Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) (22 page)

The humiliation is like broken bones. The betrayal is worse.

Luke says my name and I hate him.
I hate him
.

Taking a deep breath, I open the door and walk past him. I don’t look at him or listen to him as I pull on my jeans and my ugly hospital shirt—I will not wear anything that belongs to him. He’s speaking in a desperate voice, on and on and on, but I don’t hear any of the words. I’m blinded by rage and loss and hurt.

I clear my throat. “Of all the deception, the worst is that you could pretend to be cured. All this time, you let me think I was
alone
.”

I take one look at his face, but find that I can’t stand it so I run out of the motel room and down the stairs. Luke is following me but it doesn’t matter. I get in the car and smile humourlessly at the fact that he reprogrammed it last night to accept any fingerprints. He tries to climb in with me but I lock the doors from the inside. The engine roars to life and then I’m driving, and I don’t look back, not once.

Turns out I was wrong after all.

Love and fury can’t live in the same place.

“Amorous,” Luke says.

“That’s not a feeling—it’s an adjective.”

“I know, smartass. I’m veering from the game for a moment. Indulge me.”

I watch him closely. We’re sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing each other. He dragged the coffee table out of the way so that there’s nothing between us except a stack of cards, a bag of chocolates and a big bottle of tequila. Luke’s long legs don’t cross very well, so he has them thrown out all over the place where they take up an obnoxious amount of space. He’s smoking, which I hate, but he’s also talking, which I don’t hate. We’ve been together for a few months now, and I’ve come to understand that Luke talking about himself is an extremely rare occurrence.

“Do amorous,” he presses.

“For me? Never.”

“Bullshit. Even as a kid? There must have been some time when you were desperately in love with something.”

I shake my head. When I was a child I learned how fragile the world is. “Your go.”

Luke muses for a moment, getting this distant look on his face. “My mom used to tell me to fall in love with as many things as possible.”

This seems like a perfect mom thing to say. “So did you?”

“No. I thought she was fickle. Now I think she was something else entirely.”

“She sounds good, your mom.”

“She is good.”

“So when?” I ask. “When were you most amorous?”

Luke shakes his head. “Nope. You didn’t answer, so I’m not going to.”

I smile. “Fine then. Have a drink, pal.” As he takes a swig, I think of my next word and eventually come up with “Obstinate.”

He runs his tongue over his teeth; I’m fascinated by the act. Watching it seems absurdly intimate and I’m quite sure I’m blushing, which is completely weird. Since our brain-aneurism-inducing, impossible-to-ignore kiss by the river, Luke has been super careful around me. Christmas Day was somewhat of a break from all his rigid rules about which bedrooms we sleep in and how much physical contact we have, but after that day he went straight back to being awkward. We’re a couple and we live together, and we’re great ninety percent of the time, but when it comes to the physical stuff, it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore the fact that there is something building between us. And I don’t understand it because I’ve never experienced anything remotely like it.

I’ve started to feel nervous and shivery all the damn time. I want kisses and touches and the smell of cinnamon and aftershave and boy sweat. I’m not sure what I want beyond that, but I know it’s there, and it’s getting harder to ignore. I’m terrified of what’s looming, not sure if I’d prefer to keep it at bay forever or just get it over with.

“When Dave tried to make me protest with him,” Luke says. “I wouldn’t go, and nothing he said would make me even consider it. Now I’d give almost anything in my life to go back to those days and tell him yes. I’d say yes to everything he ever asked me.” He takes another drink of tequila then passes it to me.

I feel that a confession like that deserves some discussion, or even just an acknowledgment, but that’s not the game. The game is that we never comment on what we divulge, embarrassing as it may be. I lift up my shirt and point briefly to Lachlan. Luke hasn’t seen my foster brother’s name before—or if he has, he’s pretended otherwise. He blinks and stretches forward to clock the ugly red brand. “When I was given this,” I tell him.

“How old were you?”

He’s not supposed to ask questions, so I don’t answer. I have a swig of the revolting alcohol instead.

“What were you obstinate about?” he presses.

I was obstinate about not crying, but I discover I don’t want to talk about it anymore, so I pass him the bottle. “Your turn.”

“Fine. Curious.”

“That first morning you took me out for breakfast.”

“When I accidentally bumped into you naked.”

I throw a cushion at him to disguise my flaming cheeks. Luke catches it in the face and laughs.

“Embarrassed,” I say.

He thinks for a bit and then grins. “I took a piss in the middle of class once.”

“
What
?”

