Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) (11 page)

The stupid boy fires the gun into the ground this time, but the girl still doesn’t try to get away. Luke steps out in front of them. “I’ll play,” he says calmly.

The boy grins and aims his gun straight at Luke. He lets go of the girl and she stumbles sideways. I reach for her and pull her into the crowd. But Luke has the weapon aimed at his chest.

He’s edging his way closer and closer to the boy. Sounds are coming from within the crowd—whoops of excitement and jeers of encouragement. They’ve all lost their damn minds. Well, I wanted dangerous, didn’t I? Now I’ve got it. The static energy in the air is alive with unpredictability.

“I’ll play,” Luke says again, “but you have to come closer.”

The boy giggles and moves closer, pressing the butt of the gun into Luke’s sternum. Luke’s hand darts forward and swats the gun to the side. As this happens, he steps forward, beside the sounding shot, and into the boy’s chest. His fist connects three times with the boy’s chin, and somehow he manages to grab the gun and slip it into the back of his pants.

I blink incredulously. The boy is unconscious on the ground and Luke looks perfectly relaxed. He turns to look for me, but by the time he’s found me on the other side of the crowd, there’s another eruption from the back of the room. A huge fight has broken out and people are fleeing. Police sirens approach from somewhere outside.

Luke grabs my hand and drags me out through the swarming mass. I can hear shouts and screams and even some more gunshots. People are getting crushed by the crowd—one boy goes down and I look away quickly, horror building in my throat at the thought of him getting trampled. Luke keeps his hand locked around mine and deftly makes a path for us to escape through.

I can hear it all throbbing behind us—the chaos of it doesn’t fade until we’ve driven a long way away. I’m reeling from the whole thing, but Luke is still oddly calm. He’s the same as those lunatics inside. His calm is a product of his brain damage. It has to be.

The idiot with the gun has actually done nothing to wreck my mood. I still feel restless, right down in my bones. Josi looks outrageously gorgeous, and I want too much.

Impulsively I turn the car off the road. I’ve seen a map of this area, and I know that Josephine spent some time in a house out along the river. It’s a gamble, bringing her here, because she might loathe the idea of it, but I’m desperate to get her talking.

“Where are we?” she asks suddenly, sitting up to peer at the quickly passing trees. I’m driving too fast. I don’t want to slow down. I rip the handbrake and we slide around a corner. “Luke! Slow down, for Christ’s sake!”

I glance at her and smile. “It’s under control.”

“You’ll kill us!”

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“I don’t want
you
to die, you idiot!” she hisses.

My smile widens. “I can drive in my sleep. No one’s dying today.”

Eventually, after a fairly harebrained trip through the trees I pull us to a skidding halt. Josephine looks murderous as she flings herself out of the car and slams the door furiously. I climb out but leave the car headlights on to give us some illumination.

“What are we doing here?” she snaps.

I wink at her and walk over to the bank of the river. There’s a long wooden boardwalk that protrudes out into the water. It’s shrouded with mangrove trees, their long, gnarled boughs creepy in the dark. The headlights are throwing strange light against them, making them sway and flicker like thin, knobbly fingers reaching out to trace the surface of the moonlit river. My feet pound against the wood as I follow the planks all the way to the end.

I don’t turn around to see if she’s following. Sometimes with Josi it’s like trying to tempt a small, stubborn child into playing. Or convincing a timid animal that it’s safe to eat from my palm. I hear her feet reach the wood and edge hesitantly toward me.

“Do you know where we are?” she asks.

“Yes. Do you?”

“The house I lived in when I was eight is just up that hill. I used to lie on this boardwalk for hours and stare up at the leaves.”

I can tell by her voice that she must have loved it here.

“Did you know that when you drove here?”

“Yes,” I admit. “I saw it in your file. You were only here for six months.”

She edges a little closer.

“Why did you get moved?” I ask carefully. I think I might be frightened of the answer.

Josephine doesn’t say anything. Maybe she is frightened too.

I can see the river at the bottom of the hill, glistening silver in the midday sunlight, and I burst into a run. Before I make it something slashes through the edge of my vision and hits me in the face. I yelp and skid to a stop, raising my fingers to my cheek. It’s only when I see the blood on them that it starts to hurt. My face stings like crazy and there are surprised tears in my eyes.

