Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(111)

He can feel his heartbeat in his shoulder. He tries to concentrate on something else. A cluster of stars. A knob of ice. The piney woods that spill from the hills he must cross, east of here, where for a long time dawn has been coming. A faint green glow creeping across the sky. He is on a rise when the sun finally breaks with a white flash. He goes momentarily blind and loses his footing and goes sailing down a hillside with a wave of snow coming with him, going fast, nudging against a few rocks but otherwise feeling weightless as he’s buoyed along, leaving his stomach behind him on the ledge.

His shoulder feels bitten and he worries that the scab has broken. He flexes his fingers and toes, making sure he’s otherwise uninjured, and then kicks his way out of the cold, thick blanket that surrounds him, nearly whooping with excitement and relief.

His cries are cut short by the tracks he spots all around him. Boots. Fresh, the details of the tread not yet erased by blowing snow. He crouches to study their imprint. It matches his own. The tracks, at first separate and then twining together, head into a pine forest a hundred yards away.

He wants to sprint through the snow, follow their passage, call out for help, but something roots him in place for a long minute. He does not understand what a group of soldiers—maybe six of them, as best as he can tell—would be doing out here, far from any road, far from anything. Maybe special ops, maybe choppered or parachuted in, maybe to destroy some terrorist camp. Or maybe something else.

Just then the woods erupt with a high, plaintive yowling. They, the wolves, sound excited. Something has excited them.



He is barely aware of drawing his pistol, barely aware of lifting his feet and letting them fall, hurrying across the last snowy expanse and pushing into the cover of the woods, trying not to trip over the roots and fallen branches that knot the ground.

It is easy to find them because of the noise they make—at first howling and then yapping and clacking their teeth and disturbing the underbrush—so much noise that they do not notice him when he stands near. But it is not easy to make sense of them—to make sense of what he sees—a clearing full of men, dressed in cammies, dancing around a moose that struggles weakly to rise. The snow is stamped down and dappled with bright pools of blood.

Its antlers are a thorny basket, and the moose rakes them one way, then another, when the soldiers dart toward it and stab its haunches and its belly with spears—yes, spears—ten feet long and whittled into points. The moose’s legs don’t seem to be working, one of them bent at a sharp angle. Its eyes roll back in fear and it releases a deep-throated moan that is cut short by a spear piercing its neck.

The men throw back their heads and bay raggedly and before Patrick can stop himself he lifts his pistol and fires it into the pink, brightening sky. There is a cracking boom. The sun flames at the top of the trees.

Some of the men swing around and some flatten to the ground and some dart into the trees. A holy silence settles over the forest. Patrick lets his arm slowly fall until the pistol aims at the ground.

Then one of the soldiers separates himself from the others and starts toward Patrick. At first he appears misshapen—hunchbacked, two-headed—the kind of monster that pursues a child in a fairy-tale forest. Its crunching footsteps are so loud, like teeth chewing ice.

Patrick feels a pressure around his heart. He recognizes that this is not one man, but two, the second upon the other’s back, riding there like an infant in a leather harness. Legless. Deformed or war wounded.

The man who serves as a carrier stands at an angle, so that both can observe Patrick. They each wear cammies—torn and muddied and patched and ice-caked, as if stripped from a scarecrow—and they each wear beards that cannot hide the blunt snout of a lycan, their eyes rimmed with blood the color of the dawn. They may as well be the same man for their appearance.

Then the one in the harness begins to speak. What first sounds like a growl mellows into a string of recognizable words. “Patrick,” the lycan says, “Patrick? Is that you, Patrick? Is that really you?”

It is hard to see, with the sun half-risen and the forest soaked in shadow, and it is hard to believe, with so much time and so many miles between them, but Patrick gradually comes to understand that he is looking at his father.



*



Chase is always so tired. During the day, he can more or less deal with the pepper-belly stress, chewing down another tablet, calling Buffalo for advice on what to wear or say, studying a speech until he has more or less committed it to memory, choosing to relish or ignore the possibility he will very shortly be elected president. But at night, once sleep overtakes him, he cannot contain any of his anxieties, and so they pound through him like black bulls escaping a ranch without fences. So he doesn’t sleep, not as often as he should.

He used to sleep like a baby, like a rock, like the dead—that’s what he always told people. He would nap every afternoon and wake up with a half smile and pulse-slamming erection, ready for whatever needed conquering. No longer.

And the lack of sleep is beginning to catch up with him, so that, like a drunk, he can only patch together memories, a few shards gone missing from every moment. Sometimes he will be telling a joke or a story—the one about the priest and the sheep, the one about the time he punched a grizzly sniffing around his tent when camping the backcountry at Glacier—and his audience will smile but he can tell from their shifty apologetic gazes that he is repeating himself.