“I was in my first year of school,” he laughs. “Stuck my hand up to go to the bathroom, trotted off to the toilet block but got cornered by some boys from another class who were mucking around with a ball. I got distracted, played with them for a bit, forgot to wee, went back to class and sat down. It was a good thirty seconds before I remembered that I was busting. The teacher wouldn’t let me go again, so I sat there in my seat and pissed.”

I stare at him. “Oh my god. That’s, like … too funny to even laugh.” But even so, we do laugh, and we laugh a lot. My cheeks are sore by the time we calm down and it’s my turn to answer. Sighing, I admit, “When you walked in on me in the bathroom.”

“What? That was the most embarrassed you’ve
ever
been? Bullshit. I barely saw you.”

“Well.”

“Trust me—you’ve got
nothing
to be embarrassed about,” he assures me, letting his eyes travel over my body. I feel like a heater has just been turned on full blast.

“You can’t look at me like that if you won’t …
you know
,” I say.

He meets my eyes, looking pained. “We can’t do it if you can’t even say it.”

“I can say it!” I protest.

“Go ahead then.”

I swallow, feeling incredibly embarrassed.

“You’re not ready, sweetheart,” he says gently.

“Then when?” I demand.

“When you can tell me what you want me to do to you without getting embarrassed.”

Oh good god. My cheeks flame at the idea of speaking such things aloud. Luke laughs at my expression. “Shall we get back to the game?”

I nod, grateful to change the subject.

“Frightened,” he suggests after a thought, and even though he sounds casual, I’m fairly sure he’s been saving this one up.

“When I woke up after my first change. I was in the middle of a deserted car park. Every inch of my skin was scraped raw from the concrete ground, and I had no idea where I was, what had happened or how to get home. There was blood under my fingernails. I was frightened because I
knew
I’d done something bad.”

He sighs, flopping over onto his stomach. “When you told me you’d kill yourself.”

I swallow; don’t reply. My last one is “Inspired.” I know what my answer will be.

“I don’t know,” Luke replies.

“Come on—”

“No, really,” he interrupts, and he sounds weird. “I honestly don’t know.”

I watch his face, his bright eyes, and I think this is sad, so I give him mine. Instead of telling him, I play for him, the first piece of cello music I ever heard—
The Swan
.

These are our mosts.

We give them to each other, speaking them aloud, playing this game, because we never want to forget them. These are what make us human.

We’re walking down the frozen foods section of a small grocery store. It’s outrageously overpriced, because it only stocks items you can’t order in an average meal package.

Josephine is distracted, but I’m enjoying myself immensely, reading all the labels and getting excited over things I’ve only ever heard of before. We had to drive two hours to find this place (I had to trick Josi into agreeing) but it’s worth it.

“Lost,” she says suddenly, and I’m not in the rare food store anymore. It doesn’t even exist. This is a bad turn, and I didn’t even realize it was sneaking up on us. She gets like this sometimes, drowned in severe depression. I can’t do much about it except make sure I’m here while she rides it out.

“When Dave was gone,” I offer, because in these spells all she cares about is truth. It’s what I’m most afraid of. She reaches for my hand. We keep walking. I don’t make her tell me what hers is. “Hopeful,” I say.

“I don’t even know what that means.”

Jesus, this is a bad one. How the fuck did I let us get all the way to this stupid food shop without even realizing? “Mine is when I listen to you play,” I tell her with a smile. “I always imagine the weirdest things. Almost like dreams, but more embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing?”

“Yesterday when you played I imagined that we lived on a houseboat, way out at sea.”

She smiles. “That sounds nice.”

“We weren’t alone though.”

Her eyebrow arches quizzically.

“We had three children and they were beautiful.”

Josephine meets my eyes. We stop walking and stand in the middle of the frozen section, with people moving around us like the ebb and flow of the ocean I just spoke of. In this game I always try to tell the truth, and here is one, one truth that comes from the core of me. I don’t know if it will be enough to outweigh all the lies, given how many there are. I’m suffocating under them.

At last Josi says again, “That sounds nice,” and I can see in her eyes that she means it,
really
means it, and it is no small thing—it is a miracle. It is everything.

These are our mosts.

We do this because maybe one day they will all be gone.

There’s a blanket around me and it is itchy in the most unforgivable way. I sit in the front seat of Luke’s car and burst into tears because my blanket is itchy.

“Don’t,
please
,” he whispers, his voice so broken and haggard I’m surprised he got any sound out at all.

