“He died when I was fifteen and Izzy was seventeen,” Fury said, and Nathan shivered. It seemed to him that the temperature dropped a couple degrees.
“By then, Izzy was gone most of the time, and Dad was drunk all the time. His buddies had mostly stopped comin’ around, and we lived off a government check that barely fed us. I did odd jobs and was already stealin’ food and cash from anyplace I could. Izzy stole from her boyfriends and had dropped out of school to work. We managed.” Fury’s lashes flickered and his eyelids lowered, and Nathan braced.
“One night, Izzy comes home, and I hear her in the kitchen. I go in there, and she’s got a bottle of Dad’s whiskey. She’s cryin’.” Fury sounded surprised. “Izzy wasn’t the cryin’ kind, and I see her face is all messed up, and she’s favorin’ an arm.
“‘What happened?’ I ask her, and she says, ‘Didn’t fight him off good this time,’ and I knew she meant her dick boyfriend. I did know. But all I could think about was my old man passed out in front of the TV. Like it was all his fault, what this other boy had done.” Fury’s next breath shuddered on the way in and out, and he stared at the ceiling.
“Anyway, I got her some frozen peas, and she went off to her room. I sat there for a long time, and at some point, I walked over to Dad. He didn’t even know I was there. I remember the pipe on the table, next to an ashtray and a plate with moldy food. Flies had gotten in again, and they pissed me off. Everythin’ did. The stains on Dad’s shirt, the way his socks had holes, the gray in his beard, the way his belt was undone on his jeans… I stood there gettin’ angrier and angrier but also calmer and calmer. Used to get that way before fights. Furious, but you know exactly what you’re gonna do with all that anger.”
“What did you do with it back then?” Nathan asked.
Fury jerked his head in a rough negative. “Didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t hurt him. Couldn’t hit him. He wasn’t comin’ at me. I let him be, and I started out not meanin’ to do anything except get the plate off the table, get the food thrown away so the flies would stop, and I knocked over the ashtray.”
Nathan’s breath caught, and Fury nodded at Nathan’s silent understanding. “The pipe and ash and cigarettes spilled onto the carpet, and any other day, I’d stomp out the embers. I used to put Dad’s cigs out all the time, make sure he didn’t burn himself, though I don’t know why the fuck I cared.” Fury paused, head tilted. “Guess right then, I stopped doin’ any sort of pretendin’. I held the plate in my hand and watched the embers glow. I thought to myself, ‘no way is that catchin’ fire, it’s too small.’
“I was a lot like those ashes. I felt like we were related. Part of each other. I couldn’t do anythin’ big, even if I tried. And then the red spots started to smoke, and I didn’t panic, I didn’t try to stop them…” Fury wheezed a little laugh. “Nah, I asked them to keep goin’. I started prayin’ to the fire. Sayin’, ‘Come on… come on…’”
Fury’s eyebrows went up. “And it worked. Started small, but there was definitely flame, and I took my time goin’ into the kitchen. I scraped the plate into the garbage and watched the fire find a puddle of booze. It sizzled, found somethin’ it liked more on the rug, and it started for the curtains. I walked past it, went to my room, and I grabbed my library books, some clothes, and a box of shit that I’d kept all my life. Then I went and knocked on Izzy’s door.”
“What’d she do?” Nathan asked, winded like the smoke in Fury’s old house was there with them in Nathan’s bedroom, circling.
“She opened the door, and I told her, all calm, that the house was on fire and to throw whatever shit she needed out the window. And Izzy?” Fury flashed a wicked grin that was all pride. “She didn’t ask question one. She grabbed this bag she kept packed all the time for goin’ over to the guys’ houses and tossed it out onto the yard. We fought for two seconds because she wanted me to get out with her, and I told her I’d do it, but she had to go first. She almost didn’t do it, but I looked at her, looked right into her eyes, and I said, ‘Beth, I’m gonna watch and make sure he burns.’”
A sense of righteousness tore through Nathan, an old echo that believed in eye for an eye and strapping murderers into chairs and shooting current through them. Nathan didn’t know if he really bought into any of that, but he fully supported a teenaged Fury saving his sister and staying behind to make sure the monster was dead.
