Finally, Lucia met his eyes, hers wide and dark and heartbreakingly scared. "You're not gonna get gwumpy?"
Foreboding kinked tighter around his gut. She had eaten a bug. But what kind?
"I promise—if you tell me what it was." Please God, let him be able to ID it from a kid's description in a jumbled mix of English and Spanish.
She fit her hand in his. "I can show you 'cause there's lots more of 'em over here. But I stayed away from the frogs, just like you told me."
"Good girl. Now let's look at the bugs."
He followed as she led him back over to the tree where he'd left her eating her banana—left her unattended because he'd wanted to romance her mother, damn it all to hell. Sara's quick footsteps sounded behind him, but he couldn't let himself think about her fear right now. He couldn't let himself think about her at all, or how badly he'd been off the mark about the syringe.
Lucia pointed to the base of the tree, to a notch where tiny brown pellet-size balls lay scattered, which unless he missed his guess were...
Snatching up a stick, Lucas rustled deeper into the crevice. Spiders fanned free, some crawling up the trunk, others curling into a pellet and dropping to the ground in their instinctive hiding mechanism.
He tamped down dread that would only slow him when he already suspected they were running out of time. He studied the creatures scampering up the trunk. God, he wanted to be wrong...but there it was.
A minuscule orange hourglass on the arachnid's body—a poisonous brown widow spider.
"Lucas?" Sara's shaky voice behind him reminded him that somebody needed to stay in control.
He knelt in front of Lucia. He even managed a smile. "Did the spider tickle you anywhere before you swallowed it?"
She grinned back and held up her wrist. "I let him climb up my arm, but he bited me. I got mad. So I smooshed him and then I ate him."
A bite. Already swollen and red on her too-damn-tiny arm. The pain, sweats, paralysis would come later. "Thank you for telling me the truth."
"And gracias, for not getting gwumpy."
He was too damn scared to be grumpy. "Sara, could you get the first aid kit?"
She bolted into action.
He'd do what he could to clean the site, but time was precious. "Are you ready for another horsie ride, kiddo?"
"I wanna walk."
"Not today." They couldn't risk pumping the venom through her system any faster. "But soon, I promise."
Lucia shrugged. "Okay, long as we can share a mango instead of those icky bananas."
"Deal." To hell wasting time to hide their camp.
He reached for the first aid kit and finally let himself look at Sara, so pale he wondered if he would have to carry her, too. What a time to remember she needed to take things slower because of her own health concerns that he'd been too much of a bastard to realize.
Her lips pressed tight before she nodded. "I can keep up."
She had to, and they knew it.
"We need to make tracks and get to the town before nightfall. Best-case scenario, we have twelve hours. Since she's a kid, with a faster metabolism... We need to move. Now."
Her trembling jaw told him he didn't need to articulate the rest. They both knew. Children were at a greater risk.
They had twelve hours before the spider's toxin could kill Lucia.
They were alive. Ramon was certain.
Kneeling by the idling Jeep, he studied the baked footprints in the fading sunlight filtering through the jungle canopy. A solid trail. For some reason they'd broken from their covert jungle trek.