They’d given Malyn oxygen, x-rayed his chest, shoved a tube down his throat to take a look at his airways, taken a sample of his blood for testing, x-rayed his chest a second time, and for each of these things, he’d had to wait in between. 

At least Finch had been there the whole time, telling whatever lies he’d needed to in order to stay at Malyn’s side. Though, maybe they mostly hadn’t been lies. Yeah, technically Finch wasn’t Malyn’s brother by blood, but they’d grown up together and were closer than most biological brothers, so what difference did it actually make? He’d also told the doctors Malyn had a medical phobia and if he was left on his own, he’d probably freak out and leave, and while Malyn had scoffed at that in his head, it wasn’t actually untrue. Finch had just made it sound extra dramatic. Malyn was more incredibly bored and annoyed than he was afraid.

Finally, a doctor with a thick manilla folder took them into an office to talk about Malyn’s test results.

“Well, to start off with, your lungs look fine,” the doctor said as she opened up the folder.

“Great,” Malyn said. “Can I go?”

“You’re in a hospital, not a prison. You can leave whenever you want. The confusion we’re having, though, is that we have your medical records from when you were a child and your lungs weren’t fine then. You had permanent scarring on them.” She pulled a chest x-ray that Malyn was pretty sure had been taken when he was a child out of the folder and set it on the table between them.

“Yup.”

She set another x-ray alongside the first, this one presumably taken that night. “And now you don’t.”

“Oh.” Malyn leant forward to examine the x-rays, but he had no idea what he was looking at. “Well, that is interesting. Maybe a bit of smoke inhalation was just what my lungs needed.”

“I don’t think…”

“He was bitten by a breach creature a couple of days ago,” Finch interjected. “Bite healed completely, practically overnight. Guessing the two are related.”

“That seems extremely likely,” the doctor said. “Do you know why the bite healed so quickly?”

“No,” Malyn said. “Do you?”

“No.”

Malyn leant back in his chair. “See, I knew going to a doctor wouldn’t be helpful.”

“We were considering whether the bite itself might have caused this,” Finch told the doctor. “We’ve also got someone staying with us who moved in around the time this all started, but honestly, I don’t think he has any way of doing something like that. And then a few of days ago, we handled the seeds of a plant that came through the breach, so maybe that’s something?”

The doctor nodded as she took notes.

“We send everything to the lab here in town, so I’ll give you our reference number if you want to chase any of it up,” Finch said

“That’s not exactly part of my job, but I will do that,” the doctor said. “If something came through that could completely heal injuries, both old and new, that would be incredible. Do you have a contact number I can take down?”

“Nah, I already tossed my phone into the fire after the fire fighters got there,” Finch said. “A crazy vampire’s trying to kill us, so I think we’re going to have to go into hiding.”

The doctor’s eyebrows lifted. “A vampire? Luther is trying to kill you?”

“No, there’s another one now. Much worse. Luther’s okay, I guess. You can probably email Adin and he’ll get to it once he’s got a secure device to work on.”

“I…” the doctor said as she struggled to process all of that. “Okay.”

Malyn held his child x-ray up to the light. There were some blurry spots. Was that lung damage? “So can we leave now, or is this one of those things that kid’s TV shows always warned me about where if you have a special power, the government will lock you in a lab and do experiments on you?”

“No, you can still go. Ideally I’d like to be able to contact you, but I understand the whole vampire situation might get in the way of that.”

Malyn nodded seriously. “It’s probably going to get in the way of a lot of things, doc. Possibly including me continuing to be alive, but hey, I probably would have died like two days ago if my friend hadn’t blasted a dog in half for me, so that’s kinda just a part of life, right?”

“Uh…”

Finch stood. “Thanks for looking into those things for us. We should get going.”

Finch tried to insist on driving, but Malyn kept repeating what the doctor had said about his pristine fucking lungs, and he eventually relented and let Malyn drive the bike. They’d spent way too many hours sitting around only to find out that Malyn was fine and probably would have also been fine if they’d done nothing at all. The oxygen they’d given him when he’d first gotten to the hospital had been great, but everything after that he could have done without.

And Adin and Tyla had been waiting for them that whole time. He was sure they were fine. Katrina probably didn’t want another piece of Adin. Just… after what had happened, it didn’t feel right for them to be apart. It felt especially wrong to be away from Tyla at a time like this. Or at all, really. They were always together these days.

Malyn felt a flood of nostalgia when they made it to the road that led up to Adin’s little cabin in the mountains. He remembered Finch taking him up there for the first time when he was still struggling over the English language and being offered lemonade by a calm man with huge fucking antlers.

