Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) (12 page)

It’s dark outside. Well and truly. I feel like my feet are glued to the carpet. There’s glue through my whole body, keeping me perfectly still in a prison of my own horror.

Josephine is sitting in the middle of the room today, instead of her usual spot at the window. She’s facing away from me, and I can only see her silhouette because neither of us has thought to switch on the light. There’s a moon outside the window, and it’s tinted with a red hue, as it will be for the whole month.

She’s been talking for hours and hours, and her voice has taken on a tired, rough quality, like gravel under a shoe or the scrape of shards of glass. She describes her first weeks with Luke as I imagine she must remember them—with picture-perfect detail. Her words have a musical quality to them and there’s longing in her voice.

I knew she loved him, but I didn’t
know
. Not until today.

I want to keep listening, but she’s too tired and the lumbering hulk of a guard has poked his head in every fifteen minutes, wanting to know what’s keeping her.

“Thank you,” I say, even though there’s a part of me that hates her for having done this to me. I can’t stand the fact that she’s become a real person—more than a real person. An
uncured
person. And there’s a deep, dark tendril of dread that’s starting to appear in my head, warning me that maybe an uncured person is a better kind of person.

“Will you call him now?”

“There’s still more of the story, isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll call him tomorrow, if we finish.” I don’t give her a chance to argue, I just leave my office as quickly as I can. Halfway to my car I realize I’ve left my briefcase, but it hardly matters, does it? It’s empty. Everything I carry around is empty.

*

When I get home something feels wrong. There’s no sign that the security coding has malfunctioned, and yet my apartment smells different. It smells foreign. Like … a man.

I hate body odor just as much as I hate mess or uncleanliness. I shower three times a day, and I use a great deal of product to make sure that nothing on my body or in my home smells like anything except soap or disinfectant.

But here in my space there is an undeniably male scent. Like sweat and deodorant that is not mine. I stop and peer around, my skin crawling.

Then I spot it. There, leaning against the wall beside the fridge, is a large black instrument case. My heart starts to pound and somehow I know what it is. It couldn’t possibly be anything else, and yet this can’t possibly be happening either. There can’t be a cello sitting in my apartment, where nobody can enter except those with my retinas and fingerprints.

Slowly I force myself to walk over and unzip the case. It’s a cello.

I feel frightened and excited at the same time. I don’t know what to do with it, except that I do.

*

In the morning I get up and go through my daily routine. I make my bed. I clean myself thoroughly, scrubbing every inch of my skin with an exfoliating brush. I wash my hair and brush my teeth. I eat my breakfast and then brush my teeth again. I wipe down the sinks and the surfaces and make sure everything is in its spot. Everything in my house smells normal again, because I’ve made sure of it. I drive to work at the correct speed limit and I walk into my office at the same exact time of day that I have done for the last six years.

I do everything exactly the same as I always do it, except that nothing makes sense this morning because I’m carrying a cello in my arms.

When she enters my room at the usual time she sees the instrument immediately. I’ve placed it on the couch where she sits. She stops in her tracks, stares at it, stares at me. And then Josephine bursts into tears, and I wish with a kind of agony that I’d been the one who’d thought to give it to her.

“Why can’t we go to your parents’ house for lunch?” I whine for the one-thousandth time.

Luke ignores me, as he has been doing for most of this morning, because the feast he is preparing is more difficult than a banquet fit for the king of England.

I pout. “I’ve never had Christmas with a real family. I want to sit around a big dining table and tell stories and laugh with people who make jokes at each other’s expense.”

“I can make jokes at your expense if you’d like, babe,” he mutters distractedly while lighting something on fire. He nearly gets his eyebrows singed off but grins in delight when he sees the result of his explosion.

I can’t help but smile as I watch him, even though I’m rather annoyed at having to eat here by ourselves when he has a perfectly good family waiting not far away. It makes no sense to me—he’s
wasting
them! Granted, I haven’t actually heard much about this family, but I assume they’re perfect. They made Luke, didn’t they?

There’s a bowl of dough sitting beside me on the bench. He’s been kneading it carefully for the last twenty minutes and then letting it rest. I’ve got no idea what it’s for, but I’m blessed with a wicked idea. Picking a substantial piece off the edge of the ball, I roll it around in my fingers until it’s a nice shape. Then I peg it at Luke’s head.

He spins around and looks at me, mystified. “Did you just throw food at me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re annoying me.”

