The infirmary overflowed by day two of the epidemic and most of the prisoners were left to fend for themselves as best they could, some even spending hours in pools of their own body fluids when fever made them too weak to make their way to the commode. The guards put in repeated requests for help, but all were ignored by a warden who believed that sickness was God's vengeful wrath upon sinners.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had myself a tall, dark and absolutely gorgeous nurse who attended to my every need. Granted, my needs at the time weren't as stimulating as they might have been normally, but I've never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and having Ice treat me with such loving tenderness in my so called hour of need wasn't going to make me start anytime soon.

Ice kept me clean, warm and dry when the drenching sweats of night-time fevers alternated with the bone wracking chills that came with the rising of the sun. She sat with me and held me when the spasms of coughing stole the breath from my lungs and the will from my body. Her strong fingers were gentle on my skin as she massaged the wrenching gut cramps that hit with unpredictable and vengeful force.

Even within the terrifying depths of my feverish delirium, I knew she was there and took strength and comfort from her solid presence. I felt surrounded by a blanket of love and caring; no more so than when the sound of her humming an old lullaby would soothe me into a dreamless sleep.

It was a week later when my fever finally broke, leaving me weak and shaky as a newborn. I awoke to find my head pillowed in Ice's lap, her fingers brushing through my sweat-drenched hair in a hypnotic and pleasurable rhythm. My scalp tingled to her gentle touch.

I blinked my eyes open, wincing at the over-bright glare of the glowing lights. A second later, her hand left my hair and instead shaded my eyes. Her smile was crooked and sweet. "Hey, stranger. How ya feeling?"

"Like that heavy bag out in the yard must feel after going a few rounds with you," I managed to croak out through an aching throat and cracked lips.

"That good huh?"

I just groaned.

"Do you think you can sit up if I help you?"

"Do I have to?"

"You're pretty dehydrated. You need to drink some water at least."

"I don't think I could hold it down. My stomach feels like it's been dragged behind a horse or something."

Ice shifted behind me, gently pulling me up so that my head rested against her chest. When she had me settled, she reached over and grabbed a styrofoam cup filled with water and held it to my lips. "C'mon. Just a sip."

Wincing, I took a small sip into my mouth. It was cool against my parched lips and soothing to my scorched throat and I swallowed it eagerly. My stomach stayed quiet, so I took another sip, and then another until I'd finished half the cup.

Pulling the cup away and resting it on the communal nightstand, Ice dried my lips with a soft cloth, then smoothed my hair from my forehead before wrapping me in an embrace and resting her chin on the crown of my head. "Is it staying down alright?"

"No trouble yet," I replied, reveling in the feeling of her arms around me. Looking around, I noticed that the bed next to mine, usually occupied by my new roommate of one month, was empty. "Where's Edie?"

"She was a bad asthmatic. The flu hit her hard and they didn't get her to treatment fast enough. She didn't make it."

"What?" I stiffened in Ice's embrace. "She's dead?"

"I'm afraid so."

If I had any moisture in my body to spare, I would have cried. I hadn't know Edie all that well, but she seemed like a nice, quiet, well-spoken woman who, like many of the rest of us, simply wanted to do her time in peace. Because she roomed with me, she was spared some of the almost ritualistic hazing that befell all new inmates, and for that I was happy. And now she was dead. A young woman taken down in the prime of her life by the flu of all things. I sighed, then thought of my other friends, particularly the elderly librarian. "How's Corinne," I asked, inwardly dreading the answer.

Ice snorted against my hair. "That old battle axe? She's fine. Down for two days and then right back up again. She's got the constitution of an ox."

I laughed, weakly elbowing her in the side. "Sounds like someone else I know. Were you sick?"

I could feel her shrug against my back. "Nah. Couple days. No big deal." I came to find out later that she had been horribly sick for almost four days, yet came down to care for me each and every day, despite her illness.

My eyelids grew heavy as I snuggled into her, though, like a sleepy child on Christmas Eve, I struggled to stay awake.

"Sleep," she whispered, pulling me in close against her. "Your body needs to heal."

"I've slept too much already," I complained. "I wanna try and stay awake for a little while. Please?"

