Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  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 a
nd 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.

  Luke

  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.

  I can’t help it—I duck my face to kiss along the line of her rib. There’s something impossible about how she tastes, about having her salt skin against my tongue.

  A sense assails me suddenly—like a slap—of this moment being too perfect, like a bubble that must pop, a stone thrown that must fall back down again. It fills me with a strange melancholy, and the love inside me grows weary of constantly being tempered, contained. It wants out, wants free. It wants no caveat, no conditions; only truth.

  “You’ve ruined me for every other person on this planet,” I tell her softly, unable to articulate better the tragedy of what we have done and will do to each other.

  “There are no other people on this planet,” she replies.

  I smile, and in this moment the truth of that envelops me and becomes everything. A perfect, lonely world, shared by two who make each other not, in fact, lonely at all.

  I thought it when I first saw her, and I think it again now.

  Here she is.

  Chapter Eleven

  July 21st, 2064

  Josephine

  “You know what’s weird?” I ask suddenly.

  Luke looks up from the images we’ve been studying. We’re sitting in bed, projecting our timeline of crime scenes onto the opposite wall and undertaking our usual session of ‘stare at a picture that has no meaning for hours while your mind daydreams about other things and pretend you’re making progress’. Only this time I think I actually have thought of something.

  “Why hasn’t anyone noticed these deaths? Or at least the disappearances?” I knead the tight muscles in my hand while I mull it over. “I mean, if you got murdered, I’d report you missing, right?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to put yourself out, darling.”

  He is cutting a mango into slices on a board, and I consider warning him that juice is running onto the bed before realizing I don’t care and turning back to my epiphany.

  “So we need to prove that all of these victims are real people with names and families. How do we do that?”

  He smiles like he’s been waiting for me to reach this point. There is mango caught in his teeth, and it makes me grin. “We have to steal the missing persons reports from the police.”

  “Excuse me?” Like that, my grin’s gone.

  *

  We’re standing two blocks away from the biggest police station in the city. I’m freaking out; Luke is calm. What a surprise. These are our perpetual states of being. Maybe we balance each other out.

  “Wait!” I hiss. “Can we go over our cover story one more time?”

  His eyebrows arch in disbelief. “We’re brother and sister. Our mother has gone missing. That’s it. It’s not particularly complex, baby.”

  “Should we have back stories?” I ask, wringing my hands worriedly. “What’s my motivation?”

  He seems amused by this. “Your motivation is that you want to find your mother.”

  “Right. Yeah, okay. That seems plausible. What else? Do I have any personality quirks? What’s my job? What’s our family like? What—”

  “No, nothing else, Josi,” he interrupts. “Just keep it simple. In fact you don’t have to talk at all. Just look sad.” Then he adds, “Won’t be too difficult for you, Sad Eyes.”

  “I don’t have sad eyes!”

  “Trust me, you do. Let’s go.” Luke leads the way into the station and I focus on getting into character. I’m sad. My darling mother is gone. I’m not remotely attracted to my brother.

  Inside the station it’s a rather chaotic mess. Every wall is a screen full of constantly changing information. Officers are everywhere, chatting and calling out to each other, or ordering other people to get a move on. There’s a row of criminals sitting handcuffed to their chairs, which seems really weird to me—shouldn’t they be kept out of the way of the innocent public? I give a choked, somewhat hysterical laugh—I just considered myself an innocent. Luke shoots me a warning glare over his shoulder and I swallow.

  He walks straight up to a desk in the middle of the room. The woman sitting behind it looks up and actually does a double take when she sees Luke. I roll my eyes.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” he says smoothly. “You brighten a rough day with those peepers.”

  Jesus, what a sleaze! I go ahead and assume that treating a woman like a disrespected 1950s housewife isn’t the best way to go, but it seems to work on the girl, so what do I know. She smiles and blushes.

  “Where can my sister and I go to file a missing person’s report?”

  “Oh, that’s at the front desk there …”

  “Thank you,” he says, letting his voice drop off a bit as though he’s struggling to contain his grief. “It’s just … Could we maybe speak to the officer who’ll be handling the case? I’d really like to convey the details myself.”

  “Once twenty-four hours have passed a detective will find you and question you—”

  “It’s my mother,” Luke whispers. “She’s not well. If she’s left the house, then I fear the worst. I can’t bear it, knowing she’s out there on her own, scared and cold. Night’s coming on. And she was making threats.”

  He’s certainly laying it on thick. The young female officer gives a quick nod. “Of course. Follow me—I’ll take you to Detective Webb who handles the missing persons.”

  “Thank you so much,” Luke sighs, flashing her a smile that’s so delicious I’m surprised the girl doesn’t melt straight into the damn floor.

  Quite frankly, I’m amazed and a little bit disgusted. It’s disconcerting how good an actor Luke is. We follow the young woman to the back of the station and into a quieter area. She pauses at the door and speaks through an intercom. After a terse response from within, she places her thumbprint on the scanner and admits us.

  Luke and I enter a large office with a window that looks out onto a parking lot. There’s a huge screen on the back wall, and a professionally dressed woman is standing in front of it, moving pieces here and there, tapping images and muttering to herself under her breath. As soon as she hears us enter she claps her hands and the whole screen turns into an image of a tropical fish tank. It’s unnervingly real, even though the fish are too big to be comforting or cute. They kind of look like massive sharks gliding
around the room. Not exactly the most relaxing environment in which to work.

  The woman’s eyes travel over our faces. She reads Luke first, eyes softening appreciatively, but when her gaze finds me her eyes narrow uncertainly. I grow uncomfortable, horrified that she could somehow guess the truth—she seems to be searching me with a hawk’s keen eyes, aware that I’m unusual.

  “Sergeant Landers brought you to see me,” she states briskly. “Why?”

  “Forgive the interruption,” Luke says, taking a few steps forward so that Webb is forced to look at him instead of me. “We have a crime to confess.”

  Detective Webb motions for us to sit in front of the desk. She remains standing behind the chair, clearly to intimidate us. “And what crime would that be?”

  “We’re responsible for an old woman’s disappearance.”

  Webb’s expression doesn’t change. “You’d better explain.”

  “Laurel—our mother—needs constant care. Lately, she’s been talking about wanting to get revenge for what ‘they’ did to us, but I have no idea who ‘they’ are. In any case, she got out of the house yesterday. She’d been ranting on and on about some man named Ben Collingsworth and then she smashed the window to go after whoever that is. Josephine and I waited the twenty-four hours, but now we need help. She might try to hurt someone, or herself.”

  “Ben Collingsworth,” Webb repeats. Her eyes are shrewd, calculating. She’s watching Luke closely, but his mask and story are flawless. If I didn’t know better I’d believe every word out of his mouth. “Do you know who Ben Collingsworth is, Mr …?”

  “Bates.”

  “Mr Bates.”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t believe I do. But it hardly matters anyway, right? Whoever he is, or whatever Ma is trying to do, we need to find her and get her back on her medication.”

  Doctor Ben Collingsworth is none other than the scientist who first developed the cure and successfully introduced it into the world. I really wish Luke had warned me that he was going to go into this much detail. I have no idea what he’s doing here, dropping a name like that and tying it to our fictional mother.