It had been a confronting moment. Malyn’s parents would have called Adin a monster, but Finch had just interacted with him like he was anyone else. Like he was a friend. Adin hadn’t truly become a part of Malyn’s life until years later, but he had played a part in forming who Malyn was. There had been something absolutely thrilling about realising that he could sit down with someone so bizarre and he didn’t even have to have an opinion on them. That it wasn’t his job to grant someone permission to be.

None of them had driven back then, so Malyn hadn’t been able to make the trek up to see Adin very often. Finch might have been able to power through it easily, but it was close to an hour’s walk uphill and that wasn’t a great time when you had shitty lungs.

When Malyn drove to the end of the long, winding dirt road that led to Adin’s ramshackle, one bedroom cottage, he found Luther’s huge bus parked outside in front of the lemon tree. He’d thought Luther and Shadow would be long gone by now. Maybe it had been too late to head out by the time they'd driven up here, though. The sun was well on its way to being up now, so it was definitely too late at this point.

Finch knocked on the front door and Adin quickly answered it.

“Tyla’s sick,” Adin said as he let them in. “I’m not sure if he breathed something in or if it’s shock or something particular to his physiology that I have no hope of comprehending, but he’s pale and clammy and he’s been throwing up, and it only seems to be getting worse. We might have to take him back to Nuuvatu, because I’m not sure a human doctor can help him.”

Malyn had started searching for Tyla before Adin had even finished speaking, and he found him bundled up on the couch with a bucket at his side in case he needed to throw up, dressed in his nightgown and a cardigan that was too big for him. Malyn moved to sit down next to him, but Tyla was already reaching up to drag him down into a desperate hug. He felt like a drowning man clasping for something to cling on to that would keep his head above water. Malyn had to physically lift him and set him down halfway onto his lap to get them into a comfortable position.

Finch’s eyebrows lifted, but he didn’t comment on their position as he sat down on the arm of the couch. “How’re we going to get him to Nuuvatu? He doesn’t look in any state to be clinging to the back of a motorcycle.”

Adin sat down in his armchair. “We would have to take the bus. We could wait until Luther wakes up so that he can drive, but if he gets much worse, you or Malyn might just have to do your best.”

“I bet I could drive a bus,” Malyn said, stroking Tyla’s arm to try to encourage him to relax his grip just a little. “Most buses don’t even have seatbelts, so they must not be too bad to crash. Can’t be worse than a motorcycle, anyway.”

“I don’t want to go back to Nuuvatu,” Tyla murmured. “They won’t let you in. I want to stay here.”

“I want you to stay with us too, Ty, but we’ve done pretty well with no one dying tonight, and I don’t want to ruin that,” Finch said.

“I assume the doctors cleared you, Malyn?” Adin asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Malyn said. “Get this. Smoke inhalation healed my lung scarring. I actually have better lungs now.”

“Did they say smoke inhalation healed them, or…”

“We’re assuming whatever healed the bite did the same for his lungs, but the doctor didn’t really have any more ideas about that than we did,” Finch explained.

“Which is what I told you would happen,” Malyn said.

“She’s going to look into everything we’ve sent to the lab recently and see if there’s anything that might have caused this, which is nice of her,” Finch said. “Or, y’know, she’s hoping to get whatever magic heal-all thing Malyn’s been exposed to named after her, but whatever.”

“Good,” Adin said. “Normally I would try to be involved, but I’m not sure what our next step will be at the moment.”

“Me either.” Finch reached up, rubbed his eyes, and yawned. “I’ve been thinking for the last few hours, and… I don’t know. I don’t know where we go from here. We might have to move. Fully start over. We could take the risk that Katrina’s bluffing and assume she’ll lose interest in us as soon as Luther and Shadow are gone, but I don’t like the odds on that one.”

“We can’t risk Malyn,” Tyla insisted.

“No, no, I agree,” Adin said. “There’s a lot to work out logistically, but nothing is more important than keeping us all safe.”

“So what do we do?” Malyn asked.

“For now, monitor Tyla,” Adin said. “That will have to decide our next step. If he gets worse, someone will have to figure out how to drive that bus. If he stays the same, we talk Luther into taking us to Nuvvatu after sunset and go from there. If he gets better, well. We can move directly to more long term plans.”

Malyn leant his head against Tyla’s shoulder. “Okay.”

“Get some rest,” Adin said. “I’ll be here, watching over you. I’ll make sure that everything is okay.”