My head warmed as she chuckled against it. "I'm not your mother."

"Wish you were sometimes," I mumbled before succumbing to the demands of my body and falling into sleep once again.

When I next awoke, I found myself propped on my side, facing Ice who was sitting on the other bed, reading quietly. I tried to sit up, but quickly gave that effort up as futile as my body decided to shout out its protests quite loudly. Ice looked up quickly and put her book down, coming to kneel beside my bed. "Good morning."

"Morning."

"Sleep well?"

"Well, it wasn't bad. For a nap."

She laughed. "Awful long nap, Angel. You've been out since yesterday afternoon."

My eyes widened. "Yesterday afternoon?"

"Yup. Told you your body needed the rest."

"And you were right. Again," I grumped.

"How do you feel?"

I took stock of my body, realizing that Ice was, indeed, right. "A whole lot better than I did yesterday."

"Good. You look better too. Your cheeks have a little more color to them," she replied, gently stroking the bodyparts in question, to my immense pleasure. "You have the softest skin."

Of course, I blushed in response to that, which no doubt increased the color to my face; a fact which Ice noted with an amused smirk and one raised eyebrow. Which, of course, only caused me to blush that much harder.

"Thirsty?"

"Yeah. My tongue feels like sandpaper."

Raising up to sit on the bed, she gently lifted me up beside her and we repeated the same process as the day before. This time I managed to drink the whole cup without my stomach rebelling in the slightest. It seemed I was well on my way to recovery.

Ice nodded in satisfaction. "Later we'll try some broth and tea, courtesy of Corinne."

"Alright." Much as I hated to admit it, I was worn out even by that weak attempt at sitting. But this time, I was determined to remain awake and enjoy Ice's tender companionship. "How about telling me a story?"

Her voice was doubtful. "I don't know any stories, Angel. At least not any nice ones."

Sick I might have been, but not too muddled not to recognize a perfect opportunity when it was resting in my lap, as it were. "Then tell me a not nice one. Maybe about some of the times when you were out on your own?"

She stiffened against me. "Those aren't nice at all, Angel."

"I know, Ice. But I'd like to know more about you. And how can I if you won't share them with me?"

"Some things are better left up to the imagination."

I kept quiet, acknowledging her position, determined not to push against her inflexible barriers this time. My headstrong nature had caused enough problems between us already.

"This really means something to you, huh?"

"Yes. It really does. But not enough to make you upset, Ice. Never enough for that."

When she started speaking again, her voice was so soft I thought I was hallucinating it at first. "When my parents died, the only one left to care for me was my grandmother. I was twelve at the time and she just didn't have the energy needed to raise a young girl. She was pretty frail. I overheard some of the lawyers talking to my grandmother during the funeral. They were going to make me a ward of the state and put me in an orphanage."

"Oh, Ice . . . ."

"Yeah. I might not have known much at that age, but I did know that I wasn't about to let myself get stuffed into a home."

"What did you do?"

"I ran. I waited until everyone was caught up in other things and I took off. The funeral home wasn't too far from my house, and my parents had given me a key when I was five, so I bolted for home. I went inside, grabbed some clothes, stuffed 'em in a backpack, took my mother's 'fun' money from her hiding place, grabbed Boomer, and left."

"Where did you go?" I shifted a little to get more comfortable against her chest. My arms, neck and shoulders were aching from residual fever and days of enforced inactivity.

I felt a moment of weightlessness as I was borne up easily in Ice's arms, then settled down to sit between her legs, my back once again against her chest. The sheet was tucked around my breasts and warm hands lowered themselves onto my shoulders, beginning a truly wonderful massage.

My muscles turned to liquid beneath her skilled touches, the pain fading like a distant memory. My head lolled back to rest against her shoulder as her hands continued to probe, soothe and caress in an orgy of sensation. It was bliss.

"Oh God," I groaned as the massage softened and turned sensual. "Where did you learn to do that?"

"Assassins need to keep loose. We can't afford muscle cramps. It screws up our aim."

"Oh."

"Yeah. 'Oh'."

"I guess there really are some questions that I don't wanna know the answers to, huh?"