Last night I was a monster and this morning I was alone in a canyon gouged out of the earth. But then he appeared, lowering himself out of the sky along the length of hose that once belonged to the men I killed. During the night he must have found a way to make it longer, because it reached to the bottom now. He was carrying this blanket and he wrapped it around me, and then he put me over his shoulder and climbed all the way back up the hose. It took him hours, but he did it.

There was no trace of any death or violence above. I don’t know how he got rid of it all, but something about the absence of it was familiar.

Now we are sitting in his car and I’m crying. I never cry.

“Angry,” I say.

“I don’t want to play. Not now.”

“Tell me! Tell me the moment in your life when you were angriest, Luke Townsend, or all of this is just … it’s just a handful of dead men.”

He’s not calm exactly, not like he always is, but he is certainly contained, and I can’t for the life of me work out how he could be such a thing after a night such as that. “The day before my cure,” he says carelessly. I don’t believe him, but I don’t know why. I turn my eyes to the window. I am a monster, but for a moment he is unforgivable. Luke reaches out and puts his hand in my hair. It hurts my aching head, but it makes sense to me, having him touch me.

“Happy,” he says softly.

I don’t reply, because I can’t remember if such a thing truly exists, or if someone just made up the word to taunt me.

The door to my room bursts open as I’m brushing my teeth for the third time.

“Does your car have a tracking device you can access?” Luke asks breathlessly.

I spit out the toothpaste and shake my head. “Not from here. Why?”

“Fuck!” he roars, disappearing like a hurricane of force.

I’m torn between brushing my teeth again and following him. After a moment I remember what an idiot I am and race after Luke. He’s in the process of breaking into someone’s car, a big four-wheel drive. His fingerprints allow him access to just about anything, so he doesn’t have much trouble, it just takes him a few extra minutes to override the tracking devices in the vehicle so we can’t be found via satellite.

“What are you doing?”

He grunts. I’m not sure if this is his form of communication, or if he just wants me to shut up.

“Luke,” I say in what is hopefully a firm tone.

“She split, okay?” he snarls. “I fucking
knew
now wasn’t the time to tell her, but you forced me, and now she’s run off to god knows where to get caught by the Bloods, only a few hours before she turns into a maniac. Are you happy, Doc?”

I blanch, panic striking me. No wonder Luke is so out of control—he’s not even bothering to hide his anger. “I’m coming,” I announce.

“You’re a moron,” he mutters, but he doesn’t lock the door, so I hop in and pretty soon we’re zooming nightmarishly fast down the empty highway.

The silence is starting to suffocate me so I remind him, “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t lied to her in the first place.”

“Would you like to get shoved out of a moving car?”

I close my mouth. Bare, empty fields flash past the window, dotted with tall, dying trees. It’s depressing, seeing the way the land is now. My hand is drumming nervously against my thigh, which is bouncing repeatedly. Luke is utterly still, every inch of him tight like a stretched rubber band. His knuckles around the steering wheel are white.

“What did you say to her?” I ask. “It might help to talk.”

Luke flashes me a smile, but it’s more like a grimace. “You think I need a
shrink
right now?”

I shrug. “Maybe just … someone to talk to.”

He rolls his eyes, and it’s every bit as awful as when Josephine does it. These two are made for each other. We’re quiet for a long time, and then Luke finally mutters, as if he’s been tortured into it, “I told her the truth. Told her the story I kept from her all this time.”

“Did you tell her how you feel?”

“No, I told her the facts, Doc. For once I told her the bare facts.”

“So she drove off thinking you’d lied to her about liking her?” I ask slowly.

“I don’t
like
her,” Luke snaps. “She’s been my girlfriend for two years, Anthony. I fucking love her.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her that?”

“I didn’t have to—she knows how I feel.”

“You’re an even bigger moron than I am.”

Luke clenches his jaw angrily. “What about you then? Did you ever tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“That you love her.”

“That’s nonsense!” I splutter. “Completely absurd. She’s my patient.”

“Right,” he sighs. “Whatever. You better just hope we find her before she starts to change.”

We do. We do find her.

My car is wrapped around a tree, metal and bark entwined as though it came out of the ground that way, perfectly seamless and indistinguishable. My heart jerks to a stop and my head is empty of all thoughts. It is Luke who presses the car forward and then spins it off the road, flinging himself out almost before it’s stopped. I follow at a dazed stumble, moving around toward the front to where I know she will be, my heart in an agony of terror at the thought of what I will see.

