Hey, Kittens! I cannot tell you how very sorry I am for not having this chapter up sooner than I have, I have had a major cutback in the amount of time I have to write fan fiction, as much as I love it. I've had some issues recently with my two writing pieces that I actually have a deadline for (No, they won't be posted here. Sorry, to those who care. But feel free to ask for a snippet, I could use some much -needed feedback on it), not to mention starting back at school, so I'll hope to have the next chappy up much sooner. But, as by the time this one get's posted, I'll be reading Mockingjay, I doubt it.

Love you all! Remember, Reviews make for a happy author! (And a happy author makes for frequent updates!)

~RF

Chapter 4, In Which Our Villain Reveals Herself

Ema woke early the next morning, despite her late night, and the cold winter sunlight streaming through the open curtains made the events of the night before seem unreal. But a quick glance to the bed across the room confirmed her memories, and if she closed her eyes and listened closely enough, the steady throb of a heart monitor could be heard in the room next door.

She sat up slowly, her head mysteriously free from any of the pain she had expected this early (If her watch could be trusted, it was just past 7 A.M.). She changed out of her flannel pajamas into a dark gray sweater and black jeans, plaiting her fiery hair down her back. She listened at her door for any sign of life, and besides the irritable beeping of the monitors in the next room, heard nothing.

She poked her head into Diane's room, with the intention of checking her friend's vitals, but just the sight of Diane's face beneath the collection of tubes and wires stilled her breath in her lungs, and she left quickly. The image there was disturbing, and not what she wanted her first sight that morning to be.

With little too do, she wandered the building that she had begun to tour the day before; She was simply shocked at the sheer amount of priceless art that adorned the halls (Much of it had been reported stolen sometime within the last century. She tried not to dwell on that). The only sound was that of the heels of her boots clacking over the marble floors, and she found the sudden silence strangely comforting. For that reason, she was shocked, and rather annoyed, to realize that the closer she moved towards the western wing of the manor. The sound of harried voices with rough Irish accents carried well, and within a minuted, she found herself surrounded by people wearing a strange combination of suits and lab coats.

Ema knew immediately why they were there; Diane was a medical mystery, a healthy teenager who, within the course of minutes, had fallen deathly ill with some unknown ailment. The world's greatest scientific minds would be diligently working to find some answer, any reason that something so impossible could have happened.

That, she thought with disgust, and the fact that Artemis was a multi-billionaire.

As she followed the milling, chattering crowd, Ema couldn't help but notice the pitying stares that chased after her. They knew who she was, of course they did. They knew she was Artemis' daughter, knew she was Diane's friend. She could do pretty much anything she wanted right now, and no one would stop her.

Suddenly, she had an idea. A strange idea, and unlikely idea, an idea that had a very slim chance of being fruitful even if Fate were on her side (Yeah, right), but an idea that would put to rest the tiny seed of doubt that was slowly sporing in her gut.

Now she walked with a new determinism, still following the group, but making her way to the front of it as to reach her destination faster. An odd combination of adrenalin, anxiety, and pure nerve was now pumping strongly though her veins, lifting her mind past her current situation and enabling her to see it from the cool, detached angle she was used to viewing her world from.

Most of the group drifted off on various duties before they reached the room that Ema was so anxious to see, and it was a good thing, too; She wasn't sure her current nerves could handle too many people looking over her shoulder to see what she was doing. They passed through the doors of the lab with no one really noticing anymore, and suddenly, Ema was in her element; Bright white and stainless steel so harsh it hurt the eyes, antibacterial smell, fluorescent lights were as comforting to the teenage genius as forest and coastline scenes were to others.

Ema worked quickly, finding what she needed with ease; Evidently, Artemis was as obsessive of neatness as she was (This was strange and uncomfortable, thinking of something they had in common, so Ema put it out of her mind without giving it a second thought.) A powerful, expensive microscope, a dropper, gloves, and a vial of Diane's blood, cold and dark, extracted the night before. She took care arranging the slide, following procedure so as not to screw up. She adjusted the power, watching for her worst fear to become visible.

Almost a year earlier, under the guise of working on an extra-credit science project, Ema had stayed late at school to use one of the many microscopes kept there in the lab. She had been curious about the nature of her magic for a while, and all that was needed was a single drop from a prick in her finger. The outcome had been brilliant; microscopic, brightly coloured blue cells, flashing and then burning to a gray spec as they tried to attach themselves to the glass plates of the slide.

What she saw now was very similar, albeit more sinister; None of the cells were their healthy blue, but a dark, dead gray, as they fastened themselves now, not to the glass, but to frightening black dots that seemed to kill them upon contact.

Ema had been right. Diane was very ill, yes, but with no human disease; it was, without a doubt, a fairy virus. Where she could have contracted something like this, Ema didn't know, but sinking feeling in her stomach gave away her fear.

Had she killed Diane?

E~A

The adrenalin sparked by the desire to know the truth had faded away to a distinct listlessness as Ema wandered back to her room. Her skin was cold and clammy, her hands shook, and her stomach roiled in furious guilt. She could be the only reason Diane was sick. Some human illness could have found it's way into her system, mutated to the point where a normal immune system could no longer fight it, and passed it to her very human friend.

Swallowing her rising nausea and forgoing her morose look in case Diane was awake, she forced herself into the room-turned-near-morgue. But it was for naught; her poor friend was still comatose. She wandered closer to the bed, startled by how very sick Diane really looked. Her face was coated in a sheen of cold sweat, her face the same ashen colour as the dead magic cells that plagued her body, backing up her natural system like so much mutated garbage. As a thick, heavy pain washed over her, Ema was forced to sit on the bedside, tears welling in her eyes as she pressed the back of her hand to Diane's face. The skin was cold.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, her vice hoarse from crying. "I didn't mean for you to get sick. It's all my fault." Her head fell to her knees in shame, tears now flowing freely down her face.

