Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) (21 page)

I smile, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “You know what, Doc? You do have a bit of passion in that heart of yours.”

Anthony smiles too.

“You’ll need a room then,” Luke tells him. “Don’t use your prints to pay for it.” He pulls out a big wad of cash from his back pocket.

“I can’t pay with cash!” the doc protests. “It’s illegal.”

“In a place like this they won’t mind, especially since you’ll be paying three times the rate of the room. Off you go.”

Anthony takes the money and plods down the stairs.

“And don’t use your real name!” Luke calls after him softly. He then shows me into the room beside Ben’s, which is empty except for a backpack I recognize as Luke’s.

“You shouldn’t patronize him so much,” I admonish softly.

“He’s a dick.”

“He’s not! He’s just a bit of a … drone.
You
should be sympathetic to him, being the same and all.”

“Well excuse me if I don’t buddy up to the guy who ignored you all year.”

“It’s not his fault my story sounded so stupid.”

Luke shrugs, riffling through his backpack. He pulls out my favorite old pair of jeans and one of his T-shirts. “Thought you might like to get changed out of that revolting hospital gear,” he says as he offers me the clothes.

“You don’t think I look sexy in this?” I ask, tugging on the poo-brown, oversized sack I’m wearing.

“Baby,” Luke grins, “You would look sexy in just about anything.”

“Except this?”

“Except that,” he concedes with a laugh. I smile as I head for the small bathroom. Once I’m alone I turn on the shower and get undressed. I haven’t looked in a mirror for a year and I brace myself. My eyes jerk in shock—it’s worse than I thought it would be. The sight of my body is deeply alarming—I am covered in black and blue bruises, plus I’m so skinny I can see my ribs and spine jutting out against my skin. My cheekbones are sharp and angular, and my eyes are surrounded by deep, bruised hollows. My hair is greasy and lank and my gums are bleeding. Jesus, I look
awful
. I can’t believe Luke has just seen me like this, when he hasn’t seen me in a year.

I am humiliated as I step into the shower. I want to close my eyes and stay in here forever. I’m not embarrassed about looking ugly—I can deal with that—it’s simply that I appear weak and alien.

My fingers tremble as I try to feel my limbs for any sense of myself. I don’t look like me, and I don’t feel like me. So what the hell am I? I lean against the wall and slide to the ground, turning my face up to the water. There are billions of people out there who don’t feel much of anything, and sometimes it seems like all of their lost emotions have been crammed into my chest and are crowding me out. I wish the water from this showerhead could wash them all away and leave me with a clean slate.

Did I just wish to be a drone?

The bathroom door opens. Quickly I pull my knees to my chest and try to cover myself. The thought of him seeing me like this is too much to bear.

“Luke, don’t,” I try.

He ignores me, walking to the shower door and sliding it open. I drop my head to my knees in shame. But Luke climbs into the shower and sinks down beside me, pulling me into his arms.

“You’re the most gorgeous thing I’ve seen all year,” he says against my hair.

I shake my head, pressing it into his chest. “I’m disgusting. I’m disappearing.”

“You’re right here—I can feel you perfectly.” His hands hold onto me tightly as if to make the point.

The parts of my skin that touch his feel the most like me, the real me, whoever that is. “Luke,” I sigh. “You must be so sick of looking after me.”

“Not at all. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because you look after me.” Luke pulls away and tilts my chin up so that I’m looking into his face. “I should have told you that last year. I should have told you how you’ve changed me. How you’ve made me into a better man. It’s no burden adoring you, Josephine Luquet. It’s a privilege.”

There’s water trickling down the bridge of his nose and I smile as it falls onto my lips.

After we’ve probably used up the entire supply of water for the whole hotel, I leave Josi to dry off and get dressed. There’s a building sense of dread in my stomach. How much longer can I let this go on? This one destructive lie? I can’t tell her before the change—that seems too cruel somehow. But if not now, then when? What if she doesn’t make it through tonight?

I finish getting changed and lie down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Josi has been in the bathroom for ages. I know she’s horrified by how she looks, by how the drug is changing her. She’s becoming something she can’t identify with, and if I tell her the truth I’ll take away the last piece of our lives together. When that is all a lie, all those memories, what will she have left?

