely on each other, more so than ever before. Because one thing was slowly becoming a very real possibility, and that was that Felix was unlikely to survive.

A knock at my door jolted me awake, already knowing who it was before my eyes adjusted to see her curves in the shadows. “Luther?” Savannah called in a quiet voice. “Are you still awake?”