Read Online To Make Death Love Us by Sovereign Falconer - Free Book Online

began
Colonel John, "unless we . . ."
    "Someone will come
for us! But if you damn well move, you'll send us to our deaths, sure as sin." There was raw,
naked fear in Will's voice.
    Colonel John
frowned, trying to shift his small frame against the weights resting against them. He was able to move only a little. "Perhaps
Will is right. Perhaps moving would be dangerous. We'll wait."
    It sounded like a
death sentence from an unrelenting judge.
    What they would
wait for was not clear. They were on an old, abandoned road, long out of use, miles from any­one.
No one would come, or if they did, more likely it would be only to find their bodies in the
wrecked truck at the bottom of the ravine.
    Serena turned and
stared back at the freaks tumbled amid the wreckage and clutter inside the truck, seeing them
with her sightless eyes, her remarkable fingers. Her mind touched Marco's mind as he sat silently
in the cab, slowly bleeding his life away. She felt the gentle rush and flow of life ebbing in
his veins. Marco's mind seemed remarkably clear, clearer than it had ever been in her memory. He
seemed to have found some peace in himself that she felt was his growing acceptance of
approaching death.
    Her mind probed
each of them in turn, Pepino the Rubber Man, Colonel John, and Paulette. She probed Will Carney's
mind, reading the terror, larger in his mind than in all the others, for death was something that
robbed him of all his dignity.
    And in this reading
of them, she sought the key to open the door that would set them all free. She probed deep within
them, past their hopes and wants and bodily needs, to their dreams, to the primal streams that
made them all tick.
    Each and every one
of them had become infected with a kind of stunned paralysis, an inability to act or move. To
move was to court death, to move wrongly was to wed it.
    And so, in dreams
resigned to the idea of death, they were
content to do nothing until the rain washed enough of the mountain out from under the wheels and
made the decision for them.
    There is a
wrongness in this, this stupid and ugly death. None of them wanted to die. It was a thought in
each mind she probed. Serena could not sit back and let them go quietly and unprotestingly to
their deaths. She might not be able to help, they might all still die, but she meant for them all
to fight against it.
    Serena wrapped her
hands against her chest, as if draw­ing her body physically within herself. She had to
concen­trate, she had to reach them all in some way.
    She dreamed the
strongest dream she had ever dreamed in her life and it went out into the night and into them
all, touching them all.
    The fear in Will's
mind, the utter stark terror, repelled her. His mind was past all reason and her dream was closed
out. The other freaks had terror in keeping with their diminished stature in the world and they
opened their minds to her, unknowingly, and she began the dream for them, trying to make them see
as she saw, dream as she dreamed.
    It was her secret
and her power.
    She understood them
all, what made each of them what they were, their hopes, fears, cowardices, and petty acts. And
knowing them false, she loved them anyway. For the pain. She loved them for the pain. And she
lived for that moment when she would wrench them out of this life­time, and in so doing, make
them strong until the end came that made death love them.
    And because she
understood them, she gave them each a dream promise in keeping with each of the kinds of pain
each of them lived.
    Pepino the Rubber
Man she reached first, and she made him two promises, both terrible in their own way. Very
terrible. And only that, because they were true.
     
     
     
     
     
    Pepino was a
philosopher and had always been one. He examined the ways of the world like a scientist counting
drops of blood in the teeming cells of a corpse.
    He knew himself to
be mediocre. Even his double-joint-edness, which set him