The funny thing is, my feelings weren’t a lie—not one single piece of them. I don’t know how I’ll convince her of that.

The last year has gone by too slowly and too quickly. I have been dreading September, which has brought it on with alarming speed, and I have been longing to see Josi, which made it seem as though time stopped. In the room beside us is a man who holds her life in his hands. I feel impotent and frustrated, knowing he’s in there and there’s nothing I can do to make him work faster. I can hear the steady tick of the world spinning to face the moon. I can feel time rushing away from me like a receding tide carrying Josephine with it. I can’t think about the possibility that Ben will fail. Because if he does, I don’t have any more ideas.

Josi finally emerges from the bathroom wearing my T-shirt over her undies. Her hair is wet and tangled, and she’s frighteningly thin. But she’s wearing an expression so strong that I know she can face anything, survive anything. It culminates in my chest and I know what I have to do.

I sit up and open my mouth to tell her the truth. But then she smiles, and all the words vanish. Josi crosses to the bed and climbs on top of me, lying flat along the length of my body. My hands unconsciously move to her back, making small circles, trying to ease some of the discomfort she’s in. She weighs nothing at all—it feels like a gust of wind could brush her right off me.

There are words that I’ve never said, because I wanted to wait until there were no lies between us to say them. I wanted them to mean something to her. They build inside me now, desperately, but won’t come. I’m blocked, like there’s tar through my arteries. Fear pounds inside me, a sickening, poisonous thing, and it won’t let me tell her.

Because if I tell her I love her, when everything gets taken away I’m afraid that not even that will remain.

When the clock strikes midnight, I’m awake. I’m staring at my phone, watching the minutes tick by. Josi is thrashing in bed next to me, shivering and moaning and grinding her teeth. I can’t do anything to stop it except try to soothe her. Ben delivered some painkillers a few hours ago, as he’d apparently been disturbed by the noise she was making. I don’t think the pills have done much.

Whatever this virus in her system is, it’s a fucking tornado.

Why would they make something so strong in the first place? So destructive? I fail to see how anyone could have thought that such a thing would help any part of a child.

“What time is it?” Josephine asks woozily.

“Five past twelve.”

She sighs angrily and rolls over. I rub her back and wonder if I’ll ever have the guts to tell her the truth.

*

We’re both awake when the sun rises.

“My favorite day of the year,” she mutters. Her tone actually makes me smile.

“Ben will come through for us.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to think about it.” Josephine reaches for me, running her hands over my chest. It feels like a drug, her touch. I’ve been craving it every moment of the last year, craving it to the point where I thought it was going to drive me mad. I couldn’t go to her in the asylum until we had a cure though, because it could have led the Bloods straight to her. “Luke.”

“Mm?”

“Take your clothes off.”

I look at her. “What? Josi, we can’t—I’ll hurt you.”

“Then be gentle. I want to make love to my boyfriend,” she says. What she doesn’t say is: for the last time.

I don’t know what to do. I want her, and I want to give her what she wants, but it feels like the worst kind of lie. She will
hate
me when she finds out.

“I can’t,” I mutter.

Her hand drops away. “Because I’m … because of how I look? I know I’m hideous at the moment—”

“No!” I exclaim. “Jesus, no. That’s not it at all.”

“Then tell me why.”

I search for words, any words, but they fail me. I stare at her helplessly. She reaches for my face, running her fingers along my lips. “I want to be with you,” she says, and I realize I don’t have any more fight left—not for this.

“I want to be with you too,” I tell her, and then I kiss her. Gently, very gently, I undress her, running my hands over her damaged body. I lean down to kiss her hip, where the scars are. Then I kiss every inch of her, remembering our first time with an aching vividness, hoping that one day she will remember these kisses and these touches, and not all of the lies.

Josephine has just disappeared into the bathroom when there’s a knock on the front door. I pull my jeans back on and peer through the peephole, spotting Anthony.

Sighing with irritation, I step outside and close the door behind me. “You okay, man?”

“Fine. Have you told her the truth yet?”

I eye him up and down. Anthony is fairly average looking, a bit on the small side. He has neat brown and silver hair and a starched shirt collar. And he has a weird, squirmy quality to him. I realize he must be quite worked up, the way he’s wringing his hands in agitation.

