Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(133)

Claire skids to a stop ten yards away. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, dogs!” At once the whole horde turns to look at her, panting, hesitantly wagging their tails. She wonders if two instincts—loyalty and hunger—fight inside them like a Siamese monster. She doesn’t know what to say, so she says, “Bad dogs.”

At this some of them peel back their lips, showing their teeth, while others whine and stutter-step forward, as if she were an old friend they hardly recognize.

There are more dogs than there are bullets in her revolver, Claire realizes. She wonders if she can summon the strength, the desire, to transform. She doubts it. With the sweat drying on her skin and her back spasming and her nails rimmed with half-moons of dirt and Matthew only an hour in the ground, she feels impossibly empty.

The poodle, a mud-caked mess of hair, moves toward her, looking at once ridiculous and terrifying.

“Sit,” she says. “Sit. Stay. Roll over.” But the poodle keeps coming.

She lifts the revolver. It feels incredibly heavy in her hands. The poodle lowers its head and begins a hunch-shouldered charge. Saliva swings from its teeth when it opens its mouth to bite her. She puts a bullet in its leg and it screams in a terribly human way before collapsing and rising again and limping fast and far from her, leaving behind a trail of blood.

At the sound of the gunshot—a whipping crack that bottoms out and echoes away—the other dogs scatter, diving down rows of graves. They bark and yowl as they thread their way back up the hill, disappearing into the trees that thicken toward its top.

The wiener dog is the only one who lingers, peeking from behind the crypt. Claire holsters her gun and lifts her arms and says, “Yaaaaah!” and the dog releases a tiny stream of pee before trotting off to join its pack.

Claire looks at the girl and the girl looks at her, looks away, and then gets brave enough to maintain a stare. Brown eyes, broad cheekbones, skin the color of upturned earth. Under the giant T-shirt she wears jean shorts, Velcro tennis shoes. Claire raises her hand—the universal sign for hey—and the girl does the same. They each manage a small smile. “Speak English?” Claire says.

Her expression does not change and Claire sees in it the same thing she saw in the wiener dog: a mixture of fear and loneliness that at once makes the girl want to rush forward and back away.

“Down,” Claire says. “Abajo.” Or is it derriba? She can’t remember. High school seems ten thousand years ago. She motions with her hand. “Down. Down. Before they get brave and come back.”

The girl doesn’t move, except her eyebrows coming together to form a silent question: is Claire dangerous?

“No estoy peligroso,” she says. “No kidding. I’m a good guy. Yo estoy su amiga.”

“I’m not stupid,” the girl says with a soft accent. “I can speak English.”

“You a lycan?”

The girl gives her eyes a theatrical roll and says, “I’m Latina,” and Claire thinks, this is why I hate kids.

“We need to get going.”

Except to sneeze into her hands, the girl does not move.

It would be so much easier to walk away, to abandon the girl. Why should she care? Why should she even go on breathing? A part of her wants to whistle the dogs back and lay bare her neck for them to maul.

“Where are your parents anyway?” Claire immediately regrets asking and in her chest gets this jab of dread when the girl scrunches up her face and starts breathing heavily like kids do before they really lose it.

“Forget it.” Claire holds up her hands and twiddles her fingers and says, “Come on. Come on already.”

After a hesitant moment, the girl scoots her butt toward the edge, dangles her legs, and falls into Claire’s arms.





Chapter 54



THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED in the seconds after the plane exploded in the belly of the Hanford nuclear facility. The electrical circuit board surged and spit fire. The turbines ceased spinning; the coolant water stopped flowing. The heat spiked. The power surged and caused a steam explosion that caused the containment vessel’s caps to evaporate. The control rods and graphite insulating blocks melted. And the radioactive core ignited, creating a blast as powerful as two nuclear bombs that mushroomed upward and pinwheeled cars through the air and burned to ash anything living within a hundred miles and made the moon glow an angry red.

The president declared the Pacific Northwest, and then the West Coast, and then the Plains, a state of emergency. He ordered the citizens of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana to evacuate. He did not acknowledge that the polls had just closed, that the media had called the race hours ago. That he had lost. For the moment, that was an irrelevance, as freeways clogged with people driving as fast and as far away as they could.

Clouds boiled over the open reactor. Helixes of flame played across the sky. Lightning uncurled and lashed the ground like white whips. A hot wind blew east and spiked the atmospheric radiation as far away as Michigan.

The same night as the explosion, a video was released on the Internet. In it, Balor and the Resistance claimed responsibility for the attack and declared the Pacific Northwest their own sovereign territory. Lycanica, he called it. He asked others to join them there. And he asked all lycans already in the region to savage their neighbor and in doing so make them a fellow citizen—and to remain in Oregon, despite the radiation, for the greater good.