I look around and see that it was a rock that hit me. And it was thrown by Lachlan, my foster brother. He’s twelve, and a lot bigger than me. He’s fat. I hate his chubby fingers and his pink cheeks. I hate the way he chews with his mouth open, and I hate the way his nasty eyes always look for me, no matter where we are.

He smiles as he crosses the grass toward me. He must have been hiding behind a tree or something. I don’t say anything, but I make myself stop crying immediately. I don’t really understand why he likes to hurt me, but I do understand that I can’t show him anything. None of the things I tell the trees. He can’t have any of my secrets or my thoughts or my feelings.

“Where are you going, Josy-posy?”

I don’t speak to him. I never speak to him. My words are mine too.

“Cat got your tongue?”

I try to move past him but he blocks the way and then grabs my hair. He pulls it so hard that I want to scream, but I don’t.

“Say something, you stupid little bitch!” he snarls. I know he got this name for me from his father. Probably everyone else in the house, too. They all call me that name. I don’t know why because I’ve never said anything mean about them. I’ve never spoken a single word to any of them.

Lachlan wrenches my hair, making me fall to the ground and skin my knees painfully. He sits on my back so I can’t move, even though I struggle like a mad thing. He’s too fat. I can’t get free. I can feel him pulling up my t-shirt. The sound of his pocketknife being opened is an alarm, but even as I squirm I feel the first sharp bite of agony. It’s along my hip, and it feels like he’s carving into my bone.

“Rude girls deserve punishment,” he says happily. His breath is close to my ear and it stinks like the licorice he’s just been eating. Then he says, in a funny voice, “You know I love you, Josy-posy. You’re my little sis. You belong to me, and it’s my job to protect you. All of my things need to be labeled, right? So no one else tries to use them?”

I don’t understand what he’s saying until he starts to cut me some more, deep slices of my flesh. I don’t cry. I bite down on a clump of grass so I won’t scream.

“Nearly there,” he tells me. “I’m just finishing up the N.”

A surge of rage floods my body. I can’t feel the small knife anymore. I can’t feel anything except a red tremble under my skin. A scream erupts from my mouth and I thrash so wildly that Lachlan is thrown off my back. He sprawls on the ground and before he can get up I lunge at him, grabbing him by the neck and squeezing until his face goes purple.

Next thing I know I’m being hauled off Lachlan by the ear, and it hurts a lot, but not as much as my hip. I try to blink the spots away from my eyes.

“You little psycho!” a woman screams. The woman I’m supposed to call Mom. Is she talking to me? Yes, she is. Of course she is. More feet arrive. “I just found the little brat trying to choke our son!”

“What?” It’s the man now. He clubs me over the head, making my vision cloud badly. I close my eyes and enjoy the darkness. I can still hear them shouting and blaming me. Lachlan is crying. Some of his words drift to me, and he seems to be sobbing over how frightened he is. I keep my eyes closed and my mouth shut. I could try to show them my hip with its bloody brand, but I’m too tired and I don’t think they’ll care anyway.

Maybe this means I’ll get a new house.

But that means I have to say goodbye to the river and the trees, and that will be sad, because they’re the only ones who’ve heard my voice.

“Luke?”

“Mmm?” He’s looking at the water, standing under the trees I loved once upon a time.

“Maybe I’m crazy.”

He looks up. “Why do you say that?”

“Maybe that’s why I murder people.”

Today there was a barn, and inside it there was a pitchfork. And that’s how I know that children once lived in that farmhouse.

Isn’t there a thing about kids who are treated badly turning into violent offenders themselves? Could that explain any of this?

“Maybe I’m a Fury. Or becoming one.” The thought of turning into one of those savages … It makes me long for death. “Before I moved here I was mute,” I tell him softly, the first glimpse I have ever given him of my childhood. “I never spoke a word to anyone. When I came here, I don’t know why, but I started speaking to these trees. They know all of my secrets, these branches, these leaves.”

He looks up at them and murmurs, “Lucky things.”

I shake my head. “I’m crazy. I
must
be.”

Luke walks up to me and pushes me straight into the river. The cold of it is sharp and sudden and hits me in the chest. I am momentarily silent and weightless. Breathless. My body doesn’t hurt, and my heart beats a steady rhythm. I want to stay below the surface of the world forever. I could drift away on a current and never have to see a single drop of blood again.

