“I’m here for you. And Theo wants to be, too. His brain is just stopping him right now. But he’s safe in bed.” I stepped over to her side, avoiding the piles of dirty laundry and basins we had collected over the last few days. “What can I do to help?”

Savannah held the basin under Felix’s chin with one hand, and thrust the kettle my way with the other. “More water. Please. Quickly.”

I nodded and rushed out the door, not wanting to leave her for any longer than I had to. We needed to be a team. Theo tried, he really, really did. But we couldn’t control our scars and past hurts. Maybe one day these things wouldn’t send him into a panic, but for now, it was just a fact of life.

For a second, I thought of moving Felix to the humidity of the conservatory, thinking it might help break the fever. But there was also a chance there were more spiders, and I wasn’t sure that was worth the risk.

There were over 43,000 species of spiders in the world. It was thought over thirty of them could kill a human. Africa has the most variety of arachnids, but every continent has them except for Antarctica. A natural spider defense was citrus scents, like lemon or orange. Spiders didn’t normally come near the house, and we thought it was because animals and insects could sense the curse. Maybe this spider’s ancestors had been in the house before the curse, and weren’t affected, breeding quietly through the decades. None of these explanations stopped Felix from being bitten by what I thought was a black widow, and none of them stopped him from being a stubborn jerk and noticing the bite sooner so we could have had a damn chance.

I thought about Savannah, crying in my bed last night, and Theo, wide-eyed and worried. Would I be enough for either of them? Could I keep us all together? I couldn’t stop the thoughts from swirling as I boiled more water, wishing for faster electricity, faster water, faster everything. I had no idea how everyone hadn’t died in 1907 if it took this long to do anything. We needed Brynn, wherever the hell she was. We needed an icebox, which was just wishful thinking. We needed a lot of things. Eventually the water boiled, and I snatched the pot up with a tea towel, hurrying back to Savannah and Felix’s side. I’d take over basin duty when I got upstairs, and let Savannah have a bit of a break. Hopefully Felix would nap soon, since his body needed sleep to heal.