“And I did, Nate.” The moonlight lit Fury’s face in wide stripes. “I went back, got an iron skillet from the kitchen, and stood in the livin’ room doorway with it. I watched the fire start to burn his chair, and I told myself if he woke up, I’d hit him until he couldn’t wake up no more. The fire caught his pants and singed the hair on his arms and made his skin start to sweat and smolder, but I swear, Nate, he never stirred. Sometimes I think he was already dead. It’s what I told myself right after it happened, and it’s what I told myself later, when I was tryin’ to come to terms with being a killer. But dead or not dead, I didn’t pick him up. I didn’t get him out. I stood and waited until the smoke was so thick that I couldn’t breathe. I remembered that hot air goes up, and I sank to the floor on my belly. I didn’t put down the pan until Dad’s skin was cracklin’, and I’ll never fuckin’ forget that sound. His skin, Nate… It
screamed
. Quiet but there, and sometimes in my dreams, it’s him who’s screamin’, not his skin.”
“Jesus.” Nathan gulped.
Fury kept watching the window. “By the time I crawled out, Izzy was pissed. I couldn’t do nothin’ but cough, and she held on to me until the firefighters and cops and ambulance showed up. Don’t know who called it in, probably a neighbor. I had breathed in too much smoke, and they put me in the hospital. I had lung problems for a long time, though the doc said it’d eventually get better. The sickness did go away when I started trainin’ regular, but my voice never sounded right.”
“I think it sounds fine,” Nathan whispered, and though he tried to stop them, tears streaked down his cheeks. He ducked his head to wipe them on his shoulder, hasty so Fury wouldn’t see, but he wasn’t fast enough. Fury, with his black eye and bruised ribs, cupped Nathan’s jaw as though it were made of fine china.
“The lawyer, she knew everythin’.” Fury traced the lines of Nathan’s face. “And I told Matt the whole thing when I stopped hatin’ him and myself too much and could talk. Matt’s been with me ever since, and I still see him, ’cause bad nights still happen. Though you make it easier to sleep.”
“When we do,” Nathan pointed out.
Fury chuckled. “When we do.”
“So tonight, then…” Nathan hesitated. “The man you fought looked like your father, so you went after him?”
Fury started to pull away, but Nathan took Fury’s hand and held it against Nathan’s chest, over his heart. Fury made a quiet, negative sound. “Wasn’t that simple.”
“Tell me?”
Fury settled with a grimace. “He kept going for my knee. Dennis’s fights ain’t exactly regulated, and the guy took cheap shots and more than a few legal sweeps. But it was like he knew my weak points. And now, I think, maybe he guessed or got lucky, but when I was fightin’, I turned and saw Dennis. And the asshole looked… He looked…” Fury clearly struggled to find the right word.
“Guilty?” Nathan suggested.
“Yeah,” Fury nodded. “Don’t know if he gave the guy the heads-up, but it seemed like it when I was going blow for blow. And Dennis was payin’ more attention to the other guy instead of me, and I’m the one who did him the favor of signin’ up. I know Dennis is neck deep with bad people, and I know he does a lot of shit to cover debts. He don’t rig fights, at least he don’t rig mine, but he does play the odds in his own favor so he don’t have to pay out so much. I was the sure thing for that match, so you’d figure he’d want me to win so the underdog didn’t get the ten-to-one, but… There he was, lookin’ guilty and like he was hopin’ I’d hit the floor cold.” Fury made an unpleasant noise. “And if that didn’t do it, what the guy said was the last straw.”
“What’d he say?”
Fury rolled his eyes and snorted. “That when he was done takin’ me apart, maybe he’d start on my sister.”
Nathan would like to see the asshole try it. Hellabeth would tear him into pieces. “But I didn’t think many people knew you had a sister.”
“They don’t. Makes me think Dennis has been doin’ more than tellin’ people about my bum knee. Don’t know why he’d tell people Hellabeth and I are related, but I have suspicions.”
Nathan tried to add two and two together, but they kept equaling five. “So you think the guy was supposed to take you out so that you couldn’t, what, protect your sister from him?” Nathan remembered the warehouse and the way Fury got between drunk assholes and Hellabeth without a second thought.
“Not sure,” Fury said.
“Thought Dennis had a thing for your sister.”
“He’s got a bigger hard-on for himself. ’Sides, there might be reasons Dennis wants us out of his hair.”
“Like what?” Nathan asked, and he could tell Fury was shutting down and shutting Nathan out. “Hale, cut that shit out. What do you mean, Dennis wants you and Hellabeth—”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Nathan asked.
“Anythin’,” Fury replied. “But when I know somethin’, I’ll tell you. I’ll try. Thing is, Nate, I trust you.” Fury twisted his hand, took Nathan’s, and tugged until Nathan lay down next to Fury. “I trust you,” Fury repeated. “But Hellabeth’s harder to win over, and this is her shit to tell, not mine.”