Luke blinks. “You brat,” he laughs, and then tackles me, lifting me off the bench and onto the floor. In moments he’s tickling me mercilessly and I’m trying not to laugh but I can’t help it. I’m squirming and close to kneeing him in the groin, but he manages to make me stop with a kiss. Pretty soon we’re rolling around on the kitchen floor, and I’m about to lose my mind because since I moved back in two days ago we’ve still been sleeping in separate bedrooms. Apparently I’m too young for him. He won’t sleep with me until after my birthday, which just seems like an arbitrary day to me, but makes him feel more comfortable, I guess.

However at this particular moment he happens to be touching me. A lot. I can feel the press of his body against mine and it burns from the inside out. Maybe he’s given up on his own rule.

I reach for his shirt but he sits up. “Don’t,” he warns.

I roll my eyes.

“And don’t roll your eyes at me. It makes me crazy.”

I roll my eyes again. He rolls his eyes at me rolling my eyes. We both burst into laughter. Something starts to burn and Luke lurches to his feet. “Shit! Not the salmon!”

He doesn’t really have salmon, does he? Salmon is one of the most expensive foods in the world. I try not to think about it. Instead I pick myself up and wander into the living room. I don’t like television because it makes my eyes sore, so we don’t watch his enormous TV much. He does have an amazing collection of books though, hidden behind a sliding door where I didn’t spot them when I first moved in. I peruse them while I wait for him to finish cooking.

My life has become a constant war between my head and my heart. The last couple of days have filled me with so much anxiety and so much happiness that I’m practically nauseous with both. I know what I should do—get as far away from Luke as possible. I don’t deserve him, and I certainly don’t want to hurt him. Nor do I want him to have to deal with my death. But, selfish though it may be, I can’t leave him. He has found a way to turn the dark thoughts in my head into threads of shimmering gold, pretty and light and ready to float away.

Our lunch is truly incredible. Flavours I’ve never tasted burst in my mouth and I get so overwhelmed that I have to pause and take a break. I can’t eat much at a time because my stomach has never consumed much, so we sit for hours, picking and grazing and talking and laughing. We tell each other stories and we argue and we joke at each other’s expense. It is too close to perfect to be believable. This apartment was empty when I first moved in, but we have filled it with words, thousands and thousands of words, so that now the walls heave with the effort of containing them all.

As the sun starts to sink I have a moment of clarity. I don’t need Luke’s family because
he
is my family.

“I’m going to give you my present now,” he tells me once we’re stuffed full and ready to burst. “You can give me yours later.”

I freeze. All the food feels like it’s about to come back up. “Luke—you’ve already done so much … This meal, and letting me live here, and …”

“It’s just a small present,” he says. “It’s not as good as the one you’re giving me.”

Shit. The truth is I haven’t bought Luke anything. I haven’t worked much this week, so I haven’t had any money, and to be honest I’ve never actually had a Christmas with presents before.

Luke smiles slowly like he can read exactly what I’m thinking. “I’ll go first and then you can go.”

“Okay,” I reply feebly.

He places a small wrapped package on the table. I’m dismayed to find that my fingers tremble as I unwrap it. This is too much. I don’t want gifts from him—he’s given me
so
much. I don’t have any money to pay him back for all that he’s done, and I can’t accept anything more from him.

I get the wrapping open and stare at the little cardboard box. It’s a travel-sized container of primer.

I meet his eyes and burst into laughter. I double over and hold my stomach while I laugh. Luke pulls his chair so that it’s next to mine, putting his hands in my hair and brushing his lips against my ear, jaw, cheek. I can feel the smile in his body and he’s laughing as he kisses me. “Since neither of us knew what it was, I figured we should find out.”

“I—” The words are almost out before I can stop them. My laughter is cut off and I’m frozen in horror. That was way too close—without thinking I nearly said
I love you
. And that would be unbearable.

It is unbearable that I even feel it in the first place, and the shock of realizing it makes me feel abruptly cut loose; spinning out into orbit with nothing to tether me.

But Luke’s smile doesn’t change, none-the-wiser, and as I look at that smile, really look at it, I realize that if I can find the courage to let him, he will be my tether.

*

When we’ve loaded everything into the dishwasher and it’s rumbling softly, Luke motions for me to stay where I am. He’s on the other side of the kitchen and we look at each other.

“You can give me your present in a minute, but first I need to tell you something.”

His voice makes me worried. He sounds too serious.

“We couldn’t go to my parents’ house today because I didn’t want to. I can’t be around them at this time of year, or any time of year, really. Seven years ago on Christmas day my older brother Dave killed himself.”

My heart lurches to a shuddering stop. Luke’s face is within a shadow. I can’t see his expression very well. But I can hear it.

