Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(27)
“I will,” she says, but he is already out the door and she has already forgotten him. Her backpack drops to the floor and she digs through it for a pen and paper. Her eyes are blinking rapid-fire and her jaw is clamped so tightly it clicks. Her mind cycles through the constellations. “Grus. Octans,” she says. “Taurus. Orion. Mensa. Indus. Reticulum.” She continues to speak to the empty store, her voice solemn, as if performing some ancient rite. “Indus. Aries. Musca.”
Chapter 10
MIRIAM IS TIRED of waiting. For two weeks she has remained in the cabin, pacing the hardwood floors, waiting for the power to flicker out, the water to gurgle to a stop in the faucet. Her neck aches from sleeping in the bathtub. Her teeth ache from grinding. Her eyes ache from peering constantly out the slots sawed into the plywood sheets hammered to the windows.
Sometimes she thinks she hears laughter in the forest. Sometimes the motion detectors go off and bring a ghostly pallor to the night. One morning she woke to a thunk against the front door and thought dreamily to herself, it’s the paper, only to later discover a rabbit bleeding out on the welcome mat. Otherwise, two weeks of nothing.
She has never gone this long without transforming. She doesn’t trust that part of herself these days, like an alcoholic eyeing a whiskey bottle, knowing the promise of one sip will lead to a gurgling swallow and the night will end with broken dishes, bruised flesh, sirens. She will either tear apart the cabin or claw her way outside.
She tries to keep herself occupied. She jumps rope until her legs ache. She does push-ups and crunches on the oval rug in the middle of the living room. She plays chess, spinning the board with every turn, pretending herself the enemy. She reads her way through the paperbacks on the bookcase, among them a Dover edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The bottom shelf is crowded with children’s stories and on more than one occasion she opens them as if to make sure their words and drawings haven’t vanished. Her eyes flit to her husband’s book—a self-published manifesto the size of a brick called The Revolution—its cover bearing the image of a man casting a wolf’s shadow, but this is a book she won’t read, no matter how bored she gets.
She crunches her way through a bag of tortilla chips and then licks her finger to pilfer the crumbs and salt. She eats peanuts, Oreos, Nutri-Grain bars. She cracks six eggs and grates cheese and chops peppers and stirs up a steaming omelet. She always has a coffee in hand, the mug clacking against her teeth. She is so hungry.
Tonight is especially bad. The moon is nearly full, and it pulls at her blood. Her mouth drowns in saliva. Her muscles feel like tightly coiled springs that no amount of stretching can loosen. She gnashes her teeth and breathes as though back from a run. Every noise draws her to the window, gun in hand. Every shadow makes her eyes narrow. She walks from room to room, a clockwise rotation of the windows of the house, peering out into the clearing walled by woods.
She keeps the cabin dark so as not to ruin her night vision, and the slots in the windows glow like slanted blue eyes. In the living room she drops to the floor and hurries out a set of twenty-five push-ups. After the last rep she pauses with her chest and cheek against the rug. She does not breathe. Something has changed. She can sense it like an open door, a shift in sound and pressure.
She rises slowly from the floor and approaches the front window and releases the safety. The slot is the size of a ruler and she must press her eyes against the wood to get any sort of view. Splinters chafe her nose and forehead. A good minute passes before she sees, at the edge of the woods, a shadow come alive and separate itself from the rest, moving into the clearing, seeming very much a part of the forest, with its antlers forking upward like a cluster of branches and the band of white beneath its muzzle as bright as the moon rising over the tree line. A buck.
She closes her eyes, and when they snap open the rest of the world has fallen away, except for the deer, as if spotlighted. It lowers its head now to taste some grass, and she too opens her mouth and runs her tongue along her teeth. Through her body she feels a rush of blood that finds its focus in her chest, a throbbing pressure. She imagines her rib cage as a cell that cannot contain much longer the black fingers gripping it, shaking it.
If she does not hurry, the deer will step into the range of the motion detector and the explosion of light will startle it away. The door is braced by three two-by-fours. She sets down the gun and picks up the drill and hesitates, knowing the deer will hear the sound. She rattles around in a junk drawer for a screwdriver instead. She hardly notices the cramps in her hand when she twists out the eight screws the length of her finger.
The voice that scolds her, that begs restraint, that tells her to stay put, is a mere whimper, easily ignored. She sheds her clothes like a skin no longer needed. When she pulls open the door, ripping off the two-by-fours, and takes in her first shuddering breath of fresh air in two weeks—when she steps across the threshold, from the shadowy pocket of the cabin to the moonlit expanse of the night—she is already changing, the process as simple and liquid for her as diving into a pond.
The deer raises its head to study her. Its eyes black. Its ears twitching. It lifts one of its hooves, ready to move—and then, when she starts off the porch at a dead sprint, it twists away from her, bounding toward the cover of the trees. The motion detector flashes—instant daylight—and throws her shadow before her, a long black seam she pursues.
The wind shushes her ears, trembles her hair, making her feel as though she rides its currents, weaving past trees and cutting through bushes and curling over logs, the deer always within sight. It is faster than her but compromised by its size. Its body thuds off tree trunks; its antlers clack against low-hanging branches, finally tangling in one, dragging the deer to a stop.