First is a hand. It looks tiny, hanging out of the car like that. Limp but unblemished. As I force myself to keep moving, she comes into view. It reminds me of a puppet show, a marionette with its strings cut, the way she is lying there with her head through a smashed windscreen. Glittering pieces of glass wreath her hair and there is a forest of green leaves inside the car.

The bonnet is smoking, and when it catches alight the whole tree will go up, and with it the car. I stare at the sight, oddly stunned by how beautiful all the shapes and colors are. With the green and the crystal, there is also the blue of my car and the bright, brilliant red of Josephine, trickling onto everything. If it caught alight there would be orange, too, and that would be amazing. I wish I had a camera—people would like to see this.

“Anthony!” Luke says, breaking into my thoughts. He moves to grip my shoulders. “Your brain’s tripping out—it’s not your fault and I know it’s hard to control—but you gotta focus. I need you, man.”

“It’s so beautiful,” I say, confused.

“No,” Luke says firmly, looking fiercely into my eyes. “It’s not. This is very bad. I need you to help me get her out of the car. Do you understand?”

I nod reluctantly.

“There’s a tree branch pinning her in. I’ll try and lift it, and when I do I need you to pull her out. Okay?”

Again I nod, moving to Josephine. I’m excited now, my heart picking up speed. I can do this. I can do what Luke needs.

He climbs onto the bonnet, careful about where he places his feet. I can see the branch he’s talking about now—it’s enormous. He has to wedge his shoulder underneath to have any hope of lifting it. I get ready to pull Josi out, holding her around the waist. She feels hot and feverish in my hands. I imagine what’s making her so warm—there’s a hissing fire within her body, flickering and licking at her. Luke grunts and heaves, and as he gets the mighty log into the air he gives a scream of exertion and I slide Josi out. At least I try to—something’s keeping her in place. I peer over her shoulder to see that her foot is caught under something. The inside of the car has been so badly mangled that there are bits of the engine on top of her leg.

“Is she out?” Luke yells.

I burst out laughing. “She’s caught!” I giggle.

Luke swears furiously and lowers the branch back down, trying to move it so it’s not on top of Josi anymore. “Anthony, snap out of it! Can you get her free?”

“Maybe,” I shrug, poking my head over her shoulder to get a look.

“Focus!” Luke orders.

I swallow and try to focus. My head feels so slippery, and I’m suddenly not sure what I found funny. Okay, if I reach over and try to twist her ankle around, I might be able to slide it under this massive piece of metal … “I got it!” I shout. “But I need a knife or something! Her seatbelt’s jammed!”

“I can’t put this branch down, man, or it’ll crush her now that she’s in a different spot,” Luke tells me. He’s amazingly calm, given he’s holding up what has to be a couple of hundred pounds worth of wood and his girlfriend is about to burn alive.
If
she’s still alive.

It hits me suddenly. Josi might be dead. This is her body in my arms. I drop her just in time to lean over and vomit onto the ground. The violence all around makes me tremble in fear and shock—I can’t get any air, and my stomach is heaving so painfully my head’s spinning.

“Come on, Anthony,” Luke’s deep voice floats down to me. “It’s okay. We’re going to do this. Just come around behind me and grab the pocketknife off my belt, okay? You can do this. Just take the knife and then we’ll go from there.”

I stumble around to the other side of the car and reach up to Luke’s belt. My hands tremble so much I can’t get the clasp off.

“Easy,” Luke breathes to me, and his voice is so amazingly gentle that I feel myself calm right down. My hand steadies and I get the knife unhooked.

“Good man. Now go around and cut the seatbelt. Don’t think about anything else.”

I focus on the task, not the situation, and do as I’m told. It takes a while to saw the small knife through the thick seatbelt, but once I’ve done it, Josi slumps back onto my chest.

“Support her head!” Luke says quickly, and with the words my own medical training kicks in. I slowly slide her backwards out of the car, careful with her neck, looking for any superficial wounds or the type of bruising that indicates internal bleeding. Her ankle is badly swollen and she has an array of cuts over her face, plus a long gash along her hairline, but apart from that I can’t see anything else. She needs a hospital, badly. She could have brain trauma or spinal trauma. I hear Luke dropping the massive branch heavily back onto the car—it caves in a new section of the bonnet and as it connects the whole thing lights up in flames. I gasp, looking for Luke, but I can’t see him behind the wall of fire.

I don’t know what to do. Josi is heavy on top of me, pinning me to the ground, and I don’t want to move her too much in case it jerks her head, but I can’t stay where I am either, because if the car blows up then we’re both dead. I look for Luke again, but my eyes move instead to the flames. I was right—they are amazing. There’s more color inside them than I ever imagined. I’ve never seen fire before—not in real life. It’s always on television, but it never looks like this, dancing eerily across my vision. How could anyone call it dangerous?