After a while my lungs start to really hurt so I launch myself up to the air again.

“Feel better?” Luke asks from the boardwalk.

“You deserve a smack.”

“Do you feel better or not?”

I am loath to tell him that I actually do. He must read the truth in my face because the bastard smirks.

“Come on,” he laughs, reaching a hand to help me out.

Honestly? How can he not see this coming?

I grab his hand and pull him in. Luke surfaces immediately, coughing and laughing. He splashes me once in the face and then we both swim for the muddy bank. Luke launches himself up onto the grass with an amazingly acrobatic display of upper body strength. I, on the other hand, scramble out looking like a clumsy oaf and get myself covered in mud. He takes one look at me and then laughs again, showing all of his white teeth.

“Instead of laughing you could
help
me,” I point out. “You’ve been really chivalrous tonight—what with scaring me half to death in the car and shoving me into a river.”

Luke walks back onto the boards. He wanders under the mangroves and then turns back to face me. In his eyes the twin bulbs of light from the car are reflected. “I just wanted to snap you out of it.”

I step out after him. “You can’t. Not permanently.”

“Then I’ll do it again and again, as many times as I have to,” Luke says softly. “Forever.”

And he walks toward me again, but this time he doesn’t push me into the river. This time he touches my cheeks and presses his lips against mine. It shocks me so much that I forget to pull away. I stand there and I think maybe I’ve ceased to exist except as a pair of lips.

Heart jerking unsteadily, I remember myself and wrench away from him. I run, but he grabs me and holds me, pulling me back into his body. When his mouth finds mine this time I struggle roughly, and I can taste my tears in my mouth and his and somehow my hands are straying to his chest, to the warmth there and the heartbeat.

I can’t move or breathe but I can taste and feel and I want him so much that even with him this close it’s still not close enough I can’t get close enough. “Luke,” I try to say, but it comes out as more of a sob because he doesn’t understand all the broken pieces and the things I’ve done. I’ve told him but he doesn’t understand that I’m drowning in an ocean of guilt and regret. I’m haunted and sick and rotten to the core and he’s good and bright, the brightest thing in the world.

His kiss is savage like a thunderstorm, like he’s desperate and sure.

“I know,” he rasps against my mouth. “I know how it hurts. But it’s supposed to.”

And I realize at last that he does understand, maybe even better than I do.

The secretary—I can’t remember her name—smiles in a way that makes me think I must have flirted with her before. Maybe I hooked up with her. I don’t know and I don’t care. I ignore her and head straight into the office.

Jean is on the phone when I enter, so I gaze out the windows while I wait. We’re on the eighty-eighth floor and the ground is so far away I can barely see it. Every person down there is cracked in the head. I’m surrounded by a sea of dimwits. They disgust me.

This whole fucking world disgusts me.

“Luke,” Jean says.

I turn and sit before her desk.

“I trust you’re feeling better?”

“Chipper,” I mutter.

“Your vacation didn’t relieve you of your delightful attitude, I see.”

I can’t be bothered to respond. If I have an attitude it’s because she’s given me one. The world has given me one.

Jean leans back in her seat and eyes me. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she’s cured—she’s certainly robotic enough. I’m supposed to be like that, but I can never seem to swallow the fury. “What’s my next operation?” I ask impatiently.

“You may be a Gray, Luke, but I could easily have you demoted if you don’t watch your tone with me.”

I fold my arms—it’s the only gesture I can muster the energy for. Hopefully she’ll think it means I’m taking her seriously. The truth is she would never demote me—she can’t afford to, and we both know it.

“Your mission,” she tells me. Pressing a few things on her tablet, she projects an image onto the screen between us.

It’s a girl. Dark hair, pale skin, possible European heritage. Between fifteen and seventeen. I can’t judge her height because she’s sitting on a train, gaze cast to the sky outside her window. She has a hat pulled down over her forehead so I can’t see her eyes very well. She’s skinny and tired.

“The girl?” I question, eyes narrowing.

“Josephine Luquet.”

“Is she a threat?” This girl doesn’t look like a potential terrorist, but I’ve come to understand that nobody looks like what they are anymore. I take a closer look, but can’t find anything interesting about her. The picture’s too static—I’ll need to get a look at her in real life before I can make a proper evaluation.

“You are not required to make any judgments on her—all you are to do is set up a full surveillance program and report.”