“He hated the cure. He was a protester. One of the last. Made it through the riots without getting killed or caught, but then they got his girlfriend—she was a protester too. Livvy had a bad reaction to the drug they inject. She had to be institutionalized. There was nothing left of her personality. Severe psychosis. Dave lost it. He was so angry—impossibly angry. I think his anger became the heart of his personality, of how he saw himself. So when they finally took it away from him he lost all sense of who he was. The only way he could see out of the nightmare was to die.”

“Oh, god,” I whisper. “Luke.” I don’t know what to do, how to help him. I want to take this away for him, but I know better than anyone that grief like this can’t be erased. He has a right to it, a right to mourn his brother. The true horror of what I’ve told him hits me. My own suicide pact now seems unbearably cruel, and I’d give anything to take back the night I admitted to it.

“Can I have your present now?” he asks, and he sounds like a frightened little boy.

There’s a lump in my throat and I just want to sink into the floor. Before I can explain that I’m a callous girl who forgot to get him one, he walks from the kitchen. Worriedly I follow him into the spare room—my room. He crosses to the window and picks up my cello case.

“You left this here when you moved out,” he says. I know I did—I was a hollow shell without it. Luke opens the case and pokes his hands in. It isn’t until he pulls out the two sheets of old, tattered paper that I realize. “I found these,” he admits, and god he looks so sad it’s breaking my heart.

The pages are covered in sheet music I’ve written, at the top of which is the title ‘Luke’s Song’.

“Could you play this for me now?” he asks, voice breaking.

I nod and dash tears from my cheeks. I cross the room and kiss him on the lips, as gently as I can manage. I feel him trembling against me. “Of course.” I take the cello but not the pages—these I know by heart—and then I play for him in the spill of moonlight from the window. I play for Luke, and I play for Dave and Livvy, and for every single person who has been robbed by the world and its madness. I play the love song I wrote Luke before I even knew I loved him.

And as I play I realize I can only do so because I am alive. I can only love him because I have the privilege.

I am alive, and I must fight this blood moon and the monster inside me, if only to save the man I love from having to grieve for me.

He wants to wait for my birthday but I’m tired of waiting. I have been waiting since the day I was born for my life to begin. My real life. Not this pretend life.

I feel like a half person. Someone sketched in outline but not yet filled in.

How am I supposed to be more? I imagine him touching me and making love to me, and I imagine that under his touches I’ll be more, whole, a real and finished person. It’s the only way I can think of to stop this endless, unceasing ache beneath my skin.

I knock on his door quietly.

“Josi?”

Pushing in, I see his outline in the moonlight from the window. He’s on one side of his enormous bed, blinking quickly.

“You okay?”

I can’t speak. I move towards him. When I reach the bed I take off my dressing-gown and show him my naked body. He goes still, the expression on his face different. It gives me a quick thrill, and I think: this is normal. This is how people are supposed to be. I’m supposed to desire my boyfriend and make love to him. And I’m supposed to like it when his eyes fill with lust like that.

I’m not supposed to be frightened or ashamed.

Angry with myself, I sink down onto the edge of the bed.

“What’s going on?” Luke asks me.

But I don’t know how to answer, and I think he can see that. I lean down and kiss him. But I can’t feel it. I feel nothing.

And I feel nothing when his hand moves to my stomach, brushing softly against my skin.

I feel nothing I feel nothing I feel nothing—

Another hand is on my skin, but this one is delicate and covered in blood. I peer down to realize that it’s my own hand in the dark. Another version of my hand. And when I look up, I see my own face staring back at me, but my eyes are red, the blood vessels burst, and I look ancient and cold, like something has stolen my soul.

This part of me, this woman—she turns and starts to tear at Luke, devouring him, and there’s so much blood that it becomes like an ocean—

“
Josi
!”

His voice slices into my head and when I blink I see that we are alone, and there’s no monster in the room with us, and no blood, but a sound is reverberating around the walls and I slowly realize that it’s me, it’s my scream, not highpitched but low and throaty and tearing. It goes on and on and I can’t stop and then Luke is grabbing me in his arms and using all of his strength to squeeze and squeeze until I can barely breathe and the screaming finally stops and we’re silent and he’s holding me so tight that it’s done the impossible and managed to put me back together and keep me that way and then everything fades and stops and drifts away.

And now I know. In this silence. A touch won’t be enough to make me more. Not even Luke’s touch. It will have to be me. If I don’t want to spend my life as a half person, unfinished, then I must find a way to shed my past from my skin and be more than it.

Tonight I spend my first night in bed with Josephine. I don’t sleep. I’m too frightened of the nightmares filling her up to even close my eyes. Instead I watch the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, and the flickering of her eyelids, the clenching of her jaw as she grinds her teeth and the curling of her fingers and toes.

