Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(119)

The door is half-open and she can see him at his desk—an old library table, he once told her, crosshatched with ink and anchored by a Smith-Corona typewriter—with a newspaper spread before him and a dead pipe clamped in his mouth. The walls are lost behind bookshelves and old protest posters ragged and curled at their edges. The overhead light is off, but a jade-green desk lamp glows next to him and pools the room with shadows and brightens his glasses, which turn to observe her now.

Her stomach is an acidic pit of indecision. She knocks at the door even as she steps through it. He lowers the paper until it crinkles in his lap. “Miriam,” is all she has to say, and he brings a finger to his lips.

He pinches a pencil from a coffee mug full of them and scratches down on a piece of paper, Not safe. Not here.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he says.



The morning is still shadowy; the sun hasn’t won the sky. And the campus buildings, in this early wrap of winter, appear the leached gray of tombstones. A few students and professors wander about, most with coffee steaming in their hands, but otherwise, the campus is empty, the ground salted with snow and the grass frozen in white blades that crunch beneath her boots when she strays off the pathway, trying to walk beside Reprobus but finding it difficult because of his size and his meandering gait.

Minutes before, when she handed him the envelope, when he studied the fingers with the bit of bone peeking out of their bottoms, she wondered if he would cry or shout or swing a fist at the air helplessly—his expression was difficult to read beneath his beard—but he only handed her back the package and sparked a match to the bowl of his pipe and blew out a sigh of smoke.

“I’m going to leave,” she says. “I’m going to find her.”

“What makes you think she’s alive?”

She can’t say, not for sure. A sense. For so long Puck has wanted her. Now, at last, she is his. Like a man on the verge of sexual rapture, he will want to prolong his satisfaction.

Reprobus looks straight ahead when he says, “And then what?”

Again he bullies her off the path and she nudges him back with her shoulder and says, “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

His pipe tobacco sizzles with every breath. The sun passes between some clouds and their shadows blink in and out of sight before them. “Something is happening,” he says. “I’m not sure what. Scrutiny and suspicion of William Archer as an institution is nothing new. But there have been government cars in the east parking deck, men in suits wandering through Admissions, Accounting, IT, the provost’s office.”

There it is again, the urge to run. There is a battle to fight here, and another to fight for Miriam, and she can’t get caught up between the two. “I’m sorry, but right now it’s hard for me to care about any of that.”

“I understand. But remember—this moment is bigger than you and bigger than Miriam. We’re under attack. We, as in the university. We, as in you and I. We, lycans.”

The frost crumbles beneath her boots as if she were walking on a fragile shell, and the lights begin to blink on in the buildings around them as students crawl out of bed and professors boot up their office computers and janitors collect yesterday’s garbage.

“What do you think I should do?”

“You don’t know where Miriam is?”

“I think she’s in the Seattle area. Based on the postmarks. Otherwise, all I have to go on are these videos.”

“What about email? You mentioned that you’ve been in email contact?”

“They don’t mention anything about where she is.”

“I was watching a television program the other night. One of those police procedurals. In it, they were able to find a runaway by an email she sent. Some sort of code hacker thing.” He holds out his hands and pretends his fingers are typing—the same way her father might have—the universal code of old men everywhere for the computer. “Do you know anyone who knows anything about that kind of stuff?”



She wakes Andrea by cracking a can of Diet Coke next to her ear and then handing it to her when she groggily props herself up in bed, one eye still shut and mascara smearing her cheeks. It takes another five minutes of half-answered questions—Where was she last night? What’s with the suitcase?—before Claire can get to explaining what she needs.

“No problem,” Andrea says, her hair in a tangle. She crushes the now empty can and lets it fall to the mess on the floor.

Claire opens her laptop and calls up the email and forwards it to Andrea. She remembers Reprobus’s hesitation to speak in his office—she remembers what Miriam said about the Wi-Fi network on campus—but at this point, as she sees it, there is nothing to lose.

Andrea has powered up her computer and pulled back her hair into a ponytail. She pinches her mouth now into a button when Claire asks what she’s going to do. “So let’s say I am at Taco John’s and tapping into their Wi-Fi. That means I get an IP address from them. I then send an email from Taco John’s—and you get it. To figure out where it came from, you can just go all the way down the email and figure out the first received. That’s the one that’s farthest down. So I can look at that IP address—in this case 75.402.157.195—and it will correspond with the location.”

“So do it.”