I stare at Jean. She has long athletic limbs, dark chocolate skin and blue contact lenses. She’s startling in appearance, unflappable in manner, and when I was fifteen she was the most terrifying person in the world. I feel so far from that boy that I don’t even know who he is anymore. I haven’t been frightened in years. Quite frankly, I’d love to be frightened. At least it would be something other than angry.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I say softly. “A watch op? I’m a
Gray
.”

“When you go on vacation, you get left the crap jobs,” she says.

“I wasn’t on vacation—it was medical leave, because I got shot in the shoulder doing a job for
you
,” I remind her. I can feel my temper rising like a dangerous beast.

“This is your next job. Josephine is eighteen, a foster child. Passed around between many different temporary homes because she was diagnosed with clinical aggression at a young age.”

“Parents?”

“Nobody knows. She was found on the side of the road when she was two. She ran away from her last foster family when she was fifteen, and she’s been living on her own since. I’ve sent her file to your home office.”

“I’m not there anymore.”

She seems to understand what this means straight away. “You’ll be needing new accommodation then?”

“Looks that way. How long am I supposed to watch the kid?”

“That depends entirely on the information you find on her.”

I crack the knuckles in my hands. Slowly I stand up, trying to keep control of myself. “I’m not babysitting some crazy little bitch for the rest of my life so that you can feel like you’ve locked me in a safe box.”

Jean sits forward, holding my eyes like she does when she’s trying to intimidate. It works on most people. “Agent Townsend, listen to me very closely. Yes, you are the highest-ranking field agent in the country, but you still work for me, and for the nation. You will do the tasks you are required to, or you will be stripped and cured. Is that clear?”

My jaw clenches.

“I should have ordered it years ago,” she adds. “You’re arrogant and reckless and ruled entirely by your emotions. By rights you shouldn’t make a good agent.”

“And yet I do. Funny.”

“You do when you behave as you should. The rest of the time is a disaster.”

“I have a higher success rate than any other Blood in the world. What more do you want from me? Do you want me to be a lobotomized freak like the rest of society? Because at this point I don’t really care anymore, Jean. Go ahead and strip me if you want.”

What’s the point in surviving if you’re completely alone?

I think of all the people in all the zombie movies I’ve seen. Instead of running around like headless chickens, always trying to escape the inevitable, why don’t they just give in and join the zombies? It would be a lot easier. And nobody would want to eat them anymore.

Jean loses patience. “Get the job done. You’re dismissed.”

I feel like throwing the chair through the window. This is bullshit. As I walk from the office, moving through all the security scans and swabs and X-rays, I consider when my life became so empty. All I can do at the moment is run and fight, and force myself into impossible situations, because if I spend one single moment sitting still I’ll go bat-shit.

Dave would take one look at me right now, make some dumb joke and my foul mood would evaporate. But Dave won’t be making another dumb joke, and I have the people I work for to blame for that. I’m part of a system I was too cowardly to deny. If only I could have realized it sooner, I might have been able to change something.

*

I’m onto my thirty-fourth cigarette by the time the girl finally gets home. It’s close to midnight—she must do bar work or something. Tomorrow I’ll have to find out, but for now I need to know the hours that she comes and goes from her apartment. I’m beyond pissed off. Me sitting here in the cold and the dark is entirely the kid’s fault.

After my meeting with Jean I went straight to Josephine’s address, scoped out the place, figured out where I’d be stationed, set up my equipment and settled in to wait for her. I haven’t been to this part of town for years, which is funny, because Dave and I grew up three blocks from here. Maybe it’s not so funny, since I spent most of my childhood hating it. I got so wrapped up in hating our poverty that I didn’t see how lucky we were to have the rarest of all things: a loving family. Now I have wealth and no family at all. It’s not difficult to work out what the lesson is here, kids.

I’m sitting on the roof opposite Josephine’s building with my feet propped up on the stone balustrade when my eyes finally spot something on the path below. The street is well lit, so I catch sight of her while she’s still a fair distance away. I grab my binoculars and lean over the edge to scope her out.

My first thought is that the hologram I was shown must have been taken several years ago, because she looks noticeably older in reality. Older than eighteen, that’s for sure. She’s wearing a shabby black jacket, a skirt and ripped stockings, with worn black boots. She looks every inch the homeless kid I was expecting her to be. She’s tall and willowy, with long legs and long dark hair.

