Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(110)

Does she think of Patrick? She does. But not so much, not anymore. He is part of another world, and this is her world. Matthew is right now, right here. When she thinks of Patrick, she wonders whether she was simply starved and knows that the starved, with no standards of taste, will hunger for anything—dirt, a browned banana, a half-eaten sandwich pilfered from a garbage can.

Waking up is difficult. So is completing her homework. Her joints feel full of ground bits of glass. Her toothbrush comes away from her mouth bloody, so she sticks to mouthwash. She tells Andrea she has met a boy. Every morning, a few minutes before class, she rolls out of bed and pancakes her face with makeup to hide the bruises, then rushes off.

For this reason she misses the news about the Howling Bill.

It isn’t until she walks through the light snow that has fallen overnight and makes the campus sparkle like white fire—it isn’t until after she kicks off her boots and enters the auditorium—it isn’t until after she looks for Matthew and spots him conferring at the front of the room with Reprobus—that she notices the upset buzz of conversation around her. It isn’t until she takes her seat and unzips her bag and observes Reprobus climb to the stage and cross his hands over his belly and address them in a solemn voice that she realizes something terrible has happened.

“We are at an interesting juncture,” he says and waits for silence to settle over the room. “History is being made. History that will one day be taught in this very course, assuming this university continues to exist, which I very much hope for but very much doubt all the same. Yesterday, Congress rushed the bill, an amendment to the Patriot Act, using a procedural trick normally reserved for noncontroversial laws. They made significant changes from an earlier version, never making the new draft available for public review prior to the vote. Only two representatives voted against it. The bill now goes forward to the Senate, where it is expected to pass.”

The snow in her hair melts and drips to her shoulders and lap. She takes out her pen but there is nothing to write, so she holds it like a knife.

Reprobus says this comes in the wake of last week’s raid on a Florida terrorist cell, an entire apartment complex full of lycans busted—dozens arrested and a large cache of weapons discovered. With the security level at red for two years now, with new threats discovered every week, the government has decided new steps must be taken to keep the country safe.

She writes down safe in her notebook and then scratches it out.

He explains what this means. With the new year, all IDs will note lycan status. The lycan no-fly will remain in effect indefinitely. A database, accessible to anyone online, will list every registered lycan, along with their addresses and photos. Antidiscrimination laws will be lifted: it will be legal for a business to deny service and employment to a lycan, because the government has determined that, in light of recent and repeated attacks, lobos is now a level-one public health and safety threat.

This is the gateway, Reprobus says, to impoverishment, to ridicule, to attacks. The gateway to vaccinations proposed by the idiot cowboy running for president.

“I refuse to bear it. That might mean a fine or that might mean imprisonment. That might mean my job. I don’t know. I don’t care. When I was your age, I made a lot of noise. I have noticed your generation doesn’t make much noise. I find you disgustingly polite. I would encourage you to take to the streets. I would encourage you to be rude and obnoxious. Make yourself heard. Howl.”

And then he excused them.





Chapter 46



HARD BITS OF ICE fall from the sky and bite his skin and patter his cammies. His radio is broken, shattered by shrapnel or a bullet, but his GPS still works. Patrick panics when he realizes it is switched on, a button accidentally pressed, the battery half-drained. He has the coordinates for the base saved and keys them in and sees he has more than forty miles to travel. To save power he will have to check his placement every few hours and hope that he can eyeball his bearings and not wander too far off course.

An hour ago, when he opened the door to leave, she grabbed him, her fingers bony but strong, pressing painfully into the meat of his arm. She handed him the pistol that she had kept hidden from him. He thanked her and holstered it, but she did not let him go. He could sense, in her trembling face, that she wanted to tell him something. He waited—expecting her to warn him or wish him well—but the words never came. She let him go and gave him a push and closed the door. He stood there and faced the empty country ahead of him and felt the deepening cold, like the breath of a cave where there is no cave, already creeping under his clothes.

He grew up in the country and at night often sat on the porch with a Coke watching for shooting stars. He knows darkness unadulterated by the glow of a city. But out here, on a night lit by a half-moon, with thick clouds smearing away most of the stars, he feels gone. So gone that when he hears a chopper—the rotor like a flopping saw blade—and guesses it is twenty or more miles away, he doesn’t bother trying to spot it, to spark a flare and wave his arms. There will be no more help for him out here, no more miracles: he used up all his good luck on the old woman.

He trudges through the snow, every step a loud crunch, like a big dog toothing its way through a brittle bone. He would worry about the noise if everything didn’t seem so empty. He looks behind him and sees the trenches his footsteps have gouged through the snow and knows that if somebody or something comes looking for him, they won’t have much trouble finding him.