I watch these things and I don’t know how I am going to do this. How I’m going to be enough for this, equal to the magnitude of the damage done to her. I haven’t lived enough life, experienced enough truth. I feel like a child in bed beside her, and for the first time in many years I want to call my mother and ask her what to do.

I wake on my nineteenth birthday to a sick feeling in my stomach. Dressing quickly, I pull on my boots and head for the front door. Luke is in the kitchen as I breeze past.

“Happy birthday!” he announces, but I don’t look at him. “Josi?”

I head for the subway and jump on a train. It’s not the same station or line, but I think of them of course. The four uncured fighters.

The train takes me all the way to the edge of the city, to where I can see the mighty, looming wall. Beyond that wall is a wasteland. Diseased and dead. Within it we’re kept like rats in a lab.

At the end of a street is a steel factory. As I walk towards it, I run my fingers over the knife in my pocket.

Inside I ask for a man by name, telling the receptionist that his sister is here. I say there’s been an emergency and I’ll need to speak with him privately, so she shows me to a small office where I can wait for him.

I feel overwhelmingly nauseous, and keep a very good grip on my knife.

It takes about ten minutes for Lachlan to arrive. My foster brother. He is still fat, but a lot of his girth seems to be muscle now, too. He’s handsome, sort of. A big, robust man of twenty-two.

He is confused, looking at me curiously as he shuts the door, shutting us in this small room together.

“Hi. They told me you asked for me…?”

I search his face and find nothing that connects him to the boy who tormented me. He just looks like a normal guy.

Our eyes meet and I see recognition cross his gaze. It’s the dual color of my eyes that’s causing him to recall something so long past. Six months with a mute girl over ten years ago.

“I do know you, don’t I?” he asks. “You were one of the kids we took in. What’s your name again?”

There is no embarrassment in his expression. No shame, no discomfort, no anger or regret. I don’t think he remembers any of the things I remember. He is simply curious.

All of a sudden it is bizarre to me that I have come here. Of all the families I lived with, of all the people who harmed me, Lachlan is not even close to the worst. Perhaps it’s the brand he left on my body that makes him feel more permanent, more present in my life now. Perhaps it’s
because
he wasn’t the worst that I can come here and face him, as I certainly can’t face any of the others.

His name will be on my body until the day I die, but he doesn’t even remember what mine is. My fingers let go of the knife and I stand, eclipsed by a sudden understanding of the world and its absurdities.

We face each other, and for the first time in my life I feel wildly powerful. I smile, and then I walk past him without a word. I didn’t give him a word when I was eight, and I don’t need to give him one now.

I don’t need any of this; I have moved so far beyond it that I know, suddenly, how very little it truly means. None of this ugliness will ever take anything from me again. And the realisation has made so much clear to me.

My thoughts are, overwhelmingly, of Luke Townsend, and the things that do have meaning.

On the train it starts to rain. I watch the droplets splatter against the glass window. It’s late by the time I finally get home. Heavy clouds cover the moon and stars, blacking out the sky, shrouding the whole world in darkness. The apartment is empty, not a single light lit. My heart hammers—Luke must be out.

I have to find him. There’s something I need to tell him. Right now. I turn for the door again before remembering my phone. Hurrying to my room, I leave a trail of wet puddles on the marble floor. I have no missed calls, so I find Luke and dial his number.

A soft ringing sound comes from the next bedroom, his. But after following it, I find his phone alone. I swallow, a sense of urgency rising painfully inside me. He had plans for the whole day. He wanted it to be so special, wanted to give me the first birthday I could enjoy and remember forever. But I left without a word of explanation, and I missed the whole day.

I’m breathing very fast as I run for the door. But as I pass the living room I catch a glimpse of something and skid to a halt.

There he is. Standing outside on the balcony, in the pouring rain.

I stop for a long moment, watching him, thinking and feeling a million things at once. Finally I take a deep breath and walk outside. The rain immediately seeps into me, drenching me.

Luke hears me and turns. In the dark his eyes search and find mine. Water runs over the hard lines of his face, the heavy brow, high cheekbones, sharp jaw. I watch droplets slide over his nose and onto his lips, set in a hard line.

The lights of the buildings around us are reflected in his eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asks, his voice deep and rough as if he hasn’t used it all day.

I feel overwhelmed by the answer, managing only to nod. I can feel everything building inside me, a shiver across every nerve ending. A sudden, miraculous certainty. I have never felt so sure, or so whole.

“I’m so sorry,” I utter. “I had to do something. But now I know.”

He tilts his head. Frowns. I must have put him through a lot today. “What do you know?”