But when my binoculars find her face, my hands tighten and the air stops moving into my lungs. My first and only thought is simply:
here she is.

My hands hover over the keyboard, unsure. The report of my first month’s surveillance is due in ten minutes. I haven’t written a word, despite having spent the last thirty days almost sleepless with watching Josephine Luquet in every facet of her life. I’m addicted to her—there’s no other way to put it. I’m addicted to the way she reads avidly with this intense expression on her face, and the way she stretches her muscles with a distraction that speaks to how far away her mind must be. I’m addicted to the way she speaks to random drones, with sarcasm and wit, and most of all the way she plays her cello, as if the instrument was invented for her and her alone.

Eventually I crack my knuckles and type.

Subject is, on the whole, emotionally stable. She shows signs, however, of an antisocial disconnect from society and for this reason I strongly advise maintaining surveillance. Resistance sympathies have yet to be ascertained. Nothing else of note to report.

*

My order arrives four hours and twelve minutes later, flashing on my screen. I have to swallow three times before I’m ready to click it open.

Continue surveillance. Remain invisible.

Relief washes through me, but I still have no idea why I’m watching this girl.

There’s bass pounding through the bottom of my seat and someone yammering in my ear. The lights are dim and flashing and I feel so tightly strung that I’m convinced I’m about to have a stroke.

The guy who won’t shut up has been drowned out by the revoltingly pungent scent of the woman who’s just sidled up next to me. I glance at her. Everything about her makes me feel tired. Her platform heels. Her five layers of make-up. The black roots poking through her white blonde hair. Her expression of arrogant, distorted lust. I turn away from her pointedly. She won’t be mad. She can’t be. It occurred to me a few years ago that the cure did us guys a favor—it made it impossible for us to incur the wrath of a woman scorned, no matter how badly we treat them.

Everything is detached and discolored. I feel dizzy with disconnect.

Except when I look over at where she’s sitting, the girl,
my
girl. I followed her into this club fifteen minutes ago. Since then she’s been sitting on that couch, by herself, ignored by everyone. Nobody speaks to her, nobody looks at her. None of them will ever realize what they have sitting quietly in their midst.

Last night I saw some horrific things. Life-changing things. Things I’ve grown used to seeing in my job, but not things I’ve ever seen a teenage girl do. So much about Josephine Luquet has become achingly clear. I now understand why I’m doing this job, why I was sent to watch her four and a half months ago.

I spent all of today erasing the crime scenes.

Everything I do is done with a measure of precision so exact that it got me recruited for the Bloods when I was still a child. Even at fifteen I knew what I was capable of and so did Jean. I can make it so that no one will ever know what Josephine Luquet has done. Today my attention to detail was more extreme than it’s ever been. I don’t know why she did the things she did, nor do I understand how she was capable of such actions, but I do know that her life depends on the other Bloods never finding out about it.

When I look at her now I can feel her change color in my head. Until yesterday she’d been blue with innocence and youth. Not naïve or ignorant—I know how sharp she is, how aware. She was never cruel until last night. Never violent. Never frightening.

Now she’s green and navy and gold with all the things I don’t understand about her. She’s red with the things that make me excited.

And she’s the clean, stark white of loneliness, above all else.

As the sun rose I watched her wake, naked and scared and clearly unsure of what had happened, and then I watched her make her way home, covering her modesty with surprising ingenuity—suggesting that this was not the first time she’d been through this—and I wasn’t allowed to help her at all. I had to watch her struggle alone. And in doing so something changed in me—I knew this morning that I would never regard strength or courage the same way again.

She’s in pain—the way she moves, it’s like she’s been hit by a train. Every inch of her aches. Even sitting here in the club, she’s immersed in discomfort. I don’t know why she’s come here, to a place in which she’ll be even more isolated. But I know that I can’t watch her like this any longer. I can’t watch her sit by herself after a night like last night. I don’t understand why she did the things she did, but I can’t be this far from her for a single moment longer.

Rule number one: don’t ever come into contact with a subject.

Rule number two: don’t ever come into contact with a subject.

Rule number three: if you’re ever exquisitely stupid enough to come into contact with a subject, abort the mission immediately.

Things are simple in the land of the Bloods.

I finish my beer and come into contact with my subject. I have to: I am already in love with her.