“Anthony!” Luke shouts, appearing in front of my face. I jerk in fright. Luke leans down and lifts Josephine into his arms, making it look easy and simple and I’m reminded of how much stronger than me he is. I wonder how he got to be so strong, and this makes me wonder what his job entails, and this—

“Come
on
!” he yells. “Move it, Doc, or you’ll fry!”

I launch to my feet and run after him just as the car explodes. A wall of heat pummels into my back, throwing me off my feet, and the noise is like something’s burst inside my head. It takes me a moment to blink off the shock and crawl to where the stolen four-wheel drive is parked. Luke has Josi behind it, shielding her from the debris of the explosion, and when he sees me appear he sighs.

“I thought you were dead for a minute there, man.”

“Not dead,” I say, dazed.

“But not very alive, either,” he mutters. “Get in the car, quick.”

Luke settles Josephine in the back seat, placing his jacket under her head and strapping her in carefully. He drives for about ten minutes before he pulls the car back onto the side of the road.

“Anthony,” he says calmly, “How are you feeling?”

I stare at him.

“Do you feel … anything too strongly?”

Anything too strongly? I don’t understand what he’s asking me.

Luke swallows. “I can’t drive, man. I … I’m … My hands won’t stop shaking.”

“I can drive,” I tell him quickly. “I’m fine, Luke. I can drive.”

I go around to the driver’s seat, and Luke climbs into the back with Josephine, sliding her head onto his lap, and even though I’m concentrating on the road because there is precious cargo in this car—I can’t help but look into the back seat every few minutes. And so I see what I missed yesterday. When he came into my office I hated him for his arrogance and the way he has hurt her. I hated him for his contempt, but now I see that he has none. Now I see what he has done, not
to
her, but
for
her. I see the look in his eyes, and the way that he touches her, and I understand what it was that was missing from my own marriage. I wonder if there is anyone in this entire world for whom I would give up my life like he has done for Josephine Luquet.

And then Luke Townsend looks up at me, and he says, “It’s going to be all right, Doc. I promise I’ll make it all right. For you and for Josephine.” Even though I’m the prick who didn’t do his job, who didn’t believe her. He says it as though he really cares about me, as though it’s his responsibility to fix the mess I’ve created for myself, and even though it’s pretty damn obvious I’m in love with his girlfriend.

I even like that he called me Doc.

Looking into the back seat, I understand something. These two people are real and they are alive. But I am just a drone, who laughs when he sees a woman dying.

When I lifted my foot the earth was still. In the space of a step it has started to shake and I’ve lost my balance. She’s lying in my arms and she looks like she’s asleep, except that there’s blood on her face and bruises all over her skin, and the sight of it hurts me more than anything. As I watch her face from above, there are tears on her skin, and too late I understand that they are not hers, because she never cries.

*

Part of my brain is screaming and screaming and wanting to tear something down, but the other part is hyper aware of everything that’s going on. I know that we have been driving for twenty-three minutes when we pull back into the motel, because I have counted every single second. I know that Anthony is doing well, because he’s managed to hold it together for the whole drive, despite his mental meltdown at the crash site. I have called Ben and told him to be ready no matter what, and there he stands on the side of the road, arms full of equipment, when we pull over to pick him up.

The old scientist climbs into the front seat and turns around to gaze at Josi. “Is she …?”

“She’s not dead,” I reply calmly. Always calm. I am constantly surprised at my own ability to remain calm, even when I feel like lighting a fire that could destroy the whole damn world.

“Car accident,” Anthony says. “Where are we going, Luke? Hospital?”

“We’re going back to the asylum.”

“What? Why?”

“Because there’s an emergency aid station there, and it’s the only one close enough.”

“What about the Bloods?”

“They’re chasing us away from there—it’ll take them a while to realise we’ve gone back.”

“Yeah, but …”

“Does the station have everything you’d need to treat Josi?”

“I don’t know how badly she’s hurt, Luke, I—”

“Her body will be repairing itself at the moment, so any damage done is less harmful than it would be for anyone else,” Ben says.

“But …” Anthony tries.

“We need a place that can be sealed down, with no access from the outside, to give Ben a bit more time to finish his cure for the cure,” I say in a measured tone. I am patient and relaxed and I am not going to snap at any moment. I’m gripping the seat very tightly, and I am
not
going to snap.