Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

They might be the last two in the world, but they were two, and that mattered. That was the thing that mattered more than her moon heart.

  *

  My next prison visitor should not be out of bed. He moves slowly and as the light from his lamp flickers I can see the bandage around his skull, hiding the holes Zach had to drill in his head to release the pressure of his swollen brain.

  Will sags to the ground beside me. “Well, aren’t you a dummy?”

  “Guess so.”

  He opens his mouth to say something, then gives up and simply rests his head in my lap. “Love you,” he mutters as he drifts off to sleep.

  I rest my hand on his shoulder and try to meditate, try not to think, try to do anything but ponder how desperately ruined I would have been had he died.

  *

  April 8th, 2068

  Josephine

  I’m not sure what time it is when something wakes me. I think it must be very late. I blink and straighten, noting in the dark that a figure has crouched before us. A figure I know very well.

  Luke touches Will gently. “Hey, mate.” Will looks up and Luke smiles the warmest, loveliest smile. The smile I once adored. God it’s sweet, that smile. “Sorry to wake you, pal. Mind if I have a word with Josi?”

  “Sure thing, boss.” Will starts to rise and Luke practically lifts him to his feet.

  “I’ll help you to bed.”

  “Nah, I’m good. Stay here and salvage something.”

  Luke hesitates, then hugs the smaller boy. Will whispers something in his ear that I can’t hear, then makes his way slowly out of the big silo.

  When we’re alone Luke sits beside me. I’m so tired. I wish he hadn’t come. At least he doesn’t try to touch me.

  “You okay? You need anything?”

  I don’t reply.

  “You really socked me one in the nads, Jose.”

  “Good.” There’s a short silence. “You all prepped for tomorrow?”

  “For in an hour, you mean? Yep. I’ll need your help with the train.”

  I nod. It’s much later than I thought it was.

  “Talk to me. It might be our last chance and if I die I want to do it understanding what compelled you to do this.”

  “I don’t know how to explain. It will sound too meaningless. Too small to encompass any kind of understanding.”

  “I’m not quite as stupid as I look. You could try.”

  “You’re not stupid at all. You’re the smartest person I know.” My words are starting to run out. “I’m just like them,” I try. “The Furies. They’re not … what we thought.” My fingers stray to the stitches in my neck. How many times did they save my life out there?

  “I love you so much. But what you’ve done … it feels like you don’t want me to love you anymore.”

  The arrogance of men, always. “It’s not about you.”

  “I know, but what?”

  Silence. I tried to tell him but he didn’t listen.

  “Whatever end you’re angling for, I can’t understand it unless you explain it to me, and you won’t. Which doesn’t leave us with anywhere to go.”

  He is correct. Sadly correct. I lift my eyes to the holes in the silo and can’t help remembering the silly names Lawrence gave their constellations. There isn’t much light in them now, which means the moon is just a sliver beyond. Soon they will start to twinkle with the rising sunlight, but by then it will be time to move.

  I thought it when we were above ground in the safe house, and I think it again now. The only way Luke is going to let me go is if I take drastic measures. And I don’t want him going up there clinging to some memory of what we had, thinking it will return. So I will arm myself with the one thing he and I have always struggled with: the truth.

  “This love you have for me,” I say softly, “I don’t think you know its true face.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You say it over and over. All these words. You tell me things like how you loved me the first moment you saw me but I hate that, I’ve always hated it because it’s such bullshit. Love isn’t sight. It isn’t attraction. It isn’t what you can see in someone’s skin or bones. Your love, whatever it was made of, wasn’t about me – it was about you and what you needed to happen at that point in your life.”

  He doesn’t speak, so I draw a breath and go on. “Do you know when I first loved you, Luke Townsend? It wasn’t when we met, or when we first kissed, or even when we first made love. I loved a version of you then, and there were real pieces of you in that version, beautiful pieces, but I didn’t love you honestly until you were honest with me. The first time I loved you properly was the first moment I truly hated you. When you told me you were a Blood and broke my heart. That was when love became real.”

  I close my mouth and determine not to say any more. I can’t: I have no words left. Something hurts in my chest that I thought had died, and I think I’d rather it had. Luke stands and paces away from me. He is a shadow in the silo, a giant lumbering mass of muscle and pain. When he turns to me he sinks to his knees like he can’t help it.

  “Shall I tell you a secret?”

  I stiffen with sudden concern. It’s his tone.

  “I didn’t love you the first time I saw you. I told you that as a mercy. The truth is much uglier.”

  *

  September 16th, 2064

  Luke

  She’s had more night terrors than usual in the last couple of nights. She’s started sleeping during the day and screaming then, too. Her body has grown so weak I think she must surely be dying, so I’ve decided to break into her house and get her to a hospital, regardless of my mission objectives to stay out of contact at all times. This is what I’m thinking as I watch from the roof opposite hers, what I’m thinking as I follow her from her apartment and into the street. She is barefoot and in some sort of fugue state – I think she must be sleepwalking. She gets on a train in this state, somehow, and I follow from the next carriage down, keeping her in my sight at all times. People are staring at her in concern – she looks like some sort of street urchin, hair tangled, feet bare.

