Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(114)

The idea is short-lived.

He raises the pistol and fires into the lieutenant’s face and observes the scar along his upper lip twitch in surprise before the top half of his skull opens up and blood slides from it and churns down his face and neck like a red snake before he topples to the floor.

Chase has only a few seconds now. They will have heard the gunshot. They are already coming. They are almost here.

He goes to the lycan, and the lycan, run through with adrenaline, remains transformed. A pink mess of blood and tears dampens its cheeks. It holds up its hand—and the hand trembles as if controlled incompletely. How fragile it looks, how slight of wrist and thin fingered. It is hard to imagine its cruel strength, wrapped around his throat a moment before, squeezing. Then Chase looks closer and notices the nail, yellow and long.

Chase keeps the gun steady and imagines what he looks like from below, from the lycan’s vantage point, his body stepping forward now, blotting away the lightbulb overhead. The pistol swings enormously into view, allowing the lycan to observe the black, gaping maw of the chamber. When he squeezes, the trigger will give with a snap, like the striking of a match. And then the pistol will jump back and a bullet will leap from the muzzle, but the lycan will never see it move, already elsewhere.





Chapter 47



THE VIDEO INSTANTLY goes viral. Somehow, someone snuck a smart phone into solitary confinement, and Jeremy Saber has recorded and uploaded a five-minute rant. He is barely recognizable—in part because of the grainy image and in part because his hair has been shaved down to stubble and his face appears sunken, black hollowed; he is a wraith of a man. “I have nothing to lose. I have no political office to gain, no money to make, no power to attain.” His voice is whispery and interrupted by a cough—but resolute. “So please listen to me when I say that you must resist. You must. You cannot roll over. You cannot obey. You cannot play the bad dog they want you to play. Do you know how many lycan attacks occur in the country every year? Eleven. Less than a dozen. More people are attacked by sharks. But that’s not how they’re treating us. So we might as well live up to their expectations. Fight back. Bite back. The public registry and the abolishment of antidiscrimination laws are equivalent to hate crimes. They are crimes against humanity. Lycans are human. We are human.”

The T-shirts appear soon thereafter. They are handed out in malls, on street corners, in schools. They are handed out at William Archer—in the post office and cafeteria—and they read HUMAN in black lettering across the chest. Posters and evites and chalked sidewalks announce that everyone should gather on the quad at noon. Claire does not have a Facebook account—Miriam forbade her from opening one—but Andrea shows her how everyone has changed their profile picture to a raised fist and updated their status with a single word, Solidarity.

On the horizon, banks of cement-and plum-colored clouds boil and blur the air with what must be snow or sleet, but the sky over the campus is clear when Claire and Matthew join several hundred students on the quad.

There is something different about him, Matthew. It is less the way he looks and more the way he carries himself: he is less unfinished than most of the other boys, more a man. Her heart whirs when he touches her, as he does now, guiding her by the elbow into the mass of students. She feels protected by him. And with threatening packages appearing in her mailbox and strange visitors asking about her on campus, when she knows she is being watched but not by whom, protection is what she wants.

The day is cold and their breath steams from their mouths, like something boiling over. The media are waiting for them. Similar protests are going on all over the country—in parks and town squares—but the William Archer organizers sent an announcement to every major news outlet, and they have responded and the focus is here. Dozens of reporters corral the mass of students. Their cameras and microphones carry the logos of NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC.

There are no chants, no speeches. There is no march. The students simply stand in place—in relative silence—while the reporters thumb in their earpieces and chatter into their microphones. Claire can hear the rip-rip-rip-rip of cameras firing off shots at shutter speed, can hear people coughing, stomping their feet to kick the cold out of them, can hear a boy she recognizes from her calculus class—long hair, Birkenstocks, ankh tattoo on the back of his neck—talking to a reporter with a video camera aimed at him like a cannon.

“We just want to be ourselves, you know. We just want to be ordinary and treated like anybody else. You can’t let the few define the many. Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy didn’t make the world turn against all thirty-something white males as a bunch of crazy-ass serial killers. We’re not a bunch of terrorists—we’re just people.”

“You don’t think you’re dangerous?”

“I think people are dangerous. Period. I’m not going to bite anybody. I don’t want to bite anybody. Why would I want to do that? That’s messed up. You’d have to be crazy to do that, just like you’d have to be crazy to shoot up a school or bomb a building. It’s just a matter of being human. Some of us are mean. It’s like my professor was saying the other day—humanity is a flawed creation—all of us are all different kinds of f*cked up.”

“Who is your professor?”

“Reprobus. Professor Reprobus. He’s the man.”