Double Cross [2] (36 page)

“You sacrificed your
freedom
—”

“Only if he finds me. And he
won’t.
” He lifts a small carved wooden box from the bookshelf.

I feel sick.

He caresses the surface of the box, then sets it back in its place on the shelf. A man going on the run can only bring essential items. Packard’s going on the run.

He’s leaving.

“Packard,” I whisper frantically.

“Stop it. It was overdue. My plan never went beyond using you all to get free of the restaurant. Then suddenly we had to keep doing it. It was getting old.” He picks up the little box again, walks across the room, and nestles it into a suitcase full of clothes. “Disillusioning
people as a way of ameliorating Otto’s ridiculous head condition—”

“What do you mean?”

He stands. “Otto’s head condition.” He practically spits out the words. “There’s nothing wrong with Otto’s head except that he’s a hypochondriac. He can keep those people behind their force fields just fine without a problem. He doesn’t need us to disillusion them. He never did.”

“What? But the cranial pressure, the headaches …”

“Please. It’s imaginary. He needs a slap in the face, not the service of disillusionists. He’s a
hypochondriac
, Justine. You know how it works.” He tosses a baseball cap into the suitcase and walks off.

Stunned, I follow him into the bathroom.

He grabs an overnight bag from the closet, yanks open a drawer, and throws in deodorant.

“It worked for me for a while. We just had to disillusion the people on the list, which meant I had to keep the Jarvis lie going. What’s another despicable deed to me, right? You know how it is—I’ll do anything to stay free. To stay living in Midcity. But you started to sense how wrong disillusionment was.” He shuts a toothbrush into a plastic tube. “You were never able to articulate it, but you felt that it was wrong. For the record, I agree. It robs them.”

“You felt that way the whole time?”

“Just lately.” He twists a cap onto a tube of toothpaste. “Forcing people to turn robs them of the chance to change and grow. Which is one of the few things that set us apart from raccoons.” He unzips an inner pocket, puts in a razor. “Or to stay who they’ve become and suffer.” Helplessly I watch him pack. It’s like an out-of-body experience. “Basically, we’ve been robbing people of an essential part of the human journey. I guess I could’ve lived with it awhile longer,” he continues, “but I couldn’t live with
you
living with it.”

“Packard,” I say.

“It was monstrous. I didn’t see it before, but I do now. And you know what the worst thing is?” He stops, turns to me. “I did it to you.”

Everything slows.

“I took your choices away. I took your life away. It was unforgivable, and I’m sorry as hell. I know it’s too late, but I am sorry. I told myself that I was helping you, that it was for your own good, but it was never my right.”

“You thought I’d be institutionalized. Or dead.”

“Still wasn’t my choice to make. To force you to be a minion?” He goes back to packing. “Forcing you to attack others … I should know better. I do know better.”

Otto. He’s talking about using Otto to destroy the Goyces. “You were just a child. You saved those children’s lives,” I say.

He spins to face me, bright with shock.

“He told me,” I say. “Everything.”

Packard blinks, seemingly unable to comprehend this. “Well,” he says quietly, “now you know.”

“You were a hero,” I say.

He turns away with a derisive snort and folds a washcloth.

I feel sick. “Where are you going?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

Leaving forever. God, he can’t—I can’t—

He zips his little bag, and I feel the ground shift under me. He says, “If you want to do something for me, see if I can get enough head start. I won’t ask you to lie, but—”

“Don’t go,” I say.

“I should stay? Fight? What’s here for me now?”

“I don’t want you to go.”

He turns to meet my gaze. Maybe he see the tears starting.
“Justine, you’ll be fine.” He touches my hair. “You’ll be fine. You are the bravest, best person I’ve ever known. I
see
that. I’ve always seen it.”

“I selfishly screwed things up for you.”

“No. The opposite. You’ve given me so much,” he says. “Things I thought I’d never have.”

I turn my face to his hand, grab it, and squeeze it, like if I keep his hand, he can’t leave.