  She gets off in the outer suburbs and starts walking through the tree-lined streets. She’s heading for bushland, I think, though why I have no clue. Every minute I think now, I’ll stop her now, but instead I just keep following and watching.

  Until I see what she’s searching for. She wants trees and nature and wildlife, she wants away from the city, from its noisy soulless buildings and its metal glass steel trappings. She wants out.

  There is a tent beside the hiking track. I see it much later than she does. And I see her circling it, smelling it, listening to the sounds of the people within it.

  I watch my charge, an eighteen-year-old girl, unzip the tent with slow deliberateness and climb in. There are sounds – voices and then shouts and then screams. At first I’m not sure what’s happening, but then there is blood and I know. I don’t move to help the people. I just watch.

  Two of my colleagues arrive. They are armed, but don’t draw their guns, opting for their knives at such close range. They approach the tent from the opposite direction and still I remain hidden and silent. The thought of what they will do to her makes my heart thump painfully but some dark thing inside me has vowed not to interfere with anything, it has vowed to watch it all, every minute of whatever this is.

  The first Blood – he’s a red – cuts the side of the tent open but before he’s even finished his arm has been snapped. The rest of his shoulder and collarbone is broken with the force she’s applied and he hits the ground, unconscious from the pain. The second Blood – this one a blue – orders her to come out immediately, drawing his gun and aiming at her silhouette. She lunges, mindless of the fabric of the tent dividing them, and tackles him to the ground. Through the plastic she goes for his neck, her teeth mauling him violently open. He tries to shoot – a bullet is fired but it whizzes past her head and by then he’s dead, his throat torn open with such savagery that sh
e didn’t even need to emerge from the tent.

  When she does, I see her face is covered in blood. She is ravenous as she bends to keep at the agent’s neck, chewing and sucking and devouring.

  I move backwards very slowly until I’m far enough away to puke my guts into the bushes.

  Then I straighten and return to the scene of the nightmare. She’s not human, I know that much. She’s not what I thought she was, not even close. She’s something very other under the light of this crimson moon. She is animal, plain and simple. And I can’t stop the adrenalin pouring itself through my body, flooding it, making me shake and curse and want a dozen things I can’t name. If she smells me, she doesn’t act on it. Instead, once she’s finished with all four of the corpses she turns and continues on through the trees. Continues her hunt, perhaps. A whining frenzied noise comes from her mouth, like a cry or a moan or a baying. Agitated, she removes her bloodstained clothes as though they cause her skin pain. Whatever has become of her mind is primitive and primal. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  After she’s gone from my sight, I make a swift decision that will change my life forever. I hide the bodies somewhere until I can return and dispose of them properly, and I vow never to tell anyone what I’ve seen here tonight. Not even Josephine Luquet. Because one thing is for certain: for this she would be exterminated from the world, and for some unfathomably depraved reason I think I would die before I let that happen.

  *

  April 8th, 2068

  Josephine

  “You think I don’t know you,” Luke says. “You think I don’t know the darkest, ugliest, most monstrous parts of you, but I knew them before you did. I saw them.”

  I don’t move; I can’t.

  “Did you not think about that night? Before I found you in the bar? Didn’t you wonder what I’d seen?”

  I didn’t because I couldn’t afford to.

  “I saw the worst. Before that night I thought I knew you. I’d been watching you. You were sweet and sad and innocent and then without warning you were none of those things. You were so violent I had no way to take it in. I watched and watched – I made myself watch – and then you woke to a new day. You were small and vulnerable again. I watched you find your way home, steal clothes off a clothesline. I saw you collapse and rise and collapse and rise. I saw all that you were in that night and that morning, both sides of the truth, a bigger truth than even you knew. And that was when I loved you. For the endurance of the unendurable.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. My mouth is filled with saliva and I might be about to vomit but still he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand. He thinks me an innocent vulnerable girl trapped in the body of a monster but I’m nothing like that. I am the monster, and the blood moon simply set me free.

  I am drenched in humiliation – I can’t stand his eyes on me, and never want to be looked at again.

  Then he goes on, and I feel everything drop away.

  He says, “That’s not even it. That’s not true. Christ, I can hardly say it, even now.”

  I open my eyes and look at him.

  “I told myself that’s how it was afterwards,” Luke murmurs, holding my gaze in the dark. “But the truth … I saw you turn animal and I wanted to join you. Not the killing, obviously, but the freedom. I wanted to be the same as you, as wild and simple. So if it’s your monstrousness that you think I can’t handle, you’re wrong. If it’s the shame you think I don’t understand, you’re wrong. I see you.”

  There is an endless, endless night between his words and mine. There is an infinite life. There is death.

  I say aloud the thing I understood in the north, when all else fell away. I say aloud the thing I now realize he already knows, knew long before I did.

  “This is a kingdom of wolves.”

  We must be wolves to survive it.

  Luke crouches before me and reaches to touch my cheek. “And I hope I’ll see you on the other side of it.”

  Then he’s gone.

  Chapter 25

  April 8th, 2068

  Dave

  As I’m saying goodbye to Mom I notice there’s a rash all over my hands. She sees it and makes a concerned noise, retrieving some lotion and massaging it in for me.

