“Something’s wrong with the baby,” she said. “They’re calling doctors from everywhere.”
She was gone again before he could ask more.
Marcus spent the night at the cottage window, watching the mansion blaze with lights. White coats moved in frantic shadows past the nursery. And beneath his fear, one thought kept rising over and over.
The plant.
By the time he slipped through the gardens and crouched behind the ornamental fountain outside the nursery, the place had become a battlefield. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows he saw baby Oliver in the crib at the center of a storm of machines and people. His skin was gray-blue now. The rash had spread. Tubes ran from his arms. Monitors traced numbers that kept worsening.
The doctors had every theory except the right one. Infection. Virus. Genetic defect. Autoimmune reaction. Allergy. They tried everything. Marcus watched them reach for more tests, more medicine, more machinery, all while the plant sat on the window sill three feet away.
Then memory struck in full.