“That I’m ready. Really ready. For everything. For you. For us. To trust…” I’m not explaining myself properly because it’s all a rush now, a rush to come out and to make him understand. Does he know that it’s momentous for me, simply to trust someone? He is my first, my only.

My hands are trembling as I hold his eyes. “I love you, Luke. Desperately.”

His eyes sharpen and I see the shock freeze him still. A slice of lightning lights him up, cutting over his green gaze, and I realise that the droplets on his cheeks are not only rain, but tears too.

“Don’t,” he whispers. “Don’t do that.”

I reach for him, but he takes my wrists to stop me.

“Why?”

“I don’t … I don’t deserve it, Josi.”

I shake my head, an ache inside me, all the way through me, a lightning storm of love. “No,” I say, and then again, so firmly there is no arguing. “No.” Pulling out of his grip, I place my hands on his cheeks and run my thumbs over his lips. “You’ve saved my whole life,” I tell him fiercely. “You’ve remade me, because you’re the only good thing in this whole world. You’re a bright thing, the only bright thing I’ve ever seen, and even though they’ve tried to dull you, I can see all that courage and generosity, and
kindness
in everything you do.” He is listening to me now; I can see everything behind his eyes. I say it again, so he’ll really hear it. “I love you.”

And then I kiss him, my lips brushing the water from his skin, his cheeks, eyelids, and lips.

As my mouth finds his, I feel him respond at last, like the tide has crashed through a brick wall, one as mighty as the wall around this city. His hands grip me, my back, my hips, pulling me against him. Our mouths open, tasting each other, and my heart is hammering in my chest, because for the first time I’m not frightened of these touches—I am hungry.

I reach for his T-shirt and lift it over his head. My lips find his chest, the startling heat there. His hands, when they unbutton my shirt, are trembling. His breath is against my ear, my cheek, my mouth and I can feel something prickly and stirring inside me, spreading flame throughout my body.

Wildly my heart flutters, a heart of raven’s wings.

Luke’s mouth burns a path over my jaw, down my neck and along my collarbone. Then it ducks again, to circle my breast. I feel his tongue dart out to trace my nipple, and I’m unprepared for the sound that leaves me. Something erupts in me, something I was completely unaware existed in the world.

Who could imagine that a body could give pleasure as well as pain?

I feel the same sense of urgency in him, in his hands, his mouth; I can feel him trying to hold it back, trying not to scare me, but I want it, I’m desperate for it, for the passion I can feel beneath his surface.

He’s coming alive in my hands, and for the first time since we met I forget that he’s a drone. I allow myself to forget.

His mouth drops again, down over my stomach and then lower, and I feel a moment of terrified exhilaration before I feel his tongue slip inside me and I gasp aloud as sensation bursts to life within. It overwhelms me, too much, too intense, I can barely stand it and I think I’m breaking or dying or falling.

My hands thread through his hair as I pull him away.

Luke looks up at me and I can see a wildness in his eyes, too. “Let go,” he breathes. “Just let go.”

“Not without you.”

I push him to the ground, sliding over him until I can acutely feel the precise places we are touching. It makes it hard to breathe; he makes it hard to breathe. Everywhere we touch is like its own brand on my skin and when he gives in to the tidal wave that has picked us up and swept us away with it I feel him move inside me and begin to make love to me, and it’s a trembling, taut revelation of all the things I thought must be make-believe. He finds my eyes, keeping me with him the whole time, and he still has those lights in his gaze, golden orbs that pull me inside him so I can live within his bones and muscles and veins.

I can feel it all building inside me, burning and aching, and when he starts to move more quickly inside me, against me, I know I can’t hold on any longer. Amidst the storm, rain against our skin, lightning in our eyes and a thousand lives in the buildings around us, Luke and I burst and shatter and let go together.

As all the pieces of me fall from the sky to clink softly against the ground like the tiniest shards of crystal, I feel my mind disappear. It drifts up and away, out of my body with all its raw nerve endings.

I spend a moment wishing I could stay this way forever. Weightless and empty and full.

But it’s his deep voice that brings me back. “Josi?”

“I’m here,” I whisper, looking into his eyes. “I’m here.”

The truth is simple. Loving someone, and caring about them more than you care about yourself, is the only thing strong enough to set a soul free from its prison.

I carry her inside to my bed. I feel buoyed up to impossible heights and grounded deep in the warm earth at the same time. I feel happier and more devastated than I have in my whole life.

Placing her on top of the sheet, I gaze down at her naked body, drinking it in, unable to believe that I’m allowed to do this now, that I am exquisitely fortunate enough to have Josephine Luquet stare at me with those inferno eyes and
want
me to look at her like this.