He draws nearer, kisses the top of my head. I feel his warmth up and down me. “There was a time when all I could ever see was the way people were doomed to behave—their tendencies, their reactions to their own idiotic histories. Misery, delusions, compulsions, all of it. I would use that to control them. But you’re not like that. The way you look at people, the questions that you ask—you make me remember that people can be more than all that. You make me remember that nothing’s decided. Nothing’s known. That is what you gave me.”

Raw with feeling, I pull away, flattening his hand, warm between mine, and we look at each other—for how long, I don’t know. His eyes still look bleary, and he needs a shave, but everything about him feels new. I have this crazy sense that I know everything about him, and nothing about him at all, and it’s the most exciting thing in the world.

I think of Otto telling me the story of Riverside Elementary; of how I couldn’t stop thinking about Packard after; of how I wanted to run out of that hotel room and just come here and tell him—tell him what?

The words come to me at last, flooding into me with certainty.
I love him.

He draws a thumb across my cheek, stops on my lips, stops me from smiling. “I thought maybe if I waited …” He breaks off, eyes bleak, then smiles strangely. “Just give me my lead time, okay?”

I sniff. I laugh into his bleary eyes. “I can’t.”

He knits his brows.

I grab his thumb. “You can’t get away from me.”

He searches my face, cheeks ruddy. “What?”

“You can’t get away from me, because I’m staying with you.”

In the silence that follows, I touch his chest with my open palm. The air seems to thicken, pick up charge. “
You
. I won’t let you go. I love you, Packard.”

He pulses out a breath, gaze fixed so hard on me, the sensation is nearly physical. “What?” he says again.

I smile. He’s an endless, dangerous person.
Because I love him.

“Have I been crazy all this time?” I ask. “Because I think I have. Last night I felt so unhappy. All I could think of was you. All I can ever think about is you. Why am I always fighting it? Always fighting thinking about you, fighting this wonderful feeling about you. This aliveness. This love.” I look into his eyes and smile like a madwoman. “I love you!” I can’t stop saying it. “I love you. Love, love love.”

“Jesus,” he says, hands trembling along my waist. “Jesus!” And with a surge of feeling, he kisses me. “Jesus, Justine!” He kisses me all over—my lips, my face, my hair. He kisses me too fast to track—it’s just this flurry of him. I laugh. I will never be safe—not ever again. Because I love him too much.

He pulls away breathless. Bewildered. Maybe he doesn’t trust it.

“You,” I say, putting everything into that little word, putting my palm to his.
“You
.
”
I rip a little hole between us, just to be more with him. No darkness flows through, but somehow, we’re more together.

He grips my arms. I feel him so acutely now. “Justine,” he says, and I know he sees me, and he knows me, and I’m home. He pulls me tight to him, and I wrap my
arms around him and squeeze. We’re squeezing feeling out of each other, and making the feeling as fast as we squeeze it out. “You know I love you, too,” he whispers. “You know that, right? For so fucking long, Justine.”

Hearing this, I feel like horses galloping in me. I realize that I did know—a secret, silent knowing that had always been there, but to hear him say it is magical.

I’m aware of my own breath coming bigger, harder. His heartbeat to my breast.

“It’s decided, then,” I say, smiling into his cheek, because it’s a crazy thing to say, and because our embrace is turning animal.

He grabs my hair, and he finds my lips and he kisses me. I push him and he backs up, and we’re against the hall wall, lost in each other.

Lost.

Home.

I smash into him; I want to touch him everywhere, devour him. His face is warm under my lips, hair soft against my cheek. I pull him hard to me, fingers pressed into his flesh.

I feel teeth on my earlobe. Butterflies in the pit of my stomach. The stone of his erection between my thighs.

Vaguely I come to my senses. “We have to get you away.”

“Fuck it,” he breathes, finding my lips. He pushes up my skirt, and we maul each other. Nothing matters but us. It’s like another entity is controlling us. A tidal wave, or a comet. Love.