The door opened, and Ema bolted up, now quite aware of how awful she looked, with puffy eyes and a runny nose, but still sad enough that she didn't much care. A small Asian lady in a white nurse's uniform came bustling in, checking Diane's vitals and marking them on a clipboard.

When she was done, she looked at Ema with a mingled look of sadness and pity, which was strangely comforting to the crying girl. She gave Ema a small, melancholy smile and, brushing a stray hair from her face, said reassuringly, "There, there, 'hon. It's alright to be sad." with that, she left, leaving Ema wishing her mother was there to comfort her in this Hell hole.

Looking once more at Diane, she noted the girl's laboured breath, her erratic heartbeat, and knew, without a doubt, that her friend didn't have much time left.

E~A

Ema's fever and pains continued to get worse throughout the night, making her sleep erratic, but, at the same time, making it difficult to follow what was real and what was a dream.

Sometime around midnight, she heard a few yells in the hallway outside her door, harried voices, then a sudden hush that made her certain that Diane was gone. She wanted to cry, but her body was too dehydrated at this point to even produce tears.

Someone came into her room, presumably to tell her of Diane's passing, but she must have been more ill than she had thought, as this someone yelled for the others to come, and soon her room was full of people, running, checking, yelling, talking, hurting her. Faces flashed around her, but she couldn't tell which were actually there; Artemis, Melanie, Diane, Holly, her family, the kind Asian nurse. all swirled around her, talking, yelling at her to stay awake, but it was too hard to focus, and they might as well had been speaking Greek for all she understood.

Sometimes, her fever broke long enough for her to see things as they were, to gain some sense of what was happening to her; they were taking blood, they were checking her heart rate, they were asking her questions. The questions were the hardest, and Ema found herself refusing to answer except to the kind nurse; To her, she would say anything. So the woman sat with her, sometimes with a very worried-looking Artemis, others with a very bored-looking Melanie. But mostly, she sat alone, holding Ema's burning hands with her cool, soothing fingers, and for a while, Ema could pretend that she was home again, her mother trying to help her feel better.

But, when the fever settled down on her hardest, she felt as though she would die; she was burning, tongue dry and swollen, not an ounce of fluid in her, but at the same time, she was cold, so very cold, a freezing sweat dripping down her face and neck like so much rain. Hallucinations, pictures, colours, faces, came and went, but mostly there was darkness.

Ema came to love the darkness. It was calm and soothing, where some of the hurt stopped. It was cool, but warm. But slowly, even the darkness became unbearable as the night wore on. A heavy weight, squeezing the air from her lungs, was settling on her chest. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't see. It was then that Ema knew she was dying.

E~A

The pale-skinned fairy watched her newest victim with glee; The part-elf in front of her burning up as the magic in her system attached itself to her tissues, attacking her own body. A fairy's natural immune system was weak on it's own. Over the centuries, their bodies had come to rely entirely on the magic cells for it's defence, white cells almost completely replaced by the glowing blue ones. This was fine, and stronger than the natural one would have been, until a fairy's magic was depleted, or compromised, which was exactly what her home-grown virus was doing.

The system was a simple one, really; The normally powerful cells attached themselves to the virus, meaning to kill it, but unintentionally picking up the virus' DNA, killing themselves in the process and helping to breed the next, instantaneous generation of the virus. It then went on to destroy only the most vital organs, slowly enough that the victim was in intense pain, but slowly enough that the victim could be saved at any time by taking the antidote.

That is, as long as the antidote was taken with enough time before the heart was effected. That was her primary concern, because she didn't want the girl to die, not really. She wanted to scare her, let her see what she had the power to do, but she needed her too much to let her simply die.

She drew a small vial from her pocket, measuring out just enough to the the thick syrup to wake her up and keep her conscious long enough to get her on her side. Ema's mouth was open as he wrecked lungs tried to pull in every last breath she took. Three tiny drops rolled down her tongue. Three tiny drops were enough to keep her alive.

For now.

E~A

With no warning, a bright, warm flavour exploded on her tongue, burning her already frazzled senses, pulling her out of the darkness by force. She snarled against whatever was doing this, screaming, clawing, doing whatever she could to stay in the numbing silence. Then, suddenly, she could breath again. She was still paralysed from the waist down, but she now could breath, hear, see, taste, and, she found quickly, even wiggle her fingers. She uncurled her digits from the death grip she had held them in for so long, the small muscles aching.

But when this initial glee wore off, she looked around her, noticing first the multitude of machines attached to her via a collection of wires and pads, then the fact that every inch of her body was weak, achy, and drenched in sweat. And, finally, she noticed the small, kindly Asian woman sitting on a chair beside her bed, smiling sadistically.

But she was different now, wasn't she? Her dark eyes had elongated, becoming sharp and terrifying, and her face was angled, cut strangely. Pointed ears stood up from a mass of shiny black hair, finishing off the austere image.

"Good morning, Sunshine," she said, squeezing the hand she held. "Feeling any better?" Even if she hadn't spoken, reminding Ema of the countless tapes she'd seen of the mad fairy in the past, she would have known the face anywhere, and she cursed herself for not seeing it sooner.

The fairy who sat before her was Opal Koboi.

E~A

Ooooh...Cliffy. Whatever will happen next.

Whatever. I'm so predictable, you probably already know what's gonna happen!

Love you Kittens! R&R, and I will love you more!