Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(159)

She must hear him coming, his feet snapping branches, clunking off rocks, but she does not turn to look at him. And she does not say anything when he sits beside her, but she does not move either.

Every time he looks at her, when that old attraction geysers up inside him, he feels as excited as he does anguished. The image of her—skin and hair reddened by the fire—has made him aware of all those sunken feelings, all those things lost and untested.

He says, “Hi,” and she says nothing and the space between them seems to widen.

He can only guess how hard the past five months have been for her. That’s what he wants to say. That he understands. She must feel she doesn’t have a place in this world. She must be sick and tired of living with a knife to her throat every second, of scrounging for food, of running and running and running. She must have reached the breaking point—and that’s what tomorrow is about—her either fighting back or lying down and closing her eyes forever.

His thoughts are interrupted by Tío. He appears around a tree, tossing into the air his bone-handled knife, the blade as big as his forearm. End over end, a silver flash. Twice, three times, four. It makes a whistling sound with each arc. Tío stares at Patrick while he plays with the blade. “You’re not wearing handcuffs. You’re not roped to a tree. Your mouth isn’t duct-taped shut.” He catches the knife and then slashes at a nearby cedar. A piece of bark falls away, and then another, and then another. “You might be thinking that means you’re free to do as you please.” The blade thwacks the trunk and a crude picture begins to emerge—that of a face, the yellow pulp starkly set against red bark—two long eyes, a gash of a nose, and a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “Today we killed some soldiers. Tomorrow we’re going to kill some wolves. And I want you to know something. I want you to know that if you do anything that interferes with that, I’ll drop you.” He notches away the final curve of the smile and then departs, leaving them staring at the face, which bleeds sap. “I’ll be watching,” he says over his shoulder.

They sit there another few minutes in silence before Patrick says, “Fire is dying,” and gets up and brushes off and collects an armload of sticks to set upon the flames. Sparks dance. Pitch pops.

Then he begins to talk. He tells her about the war as if it were a thing alive, with metal jaws and sulfuric breath and a saber rising from its groin. He tells her about the crystal-cold sky of the Republic and the snow that lies over everything like a wrinkled white sheet. He tells her about his father and his fool’s mission to find him and what he learned when he discovered the doomed lycan squad. He says he is afraid that she is going to appear and vanish again like his father. He says he is sorry. He says he understands why she might hate him. He says he hopes that another universe might exist in which none of this happened and their only concern would be lying on a beach and rubbing oil all over each other and drinking pi?a coladas right out of the coconut.

Her expression softens and she smiles when she looks to the sky, and he can tell that she sees there the same thing he sees: a life beyond the walls of this place, where rivers rush with clean water and where gardens flower with spring and where children play soccer and couples walk hand in hand through parks and order large Cokes and buckets of popcorn when they go to the movies and where the two of them, Patrick and Claire, might be together without regard for the past, only the future.

She lifts her arm. He scoots into it. And they are holding each other. “Remember what you said about electricity?” he says.

“I still don’t understand it.”

“Me either. But I can feel it.”





Chapter 66



THERE IS A PATTERN in the ceiling. The cracks and water damage melting together into the image of a dark-hooded wraith. Miriam tries to look away, tries to rearrange it into another design—say, a fish breaking the surface of a murky pond—but try as she might, it is always there. It is waiting for her, she feels certain. Waiting for her to give up. And when she does, it will drop like a bat to seize her and flap away to some cave deep beneath the earth where her bones will become jewelry and her teeth dice and her lungs red accordions, her soul sealed away in a locket worn around a demon’s neck.

It is morning. She knows this from the pink light leaking through the glass-brick window. Right now, maybe only a few hundred miles away, alarm clocks are blaring, people are rolling out of bed, brewing coffee, burning toast. For her, though, morning may as well be night. She has no routine—day’s beginning, day’s end. Sometimes they feed her—sometimes they come to clean her or to f*ck her—and sometimes they do not. Otherwise everything remains the same.

Her husband once said that he believed some sort of mathematical equation could be applied to life—since the longer you lived, the greater its seeming velocity. She always attributed this to familiarity. If you kept the same habits—and if you lived in the same place, worked in the same place—then you no longer spent a lot of time noticing. Noticing things—and trying to make sense of them—is what makes time remarkable. Otherwise, life blurs by, as it does now, so that she has difficulty keeping track of time at all, one day evaporating into the next.

So she cannot be certain, but she believes it has been a week or more since she last saw Puck. Curiously, she has come to look forward to his visits as much as she dreads them. He speaks to her. He listens to her even when all she has to say is f*ck off, go to hell. He is keenly interested in her, even if only to see her suffer. That makes her feel important, adversarial. Like she has some role more essential than furniture discarded to the basement. She hates him. She wants him dead. But she also wants him to bite her, to cut her, because if she bleeds, she lives, and this day then distinguishes itself from the last.