“Come here.” He picks me up, legs wrapped around him and all, and carries me to the other end of the bathroom, where he sets me on smooth, cool marble. He has my leg in his arm, he’s nuzzling my neck, and I’m pulling him hard to me, sucking his lip, his tongue.

I’m ready to come before he even thinks to grab a condom from a bathroom drawer. I push my hands over his
chest as he rolls it on, baffled and feverish, with the sense that we’ve left the whole world behind.

He hides his face as he penetrates me. He pushes into me and stays there, unmoving, and I grab his hair and pull him away to look at his eyes. They’re shining with tears. I kiss the tears off his coppery lashes, his lids and coppery lashes.

And then he holds my face and we fuck in a wet, blind, mad way.

“S
O WHERE ARE WE GOING
?” I ask, buttoning his shirt. His eyes gleam. He looks wild. Alive. He looks the way I feel.

“What do you think about Mexico?”

I gaze into his gleaming eyes, wanting to kiss them. And his nose. And his lips and cheeks. “The beach, perhaps?”

He tilts his head. “What do you think?”

When he was trapped in Mongolian Delites, he dreamed of sun and the ocean. It’s hard on highcaps to live outside of Midcity, but if Packard left, that’s where he’d go. “I think it sounds perfect. If
you’re
there.”

He helps me down from the counter, kisses my forehead. “There’s this old beach estate I’m in the process of buying. It belonged to a 1950s movie star—a central building and smaller estate homes. A place for any and all disillusionists to come and live. A few of them will join me later this month.”

“And zing you when they want.”

“Of course,” he says.

Packard’s the only one who can handle a zing. The only one whom it doesn’t affect.

“Or we can all finally get psychological help or shock therapy or something.”

“You might need psychological help after you see this place. It’s pink stucco. And very wild.”

I pick up his overnight bag and press it into his stomach. “I’m there.”

He takes it, and we just stare at each other, and I know I’ll never get enough of him.

I ask, “Will you be able to do it? Be cut off from Midcity?”

“I’ll make it work.” He touches my hair, then pulls away. “We have to go. I have to tie up some things. Hit the bank. We can’t be stupid.”

The boxes and books are gone from the dining room. Packard sticks the overnight bag in his suitcase and shuts it, then looks up.

“What?” I say.

He comes to me and kisses me. There aren’t words.

A harrumph from the doorway. “Have you gone insane?”

Carter.

“She’s going with me,” Packard says, in a warning tone.

Carter very pointedly makes no reply. “Vesuvius found a trade for your car. Your new one’s a red Chevy. He’ll leave it at McGonah and Twenty-second within two hours. Keys on the front right tire if he’s not there.”

Packard turns to me. “Ready for a road trip?”

“In two hours?”

“Yeah, two hours,” Carter snaps. “Or do you want to slow him down even more?”

“Stop it,” Packard says. “Nobody’s slowing anyone down.”

“I’ll be outside.” Carter stomps off.

“That’s so fast. I have to pack, and I can’t not say good-bye to people. I don’t want to slow you down, Packard, but are you sure it’s so urgent?”

“It’s urgent.” He hoists his suitcase and takes a look around his place. A last look. “Come on.”

I follow him down the stairs.

Everything seems like a dream. “Don’t you think,
when Otto comes to understand that he doesn’t need us to disillusion people, and that there’s nothing wrong with his head, don’t you think he’ll release you from the bargain?”

“Absolutely not. It’ll only inspire him to seal up more people, including me.”

“But you were trying to help rescue him from the Dorks.”

“Only to prevent his prisoners from running free—or being sealed up for eternity. He knows that.”

“Come on, don’t you think he’d be a little grateful—”

“No,” he says.

I laugh. “Packard.”

“It’s not a joke.” He turns to me at the bottom of the stairs. “I scuttled the deal. He’ll be looking to put me back inside. Don’t doubt me on this, Justine. I know him. I know people. You see the best in them. But I see how they really are.”