“It’s not really your business, Doc,” I tell him.

“Of course it is—I obviously care more about her wellbeing than you do.”

“My whole life is caring about Josephine’s wellbeing, so don’t you dare tell me you have a clue what that even means.” I step forward, bristling with everything pent up inside me. I’m growing weary of holding it in, squashing it down. I’m growing sore with the weight of it, the betrayal of it. It’s what I fight for, what I live for, and yet it gets given no voice.

“You’re infatuated with her,” I say. “But you don’t understand the difficulty and the beauty of loving someone so broken.”

Anthony takes a step back, brushing against the balcony railing. He says, “You talk like you know the meaning of everything. You’re arrogant.”

I close the door in his face, but I hear him say, “If you don’t tell her I will.”

My heart pounds with sudden, unavoidable loss.

I’m in the bathroom when he says it.

“I have to tell you a story.”

“Okay, baby, can you just wait a minute?”

“No, now.” His voice sounds weird. He starts talking before I’ve even come out. “I grew up over near your apartment. We didn’t have any money, and sometimes we didn’t eat. I hated how poor we were, because I thought it was something to be ashamed of. When I was fifteen my parents made me take a whole bunch of aptitude tests and then they sent the results to the national agency. The results then got sent to the Bloods, who decided they wanted to recruit me.”

My fingers are on the door handle, but I don’t open it. I stand still, listening.

“There is a part of this whole story that Anthony didn’t explain to you. Several years ago, when Ben’s team started realizing the effects of Zemetaphine, they took most of the test children into custody. They were teenagers by then. But they couldn’t find you because you’d run away from your foster home and disappeared. The Bloods tracked you down eventually—they followed the trail of your crimes as they got steadily worse. They watched you and hid your condition from the world. I think they wanted to see what you could do before they decided how to act.”

He pauses, and I’m not moving at all, not even breathing. It’s something about the tone of his voice. It’s almost … dead.

Then he says, softly, “As your crimes got worse, they sent me in to monitor you. I’m classified as a Gray—I’m one of three in the world—so they assumed I’d be able to clean up whatever messes were made. That first year, I watched you for four months before I saw you kill three other Bloods on the night of the blood moon. I covered it up. I didn’t tell my commander, but last year I was given the order anyway. To bring you in. To be killed or cured. That was the day before the canyon. After you changed that year, I reported you as dead and, as you know, I took you to the asylum. Then I spent the year in hiding, working with Harley and Ben to come up with a treatment.”

He pauses.

I feel cold with shock. I can’t move or speak. There are no thoughts in my head.

“There are two more things you don’t know. The first is that Louise—the woman you spoke with on the phone—isn’t my boss, she’s my ex-girlfriend. She can’t accept the fact that we aren’t together anymore because she’s confused by the fact that the deed to her house is in both our names, so she calls and calls. And the second thing you’ve probably figured out by now. It’s that …” Luke clears his throat. I’ve never imagined he could sound like this, so unbelievably detached, even calm as he’s always been. I haven’t figured it out—whatever he’s talking about. I haven’t figured anything out, but I brace myself because there is something in the air that’s telling me that this will be bad.

“I’ve never been cured,” Luke says.

It takes me a moment of complete incomprehension before the words make sense. Then it’s an explosion. An attack so savage I feel instantly ruined by it.

“I feel angry all the time,” he mutters. “I feel like I’m made of fury and sometimes there’s nothing else left. I hate what’s been done to you, and I hate the people I worked for, but mostly I hate myself.”

He’s listing things like he’s ticking them off. He’s listing lies without any emotion.

I lean over the toilet and vomit. It hurts so badly I think for a second that pieces of my insides have come up and out of my mouth. I stand and wipe my face, looking into the mirror. The man behind that door is a stranger. He made love to me twenty minutes ago, but I have no idea who he is. Anthony’s questions make sense now. He figured out that Luke was lying to me without even meeting him. It was that obvious. Memories are flashing before my eyes, all the time we spent living together, sharing things with each other, all the time we spent trying to solve a problem that Luke knew the answer to from the start. Those memories are all false. My head is full of moments I have imagined. Anthony was right all along—I’ve made the whole thing up. I am a crazy person.