  “Just stress,” she consoles.

  But it’s no consolation. It is a terror. My body is turning against me. I can be attacked from every side, even from within.

  “Why do you stay here?” I ask her. “It’s a place of death.”

  She holds my eyes and frowns. “I look around these tunnels and see only life.”

  Oh, my mother. How I used to love her. She was the strongest of us. I think she still is. I wonder what she sees when she looks at what I’ve become.

  “I think you should leave,” I whisper. “I think you should get out of here while you still can.”

  “We’ll go when it’s time, and not without everyone else.” She finishes rubbing the moisturizer into my hands and gives them a squeeze. “Help your brother. Do the best you can.”

  I nod but I’m not sure my best is worth much.

  *

  Luke

  From the silo I go straight to the barracks, but the kid I’m looking for isn’t in his bed. I find him instead in the infirmary, dozing on one of the gurneys. Probably to avoid being shivved while he sleeps by his bunk mates.

  “Zach,” I whisper, not wanting to wake Will in the next bed.

  Zach lurches awake in a panic. I press my hand to his mouth and then drop something into his hand.

  The key to Josi’s handcuffs.

  He looks down at them expressionlessly, then nods.

  *

  I have Shadow, Blue, Eric and Coin help me carry the drill onto the train. Next, I set Teddy up with the train programming instructions Josi left scrawled beside her open cuffs. She and Zach are long gone by this point, though I have no idea to where.

  “Get us here,” I tell Teddy, pointing to a spot on the map directly beneath the Blood base.

  “This is fifty feet underground,” he points out, looking green from his hangover. “And there’s no tunnel exit points anywhere near here.”

  “That’s why we’re bringing the drill, kid.” I clap him on the shoulder and then start jogging home. When I get to the dining tunnel, Will is waiting with the rest of my soldiers. “No,” I tell him. “You’re not coming anywhere near us.”

  “You’ll have to cuff me, then.”

  “Will, you were dead two nights ago.”

  “Yeah, and now I’m alive.”

  “Your head—”

  “Is bandaged and well.”

  “It’s got holes in it, for Christ’s sake.”

  “How’s that different from normal?” He grins.

  I can’t help it – I snort. Rub my eyes wearily. It’s only six a.m. and I’m already exhausted at the thought of what we’re about to do. “Fine, kid, but don’t you dare die again.”

  “I’m not gonna make a habit of it, trust me.”

  “Right, you lot, all armed and fitted with tested comms?”

  “Yes, sir!” they answer, sounding like good little soldiers. I keep remembering the words Josi spoke about how they aren’t real fighters, they’ve never faced an army of Bloods. But I’m hoping they won’t have to. Not if the plan goes smoothly.

  “Then we have a train to catch, amigos. All aboard.”

  “We’re coming,” Coin tells me, sidling up with Alo and Henrietta, all three of them heavily armed and dressed in Kevlar vests.

  I hadn’t chosen them for the op. I can’t stand the thought of them in danger – losing more of them would take us beyond repair. But something in their eyes is undeniable. So I nod and let them pass.

  Before I leave I find my parents. They’re in the kitchen, frying eggs and talking swiftly under their breaths.

  “You run a tight ship, chef,” I tell Dad.

  He turns and bursts into tears.

  “Woah, god, why are you crying?”

  ??
?Because you’re doing something inconceivably stupid,” Mom answers for him.

  “I’ve got this, alright? I know what I’m doing.”

  “Can’t you stop your brother from going with you?”

  So that’s what Dad’s crying about. The thought of losing his oldest twice.

  “I don’t have a right to,” I say. “He wants to help.”

  “He isn’t trained like you are.”

  “I’m not gonna let him out of my sight, I promise. If anyone’s safe on this mission, it’s Dave.”

  I give them each a long hug. As I pat my Dad’s back I can’t help laughing. “You old softy. I go on ops all the time.”

  “Not like this. Just do me a favor and remember where the line is. You don’t cross it, not for anything.”

  “What if I have to cross it to get back to you?”

  “You wouldn’t be you anymore.”

  I search his face, wondering if he really believes this. Because I don’t. It’s easy to say that from one side of the line, but what he doesn’t realize is that I’ve already crossed it a thousand times. And from this side of it the view is much better. I kiss his cheek and say nothing: those of us on this side keep the secret. Cross the line enough times and it disappears.

  *

  On the train Teddy is sweating up a storm. He smells of whisky. And he’s got Will, Pace, Alo and Coin chattering over his shoulder, telling him what to do and pointing out any errors he makes.

  I stride into the driver’s cabin. “Everyone out. Leave the poor kid alone.”

  They file out grumpily and Teddy sighs in relief. “I think it’s ready. I can’t guarantee the speed you’ll travel, though – I think that only gets programmed once you’re moving – so I have no idea of your arrival time. Also I can’t be entirely sure the train will stop where it’s supposed to.”

  “Okay, well, good enough is good enough, mate. You head back to base and we’ll be in touch from there. I’ll let you know when I want you to set off the comms virus and recall all the agents.”