"Most likely."

I allowed my eyelids to drift closed so as to better appreciate her welcome touch. There was nothing overtly sexual about her movements, but I felt energized just the same, her hands waking dormant parts of my body in pleasing tingles. "You're not trying to divert my attention from the subject at hand, are you?" I mumbled.

"Would I do that?" Her voice was innocence personified.

"Mmmm hmmmm."

She laughed. "Well, actually, I was just enjoying touching you. But if you want me to stop. . . ."

"Oh no. You can keep doing that till your hands fall off. You won't hear me complaining."

As her hands moved beneath the sheet to continue their dance across my skin, she cleared her throat and picked up her tale once again. "To answer your question, I headed west. There was a decent stand of woods at the back of the house that I knew from previous experience led to the highway. It hadn't really sunk in that my parents were gone yet. I tried to tell myself this was just an adventure and that worked for awhile."

"Kids are really good at pretending."

"Yeah. I was pretty lucky in that way. My parents encouraged my fantasy life." She shrugged. "I think it was an art thing."

I hid my smile. "Must have been."

"Anyway . . . ." The timbre of her voice let me know that my ruse had been discovered. "I made it out to the highway pretty quick. After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the right ride to come along."

"You hitchhiked?"

"Well, I didn't exactly walk from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, Angel."

"Don't you realize how dangerous that was?"

"Of course I realized it, Angel. I was young. Not an idiot. But what choice did I have? My parents were dead and I wasn't about to sit around and wait to be shoved in some home somewhere against my will. I saw the opportunity to get out and I took it. I didn't really have much time to think about anything else, even if I had been thinking clearly, which I wasn't."

Hearing the defensiveness in her tone, I reached down and clasped both of Ice's hands in my own, briefly stopping their delicious motion. "I'm sorry, Ice. That was incredibly pretentious of me to say."

She sighed. "It's alright. It was a stupid thing to do. But I knew enough not to accept rides from certain people. Boomer was a pretty good judge of character as well." I could hear the smile in her voice. "I got pretty lucky. It was near the end of summer and a lot of kids were going back to college. I managed to hook three rides, the last one all the way to Pittsburgh. I had intended to go further west, but for some reason, just wound up staying here. I guess when you're a kid, even a few hundred miles seems like a world away."

"What did you do then?"

"Well, my options were kinda limited. I had about five hundred dollars of my mother's money and that could last a long time, especially considering I didn't need to pay for a roof over my head. Not too many people would rent to a twelve year-old, you know?"

"But where did you live?"

"Here and there. Pretty much any place that would keep the rain off would do. Abandoned buildings, highway underpasses. Places like that."

"Weren't there shelters?"

"Sure. But that would have been, to my mind anyway, just like being in the orphanage. I didn't want to be hemmed in. So I stayed away. I was able to live almost six months on the money I'd taken. It probably would have lasted longer, but I didn't know anything about living on my own. When you're twelve, five hundred dollars seems like a gold mine. You don't think it's ever gonna run out."

I nodded in agreement. On the rare instances I received cards with money in them, I felt wealthy beyond the dreams of kings. And invariably I'd wind up blowing the whole thing in an orgy of gumballs and cheap paperbacks.

"When the money ran out, there weren't a whole lot of options for me. I could have joined a gang, but I've never been much of a follower. Plus, girls weren't treated any better than non-paid whores, so that was out for me. I tried shoplifting food and stuff, but it isn't easy to be inconspicuous when you've got a hundred and fifty pound attack dog at your side."

Her hands, which had resumed their lazy caress of my body, abruptly stilled and I felt a small shiver of dread flow down my spine. Suddenly, I was sure I didn't want to hear her next words. Suddenly, I wanted to be anyplace but where I was.

I battled down my fear. After all, this is what I had asked for, right? Right. Whatever I was going to hear would give me insight into the woman with whom I'd fallen in love, and no matter what it was, that was something I wanted more than anything.

Behind me, Ice took several deep breaths. I could feel the strong beat of her racing heart against my back and knew that whatever this secret was, it frightened her worse to say it than it frightened me to hear it.