Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(101)

“That’s from the fire it lights inside.” His eyes are kind but rheumy. His belly bulges beneath his shirt. His arms, thin and spotted. His legs, pale and hairless—fat at the thighs, twiggish at the calves. His voice is his power. His voice, low and booming and roughened at the edges from pipe smoke, is what commands an auditorium full of students, is what intimidates her even now, despite the frailty of his appearance.

“I need to know what you’re hiding me from,” she says.

He nods at her pocket, the outline of the knife there. “Will you cut me open if I don’t tell you?”

“Maybe.”

“I almost believe you. You’re like your aunt, a good bully.” He finishes his Scotch. A few drops bead his beard and his tongue darts out and finds them.

“Tell me.”

He glances at the oven clock, its green numbers reading a few minutes after midnight. “Are you up for a walk? They should still be there.”



The shattered lightbulb peppered his feet, his right foot worse than the left, a blade of glass toothing open a gash in his arch. She helped him pull on two pairs of socks, but he still limps a little when they take the short walk to the rec center.

“Sorry,” she says, and he says, “You should be. Abusing an old man.”

A quarter moon cuts the sky like a sickle. They walk past bare-branched trees and dark-needled hedges. The campus is quiet except for the buzz of the occasional lamp. Reprobus points out two does grazing along the edge of the quad. “They’re on the move this time of year. They can feel the winter coming.”

They walk around the rec center. It is built into the side of a tree-studded hill and the ground slopes downward to reveal the lower stories of the building. The trees thicken around them and block out the sky and at first Claire doesn’t see the gravel path that curves off the sidewalk. She follows Reprobus a short distance to a steel maintenance door, a side entry to the rec center. He fumbles out his keys and jangles them until he finds the right one. He jams in the key and swings open the door. “Here we are.”

The smell hits her before her eyes adjust to the light. An animal’s den. For a split second she worries about what she might be walking into, worries she has given herself over too easily to Reprobus. She is so hungry to trust someone that she didn’t think to question his motives in bringing her to this place. She is standing in the doorway, half in, half out, when he grabs her by the wrist and drags her forward. “Hurry.”



Music is playing from some unseen stereo. Thrash metal. A voice hollers, a guitar screams, blast beats pulse. The walls are windowless, the floor concrete. The ceiling reaches twenty feet above them. From its steel rafters hang thick, braided climbing ropes and chains from which dangle heavy bags ripped open in places and repaired with duct tape. Old gymnastics equipment—balance beams, sawhorses, vaults, parallel and horizontal bars—has been arranged strangely around the room. She sees what she thinks is a shredded log set upright in the corner. The floor is smeared with what appears to be blood old and new.

In the flash of a few seconds, she takes this in, before feeling their eyes on her. Then she spots the lycans. They are all men and all naked. Standing next to a punching bag that sways and creaks on its chain. Hanging halfway up a rope by one arm. Crouched on top of a sawhorse. Their mouths are red and gaping. Their bodies thick with hair and muscle. Watching her. Slowly, with the music charging and raging in the background, the one next to the punching bag begins to creep toward her.

His abdomen sinks and expands as if he is inhaling her. His eyes close and his body quakes. He cries out in obvious pain, falling to all fours and arching his back and lowering his head. When he lifts his face to her, she recognizes him, Matthew. It takes him a minute to rise from the floor and straighten his long body and quiver out a breath.

Nearby is an industrial sink, a coil of hose, a pile of towels. He splashes his face with water and towels off the blood and sweat. Someone shuts off the music and in the sudden quiet he looks at her and says, “Hi.”

She tries to focus on his face, not his body, when she says, “What is this place?”

He ties the towel around his waist. “Basically it’s where we go apeshit.”

“Or wolfshit,” Reprobus says. She has forgotten about him. Now he lays a hand on her shoulder. “You’re among friends, Claire.”





Chapter 42



THEIR CONVOY HEADS down the hill. The MRAP trucks are slow moving, mine resistant, ambush protected, but Patrick is in a Humvee. It has been up-armored by the mechanics, with greater suspension and ballistic-resistant glass, but he has seen their black carcasses trucked in and knows an IED can crisp and cut metal as if it were paper.

Patrick has been on base so long—walled in, enclosed—that the snow-scalloped field out the window makes him feel untethered, as if the Humvee might lift off the ground and float into space. Then, in a blink, the woods are all around them and the trees shut out most of the sky except a few fingers of light and he feels oddly comforted.

They drop down the valley and through the town of Hiisi—first the neighborhoods where the mine workers and fishermen live in their modest, square homes—and then into a narrow labyrinth of rotting buildings, some of them high and some low, many ruined heaps of wood and stone, all of them close and crumbling into each other except when a fire charred a cavity. They pass a motorcycle with studded tires, a group of children who do not wave, a brightly colored jingle cart carrying goods to a market.