Warehouse 13: A Touch of Fever by Greg Cox

his way, but nobody challenged him. He forced himself to maintain a smiling countenance, despite the pain and nausea driving him onward. His swollen veins pulsed horribly. His teeth ground together.
Worrall entered the church, gratified to discover aisles of unsuspecting people. The bride and groom were not yet in evidence, but he had no doubt that they were nearby. He had his own gift to bestow on the happy couple.
A helpful usher who couldn’t have been more than seventeen approached him. “Are you here for the bride or the groom?”
“All of the above,” Worrall said.

CHAPTER
    9
     
WAREHOUSE 13
Claudia and Artie were in full search mode.
Scattered notes, files, and printouts were strewn across their respective desks as well as large portions of the floor. A whirring fan rustled the documents, which were held down by assorted oddball paperweights. Claudia was glued to her keyboard, scouring the Internet, while Artie went old-school, leafing through various dog-eared dossiers, catalogs, and history books in search of some clue to the glove’s provenance—and Nadia’s possible whereabouts. They had been going at it all day without a break. Leena had headed back into town to check on the B&B. Claudia figured she’d catch up with her later. Right now, the game was on.
“Gloves . . . gloves.” Artie muttered to himself. A neglected mug of herbal tea went cold. He repeated the refrain like an incantation, as though trying to summon up some stray scrap of knowledge from his voluminous memory. Frustrated, he slammed shut yet another volume. “But whose gloves? That’s the question. If we can just pinpoint their origin, we might be able to predict where they will turn up next.”
“Not sure I can help you there,” Claudia said. “But I might be onto something.”
“What is it?” His interest piqued, he rolled his chair across the office to join her. “Anything interesting?”
She scooted over to give him a better look at the computer screen. “I was prowling hospital and emergency databases, looking for more cases of people being cured inexplicably,” she explained. “Just in case there really is another glove out there.”
“And did you find any?”
“Just the opposite, actually.” She nodded at the glowing monitor. “There’s been a chain of freakishly sudden, unexplained illnesses popping up all along the East Coast, more or less in sync with Nadia’s recent spate of healings. We’re talking perfectly healthy people suddenly coming down with typhoid fever of all things . . . for no apparent reason. Several people have died already, and the rest are still hospitalized. The last outbreak was a few hours ago, at a wedding in Pennsylvania. The whole production—bride, groom, guests, et cetera—had to be hospitalized before they even got to the cake.”
Artie lifted his glasses to squint at the screen. His eyes weren’t what they used to be. “Typhoid?”
“Yeah. Weird, right? And that’s not all.” Her fingers danced over the keyboard, calling up a map of the eastern seaboard. “I plotted the epidemic’s vector against Nadia’s magical mystery tour.” She stabbed a macro key. “Check this out.”
On the map, a green line charted the southward progression of the Whitman Bros. Carnival as it made its way from Rhode Island to Connecticut. Blinking dots marked documented healings along the route. A red line, connecting each of the bizarre fever outbreaks, meandered north from Florida to Pennsylvania.
“They’re on an intercept course,” Artie realized. A theory instantly formulated in his brain. “The two gloves, separated for who knows how long, are being drawn back to each other.”
The same notion had crossed Claudia’s mind. “But are we sure there’s a connection? Maybe these two patterns are unconnected?”
“Not on your life,” he said confidently. “There’s no such thing as coincidence where artifacts are concerned. This is all starting to make sense now.”
At least by