“Okay,” Nathan said, trying to channel understanding and patience.
“But I won’t let what she does hurt you in any way,” Fury said as though swearing to it on a stack of Bibles. “And that might mean I got to get gone for a while. I’ll be back.”
Nathan’s heart sank into his guts, and his intestines quickly started tearing it into tiny pieces. “No,” Nathan said.
“Nate—”
“You’re hurt.”
“Not bad.”
“You live here.”
“For now.”
“For good.”
“And they know.”
“Who the fuck is ‘they’?”
“Dennis. And the people he’s truckin’ with.”
“Who cares?”
“I told him your name, and he knows your face. I don’t know if he’d go after you to try to get me or Izzy, but…” Fury shook his head. “My fault. I’m sorry.”
Nathan sat up, and Fury struggled to rise, the sheet slipping to show he wasn’t wearing anything at all. Nathan wanted to say a billion things, but none of them would make it out of his throat. The saner part of him knew that Fury was right. There was something going on here that could potentially hurt him, and he should do what Fury said so that they’d all end up in one piece on the other side. Nathan wasn’t sure why he knew that to be true, but he knew Dennis, the warehouse, Hellabeth, and even Duke, who was part of Dennis’s new crew. He remembered the men with guns, and he remembered how it had been within the walls of that warehouse that Nathan finally had found his hidden sense of self-preservation.
“But why now?” Nathan said, floundering. “Why all of a sudden?”
“May seem sudden, but it’s been comin’ for a while.”
“What has?” Nathan asked.
“What Hellabeth wants to do.”
“But if she knew what she wanted to do, and so did you, then hasn’t the danger been there all along?”
“Some of it, sure, Nate.” Fury gave Nathan a weak smile. “It’s one of the reasons you like me so much. The danger part.”
“No, I like you because you’re real.”
“Yeah?” Fury asked quietly.
“Yeah. I do, and you are. Now stop avoiding my questions.”
“We thought we had more time,” Fury said sadly. “But if Dennis is gettin’ nervous, we don’t.”
Nathan gritted his teeth to keep from cussing black and blue. He blew a shaky exhale. “You’re going to do whatever you need to do whether or not I agree, aren’t you?” Nathan asked. Fury nodded.
“And it’s more to do with your sister than you?”
Another nod. “But you’re connected to her,” Nathan continued, “And you’re worried that I’m connected to you, and Dennis is a bad guy, and he knows who’s tied to whom with what?”
Fury’s lips twitched, and he nodded again.
“Will it…will it be done soon? Whatever she’s doing?” Nathan fumbled.
“I can hope so.”
It was as straight an answer as it was going to get on their twisted road. “Can you promise me that you won’t go near that fucking warehouse again?”
“I don’t know if it’ll matter, Nate.”
“It matters to me.”
Fury’s good eye widened, and his next nod was slower and more serious. “I promise,” he said.
“Are you…” Nathan hated himself for sounding so small and helpless. “Are you coming back?”
“I want to, Nate.” Fury’s whisper was like a secret that only Nathan could know. “For you, I want to.”
“Good enough,” Nathan said when he found his ability to speak. In truth, Fury’s desire was more than enough. It was everything.
Chapter Eleven
The next two weeks introduced Nathan to all new levels of hell.
After saying good-bye and giving his thanks to the Hutchinsons and Hellabeth, Nathan had convinced Fury to stay the night. It was the first night they had spent together that they didn’t fuck, and at the time, Nathan had thought that wise. Thirteen days of no Fury at all had convinced him that he would spend the rest of his days in bed with Fury to make up for lost opportunity.
But the calluses on his damned palms were the least of it. Nathan’s longing for Fury was a physical ache. He thought of nothing but Fury in the hours not spent submerged in work, and even then, he forgot meetings because he was thinking about where Fury might be. He forgot plans, lost train of thought, ran too many copies, tried to put the coffee carafe in upside down, and moved through his days in a foggy mist inhabited only by the Many Possible Fates of Fury.
The following Thursday, Nathan went to see Fury in his last round of qualifying. It was a close match, but Fury lost in the end. Anyone else in the crowd might have mistaken Fury’s expression for regret or frustration, but Nathan knew it for what it really was: relief. Nathan could tell by the purse of Fury’s lips and from the set of Fury’s shoulders when he congratulated his opponent. Fury didn’t come by afterward, and Nathan had known he wouldn’t, but that hadn’t stopped Nathan from waiting up just in case.