Free Fever by Lauren DeStefano Page A

the Gatherer says. “There’s other girls with eyes out there.”
    “Not. Like. These.” Madame is red with fury. She wraps her arms around me like she’s protecting me. “Her ring alone is worth what I’m asking! If you won’t buy her, someone else will.”
    For one dangerous moment I allow myself a glimmer of hope. Hope that he will not buy me and Madame will send me back to a tent, and I can grab Gabriel and steal away.
    But the Gatherer reaches for his hip, and in the next second I’m staring down the barrel of a handgun. And the lantern lights the rage in the Gatherer’s eyes, more maddened even than Madame’s, and he’s shouting that he has changed his mind, he wants me for free, or he’ll make sure no one else can buy me. And Jared has a gun too, pointed at the Gatherer, and the Gatherer points his gun at Jared.
    I hear a wind in the tall grass like the whole world is gasping. But it’s Maddie, launching out from the weeds. In a moment she’s shrieking in that horrible way of hers, and then clinging like a leech to the man and biting into his leg. The Gatherer is clearly surprised by this. He tries to shake her off, but she has coiled herself around his leg and is biting and clawing and screaming.
    The Gatherer is swearing and spitting, and I don’t think he means to fire his gun—I see the surprise on his face when it goes off—but how can he concentrate with all this commotion? He gets Jared in the arm. There’s a small explosion of blood.
    Then another shot, this time from Jared’s gun.
    For the second time in my life, I watch as a Gatherer crumples and falls down dead in front of me. Maddie whimpers and coils herself around Jared’s leg like a cat. He crouches down to console her, petting her hair with one hand and still aiming the gun at the Gatherer’s corpse with the other.
    “Bastard.” Madame spits on the gray coat. The Gatherer’s eyes are open and staring at her bare feet as she stamps out her cigarette. “One of the best customers. I give him all my best girls,” Madame says. One of ze best customers. “This is the thanks I get?” She spits again.
    Jared is whispering soft things to Maddie. Many of the women and bodyguards have a fondness for Maddie; they treat her as a sort of pet. But Jared is her favorite, and seeing a gun pointed at him clearly upset her.
    “And you.” Madame directs her anger to Jared. She paces toward him, dragging me tripping after her. “Look at the mess you’ve left me to clean up! How will I explain his death to his pack? He would not have shot her. It was a bluff.”
    Jared stands to full height, easily a whole head taller than me, and much taller than Madame, and still he looks small in the line of Madame’s rage.
    “I—” he begins, his fists clenching. Madame slaps him, first in the face but then again on the arm where he’s bleeding and his skin has been ripped by the bullet.
    “You’ve cost me too much business! You’ve cost me the sale of a lifetime!”
    She’s so furious that her accent is gone. She starts raving about there being spies, that she’ll never be able to do business with the Gatherers again if they find out about this. She hits him again and again, the way I think Vaughn must have hit Gabriel the day he let me out of my room, which left him bruised and limping. But Jared is much bigger than Gabriel, and much stronger. He could rip Madame in two, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t because she is his only home, his only shelter. He’s her technological genius, her favorite, and Madame is so broken from losing her child that even for him she hates where she should love. Hates brutally.
    Jared takes it, doesn’t cower, doesn’t flinch. It’s Maddie who is fuming. When she can take it no longer, she screams and throws herself at Madame with such a force that they both hit the ground. Fake rubies and emeralds scatter around them.
    And then Madame is ripping Maddie away from her, standing over her, kicking her. And the girls