Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(33)

The mill is long gone, the industrial district replaced by condos, organic coffeehouses, boutique clothing stores, a brickwork river walk. There are few intersections, everything a roundabout that makes Patrick feel dizzy and lost.

She points out the section of town where the lycans used to live—before the Struggle, when lycan segregation was mandatory in housing, schools, bathrooms, restaurants—a collection of quaint one-story bungalows that now, his mother says, cost three hundred thousand a pop.

The road inclines as they drive up the side of a butte—into a neighborhood that is a carbon copy of his mother’s. These faux-rustic developments are all over town, as far as Patrick can tell, many with golf courses spilling greenly through them. They have names like Elk Ridge and Bear Hollow, and every house seems to come with a river-rock chimney and rough-hewn pine pillars flanking the front porch.

The sky is a pale and depthless blue. A gusty September breeze sends leaves skittering across lawns, and one of them catches on Patrick’s shoe—a round leaf, as gold as a coin, as though money indeed grows on trees here—when he steps out of the car next to the Century 21 sign staked in the front yard.

From the car trunk, his mother retrieves a broom, a Dirt Devil, and a paper bag full of cleaning supplies. They roll down the windows for the cat.

The family moved out last week. She vacuums the footprints from the carpet, massages away the divots from where tables and couches stood. She Windexes the fingerprints smeared across the storm door and arranges scented candles throughout the house to light before the showing. She clips flowers from the garden and fits them in a short vase on the kitchen island. He yanks the cheatgrass flaming up between the four cement squares of the driveway. He sweeps the stone entryway, the tile bathrooms, the oil-spotted garage. He lifts a window and clambers across the roof and cleans out the pine needles clogging the gutters.

When they finish, an hour later, he asks if she does this for every house and she says she does, more or less. He asks if it really makes that big of a difference, a candle sputtering in the bathroom, and she says absolutely. “Because appearances matter.” She snaps her seat belt into place and readjusts the mirror and feathers her hair with her fingers. “That’s the world we live in.”



*



From the day Chase took the oath of office, he refused police escorts. They cost taxpayers too much, thirty-eight million in California the previous year. Besides, he claimed, he could protect himself. For the past month, ever since Chase began to regularly appear on the lecture and talk-show circuit, Augustus forced a compromise and hired a private security detail from Lazer Ltd., mostly thick-necked, thin-waisted ex-military. Chase calls them babysitters and refuses their protection except during speaking engagements. Augustus tries to get him to reconsider, telling him the worst can happen when you least expect it.

The worst has happened. Four men, all wearing tracksuits, pick up Augustus in a black Chevy Suburban and drive at a perilous speed to the Kazumi Day Spa, honking their way through red lights, screeching their way around corners. It’s an unlisted address, but Augustus knows the way and directs them from the backseat—telling them to hurry, goddammit, hurry—even as he leans into a turn and braces an arm against the window to keep his balance.

They find the front door locked and use a metal battering ram to splinter it from its hinges. One man remains posted at the entrance while the others, their Glocks unholstered, charge inside. They give the all clear and Augustus walks into the dim entryway. The lights are off, the hallways and rooms empty—except for one barricaded door. They shove at it and a crack of orange light appears and only then does Augustus tell them, “Stop.”

The men step away and wait for him to tell them what to do. “Stay here,” he says and shoulders past them and puts all of his weight against the door until the bureau slides away and allows him entrance. He hurries the door closed before the men can spot Chase, curled up on the floor—dizzy and naked and shivering from blood loss, but alive.

There is blood smeared across the wall and soaked into the carpet that squelches underfoot. “I’m here,” Augustus says, not daring to touch his friend, not knowing how long the disease can live once exposed to the air.

He toes the slumped body of the transformed lycan. Her hair, tacky with blood, has the look of seaweed plastered across the beach at low tide. “Bitch,” he says, “you really f*cked things up.” The governor attacked in a whorehouse. Half-dead and likely infected. His political career finished. Augustus brings back his foot and considers kicking her face but doesn’t, not wanting to dirty his shoe.

Instead he covers her body with towels so that the others won’t see her. Red splotches soak through immediately. He pulls a terry-cloth robe off a hook and tucks it around Chase. No one can know about this or everything will be ruined. There is only one choice. He opens the door and tells the men to get a makeshift stretcher for Chase, and then, once they get him to the car, “Burn the place. Burn it to the ground.”



*



Patrick’s mother needs to make a stop on the way home. Just for a minute. To drop something off. “The cat,” she says. “I hope that’s all right.”

They drive past several car dealerships, where dozens of American flags snap in the breeze, and past the dump, where crows and seagulls darken the sky, and here, his mother says, pointing to an abandoned whitewashed cinder-block building, is the old school where the lycan children went. Its windows are thorned with broken glass, its front door yawns open, and a pine tree twists through its roof.