Savannah's brain felt like it was catching fire – like flames were raging inside her skull, inside her skin, inside her bones. This was fever like she'd never had fever before; fire that was burning her in a forge, in a crucible. Destroying her and remaking her. How could she survive it? And he had said this was only the beginning. The beginning of Transition – a process so dangerous that most women who went through it didn't survive.

She would be damned if she'd be one of them.

"I'm a survivor," she told him.

He stopped what surely had to be swearing in a language she'd never heard before and crossed swiftly to the bed, then crouched down and took her hands. "Damn straight you are. What do you need?"

"Ice. Water. More ice and more water. So hot. So thirsty."

He touched her forehead with his cool fingers and swore again. "Okay. I'm going to leave you alone just for a minute, just long enough to go find ice and water. Don't go anywhere, and don't let anybody in the door. I'll be right back, I promise."

She tried to smile. "I'm not an invalid, it's just a fever. Go. Get the water before my skin catches fire."

Seconds later, he was gone, so fast that she didn't have time to change her mind and call him back to her. She was afraid, and maybe it was weak but if you couldn't be honest with yourself about feeling scared when you were dying, then when could you be? She didn't want to die, especially not like this, alone in this horrible place with these horrible people. She shoved the pillows against the wall so she could lie back propped up against them, closed her eyes, and waited for Jake to return. Strange how he had become such an important part of her life in such a short time.

The door slammed open and Savannah jumped, startled. Why would he…

It wasn't Jake.

It was a woman she'd seen at the edges of the gathering after lunch, a stringy, wild-eyed woman in baggy clothes and ratty hair.

"Wrong room," Savannah said, trying to look tough. It was harder than one would think to look tough when her head was splitting open.

"You don't look like much," the woman sneered, sauntering into the room with a familiar swagger. She walked just like B.D. and his father. Maybe it was a genetic thing.

"B.D.'s mother, I'm guessing?"

"Got it in one, Babe, so you're not stupid, at least."

Savannah struggled to sit up and reached back behind her to push the pillows out of her way. "Get out of my room."

"Big talk for somebody who's gonna be bowing down to me as your alpha in a couple of days – if you survive it. You got some muscle, so maybe you will, city girl."

Savannah narrowed her eyes. "I will bow down to you when hell freezes over. Get out of my room."

The woman bared her teeth, demonstrating to Savannah that she was really pissed off and also that she'd had a terrible lack of dental care in her lifetime. Neither fact really seemed relevant in Savannah's current condition. Instead, her body was shaking with the effort to keep herself from jumping up and tearing into the woman. A weird territorial feeling was thrumming through her veins, shouting at her to protect her territory. Protect and defend; protect and defend. Oh, God, she really was becoming a shifter.

She'd be a predator, at least. Nobody was ever going to turn her into prey.

The woman, who had no idea what Savannah was thinking, came a little closer. "I got an idea. How about I just take you with me now, and B.D. can try you out while you're still human and get you out of his system."

She reached out in a quick motion to grab Savannah's arm, but Savannah moved even faster. In an instant, she had her hand on the gun she'd taken from the firing range and hidden under her pillow. In another instant, she was pointing it at B.D.'s bitch of a mother.

"I don't think so. Now, for the last time, get out of my room."

The woman looked at the gun and laughed. "You're not gonna shoot me, little girl. You--"

Savannah shot her.

Well, she didn't exactly shoot her, but she shot the floor right in front of her, which was enough to get the woman stumbling and scrabbling back away from her.

At the doorway, she stopped to scream. "You're gonna regret that!"

"I don't think so," Jake said, arriving at a run and shouldering the crazed woman away from the door. "Leave and don't come back."

With that, he shut the door in her face.

"Nice gun," he said, a grin quirking up the corners of his lips. "Take it from the gun range?"

She looked at him and shrugged. "They never gave me a tote bag, so…"

Then another wave of fever came, and she dropped the gun and fell back on the bed. When she could sit up again, she downed three bottles of water, one after the other, until she felt it pass. "So it comes in waves? Like contractions?"

Jake winced. "Never having had contractions, I don't how to make that comparison. But from what I've heard, yes, it comes and goes in waves at first and then the waves speed up until it's one long painful feeling of your bones breaking and your nerves on fire. It ends in the shift."

"Or, more likely, in my death," she pointed out.

"Not a chance. I'm getting you out of here now."

"How are you going to do that?

He grinned. "Easy. Nobody ever looks up."

* * *

The window had been painted shut long ago, from the looks of it, so it took Jake a while to get it to open. Then there was the matter of the bars. Simple enough. He called on water to come to his aid and lend him its strength.

He slowly raised his hands and water swirled from the faucets in the sink and the bathtub, twirled itself into loops and spirals of shimmering silver, and came to his call.

On the bed, Savannah gasped. "Jake. It's beautiful."

"I think so too," he admitted. "No matter how many times I do something like this, I'm always in awe of nature's power."

With a flick of his wrists, he directed the water to spiral up and around the bars on the window. It was a matter of an instant for the bands of pure sparkling water to yank the bars out of the concrete. He had directed the water to muffle the sound, as well, so as not to cause an alarm, so there was barely any noise at all.

"You really are from Atlantis!"

"You had doubts?"

She shrugged, half-smiling. "So many doubts. But you think we're going through that? You do realize we're on the third floor, right?"

"Yes, and yes," he said, lifting her up off the bed as if she weighed nothing at all. Since she was nearly six feet tall, and at a healthy weight, this was a new experience for her. She kind of liked it.

"Are we going to fly?" Her voice sounded funny; this must be what breathless with anticipation meant. Holy cow, they were going to fly!

"Exactly. Well, to be precise, I'm going to fly, and you're going to be carried."

He was nuts. That had to be it. They were both nuts – but especially him – and this was some kind of fever dream. But hey, she would play along with it.

"Let's say you do know how to fly, which is ridiculous and I don't believe it, but anyway. For the sake of argument. The guards will see us and shoot us down, so this is really counterproductive."

"No, they won't. I told you: Nobody ever looks up."

With that, Jake's body dissolved. She didn't know any other way to think of it. It was not that he disappeared, it was more like a fading. But he was still there – she could feel him holding her. It's just that where Jake had been, only shimmering mist remained.

"Atlantis is cool," she said, and she could somehow feel that he was laughing.